Boiled beef and carrots
"Boiled beef and carrots,
Boiled beef and carrots,
That's the stuff for your "Derby Kell",
Makes you fit and keeps you well.
Don't live like vegetarians
On food they give to parrots,
Blow out your kite, from morn 'til night,
On boiled beef and carrots."
This famous old English music hall song was sung by Harry Campion and you can hear the original on YouTube. It's a cockney song and a London dish. Those words you might not understand are explained in Wikipedia:
"'Derby Kell' is old Cockney rhyming slang for belly ('Derby Kelly'). 'Blow out your kite' means 'fill your stomach'. It uses the word 'kite' (also 'kyte'), a dialect word, originally derived from an Old English word for the womb which, by extension, came to mean the belly."
Can't say the rhyming slang 'Derby Kelly' is sufficiently explained here. Yes it rhymes with belly, but why 'Derby' and why 'Kelly' and what is the association with belly? I looked it up but I have to say there is no really satisfactory explanation. It seems to come from an old Irish ballad about three generations of military drummers called Darby Kelly but what the association with belly is nobody seems to know. Curious.
Anyway, I'm trying to clear out my freezer which is overloaded and I remembered that I had a piece of corned silverside in there. So that's our dinner for tonight. Not very fashionable and much maligned, but I like it and the stock that is left over is great for a soup, let alone the leftover meat with which you can do a number of things. I will have to go and buy some cabbage though. And I shall definitely be making it with dumplings. Love dumplings, as I have said before.
So when I started looking through my recipe books and the net I was slightly surprised to see who had a recipe and also, perhaps more interestingly, who didn't. Nothing from Delia, Jamie or Nigel or Nigella come to that. Not that I was expecting anything from Nigella - she's a bit posh. Nothing from Elizabeth David either in her book on Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen - not even a snide comment. But Gordon Ramsay has a recipe and so does Mary Berry, both of whom are a tiny bit unexpected. And guess what, Robert Carrier has a version in his Great Dishes of the World opus. Admittedly it follows on from New England Boiled Dinner, which is obviously closer to his heart and has a mini essay attached, but still it's a bit of an honour to be rated as a world great.
On my bookshelves I found four versions - from Jane Grigson in English Food, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in his River Cottage A-Z, the Time/Life volume on the Cooking of the British Isles and Theodora Fitzgibbons' London volume in her historical series on the food of Britain.
Of course there are variations, and of course it is a poor man's dish derived from the need to preserve the cheaper cuts of meat by brining them. The variations are to do with what vegetables you put in - probably what the poor had to hand, which is why potatoes always feature - as do carrots of course, and the flavourings - a clove or two stuck in an onion, a bay leaf maybe, parsley. Then do you serve dumplings or not? Yes say I. It's one of those incredibly easy dishes - just throw it all in the pot and cook very slowly for a while until the meat is almost falling apart. And maybe thicken some of the stock with flour and parsley to make a tasty sauce. Oh - and horseradish. Mustn't forget the horseradish.
The main controversy seems to be on when to put in the vegetables. At the beginning, halfway or not at all. Jane Grigson is the only one to be definite about this.
"Many recipes suggest adding various vegetables to salt beef, but it has so much flavour already that they can do little for it; and they end up sodden and uneatable, whatever the peasant school of cookery maintains. It is far better to cook them separately. Glazed carrots are a good accompaniment, lightly cooked leeks are good too, and some people cannot entertain the though of sal beef or salt pork without pease pudding. I sympathise with this, but suggest too that dumplings should not be overlooked."
She also stresses the slow cooking:
"During the cooking time, the water should never boil. A few bubbles should hiccough to the surface in a desultory kind of way."
One thing I learnt though is that you should cover the pot. I don't think I have done that before.
I'm not looking for difficult today, so I shall go against Jane Grigson's advice and put the vegetables in with the meat, but probably not until near the end of cooking. And I'm definitely doing dumplings. Now should I add a tiny bit of wine to the liquid?
Looking forward to the soup the next day. (The picture below is Gordon Ramsay's - he likes dumplings too.)
