Pork & Beans (or Ramblings on the Food of Old England & a Shared Inheritance) 

Dry curing pork belly for bacon

I recently spent the best part of a weekend perusing the pages of various ancient cookery tomes (admittedly in facsimile form, on line, so not quite the tactile and ocular pleasure it sounds!), ostensibly in search of old bacon curing recipes but, in truth, simply as an excuse to riffle through the 'receipts' and epicurean delights of Old England. I was particularly enthralled by the recipes and notes contained in 'The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy' by A Lady, the lady in question being Mrs Hannah Glasse. First published in 1747, this cookery book was an enormous success, so much so that it was revised and reprinted many times over the subsequent 70 years. The book gives a fascinating insight into the culinary arts of the mid Georgian period, albeit a style of cooking generally enjoyed by the middle and higher orders; that is, households wealthy enough to keep at least a cook and a few servants.

 And the book is clearly intended for use by (literate) cooks and servants of the wealthier classes, as Mrs Glasse states quite unashamedly in her introduction: "If I have not wrote in the high polite style, I hope I shall be forgiven; for it is my intention to instruct the lower sort, and therefore must treat them in their own way". To clarify she continues: "For example: when I did bid them lard with large lardoons (sic), they would not know what I meant; but when I say they must lard with little pieces of bacon, they know what I mean".

Helpfully divided into chapters, 'The Art of Cookery' covers every aspect of English cookery, from the roasting and boiling of meat, to the brewing of beer, and just about everything in between.The most fascinating section of the book, for me, is the chapter on 'Made-dishes', Generally these were dishes where meat or poultry was sliced, cubed or jointed prior to cooking in a pan with gravy and other flavouring ingredients. The shear range of these additional ingredients would, no doubt, surprise anyone brought up in that bland post war era of 'meat and two veg'. Hannah's 'made-dishes' frequently included ingredient such as; sweet herbs, shallots, truffles and morels, other dried and pickled mushrooms, lemon peel, capers and gherkins, red and white wine; ingredients that from the mid 19th Century the English considered distinctly continental and, consequently, treated with suspicion and disdain. Flavours were further enhanced by the frequent use of spices including; nutmeg, mace, cinnamon, cayenne and, of course, pepper, both black and white; all redolent of our medieval culinary past. The point is, the English had been using these ingredients for hundreds of years prior to the Georgian era;  they were intrinsic to our style of cooking and not something fancy introduced to these shores by our supposedly more sophisticated continental neighbour.

Mrs Glasse's fulminations against French cooking are legendary and have amused both historians and food writers alike. It's important to remember, however, that Hannah was compiling and writing the original manuscript at a time of great political upheaval in Britain and Europe. Hot on the heals of yet another skirmish with the French in 1743, the 1745 Jacobite rebellion had thrown England into utter turmoil. Led by the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stewart (Bonnie Prince Charlie to you and me!)  and with French financial backing, the Jacobite forces had raised an army in Scotland before marching south into England as far as Derby. Britain had faced the real prospect of a royal coup and with it the return of the country to Catholicism. No wonder Mrs Glasse was vindictive in her writing of Catholic France and its ostentatious cookery. 

Amusingly, and despite her constant berating of France, the French style of cooking and, particularly, Gallic chefs, Hannah's book is peppered liberally with French culinary terms, without any hint of irony and often applied to dishes that are quite obviously English and medieval in origin. What, for example, Mrs Glasse refers to as a fricasey (sic) is quite clearly a development of the medieval dish known simply as a fry-up! A good number of the recipes contained in 'The Art of Cookery' would be recognisable to many of us today, though once again, like our forebears, most would probably attribute them erroneously to the French.

Incidentally, I did find an old cure for bacon in 'The Art of Cookery' and was interested to note its list of ingredients included a small amount of saltpetre (potassium nitrate). From my first tentative forays into the world of meat curing some years ago, I have wrestled with the difficult question of nitrates/nitrites (sodium based these days, rather than potassium) and their use in modern preservation processes. The natural route, relying on the inherent preserving qualities of common salt, plus good practice, would be my preference; my Environmental Health Officer (EHO), however, has other ideas!  The inclusion of saltpetre in a 270 year old bacon curing recipe has gone some way to allay my qualms in relation to the use of nitrates/nitrites in curing, but I am still inclined to favour a more natural approach.

I digress! Unfortunately, 'The Art of Cooking, Made Plain & Easy', by its very nature, provides us with only a limited view of the full extent and breadth of English cookery at the time of the book's publication. Away from this middle and higher class world of fricaseys, ragoos, harricos and cullis (sic), what do we know of the food of the 18th century rural English peasant, my particular area of interest? Of course, with the Georgian lower orders still largely illiterate, little written evidence survives of the dishes on which the English peasantry, the cottagers and the agricultural labourers, sustained themselves. Prior to the enforced land enclosures of the late 17th and early 18th Centuries, cottagers at least had the right to use common lands to graze a few beasts, forage for wild foodstuffs and collect fuel in the form of firewood. In addition, they'd usually have a small plot of land on which to grow vegetables and grains, perhaps keep a few chickens, maybe even fatten a pig or two. Once the common lands and, indeed, their small plots had effectively been privatised and enclosed by wealthy local landlords, the cottagers were left with little option but to join the cash economy; carrying out poorly paid production work at home, move to one of the growing industrial cities or emigrate.

It's no great leap of the imagination to surmise that, without the interruption of the enclosures, the arc of English peasant cooking would have continued along much the same trajectory as that of our rural continental cousins. My hunch is that our cooking culture would have straddled the culinary traditions of a number of our European neighbours, falling somewhere in style between the Spanish and German models (though perhaps without the Spanish emphasis on New World vegetables, such as the potato and tomato, which the English lower orders were very slow to embrace), but certainly a more earthy and rustic style than the French. I am certain that in England's cold winter months a hearty rib-sticking dish containing a little salted pork bulked out with highly nutritious dried beans and flavoured with dried wild herbs, would have been the order of the day. A dish similar perhaps to the fabadas of Spain's Asturias region (pork belly, chorizo, morcilla and butter beans), the French cassoulet (pork belly, Toulouse sausage, a confit of duck or pork and white haricot beans) or, indeed, the pot baked pork and bean dishes originally brought to North America by European settlers. I envisage some form of pottage, comprising smoked bacon, sausage of some type, either fresh or cured, and dried beans; most probably the Old World broad bean. It's always exciting to recreate dishes from the past, so as soon as the new smokehouse is built and things have settled down a little, I'll get to work developing a  recipe or two. I'll let you know how I fare in a future article.  

 In the meantime, I'll leave you with this recipe for a Spanish style pork and bean dish of my own devising. Inspired by a meal I had at a local Tapas bar probably a decade or so ago (in hindsight, it was probably some form of fabada), I very much enjoy the contrast between the piquancy of the chorizo, the relative blandness of the fresh English sausage and the floury texture of the beans. I hope you do too!

A Stew of Chorizo, Fresh Sausage and Butter Beans

Serves 4~6

a small handful of sundried tomatoes

half a chorizo ring, the cured and fermented type, either natural or picante

A glug or two of olive oil

a large onion, diced

one large carrot, diced

2 plump cloves of garlic, sliced and roughly chopped

2 heaped teaspoons of sweet smoked paprika

a generous half a teaspoon of hot smoked paprika

half a dozen good quality meaty English sausages, each sliced into 4 pieces

a generous shake of dried oregano

2 fresh bay leaves

a small glass of dry sherry

a good glug of balsamic vinegar

one 400ml tin of chopped tomatoes

salt and freshly ground black pepper

two 400ml tins of butter beans drained of their water and rinsed (or the equivalent in dried beans soaked and cooked according to the instructions on the packet) 

Before you begin cooking, soak the sundried tomatoes for 15 minutes, or so, in just enough hot water to cover them. Whilst the tomatoes are soaking, slice your chorizo into rounds just a little thicker than pound coin. Once the tomatoes are soft, squeeze out any excess liquid and roughly chop. Be sure to set aside the water you soaked the tomatoes in for use later in the recipe.

Heat the oil in a good heavy pan or casserole over a medium heat, add the sliced chorizo and fry, turning it over until it has coloured a little on both sides. Turn the heat down a little,  add the onion, carrot and garlic and cook, stirring now and again, until the vegetables have taken on some colour. Now add the sundried tomatoes to the pan together with the paprikas and let these cook out for a few minutes.





Time to add the sausage pieces! Make space in the pan by moving the chorizo/onion mix to one side, then add the sausages to the pan and turn up the heat a little so they begin to sizzle. Once the sausages have taken on a little colour, gently mix the contents of the pan together, sprinkle in the oregano, added the bay leaves and allow the whole lot to fry slowly for 5 minutes or so. Now turn up the heat, add the sherry, a good glug of balsamic, the whole can of tomatoes and give everything a gentle stir. You can rinse out the empty can using the the reserved tomato soaking water, if you like, and add this to the pan too. Turn down the heat, season the with salt and pepper and simmer with the lid on for 30 minutes or so. Finally, add the drained butter beans and allow these to heat through before serving. I like to serve this stew with fried paprika potatoes and a salad of tomatoes and green beans with a sherry vinegar dressing.