Then I stumbled upon stargazy pie, which totally sounded up my alley. Who knows if that’s any gauge of the dish’s popularity? I’m not acquainted with fish pie but I liked some of the takes on it even though smoked haddock seemed like it might be a pain to procure. And well, technically Moro is a British cookbook, despite its Mediterranean cuisine.įish pie popped up in three of the four issues of Olive I’ve received since Christmas. But it turned out I also owned Favorite Devonshire Recipes, Symington’s Recipes, a 1930s, thin promotional book with horrific recipes like tomato sauce & fried bread and green pea eggs, which are scotch eggs with a layer of Symington’s pea soup between the white and breadcrumb layer, Carrier Cookery Cards in seafood, soups, main dishes and salads and cakes, sweets and puddings, Recipes for The Nation’s Favourite Food, Fergus Henderson’s Nose to Tail Eating (without the Tony Bourdain intro but with an entire chapter devoted to lamb brains), Traditional Scottish Cookery and British Regional Food. I was thinking that my only option would be The Cooking of the British Isles, which I found on the street some time ago. I surprised myself with the number of appropriate cookbooks and pamphlets I had at my disposal. This is supposed to be an exercise to prove that English food isn’t a joke, duh.
I most definitely didn’t want to delve into spotted dick or faggots territory. I was looking for a recipe to fit the Fish & Quips call to arms (I rarely get involved with these food blog cooking events but this one struck my fancy), and had a hard time striking a balance between the stodgy and the esoteric. While I love those skin-on, crackly pork roasts, what I really wanted to cook was something fun. I didn’t realize the meal was such a big thing and that’s not the direction I wanted to go. I’ve been surprised how much attention is given to Sunday roasts. Prawn cocktail, cottage pie, syllabub and suet-based oddities like Sussex pond pudding. Based on my recent media exposure to modern British food, which pretty much only consists of Olive magazine and The F Word, there seems to be a trend toward revamping or rediscovering classics.