Food Glorious Food (Part 1)

Prompted in part by our surprise at some of the food issues we found in England when we arrived, and in part by /Karen/’s suggestion that we look into some quite specific foods (such as bubble and squeak, which sadly will not make an appearance in today’s blog), we decided some weeks ago to devote some space to blogging about food in England. Our apologies to the gentle reader of this blog who finds the subject boring and frustrating. Please accept our assurance that we will return to our trip to York very soon. (Yes, there’s even more to tell!) But for now, the more prosaic issue of food...

First to say that this is a country for berries. Of course, we arrived at the tail end of the berry season. But we still found succulent raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, redcurrants and so forth in ordinary supermarkets for quite reasonable prices. And sometimes even spectacular prices. Both in Oxford and in Cardiff we obtained punnets of raspberries for a pound! I even came across cranberries the other day (among the more specialist produce in the Covered Markets – this is where you go to buy unskinned (or skinned) rabbit, pheasant, duck eggs and pigeon, etc). The cranberries had been imported, but I had never seen cranberries in their original form before (only dried). We even came across ‘golden rasberries’—something we’d never even heard of before, and I really, really like raspberries and take a special interest in them.

Providentially, England is also the place for cream, and cream goes really well with berries. So it’s quite serendipitous all around. There is single and double cream, cream from different parts of the country (West country seems to be superior), and various other versions of cream, culminating with clotted cream. Clotted cream looks remarkably like butter and is so thick it seems to come as a solid. Presumably it is called ‘clotted’ cream because this is the effect it has on one’s arteries. But, if one is going to indulge in cream, one might as well indulge. Half-hearted indulgence seems somewhat misguided. Having said that, we actually indulged in clotted cream yet...

The perfect evening would almost certainly include a bowl full of assorted berries, covered in thick, luscious cream. You could include chocolate, pancakes and various other delights to this assortment, but the quality of both the berries and the cream here would render such lesser provisions unnecessary.

However, every silver lining has its cloud, and England’s cloud is probably its meat. Its not news that England has enormous trouble keeping its livestock disease free: foot and mouth, blue tongue, mad cow and so forth. It’s simply not a healthy place to live if you happen to be a domestic animal. Before we came here, we had only a vague sense of the impact isolation had on Australia – and we would have spoken more in terms of foreign policy, the armed forces, intellectual and cultural history and so forth. We probably wouldn’t have said much about meat. Now we would. Because Australia is capable of keeping itself relatively free of these kinds of diseases and actually producing really good quality meat that is safe to eat and reasonably cheap.

Over here, the story is quite different. Pork is by far the most favoured meat (you might have noticed us mentioning it), and seems to be reasonably disease free. There are so many different kinds of bacon it makes one’s head spin. We’d sort of thought that bacon was, well, bacon. Lamb and beef are rarer, and less favoured. We were inordinately excited a few weeks ago to get a NZ leg of lamb on special for about fifty percent more than what we would have paid for it in Australia! (It was exceptionally good: we had guests over to enjoy it with us). Interestingly, it seems to be a bit of an Australian reputation to eat lamb—some American students here clearly had eaten little lamb despite being big red meat eaters, and made a comment to the effect of ‘you guys eat a lot of lamb in Australia, don’t you?’

We’ve found a few places which will sell us reasonably good meat at prices we can almost cope with. And we’ve been caught out a few times: for example, buying meat we thought was steak (because it was labelled as 'steak'), only to find that it was something very different… and not in a good way.

One of the strategies we worked out quite early was to make use of a crock pot, so we can get cheaper cuts of meat and make them delicious. We’ve never used a crock pot before, so this is opening up a whole new field of cooking for us. In case you’re not used to this style of cooking, it has three great advantages. You can use cheaper cuts of meat that need a long cooking time. You can prepare the ingredients four to eight hours in advance and then you don’t touch it again until it’s time to serve. And, if you do it right, you can get an amazing combination of hearty flavours that work well in wintry weather (and this is England…) So far we've been very happy with the results.

And the local library has provided some great slow cooker recipes, even to some scrummy looking deserts (we haven’t tried the latter yet). So, we aren’t particularly perturbed by the meat situation, though I think we are still a little amazed at the high prices compared to what we are used to. Perhaps we’ve just been distracted by the berries…

What does disturb us are the meat products in the shop which look like they should not be eaten by people. The most disturbing that we have come across was not just Spam, but Spam fritters: battered Spam, ready for you to take it home and deep fry it. Crunchy Spam. I realize that Spam is quite acceptable for some people, but I find it hard to deal with the idea that people are allowed to sell (and make money from) something like Spam fritters. I can’t help but think that in Australia it would be illegal – after all, in Australia there is legislation insisting that a particular percentage of a meat pie be actual meat; and meat pies would have to be a fair way down the list of 100 nutritionally best ways to eat meat. We had a great time with an old friend from College and his wife a few weeks back and mentioned the Spam fritters. He happily admitted to eating them, but then he’s the most culinarily adventurous person we’ve ever met. He goes out of his way to push the boundaries on what he eats. But even he admitted that, ‘Spam Fritters are really the kind of thing that you only ever want one of…’

We’d be more than happy to donate our ‘one’ to anyone who feels the need to embark on this glorious adventure. JMB