Lincolnshire Lunch

You may (or may not) remember from a post here in April that I met up with a fellow blogger when I visited New Zealand.  Well today, Debbie, and her husband, Ian, came to lunch with us here in Lincolnshire.  It was lovely to see them both again and only sad that they didn't have time to stay longer and that I forgot to get my camera out.  We had a great catch up and chat - Debbie's been to the quilt exhibition at the V&A museum while they've been in England and she dropped some tantalising titbits about what there was to see and the good advice to get the headset guide when I go in June.  We fed them with some real Lincolnshire delicacies:  pork pie, stuffed chine, haslet, Lincolnshire Poacher cheese and Lincolnshire Plum loaf.  The cheese (eaten with the plum loaf) and the pork pie were particular hits!  If you'd like to try the chine or haslet, here are some recipes:

Lincolnshire Haslet
Serves 6-8
675g (1½lb) Lean Minced Pork
110g (4oz) Slightly Stale Bread
1 Medium Onion, finely minced
Caul Fat
Pinch Ground Dried Sage
Salt and Pepper

Pre-heat oven to 170°C: 325°F: Gas 3.
Soak the bread in water for 30-45 minutes.
Squeeze bread, removing as much water as possible.
Mix with the minced pork, add the sage and season to taste.
Mould into a loaf shape, wrap with the caul.
Place on a baking tray.
Bake for 60 minutes.

Stuffed Chine

This superb Lincolnshire dish of salt pork filled with herbs is known as stuffed chine. Verlaine, in the mid-1870s, spent a year as a schoolmaster just north of Boston. He liked chine so much that he tried to find it elsewhere in England, but without success. Verlaine's chine was stuffed with leeks, spring onions, lettuce, raspberry leaves, parsley, thyme and marjoram. Nowadays parsley suffices, but you will need a great deal.

 

Ingredients

Serves: 6-8

1 Chine of pork
large bunch Fresh parsley

Method

Take a careful look at your piece of meat. One side will be bordered with fat, the other will show the backbone. Turn the fat towards you, the bone away, with the lean side uppermost. Leaving a border of meat, make a deep slash from fat to bone (not to the edge of the joint but to the fat at the edges, leaving a pocket for the stuffing). You will not go through, as there is the unseen barrier of the vertebrae wings of bone.

Repeat, make five slashes in all. Turn over and do the same the other side. Soak the meat for 24 hours.

Meanwhile prepare an enormous chopping of parsley, and other greenery if you like. Use a processor, but do not reduce to a soup. A moist hash is easier to stuff than a coarsely chopped dry pile of parsley. Cram as much as you can into the slashes.

Tie the chine tightly into a cloth. Put into a pan, cover with cold water, and simmer for four hours. Change the water as it becomes salty. Cool in the water for two or three hours, remove, drain and press under a weight, with the meat still in its cloth.

To serve, unwrap the chine, and slice it form the fat end, parallel to the fat. The slices tend to fall apart, but reassemble them on the plate. In Lincolnshire you eat stuffed chine with vinegar.