Marjorie Elsie Oldham, my paternal grandmother, was a force of nature.
In fact, according to current wisdom, she defied it all the way until her death, aged 90, when she keeled over while cooking lamb cutlets for lunch, having just enjoyed her first whisky of the day (she only ever had two, the second being just before dinner)
She loved a life with food at its very centre and was a role model on how to eat, drink and live well. In fact, much of what you will read on these pages has her DNA running through them like Blackpool through a stick of rock.
The most extraordinary thing about her relationship with food, however, and certainly by modern standards, was the sheer amount of joy she took from it day in day out. Not for her the modern disease of food being a ‘problem’ that needed a ‘solution’. Rather, each meal was seen as an opportunity for unalloyed pleasure.
Whether it was the arrival of her beloved Jersey Royal potatoes in March, for her one of the glories of the spring calendar, suffused with the seaweed they were grown with and served simply with salted farmhouse butter and mint, or – even better as far as she was concerned – the arrival of the new season’s asparagus a few weeks later, she reserved for these occasions an uncomplicated delight often only seen these days in small children at Christmas.
Food, though, was merely the foundation on which she built a wider celebration of life with every mealtime, whether consciously or not, being treated as an opportunity to lift the spirits. In all matters food she had a certain style and élan, understanding instinctively that that food was merely the beginning of the journey.
And so whether it was the small posy of flowers from her garden to be found on the dinner table, or the fact that she took her aperitif into the living room on a brass tray that she and her husband had used every night of their married life, or, in her later years, the simple act of laying a table with nice crockery and cutlery even though she lived alone, every meal was suffused with a sense of occasion and her manifest belief that this sacred act of eating was not something to be taken lightly or wasted.
Born in England but raised on the Channel Island of Jersey, just off the coast of France, she had the unenviable task of raising two young boys – along with her tomato farmer husband – on starvation rations while the island was occupied by the Germans during the Second World War. That gave her not only a keen appreciation for food in general but also
an abhorrence for any kind of waste. Mouldy cheese was trimmed till she got back to the good bits. Every bit of every animal was roasted and boiled and rendered until it could give no more. Every morsel of food that passed across her table was savoured as though it were the last.
And this, all of this, she passed on. First, to my father and then to me. As a result, I grew up in a house where even the very thought of food, good food, would bring an anticipatory smile to the face. A house where “Use by” and “Sell by” dates were an irrelevance (‘Trust your nose,’ I can still hear my father say). A house where food was the spiritual epicentre around which good living revolved.
And so even though Marge is now, sadly, long gone, she lives on. Every time I serve drinks on the brass tray she gave to me shortly before her death, every time I lay the table with linen napkins or light a candle and, most certainly, every time I cook one of her signature dishes, a Jersey Bean Crock, I think of her and give thanks not only for a life well lived but also of good living shared.
Jersey Bean Crock
Jersey Bean Crock is a peasant dish and as such makes a mockery of the twin modern lies that good food is both expensive and only for posh people. Its origins are similar to the cassoulets and other slow cooked bean dishes found just across the water in France where women would bring a crock of whatever bits of meat they had to hand to a cooling baker’s oven to be left cooking slowly till early that evening.
Let me warn you now, this dish looks nothing when you start. When you put it into the oven you will be cursing me for persuading you to cook something that looks so unprepossessing, so unappetising even.
And yet, the transformation is astonishing. The gelatin – and there’s lots of it – in the pig’s trotter slowly renders down and results in a sauce that is so velvety, so luscious and so tasty that it is now illegal in twelve US States.
And it’s cheap. My God is it cheap. I have had up to 10 servings out of one large pot, all for a total cost of around £5. I grant you these days that butchers are getting wiser to this sort of cooking and so are starting to charge for pig’s trotters but it remains one of the most frugal, and yet most tasty, dishes you will ever put on your table.
Serve with any kind of buttered greens (here steamed stem broccoli) and fresh baguette to mop up a sauce so rich that you shouldn’t plan on eating for a week.
This is not a quick dish. As you are reading this you are cooking for tomorrow night (if you’re in a hurry) and, ideally, for forty eight hours time which is when the crock will be at its best, having had a chance to sit and settle. That said, once the initial assembly of the ingredients in the pot is done, you can leave it to do its thing with only one fiddly bit to do before. you can get stuck in. So although it takes a fair amount of time, it’s not time consuming.
Still want to do it? Grand. In which case, take a deep breath and here we go…
|| Shopping ||
One or two pig’s trotters
One knuckle of pork (optional)
1-2kg shin of beef (ideally on the bone)
A large handful each of your favourite pulses. I use butterbean, flageolet and borlotti.
An onion or three (up to you)
3 large bay leaves
|| Cooking ||
The night before, take your chosen beans and soak overnight in cold water.
First thing in the morning put the oven on at 110 degrees (yes 110; you’re going to cook this low and slow) before draining the beans. Then grab the biggest pot with a lid you can find (an old fashioned casserole or dutch oven is ideal) and place the meat in the bottom. Pour in the beans around and in between the meat before adding the chopped onions. Finally, add the bay leaves and cover well with cold water.
[x]
That’s the prep done so onto the cooking.
Bring the pan to the boil and then turn down, keeping it at a low boil for 10 or so minutes depending on how much meat you’re using. Then make sure there’s enough water to cover the meat by about an inch before placing the pot in the oven, lid on, for 20 hours or so, topping up with water when necessary. When you check it, as you will, it should be steaming fairly vigorously and possibly even blobbing very gently. If it is doing more than that, turn the oven down to just under 100. You don’t want it all to boil, rather simply tease all that goodness out very gently.
Now onto the only fiddly bit in the whole process.
First thing the following morning (ie after about 20 hours cooking), remove all the meat from the pan. Some of it may fall apart as you do this and that’s fine. The trotter will wobble like crazy as you transfer it to a plate; basically it’s being held together at this stage by the skin.
Once all the meat has cooled and can be handled, take the trotter and begin to pick it apart. You’re looking to remove only the bones and tough gristle, and particularly the very small metatarsals of the foot. You keep everything else, especially the skin, although even I draw the line at the hairier bits between the hooves.
Repeat with the knuckle of pork (if you’ve added one), again reserving the skin, and then do the same with the shin of beef removing the central bone and making sure that any remaining bone marrow has been extracted and put back into the sauce. Then put all the meat back into the pot.
Back to the reserved pork skin which is, by this stage, quite blubbery and rubbery. If you’re not used to it, it may look a little unappetising. Do not fret, it tastes great; remember, you eat this all the time as pork crackling or, like me in my weaker moments, pork scratchings.
You can do one of two things with it. Either slice it thin and add it back to the pot to render down further or fry it for a minute or so in a very hot pan to get a bit of colour (and possibly crispiness) back into it. I then keep this and serve on top of the finished dish.
Now put the pan back into the oven, lid off this time, and leave to reduce the sauce. After a few hours or so, switch the oven off and let it cool and rest until you need to eat it.
(Try not to skip this resting stage – I usually leave it for a good 6 hours – as this is when the magic of slow cooking happens.) When you’re ready to eat, then simply gently reheat the pan, trying not to boil, before ladling it out into large bowls.
As the fat and gelatin content of the dish is so high, the leftovers will set solid and store in a sealed container for weeks, improving as these things do, with age.