I have always been struck when reading old cookbooks by how often they roast joints of meat to be eaten cold. I don’t think people do this much any more. Maybe it is just me: if I fancy some cold meat, I generally buy it from the supermarket at an astonishing mark-up, as I suspect do many others. As for leftovers, I don’t really have any: we buy roughly the amount we need for the Sunday roast, and we tend to eat it all.
The big roast dinner or lunch is very important to our food culture. It feels very British, and it is often the first major meal that many of us learn to cook. I can remember being in awe, as a child, of how my mother managed to have everything ready at the same time, and I wondered if I would ever be able to do the same.
For many of us, the Sunday roast is the only meal that the whole family sits down to eat together, so it is important for reasons beyond food. And after all, what is Christmas dinner but a glorified Sunday roast?
Recently, I found myself hankering after a lighter dish of cold cuts to enjoy during the week, only as I say we’d efficiently finished up our Sunday roast on Sunday. I went to my local farmers’ market, The Goods Shed in Canterbury, which only stocks meat of really high quality from local farmers. (I realise I am lucky to have such an amazing place nearby, but weekly farmers’ markets are now widespread across the UK, and most of them seem to be trading still despite the Covid-19 lockdown.)
I bought a lovely piece of pork loin with a good, thick layer of fat. I roasted the joint for lunch (there’s a recipe for this in The Sportsman cookbook). This time, I had deliberately chosen a piece of meat that was too big for us to eat in one go, so there was a lot left. Once it had completely cooled, I wrapped it in foil and stored it in the fridge. When I took it out a couple of days later, I was really struck by how easy it was to cut into thin slices. I covered a large plate with a single layer of these, then set to work.
My cold cuts idea had been nagging at me for a while: my first notion was to try to make a porky version of vitello tonnato, a classic Italian dish that pairs cold veal with a tuna mayonnaise. It may seem like a strange combination, but it’s utterly delicious; I reasoned that cold veal and cold pork weren’t a million miles apart, so surely it was worth a punt.
I have to report that it didn’t really work. It may be that I just wasn’t in the mood; maybe it is a dish for summer, or perhaps you have to be taken by surprise and of course, being the one who had devised and executed the dish, I wasn’t.
At least the cold pork was lovely. Because of the fat, it needed a good pinch of salt, but it was so good that I began to feel that my cold cuts journey wouldn’t be in vain. Then, a brainwave from my partner, Emma, who suggested I serve it with a parsley, red onion and caper salad, like the one we used to serve at the pub with some just-grilled ox tongue.
This winter salad is similar to the one St John restaurant in Smithfield serves with its legendary bone marrow starter. I first ate this more than 20 years ago, and it really took me by surprise then; two decades later, it still sings.
A happy coincidence occurred when I went out into the garden and saw that the healthiest thing growing was parsley. Here we are in the depths of winter, and the parsley is a beautiful dark green, growing profusely and showing no signs of distress because of the cold. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I cut the parsley quite roughly, and used it as I would salad leaves in the summertime: I put it into a bowl with some red onion (briefly pickled in red wine vinegar) and salted capers. A little dressing of olive oil and lemon gave me the perfect winter salad to strew over my lovely thin slices of cold pork.
With a little persistence, I had come up with the dish I’d been craving for so long. It may seem counter-intuitive to suggest cold food in bitter February, but it’s definitely worth over-catering your Sunday roast a little, so you’re left with some cold meat with which to try out this recipe.
And anyway, who says salads are just for summer?
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