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 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.
