Christmas 2011 in Leros

I do apologise for not producing a Christmas beef this year but the last few weeks have been rather busy what with moving to Greece.

Let me take this opportunity to particularly wish all those who partook of spicy beef in the Clarendon on Christmas Eve over the years, yes thats you Chunky and Staffs, a very merry Christmas and happy 2012.

Sam

The beef is cooked

Yesterday was the end of the curing process. The beef has shrunk quite a bit with over a pint of fluid coming out of it which if I was minded to do could be used to cook a pork tongue in. Anyone who is vegetarian must think this blog is pretty nasty.

Before cooking the beef looked like this


The beef is taken out of its gloop and then washed and its is then broiled in a sealed pot for, in this case, an hour and a half and then allowed to stand in the pot for another 30 mins.

Here's the meat in the pot for broiling



And after broiling you can get a nice base for a stock




The meat is then allowed to cool and then carved ready for eating



It tastes beautiful. It will be served on Christmas Day for breakfast



Happy Christmas blog fans.

New pictures and a new computer

Apologies to you all for not updating this blog for a few days but this has been due to the untimely death of my computer. Happily I have taken delivery of a rather splendid iMac upon which this blog is now being written but you won't notice any difference only it is an awful lot easier to construct the blog pages.

The last posting was on 3rd December and by the following week the beef was festering way very pleasantly



Jo has gone to town decorating the house and making it look generally lovely for Christmas but the tree is all my own work. Decorating the house took about five and a half hours of which 5 hours was spent trying to unravel the lights for the front window. They might accidently break before going away after the festive period.

Right. If you are in the mood to waste a little more time the beef is progressing well. Last night I rubbed in the salt and spice mix and this evening gave the meat its first "turn". This has to be done once every 24 hours for three weeks.

You can see that already there is a good amount of juice at the bottom of the pot and the meat has actually shrunk a little. More liquid will come out of the beef as the salt cures it over the next few days.

The pot is kept in a cool place during this process. Our conservatory is pretty cold at the moment as we wait for snow tonight.

More pictures in a few days time.

Christmas Beef: The Davies Family Tradition

This could be one of the most boring of blogs but if you have found your way to this blog either by design of happenchance then please bear with me, read and be a little enlightened on a Davies family tradition stretching back a good many years.



I can vaguely remember my grand mother, who died in 1970, producing each December a blackened enamel pot within which lurked a large piece of beef. When this was on the kitchen table I could stand on tiptoe and just see inside. It could take a second or two for my eyes to adjust to the light and make out a dark gloopy mixture. Whilst my eyes took a moment to see what was there, my nose was instantly filled with an exotic and mouthwatering aroma in which sat the Christmas Beef.

The notion of a cured and spiced piece of beef at Christmas is hardly new and I would venture has origins in Jewish culture and salt beef curing. It is fair to say that the spices used in the Davies Christmas beef include a hefty dose of salt so that the beef which stands for three weeks in its pot, uncooked, is cured and preserved by the salt.

Anyway, the recipe for the beef seems to have been lost for some time but four or five years ago my uncle Jeremy stumbled upon a tattered and stained remnant of paper and recognised it for the missing potion.

He could just have easily got the recipe from Delia Smith.

I digress. Here is a picture of the beef for this year. Its a five pound (or for metricists about 2kg) piece of silverside, kindly supplied by the butcher on Tettenhall Green Mr Whitten. That sounds like he gave it to me; which indeed he did, in exchange for some money and the promise of a sandwich when the beef is done.

The beef has had about half a kilo of brown sugar rubbed into it and this will start to extract some of the juices out of the beef and form the basis of the "gloop" in which the meat stands.

It will stay like this for a couple of days before the spices and salt are mixed together and then rubbed in all over the meat. I am sworn to secrecy as precisely what blend of spices is used in the Davies recipe but I can say one ingredient that is not used since my grand mother's day is woodbine cigarette ash invariably blown in to her pot when she was turning the meat in the mixture.

Next post will show the meat after a couple of days in the spice mix.