I’m a huge fan of offal and have been for as long as I can remember. Back when I was very young, liver and kidney would feature frequently on the family menu and I thoroughly loved it, not a claim that the majority of children would make, I suspect. Offal remains a firm favourite to this day but now that I’m all big and growed up I’ve learned to appreciate the more social elements that come with being an offal eater. I can’t claim to be a nose-to-tail diner but there’s something ultimately satisfying about eating more than just the prime cuts of a beast. Besides which there’s a thrifty element that can leave you pleasingly smug as well as pleasingly fed.

Faggots are an ideal example of this. They are essentially meatballs made from offal and offcuts, anything that is either left over or to hand, and well within the means of the frugal housekeeper whether by want or necessity. Here, I’ve chosen ‘Ffagod a Pys,’ a Welsh variation of the dish, but faggots reach far wider across many English regions too, such as Lincolnshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire, and are particularly fondly regarded in the Black Country where they are also served with peas.

And not to ignore the elephant in the room entirely, the origins of the modern, more derogatory use of the word swim in an entirely different etymological fish pond. ‘Faggot’ is a word we stole from the French meaning ‘bundle.’ You may have seen the term ‘faggot of herbs’ in older cookery books, referring to what we nowadays call a bouquet garni, but centuries ago it was the term given to the bundle of sticks, twigs and branches used to burn heretics at the stake! Given the choice I would certainly choose Ffagod a Pys over a torch-wielding Cardinal.

I served my faggots sliced on English potato cakes known as bacon floddies, (a much daintier version this time) crunchy roasted parsnips and sautéed spinach. I boiled frozen garden peas until they were cooked through, drained them and made a rough purée with a stick blender, adding a few mint leaves to lift its freshness. Finally the gravy was reduced to my liking and spooned over the top and round about.

The faggots themselves were made to own preference, still getting plenty of richness of liver and heart but using belly pork to keep the offal from overpowering the dish. Here are the ratios I used. > > Read on > >

About 4 years ago I decided to take up brewing my own beer as a serious hobby. By ‘serious’ I’m not talking about the 12% ABV gut-rotting death ale that many associate with homebrew, but brewing beers with faithful attention to style, strength, flavour and aroma. Beers that would stand up to my favourite commercial bitters, pale ales and stouts in terms of both taste and finish.

An early decision I made was that I wanted to brew straight from malted grains (barley, wheat, etc) rather than using tinned or powdered malt extracts. Extract brewing is perfectly respectable and a great entry-level way to start, but I felt it suited me more to dive straight in at the complicated end. However, choosing the all-grain route left me with an important requirement, I needed a ‘mash tun.’

‘Mashing’ is the term that brewers give to the process of steeping malted grains in water at a specific temperature, activating enzymes that convert the starch in the grain into fermentable sugars. The ‘mash tun’ is the vessel in which this steeping takes place for a duration of 90 minutes, so to hold a body of liquid at such a defined temperature for this length of time would obviously require something with significant insulation. What better vessel than a picnic cool box? Just as suitable for keeping a mash at a stable 64°C as it is for keeping sandwiches and salads chilled. My cool box is a Thermos 32 litre ‘Weekender’ - the Rolls Royce of cool boxes - easily capable of mashing 5 kilos of grain, enough for a 25 litre batch of the good stuff.

A couple of modifications are needed before she’s ready to go. A keg tap is core-drilled into the wall of the cool box, behind which a run-off manifold is fitted. The manifold’s job is to allow the wort (brewspeak for unfermented beer) to pass freely through the 5 kilos of grain to the tap without getting bunged up along the way, an unfortunate event known as a ’stuck mash.’ It’s made from standard copper plumbing pipe and the elbows and T-joint are solder fittings so a quick blast with a blow torch was all it took to fix it together. The crossbeam is there to increase the surface area of the manifold and the outward-turned T-joint attaches to the back of the keg tap via a hosepipe fitting and a short length of syphon tube. Finally, slots are sawed into the bottom of the manifold at 10mm intervals, at a depth of just less than half the pipe’s width. My Dad and I worked up a hell of a sweat with our junior hacksaws that day, I can tell you. Good thing we each had a bottle of Deuchars IPA to hand.

And so, tap and manifold firmly in place, (slots facing downward) the mash can begin. Water is heated in the boiler to ‘strike temperature’ (calculated to several degrees higher than the intended mash temperature, accounting for the loss of heat when the grain is added) and the grains are stirred in well to avoid clumping. If the mash temperature hasn’t been hit then either more hot or more cold water can be added to adjust. With the room already filling with a malty aroma like a cow biscuit dunked in a mug of Horlicks, the mash tun lid goes on and the whole thing is wrapped up in a thick sleeping bag for extra insulation. An hour-and-a-half later and the mash tun will be full of sweet liquid maltose (and other sugars) that the brewer’s yeast can go to town on. Mashing is only the first step along the way, of course, but one made so easy by this little DIY gem.

The bottom line is that you can mash in anything, but this set-up is extremely efficient (I’ll barely lose 2 or 3°C over the 90 minutes) and is ideal for the batch sizes I like to brew. Ladies and Gents, the cool box mash tun. Its inventor, whoe’er you may be, I salute you!

GDave

Go back to the 1980s and you’ll find me, knee-high to a grasshopper, attending a small primary school in South Manchester. It was a faith school of only about 120 pupils but it was by no means exclusive. We still had our ubiquitous, ‘girl who smelled of Spam,’ (thank Lee & Herring for that one) and none of us were from particularly affluent families. We all enjoyed our mid-morning bottle of free milk - quite how that survived the clutches of Thatcher the milk snatcher I’m not 100% sure - and we all enjoyed our school dinners.

It was a very simple affair, a two-course set meal usually consisting of sliced pork or beef with gravy and some boiled veggies followed by a sponge pudding or a crumble. There was no menu, no buffet to choose from and come to think of it I can’t even remember there being a vegetarian option. But it was good hearty stuff, not exciting I’ll be the first to admit, but a balanced diet. We were eating what we needed, not necessarily what we wanted. I wolfed it down anyway, of course. (This blog isn’t called Pernicketydave!)

In recent years school dinners have rarely been out of the newspapers. It took a celebrity chef back in 2005 to embarrass the authorities into improving what had become shockingly low standards. The budget per child that schools were being asked to work with was so low that their only option was to provide cheap, processed foods that were alarmingly unhealthy. The government’s response to the problem? As always, to appear on television and say they’ll throw money at it - money it was later reported they didn’t actually have. The ‘quango’ that was set up to deliver reform, the School Food Trust, was initially criticised for having a conflict of interests due to many of its board members having links to large catering firms that already supply to schools. These concerns do appear largely to have been redressed and the School Food Trust have compiled new guidelines for food standards which are now mandatory in English primary schools, with a looming deadline for the same in secondary schools. Of course, it wouldn’t be a quango if there weren’t conflicting reports on its success so far, but it’s early days. Let’s hope the shame that kicked this whole thing off is matched by an ongoing sense of responsibility to our kids.

Here’s a dessert from yesteryear, though one which is unlikely to appear in the SFT’s guidelines.

Gypsy Tart is a fondly remembered school dinner dessert, particularly in the South of England. A sweet pastry tart with a filling made from whipped evaporated milk and muscovado sugar, very basic ingredients for essentially a very basic pudding. It might be a little on the calorific side but nothing that can’t be worked off by shinnying up a rope in the school gym afterwards…
> > Read on > >