Italian Charcuterie Tour – In London

If you want to explore Italy’s rich and varied charcuterie, Cantina del Ponte (Shad Thames, next to Tower Bridge) can offer this journey of flavours in London. Head Chef, Claudio Gottardo, has sourced the absolute best examples of each kind of Italian charcuterie and separated them into selections from Northern, Central and Southern Italy, as well as a set of unusual charcuterie from across Italy. Each selection will be available for a month, accompanied by a glass of wine from the region and followed by a local pasta dish – all for £19.50 per person.



January is Northern Italy, and includes bresaola (nothing like the dry stuff you get in supermarkets), sopressa, san daniele ham, melt-in-the-mouth lardo pernigotti and spec. The pasta dish – canaderli - was sold as giant gnocci, but was actually superb bread dumplings, flavoured with herbs, that I hadn’t heard of before.

Go in February for the Central Italian charcuterie menu, that encompasses wild boar salami, parma ham, mortadella and culatello. Pigs destined for culatello are fed parmesan and you can actually taste it in the meat – unusual and fantastic.

Mortadella


The southern Italy menu for march includes spicy salami, herby porchetta (like the French anchaud, but served thinly sliced), n’duja and sopressata- The soft, fatty n’duja is really tasty spread on bread, and very much like Spanish sobrasada, except that the Spanish version is made with smoked paprika, whereas the smokiness in the Italian one comes from smoking the finished sausage.

N'duja


The ‘strange’ charcuterie selection has not been confirmed yet, but this is the one I am most looking forward to trying. Expect blood, guts and balls, made delectable through hundreds of years of recipe perfecting – can’t wait!

Cantina del Ponte

Images supplied by Nife Is Life, Italian online deli

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Hello fellow friends from all around the world

My Woodcock Experience

In case you don’t know, woodcock is traditionally served grilled on toast, and the guts and brains are eaten spread on the toast.

I had understood that something about the way woodcocks feed and digest makes their insides more edible than those of other species, but have been unable to find out exactly what that might be.

A kind client gave me a wild woodcock that he’d shot. I plucked it (inexpertly and possibly lazily, as you can see from the photo) and it felt really odd not having to gut it afterwards.

I didn’t have any decent bread that evening, so I split a wholemeal pitta bread and put one side in an oven dish, inside up. I then put the woodcock on the bread (beak under wing – again, a traditional thing) and put big wedges of butter over the bird, before cooking in a very hot oven, until crisp. I know, it looks like a horrible scorched alien foetus. It had been pretty and cute as a feathered corpse.



I dived straight in and attacked the flesh, which was unexpectedly solid. After a little nibble of the meat (very strong, dark, gamey and ‘ripe’), I broke the body apart and moved on to the guts before I could chicken out.

Having regularly come into close contact with the guts of other fowls, their smell and their contents, I was a quite scared of eating those of the woodcock. Especially as its squiggley intestines were white, like bird poo. (All other birds I’ve gutted had brown intestines. I’m not sure which is worse.) Would I be able to handle it? Would I have to admit weakness?

It was nice! Much more pleasant than my first taste of the woodcock meat! Relieved, I enjoyed all manner of its innards spread on the pitta, which had essentially deep-fried in the butter, so was exceptionally tasty. The only drawback was that I had to avoid lots of bitter blood - the body cavity was full of it, and the guts encased in it. The flavour of the intestines was like other delicate offal; sweetbreads etc. The heart, liver and other normal bits and pieces were the same as in any other game bird, but smaller.

With quite a bit of effort, I managed to crack open the head and was rewarded with a miniscule quantity of brain – so small that I didn’t bother with toast. It was creamy and nice as any brain should be. Only tiny. How does a creature manage to grow a beak, feathers, innards, skin, and fly, eat, nest, mate, lay eggs, incubate etc with the instructions from such a weeny brain?

Once I’d exhausted the guts and brain, I went back to the meat. Interesting! Mainly dark, densely textured, gamey meat, like tough wild duck. But there were also seams of white, extremely moist and tender meat, similar to rabbit.

I wonder how much woodcocks vary in terms of eating qualities?

London Oyster Tasting, Oyster Festival & SO Much More

Oyster Tasting, Rabbit Terrine & Terrific Steak. And Foie Gras and Crème Caramel. And More.

London is falling back in love with oysters. Of course, there have always been individuals here who have been willing to hunt down a regular supply and pay for the privilege. But the new wave of interest in oysters goes beyond the generic and is reaching out for the plethora of scents and flavours that are produced by the oysters’ species, environment and the season you're eating them in, and this is making oysters a more accessible treat. I can't tell you what good news this discovery is for me, having recently moved to London from France, especially as the current interest is focussed on UK-produced specimens.

As part of their Oyster Festival (November 2011 – April 2012), Boisdale and Wright Brothers teamed up to host the Oyster Tasting Championships 2011. A panel of epicurean judges picked six winners, including three native and three rock:

Rock Category
Gold – Poole, Dorset supplied by Dorset Oysters
Silver – Maldon Rock supplied by Maldon Oysters
Bronze – Portland supplied by Fleet Oyster Farm, Dorset

Native Category
Gold – Loch Ryan supplied by Rossmore Oysters
Silver – Duchy of Cornwall supplied by Wright Brothers
Bronze – Maldon supplied by Maldon Oysters


Native oysters at Boisdale


For the duration of the festival all Boisdale restaurants and Wright Brothers Soho are serving all six winners on Boisdale’s ‘Six Medal Plate’, so oyster lovers - or anyone who is curious - can enjoy a tasting session of their own. It’s the only way to fully appreciate the differences between each variety. They are also half price from 5-6pm Monday to Friday during the festival.

This will take us a little further along the way towards oysters becoming commonplace and therefore more accessible for everyone (cheaper). Not that I want to devalue the wonderous oyster or its farmer - but a booming mainstream industry would fund itself nicely.

Anyway, I went to try the platter of winners at Boisdales in Canary Wharf, and had a great time. The only drawback as an oyster-explorer was that we weren’t able to establish which oyster was which. Boisdale & Wright Brothers, can your chefs supply labels? I’ll gladly go back and try them again, possibly on multiple occasions, if my oysters came labelled. I want to not only taste the difference but learn which one tastes of what, please.

Way More Than Just Oysters

For me, an oyster-tasting session is extremely exciting in itself.

Foie gras is also enough to animate me, and ditto top-notch steak. So, I was quite overwhelmed by consuming the following menu at Boisdales, after the oysters:

Generous slice of foie gras (sadly a bit over-cooked for my taste but nice to have anyway) with a truly fantastic rabbit terrine, containing all sorts of perfectly placed surprises, like pistachios and fruit.

Wonderful rare filet steak and trimmings – can’t remember the trimmings as the steak stole the show, just as it should.

Delicious (if inappropriate after such a heavy meal) crème caramel with a rich chantilly.

Each course was served with a well-matched wine, starting with champagne with nibbles and finishing up on sauternes with dessert.

Pot Roast Partridge

A client gave me a beautiful partridge he'd shot in Ireland. It was the first chance I'd had in ages to pluck, gut and prep a bird for the table, and I thoroughly enjoyed the whole process - precious memories of self-sufficiency came flooding back. It seemed strange to be plucking a fowl in London!



I cooked the partridge whole with stock vegetables (leek, celeriac, onion, lots of garlic), thyme, chanterelles, horns of plenty, a little red wine and water. I also added the bird's heart, liver, feet and gizzard to the stock, and draped bacon over it, before covering and cooking gently for about 90 minutes. I then uncovered it and cooked until the bacon was crispy, before taking the bacon off and crisping up the partridge's skin. I served it with kale and grilled it's feet as a tasty, crunchy accompaniment.

Danish Delicacies

Just got back from a wonderful weekend with the gals, visiting a friend who lives in Copenhagen.

We managed to pack quite an impressive number of local delicacies into our two days, including numerous tasters at a food market. We bought an amazing pesto gouda and an extremely strong, soft, nutty artisan gouda, tasted licorice and chili salami (surprisingly and stunningly good), and we cooked ourselves traditional meatballs. I love the Scandinavian breakfasts of slivers of cheese on bread or rye bread.

I was in my element when we sat outside a restaurant by the quay and shared platters of mixed seafood specialities, including smoked salmon, rollmops and other cured fish, all washed down with akvavit. We chose one akvavit that had been matured in barrels while being sailed to the equator and back, which was mellow and caramelly, whilst still very clean-tasting. The other one we sampled was flavoured with dill. It was exceptionally good, went beautifully with the food, of course, and sipping it made transported me to wooden cabins in forests and on heathery heaths.

Fragrant Figs

A timely visit to my parents' place in Sussex, meant I could scrump some of their massive fragrant figs, at optimum ripeness. I took them back to London to have with Greek yoghurt and the wonderfully nutty, toasty Ugandan honey that my Dad gave me ages ago. They made a very special breakfast, accompanied by coffee and enjoyed on the sunny terrace.