But evening meals go on (luckily!), and this week featured two interesting things to do with sausages. I'm a big fan of sausages - the butcher sort, that is - and with mash it's the perfect meal, in many ways.
First a comment about our favourite butcher, Drings in Greenwich, SE10.
They do probably the best sausages I've ever had. Favourites are the 'Londoner', which is a pork & leek number, and the 'Old English', which is full of black pepper. Drings generally is a rare find in London - an extremely high quality, friendly butcher that sells absolutely excellent things at not ridiculous prices. Everybody seems to know each other there too, which plays to my suspicion that Londoners generally crave two things: anonymity and a village atmosphere. I'll leave you to ponder the delightful contradiction in that statement. Drings recently won an award on one of the radio stations, but I can't find the story on the web - maybe someone else can, in which case pop it in the comments below...Getting back to sausages though, another kind of sausage which never fails is the continental 'U' shaped one. We had one in the cupboard from a trip to Holland that we had to use up, from the rather excellent supermarket Albert Heijn. It's a great shop - sort of place where you can pick up Old Amsterdamer cheese for about a tenth of the price in London, not to mention 'Poiret', a pureed apple and pear really thick jam which is the sweet equivalent of Marmite, and which is amazing on pancakes... More another time.
Getting back to sausages though, we had rather a lot of cabbage this week, so out came Nigel Slater to out with a fantastic way of cooking it. For this, get the sausages under the grill and the potatoes cooking, then core and cut up the cabbage into finger sizes slices. Then grind up 2 tsps each of peppercorns and juniper berries. Bring a pan of water to the boil and drop the cabbage in for no more than 2 minutes. Once that's done, drain it in a sieve. Then heat the pepper/juniper berry mix in a bit of butter for a couple of minutes and add 150ml of cream. Heat that up a bit until it thickens, then add the cabbage and mix it all up. By this time the sausages and potatoes will probably be ready. Make potato mash, then serve it all up. Great way of eating cabbage (if a little high cholesterol!). It tastes a little bit like Gin - wonderful.
So compare and contrast with the traditional Dutch dish of Hutspot, which we made last night with the Albert Heijn sausage. Again, pretty simple. For this, boil up about 3 carrots cut into chunks along with potatoes and a very roughly chopped onion. Cook that til it's soft, then mash up. Meanwhile though, my own recipe (there's a first!) onion gravy. For this, very gently heat some sliced onion in some olive oil in a pan with the lid on for about 10 minutes. Add a tbsp of demerara sugar and let it sweat another 5 minutes. Then add a beef stock cube and some water, preferably from whatever you've got cooking (potatoes, veg etc). Bit of gravy browning (can't beat it!) and you've got really nice gravy. Better season it too.
To make the Hutspot, you have to make a pile of mash with an indentation in it for the gravy. Nice.
A final note on the Nigel Slater recipe - this is from his absolutely wonderful book 'Tender, part 1', all about his experience of growing and eating his own veg in his London garden. M gave me a copy for Christmas - It's a gorgeous, hardback volume, with a chapter on each type of vegetable. Each is described beautifully, and the man has clearly given a great deal of thought to the individual characteristics of the vegetable and what it works well with, and has concocted some extremely fine recipes. More to follow...
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