![]() Originating in China in the early 19th century, lapsang souchong gets its distinctive flavour from the tea leaves being dried over a pinewood fire. Yet the company has enraged tea connoisseurs by ditching lapsang souchong, and replacing it with a blend called Distinctively Smoky. “It’s a brave person who tampers with an Englishman’s tea,” says Eleanor Steafel in The Daily Telegraph – advice you’d think that Twinings would heed, given that it has “been in the business for 300 years”. ![]() Use while still warm to dress “your salad of choice”. Shake vigorously, taste, and then season as required with flaked sea salt and black pepper. To make the vinaigrette, warm about two tablespoons of the bacon fat in a pan (or of course you can use fat from bacon you’ve just fried) and then add it to a small jam jar with one tablespoon of balsamic vinegar and one small clove of crushed garlic. For instance, you can try it with a simple salad of gem lettuce, tomatoes, basil and extra crisped bacon or use it to “turbocharge” cooked vegetables such as sautéed mushrooms, boiled new potatoes or roast carrots. The resulting salad is indeed “lovely”, but the vinaigrette is equally good drizzled over many other things. In her 2017 book “Too Good to Waste”, Victoria Glass has a recipe for a warm bacon fat vinaigrette, which she recommends pairing with beetroot, basil, bacon and green beans. Then, when the time is right, you can take it out and use it to create an “umami potion of a salad dressing”. Instead, store it in the fridge in a sealed jar, where it will keep for several months (or put it in the freezer and you can keep it even longer). When you have fat left in the pan after frying bacon, don’t throw it away, says Tom Hunt in The Guardian. Yet Heath was surely onto something: while you wouldn’t want every meal to end with one, there remains “something enlivening about a punchy, crunchy bite as the evening wanes”. Admittedly, in our diet-conscious age, savouries might not find many fans. ![]() Heath said that savouries provide an “admirable ending to a meal, like some unexpected witticism or a musing epigram at the close of a pleasant conversation”, adding that they are “the passion of the average Englishman and the bête noire of the ordinary housewife”. The biggest populariser of the savoury was the journalist Ambrose Heath, who in 1934 “wrote a whole book on the topic”. Think Scotch woodcock (scrambled eggs and anchovy paste on toast), Welsh rarebit, or angels and devils on horseback. This was a strongly flavoured “extra course” served towards the end of a meal, usually on toast or “with a small pastry croute”. Yet no one has, so far, sought to resurrect that Edwardian favourite, the “savoury”. Pies, puddings and various other “old-school” dishes have lately enjoyed something of a renaissance, says Olivia Potts in The Spectator. Meanwhile, Judy Joo, of Korean restaurant Seoul Bird in London, has an unusual technique for making her asparagus “ultra-flavourful”: before cooking it, she brines it in salt water, having first poked small holes in the spears with a fork to “allow the salt water to permeate the asparagus”. Thomas Heaney of Heaneys Cardiff prefers barbecuing: “For me there is no better flavour than asparagus barbecued over natural coals,” he says he pairs his with taramasalata and toasted hazelnuts. Tomas Lidakevicius, of Turnips in London, says asparagus shavings are “delicious pickled”. The vegan chefs Henry Firth and Ian Theasby suggest shaving asparagus into thin ribbons lengthways, with a vegetable peeler, and then using the ribbons in pasta dishes or slicing them into small circles widthways and adding these to a risotto. But since there are only so many times you can enjoy boiled asparagus with melted butter, “I asked some top chefs for their tips”. ![]() It’s British asparagus season, and like many people, I intend to capitalise on it by eating an awful lot of the vegetable, says Giulia Crouch in The Times.
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