Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

Traditional Irish Stew with lamb, not beef. Rory was asked about this during the demo on Tuesday. He allowed that it could perhaps be made with beef but went on to say that there were many French and Italian stews that would be a better choice if you had beef to stew.

Anyway, it’s not that difficult, really, cut lamb shoulder chops in half, trim the fat, render these bits of fat, brown the meat, glaze the onions & carrots, pour in the stock, bring to a boil, put in the oven for an hour, add the potatoes, wait until they’re cooked (30 mins or so), then serve. You can, optionally, thicken the sauce with roux but, this being the demo kitchen, we weren’t going to be doing that.

My stew was in the oven by 9:30 with the cabbage all prepped so I had plenty of time to demonstrate that I can fry and scramble eggs to tick off two more techniques from the list. Fortunately, the Ballymaloe technique is pretty much as I do them anyway (Felicity Cloake’s perfect versions, of course), so Julia was pretty happy with them, polishing off the fried egg (which I forgot to photograph) and sharing the scrambled eggs.

Not much to add other than that, as I somewhat expected, Ballymaloe prefer cabbage to be a little softer than I do, but their cooking method is again pretty much as I do it anyway—in butter with minimal water. Using gin rather than water can be good (add after the cabbage has been well coated in the butter initially) but I’m learning to toe the Ballymaloe line.

One more thing for the blog, though or, rather, two. First, Rory confirmed my suspicions about using the shape of the leaves to distinguish tat soi and pak choi. The former looks like a spoon, the latter looks as you’d imagine a leaf taken from a pak choi head. Then, I mentioned that I’d assembled a list of two recipes for each of the ten herbs we have to identify. That wasn’t quite true, I’d only found one recipe for fennel. I’d only been looking through recipes we’ve been shown so far, though. Others have scanned the Ballymaloe recipe database and found others, including Lamb cooked in Milk with Fennel. Not something I’m keen to cook, but I know have a proper list of twenty recipes to learn along with my decision tree for salad leaf identification.