The Indian Pantry by Vir Sanghvi

Author:Vir Sanghvi [Sanghvi, Vir]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: amazon
Published: 2020-02-03T09:31:25.404445+00:00

Nargisi Kofta

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Scotch Egg has nothing Scotch in it.

Over the last two decades, chefs in the West have taken relatively humble dishes and tried to turn them into something special. The hamburger is one instance. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, most American chefs did their own riffs on the burger, including, perhaps most influentially, Daniel Boulud’s version at DB Bistro Moderne in New York. This used high-quality beef, foie gras and every other luxury ingredient Boulud had lying around in his kitchen.

Then, it was the turn of the boring old mac and cheese to get the haute cuisine treatment. These days, fancy chefs will add slices of black truffles to the cheese (the flavours go well) while lesser chefs will mistakenly believe that they are elevating the dish with liberal use of synthetic truffle oil.

British chefs took longer to catch on and when they did, the luxury updates focused on better cooking skills and ingredients: good fish and superb frying for fish and chips, triple-cooking of chips for the perfect texture, pigs-in-a-blanket or bangers and mash made with artisanal sausages, etc.

I like the idea of upgrading dishes, though, frankly, one often gets tired of the newer versions fairly quickly. I would never order a so-called gourmet burger, for instance. And very few of the upgrades actually last; most fade as new trends develop.

These are a few exceptions though. Joël Robuchon’s pommes puree has become the benchmark for upmarket mashed potatoes. Anton Mosimann’s bread-and-butter pudding has transformed the way that old nursery favourite is cooked. And though Heston Blumenthal’s triple-cooked chips are difficult to pull off (even the ones I had at Heston’s own The Hind’s Head were rubbish), that hasn’t stopped chefs from using ‘triple-cooked chips’ as a menu cliché.

One such dish that has become a favourite of chefs who want to upgrade old comfort staples is the Scotch Egg. If you have tried one of the industrially manufactured versions in the UK, you will know how disgusting mass-produced Scotch Eggs can be. The meat component consists of cheap sausage meat, which is basically mince made from the parts of the pig that nobody wants to buy. And the inside is a tough, hard-boiled egg, laid by a battery chicken in an industrial operation somewhere.

So, it was relatively easy for chefs to upgrade the dish. All they had to do was to use good-quality free-range eggs and proper sausage meat.

As the remake grew in popularity, newer versions emerged. One obvious route—to indicate that the dish had been freshly made—was to soft-boil the egg (the original dish calls for hard-boiled eggs) so that a liquid yolk oozed out when you cut into it. A second was to change the batter. At one of Bruce Poole’s restaurants in London (it may have been La Trompette), I had an interesting Scotch Egg over a decade ago—the egg was soft-boiled, the batter was panko (which is of Japanese origin) and they had used good-quality truffle oil to add another layer of flavour.

These days the upmarket Scotch Egg turns up again and again as a canapé.

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