Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Hello
The Gastronaut’s Creed
CHAPTER ONE: THE GASTRONAUT’S TOOLBOX
Let them eat gold
Teaching grandmothers to suck eggs
How to make your own moonshine (almost)
How to make your own biltong
How to make your own cheese
How to make your own margarine
A biscuit-tin smokery
CHAPTER TWO: ADVENTURES IN DINING
The Last Supper and other memorable meals
How to stage a bacchanalian orgy
Why not eat insects?
How Britain lost its culinary edge
CHAPTER THREE: FOOD AND THE BODY
Our secret cannibal desires
A personal journey into cannibalism
Cannibal recipes
The human harvest
Aphrodisiacs
Flatulence
A personal journey into extreme flatulence
Physiological fun
CHAPTER FOUR: EXHIBITIONISM FOR THE ROMANTIC
Cooking with aftershave
Bum Sandwich
Red and White Soup
Mumbled Mushrooms
Homemade Gravlax
Smug Homemaker Iced Pea and Lemon Grass Soup
King Edward’s Chippenham Cheese Savoury
Chicken-foot Stew
Laver Bread
Mackerel Tartare
Heartbreaker
Lumpydick
Buckinghamshire Bacon Badger
Nettle Soup and Nettle Haggis
Rabbit Pie
Gruel
Monkey Gland Steak
Carpetbagger Steaks
Clapshot
Picasso’s Poussin
Interactive Pizza Engineering
Andy Warhol’s Chocolate Balls
Hasty Pudding
Flummery
Deep-fried Mars Bar
Toffee Fondue
Frumenty
CHAPTER FIVE: ADVENTURES FOR THE BOLD AND THE BRAVE
Sea Urchin Gonads
Cow-heel Soup
Pigeon Pie
Mock Turtle Soup
Fish Sperm on Toast
The world’s oldest recipes
Cooking with insects
Frogs’ Legs
Testicles
Rhinoceros Soup
Drisheen
Ears
Reindeer Stew
Stargazey Pie
Stuffed Fish Heads
Stone, Stepladder and Bucket Cream
14th-century Blancmange
CHAPTER SIX: GRANDS PROJETS FOR MEN AND WOMEN OF DESTINY
Headcheese
Suckling Pig
Turducken
Imu
Brillat-Savarin’s Truffled Turkey
Guinea pig
CHAPTER SEVEN: LEFT-OVERS
A beginner’s guide to gastronautics
Beef Carpaccio
10-hour Leg of Lamb
Roast Partridge
Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic
Calf’s Liver
Whole Roasted Pineapple
Seasonal oddments
Rhubarb Shortcake
Pickled Eggs
Sweetbreads
Carrot Jam
Elderflower Cordial
Herring Sperm on Horseback
Pickled Walnuts
Marsh samphire
Dandelion Coffee
Fragolina grapes
Mushroom Ketchup
Homemade Ginger Beer
A brief history of washing-up
Useful websites and suppliers
Bibliography
The Gastronautical Survey
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
Gastronaut is an irreverent journey through the crazy, twisted, mixed-up world of food. It’s full of extraordinary, extravagant and bizarre culinary experiences, arcane information and practical recipes for spectacular food.
Each of us will spend 16 per cent of our waking lives cooking and eating. That time is far too precious to waste on chores, so why not turn cooking into an adventure? This book of strange and wonderful gastronomic quests will help you do just that.
If you’ve ever wondered how to stage a Bacchanalian orgy in the comfort of your own home, how to make a bum sandwich, how to cook a whole pig underground, smoke salmon in a biscuit-tin, cook with gold, woodlice, reindeer, guinea pig, aftershave or breastmilk, or whether it’s true that you can’t teach a grandmother to suck eggs the answers are here.
This isn’t a work of fiction or hyperbole. Gastronaut is thoroughly researched, tested and illustrated throughout. It also includes a survey that lifts the lid, Kinsey-style, on the real eating habits of the nation. If cannibalism were legal, which famous person would most people like to eat? What foods make us fart? Do people genuinely like their pasta al dente? Can men lactate? Gastronaut is perfect for people who are fascinated by food, who love the wilder side of cooking, who yearn for adventure or who, frankly, just like showing off.
Stefan Gates is a writer and broadcaster. In 2004, as a presenter and writer of the BBC2 series Full on Food, Stefan introduced the nation to the wilder side of gastronomy. He’s worked as a TV directorm scriptwriter and comedy producer, but his strangest job was appearing naked on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy at the age of four. He is married to the top food photographer Georgia Glynn Smith, who shot the pictures for Gastronaut in between working with the likes of Nigel Slater and Gordon Ramsay.
What are little boys made of?
What are little boys made of?
Frogs and snails,
And puppy-dogs’ tails,
That’s what little boys are made of.
What are little girls made of?
What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice,
And all things nice,
That’s what little girls are made of.
To my girls, Georgia, Daisy and Poppy
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781448141951
www.randomhouse.co.uk
First published 2005
Copyright © Stefan Gates 2005
The moral right of the author hasbeen asserted.
Photographs © Georgia Glynn Smith 2005
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
ISBN 9780563522720
Published by BBC Books,
BBC Worldwide Ltd, Woodlands,
80 Wood Lane, London W12 0TT
Commissioning editor: Nicky Ross
Project editor: Christopher Tinker
Copy-editors: Judith Scott and Patricia Burgess
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YOU HOLD IN your hands a gastronautical questbook, a practical guide for the adventurous cook and a personal journey through the crazy, twisted, mixed-up world of food. If you see it as a manual for culinary show-offs, I can live with that. I just want to encourage you to play with your food.
The first half of this book is for your bedside: a mixture of essays and tales of culinary adventure. If that inspires you, then I hope the second half will travel to your kitchen to join you on some wild gastronomic projects. Barring a handful of recipes that I’ve included because I thought they’d tickle you or because I just couldn’t stop myself, everything here is real and practical. That said, I don’t expect you to cook from this book every day or even every week, but rather when you have the time and inclination to have some fun, to make something spectacular and to explore the culinary hinterland.
But why bother playing with food? Well, bear this in mind: you will eat 20 tonnes of food in your lifetime, and you’ll spend 2946.62 days eating, shopping, cooking, queuing or hunting for it. That’s 16% of your entire waking life. You could spend that time making comfort food, eating burgers or fussing over canapés, but Christ alive, what a waste of a life. We’re a race of dreamers, alchemists, poets and explorers, and my guess is that you, dear reader, are one of those and you’re not willing to see life slip through your fingers. Much better to maximize your excitement-to-mastication ratio by every now and then spending an inordinate amount of time slaving away over a crazy recipe in search of a moment of epiphany.
Whenever I’ve been asked what my moment of culinary epiphany was, I’ve lied through my teeth trying to make up something clever. The truth of the matter is that I fell in love with cooking before I fell in love with food, and for two very simple reasons. The first was named Jane and the second, Denise. These were two highly fanciable girls in my home economics class when we were 13 years old, and whenever the teacher wasn’t looking, we’d play a game whose rules were completely incomprehensible, but which invariably ended up with us fondling each other’s bottoms with floury hands. It quickly dawned on me that great things could be achieved through cooking.
Food is so much more than fuel – it’s a catalyst for emotion, an historical journey, a rite, a celebration, a three-times-daily act of giving and receiving love and a fine opportunity for exhibitionism. For myself, I wouldn’t claim that I dive into the culinary unknown every day, but most weekends I like to destroy my kitchen (with my two-year-old daughter as my wingman) in a flight of gastronomic fancy, and I hope that once in a while you will, too.
Experimenting with food is more than just fun – it’s essential. In the 1580s the potato was an obscure poisonous tuber, but some gastronaut persevered until it became one of the world’s most successful crops, sustaining life for billions. But, by then relying on this miracle discovery, we failed a nation by creating a monoculinary culture. Ireland’s tragic potato famine was mostly due to over-dependence on a single strain of that self-same crop.
We are omnivores with a diverse diet and, in our primitive state, insatiable culinary curiosity, and this is one of the reasons why, in evolutionary terms, our species has been so successful. We are highly adaptable in times of want, unlike the koala bear, for instance, which lives exclusively on eucalyptus. If the eucalyptus season is a bad one, whole populations of koala bears are wiped out. We have the ability to move on to other crops (annoyingly, we can’t actually digest eucalyptus – the koala has had to develop a special stomach to cope with such a poisonous herb). We must avoid the temptation to stick with what we know, and continue to experiment, to take risks in order to survive.
But is over-reliance on a small set of foods really a problem in the modern age? Absolutely. Our current problems with obesity are caused by a dietary dependence on specific food types, and it’s killing people right now. A reliance on powdered baby milk causes terrible problems, especially in the developing world. Richer nations have a long history of manoeuvring farmers across the world into growing commercial crops that create a devastating lack of adaptability, and modern agribusiness offers the joys of the GM seed-to-chemical cycle of financial dependence. There are strong arguments for and against GM crops (and organic foods, for that matter), but none of it sits well with me yet.
We may hate GM, but we still need to find a way to feed a hungry, changing world, so we must keep experimenting with both new and ancient foods. I’m not saying that we’ll be the ones to save the world, but who knows what you and I will find on our adventures?
I ought to dish out some apologies here: I’m sorry to all my friends and family who’ve been guinea pigs as I gamble recklessly with their appetites; who’re rarely served their food before midnight, and smile even though they’re too pissed to taste it. And above all for their enthusiasm – together we’ve discovered a whole encyclopedia of successes and a fair few disasters.
I’d also like to apologize to you, dear reader, for having to endure the many moments of indulgence in this book that I failed to cull. In my defence, they are inextricably linked to the exhilaration of culinary adventure, so I thought I might just get away with them. I hope that this book heralds a few adventures for you, helps you have a little fun and perhaps unlocks some secrets. And if you stumble across anything new and wonderful, or have any glorious failures, I want to know all about it.
When are you free for supper?
Food will consume 16% of my life. That life is too precious to waste, therefore:
IN THE PANTHEON of unnecessary, over-elaborate and time-consuming recipes, there’s surely no greater waste of time and money, no more pointless and recklessly prodigal a task than cooking with gold. Let’s give it a go. Gold has traditionally been used to decorate namby-pamby fancy foods, such as chocolates, gingerbread and cakes. So we’re going to make bangers and mash with golden sausages, fish and chips with golden chips, and gilded Wotsits.
Why bother cooking with gold? It’s tasteless, odourless, infuriating to handle, entirely devoid of nutrients and cripplingly expensive. But that’s precisely why it’s so exciting. It’s an alchemical elevation of food from fuel to wonder, an escape from reality, a flight of decadent fancy. And it’s all the more decadent if, like me, you can’t actually afford it. Like going shopping to ease the misery of your overdraft, or eating chocolate to forget how overweight you are. In fact, if you’re rich, cooking with gold is no fun at all. Naff, even. A bit like putting a big sign in front of your mansion saying, ‘I’m rich’.
There’s an interesting, if slight, history to gilded food. It was very popular in medieval Britain, especially amongst the clergy. Elizabeth Grey’s 1653 Secrets in Physick and Chyrugery explains how to gild candied flowers, the 15th-century Ordinance of Pottage shows how to gild walnuts, and in 1769 Elizabeth Raffald wrote a recipe for gilded fish in jelly. Bols still make Gold Wasser de Danzig, which they claim dates back to Louis XIV’s time and features flocculent shavings of gold skimming the bottom – so flocculent, in fact, that it looks like there’s been a fault with the bottling machine, but it’s a nice idea. In India and Pakistan gold is used on special occasions for handmade sweets and occasionally mixed, with a glorious sense of abandon, with rice. Unsurprisingly, it’s also reputed to have aphrodisiac qualities. These days it’s pretty much confined to the odd dusting on a bourgeois chocolate truffle, and the EU lists it – rather unromantically – as food colouring E175 (silver is E174 and aluminium E173).
Once you have decided to throw caution to the wind, you must procure some gold. Unless you are a complete squandermaniac, the only reasonable approach is to buy gold leaf, usually available from art shops. At this point, you may be tempted to try cooking with silver leaf, which does indeed behave in a similar way but is infinitely cheaper. Perhaps the appallingly named Luster Dust or Gold Luster Dust aerosols have caught your eye. Don’t even think about it. You’d only be cheating yourself. If you’re going to celebrate life by doing something truly pointless and unnecessary, you have to throw in your lot. It’s got to be real gold or nothing at all.
There are three main types of gold that you can use for food: gold leaf, gold ribbon and gold powder. By far the most cost-effective is gold leaf, but it is a tricky substance to deal with.
Two of the leading gilding specialists are E. Ploton, with a shop in north London, and Habberley Meadows, who boast ‘By Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen’ and are based in Birmingham. I visited Ploton’s and spoke to an affecting young scallywag by the name of James, who was wonderfully helpful and patient. He had once tried gilding some profiteroles, a confession that surprised and pleased me, coming from a young man of grunge-rocker appearance.
Ploton’s advise that only 24 ct gold (i.e. 100% pure) is edible, though other sources say that 22 ct is okay. Anything below 24 ct is mixed with copper and nickel, so the choice is yours. Gold leaf is sold by the book of 25 leaves, each mere molecules thick, which makes it a flighty, extremely delicate substance to handle. It tears easily and if you pick it up with your fingers it will stick and probably disintegrate. You can buy it as ‘transfer’ leaf, which sits conveniently on a piece of parchment, or ‘loose’, which is great for non-flat surfaces but a swine to control.
So how much does it cost? At the time of writing, a book containing 25 leaves of 24 ct transfer gold 8 × 8 cm was £15.50 from Ploton’s, which is pretty good value for a book of dreams. It cost
£14.45 loose, whilst the 22 ct was £10.70 loose or £12.30 for transfer. If you want to go crazy, gold powder would cost about £56 for 2 grams. (All prices fluctuate, often on a daily basis, as the price of gold shifts.) Most of it seems to be made in Germany or Italy. It’s also a good idea to buy some inedible faux gold leaf for practising with before you use the real stuff. Try some No. 2½ Schlag loose leaf at £2.95 for a larger 14 × 14 cm book, but bear in mind that it’s still thicker than real gold. If you’re feeling flush, you might also want to invest in a special gilding brush made from squirrel hair, 9 cm wide and £11.15 to you, squire.
When you buy the gold, a warm feeling sweeps through you. Enjoy it – that’s decadence setting in. It feels rather sparkling and splendid to own sheets of pure gold. Once you get home, find a couple of artist’s paintbrushes (if you didn’t buy the squirrel version), a pair of tweezers, some sharp scissors and a good smooth chopping board. Close the windows – any breeze at all is likely to destroy wafer-thin gold – and pour a small amount of vegetable oil into a bowl. Have a go with the faux gold first – try gilding a few Wotsits and you’ll see how delicate and tricky it is. You’ll need to coat the Wotsit with a thin layer of oil to make the leaf stick, then roll it across the gold, pressing it down with the brush. You’ll make a hash of the first few, but then you should get the hang of it.
Before you start, clean and dry your hands. If at any stage a gold leaf floats free, don’t try to catch it as it may break and probably stick disastrously to your fingers. Let it settle wherever it wants to, then pick it up very gently with tweezers or with a paintbrush dabbed with the lightest amount of oil. When you’re ready to do the real thing, make sure you have a little bowl ready to keep all the gold shavings that you muck up or don’t use. These can be used later to scatter on top of cappuccinos or for gilding a nifty gin and tonic.
I thoroughly recommend that you try this. Cooking with gold lends you a gentle magical aura that lasts for a couple of days afterwards – similar to that blessed feeling of waking up with no hangover when by rights you should be enduring waves of alcoholic nausea and nihilism. And just so’s you know, your guests are likely to ask you the following questions:
I suggest that you gild just one sausage for each person to serve with some ungilded ones otherwise you’ll be there all day. Use good sausages that aren’t overly thick – no bigger than the usual eight-to-the-pound banger. Chipolatas are even better. I won’t waste time with the recipes for mash and gravy – I’m sure you’ve got your favourites.
Heat your oven to 160°C/325°F/Gas Mark 3. Slowly roast rather than fry your sausages (this seems to keep the shape better) for anything up to an hour (check after 30 minutes), and whilst they are cooking make your mash and perhaps a red onion gravy. When they are nicely done, let the sausages cool a little, and as soon as you can handle them easily, take the ones that are least curly – one for each person – and dab as much of the fat off with kitchen roll as you can. Don’t skip this bit otherwise the fat will go straight through the gold and fasten it to the parchment.
Turn the oven off and put the rest of the sausages in to keep warm. Shut all doors and windows and set yourself up on the kitchen table with all your tools and an aura of calm. Having put all the time and effort into preparing yourself for this moment, it should now only take you about 10 minutes to gild the sausages if you have all the tools assembled. Take one leaf of transfer gold and lay it on the chopping board. Then simply roll your sausage across the gold leaf and it will pick up the gold as you roll. The leaf will probably not be long enough to entirely cover the sausage so either cover one end fully and bury the other into the mash for serving or use two leaves per banger. You may need to use a dry paintbrush (not the oily one) to dab the leaf onto the sausage if it hasn’t stuck, and then carefully pull the parchment away, if it hasn’t come away already. It probably won’t be that neat, and you may have left some gaps, but it’s best not to worry too much.
Put a neat pile of mash on each plate and stick the plain sausages into the mash in Desperate Dan style. Pick up the (admittedly slightly colder) gold one – you should be able to use your fingers without destroying them. Serve, without drawing any attention to the gold, and crack open a very expensive bottle of wine. Luxuriate in the warmth of your fellow man.
Very slowly and carefully, cut your gold to the approximate size needed for each Wotsit. Paint a little oil (olive or sunflower will do) onto each Wotsit just before you are ready to gild it, then roll it across the leaf, as you did with the sausages. This is a tricky number as Wotsits are uneven and difficult to roll. Persevere. Use your dry paintbrush to dab the gold onto the delicious cheesy corn-based puff product. As with the sausages, it would be madness to gild all the Wotsits, so do just a few and scatter them among some ungilded ones. Incidentally, it’s best not to prepare these too far in advance as Wotsits turn stale very quickly, often within the hour.
This is basic but fiddly. This time, you should try to cut the gold leaf (while still on the parchment) to a shape that’s slightly bigger than the chip. It’s a bit of guesswork, really. Very sharp scissors are a great help here. Again, the chips shouldn’t be too hot or they will be a nightmare to handle. Follow the same principle as for the sausages, draining as much of the grease from the chips as you can before gilding. Again, serve just a few gold chips amongst the normal ones.
You should be feeling slightly mucky from all this decadence by now. I suggest you pick up the phone and call Oxfam to make a hefty donation. It might not solve your guilt, but it’s a redemption of sorts.
Whilst carrying out the actual gilding, it’s useful to play something appropriately ethereal, such as the collection of pieces by Hildegard von Bingen, A Feather on the Breath of God, the delicious ‘Song to the Siren’ from This Mortal Coil’s It’ll End in Tears album or ‘Trying to Find a Home’ from the Tinderstick’s Waiting for the Moon. For serving, however, perhaps Quincy Jones’s Big Band Bossa Nova, for the simple reason that it’s splendid.
I LOVE OLD ladies. I’ve rarely met a bad one. In fact, if I didn’t relish the prospect of being a pipe-smoking, Boo Radleyesque, grumpy, slightly stinky old man quite so much, I would like to have been one when I grow up. One thing has always troubled me, though: the idea that you can’t teach them (or, specifically, grandmothers) to suck eggs. This is one of a family of wide-ranging culinary assumptions such as ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth’ and ‘A watched pot never boils’. These really ought to be proven before they are allowed to become aphorisms (I presume there’s an aphorism council that decides such things), so I’ve taken my favourite one to test.
The aphorism ‘You can’t teach a grandmother to suck eggs’ is generally used to imply that what you are saying is obvious, that you’re telling someone a fact that they already know. It works on the assumption that our elderfolk are wise and sage about everything. Now, I love a granny as much as the next man, but to grant them omniscience is pushing it a bit. So I decided to test the theory in an unbiased, strictly controlled study. First, I needed to become an expert at egg-sucking, then I needed to get me some grandmothers (a quorum of 20, say) and try teaching them.
The body of literature on egg-sucking is small. So small that I couldn’t find any. I bet there’s a church pamphlet on creating Easter displays that contains everything you need to know, but luckily in its absence there is a strong word-of-mouth history, which reveals that egg-sucking is mainly used to remove the insides of eggs so that you can preserve the shells for painting, like the brightly decorated eggs traditionally produced at Easter. Eggs are, of course a potent symbol of new life in lots of religions, including Paganism, Christianity and Judaism.
So how do you suck an egg? I had to ask … well … a grandmother. Grandma Gates, my long-suffering mum and grandmother to my daughters Daisy and Poppy, has sucked eggs in the past – not for any religious occasion, but because she wanted to preserve some wild birds’ eggs (we’ll skip lightly over the legality of this – in mitigation it was some time ago) and was taught by my grandfather, Wilfred. The technique seemed pretty obvious: take your egg and, using a needle or thin point of a knife, make a small hole in the top and bottom. Then suck the egg out.
Incidentally In 2003 Alice Shirrell Kaswell solved the age-old problem ‘Which came first – the chicken or the egg?’ once and for all. She mailed an egg and a live chicken in separate packages from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to New York City, following the US postal service’s advice on the mailability of adult chickens. The chicken arrived within 48 hours 51 minutes, followed by the egg, 11 hours 6 minutes later. She concluded that the chicken came first and the egg second. Her research was published in the brilliant Annals of Improbable Research, which also published the reply of an outraged reader who objected to the whole episode as it smacked of chicken abuse.
I resolved to become an expert, so I sat down with half a dozen eggs and gave it a try. It quickly became apparent that if you use unwashed eggs donated by your friend’s chickens you are apt to get a shitty mouth. I washed the second egg but the process was still disgusting. Having a mouthful of cold, raw egg made me want to vomit. It also struck me that raw eggs aren’t the best things to ask people to eat, especially the old and, quite possibly, infirm. I put this to my mum. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I think we actually blew the eggs rather than sucked.’ Thanks, Mum.
After extensive experimentation, I ascertained the following:
Take the eggs out of the fridge to let them warm a little, making the insides less viscous and more manageable.
Use a pin to make the hole and then widen it with the point of a knife.
Don’t make too small a hole otherwise the pressure of the exiting egg will cause more damage, collapsing your egg.
I may be particularly malcoordinated, but one third of the eggs cracked too much to be useable.
It took me five eggs to get it right. Now I needed some grandmas. I originally had visions of going to a retirement home and gathering a group of willing, lovely ladies to teach. I realized, however, that this might be seen as patronizing – who would ever agree to that? So I got hold of the phone numbers of 18 grandmas through friends and family, and called them up. Not quite my quorum of 20, but near enough.
Out of my 18 grandmas, seven of them politely declined to take part, and hence couldn’t, indeed, be taught to suck eggs. One was just too talkative and managed with devilish skill to change the subject, so I never did get to the teaching. One was my mum, who taught me in the first place, and therefore couldn’t be taught herself. This left nine grandmas, eight of whom claimed that they already knew how to suck eggs. There was, however, one wonderful lady, a friend of my mum’s, who thought the whole thing hilarious, and who I managed to teach successfully, albeit over the phone, so I can’t guarantee that she pulled it off to complete satisfaction.
So, from this I concluded that on the whole the idiom is true – you can’t teach all grandmas to suck eggs. You can, however, teach one grandma to suck eggs, and if I found one, there might be others. But the idiom is one of those absolutist conceits – if even one grandmother can be taught, the whole thing goes out of the window and hence the aphorism is proved false and should be struck from the aphorism register immediately.
But I won’t stop playing with old ladies. If you know any grandmas who are in the dark about the egg-sucking thing, please send them to me complete with a box of half a dozen free-rangers, and we can suck some eggs and maybe drink some tea.
IF YOU’RE PLANNING to make your own spirits, stop right there. I don’t want to be the cause of your moral collapse, nor the collapse of your house: home distillation is highly illegal and dangerous to boot. If, however, your interest is purely academic, or you live in New Zealand (where, oddly enough, it’s legal) you may read on.
Moonshine is illicitly distilled alcohol, traditionally synonymous with Wile E. Coyote and, by all accounts, very common in Scandinavia. It’s also common in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, where in 2003 customs officers found six illegal stills on a remote farm, busy brewing moonshine under the name ‘Highland Game’. They arrested a fellow called Peter Cox and put him away for two years.
At first, a sentimental part of me sympathized with Mr Cox – surely moonshiners are survivalist freedom fighters kicking against taxation from greedy governments? All he needed was to have his hair tousled with an ‘On your way, scallywag’. Then I read how much moonshine he was brewing at the time of HM customs officers’ visit: 35,000 litres. Around 130,000 empty bottles had been supplied to the farm and Coxy pleaded guilty to evading £529,275 in excise duty. Not exactly The Good Life, is it?
The reason it’s illegal is simple: cash. Evading duty equals ‘theft of vast sums from the public purse’ (I’ve always imagined the public purse to be the size of a house, all purple velvet, brim-full of golden ducats, with a big drawstring at the top). I had protracted conversations with Customs and Excise about what exactly is illegal about it. Apparently it’s not the alcohol content – you can make home-brew for your own use at any level of alcoholic content. It’s all about owning and running the still. Basically, any still has to be licensed, and to get it licensed you need to meet a whole shedload of difficult criteria – it has to have a capacity of 18 hectolitres, for starters, and your premises need to have certain levels of security.
Moonshine is also potentially dangerous. If impurities or chemicals like methanol are left in, it can cause severe abdominal pain, drowsiness, dizziness, blurred vision leading to blindness and the risk of coma with breathing difficulties. The customs folk warn that ‘If anyone has a bottle at home, or is unsure if it is a genuine product, they should contact their Environmental Health Officer.’ Yeah, right.
So bearing all this in mind (i.e. that you can’t, mustn’t, won’t), how would you go about making the stuff? Well, very carefully and very quietly, that’s for sure. There are, inevitably, several ways of going about this. You can make your own still but you’d need to be an engineer or survivalist fruitcake because it’s rather complicated. Everyone else would buy their still from legal suppliers in New Zealand or Germany as a water purifier. They helpfully break them down into several inconspicuous packages to avoid prying eyes, if required.
The whole process starts off thoroughly legally, with the creation of a ‘wash’ – an alcoholic base liquid up to 20% alcohol. You can make your own wash from pretty much any organic material – one combination is water, sugar, orange juice and yeast, and you can do about 25 litres in three weeks or so. But you can also buy complete kits to make a high-alcohol home-brew. These kinds of kit work a treat. I only wish I had a faster consumption rate for spirits – they tend to make 5 litres in a batch.
You could, of course stop here, which many people do, and add one of hundreds of different essences to your brew, including London gin, vodka, rum and Scotch. They are surprisingly authentic but they are still only 20%. Happily, this brew can then be converted into the illegal stuff by distillation, which aficionados have taken to complex levels of expertise.
At this point I had hoped to put all the means to brew some banging gear at your disposal. However, when the BBC lawyers read my manuscript they had what I can only describe as a ‘fit’, and banned the four pages that followed, despite my having struggled so hard to offset hard-core engineering with irreverent humour. Luckily, my burden of responsibility is lighter than the BBC’s, so I have published the entire set of instructions at www.thegastronaut.com. Ha.
CURING MEAT IS good for the soul. It may seem a daunting prospect, but the childish sense of pride you get from making your first batch will get you straight on the phone telling your mum how proud she ought to be. Biltong is the ideal way to start your journey into home butchery – it’s a very simple process and can be done on a small scale – and before you know it you’ll be making saucisson and spending your weekends washing pigs’ intestines.
Biltong is a strangely addictive, very chewy South African speciality made from cured and air-dried strips of meat, and it was developed as a good way of storing meat in a hot climate. The word comes from the Dutch – ‘bil’ meaning ‘buttock’ and ‘tong’ meaning ‘strip’. The temptation to delve into the sexual proclivities of the Boers is strong, but I’ve fought it – this is a book about food.
There are several versions of biltong including ostrich, kudu (a type of antelope), springbok and fish, though the most common is undoubtedly beef. What’s interesting is that, other than the fish one, they all seem to taste the same. Of course, try telling a South African that and they’ll bite your head off.
The kit involved is minimal – the most important thing is to knock up a contraption in which to dry the hanging strips of meat. It should allow a flow of air but not flies (if you’re too lazy even for this, you can buy a ready-made biltong-maker with an integral heater). I’ve made one of these out of coat-hangers and mosquito netting in the past, and even found an old cage in a second-hand shop and lined that with mosquito netting.
I don’t need to give you full directions as it’s pretty simple. First of all you need a box-shaped frame a bit bigger than a portable TV with slats or wires on the top that will allow you to tie strips of meat on with string, letting them hang without touching the bottom or sides. Then you need to cover the whole thing with netting for protection.
When you have assembled your biltong-maker you will need to find somewhere to hang it. If it’s hot and dry, you can leave it hanging somewhere outside in the sunshine. You can also use a dry cellar, but failing that a window ledge will do. If you put it in your airing cupboard your laundry will smell of biltong for weeks, so you have been warned.
First, make your hanging contraption, then:
MAKES ABOUT 800g
2 kg beef fillet
150 ml red wine vinegar
50 ml Worcestershire sauce
1 handful of coriander seeds, coarsely ground
1 tablespoon black pepper, coarsely ground
500 g fine sea salt
150 g brown sugar
5 ml bicarbonate of soda (this will help to soften the meat)
Cut the beef into strips about 4 cm thick and as long as you fancy. Put the meat into a bowl so that it fits tightly and add the vinegar and Worcestershire sauce. Leave for 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, mix the coriander and pepper together in another bowl.
In a third bowl, mix the salt, sugar and bicarbonate of soda together.
Remove the meat from the liquid (but don’t throw it away), drain briefly and add to the bowl of spices, mixing it around for an even coating. Retain the spices that don’t stick.
Bury the spiced beef in the salt and sugar mixture and leave it for 3 hours (it will draw in the brine mixture). Remove the beef from the brine and dip it back in the vinegar for another 5 minutes. Remove and, using the vinegar, wipe all the salt off (don’t skip this bit or your biltong will be unbearably salty). Squeeze it to remove as much liquid as you can, roll it in the spices again and it’s ready for hanging.
To hang your biltong, cut lengths of string, and tie them tightly around one end of each beef strip. Tie these to the top of your hanging contraption and make sure that they don’t touch the sides or bottom.
Leave the strips hanging for 3–20 days in a dry (and preferably warm) place. It’s difficult to say exactly how long they’ll need because it will depend on the temperature and humidity of your chosen drying place, but basically they’re ready when the meat is as tough as old boots. When made in mid-summer in South Africa, this is about 3 days.
Anything by Miriam Makeba or Ladysmith Black Mambazo would go down a treat.
I USED TO