Good Foie Gras (who knew?); Bad Asparagus. And How Good/Bad Distinctions Are Seldom That Simple...

Me, communing with ducks.  A bit like Eduardo Sousa (but rest assured none of the ducks in this picture were subsequently killed for their livers)

When I was searching out items to link to on my last post I came across a couple of things that got me thinking.  Thinking among other things that the issues they raised merited rather more than just being hidden away behind embedded links, that might or might not be clicked on.  So, rather than just posting the links and passing on, and at the risk of going back over ground that you may well have covered yourself having clicked on my previous post, here are a few of my thoughts prompted by two of those linked items:

The first was this one, which I came across while searching for articles on the ethics of foie gras production, that would illuminate the issue without being too revolting – after all, I was seeking to turn people on to the delights of chicken livers, not put them off eating all together.   What I hadn’t been expecting to come across was something that made me think again about foie gras, and make me really want to try some – of admittedly a very rare and no doubt terrifyingly expensive kind (there is no indication of how and where you might be able to purchase it on the Pateria de Sousa website, let alone a pricelist).  Even if you are – not unreasonably - unwilling to have your views on foie gras modified by the example of a product you have next to no chance of ever sampling, I would still urge you to click on the link and check out Dan Barber’s “foie gras parable” – because not only is it an extraordinary and intriguing tale, entertainingly told, I have to admit that by the end I also found it genuinely moving and, although it’s a word I’m not generally wont to use, actually inspiring.  And not just in the sense that it inspired me to think again about foie gras in particular, but for what it has to say more generally about animal welfare in farming, and even food production as a whole. 

If, of all things, foie gras can be produced with such respect for the welfare of – even love for – the geese involved, and for the environment in which they, and the farmer, live, then surely there is hope for us all.  And I’m not just talking about those who hanker for guilt free foie gras, or even just about those of us who do genuinely care about the ethics of food production, but ultimately, actually, everyone, because we all depend on the farming industry to produce our food.  Even those very few people among us who don’t directly, who manage to be 100% self sufficient, do still rely on an environment profoundly affected by the farming industry. 

Further, the fact that the foie gras produced in this way is so good, not in spite of the focus of attention being on the welfare of the goose and it’s environment, but as a direct result of it, is a truly beautiful thing.  An inspiring thing.  And, I think, the thing that turns the story into a parable.

Now I’m not so naïve to believe that Eduardo Sousa’s methods can be applied across world farming; that every livestock farmer will ever have either the time or the inclination to lie down with his flocks and whisper sweet nothings in their ears; that the lives of all domesticated animals reared for meat can be made so attractive that wild members of their species voluntarily come and join them.  Nor am I likely to be convinced that foie gras, or any other part of the goose for that matter, produced by his methods is ever going to be anything other than a prohibitively expensive luxury, available only to a very few.  But still, there are wider reaching lessons to be drawn from Dan Barber’s parable, lessons that apply to all animal husbandry, to all farming. 

There’s even a lesson that applies more generally than that: a lesson about ethics generally, or perhaps more particularly about how we view the world.  Too many people, too much of the time tend to reduce all issues to black/white; right/wrong.  The real world is more complex than that, and if an issue as apparently black and white as the ethics of foie gras production (foie gras: clearly bad, on animal welfare grounds) can turn out to have such a massive grey area (some foie gras, it turns out: not just good, but the highest welfare meat product you’re ever likely to encounter…) then what does that tell us about all the other, more obviously fuzzy, areas of ethical debate, that people still tend to polarise?  Don’t polarise, that’s what – think, and think again.  Just like the veal issue.

The other link that got me thinking was this one, about the impact of asparagus farming for overseas markets in Peru.  It seems our taste for out of season asparagus is, literally, draining Peru dry.  Which just goes to illustrate that the current trend for seasonality and local produce is based on more than foodie faddism (which is not to claim that all its proponents are more than mere foodie faddists).  Although, in light of my comments in the paragraph above, one does also have to take into account the benefits of $450 million annual export revenue for a country as poor as Peru, and the 10,000 jobs the asparagus industry has created in one of the very poorest parts of that poor country.  See, it can be tricky, living in the grey areas - so I’ll leave it entirely up to you whether or not to purchase Peruvian asparagus from your local mega mart.  On balance, personally, I won’t be.

I did say I’d be writing up more things to do with chicken liver on my next post – that’ll have to wait.  In the mean time, here’s a picture to keep you going…

This is insane. Or just plain dishonest.

I was in Sainsburys the other day and saw this:

Yes that’s a bottle of wine, a red from Cahors.  Buy one of them, it’ll cost you £11.99.  Buy two and that’ll be a round tenner.  As in two quid cheaper for two than one on it’s own would be.  Who’s going to be fooled by that?  Who will really believe they are getting wine genuinely worth twenty four quid in return for just ten?  Surely even in a world in which people have become blandly accustomed to supermarket BOGOF promotions, the notion that Sainsburys are going to not just give you one item free when you buy one at full price, but will actually charge you less for the one you do pay for, presumably, for doing them the favour of taking another one off their hands, is absurd.  I mean, come on Mr Sainsbury, what’s wrong with this wine that you want rid of it so badly?

Clearly the stated full price is, at best, notional.  At worst it’s flat out dishonest.  And I’m afraid I have to go with worst in this case.  And it is indeed the worst kind of dishonesty – in the sense of ‘worst’ being the most rubbish.  Dishonesty so cack handedly blatant that the only people who could possibly be fooled are those not paying attention.  It’s the people doing their shopping distractedly – maybe people yakking on their mobile phones, but also perhaps young mothers with kids in tow - whose eyes take in the fact that this wine is on special offer without actually reading the details and pick up a single bottle, not noticing the extortionate price they’ve been charged for it until they get home that I feel sorry for.   The mothers at least, the mobile phone yakkers not so much…

Them and, indeed, the wine producers, who are almost certainly getting thoroughly screwed over by Sainsburys on cost to allow them the margin to dick about so comprehensively with the retail price.  Obviously I don’t know the details of the specific bit of business behind this particular deal, but have no doubt that it will be based on them producing twice the wine at half the price, which is bad for the wine makers, and ultimately bad for us – assuming we actually like and appreciate wine - because the wine simply will not, can not, be the best that they could make it in those circumstances.   I may not know much about making wine, but I do know that doubling volume, while cutting production costs is not the way to improve your product.  And, if we like and appreciate wine, why should we want the people who make it to gain neither profit nor satisfaction from doing so?  It seems to me we should want to encourage wine makers to make the best wine they can, not discourage them from making wine at all.

The one bunch of people you can be sure that this apparent largesse on Sainsburys part will turn out not to be bad for, will be Sainsburys themselves.  They, after all, choose the price.  Nobody is forcing them to give away a second bottle of wine at a negative price.  Which of course they’re not anyway.  The ‘real’ price of this wine will undoubtedly be closer to the £5 a bottle that two bottles works out at than that plainly spurious £11.99.  My guess would be that at £5 a pop it will probably turn out to be excellent value, indeed I’d think it most likely that this would turn out to be something you’d think was pretty good for six quid, OK but unremarkable at seven.  That is, as I say, just a guess, but I’d be amazed if it proved far wrong.  So you might well argue that two for a tenner is a bargain, and that’s good for us, the wine buying public. 

Well, yes, but also no.  Why not just price the wine honestly, Mr Sainsbury?  Don’t try and fool us into believing we’re getting a better deal than we are, and let us decide how many bottles we wish to buy.   And do you always have to push the wine makers into producing the volume to allow you to sell twice as many bottles at a lower price, rather than allowing them to produce a lower volume of a better, more interesting wine that we’d be happy to buy less of but at a higher price?*

I should of course, at this point, declare an interest.  My day job is in the wine trade, working for, if not strictly speaking a small, local independent wine shop, then an independent chain of shops that is much smaller and altogether more localized than it was at this time last year – circumstances for which I do not, incidentally, hold the supermarkets solely and entirely to blame.  I normally refrain from writing about wine on this blog, partly because of the obvious potential conflict of interests, and for the sake of my own independence, but also, and mainly, because it’s hard enough finding time and space to get down all that I have to say about the food, without getting started on the wine.  But this post really isn’t about wine, it’s about supermarket pricing policies – and the example here is Sainsburys, but this is not just about them, either - and what this example of a bottle (or two) of wine reveals about them.  Because if we recognize the inherent dishonesty in the pricing of this one item, why should we presume that everything else in the store is honestly and fairly priced?  Maybe (and that’s a heavily ironic ‘maybe’) we shouldn’t.

* Actually, to be fair to Mr Sainsbury, the answer to that second question is basically ‘yes’.  That’s just the way supermarket scale economics works, and why you’ll always be able to find more interesting wines in small independent wine merchants.  The more interesting and unusual wines, almost by definition  come from small producers with limited production, and they simply cannot supply in the kinds of volume that the supermarkets require to stock their many thousands of miles of collective shelf space.

Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall is absolutely right, but please don’t all follow his advice at once…

A new potato and caulifower curry, just to prove I do vegetables too (even if I never did get round to writing up the recipe...)

In last Saturday’s Guardian Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall wrote about how he has drastically reduced his consumption of meat, and fish, and made vegetables the mainstay of his diet.  And urged us all to follow his lead, for the sake of our own well being, that of the animals we would otherwise be eating, and, most of all, the well being of the planet itself.

I have to say, even speaking as one who, as regular readers will know, does like their meat, that I cannot fault his argument: scientifically, ethically and logically, it’s pretty unimpeachable; his conclusion, therefore, becomes pretty unavoidable.  Frankly he’s absolutely right: we will all be better off if we all consume less meat.  The only effective way each of us as individuals can contribute to that is by eating less meat ourselves.  I cannot disagree.  No, more than that, I positively agree.  I do however, have one considerable concern with his position.

Not a concern, oddly enough that anyone seemed to raise in the comments attached to his piece in the Guardian online.  A tedious number of those – presumably, I’m afraid, from vegetarians (I say ‘afraid’ because this really isn’t a veggie vs. carnivore issue, and although HFW is not advocating vegetarianism, he doesn’t dismiss it either, indeed acknowledges it as the logical endpoint of his argument) – start off by praising him for his new found passion for veg, then sarcastically point out that, oh, he just happens to have a book on the subject to plug.  As if that undermines his argument.  Which rather overlooks the fact that the man’s a professional food writer.  And if he felt sufficiently passionate about any food related issue we would surely, therefore, expect him to write a book about it.  Wouldn’t we?  Or am I being naïve?

Personally I’m not worried in the slightest about the advocacy or otherwise of vegetarianism, nor the naked cynicism of a food writer having the brass neck to write a book about food, what concerns me is the potential consequences of too many people following Hugh’s lead.  Because, let’s face it, it’s not McDonalds, or Bernard Matthews turkey farms that’ll feel the impact, is it? 

For many years HFW has campaigned tirelessly (some would no doubt say cynically, what with him having a book to sell and all…) for a more ethical meat industry and sustainable fisheries, with better standards of welfare for the animals and less harm done to the environment.  He is far from alone in this, but his is one of the best known and most influential voices in the movement.  That influence though, surely, does not extend far beyond that intersection of the demographic Venn diagram where foodie and Guardian reader cross.  And while this demographic makes up no more than a tiny fraction of the global meat market, they undoubtedly make up a sizeable chunk if not, frankly, all, of the market for just the kind of ethical, sustainable, high welfare, low environmental impact British meat and fish producers he has previously championed.  It seems to me that if ALL of Hugh’s readers heed his advice, and drastically reduce their meat consumption, while it will make no statistically significant difference to global meat consumption (and therefore neither on the welfare of any of the beasts processed by the industry that feeds that consumption, nor on its environmental impact) it would have direct and dire consequences for the meat and fish industries good guys.  So much so that when we came to seek out organic, high welfare meat for our occasional meat treats, we might just find that all the suppliers of it have gone out of business, and all that is left available to us is factory farmed, antibiotic and steroid pumped, low welfare, water injected, shrink wrapped supermarket pap.  Or organic, high welfare meat at prices only the super wealthy could afford.

HFW’s current advocacy of reduced meat/increased veg consumption is not, in truth, as dramatic a U-turn is it may seem for a self described ‘notorious carnivore’.  His position has always been that the ethical meat eater should be responsible for the killing of fewer animals, well cared for while alive, and made the most extensive use possible of once dead (the ‘nose to tail’ philosophy).  His current position is simply a shift further along the same line of thought.  I would urge caution in everyone who cares about the ethics of meat rushing to follow Hugh to the logical endpoint of that line.  Otherwise we might just be the unwitting instruments of the destruction of all that Hugh, and many others, some of whom have sunk their life’s work into it, have been striving for these past ten years or so.  Please, let’s not allow that to happen.  Reduce your meat consumption by all means, most of us could probably do with doing that, I know I could, and have long intended to, without ever really getting round to it.  But let’s not leave the good meat producers entirely without a market.

That said, we did do a version of Hugh’s aubergine and green bean curry, substituting runner beans from the garden for the green beans, and very nice it was too.  We added the juice of a lime to the curry paste recipe as given, and reduced the quantity of water accordingly.  Not having had a control sample of the lime free paste to directly compare, I can’t categorically say it was an improvement, but I think it probably was.

Pity the Eel (and forgive me)

 So.  The smoked eel I returned from Belgium with.  First of all, I’m really, really sorry.  Sorry because I contributed to what I now believe to be the unsustainable fishery of an endangered species, and sorry also because this post is going to be that most annoying of all injunctions – the ‘do as I say, not as I do’.  Because, yes, obviously, I did purchase and consume a half kilo of smoked eel, and I’m not going to lie to you, it was good.  It was, in fact, very tasty indeed, but still, I implore you not to follow my example.  Please, please DO NOT purchase and consume eel.  Do as I say, not as I did.

The simple fact is that, according to best estimates the population (if that’s the word) of the European Eel (Anguilla anguilla) – because, for all my digression on to the subject of the conger eel in my last post, that is, I’m pretty sure the eel in question – has crashed catastrophically over the past thirty years or so.  The numbers of eels reaching European waters from their spawning grounds in the Sargasso Sea having reduced, since the 1970s by at least 90%.  I’ll say that again, AT LEAST 90%.  Maybe as much as 98%.  The species is, therefore, unsurprisingly, listed by the IUCN as critically endangered.  That’s as a species, not just as a menu item.

Eels – stewed or jellied, of course, used to be the staple fast food of the part of London I live in.  That is no longer the case, and the fact that there are just a handful of traditional live eel handling pie and mash shops left in the East End, and that almost nobody regularly consumes jellied eels any more, unless they dress like this, might lead you to assume that pressure had been taken off eel stocks in the past couple of generations.  Taken together with the fact that the Thames is, apparently, cleaner today than at any time since the industrial revolution, then one might assume that London’s river would be teeming with the slithy toves.  But it’s not.  It is, almost entirely, devoid of eel.  In as few as five years, the numbers caught by the Zoological Society of London’s monitoring traps fell from 1500, in 2005, to just 50, in 2009.  And that has nothing to do with jellied eel consumption (almost all of the eels for which have been imported, mainly from Ireland, for many years). 

No, the decline of the eel population, and the decline of the cockney culinary tradition appear to have been coincidental, in both senses of the word – happening at the same time, but unlinked by cause and effect.  So where have all the eels gone?  And if Chas’n’Dave are not to blame, who is?

While fashion and, I suspect, modern squeamishness, have led to the crisis in jellied eel consumption and subsequent demise of traditional pie and mash shops in London’s East End, eel appears to remain a popular, and rather more upmarket, item on Belgian and Dutch menus.  Even this, though, is small fry compared to the Global sushi market’s demand for Unagi.  But, it would seem that not even the world’s appetite for Nigiri can be held wholly responsible for the precipitous collapse of European eel stocks.  Quite what is responsible has yet to be definitively identified, and no doubt overfishing to feed a growing global sushi market plays its part, but that’s not the whole picture, and to even begin to grasp that we need to take a closer look at the eel’s biology, and in particular the mysteries of its life cycle.

The European eel is arguably misnamed, because it doesn’t start its life in Europe at all.  Rather, all Anguilla Anguilla are hatched in the Sargasso Sea, near the Bermudas, from where they are carried, as microscopic larvae, on the currents of the Gulf Drift, on a journey North and East of several months, to the coastal waters of Europe.  On reaching the colder European waters the larvae metamorphose into the tiny, transparent ‘glass eels’ that then seek out fresh water, making their way into the river systems of Western Europe where they will, slowly, mature.  Finally, at the age of fifteen or twenty years old, they will return to the seas and embark on their long final migration back to the Sargasso where they will spawn, once, and then die.

The complexity of this life story, then, makes the eel dependent on (and thus vulnerable to) a plethora of factors, related and unrelated, ranging in scope from the global to the very local.  This makes pinning the blame for the species’ decline onto any single factor both impossible and pointless.   That it’s some combination of overfishing, climate change (pretty much every model of global warming charts a severe weakening, or complete cessation of the Gulf Drift – in which case the absence of eels from our tables may well be the least of our worries), habitat destruction and pollution (particularly the accumulation of plastic detritus in the Sargasso Sea), would appear to go without saying.  And those last three items kind of make it all of our fault.  Whether we eat eel or not.  Or, maybe it’s just that the eel itself and its, frankly, implausible lifecycle is just an evolutionary dead end that was always doomed to extinction, sooner or later – which just happens to turn out to be right about now.

Oh, and the fact that the majority of eel we might eat, be it jellied, smoked, stewed or sushi, is farmed doesn’t much help either, in case you were wondering.  Not only is there the question of the environmental impact of this form of acquaculture to be considered, but there is, even more compellingly, the inescapable fact that all farm raised eel start off life as wild creatures who are caught – still in vast numbers – in their juvenile glass eel form, and thus removed from the potential breeding pool, never to be returned to it.  A particular problem for a species which takes so long to reach sexual maturity and then only gets one shot at procreation

Ultimately, it seems clear to me that the fact of the eel’s decline being not necessarily solely, or even principally, the result of over exploitation is neither here nor there when it comes to choosing whether or not to eat it.  The simple fact is that this is a species potentially on the verge of extinction, for whatever reasons, and we really can’t justify its consumption.  So does that make me a hypocrite, or just a smug bastard, to be telling you about the eel I consumed?  Or can I lay any claim to honesty?

What I will say is that, when it comes to eel in its smoked form, anything you might chose to do with it is entirely and eminently do-able with smoked mackerel - that longstanding favourite of this blog - the two being very much in the same area in terms of flavour, texture, aroma and colour – all the key features of a foodstuff.  I will not lie to you, though.  While similar, our eel was both sweeter and more intensely flavoured, and somehow managed that intensity without being so all pervadingly, and lingeringly, fishy smelling as mackerel can be.  Still, is that really worth your conscience?  Not mine, I think.  Nor, in future, can Unagi be, much as it has always been one of my first choices from the sushi conveyer…

So here’s what I did with my smoked eel.  Just imagine I’m using mackerel, which shouldn’t be hard as it’s basically just a version of the mackerel and potato salad I’ve written up here before, but specially modified to incorporate the Belgian leeks we came home with, as well as the eel.

I put on a pan of new potatoes (anyas in this instance) and while they were boiling I chopped one of the leeks in half lengthways, then sliced each half reasonably, but not too, fine.  Then I chopped three or four stems of the fine celery and sautéed both up with just a little finely sliced garlic and red chilli in a generous amount of olive oil.  Once the potatoes were cooked I drained them and stirred them though the pan of leek and celery (off the heat), adding the zest and juice of half a lemon and a good grind of black pepper, then flaked in the smoked fish and a sprinkling of capers and halved and pitted black olives.  Then I left it all to cool.  It’s entirely up to you how much you want to let it cool - all the way and serve at room temperature; or serve it as a warm salad.  Either’s good, but I’d tend to favour warm.  Whatever temperature you want to serve it at, mix in the salad leaves at the last minute so they’re crisp and fresh and don’t go soggy – check the seasoning and add a few spoonfuls of a good mustardy vinaigrette if you feel it needs it.  This was a distinctive and utterly delicious variation on the smoked fish and potato salad.  And of course it would work just as well - maybe not quite as sweet but considerably more conscionably - with mackerel.

Fight!

Help me to salve my conscience and make amends for the whole eel eating farrago by joining me in signing up to Hugh’s Fish Fight right here, to champion sustainable fishing practices, reform the European Common Fisheries Policy, and put an end to the absurd practice of enforced discarding of perfectly good (and thoroughly dead) fish.

And don't just sign up, help spread the word - click below to share the link on Facebook.

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And don’t spare the horses…

Now I know that some (many?) of you will think I should also be apologising for coming home from Belgium with horse meat.  Well, sorry, but no, I’m not.  Sorry that is.

Maybe for buying it from a supermarket (a Carrefour Express in Knocke), vac packed and bearing the label “Cock’s Fresh” (Ha! Sorry, I couldn’t resist), but not for it being the flesh of a horse.  Personally I’ve never really understood the sentimental squeamishness we traditionally have in this country to the idea of horse meat, let alone the hypocrisy in how differently we regard horses and cows, pigs and sheep.  I wouldn’t eat dog, but that’s because a dog is a scavenging carnivore, not because I regard it as man’s best friend.

Whatever.  This ‘filet de cheval ex doux’ was lightly cured so that it had the texture of fresh, raw meat, sliced very fine, with a deliciously sweet, delicately smoky flavour.  It would have been quite serveable as carpaccio, and made thoroughly excellent sandwiches with tomato, rocket and some pickled cucumber.  Nice horse.

Veal: Yes we can (and why we should...)

‘We shouldn’t eat veal, should we, Sebastian?’, is a question people almost never ask me.  But I know that many of them think it.  And, like many, indeed most, of the questions people ask, the answer is not as simple as they assume.  No, we should not eat some veal, just as we shouldn’t eat some chicken and some pork, but while most people are familiar with free range chicken and outdoor raised pork, and (the carnivores at least) recognise these as good things, there is still a widespread assumption that all veal is a bad thing.  Which it isn’t, not if we accept the eating of meat at all.  If you are a carnivore, and perhaps more particularly a consumer of dairy products, the properly ethical position to be taken is  - and this may be uncomfortable for some - probably not only, yes, we should eat veal, but almost certainly also that we should eat more veal*.

There is a good case (that’s good as in logically and morally consistent, not good as in one I necessarily agree with) to be made against all consumption of veal, but in order to make it you’d better be, or be prepared to become, not just a vegetarian, but a vegan, because the argument to be had there is to not do with how we feel about the meat industry, but about the dairy industry**. Rose Prince, in her excellent book, The New English Kitchen goes so far as to cover veal not in her chapter on meat, but under the heading of Dairy, which I think is slightly perverse, but not so very much.  Because veal, while obviously meat, is essentially a by-product of the dairy industry. 

A dinner table with no veal.

As long as there is a dairy industry there will be excess production of calves, and if nobody’s going to eat them, those calves aren’t going to be sent away to live on a farm, like your mum and dad told you your old dog was when you were a kid.  Your old dog wasn’t sent away to live on a farm either.  And there is no Santa Claus.  Sorry, once you get started it’s hard to stop.  The point is that the dairy industry relies on calves being born, most of which (and pretty much all the males) are always going to be slaughtered whether we eat veal or not.  So if we want milk, and cheese, we really should be eating veal as well.  Otherwise all those calves, which are going to die anyway, will simply go to waste.  And as long as we eat pink, or rose, veal, which British veal has always tended to be anyway, then the animal welfare issues that are commonly, and inaccurately, associated with all veal production, do not arise.  The thing to avoid is white veal, the meat of calves fed exclusively on milk (or, more to the point, milk “products”) and kept in the dark, in spaces too confined to move, in order to keep the meat pale and soft.  Why anyone thinks this is a good idea is quite beyond me, because – quite apart from the unspeakable cruelty - the meat produced this way really does taste, at best, of nothing, at worst of stale milk.  I find it vaguely, and unsettlingly reminiscent of that old free school milk taste and smell that still haunts me from my infancy, and which to this day means that an innocent glass of milk is one of the few things widely consumed by mankind that I cannot even countenance passing my lips. That, of course is a question of taste, and, it must be acknowledged, that the notorious crates commonly associated with (most commonly Dutch) white veal production were banned by the EU in 2007.  Neither of these acknowledgements, however, make intensively reared white veal OK.


As a rule the pinker the meat, the less intensive the rearing, and the more natural, and therefore 'happier' the life of the calf that produced it.  So, as we've established that the calves are going to be born anyway, the more ‘good’ veal we eat, the less incentive there is for dairy farmers to either destroy them out of hand, or to ship them out to the producers of ‘bad’ veal.  It's one of the clearest examples I can bring to mind of the idea, first expressed to me by my sister Helen, a re-converted carnivore, that if your concern is the welfare of animals, it is much more effective to be an ethical meat consumer than to be a vegetarian.  Because meat producers really don't care what people who don't buy meat think.  Choosing to buy pink veal, well sourced, is good, both in the sense that you really don’t have to feel bad about eating it - quite the opposite - and in that it tastes good - and not of stale milk from the 1970s… 

The 'good' veal I bought the other day was yet another of Waitrose’s forgotten cuts (this blog is honestly not meant to be an advert for Waitrose, it’s just I like to try new cuts of meat, and they happen to be a good local source.  And hopefully local enough to many/most(?) of my readers, because this blog is not meant to be too esoteric or ‘cheffy’ either.).  This time it was even a cut that was not only properly forgotten, I hadn’t even heard of it in the first place, or at least not the name for it.  It was labelled as veal goose skirt, and it was clearly the same cut of the calf as a skirt, or bavette steak would be of the cow – a long, thin blade of lean, fibrous meat, so called, allegedly, due to its resemblance to a goose’s wing.  It was recommended as ideal for slow cooking.  I’m sure that’s true, but I also couldn’t help but think it would be a waste.

With bavette, as with onglet, or hanger steak – a similarly lean and fibrous cut – there are basically two ways to go with the cooking of the meat to achieve a deliciously tender end result: hot and fast or slow and low.  If going the low and slow route there are so many other (generally cheaper) cuts you could use – shin, shank and shoulder, cheek or tail – that will produce as good, if not better results, then it just seems a shame not to take the hot and fast alternative, just searing it and serving it good and rare.  Particularly in the case of a veal steak which is not only similar to bavette, but is in effect a younger, more tender, more delicately flavoured bavette.

roast squash and lentil salad

golden crusted boulangere potatoes

Rose Prince, in her aforementioned book reckons that due to it’s richness, you don’t need to serve as much veal as you would beef, about 150g per portion being plenty, which turned out to be just as well, as my friends Darren and Christabel, having just moved in around the corner from us and being, as yet, without kitchen facilities came round for dinner at short notice, and the two goose skirts I’d brought home, which I’d thought might be a bit over generous for two, would, by that maths just about stretch four ways.  To make sure nobody would go hungry I made a substantial warm salad of roasted butternut squash and lentils and baked a big dish of boulangere style potatoes, with onions and beef stock, to serve alongside.

The goose skirts I salted and peppered, and rubbed in sunflower oil on both sides, got my frying pan smoking hot and seared them for just a couple of minutes a side.  I took them out to rest on a board while deglazing the pan with sherry and adding a splash of beef stock to make a gravy. I served the steaks sliced – which is always a good trick for making a small portion of meat appear more substantial – alongside the salad and potatoes.  It was plenty.  Really good.  And almost obscenely tender.

Veal goose skirt. Seared briefly, to rare. Rest and slice to serve.

* Unless your view is that we shouldn’t eat veal because calves are simply too cute and adorable and baby to eat.  But I really don’t believe that the majority of people who will happily eat lamb but have genuine concerns about veal are that hypocritical, although there will, of course, be some.  Any sample population will always have its share of self contradictory moral hypocrites, and there’s no reason to suppose that just because somebody holds a view that is reasonable, they don’t do so for incredibly stupid reasons.  The assumption that just because somebody happens to agree with you then they must necessarily be smart, is one of the most flawed one can make, on so many levels… 

** In the course of my research for this piece I have certainly not been tempted to become either vegetarian or vegan, you probably won't be surprised to discover.  I have however come to the conclusion that I will probably make more of an effort in future to buy organic milk and butter, and organic and ideally unpasteurized cheese, wherever possible.

Should we all, ultimately, agree that the dairy industry is insupportable, and veal, as a result becomes unavailable, or prohibitively expensive, that will be a shame, although stick with this blog (ignoring the post about the best toasted cheese sandwich ever) because entirely by chance, and thanks to Becca’s allergies, it could show a way forward to a bold, new dairy – but not meat, obviously – free future.