British Regional Food (97818494 - Hix, Mark.docx

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Contents

Introduction

London

The South

The South West

The Midlands

The East

The North

Wales

Scotland

Ireland

Gazetteer

Index

Acknowledgements

Mark Hix

British

REGIONAL

FOOD

A cook’s tour of Britain and Ireland

Photography by Jason Lowe

QUADRILLE

This edition published in 2006 by
Quadrille Publishing Limited,
Alhambra House,
27-31 Charing Cross Road,
London WC2H OLS

Editorial Director: Jane O'Shea
Creative Director: Helen Lewis
Editor & Project Manager: Lewis Esson
Art Director: Lawrence Morton
Photography: Jason Lowe
Food Styling: Mark Hix
Styling: Cynthia Inions
Production: Bridget Fish

Text © Mark Hix 2006
Photography © Jason Lowe 2006
Edited text, design & layout © Quadrille
Publishing Ltd 2006

The rights of Mark Hix to be identified as
the Author of this Work have been asserted
by him in accordance with the Copyright,
Design and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape,
mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise, without the prior permission in
writing of the publisher.

Cataloguing in Publication Data:
a catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library

ISBN-13: 978-184949-168-6

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

London

The South

Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hampshire, Kent, Oxfordshire, Surrey, Sussex

The South West

Bristol, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire

The Midlands

Derbyshire, Herefordshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire,
Rutland, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, West Midlands, Worcestershire

The East

Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk

The North

Cheshire, Cumbria, Lancashire, Greater Manchester, County Durham, Mersey,
Northumberland, Teesside, Tyne and Wear, Yorkshire

Wales
Scotland
Ireland

GAZETTEER
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

6
8
24

48
78

98
126

158
178
208
234
236
240

Introduction

I knew as soon as I set out on this project that in order to do the subject justice I really needed to take about two or three years off my day job and probably fill several volumes with what I found. Of course, that was impractical, so I decided right from the start that all I could really do was just to try to seek out what took my fancy all over the country, and write about that in the hope that it would give readers sufficient feeling of what is out there that they would want to find out more for themselves.

I apologize wholeheartedly to those I have omitted… perhaps next time… and to those I have included but have not mentioned all their products or spelled something wrongly, or not included the latest developments (I did start researching this book back in early 2005), I have tried my best - as has my redoubtable editor, Lewis Esson - to get it as right as we could.

I do have to thank my friend and photographer Jason Lowe, not only for accompanying me to many of the places I have visited and for taking such beautiful pictures for the book, but for leading me to so many fascinating places, producers and personalities.

If we have managed to convey just a fraction of the interest and excitement we came upon in our travels around these beautiful islands, then I am sure you will forgive me any errors or omissions, and that you will get almost as much enjoyment from reading this book as we did from making it.

Mark Hix

London 2006

6|British regional food

LONDON

has long been a dynamic centre of food fashion. It is no surprise then that these made their mark on the great city – not only in evocative place names like Cinnamon Wharf, but in the city’s bustling inns and coffee and chocolate houses, the smoky bonhomie of which spawned great institutions like the gentleman’s club and the Stock Exchange, as well as industries like insurance. Local manufacturers also used the rich reservoir of flavourings available to create condiments that are still staples of the British table, like HP Sauce and Gentleman’s Relish. The city’s position as the world’s trading centre also made it increasingly multicultural, so Cockney pie and mash shops, whelk stalls and jellied eel stands were soon vying with the salt beef and bagel shops of Jewish immigrants, who also, surprisingly, gave us that most British of institutions, the fish and chip shop. Later, Limehouse was also to become one of the first ‘Chinatowns’ in a Western city, and the first Indian restaurant in the West opened in Covent Garden.

A

London has changed in many ways since Elizabeth David’s account of the London food scene back as recently as 1984. I had not long been in London then, but she was absolutely right – there were then no shops to compare with Pec’s of Milan or Fauchon of Paris for a combination of high-quality ingredients and quality cooked food. There was nowhere with the energy

top left The menu board at the current
F. Cooke in Hoxton Street (page 15)
bottom left Andrew Casson’s bee hives (page 22)
top right Chelsea buns

S THE MAIN PORT INTO WHICH CAME

all the heady spices of the Orient, and the tea, coffee

and chocolate of the Far East and Americas, London

You can get a couple of hundred different types of cuisine if you only explore the capital’s many ethnic pockets, or read Charles Campion’s The London Restaurant Guide. Check out things like back-street Turkish and Vietnamese cafés –

I love taking visitors to these places. Years ago I took Rick Stein to the Mangal Ocakbashi in Stoke Newington on his return from Turkey, and he reckoned it was the best Turkish food he’d eaten in two weeks.

and scope of Dean and Deluca or Balduccis in New York; and where was there to take a foreign visitor to sample skilful English cooking apart from The Connaught or The Dorchester, where neither of the chefs were English, but produced great English food?

Well, I was lucky and worked at the latter for Anton Mosimann, and Elizabeth David was right in saying that the English food in the Grill there was bloody good – I’m still using many of the traditional methods Anton taught us. If Ms David was still around, I’m sure I would bump into her at Borough Market on a Friday or Saturday, as I do most of the other cutting-edge food writers and chefs of today. Chefs and cooks are increasingly understanding the roots of English cooking and it is now not so uncommon to eat English food in restaurants.

Food from far corners of the British Isles makes its way to London now and we don’t have to rely on foreign imports any more if we are cooking seasonally and purely British. We still have a few pie and mash shops, which are a fine example of good-value working man’s food, although many of them have closed, like the one in Kingsland Road, that has now become a Chinese restaurant. Fortunately, it now serves great Chinese food and they have sympathetically kept the old part of the shop intact, with the original benches, mirrors and mosaic floor tiles, so we can still enjoy that part of the tradition. This, for me, is an example of how London preserves its historic food traditions, because London is as much about Chinese food now as it was once about pie and mash and jellied eels. Now the two food stories still remain in one room, it almost feels like you want to order a bowl of jellied eels with your dim sum.

above The interior and window of
the original F. Cooke pie and mash
shop in Kingsland Road, which is
now a Chinese restaurant (right
and page 15).

Where I live, you can virtually eat or buy anything at any time of the day, from goat tripe to a pint of milk, and these pockets of London are what make London life really interesting. Many of our small producers’ businesses thrive on taking part

in the several farmers’ markets that are now popping up all over the city, and shopping in these markets can give you a real taste of Britain and what it has now got to offer.

12|British regional food

We have just opened a Rivington restaurant – one of
our British-style bistros, the first being in Shoreditch – in
Greenwich. There we feature a whitebait supper as a part
of our banquet menus, where everyone gets their food in
the middle of the table and shares. This area along the
Thames has a big whitebait connection. Believe it or not,
whitebait suppers were held by the Commissioners of
Sewers, who oversaw the engineering projects carried out
in and around Dagenham after the great flood that
inundated local marshland around the Thames in 1713.
Breach House, built for the superintendent of works,
became a regular meeting place for the commissioners,
who would combine their business meeting with a spot of
fishing, and eventually Breach House became a formal
fishing club, holding annual whitebait suppers.

The club was apparently damaged beyond repair after
a rowdy evening and, after 1812, the suppers were held at
riverside inns in and around Greenwich and Blackwall,
including the Old Ship Tavern and the Trafalgar Tavern.

During the summers in the 1830s, there were even hourly
steamboat sailings, so that civilized gents and cabinet
ministers could partake in whitebait suppers.

These annual suppers became very sophisticated and,
as well as the whitebait, also featured lobster, stewed eels,
a fish soup called ‘water souchy’, or ‘souchy’ (pronounced
sooky), using the stray fish caught in the nets with the
whitebait. The name of this soup was derived from the
Dutch word waterzooi (a freshwater fish soup). A favourite
venue for these grand suppers was Lovegrove’s West
India Dock Tavern, which would be frequented by
politicians and special guests. The last of these grand
dinners was recorded in 1894.

Whitebait, the small fry of herrings and sprats, were
caught extensively in the mouth of the Thames and
sometimes further up, but with the demise of the herring
shoals on the east coast, they are now less common and,
these days, we have to rely on frozen whitebait, which can
be quite acceptable if you buy good quality.

DEEP-FRIED WHITEBAIT serves 4

Whitebait are usually sold frozen or recently defrosted
and rarely fresh, as they are so perishable. As a young
man, working in a pub kitchen in West Bay, I was brought
whitebait freshly landed by local fishermen, which I
ended up freezing anyway. We’ve come to live with
frozen whitebait, and they still make a perfect comforting
starter and snack.

vegetable oil, for deep-frying
100g flour
sea salt
good pinch of cayenne pepper
400g frozen whitebait, defrosted
100ml milk
lemon wedges, to serve
tartare sauce, to serve

Preheat about 8cm of oil to 160-180°C in a large
heavy-based saucepan or electric deep-fat fryer.

Mix the flour with a pinch of salt and the cayenne
pepper. Dust the whitebait in the flour, shake off excess
and dip briefly in the milk, then back in the flour. Ensure
they are all well coated and shake off excess flour again.

Fry the fish in 2 or 3 batches, depending on how many
you’re cooking, for 3–4 minutes each batch, until crisp.
Drain on to kitchen paper and season with sea salt.

Serve immediately with lemon wedges and tartare sauce.

Whitebait suppers

London|13

Fish and chips

Why, you may ask, have fish and chips got a spot in the
London section of a modern regional food book? You’re
absolutely right in thinking that our once-favourite
takeaway is available all over the British Isles, which it is.
However, it was originally a regional food in the working-
class areas of the North and London.

Although London had its own kind of food and pies,
and ‘cook shops’ in the Middle Ages, it wasn’t until the
nineteenth century that fried fish hit the streets, initially
without chips. Fish sellers and fried fish shops were all
over London in the middle of that century, as there was
an abundance of fish available from the fleets working
the North Sea. Barking was then an active fishing port,
supplying London, and fish like plaice had become so
common, and no longer a delicacy, that it would often get
tossed back overboard, along with haddock and whiting.
Between 1799 and 1823, the supply of North Sea fish
reaching Billingsgate Market had increased from 2,500
tonnes to 12,000 tonnes, not including the 500 million
oysters brought up from the Essex and Kent coasts.

The freshest fish would get sold immediately and the
not-so-fresh would get battered and fried to try to
disguise the inferior taste and texture. Deep-frying, as we
know it in chippies now, didn’t exist then, so the fish
would be fried in shallow pans and served occasionally
with baked potatoes.

This, incidentally, was around the time of the birth of
the baked potato trade; they would be parboiled and

taken to local bakers and then sold on the streets from a
kind of four-legged charcoal burner. There was a famous
baked potato stall in Shoreditch, which was brass-
mounted with German silver, and lamps attached with
coloured glass. The potatoes would get served with just
butter and salt.

As this way of eating fish became popular, so the fish
frying trade developed and, by the mid-1800s, there were
around 300 fish fryers in the city. The fried fish would
still not have been as we know it now. Fish like dab and
sole would be fried whole in a flour-and-water mixture,
then just pan-fried in oil. Fish fryers would also trade
outside taverns crying ‘fish and bread a penny’ with
painted boxes strung around their necks and fish wrapped
in newspaper. These fish sellers would live in
communities of their own and garrets, as even the
poorest classes objected to taking them in as lodgers,
because of the odours of fish and frying.

Between the mid-1800s and 1900, fish shops started
opening, some selling just fish and fried unpeeled
potatoes, which would be crudely prepared, roughly
sliced – even chipped – or, in some cases, small whole
potatoes. A Mr Teutten was one of the key figures in the
development of chip frying at this time, as he set up a
frying range business near Billingsgate in 1869.

One of the earliest recorded proper fish and chip
shops with a traceable history was Malins of Old Ford
Road in Bow in the East End, which moved a couple of

14|British regional food

times in its long history, from Cleveland Way and
Goldsmiths Row. The family that ran it were originally
from Cornwall and the business was thought to have
started around 1860. As recently as 1965, they received a
plaque from the Fish Friers Review and Friers Federation,
in recognition of their being the oldest fish and chip shop
in the world.

There was, of course, some disgruntlement from some
of the Northern fish fryers, who claim to have similar
long-standing businesses. Malins has now sadly been
scooped up by a larger company, some sort of franchise
operation, and is not what you can call a real fish and
chip shop any more.

There are a few good examples of quality old-
fashioned fish and chip shops still left in London, one
of which is Faulkner’s in Kingsland Road and the other
the Two Brothers in Regents Park Road in Finchley.
Sadly, most of the old fish and chip shops have lost their
way and have surrendered old tradition to serving fast-
food items that have nothing to do with what they were
originally all about.

There is, though, a resurgence of modern fish and
chip shops, which have the qualities of the old style with
a few modern twists, for example frying only in
...