The Hinds Head And Tales Of Olde Puddings

Guest post by Dom Bailey

If the haggis is the great chieftain o’ the puddin' race, the Hinds Head in the upmarket village of Bray, in Berkshire, has snagged a couple of others from the noble hierarchy.

Given that owner, Heston Blumenthal, is the Dr Frankenstein of gastromistry, you are more likely to find something Mary Shelley herself may have tucked into.

Little numbers by some of the dishes denote the age of resurrected recipes - but resurrected to live and taste as intended. Veal chops with cabbage and onion and sauce 'reform' (c.1830) are not out of place alongside the no-nonsense Hereford rib-eye with bone marrow, or bream, peas, mussels and borage, or pork belly with pearl barley and wheat beer.

I could have gone for all five starters - ham hock and foie gras terrine, crab on toast, raw venison, tea-smoked salmon, or lemon salad with cider-poached pear, goat's curd and walnuts (this, the menu modernistically warns, may contain nuts...) But instead I opted for a more rounded meal - a Scotch egg and two puddings.

I have only recently discovered that Scotch eggs do not have to be the shot put balls of grisly meat, air-pocket and dry hard-boiled egg found in school canteens, salad bars, and service station fridges.

In fact, I'd hazard to say the proof of a place is in its Scotch egg.
I mean really, how do they do it? Crispy salt-flaked breadcrumbs, tender sausage meat, and a soft-boiled quail's egg oozing yolk out of the middle. Soft-boiled!

But the proof is also in the puddings, as you might say.

The first is a specials/signature dish alongside the vivid pea and ham soup, or Cornish mackerel with Jersey potatoes, smoked fennel and red gooseberry chutney.

It is oxtail and kidney pudding (top pic) - a steaming flat-topped dome of delight in a silky, rich sauce. The pudding shell is thankfully thin and splits open to reveal the shreds of oxtail and kidney chunks. The beefy flavour is intense but not overpowering. A slightly thicker amount of pudding below - but all the better for mopping up the sauce. It’s definitely a plate-licking dish.

We had it served with sand carrots (growing them in sand makes them sweeter apparently, and I guess a lot less knobbly) and a baby spinach salad with an anchovy dressing, hazelnuts, and Lord of the Hundreds ewe's milk cheese. Ok, the salad was for my partner who had the mackerel, but it was fantastic with the salty anchovy, nutty cheese and nutty nuts.

The second pudding had the number c.1700 together with a little explanation card about the origin of puddings. I won't spoil it, but basically it dates back to a time when puddings got sweet, coming out of their haggis-binding intestine skins and into cloths.

The speckled, wobbly blob on the board next to some apple strands is Quaking Pudding. If I said imagine a warm, cinnamon-spiced panna cotta it wouldn't do it justice. There is just something comforting and earthily-maternal about each mouthful. The queen o’ the puddin' race, no less.

Other desserts - not puddings - include banana Eton Mess, and another resurrection and intriguingly-named chocolate wine ‘slush’ with millionaire shortbread (c.1660).

The Hinds Head looks like a country village pub, but it has foregone the soul-destroying gastropub/bistro make-over to keep the dark wooden panels, polished leather, and ghosts of a bygone era (there's even a Duck or Grouse warning sign to mind your head on the low beams...)

There's a bustle of black-dressed staff, and local drinkers are confined to the small bar area (during this Friday evening session at any rate). But worth seeking out for any time-travelling fans of the Great British pudding.

Price: £88 for two people, including a few pints of Marlow Brewery Smugglers ale (rather than the £600 bottle of Chateau Latour premier grand cru, Pauillac).

The Hinds Head: High Street, Bray, Berkshire, UK, SL6 2AB
Tel: +44 (0)1628 626151, email: info@hindsheadbray.com

:: Dom Bailey is a writer and musician. His songs – largely inspired, appropriately enough, by old English tales - are here...

Vietnamese Beef Stew (Bo Kho): A Breakfast For Champions

One thing that surprised me during the two months or so I spent in Vietnam was how dismissive many tourists were of the food. When I was in Thailand and Cambodia, people kept saying to me that Vietnam was THE place for grub in SE Asia. Most of them had travelled throughout Indochina and knew their stuff, some were chefs who’d been working out there for a while.

Perhaps it was the high expectations, but my first experiences of Vietnamese food hardly blew me away, and I kept bumping into people who said the same – that it didn’t quite live up to the hype.

I even met a rapper called DJ Shadow in Saigon, who had a bizarre theory that it was down to the fact that Vietnam had been at war for most of the 20th century, and its people had been too busy learning to fight than cook. He’d even written a rap about it.

I can’t say I agreed with him, but it made for an interesting conversation from what I scarcely recall. After all, when the French colonised Cambodia, they tended to use Vietnamese chefs rather than Khmer ones, believing they were far more skilled cooks (which is praise indeed from the French).

But I did find some very good dishes during my travels through Nam. And the best of the lot, for my money, are the breakfasts. I never thought I’d find a meal to rival the great British fry-up, but it certainly holds true for banh mi op la (fried eggs cooked on a skillet with a freshly-made tomato sauce and a garlicky, mayonnaise-like emulsion, served with a crusty baguette) and bo kho (invariably described on tourist menus as Vietnamese goulash).

And the latter is not an unfair comparison, because like a properly-made goulash, bo kho has that beautiful, meaty thickness to the broth that only comes from cooking cheaper cuts for a long time, with root vegetables in towards the end.

There’s nothing quite like mopping up a hearty stew with bread, and that’s how it comes in Vietnam – banh mi – with a lovely fresh baguette to wipe up every smear of juice. But there’s other stuff too: the ubiquitous plate of thorny coriander and basil leaves for vitamins, and usually a small saucer of Kampot pepper, sea salt, chopped chilli and a lime quarter to squeeze in and stir into a paste – which takes the dish from superb to sublime.

The meal is a sister of the famous beef noodle soup, pho bo – Vietnam’s unofficial national dish. And it shares the same secrets in the stock – onions, cloves, star anise, cinnamon, ginger, and occasionally other spices, cooked to black. This gives it a deep, slightly bitter, spicy flavour that differentiates it from the hundreds of permutations of beef daubes, stews, and goulashes you’ll find around the world from Paris to Prague to Phu Quoc.

The result after a few hours of simmering is an aromatic, velvety stew with lumps of falling-apart beef, potatoes and carrots – the sliced onions long having been dissolved into the thick broth. The best place I had it was at Cafe 333, off De Tham, in Saigon, where it is only served on the breakfast menu, topped with a garnish of sliced fresh onion and spring onion greens. It really is wonderful.

I’ve been tinkering with my version of it (I’ve even added wine, eek – so kiss my ass aficionados), and I’ve watched it being made in a few places, and I reckon it is definitely worth trying. There’s enough here for six very hungry people (at least)...

Ingredients:

1kg different cuts of stewing beef – brisket, chuck, shank etc.
4 medium onions, or two big ones, chopped
2 garlic cloves, chopped
2 star anise
3 cloves
3 red chillies
2 sticks of lemon grass, bruised and roughly chopped
1 stick of cinnamon
Thumb-sized piece of ginger
Two onions, cut in half
1kg beef bones
3 potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
2 carrots, peeled and cut into chunks
2 tbsps tomato puree
½ bottle red wine
1 tbsp fish sauce
3 bay leaves
2 tsps brown sugar
Handful of flour

Method:

First make the stock by roasting the bones in a tray in the oven, scattered with the cloves, cinnamon, ginger, star anise, whole chillies, lemon grass, and a little oil and salt.

Blacken the unpeeled onion halves on the cut side directly over a hob, and add to the tray. Cook for about one hour at 170C until the bones and spices are nicely singed.

Remove from the pan and put in a saucepan. Pour in enough water to cover the bones and bring to the boil. When the water is boiling, deglaze the pan the bones were roasted in with a couple of ladles of the hot stock by putting the pan over a hob and scraping the bottom with a wooden spatula so all the juices and caramelised bits of flavour dissolve into the fiercely bubbling water.

Add to the stock, and simmer for two hours, adding more water if necessary. Then sieve the stock and reduce over a high flame – until you have about one litre of liquid.

Cut the beef into one to two-inch cubes. Put a handful of flour into a plastic bag, and throw the meat in, and shake until it is well-coated. Remove the meat from the bag, shaking off the excess flour.

Heat a little oil in a saucepan over a very hot flame and fry the diced pieces of beef, a few at a time, so as not to lose the heat from the pan, otherwise they will “stew” rather than brown. Add the chopped onions, and fry for another ten minutes, stirring all the time. Then add the tomato puree, garlic, sugar, and bay leaves, stir well, and cook for 30 seconds.

Pour in the wine and fish sauce, and bubble away. When the liquid has almost evaporated, pour in the stock, bring to the boil and simmer slowly for several hours until the meat is soft and feathery, and at the point of falling apart.

Add the potatoes and carrots about 40 minutes before the end so the veg is cooked through but still firm, adding more water if necessary. Season the stew, and serve with a fresh baguette, a plate of fresh green tops and herbs, and a side dish of Kampot pepper if you’re lucky enough to get it.