A plate of pie'n'mash

Potted shrimps, jellied eels and rib-sticking pie'n'mash – Duncan JD Smith is your guide to the no frills but oh so good historic eateries of London

Pie'n'mash and liquor sauce at Manze's on Tower Bridge Road

These days Britain’s national dish is no longer roast beef and nor is it fish and chips. It is Chicken Tikka Masala, a dry and spicy Indian dish with added sauce to satisfy the nation’s craving for gravy. It’s a good illustration of the way in which Britain has absorbed and adapted external influences since the days of empire and is available at Veeraswamy, Britain’s first Indian restaurant established in 1926 at 99 Regent Street (W1).

That’s not to say that roasts and fried fish have disappeared from London’s culinary map. Far from it. Simpson’s Tavern at 38 Ball Court (EC3), London’s first chophouse, has been serving pies and roasts since 1757, whilst Rules at 35 Maiden Lane (WC2) has specialised in game since opening in 1798. Meanwhile since 1889, Sweetings at 39 Queen Victoria Street (EC4) has been bracketing its fresh fish lunches with the likes of potted shrimps and Spotted Dick pudding. Modest by comparison is the Regency Café at 17–19 Regency Street (SW1), which has provided the best full English breakfasts since 1946, and the family-run Golden Hind at 73 Marylebone Lane (W1), which has been serving excellent fish and chips since 1914.

Two delicacies unique to London are pie’n’mash and eels. Steeped in Cockney culture these honest, no-frills dishes have been enjoyed since the mid-1800s and are still available in more than 80 eel and pie shops around the capital. One of the best – and certainly the oldest – is M. Manze at 87 Tower Bridge Road (SE1). It is considered important enough to warrant its very own Blue Plaque, which is displayed inside the shop rather than being fixed to the wall outside because of the building’s Grade 2 listed status.

A no frills pie shop menu.

Established in 1892 and taken over in 1902 by the Italian Manze family, the premises and the recipes remain exactly as they were a century ago. Behind the old-fashioned façade and green awning there is a single dining room lined neatly with green and white tiles. To one side a row of booths contain dark wooden benches and marble-top tables, where customers can enjoy their food sitting down. Those with less time queue at the take-away counter and enjoy this most original of fast foods outside. Either way the product is the same: a traditional beef pie with mashed potatoes served with a topping of parsley sauce, known as liquor. A splash of vinegar with a side helping of jellied or stewed eels completes the experience. For devotees of the dish there is the Pie & Mash Club, which meets regularly at different restaurants and grades them accordingly.

Manze's: little changed over the decades

Those in need of a stroll after eating should head north from Manze’s to 11 Bermondsey Square (SE1), where the shadowy 11th-century remains of Bermondsey Abbey can be seen beneath a glass floor in the Del’Aziz restaurant. Around the corner at the junction of Mandela Way and Page’s Walk is a decommissioned Soviet T-34 tank placed here in 1995 by local property developer Russell Gray after his plans to develop the site were refused by Southwark Council!

M. Manze at 87 Tower Bridge Road, Mon 11am–2pm, Tue–Thu 10.30am–2pm, Fri 10am–2.30pm, Sat 10am–2.45pm

Getting there: Jubilee, Northern lines to London Bridge, then bus or walk down Bermondsey Street

This article is adapted from Duncan JD Smith’s book Only in London: A Guide to Unique Locations, Hidden Corners and Unusual Objects published by The Urban Explorer. Existing titles in the “Only In” series cover Berlin, Budapest, Cologne, Hamburg, Munich, Paris, Prague, Vienna and Zurich, with Edinburgh in preparation. Find out more at onlyinguides.com and duncanjdsmith.com.

Venison Steak Rub

In the fourth issue of Ernest Journal, 7th Rise founder Thom Hunt and butcher Frank Linn are your guides to primal butchery of an entire deer carcass, including this delicious meat rub recipe for venison steaks. Get rubbing, folks.

Photo: Oliver Berry

Ingredients

1oz ground black pepper
1oz cayenne pepper
1oz paprika
1/2 tbsp brown sugar
1/2 tbsp granulated sugar
1 tbsp dried thyme
1 tbsp garlic powder
1/2 tbsp juniper berries
1/2 tbsp ground coffee 

This rub is enough for 2.5 kilos of meat and needs grinding in a pestle and mortar before rubbing onto your steaks. Also superb with beef.

You can read the full guide to primal butchery of a deer carcass, plus wild rabbit and wood pigeon in the fourth issue of Ernest Journal, on sale now.

Wild cocktail foraging with reyka vodka

Guy Lochhead ventures into the Lothians with Fergus the Forager and Reyka Vodka to gather meadowsweet, pine needles and seaweed for a wild twist on vodka cocktails.

Foraged seaweed pickled in cider vinegar, lemon juice and spices

“Edinburgh has it all,” explains our guide, Fergus the Forager. "From sea-sprayed hardy coastal plants to the lowland grassland of Holyrood Park via the shady nooks of the dark Georgian terraces of Newtown, you can make a cocktail just from ingredients sourced on Arthur’s Seat," he says, "but we were going to sample from further afield, too."

As we drive down Queen Street, he hands round bunches of urban weeds we can pick in the alleys we pass through, such as feverfew, a daisy-like flower with the power to knock out coffee withdrawal symptoms; yarrow, full of tannins to stem bleeding; pineapple weed, with aromatic buds of chamomile and apple; versatile burdock, used as coffee in Japan. We take bites out of the bouquets handed to us and I can feel a thrill of excited connectedness among my fellow urbanites – most of them bartenders, usually asleep this early in the morning. I look out of the window and the weeds shine like green jewels.

Our first stop is Longniddry Bents, a long grey beach peppered with tank traps. The tide is out. As we walk to the sea, Fergus points out all the resources available to us here. Sprawling seabuckthorn covers the roadside. The berries are dense with nutrients, the leaves full of protein. This was Pegasus’ favourite food, and is still used as feed for animals. We collect a few leaves and berries in our baskets and move on to admire some hogweed. The mature seeds make a great spice, commonly used in Iran. Fergus digs around in his rucksack and pulls out some syrups he's made from the stem and seeds - a burnt caramel and orange flavour, but somehow not either. Foraging offers flavours we don’t have names for.

An easy way to identify hogweed is by its unpleasant smell, which Fergus likened to a urinal

Our passage to the sea takes us past willowherb (...subtle…), sea sandwort (cucumber-like succulents), mayweed (sea-scented and delicate), until we arrive at the seaweed. This is what we've come for. Fergus explains how overlooked our marine bounty is – although Britain’s coastline is the same length as Japan’s, we don’t have nearly as much of a culture around our seaweed. It can be deep-fried, pickled and dehydrated, and is full of nutrients, which it draws from the seawater. Unfortunately, this same mechanism means it’s very good at concentrating pollutants, so you should check the cleanliness of the beach you are taking from.

Beginning at the tidemark, we sample different species as we move towards the water. First, spiral wrack, like ghosts of grapes draped over the rocks at high tide. It breaks down in the sun, so use the moister under-layers. Knotted wrack looks like discarded green lawyers’ wigs. It has a 12 year lifespan and is the favourite food of limpets. Channelled wrack, folded into little grooves, with smart highlights at the ends of its fronds. These are all green seaweeds. Bladderwrack is a brown macro-algae with an amazing reproductive cycle involving “bladders” full of gametes.

Fergus gleefully produces a tupperware full of deep-fried sex organs for us to try. Some decline. He also has sugar kelp, which he’s prepared as sweet shards of natural stained glass, a beautiful deep green when held up to the light. Our final species to gather is rhisocloamine – a dense, felty sponge of lighter green. Powdered and melted into butter, it’s delicious with seafood. We wash our harvest in seawater and return to the coach.

Light snack, anyone? Sugar kelp can grow up to five meters long

As we head to our next site, Fergus tells me how he’d found preparing for this trip more challenging than normal. Away from his home of Canterbury, he didn’t know what plants to expect to find or what state they would be in. He describes how he' only recently learned to switch off from seeing nature as a pool of resources and just enjoy walking for walking’s sake, but it requires real effort. He talks about sustainability and how short-sighted it is to consider foraging middle-class. He says he got bored of foraging for restaurants because chefs only wanted wood sorrel and tended to just use wild foods as exotic garnishes. He's recently got into lacto-fermentation and historical recipes.

We arrive at Roslin Glen, a gnarled wooded gorge spilling down from a ruined castle and its historic chapel. Fergus leads us down the slope, skidding through the pines. We pause for a moment to admire these versatile trees. We can use their needles as a tea, in syrup, or to smoke things with; pollen from their catkins is apparently androgenic; and we can use their resin to produce retsina from bad white wine. There are Douglas Firs around us too, which have smaller, more aromatic needles. The blisters on their bark contains delicious sap. We eat supermarket sandwiches and pass around a pine pollen tincture before continuing down.

In the gorge, we're treated to herb bennett roots, beech leaf noyaux, medicinal meadowsweet, candelabras of sweet cicily, golden wild raspberries, birch sap, daisy petals, japanese rosehips, and white clover heads. The bartenders scatter among the undergrowth, harvesting cocktail ingredients for later. We gather again to smoke some mugwort – “sailor’s tobacco” - before climbing back up to the coach.

Who's for a puff of mugwort?

Our final stop is a yurt containing a full cocktail bar and a staggering range of syrups that Fergus has made - japanese knotweed, willow leaf, hawthorn blossom and green fig. The bartenders make elaborate drinks with these and their own found ingredients while Fergus prepares a meal for us all. He asks me to cut radishes to look like fly agarics for the salad and tells me about eating badger (90% tasty, 10% soil and worms). We drink some of the wild cocktails and heat a pan for the seaweed. He tells everyone to stand back before casting them into the oil, which erupts into a column of flames. Fished out and dried on kitchen paper, they taste like perfectly seasoned crispy cabbage, but with more depth of flavour. We try each species in turn, acknowledging their subtle differences.

While Fergus prepares sea bass and bhajis, I ask him if he has a garden at home. He’s started growing squashes, including some from 800 year-old seeds - gete-okosomin, which translates as “really cool old squash”. He has a greenhouse and the plants grow monstrously around a bench in one corner. Everyone agrees that the fish is delicious. Fergus seems pleased. He warms himself by the fire and tells me what swan tastes like.

Back in the centre of Edinburgh, I notice pineapple weed growing on some scrubland by the pavement. I pick a couple of buds and chew them on my way home, looking at my feet and the fertile cracks between the paving slabs. I'm in the city but now I can leave at any time.

Northern Hemisphere

Get your foraging basket out and give this zingy vodka cocktail a whirl this Christmas...

40 ml Reyka
20 ml willow leaf tea syrup
15 ml green fig syrup
20 ml lemon juice
7 ml Benedictine
Orange zest garnish

Reyka is a vodka hand-crafted in Iceland, using Arctic spring water filtered through a 4,000 year old lava field. 40%ABV.

 

Words by contributing editor Guy Lochhead

The Ernest Smoothie

We noticed our friends at Offgrid Clothing blog a lot about smoothies. We asked them to create a smoothie fit for Ernest and the curious and adventurous – a concoction to keep the brain focused and body primed for spontaneous revelry...

Photos: Offgrid Clothing

Why do we at Offgrid love smoothies so much? The health benefits have to be at the top of the list of reasons. They can improve the body’s immune system, increase energy, improve digestion and boost brain capability to get through tough and demanding days. Plus, they are quick and easy to prepare – so there is no excuse for not getting your recommended daily intake of fruit and veg. Plus it's fun to create new concoctions - just see yourself as a sort of modern day alchemist!

Slow adventurers and curious minds were the inspiration behind our Ernest Smoothie – something full of energy with a bit of a creative twist on the usual ingredients you find in many recipes. It is delicious. Get blending and perhaps try out some variations of your own.

Ingredients (quantities can vary to your own personal taste)

Raspberries (approx 100g)
Baby spinach (large handful)
Banana (1 ripe banana - frozen works best)
Nut milk (approx 300ml)
Cacao nibs (1 tbsp)
Chia seeds (1 tbsp)
Cashew nuts (1tbsp)
Maca powder (1 tsp)
Cinnamon (1/2 tsp)
Honey (2 tsp)

Blend all the ingredients together until smooth. 

The health benefits of an Ernest Smoothie

We wanted to make a smoothie packed with enough energy to keep people going through their adventures. Each of the ingredients have quite a list of health benefits in their own right, but they were chosen mostly for their energy punch and keeping the blood sugar levels constant.  

Raspberries are a source of vitamin C (good to ward off colds at this time of the year) and are one of the fruits that don’t send the body into a post-sugar crash due to the fact they don’t spike the blood sugar. 

Baby spinach leaves have a remarkable ability to help restore energy levels. Popeye can vouch for that! This green leafy marvel of a food is packed with so many healthy attributes, it’s hard to list them all.

Bananas pack an energy punch and help sustain blood sugar levels.  Your adventure partner will certainly appreciate the fact that they improve mood and reduce stress as they are also a good source of one of the amino acids tryptophan, which the body converts to serotonin – the happy hormone. 

Cacao nibs - chocolate without any of the guilt, who wouldn’t say yes to that!  Cacao nibs also contain theobromine which is a stimulant similar to caffeine.  

Chia seeds are an unprocessed whole-grain food that are a huge source of slow-burning fuel for our bodies.  They're rich in plant based Omega-3 fatty acids - reported to have 8 times more Omega-3 than salmon!

Maca powder, as with most superfoods, it boasts plenty of health benefits.  Maca powder is known for its energising properties and the ability to balance hormone levels. It also heightens the body’s 'feel-good' factor endorphins.   

Cinnamon, not only deemed to regulate the bodies blood sugar levels, it has been reported that even just smelling cinnamon actually enhances cognitive processing (good news for all out there that may not be fans of the taste), and consuming it significantly increases brain function.  

Honey, or “liquid gold” as some call it, due to its nutritional and medicinal properties that have been used for centuries. That aside, it is a notable source of all-natural energy with the unprocessed sugars delivering a quick energy boost.

This is a sponsored blog post, created in collaboration with Offgrid Clothing. Read more about Offgrid in the Ernest Journal directory.

Mining for gold in the Arctic

Every August, Marielle Amelie Lind Hansen and her family venture onto the marshes of northern Norway, in search of an elusive golden berry 

Photo: Marielle Amelie Lind Hansen

Andøy, Norway. It’s the first week of August and the behaviour of the locals has changed dramatically. It is cloudberry season, and the hunt is on for this small, elusive berry known as the gold of northern Scandinavia. The season lasts for just one week before they all disappear.

Almost impossible to cultivate, cloudberries can be found growing wild in wet, acidic soil in Arctic and subarctic regions. These hardy berries, which are related to raspberriesm have 10 times more vitamin C than blueberries. They are also packed with vitamins A and E, iron and Omega 3 and 6.

This extremely short harvest, called ‘the cloudberry year’, is such an important event in the local calendar that people bunk off work, mark large areas of bogland with signs telling you where can and can’t forage and spin yarns to trick others into thinking there are no berries left. I’ve heard stories of old ladies staying up into the wee hours to sneak into the fields for their share of the glut, while landowners patrol their bounty with binoculars from the roadside. It’s also a time for celebration – a festival of socialising, gossiping and telling tall tales about the number of berries you’ve found.

In an average harvest, you might end up with around 7kg. My grandmother used to harvest nearly 30kg and would create a vast array of recipes from her yield, from cloudberry liquor to cloudberry cake. Whenever I think of her, I see her surrounded by orange fruit...

Anatomy of a cloudberry

Habitat
Grows in moist, acidic soil in bogs and marshes across north Scandinavia, north America, north Russia and, very rarely, in the moorlands of Britain. 

Leaves
Green, round-lobed, tooth-edged leaves on straight, branchless stalks. 

Fruit
The drupelets of fruit start pale red then turn a yellow-amber in early autumn.The sweet, tart flavour is perfect in jams, tarts and liquers. 

Medicinal uses
Historically used to cure fever and dysentery. In the 17th century, seamen ate cloudberry jam on voyages to prevent scurvy. 
 

This is an extract from Mariell Amélie Lind Hansen's article in print issue 4 of Ernest Journal, on sale now. To read more about her annual family foraging trips in the marshes of Andøy, Norway, order issue 4 below.

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