Up the hill, and down the pub

What to do with a couple of hours to kill in Edinburgh before the train home? I was up there for the day yesterday, and so was faced with this question. After browsing the souvenir-shops along the Royal Mile, I thought it would be fun to climb Arthur’s Seat, the big hill just to the east of the city, but realised that this would probably take longer than the time I had left.

Instead, I focused my attention on the smaller Calton Hill which rises above the eastern end of Princes Street and is topped by a variety of early-19^th century monuments which has led it to be dubbed Edinburgh’s answer to the Acropolis (and thus, probably, the reason why Edinburgh has sometimes been referred to as the ‘Athens of the North’, although as the city has seven hills it has also been compared with Rome).

The climb was a fairly easy one. From the top, you can see all the way to the docks and beyond into the Firth of Forth – the island of Inchkeith is clearly visible, as is the Forth Bridge. As for the city, much of it is laid out before you, from Holyrood Palace and the Parliament building up to the Castle perched atop its rock.

Like several others who had come to Calton Hill, I climbed up onto the National Monument, that unfinished replica of the Parthenon which was started in 1822 as a memorial to the Scottish soldiers and sailors who had died during the Napoleonic Wars, although they’d only managed to erect a dozen of the columns before the money ran out. 

Nearby, among various other structures, is the Nelson Monument, a tower built on the highest point of Calton Hill shortly before the National Monument to commemorate Lord Nelson; it replaced a mast that had been used to send signals to the ships on the Firth of Forth (the flags that make up Nelson’s famous signal, the ‘England expects’ one, are flown from the monument every Trafalgar Day). The fact that it looks a bit like an upturned telescope is, apparently, deliberate.  

Naturally I can never resist the chance of climbing any available tower and as luck would have it I was there about half an hour before it closed for the day; plenty of time to go to the top and enjoy the panoramic view of this historic city.

After descending back into the city, I felt that a pre-train pint was in order, and that there was one Edinburgh pub above all others where this need could be best met. I have long been a fan of the Rebus books, Ian Rankin’s series of detective novels which are set in Edinburgh and which present a view of the city far removed from what the tourists see (rather like what the Morse books did for Oxford and the Zen ones for Italy, I suppose). The curmudgeonly yet likeable John Rebus may be a fictional character but he has a favourite pub, which he shares with his creator: The Oxford Bar in the New Town, that part of the city which was built in the late 18^th century and which retains much of its Georgian charm.

My guide book describes the pub as “that rarest of things: a real pub for real people, with no ‘theme’, no music, no frills and no pretensions”. I rather liked the sound of that, for it sounded like my sort of pub.

I also rather liked the name of the street on which it is located.

I really liked what I found – a quiet, old-fashioned sort of back-street pub where one could order a pint – it had to be Deuchars IPA – from the small bar at the front and take it to the main room and sip it in quiet contentment with the only accompanying sound being the rambling conversation from the people on the table opposite (even in the week before Christmas, there is clearly a point before which it is not the done thing to just leave work early and head to the boozer).

It brought to mind pubs like the Mitre off Hatton Garden (a favourite of mine) and various others, usually located in the back-streets, which have an authentic air which is sadly missing from so many watering-holes these days. The Oxford Bar was, I felt, definitely worth a visit in the short time I had before I walked back to Waverley Station, and onto the 17:00 to King’s Cross.

Something a bit special for breakfast

How about something a bit special for breakfast? The first and, let’s be honest here, usually the best meal of the day is one of those meals that I really enjoy cooking (must be something to do with the smell of frying bacon), and when we have guests staying it’s nice to do something a bit different. Bacon and parsley hotcakes it is, then, using a recipe that Allison clipped from the BBC Good Food magazine a few years ago.

We start by cutting up the bacon into lardons and dry-frying it until it’s crispy (contrary to what I appear to have learned in the Scouts, there’s no need for oil when frying bacon). 

While that’s cooling, the dry ingredients – self-raising flour, grated cheddar cheese (the more mature, the better), a small handful of chopped parsley, thyme (fresh or dried, either will do), salt and pepper – are mixed together in a bowl, to which the bacon is added.

Then come the eggs and the milk – the recipe says to use six tablespoons but I’ve found that you don’t need to use more than four to get a nice, thick batter. 

Spoonfuls of the batter are then fried, a couple at a time (oil is needed for this bit of frying) until golden; the recipe says that it serves four (meaning that it makes eight hotcakes) but I sometimes find that I can make six of them with the quantities provided. 

The recipe says that these are best served topped by a couple of poached eggs but I prefer fried ones; probably because I find poaching eggs to be a bit of a hassle (and it would involve more washing-up; by frying the eggs, I’m limiting the number of pans used to one).

So, there we are – bacon and parsley hotcakes, for when you want to make something a bit special for breakfast.

Of London's Christmas traditions, with references to Samuels Pepys and Johnson

Looking into the stories behind London’s various Christmas traditions has been a fun thing to do for my latest Londonist piece. I must say that my favourite bit is the one about the ‘Boy Bishop’ of St Paul’s, probably because I used to be a chorister myself and am therefore favourably inclined to the idea that, in times past, one of them briefly got to be a mock-bishop. This would seem to be an ecclesiastical variant of the ‘Lord of Misrule’ tradition (whereby the social order was briefly inverted) which was prevalent in the Middle Ages but which dates back to Roman times. Anyway, it is one of several aspects of a London Christmas, modern as well as historic, which made it into my seasonal article which also looks at (among other things) the meat auction at Smithfield, the lack of public transport on Christmas Day (something about which many Londoners are oddly accepting) and the question of which was the first London department store to have a Santa’s Grotto. The result can be found via this link:

http://londonist.com/london/christmas-in-london/what-are-london-s-christmas-traditions

My source for the ‘Boy Bishop’ story was a book called London Lore: The Legends and Traditions of the World’s Most Vibrant City by Steve Roud – a really good compendium of London’s folklore, of which there is a lot (including various ghost stories, local customs, etc). Definitely recommended reading for anyone with an interest in London’s rich and varied history.

Sticking with Christmas, though, there are of course some things that don’t change much over the years and even the centuries. For evidence of this, we can look at the experiences of Samuel Pepys on Christmas Day, 1661; he had an argument with a close family member and witnessed someone dealing with a drunken guest, both of which are things that many would readily identify as festive occurrences in our own time. After going to church, Pepys had dinner followed by an argument with his wife (“taking occasion, from some fault in the meat, to complain of my maid’s Sluttery”), causing the diarist to go “up to my Chamber in a discontent”. Later on, Mr and Mrs Pepys popped in on a neighbour, Sir William Penn (the admiral and father of the man who founded Pennsylvania). Unfortunately, another guest, a Captain Cock, “came to us half-drunck and began to talk; but Sir W. Pen, knowing his humour and that there was no end of his talking, drinks four great glasses of wine to him one after another, healths to the King &c., and by that means made him drunk, and so he went away; and so we sat down to supper and were merry; and so after supper home to bed.”

I have also recently been drawn to the writings of Samuel Johnson, in particular his essays which were for the most part published under three short-lived periodicals – The Rambler (1750-52), The Adventurer (1753-54) and The Idler (1758-60). There are some true literary gems to be found here, and it surprised me to learn that a few are dated Christmas Day, meaning (presumably) that the great man could sometimes be found writing over the festive period as opposed to going out and indulging in some seasonal perpotation (a word that is in his Dictionary and means, and I quote, “the act of drinking largely”).

One such essay, from The Adventurer (25^th December 1753), concerns the folly of wanting too many things. Taking the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates as his starting-point, Johnson ponders “the great business of life to create wants as fast as they are satisfied”. He observes that “there is no man, who does not … suffer himself to feel pain for the want of that, of which, when it is gained, he can have no enjoyment.” A couple of paragraphs later, he writes: “What we believe ourselves to want, torments us not in proportion to its real value, but according to the estimation by which we have rated it in our own minds.” Some seasonal food for thought there!

Fish for Christmas, part 1: Pickled herring

Up at early o’clock last week for a visit to Billingsgate Market, London’s wholesale fish market located down in Poplar. The objective was to buy some fish for Christmas; in particular, we were after a salmon with which we could make gravadlax and some herrings with which we could make, well, pickled herring.

The market was as busy as ever – we’d got there by about 5am – and as is usual on a visit to Billingsgate, you do need to keep an eye out for the porters with their heavy trolleys. We were very quickly able to find ourselves some herrings, sold fresh at £5:50 for three kilos. They hadn’t been gutted but I’ve done that before so I reckoned it wouldn’t be a problem. 

Last time we made pickled herring we’d a hard job trying to find a fishmonger selling the stuff (eventually settling on a kosher place in Edgware that just happened to have some in stock), which was one of the reasons why we’d opted for Billingsgate this time – for if you can’t find the sort of fish you want there, you might as well give up. Then we looked for the salmon, coming across someone else selling herring that had already been gutted and filleted in the process! After getting the salmon (gutted, this one), we picked up a few other bits and pieces before going for breakfast.

This was in one of the market’s cafés, decorated with photos of porters in the old market in the City (where they wore those leather hats that they could balance several crates of fish on); that one closed in 1982 when the market moved to its current location in the Docklands. On previous visits to the café I’ve always been tempted by the smoked haddock and poached egg option (it is a fish market, after all) but had shied away from the £10 price on the grounds that we’ve not usually got much cash left by this point. But cash we had today, so I ordered it. So did Dad. Turns out that it’s a big piece of haddock so you really do get your money’s worth.

Back home, my big job involved gutting and filleting – first the herring, then the salmon (the latter had already been gutted, at least). I have a thin, sharp knife for this, and I have gutted and filleted herring for the purpose of pickling it for Christmas before; that said, it probably took two or three fish to get back in the hang of it. Once the fillets have been removed, they need to be gone over with a pair of tweezers to make sure the bones have all been removed. After this, the herring fillets were washed, dried and put in the fridge to anticipate the pickling process. The salmon was filleted – and after the fillets were cut up we had some to spare for the freezer as well as for the gravadlax (of which more in a later post).

We make two kinds of picked herring – garlic herring and, err, pickled herring. The first – my favourite – has the herring fillets layered in jars with a mixture made from shredded carrots, a shredded onion, tomato juice, garlic, pickling spice, a bay leaf and vegetable oil; this mixture is heated until the carrots and onions are cooked and then cooled and the bay leaf removed before being added to the jar with the herring fillets. Pickled herring is the herring fillets layered in a jar with onion slices, with the jar then being filled with the pickling liquid (water, vinegar, sugar and pickling spices) that’s been boiled and cooled.

This needs to be done about two weeks before you are due to serve it. So that’s one part of the food for Christmas done!

A few Christmas movie drinking games

’Tis the season for excess and watching Christmas movies, so why not combine the two? Here, in the spirit of the festive season, are the rules for drinking while watching some of our favourite Christmas movies...

The Love Actually drinking game

Drink when…

·       Anyone actually says the word ‘actually’

·       Anyone swears

·       The ‘Christmas is all around’ song is played

·       Some stirring music is played to signify an important moment

·       There’s a story crossover (Liam Neeson talks with Emma Thompson, etc)

·       There’s nudity

·       Laura Linney’s phone rings

·       You spot someone wearing a polo-neck/turtleneck sweater

·       Hugh Grant says or does something cringeworthy

·       Colin Firth tries to speak a foreign language

·       There is a cameo appearance, either by a celebrity starring as themselves (Michael Parkinson, etc) or by someone you’d forgotten was in this movie (Elisha Cuthbert, etc)

The Die Hard drinking game

Drink when…

·       It is mentioned that John McClane is a police officer

·       John McClane smokes

·       John McClane talks to himself

·       John McClane kills someone

·       There’s an explosion

·       You hear some Christmas music

·       You hear Beethoven’s Ninth (‘Ode to Joy’), or some incidental music based on it

·       German is spoken

·       Two characters converse via a communication device such as a walkie-talkie

·       Anyone says ‘Nakatomi’, ‘Christmas’, ‘Gennaro’ or, of course, ‘yippee-ki-yay, motherf***er’

The Muppet Christmas Carol drinking game

Drink when…

·       Gonzo narrates

·       Rizzo asks Gonzo a question

·       Any character talks about being hungry

·       You hear a bell ringing or a clock chiming

·       A new ghost appears

·       A song starts

·       Anyone says ‘Christmas’, ‘spirit’, ‘humbug’ or ‘Scrooge’

The It’s A Wonderful Life drinking game

·       Anyone says ‘Bedford Falls’, ‘Mr Potter’, ‘George Bailey’ (full name, not just ‘George’) or ‘wings’

·       Someone falls in the water

·       One character physically assaults another

·       George gives up something to help someone else

·       George’s ear is mentioned

·       George cries

·       George shouts someone’s name

·       You see the crow

·       Someone uses a 1940s phrase that isn’t used any more (or might have just been made up by the film people to get around the restrictions on blasphemous language and swearing in movies), like ‘holy mackerel’ or ‘doggone it’