Summer's Lease by Thom Eagle

Author:Thom Eagle [Thom Eagle]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Quadrille Publishing Ltd
Published: 2020-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

ON SOURING

The transformations we have made so far to food are significant, the ingredients becoming totally changed – arguably, however, not so much as if they were cooked. A tomato leaking its juices into a bowl is altered of course, but not half so much as a tomato cut across its middle and seasoned with oregano, garlic and oil as well as salt and pepper and roasted in a slow oven for an hour or more into sweet and savoury collapse; this is undeniable, but the alteration of each is irreversible. A daube of beef hanger steak, unbrowned but stewed nonetheless into a dark and sticky mass is certainly more cooked (which is to say more altered) than the same cut charred briefly over smoking coal, but that doesn’t mean that the latter is raw – and in fact I would add that you need the one to understand the other. Lacking the climate and the tools to make stockfish, we can learn a lot by reversing the historical development and starting with our salt-cured cod. Similarly, understanding the ways we use force and salt in (and outside) the kitchen, although their effects thus far seem minimal, allows us to properly understand what happens in the more involved processes of cooking that take place across the culinary world, especially when you introduce an element that the recipes have so far kept to a minimum – time.

It is true that a multi-day preparation process, beyond the scope of many recipes, would already appear to have time, as it were, on its side; but really, the overnight cure of the lamb fillet or the three days required for the pork and fig leaves are not processes of ageing; they are simply the time required for the initial process, whether of salting or of acidifying, to take place. You wouldn’t say that even a whole pit-roasted pig, buried in the hot ashes of a dying fire for twenty-four hours or more, was ‘aged’ as such; it is simply cooked, for the length of time required to cook it. This is in contrast to many culinary practices which, after an initial attack of salt, of force, of acid or even of heat, need a separate period of maturation – of simply allowing time to do its slow work. This is the difference between our salt-cured cod and clipfish. It is not even a question of the length of time required. If you were to make your own hot-smoked mackerel at home, then after curing it briefly in sugar and salt and letting the skin dry to a pellicle, you would smoke the fish directly over smouldering woodchips, or perhaps rice and tea, for only twenty minutes or so; crucially, having done so, you would then allow it to rest overnight. This is a question of practice and not of degree. The whole process from start to finish might have taken less time than cooking that pit-roasted pig, or even a barbecued brisket in the

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