Lap yuk - Chinese air dried bacon

I've had a months' sabbatical from SDON having become a bit unmotivated with blogging. Hopefully I'm now suitably refreshed and ready to get back into the swing of things. The most interesting thing I've made recently has been lap yuk - air dried Chinese bacon.

First up props to the original source: Sunflower Food Galore, one of my favourite food blogs. If you want loads of interesting East Asian and specifically Chinese recipes head over. The archives are a gold mine.

Sunflower's lap yuk recipe can be found here - I followed it more or less to the letter so I won't bother repeating it all.

This is a very easy first step into the world of curing meats, a world which may seem intimidating at first. The only specialist ingredient is Prague powder (also known as Instacure or curing salt or pink salt). The key thing to note is that there are actually two Prague powders/Instacures/pink salts - Number 1 always contains 93.75% table salt (sodium chloride) and 6.25% sodium nitrite. Number 2 always contains 89.75% table salt, 6.25% sodium nitrite and 4% of the slower acting sodium nitrate. Number 1 is used for fresh sausages and Number 2 for air dried sausages as well as whole meat products like this bacon or the Italian coppa.

The sodium nitrate and nitrate helps cure the meat, preserves pink colours in certain things and discourages dangerous bacteria including that responsible for botulism. Neither versions are expensive and can be easily obtained on Ebay or Amazon. Safety warning - in large amounts they are toxic so be careful with amounts in recipes and don't let any kids near them!

Right, with that out the way here is what you are going to need (cribbed from Sunflower).

• 1.75 - 2 kg belly pork
• 1/2 cup of light soy
• 1 tbsp dark soy
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 2.5 tbsp salt
• 1 tsp five spice
• 2 tsp crushed Sichuan peppercorns
• 1/3 cup Shaoshing wine
• 5g #2 cure salt (Prague #2 or insta cure #2)

Get your butcher to cut the pork belly into long thick strips. Mix all the other ingredients together to make a marinade (shown up top). I added a few chillies too. Put the meat in a sealed bag with the liquid.

Keep the bacon in the fridge for three or four days and turn once or twice per day so all areas are exposed to the wicked flavours.

Remove the meat, put some string through the end and hang up somewhere with a slight breeze. My long suffering co-habitees let me use our curtain rail.

These two photos were taken after a couple of days of hanging. You can clearly see the meat has lost some mass (in the form of moisture). It's also darkened a lot. That's the result of both the wet cure in the fridge with the salt and sodium nitrate/nitrite and the gradual air drying.

context shot of location

Sunflower recommends a week's drying. My bacon is seen in cross-section below and I've got to say was (is) bloody tasty. Big success this one. I've only had lap yuk a couple of times - most memorably in an excellent stir-fry at Gourmet San with leek and crispy tofu - but the taste of this was absolutely spot on. It's got an extremely strong flavour - salty, fatty but most of all muskily meaty, with the warmth and perfume of the spices coming through at the end.

Hold tight for some recipes involving the bacon. I've found it most straightforward to use as lardons or slices in stir-frys. I chop the bacon and fry it first before adding chilli pastes, garlic etc. This allows some of the fat to render out and subsequently coat the stir-fry, and also the chance for the fat to crisp up a little. The skin is pretty chewy, I think it's fine to remove it if it's not too your taste. From a bit of googling I'd guess that steaming the bacon is the most popular and traditional means of cooking, however I'm very fond of frying it to obtain some crispiness.

As a first go at curing meat lap yuk was a highly satisfying experience. Easy and very rewarding, I've got my hands on a copy of Charcuterie and an old school meat mincer for sausage making so watch this space.

PS
A few thoughts:

• Make sure you get the pork belly end without the ribs in. Most of mine was boneless but it had mini cartilaginous proto-ribs at one one as you can see above (the two central white circles).
• Check the bacon after five or six days drying as mine was very hard after seven.
• It's a strong tasting and robust kind of thing, so don't worry too much about exact details!

Steamed beef with rice meal (fen zheng niu rou)

The idea of steaming meat in a coat of rice flour is one that caught my eye a year or two, before I had even started cooking Sichuan or Hunanese food at home. It was in the form of the excellent Eating Asia's Mizheng Rou. Basically you slow steam meat with a load of spices and smashed up rice and the rice gradually cooks - absorbing the steam, the meat juice and your favoured exciting mix of spices. Meat and rice integrated, prepared together as one like in the great European dishes of risotto of paella.

Having never got around to doing something based on EA's version I ended up doing a version with beef from Land of Plenty. It's a bit more fiddly than, say a mapo tofu, or a braised fish in chilli bean sauce, but ultimately pretty interesting given the new textures brought by the rice and by the steaming.

• 500g beef
• ginger, garlic, chilli bean paste, soy, Shaoxing wine, veg oil, dash of water or stock - for the marinate
• dried chillies, Sichuan pepper, sesame oil, raw garlic, spring onions
• 75g raw rice

Cut the beef into largish, thin squares. Combine with the marinade ingredients and leave for half an hour.

Toast the rice until brittle. When it's cool grind down in a mortar and pestle - half way to a meal like state is fine, so there's still some texture. Add this to the beef and steam it for two hours. The rice will start to fluff up and increase in size. This dish should not be cooked by anyone in a rush as the steaming really does take quite a while.

When its looking ready remove from the steamer and season with all the other ingredients (mash the raw garlic and thin with a little cold water) to your taste. I served this with some more white rice on the side which, looking back on it, was possibly a massive gastro-cultural faux pas.

A load of your favourite greens stir-fried with garlic and dressed with sesame oil and Chinkiang vinegar is more or less obligatory here in my opinion. Sprouts, courgette and cavalo nero in this case but obviously grab whatever's in your fridge.

So - does it cut the mustard? I don't rate this one quite as highly as some of the other Sichuan dishes I've got to say. I love the idea of it - cooking meat with veg makes perfect sense in a rice heavy Chinese cuisine and clearly works fantastically with congee. The rice makes it all a bit heavy and slightly claggy, somehow lacking the clean hit of a high-powered spiced and peppered stir-fry. Eating Asia suggest putting some root vegetable or pumpkin in with the meat which I think could act as a useful counterpoint. One to retry then, with some belly pork and pumpkin perhaps...

SD, ON's chilli con carne

Beautiful huh?  The dark orange of those little chillies in the middle is just amazing. After a bit of a scatter-gun approach to chilli inclusion in the pork stew I made a few months ago I would like to ID these ones. The top chilli is ancho (massive, mild, rich, sweet/smoky). If you know what the others are can you please let me know.

Having nabbed an enormous bit of beef in the supermarket (a silverside roast on one of those half price deals) I wanted to make some sort of spiced beef stew. Now the obvious cultural touchstone is the oft used and abused chilli con carne. There are purists and pragmatists - there are dilettantes and devotees. I've enjoyed all sorts and do not take a hard-line on these matters. (Why is it always made with mince thought?)

So I made up the recipe with some background reading informed by hollow legs and the Guardian. I did not include beans (though there were some on the side, refried style) but did include some tomatoes (not too many though).

• cheap cut of beef, roughly cubed
• lots of carrots (1/3 the amount of beef)
• lots of onions (1/2 the amount of beef)
• spices: cinnamon stick, five cloves, a big-ish spoon of cumin
• a sprinkle of oregano
• one head of garlic
• one big handful of sweet cherry tomatoes
• a selection of dried Mexican chillies
• two limes
  

Toast the chillies and then soak them in boiling water for half an hour.

Brown the beef in batches.

Fry the onions roughly chopped in vegetable oil for ten minutes. Add the spices and fry for a couple of minutes. Add the whole head of garlic - cloves peeled but un-chopped (they will disintegrate). Add the chopped carrot and tomatoes. Add the beef. Add the oregano.

Blitz the chillies to a paste in the magimix. Add this to the mix.

Cook for two and half - three and a half hours. Mash down any big bits of beef and the garlic cloves. Squeeze two limes in.

Serve with delicious thinly sliced red onions softened in lime juice, refried beans, salad and sour cream.

messy

Messy and vary tasty. This preparation certainly had the heat that the pork lacked but it was a slow and rich heat the lazily penetrated the mouth, pleasurably tempered by the vegetable content. Very pleasing and very easy to prepare. This is a rough and ready dish which doesn't suite fussiness so will be easy to adapt.

Congee Mk 3 - split-pea and red-braised partridge

I've made congee a couple of times before. I love the idea of it: a bland starchy base  topped up with pleasingly strong toppings. My recent discovery of the superb Food and Drink Chengdu lead to the inevitable trawl through the archive and a hoarding of tasty looking dishes. One that took my fancy was a rice and pea soup, a liquid congee type mixture of rice and split-peas.

pre-partridge

I've had a couple of partridges in the freezer for a long time. And there in, perhaps, lies the problem. Emboldened by a recent red-braised pork dish which was a wonder of sweet and spice I thought I'd try the same treatment on the aged partridge.

• rice and split-peas
• meat (try fatty pork, or chicken?)
• sugar, star anise, dried chilli, cinnamon, chilli oil, Shaoxing wine
• pickled vegetables

Start the congee - put the rice and split-peas in plenty of water in a ratio of 3:1. Boil away until you get a soupy texture. It'll take a good hour.

For the red braise I'd recommend not using partridge, at least not long-frozen ones. Perhaps this is a lesson in freezer stock-monitoring. Try fatty pork - belly or spare rib chops are ideal.

Heat some oil and add a couple of teaspoons of sugar. Melt. It will go liquid and brown. Splosh in a few good shakes of Shaoxing cooking wine (dry sherry is often suggested in lieu of it should you be lacking) and stir. Chuck in a star anise, a few dried chillies and a stick of cinnamon. Add the meat and top up with water. Simmer for forty minutes and when nearly ready reduce the liquid a bit.

When the congee is ready put a portion of meat on top, spoon over some braising sauce, top with chilli oil and add a little preserved vegetable.

post-partridge

Good in theory, this dish could come to life with some nicely braised tender meat. As it was, the partridge was dry, stringy, musky and rather tough. The legs were especially unappetising; borderline inedible in fact. In the end I shredded the breast meat and stirred it into the mixture.

It's also possible that I don't really like partridge that much. I might loose food-cred points but I'm not sure that fiddly, muddy tasting, micro-fowl are the way forward in life.

Kuru fasulye

Sometimes I see a recipe posted on a blog and immediately know that I want to cook and eat it. The simple looking stewed beans on the super Eating Asia was one such dish. Beans long cooked with tomato and pepper, sweet and rich with butter and lamb fat. A modest warmth from some dried chilli. Clearly this is an amazing combination of tastes.

So off to Turkish Food Centre I went. First problem is that TFC is so well stocked, so good a shop in fact, that they had three rather than the expected one type of dried white bean. I cast my mind back to the post and tried to remember the shape of them. Butter bean size? No, maybe too big, something a little smaller. In the end I went for dermason fasulye which looked about right. I left on the shelf butter beans, something called Argentinian bean and a few other things. I had a guess at what would go into a hearty rendition of the dish rather than digging out a recipe.

• fatty lamb on the bone
• two cups of dried white beans
• a couple of red peppers cut small
• a couple of onions cut small
• a head of garlic
• chilli flakes
• a can of tomatoes
• butter

Fry the onions in some butter for ten minutes with two big pinches of chilli (the mild, tasty Turkish kirmizi biber is well worth tracking down).

Add the lamb, dried beans and tomatoes, top up with water and boil for an hour and a half. Fatty and bony lamb is the best for giving the dish a good overall lamb flavour. I used scrag from the freezer left over from congee Mk. 2.

Add the peeled garlic cloves (keep them whole to save effort – they will dissolve in the liquid) and cook for another hour. Prod the meat and encourage the removal of any meat, whilst leaving the bones in the mix for flavour.

Add the chopped pepper. Assess the situation. Are the beans cooked? They should be creamy inside with a uniform give when bitten. There should be none of the sudden shifts in texture that pockets of under-cooked bean can bring. Cook until the pepper is soft and the beans are as desired. Is this dish gummy, oily and comforting? If it isn’t add some butter, olive oil or lamb tail fat.

Season.

Serve with rice, bulgar or Turkish bread, a fried or boiled egg if you want more protein and some pickles.

Do not cook this if you are in a rush. These modest little beans took an age to cook. I didn’t get the sauce quite as intense as I wished. I’m going to try again. Maybe I can get some rendered lamb tail fat from TFC. Their dried bean selection is a sight to behold – surely they can melt down a few tails in a back-room somewhere?

After googling the beans it seems they are white kidney beans. However in the finished dish they looked very much like baked beans - which are haricot. So I'm not sure.

Red-braised beef with vegetables (hong shao niu rou)

all hail fermented chilli-bean paste, food of the gods

Refrshingly, the (European) received wisdom of starting every braise or stew by frying onions and browning the meat to maximise flavour does not apply here. Since they are two of the few things that take any time, the prep time of this dish is seriously short - under five minutes. The chilli-bean paste packs so much flavour it's all you need. I wonder if a crossover stew inclusive of these two steps, with many onions cooked down in the stock, would be a success?

Fry chilli-bean paste in oil and add chilli and SP. I found the amount of SP specified by FD in the previous dish I made a bit on the conservative side so beefed it up by a factor of around three. Add the beef (something cheap and with fat/collagen to release) stock, a star anise, a drop of dark soy sauce for colour and some smashed ginger. Simmer for one or two hours, adding the veg to cook at an appropriate time.

Big white radish aka mooli/daikon is specified here and is a lovely vegetable – porous and good at absorbing savoury liquids whilst retaining structural integrity and a decent crunch. I also had some common or garden radish and kohlrabi to use up from this salad and a depressed and wrinkled beetroot waiting aimlessly on the window sill. That went in too. Maybe not wholly authentic but it did the trick. To complete the low-effort ethos I just tipped in some noodles rather than bother to do rice.

one-pot goodness

I used ox cheek for this as Waitrose had some reduced to crazy cheap levels. Much as I've enjoyed it before it went almost too soft here, whilst maintaining a slight rubbery-ness that was not wholly pleasant. I can imagine shin being nice here: maybe it would be a touch more succulent.

PS. Szechuan experts - do your Szechuan peppercorns have the hard gritty seed in the middle of the husk? Some of mine do and when you bite in to them it can get a bit emotional - perhaps superior stocks somehow have this bit removed? Thanks!

Congee Mk 2 - aromatic lamb

After my first attempt at congee I fancied another go to try and perfect the texture and thickness, this time with a rich lamb stock with lots of aromatic spices in. This amount served four. Some interesting history.

Ingredients

• half a scrag end of lamb, sliced
• one onion and one head garlic, cleaved in twain
• chilli, cloves, star anise, peppercorns, cinnamon and coriander seed
• two scant handfuls of rice
• medium chopped root vegetables, any veg lying around
• soy and fish sauce
  

First make the stock: brown the lamb, onion and garlic. If you are bothering to brown meat pre-stewing then you need to get plenty of colour on the meat to get the malliard reaction going. I read about scorching onions and garlic before going in the stockpot and, er, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Not sure it led to any extra flavour in the congee but it's not going to do any harm if you have the pan going already for the meat.

When it's done add to a pan of cold water along with the dry spices. Aromatic and a mite of heat is the way to go here I feel. Simmer for 1.5 hours. Take the sliced scrag out, cool and remove the meat from the bone. Strain the stock and return to pan. Squeeze the cooked garlic back into the soup, chop the cooked onion and return that also. Add the rice to the stock and put the bones back in to ensure max flavour extraction. When the rice is getting really soft and starting to break down (this seems to take ages) add the other veg (I used carrot, parsnip (sweetness worked really well) and baby leeks) and cook till everything is done. Remove the bones, put the shredded meat back in and then when everything is hot add a shot of fish sauce (nam pla) and two shakes of soy.

Rubbish pic of finished article

Hmm, still not nailed the rice cooking part. Nowhere near. This congee had discernible rice grains in it, albeit visibly disintegrating ones. Some of the photos on the net show a cloudy stock and almost jellied consistency with no individual grains of rice left. Am I using the wrong rice? I just used an easy-cook one I had in store. Still, it was tasty and warming soup. Scrag end definitely seems reminiscent of oxtail in mouthfeel and levels of fat, collagen and gelatine. So I guess I'll carry on - keen, green congee dilettante - in looking for the perfect mix!

Teochow braised duck

I don't know about you but I find I turn to blogs as much as cookbooks when looking for recipes these days. People odd enough to bother setting up a blog dedicated to food are clearly carrying out a labour of love and this is usually apparent in the writing. They also tend often to furnish the recipe with excellent photos - just flicking though Google reader or the like grants access to an enormous, international, multi-authored, open-source cookbook personalised by the stars or bookmarks you have added.

So when I had a duck in the fridge (half price at Co-op, sweet) I had a little dip and came up with Teochow braised duck. The other idea was Fergus Henderson's wonderful (and extremely simple) duck with carrots. I'm gonna do that again next time I guess. For the Teochow braise I liked the idea of putting the ingredients and a pot and basically leaving them for an hour half to relax and simmer away. All I had to pick up on the cycle home (another benefit of the bike - stopping for crucial foodstuffs mid-commute!) was some lemongrass and I was set.

The ingredients are listed in the original post so I won't replicate them: I was fastidious is my following and added only a single chilli as I couldn't bear the thought of all those fine spices within a tiny bit of heat.

After an hour-and-a-half the duck was tender and I removed it to a frying pan to  crisp up the skin while the thin sauce was reduced a little and had some mushrooms added. We ate the heart and liver fried for starters and then the duck with the sauce and some pickled vegetables as suggested in the original link. Unfortunately the rice was that cloudily translucent easy-cook type which went a bit Uncle Ben when cooked and not the proper regal white stuff. The sauce was pretty good, the star anise goes very well with a dash of sweet soy I put in. Not mind blowing though.

I'm sometimes a little scared of poaching or braising birds but this came out wonderfully tender. The fat all rendered out and the finished article was not particularly greasy. I now have a cup of duck fat in the fridge and a bag of potatoes in the cupboard begging me to fry them in it.

The stock from the carcass was deep & ducky on a profound & infrequently achieved level

Pheasant stew

One of the better presents I got for xmas this year was two dead pheasants in a plastic bag. I have never hung, plucked, skinned or gutted a pheasant or any game bird but that, of course, made the process all the more interesting.

Hugh suggests around five days for the ideal hanging period and that, through happy circumstance rather than supreme planning skills, was exactly what these guys got. The hanging was done in a plastic bag suspended on string through the window of my sitting room and anchored to the radiator. The hanging process gives flavour and character to the meat by allowing it to begin the first stages of decomposition.

The thought of plucking the birds was a little daunting so I decided simply to skin. Not remotely knowing what I was doing, I sharpened up my favourite knife and slit the skin down the front of the birds' chests. This peeled off fairly easily and a few more slices around the top bit of the legs meant I could rip off a trouser like configuration of copper feathers and sticky skin. Some more cutting at the head end allowed me to get the crop out – packed full of grain in both birds - without puncture. Slashing the abdomen released the innards into the bin. The livers of the birds seemed incredibly hard and distended – a result, perhaps, of them gorging on freely available grain – but the pungency of their viscera disinclined me to root through the bloody strings and clumps in the bin and I must embarrassingly admit I chucked the lot. Just think – possibly two natural and humane pheasant foie gras wasted. Oh for shame.

The legs were easy to snap off and remove but I ended up chopping the carcass in a rather irregular manner probably not known to any reputable school of butchery.

Check the outrageously yellow fat

I followed a really basic recipe for these – browned meat, bacon fried to render its fat, lots of standard veg (onion and both carrots and celery in big amounts to serve as an actual feature and not just background flavour mulch), wine, dried herbs and an hour-and-a-half 'pon the hob. I think white wine might have been best as the red sent the stew a grey colour.

The flavour of the pheasant was very fine. Chicken like, but with a denser and drier meat and with a musty countryside aftertaste, especially in the leg parts. The bacon and veg did the business as expected and the resulting stew, finished with a little lick of cream, was hearty and pleasingly unfussy. We ate it with potato and parsnip mash with plenty of pepper in which was a delight. Many thanks to the pheasant bringers - you know who you are.

Proper

Happy 2011 dear readers!

Congee Mk 1

 

I've wanted to cook congee for a while and finding myself still suffering under the tail of a hangover one day at 6pm a bowl of rice cooked in a single pot sounded like a good idea. There was no proper stock involved in the making of this congee nor is it remotely authentic I expect.

Ingredients

• three cups of rice
• shrimp satay sauce, nam pla, garlic, ginger, dried shrimp, sweet soy sauce
• peas, kale, bamboo shoots, spring onions
• sausages

Two to three cups of easy-cook rice I mixed with about twenty cups worth of water and simmered until the grains start to break down and loose their individual structural integrity. I included some ginger and garlic from the starts, thinking they too would break down in the long cook and give some nice background flavours. Having never cooked congee before I wasn't sure of how long they rice would need and man it does need quite a while! You could still see the grains in mine by the end, held in a starchy matrix, but some pics seem to show the grain totally broken down to a paste.

In lieu of stock proper I added some sweet soy, hot shrimp satay sauce, nam pla and a pinch of veg bouillon. After a good hour and a half I chucked in the other things according to cooking times. Some sausages needed eating up so popped out of their skins and fried they made excellent meat balls. Bamboo shoots had the texture of artichokes in brine and a slightly nondescript or almost mildly fishy taste. When everything looks done serve with some deep fried shallots on top.

Hearty

What a wonderful food. I guess that lots of Asian countries have their own versions of congee and it's not hard to see why - a modest amount of staple grain can be eked out a long way and flavoured with what ever is to hand. It's not far from risotto or paella though the UK doesn't really have a soup/stew based on a grain I can think of. A good chance to mess around then perhaps, and do a suitably patriotic British version.

Bolognese sauce

There seems to be much made over what exactly goes into a Bolognese ragu. Milk or no milk, pork or no pork, red or white wine, lots of tomatoes or just a few. After doing a bit of reading on it I decided to give it a go with an emphasis on a strong meat flavour (to be provided by bacon, beef mince and chicken livers), a relatively modest amount of tomato, milk and a long cooking period. There seem to be fans of both red and white wine, I used white for a change to see how it was.

Ingredients

• onion, carrot and celery
• beef mince, chicken livers and bacon in a ratio of 3:1:1
• dried herbs (thyme and oregano for me)
• tin of tomatoes
• large glass wine and same amount of whole milk
• olive oil
  
  

The vegetables are first softened in olive oil for fifteen minutes or so with a little garlic. Some bacon scraps were browned and added to the vegetables, as was the mince and the chopped chicken livers. I then allowed this to all cook down for ten minutes. Then the wine and milk were added and dried thyme and oregano added to the mix. It was slightly grey at this point and did not in fact look hugely attractive.

After a couple of hours the sauce had started to look a bit more together, although still far from the glossy red more normally seen. Some penne, a twist of salt and pepper and some parmesan finished things off. It was good but not mind-blowing. So, any tips or tricks for making a top notch version?

Curry lamb soup

With the leftovers of last week's curry goat I made a cold-weather soup so steadying and satisfying that it had to be recreated from scratch as soon as possible. It was a classic case of the humble successor dish being tastier and more enjoyable than the grander original upon whose remnants it is based. I thought I would go for lamb scrag this time as I have found it so good before under conditions of long cooking.

At Turkish Food Centre in Dalston, though, they had middle neck lamb for half its normal price. The middle neck is cut into chops, fattier by far than normal chops, but with the same bone up the side and an oval yellow cross-section at the bottom (spinal cord?).

Crazy cheap! Over 800g of lamb for just over three quid. I also purchased some dried peppers from TFC because they looked nice and I  felt they might be good for enriching stews.

Ingredients

• lamb with plenty of bone
• two onions
• garlic, scotch bonnet, thyme
• handful of lentils, barley or can kidney beans
• carrots
• tin tomatoes
• curry paste

Following a similar recipe to the curry goat I sweated two onions with curry paste, chucked in some additional spices (scotch bonnet kept whole, couple cloves, some whole peppercorns) and a tin of tomatoes. I also added the dried peppers here so they had plenty of time to soften up and topped up the mix with boiling water. The aim is to cook down enough so the onions and tomatoes start to disappear and the soup is an oily red-brown.

After twenty minutes the lamb was added (brown if you fancy - I'm still on the fence) and four or five carrots cut large tipped in also. After fourty-five minutes a handful of green lentils were added and the soup simmered for another thirty minutes or so. Taste, correct seasoning and when it tastes ready then it is!

What I was looking to recreate here was the success of last week - a thick soup whose meatiness came not from big chunks of floating flesh but the deeply savoury stock. Think of the profound beefiness of the best pho as the cornerstone, augmented by a sweet richness of tomato, long-cooked carrot and meat fat and the heat of the chilli. I don't know if the extra day or two in the fridge for the ingredients of that previous dish meant the flavours had got to know each other more and had in fact become extremely comfortable in one-other's presence, but this attempt at recreation did not quite capture the savour and success of it, tasty though it was.