Steam rising

It was time for another stew from the Bastides people yesterday, something over a month from the last, noticed at reference 1. More or less the now traditional recipe, including on this occasion an orange pepper and ready-cut celery, this last from the Co-op by Epsom Station. And rather less potato than on the last occasion, when there had been too much of a good thing. In this case, left over potato which had already been reheated once, but you would not have known that from the stew. Probably would have done if you had taken them neat, when the stale taste is usually quite distinctive.

We did about two thirds on this first occasion, leaving more or less enough for tonight's evening meal, probably to be supplemented by a spot of cold hand of pork, yet to be properly noticed hot.

Interested to find that the recipe for the sausage was shoulder and hand of pork, salt, pepper and a few other spices. Perhaps they don't use saltpetre in the way explained at reference 4, stuff which is widely available online. Perhaps they conflate it with regular salt. Perhaps they include it under the rubric spice, which seems to be pushing things a bit. And, what about the water that we use to pad out our English sausages?

On a more positive note, we make more use shoulder of pork than leg of pork. Seems to us to have more flavour.

PS: reminded this evening of a feature of the tubular pasta which we take with sausage stew, which BH buys ready cut in packets from Sainsbury's. One assumes that the stuff is cut by machine - but the length of the pieces varies - say around two inches, plus or minus a centimetre. It seems unlikely that this is down to wobbling cutters, much more likely that variable length is deemed to make the product more 'artisanale' in the language of the people who job it is to promote the sale of food in France. From where I associate to the yarn about manufacturers of cutlery getting their machines to include imperfections in the product so that they could pass it off as having been hand made in Sheffield. From the far-off days when we still made stuff in Sheffield.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/12/another-sort-of-feeding.html.

Reference 2: http://bastides-salaisons.com/. For the sausages.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/07/bastides.html. See the end of this post for the company.

Reference 4: https://www.primalsurvivor.net/salt-curing/. A website which is informative about curing meat, but which also contains a particularly irritating amount of advertising. Advertising which has, as is normal these days, been tuned to my email and viewing habits. I associate to a correspondent who was pleasantly surprised that I don't do it. With a downside being that one gets pushed well down the hit lists...