For the Love of British Food

The JD Wetherspoon chain of pubs and bars is one of the UK’s biggest, and seems to be managing to stay profitable despite the current economic situation. Recently I’ve been in quite a few as a friend has been doing some market research on them and that was how we came to find out about their beer festival. 

This has become an annual event, JDW work with CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, to seek out the best of british brewing and mix in a few interesting guest beers from overseas as well.  CAMRA started back in the 1970’s as a reaction against the bland and boring chemically produced beers which were easier for pub landlords to manage and serve, but were putting traditional breweries out of business – the UK was in danger of losing one of its trademark tastes!

Fortunately the trend has been reversed and via the festival, drinkers in all parts of the country can taste beers that are normally just available to a small area of the country and in some cases, just one or two pubs that are also on-site micro-breweries.

We visited our local JDW pub, the Parchment Makers in Havant, Hampshire to sample some of this year’s festival beers and enjoy a meal. Our tasting notes do not necessarily agree with the booklet that the pub supplied! However, where possible I have linked back to the brewery concerned.

Overall, the JSW 2008 Beer Festival featured 50 different beers, 10 of which were from outside the UK. The Festival has been running since October 15 and ends today November 16. It would have been impossible for every pub to have every beer on for the full period, so we didn’t get to taste some of the ones we would have liked to on just the one evening visit.

You’ll find details of all the beers on JDW’s website, at least for the time being. I’ll try to check back periodically if they take it off, if you read this at some later date and it isn’t there, please let me know.

We were drinking half-pints to be able to sample as many beers as possible during our visit, Dave drinks at least twice as fast as I can, so we got through quite a few. 

First round was Traditional Scottish Ales Loch Lomond Gold for me and Anker Gouden Carolus Ambio for Dave. The Loch Lomond was a light coloured ale, said to be in the IPA style, but was very sweet which wasn’t really mentioned in the notes.

Carolus is a Belgian beer, very much in their style of strong darker beers. Belgium produces an amazing range of beers for such a tiny country and some of their brewing is still done by monks in religious houses as it has for hundreds of years. I would describe it as deceptively strong with a robust character.

With our meal (sausages, mash and peas for me, and a burger and chips for Dave) we tried Titanic Iron Curtain Russian Stout and Brakspear’s Oxford Gold for Dave. The Russian stout went very well with the food. I thought it had an unusual hint of coffee in its bitterness. Other stouts like Guinness are too bitter for me to enjoy more than an occasional half-pint, but I could happily have carried on drinking this one.

I also liked the second beer in this round, Brakspears Oxford Gold. It had a beautiful aroma and was not too bitter, but Dave thought it lacked some aftertaste. May have been the comparison with the

The next round was St Austell Proper Job and Greene King Bonkers Conkers. The notes for the St Austell described it as having citrus grapefruit flavours and I certainly agreed with that. Although it was more bitter than I would normally try, it would make a really refreshing drink on a hot summer day.

The Bonkers Conkers was more appropriate to the autumn season, rounded and mellow. In another recent visit to another JDW pub in our locality, Dave tried Thwaites Nutty Black, but he was a little disappointed with it and said it didn’t have a lot of flavour.

The beers that we missed out on, that we would really like to have tasted include one with real coffee in it, Meantime Coffee Porter from London, Robinsons Old Tom Chocolate Ale from Cheshire and an Australian beer with an unusual ingredient, Baron Original Black Wattle which uses wattle seeds to produce its flavours, described as having chocolate and hazelnut overtones. We also missed a fruit beer from Poland, Namyslow Original Plum. I am a great fan of the Belgian fruit  beers like Kriek, made with cherries and Frambozen with raspberries, so this would have been right up my street. Hopefully it will make a re-appearance.

CAMRA also worked with Wiltshire brewers Wadworth, best known for their 6x bitter, to produce a special beer for the festival called CAMRAle. If you are reading this on Sunday 16th November, rush down to your local JDW as they may still have some, along with Coach House Cinnamon Special neither of which were yet on tap for our visit.

The festival has also featured some unusual ciders and perries (perry is made from pear juice or a combination of pear and apple). Hopefully as they are bottled, they will be on sale for a few more days. I particularly want to try one from California, Ace Apple Honey.

Visitors to the UK from overseas should not miss the chance to try British beers and JD Wetherspoon pubs are an excellent place to sample them along with some traditional British food. You’ll find them all over the country, but you should also take the chance to try other offerings from the same breweries in local pubs in their ‘home’ areas.

I hope this post has given prospective visitors an idea of the wide spectrum of British beer on offer and encourage a few Brits to try a distinctive local brew on their next pub visit rather than the nationally produced and distributed beers.

The British Government are currently considering tax cuts to boost the economy. One cut they might consider is the taxes on beers and wines which have hit pub landlords very hard. At present, up to 60 pubs may be closing their doors every week, which is very sad for the local communities they serve. Our pubs are part of British life. While I understand the need to educate younger people about the dangers of alcohol, perhaps destroying jobs and livelihoods is a rather heavy-handed way to do it.

Well, OK, really it is a little past the apple harvest now, and it hasn’t been the best year for a good apple harvest in some areas of the

UK. In the South, we had late frosts into April and May that killed blossom, our bee population has been hit badly by varroa and colony collapse, and a wet and windy summer did not help the fruit grow and ripen.  Other parts of the country had better weather, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk for example have had good crops this year. 

One delicious variety of British apple, the russet, has hardly been seen in the shops this year. It has an odd, rough almost scaly skin, rather than red or green and shiny but a wonderful crisp texture.  There are plenty of Bramley cooking apples in the shops, so obviously some areas of the country managed a better harvest. You could be forgiven for thinking that this is the only variety of cooking apple available, you hardly ever see other ones in the supermarkets, although they can be found in farm shops, farmers’ markets and occasionally turn up in my organic veg/fruit boxes.  My veg boxes come from a company called Riverford Farms (http://www.riverford.co.uk/).

The company started out in Devon, but have spread across the country and brought in other farms to cut down on food miles, by swapping local crops in bulk. One of these new farms is only a few miles from me at Upper Norton (www.riverfordnorton.co.uk)  near Winchester, Hampshire. Checking their website just now, I can see they have my beloved russets on sale this week! Other cooking varieties you might find are Grenadier and James Grieve. The latter I recall very well from my childhood when my Grandad had a ‘double’ tree he had grafted, so that it produced both James Grieves for cooking and I think, Coxes Orange Pippin for eating or it may have been Laxton Superb.  Apart from russets, of which there are many sub-varieties, I think I like the small, sharp and juicy Worcester Pearmains the best. Only a few years ago, it looked like our native apple varieties were disappearing under a tide of imports from Australia and South Africa. The movement for local food has started to reverse this trend.  I was also quite surprised to find that the idea of a different type of apple for cooking is less common in the USA.  

Researching this article, I found some interesting links that I’d like to share
Britain’s declining bee population 

An apple encyclopaedia

Growers determined to keep old varieties alive

It might well seem odd for a blog about British food to start with a post about the food of the Indian sub-continent, but it has become a part of our national cuisine, just as surely as people from that part of the world have become part of our society and it is much welcomed.

Back in the time of Queen Victoria, the last ‘Empress of India’, people who worked or soldiered in India started to bring home spices and recipes. Only in the last 30 or 40 years though, have really authentic ingredients become commonly available and made cooking at home, those dishes you can get in your local restaurant or takeaway, really possible.

The restaurants and the food now available in supermarket chill cabinets are still heavily ‘adjusted’ to British tastes, and are very different to what is available in restaurants in say, the Brick Lane area of East London where they are catering for the local population rather than more general tastes.

What I cooked for dinner this evening was my take on chicken dhansak, a Parsi dish from Northwest India and made with lentils. I like spicy, but not as much chilli heat as in the traditional recipe.

The lentils (small red ones, need very little pre-soaking) give it substance and body, and the method of making a massala or paste with the onions, garlic and spices and frying at the start of cooking also helps to make the dish thick and tasty. It was also very economical, a small amount of meat bulked out with lentils – there is a portion for lunch tomorrow. With a mind to nutrition, I threw in a handful of chopped fresh green beans at the end.

I used a ready prepared, but good quality curry paste today, but I do use freshly ground or whole spices quite a lot, for instance, grinding cumin and coriander seeds, to spice up a soup or mash made from butternut squash or sweet potato. I use a mortar and pestle, but you can buy electric spice grinders. That little bit of physical work and the wonderful aroma is part of the pleasure of cooking.

When a survey was done a couple of years ago, it emerged that one of Britain’s most popular dishes was Chicken Tikka Massala, which is very definitely a ‘made-up’ dish and not one you would ever find on any menu in India or Pakistan.

What I have tried to show in this post is that we can, and do use ingredients and methods from other cuisines to make tasty food, and so can you, without feeling that you have to follow an authentic recipe word for word. And last, but not least that the most humble and inexpensive ingredients are all that is needed to make a great meal.