The problem with recipes

And how to make a great big sausage to be cooked over an open fire

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For the avoidance of all doubt, I have never said that recipes are not my thing.

As it so happens I’m going to share another today.

My issue however, is that I believe there is so much more to say as a cook than just listing recipes ad infinitum. I can certainly give you recipes, but I’d much rather tell you a story, explain it to you, talk to you about it, to tell you about its nuances, tricks, pitfalls, the whys and wherefores and vagaries of how impetuous handling of ingredients might result in chaos. That’s the benefit of years of accumulating knowledge. I’d always told my cooks they were very welcome to copy any of the recipes from the thousands of my handwritten index cards, neatly kept in plastic boxes, categorized in colours, arranged alphabetically by subject. Cards that I wrote and collated over the best part of a couple of decades. Insisting only on the condition, that if they took a recipe, then it should be something I had shown them before or could go through with them that day. I mean what use would it be to give a young cook the recipe for Pierre’s ‘Pieds de Cochon farci aux morilles et aux riz de veau’ without them comprehending the immensity of the task at hand?

Firstly that the trotters must be boned out neatly, without holes from an ill judged placing of the knife, (otherwise the filling will push out and they’ll look terrible, also it shows deft handling of a knife to complete them quickly without holes ) usually done in batches of one hundred on your half-hour afternoon break hunched over a table with pain in your lower back, gripping the trotter firmly in a tea towel as you simultaneously pull back the skin whilst guiding the knife blade down against the bone and knuckles, slipping it off like a glove.

A slip at this point could be potentially game changing. Mind your fingers.

You also might not know that the chicken for the mousse must be placed in the freezer before grinding, just so the ice crystals start to form on its surface to keep the soft mixture from splitting when mixed with the thick, softly whipped cream, the metal attachments for the processor kept in the freezer, so cold that the metal sticks to your fingers as you handle them. It would only say ‘cold’ in the notes, so you see, just that part would need to be more than a simple explanation, or the resulting mousse would split. Then there’s the careful preparation of the morels and the sweetbreads, the six different bottles of booze, brandy, Madeira, wine and port for the sauce each in a particular order, reduced to a certain consistency, then the veal stock, whilst remembering to certainly not use the braising liquid that the trotters cooked in for four or so hours as that’s different and the two must not be confused. It would just say ‘sauce’ in my notes, a trap for the unwary. You would now need to know how to butter and prepare the foil properly before wrapping the trotters for steaming, and there is a correct technique for that as well. You wouldn’t know these things unless you’d been taught.

Recipes that everyone wants but ones that you’d never really understand unless you were shown, so as to understand the process you see, instead of pondering aimlessly at coded notes on an index card that young cooks hoped might give them the information they craved. Like recipe bingo, ticking all the best ones off, writing them all down without the understanding of how.

Imagine having decades of experience to share, all those ideas to be shared, the years spent refining techniques, hands scarred from the wounds of sharp and hot implements that still make me wince when I remember them, tough callouses on the base of the joint of my forefinger, where the heel of a knife pushed into the soft skin for hours upon hours over years of repetitive movements. The emotional breakdowns, tears and late nights, lack of sleep, the crushing anxiety of imposter syndrome, the bullying, the aching back, swollen feet after another ninety-hour week, standing for days upon days. Imagine being able to taste in your head, conjuring together imaginary flavours to see if they work as one, your brain filled like a reference library of tastes, flavours and combinations. Imagine the rigours of work like this day in and day out, lunch after lunch, dinner after dinner, filing and sorting away flavours in your head for another day. Being able to weigh half a kilo of sugar almost to the gram by sight, to cut fillets of beef to eye at two hundred grams, cut after cut, always the same, no deviation from the task and always correct. Experience that you can’t acquire quickly, only by graft, repetition and sheer bloody hard work. To know instantly if a sauce needs salt, often by smell, learning to use your senses to guide you through your day. Touch, taste, smell, sight and sound all playing their role in the learning of how to cook.

These are things that cannot be shared in a recipe. These are the things that are peculiar to cooks in general. They cannot be taught easily, only learned with patience and attention. Take for instance a squab pigeon. I might say to roast it for six minutes on each side of the crown, basted and rested, but only your touch and sense of smell and your eyes can truly guide you. The colour of the roasted bird needs to be correct in a pan on top of the stove before placing it in the oven for the right amount of time. The clock might guide you, but it’s only ready when it feels right to the fingers. There are many cooks now that use thin needle thermometers, pushed deeply into the meat to satisfy the lack of understanding of the product and technique. How would you know it was ready if the thermometer was to break?

A kitchen controlled by a thermometer.

Sous vide.

Cookery by numbers.

Meat and fish, sealed in plastic bags, submerged in lukewarm water and left to fester at low temperatures for a day, then rolled in a pan to crisp it up.

I once ate at a one-star Michelin in London, that revelled in the culture of sous-vide cookery. I left with a dose of horrendous food poisoning that would hit me about twelve hours later. Low-temperature madness of barely cooked proteins, held in the danger zone for hours.

As with Wil Reidi’s piece yesterday on the minefield of social media cookery. I’ll dive in further. Do you know what really irks me?

Expensive ingredients, handled badly by those who know nothing about what they are cooking. Cooks with only the reference point of Instagram or TikTok as guidance, roasting scallops badly, ruining langoustines, dollops of caviar spooned over anything, reverse searing aged Galician beef, or chunks of wild turbot with sauces spooned straight from jars to hide any flaws from terrible cooking. Pale steaks, burnt fish skin, the steak in a jar, bits of burnt, half-cooked onions and reduced oxo cubes and balsamic are the emperor’s new clothes.

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A great big sausage to cook over a fire

And so here we are at the point where I’m unable to sit you down to explain the finer points of sausage making, so will trust that you might have an inkling of what you might have to do to be able to make a huge pinwheel of Boerewors.

This is straightforward sausagemaking for those of you who are happy to go about such things, the special thing here is that this is a fine farmer’s sausage from South Africa. It has a fine mix of spices that give the flavour of the meat a richness that isn’t overpowering.

It would be much better to grind all of the spices from whole yourself, as the ones you buy in packets that are preground often lose flavour after a while. You will notice the difference, though if you’re not up for that, then use new packets of ground to ensure the flavours are best.

There’s no cereal in these as is often the way with these things, where it is used as a bulking agent, here it will be a juicy, coarse chunk of sausage that cooks rather nicely over some slow-burning oak logs, the fats hissing and spitting as they drip onto the embers below.

Allow one day to prepare and rest the thing, then after a night in the fridge (the sausage not you) the next day, start a good fire and let it cook over a grill, without much interference for half an hour or so, turning once or twice, perhaps loosening up the pinwheel to enable the skin to render and crisp up.

Boerewors

You will need

2.75k Beef brisket including fat

1.5k Pork belly or shoulder, rind removed

35g Sea salt

45g Coriander seeds, freshly ground

2g Ground Nutmeg

2g Ground Cloves

10g Ground Black pepper

80ml Malt Vinegar

60ml Worcestershire sauce

2g Fresh Rosemary

150ml Cold water

10g Hot jalapeno

Prepared natural sausage casing

How to

Remove the skin from the pork, then dice both the brisket and belly into cubes. Place them in the fridge to become very, very cold which is important as if the fat is not absolutely chilled, then it will smear as it warms in the mincing process, and then all hell will break lose.

Push the diced meat through a coarse setting of an ice-cold grinder attachment into a tray. Dont use the fine plate, it’s much better when it’s coarse. The parts of a mincing attachment are usually metal. It’s best, as you will have read in my story above, to place the parts in the freezer for as long as possible so everything keeps cold as cold can be when it’s grinding.

When you have ground and milled all of your dry spices, mix them all together with the vinegar, Worcestershire sauce and water, add the chopped jalapenos and pour it over the meat mixture. Using your fingertips, as if you were making pastry, rub everything together nicely and spread the mixture around the tray to ensure it is well mixed.

Load the soaked skins onto the nozzle of a sausage stuffer. It helps to have a sense of humour at this point. Slowly turning the handle, or on a low speed, force the mixture into the skin, evening out the smoothness as you go. It’s best to go at a slow even pace here as it will fill the skin more smoothly. Keep the pressure steady and when the mix is finished either reload the stuffer and continue or tie off the ends, smoothing out the Boerewors to an even sausage shape.

I coil mine into a pinwheel so it cooks in one piece.

Place the sausage on a rack over a tray and let it sit for a day in the fridge. This will help it to dry a little.

Light the fire and when the embers are hot, place it on the grill.

It will be ready when it tells you. Not before.

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Coming up

Next week, for my paid subscribers will be ‘February’ the second chapter of my serialisation from ‘A Story of a Year’ a book of sorts, that I write here month by month.

Both the Introduction and First Chapter are here if you missed them.

If you enjoy, then feel free to share the word.

Until Sunday,

William