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Rose and Crown, Great Horkesley, Essex

White onion and thyme soup
White onion and thyme soup amuse bouche - dense flavours just right for a tiny serving.

That little episode was, I think, the longest break from blogging I’ve had in about six years. I read somewhere that we are due to get flu every ten years or so, and I managed to have this decade’s dose while on a flight back from New York (scratch one week’s blogging, while I was having fun on holiday) a couple of weeks ago. It’s been exactly two weeks today (scratch another two weeks’ blogging, while I was lying in bed staring at the ceiling and wishing I was dead), and I’m still not better. But at least I can look at a monitor now without splattering goo all over it and getting a blinding headache from the backlight.

So. To the Essex/Suffolk border, where about a month ago, I was invited over to the Rose and Crown in Great Horkesley (01206 271251) for a lazy Tuesday supper. Chef and patron Ed Halls set up shop in the sort of place that estate agents describe as having a “wealth of beams” almost exactly a year ago, after spells cooking at starry places like Morston Hall in Norfolk, and Pétrus under Marcus Wareing. (And, in the spirit of full disclosure, I should mention that I discovered half-way through my meal that my buddy Krista from Passport Delicious is a part-owner of the Rose and Crown.)

Warm salad
Warm salad of black pudding, smoked bacon, shallot marmalade and soft boiled quail’s egg. As good as it looks!

Ed marks a very clear line in the fuzzy territory between the pub scampi-in-a-basket menu and the sort of fine dining that might intimidate your gran. This is an accessible menu that you can easily put in front of the family; but it’s also full of little un-pubby gestures like a little amuse bouche – in our case, a little cup of dense and pepper-hot white onion and thyme soup –  some exceptionally good olives, and ingredients like quail’s eggs, shallot confit and polenta. (Lady at table next to us: “What is this poo-len-ta on the menu?” The staff are brilliant, and had her all set in no time; and yes, she ended up ordering it.)

Alongside the less pubby flourishes, you’ll find all of the things you’d hope to find on a pub menu: stellar onion rings made with a beer you can get on tap at the bar; proper, twice-cooked chips; gargantuan portions of calves liver; and the thing that really drew me to the Rose and Crown in the first place: dry-aged Dedham Beef steaks, cut thick and chargrilled perfectly (in my case) medium rare. Don’t be put off by the slightly George Foreman Grill-looking char marks on your steak. My bone-in ribeye really was a great-tasting piece of meat, raised properly, fed with grass, like cows should be, and cooked simply and well. (Witness the fact that I polished the whole thing off; I am almost never able to finish a whole steak.) Ribeye, especially with the bone, is far and away my favourite cut of steak, and you don’t see it on menus as often as it deserves. It’s tender from extensive marbling, and full of wonderfully beefy flavour: this is a muscle that gets used a lot, and the proximity to the bone adds flavour and sweetness.

Rib eye steak
Ribeye steak, with slow-roasted garlic tomatoes and watercress salad. Stellar chips and onion rings out of shot, disappearing into Dr W.

You can choose saucing for your steak from a short list, and I heartily recommend the chunk of Stilton offered as a kind of hard sauce.

The quality of the cooking shines through in little details like the breathtakingly rich fish stock making a base for the scallop risotto, and the desserts, which were shockingly good. Not at all what you might expect on a pub menu: here was an orange and passion fruit crème brulée, topped off with bitter macerated oranges and a spectacularly creamy white chocolate ice cream. Those bitter, sour oranges paired with sharp passion fruit were such a good foil to the dense, rich custard that they made my head spin. Dr W interjected that the head-spinning may have been caused by the Greene King ales we were drinking. The brewery, at Bury St Edmunds, is only 25 miles away, and there’s a definite, and very positive, difference to the taste of the beer when it’s not had to travel too far.

Great Horkesley is just outside Colchester, and near all of those lovely day-out places like Long Melford and Lavenham; it’s also a great place to stop for lunch if you’re out on your way to the Suffolk coast. It’s great to see more pubs taking food seriously, and Ed is a really interesting guy to chat with; if you’re in the area, it’s well worth a visit.

Pecan pie
Pecan pie with maple syrup and butterscotch ice cream. There must be a magical ice cream elf in the kitchen; all the ice creams we tried were spectacular.
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Steak with sweet pepper salsa

I love the silky, slippery texture of a roasted, peeled sweet pepper. Removing the seeds and skins is a job I relish – a cleaned pepper is velvety-smooth between the fingers, and once it gets to your mouth, that texture combined with the pepper’s natural sweetness makes for an experience far more sensuous than supper should be.

This is a good way to get out of a steak rut (you know the rut I mean – it’s the one with the chips and Hollandaise). I’ve served my steak, rested for a few minutes to allow the meat to soften up and release its juices, over a plateful of undressed pea tops, which you should be able to find in some supermarkets at this time of year. The meat juices and the salsa will dribble into the salad, like a particularly stupendous dressing. I served this with some buttered rice cooked in chicken stock – good, crusty bread will also be good (and this mixture of pea tops, salsa and steak will make a world-beating sandwich).

To serve two, you’ll need:

2 steaks of your choice – I used sirloins
5 sweet peppers – I used 2 pointy piquillo peppers and 3 bell peppers. Try to vary the colours, but don’t use any green ones; they won’t be sweet enough.
12 cherry tomatoes
½ red onion
1 large handful (25g) parsley
1 heaped teaspoon cumin seeds
1½ tablespoons balsamic vinegar
5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 pack pea tops, or another sweet, tender leaf
Salt and pepper

Take the steaks out of the fridge before you start and pop them to one side while you deal with the salsa, so they’re at room temperature when you come to cook them.

Rub the whole peppers with a couple of drops of olive oil and arrange in a baking tray. Cook at 180° C (350° F) for 20 minutes, until the skin is browned and blistering, and use tongs to put them in airtight freezer bags. Seal the bags and set aside while you prepare the other ingredients – this will give the steam rising from the flesh of the peppers time to loosen the skin, which will make peeling them much easier when they are cool.

Dice the onion and quarter the tomatoes. Put them in a mixing bowl and stir in the finely-chopped parsley. Toast the cumin seeds in a dry frying pan for a couple of minutes until they are giving up their aroma (be careful not to over-toast and burn them), and stir them into the bowl.

Use your fingers to peel the skins from the roast peppers, and remove their seeds. Discard the seeds and skins, chop the flesh of the peppers into chunks about the size of the pieces of tomato, and add them to the salsa. Pour the oil and vinegar over the other ingredients, stir well and set aside for the flavours to meld while you prepare the steaks.

To cook the steaks, rub them on both sides with salt and pepper, and grill or saute (I chucked mine on the barbecue) for a few minutes on each side until medium rare. Remove to a plate and rest for five minutes to allow the tissues of the meat to relax. Slice on the diagonal and lay the warm steak on a bed of pea tops. Taste the salsa for seasoning, add salt and pepper to taste, then spoon a generous helping on top of the steak. Serve with sunshine and a cold drink.

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Caramelised onion, horseradish and blue cheese crusted steak

Sometimes, you might find yourself in possession of a less-than-handsome steak. Now, if your steak is richly marbled, fat and nicely aged, I wouldn’t recommend you do more than rub it with olive oil, salt and pepper – maybe a little garlic too – and grill it briefly. The pieces of topside I found myself with needed a bit more help, so I came up with this recipe.

I’ve been spending lots of time hanging out at the Polish deli in Newmarket recently – I’ve already told you about the salt pork and cherry juice, and I’m really enjoying the smoked sausages and pickled herring. I decided to sample some Polish horseradish (chrzan) after reading an extremely enthusiastic hymn to it in a book I was editing a few weeks ago, and found that if anything, the author wasn’t giving it all the love it deserves. English creamed horseradish can be a bit wet and insipid, but this Polish stuff is fiery, sweet and intensely fragrant – just sniffing the jar caused hallucinatory roast sirloins of beef to parade before my eyes. Look out for it in your local Polish deli – some supermarkets now have a Polish aisle too. You might also be able to find a variant called cwikla, which is horseradish with sweet red beets. It’s delicious, but it’ll make the crust here an alarming pink.

The crust on this steak is soft and light under its buttery, crisp surface, and is full of flavours which make the very best of your steak. To make enough to crust four steaks, you’ll need:

1 large onion
3 heaped tablespoons Polish horseradish sauce (or whatever you can find)
3 heaped tablespoons crumbled blue cheese (choose something strong – I used an elderly Bleu d’Auvergne)
100g fine, fresh breadcrumbs (just whizz white bread in the food processor)
100g butter
1 bunch (about 15g) chives
Salt and pepper
Olive oil

I also made some garlic-lemon green beans, which used the meat juices. If you want to make these too, you’ll need:

100g green beans
2 fat cloves of garlic
Zest and juice of one lemon
Salt and pepper

Get the steaks out of the fridge well before you want to cook them to allow them to come to room temperature. Rub them with olive oil, salt and pepper, and set them aside. While the steaks are coming up to temperature, prepare the crust.

Cut the onion into very fine dice, and fry over a low heat in two tablespoons of the butter, stirring regularly, until the onion is a lovely golden caramel colour. Put the cooked onion with its butter into a large mixing bowl, and melt the rest of the butter in the onion pan. While the butter is melting, use the back of a fork to blend the onion in the bowl with the cheese – try to distribute the cheese as evenly as you can. Stir through the horseradish, then stir the breadcrumbs into the mixture, adding the melted butter bit by bit until you have a mixture that is still loose, but that holds together when pressed. Stir the chives through the crust mixture, taste and season. (If your cheese is particularly salty, you may not need any extra salt.)

Cook the steaks for a minute per side in olive oil in a very hot frying pan – just enough to sear them on each side. Remove to a plate, keeping the oil in the pan. Divide the crust mixture into four and press it into the top of each steak. (If you find you have some left over, you can just make it into a little rectangle and grill it along with the steaks for a cook’s treat.) While you are working, some of the steak juices will come out of the steak onto the plate. Hold onto these for the beans, which cook very quickly, so you can do them as the crust grills.

Transfer the steaks with their topping to a grillpan and put under the grill for 6-8 minutes (or as long as you find your topping takes to go golden and crisp on top). Transfer to warm plates to rest for a few minutes before serving. I served this with some roast potatoes and more of that lovely horseradish.

To make the beans, warm the olive oil you seared the steaks in, and fry the garlic in it for a few seconds before tipping the topped, tailed and chopped beans in. Toss the beans around the pan until they start to turn bright green, then pour over the lemon juice mixed with the zest and the steak juices. Allow the liquid to bubble up and reduce a little, check the seasoning, then remove to a hot serving dish.

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Delmonico’s Restaurant, Financial District, NYC

America is a country where every third restaurant seems to be a steakhouse. I didn’t want to overdo the steak, having watched Beverly Hills Cop as a child and taken that thing about your colon very seriously, so we decided on one steakish meal over the week we were in New York. This presented a problem – with so many steak joints on offer, which should I choose? There’s Kobe Club, which reviews well but is amazingly expensive (their menu suggests that you order at least two of their 4 oz portions of Wagyu – but the cheapest 4 oz portion is $50, and with side dishes, a shrimp to balance on top of your steak, the very pricey starters, and supplements for any sauces involving ingredients like foie gras, marrow or truffles, it adds up very quickly). I want at least some money left in my wallet for clothes shopping while I’m in New York, so Kobe Club is off the list. Craftsteak also has an excellent reputation, but Tom Colicchio spreads himself awfully thin – he’s currently involved in 13 restaurants across the United States, so it doesn’t feel very special. Good steak is something so many restaurants here do – so I want a restaurant with something extra-interesting to it. Enter Delmonico’s. (Turn your speakers off before clicking this link – there is intensely aggravating music.)

What’s interesting about Delmonico’s? Simple: it’s the oldest continuously run restaurant in the US, and may be the first fine dining establishment in the whole country, having been established in 1827. Those pillars outside? Imported from Pompeii in the 19th century. This is where Lobster Newburg, Chicken a la King and Baked Alaska were invented; the restaurant also gave its name to the Delmonico steak, a cut served in restaurants all over the country. (They also claim to have invented Eggs Benedict, but this seems to be controversial.) Mark Twain has eaten here – so have Theodore Roosevelt, Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Tesla, Napoleon III and a positive galaxy of America’s great and good. We booked for a Wednesday night, put on those clothes we’d been able to afford because we didn’t go to Kobe Club, and got stuck in.

The dining room is very masculine; all dark leather and wood panelling, like a meaty gentlemen’s club. Service was smiling and fantastically personal – my cocktails, including the most savoury and well-balanced Dirty Martini I’ve ever tasted, were constructed at the tableside in a silver shaker. The menu still includes some of the classic dishes from the restaurant’s past, although I was disappointed that there were no Delmonico Potatoes – a gratin made from parboiled potatoes grated into long shreds with parmesan and nutmeg. That famous steak was there, though, along with the Lobster Newburg and Baked Alaska.

Dr W plumped for a Caesar salad to start with so he could fit in as much steak as possible later on. It was a good example, dressing clearly made in-house and strongly flavoured, with white anchovies interlaced on top. I went for the foie gras, dusted with crushed hazelnuts and grilled, then served hot with three fruity sauces. The crushed nut/foie combination is one that pops up more and more often these days, and it’s a good one, the toasty richness of the nuts complimenting the buttery foie beautifully. This little lobe was nicely and neatly prepared, too; no stringy or bitter bits.

The Delmonico steak (a wet-aged, boneless ribeye) was thick, and served perfectly medium rare; it was gently crusted on the outside, the fat crisping and delicious, and marbling the whole piece. It was also enormous, weighing in at 20 oz, and I wasn’t able to finish it, which made me extremely jealous of Dr W, whose salad decision was a good one which enabled him to absorb his entire steak into his person. Spinach and parmesan and something called “The Perfect Hash Browns” made for good sides, although I’d quibble with the “perfect” thing; they weren’t particularly interesting or memorable.

It is a happy freak of biology that I appear to have been born with a separate stomach especially for dessert. I couldn’t have packed another atom of beef in there, but Baked Alaska (two spoons, because Dr W was so full that tears were appearing in the corners of his eyes) sounded just the ticket. And where those hash browns hadn’t lived up to their description, the Baked Alaska was pretty much divine. A piped hedgehog made from tens of caramelised meringue peaks surrounded a soft, but not melting centre of gorgeous, gorgeous banana-candy ice cream, sat on top of a piece of sponge studded with juicy pieces of apricots. Regular readers will know that I’m not much of a pudding person, but I would be perfectly happy to eat Delmonico’s Baked Alaska and nothing else for…ooh…at least one meal every day.

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Shooter’s sandwich

I first came across this recipe on the Two Fat Ladies’ television show a decade or so ago. Their version of a shooter’s sandwich was very plain – just a steak, salt, pepper and two Portobello mushrooms inside a hollow loaf of bread. My recipe for this perfect picnic food is a bit more exciting, with more steak, more mushrooms, plenty of garlic, fresh herbs, some sauteed wild mushrooms and a generous spiking of vermouth. It’s delicious, and it looks so fantastic when you slice into it that your fellow picnickers will be speechless first with awe and later because it’s very hard to talk through a mouthful of mushrooms and meat.

The sandwich looks complex, but it’s very easy to prepare. The secret is in the long pressing it receives between two chopping boards. To make enough for four (alongside other picnic nibbles) you’ll need:

1 loaf white bread
2 sirloin steaks, a bit shorter than the loaf
4 Portobello mushrooms
1 handful dried mushrooms
4 cloves garlic
1 handful fresh herbs (I used parsley, marjoram, chives and thyme)
½ wineglass vermouth (I used Noilly Prat)
Olive oil
Butter

Cover the dried mushrooms (I used a mixture of porcini, shitake and oyster mushrooms) with boiling water and set aside. Slice one end off the loaf and hollow out the middle, setting the soft crumb to one side.

Saute the steaks, seasoned with pepper but without salt, for two minutes per side in the olive oil. Remove to a plate. It is important that your steaks are rare so that they give up their moisture to the sandwich when pressed.

Reduce the heat and melt one knob of butter in the pan with the olive oil from the steaks. Saute the Portobello mushrooms with two smashed cloves of garlic until the mushrooms are soft and starting to release their juices. Transfer to the plate with the steaks.

Melt the other knob of butter in the same pan, and drain the dried mushrooms, reserving their liquid. Saute the dried mushrooms with two more smashed cloves of garlic for about five minutes, then add half the soaking liquid and the vermouth. Simmer until all this liquid is reduced to a few tablespoons of glossy syrup.

Season the steaks and mushrooms with plenty of salt and some more pepper. Build layers of steak, Portobello mushrooms, wild mushrooms and herbs inside the loaf until you have used everything up – if any cracks appear in the loaf, patch with the crumb you reserved. Pour any juices from the plate into the sandwich with the liquid from the pan. Wipe the cut end of the loaf in any remaining pan juices and put it back on the loaf. Wrap the whole thing in three layers of greaseproof paper and tie up tightly with string.

Place the loaf on a chopping board so the steaks are lying horizontally. Place another chopping board on top of the loaf and weight it down – I used two large, cast-iron pans and both sets of weights from the scales. Leave the sandwich (no need to refrigerate) for five hours.

Serve the sandwich by simply slicing through the whole stuffed loaf with a breadknife. The steaks will be juicy, the pressed mushrooms silky, and the whole thing full of concentrated flavour. If it’s too late in the year for picnics, don’t worry; just serve with some hot sauteed potatoes for a filling supper. Make a martini with some more of the vermouth if you feel that way inclined, and enjoy.

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Weeping Tiger

It’s a chromosomal abnormality passed on by my father (Chinese by way of Malaysia); every week or so I find myself subject to an overwhelming craving for oriental food. One kitchen cupboard is kept full of Chinese, Malaysian, Thai, Indonesian and Japanese condiments, including seven kinds of soy sauce, numerous sticky brown things in jars, hermetically sealed packets of blachan (the stinkiest thing in the house, but completely necessary in a lot of Malaysian and Thai dishes), dried fungus, four different kinds of dried noodle, four kinds of rice (not including the two risotto rices in the other cupboard), lye water, pork floss, fish floss, rice wines, black and red vinegars and some mysterious tins which have lost their labels. This is all in order that this craving can be assuaged any time it hits, as long as I’m in the house.

The craving thumped me between the eyes this time when we were expecting some friends. Weeping Tiger, a Thai beef dish, would hit the spot, with some Chinese noodles for some stodge. I took a good-sized piece of sirloin steak per person, and rubbed each well with kejap manis, an Indonesian sweet soy sauce.

I made some Nuoc Mam Gung – a sweet, salty, strong sauce made from raw ingredients. I put a peeled piece of ginger the length of my forefinger, two peeled limes, four cloves of garlic, half a stalk of peeled lemongrass, two birds eye chilis, four tablespoons of Nam Pla (Thai fermented fish sauce – I use Squid Brand, a Thai premium brand, because it has a fabulous label) and four tablespoons of caster sugar into the Magimix, and whizzed the lot until I had a sauce. If you follow this recipe, you may prefer to use less chili; taste the sauce when it’s out of the blender and see whether you think it needs more lime juice or fish sauce. You may want to add a little water if you find it too strong.

After the sirloins had marinated for half an hour, I grilled them in a very hot, stovetop grill-pan, keeping the middles pink (about two minutes per side). The steaks were then sliced very thin and placed, still warm, on top of a crisp salad with grated carrot, Chinese leaves, cabbage, shallot, mint leaves and coriander leaves. The nuoc mam gung I’d made earlier was drizzled on top – delicious.

This dish is notably lacking in carbohydrate. To remedy this, I made a very simple garlic cauliflower noodle stir fry which my Dad used to make regularly when my brother and I were little; real childhood comfort food.

This dish needs pea thread noodles – a very thin noodle made from mung beans. These noodles are one of my favourite kinds; they’re thread-thing, transluscent and glassy, and they don’t go slimy in sauces. I broke off half a packet and made them soft in boiling water, then drained them and rinsed them under the tap in a sieve. At the same time, I took eight dried shitake mushrooms and put them in boiling water to rehydrate. When they were soft I sliced them thinly.

To serve four people, I broke up a large cauliflower into bite-sized florets. I stir-fried six roughly chopped cloves of garlic in very hot groundnut oil, added the cauliflower and mushrooms after about a minute and stir-fried that for another three minutes. I then added a pint of chicken stock (I usually keep home-made stock in the freezer, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a stock cube if you don’t have the time), half a glass of Shaosing rice wine, about three tablespoons of mushroom soy and the same amount of light soy. I then put the lid on the wok for four minutes. Lid off, noodles in, taste, add more soy sauce. (I also add half a teaspoon of MSG at this point, which will doubtless cause gasps of horror from my Mum when she reads this; sorry Mummy.)

I thought my Chinese food craving had been squashed for the week. Unfortunately, writing this meal up has made it come back again. Time for a pork floss sandwich.

Lunchtime update:
Emails and comments have been arriving asking what the hell pork floss is. It’s not something I shall be cooking for you, since I don’t want another bout of RSI (this is a dish which needs several hours’ constant stirring); besides, it’s one of those things I always fill suitcases with when returning from Malaysia. There’s an excellent post at Umami on pork floss, which I commend to you.

Pork floss is, simply, lean, lean pork cooked with spices, sugar and sauces until the muscle fibres come apart in a dry, flossy mass; it melts in the mouth and tastes beautiful. It’s a gorgeous garnish, a delicious snack and one of my favourite things.