EATING FOR BRITAIN: CLOTTED CREAM & PASTIES IN CORNWALL.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have written entries for The Guardian’s Word of Mouth Blog supporting the attempts of Glasgow and Birmingham to gain PDO status for the Chicken Tikka Masala and the Balti respectively.

Inevitably, this being The Guardian, I received plenty of comments both in support and telling me not to be so bleeding stupid. I could certainly sympathise with the latter group, but think that in the end their slightly pooterish argument that these two dishes are just imports from the sub-continent that we have fannied around with fails to take into account the fact that without immigration we would not have had so many of our national dishes including Lancashire Hot Pot, Kippers and of course, Fish & Chips.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of that debate, I am sure there can be little doubt from about the claims to protected status of the two dishes I went in search of this week, both in Cornwall and both, quite frankly, bloody delicious.

On Wednesday, I found my way to Scorrier a short distance from Redruth and the home of the big name in Clotted Cream, Rodda's. The large plant still stands on the site of the original farm and many of the old buildings remain in place as indeed does the ownership of the Rodda family.

I met with Philip Rodda, who is a grandson of Fanny, the woman who first started cooking cream in glass jars to preserve it so it could be sold further afield than just the surrounding villages. It kept well in the jars, but did not form a crust, so, over the years, the family tweaked the system so it could be cooked in the plastic containers in which it is now sold, which allowed for the formation of that glorious yellow topping.

There is not much to see in the factory, which is much like many of the other facilities I have visited, but Philip explained that, although they now get through more than 200,000 litres of milk a week, the cream is still made in exactly the same batch method as it always has been, which is simply to separate the cream from the milk and then to bake it gently until the crust forms before allowing to cool.

This tradition and attention to detail is probably why it has remained so popular, not just with the likes of you and me but also with the late Queen Mother who used to have it delivered to Clarence House every week when she was in residence.

Well, the proof of the cream is in the eating and Philip explained the Cornish way of eating it. His own preference is to have it on a ‘split” a bread roll which is dolloped with cream and then drizzled with syrup to make a “Thunder & Lightning” or on a scone where the cream MUST go one after the jam unlike the way the heathens in Devon serve it. Me? I just like it straight out of the pot with a spoon.

Rodda’s Clotted Cream is easily one of the greatest tastes I have encountered in the whole of the UK

If Rodda’s cream is made a large facility, then Chough’s Award winning Cornish Pasties could not have a more humble home. Close to the harbour in Padstein, sorry, Padstow The Chough Bakery has been around for well over twenty-five years but has only been making pasties for about seventeen of those. Robert Ead and his wife began to sell them in competition to the mass produced efforts on sale in the rest of the town.

The recipe comes from Robert’s mother and, although they have had to change it a little to deal with the demands of making thousands a week, they are still made by hand fresh every day less than ten feet from the sales counter in the shop.

The recipe for a proper Cornish Pastie is a simple one. Shortcrust pastry surrounding a mix of beef, potatoes and turnip, seasoned with salt and pepper. Given this simplicity, you would imagine that it is not too hard to make a good pastie but, as Robert explained too may bakers use the humble status of the pastie to use poor ingredients including something rather unpleasant called “pastie meat” which involves bits I would rather not contemplate.

At Chough’s on the other hand, they only use prime ingredients. Chunks of lean skirt steak, from Cornish cattle, of course, freshly peeled and chopped potatoes and turnips, plenty of salt and both black and white pepper, hand mixed shortcrust pastry and their own special ingredient, a blob of the Rodda’s clotted cream I had seen being made the day before.

The real skill comes in the crimping of the pastry, which in the days of the tin mining industry allowed workers to eat the filling and discard the crust of twisted dough which was left on the mining floor for the “knockers” the fairies that people believed inhabited the mines and guided the miners to the rich veins of tin with their knocking.

After being brushed with a wash of whole egg, the pasties are baked for forty minutes and allowed to cool a little before they are served up as fast as Robert and his small team can make them.

Like so many “peasant” dishes the end result is hearty and delicious. The pepper makes sure the filling is never bland and the pastry breaks to allow a gloriously meaty steam to escape from the insides. Perfect with a good slug of HP sauce or English mustard.

If you want to try for yourself, they run an efficient online mail order service where you can of course buy pasties but also an entire Cornish cream tea by post which includes, you guessed it, Rodda's clotted cream. www.thechoughbakery.co.uk

Two more dishes ticked off my EATING FOR BRITAIN list and I don’t think even some of the readers of The Guardian could argue with their inclusion.

MARGOT’S: WE ARE FAMILY
What is the most difficult restaurant in the UK to secure a table for supper?

The Ivy? Nah, Easy Peasy.

J Sheekey? Nope. Easy Peasy Lemon Squeasy.

The Wolesley? You kidding? Easy Peasy, Lemon Squeasy, Hands and Kneesy, One two Threesey.

The correct answer is of course, Margot’s Padstow. To quote Chef Patron, Adrian Oliver “ if my own mum came in and asked for a table tonight, I couldn’t fit her in” quite right too.

Now, this may have something to do with the fact that the place only has 22 covers but it has more to do with the fact that Margot’s is really rather good and people come back again and again and he is, consequently, packed to the gunwhales every night.

I know that, if it were in my neck of the woods, I would make Adrian even more sick of me than he became over our three night stay in Padstow. It is just my kind of place. Which probably explains why we ended up having two meals there on this visit.

I once wrote something nice about it on one of the food boards and a well known restaurant reviewer e-mailed me and asked if it was really any good or if I was just being kind. My response was that I would have been kind anyway, but fortunately I didn’t have to be as it really was very good.

Three years later, nothing has changed.

Our first Margot’s meal saw Dos Hermanos given the chance to play wicked Uncle Ernie to the two unsuspecting offspring of my chum Nick and his wife, Ann who had joined us for the long weekend. There are few things more enjoyable in life than telling a young innocent that the food in front of them is made from dead dog and the tears of crushed fairies and Nick’s two daughters provided suitable sparring partners for the evening’s entertainment when, that is, they could be prised away from their Nintendo’s.

We were really quite full already by the time we arrived having already grazed on ice cream, pasties and some Fish & Chips from Stein’s Shop on the harbour which turned out to be much better than expected. On top of which, a few glasses of fizz at BinTwo or base camp as it became known, were accompanied by the inevitable large bowl of porkie goodness in scratching form.

Despite that, walking into Margot’s and getting a big old waft of Duck Confit roasting is enough to heave one’s appetite back up to suitable levels and we were all soon bib in collar and knife & fork at the ready.

The joy of Adrian’s food is its simplicity. The food is not about him, it is about the ingredients. Mackerel is so fresh that little is done to it save a flash under the grill and a drizzle of herb butter. Goats cheese is grilled so it is crunchy on the outside and liquid in the middle, mussels come in a sauce of coriander and ginger which compliments rather than swamps. Lamb chops come pink as they should and, heaven forfend, taste of lamb. Best of all, the duck confit which is braised in its own fat until it is falling off the bone and then roasted to give the required crunch. It was three years since I last tried Margot’s version. My memory did not lead me astray. It really is the stuff of dreams.

But, as in all things, such simplicity takes skill and restraint. It is about the ingredients not about the chef. It is about letting the customer taste the food not guess how long the chef spent in catering college.

Adrian’s menu changes little and this gives him the confidence in his ingredients to let them speak for themselves. None of this is to suggest that he does not have any skills in the kitchen just that, like the man himself, Adrian’s food is unassuming and eager to please without showing off.

For many, the desserts at Margot’s, made by Claire, are the main event although there is a tendency to over cooking the Sticky toffee pudding so it can be a little dry. Not so this time and two portions of that and a chocolate parfait disappeared as quickly as they arrived.

Tea and Coffee came with some decent petits and some even better caramelised walnuts and brought the bill to about £165 for the four adults and two Gameboy addicts.

Good value by anyone’s reckoning.

Margot’s is not perfect, of course. Adrian seems pathologically incapable of passing the napkin test. He dismisses my idea of offering an “ all day breakfast” out of hand and Claire’s Muscat jellies are a tad on the misshapen side. But, these are small things and only slightly muted our enjoyment of an otherwise fine meal.

So fine, in fact, that when Adrian and David from BinTwo suggested Margot’s could be used as a venue for a full on family style lunch the next day, we all leapt at the chance to return and reconvened on Sunday with our BYOB, a crab tart prepared by David’s own hands, enough children to put on a performance of “ Lord of The Flies” and more food than you could shake a maypole at.

I can seldom recollect such a fun lunch as plates of mackerel, cod and smoked duck swapped hands for salads, the sweetest of scallops and a few delicious bottles of Vino Collapso. The adults talked amongst themselves, the children did likewise. Me, the perpetual man child, I just talked out loud to no one in particular. It’s better that way.

A quick stagger over to BinTwo for one more goodbye over a jug of Pimm’s in the afternoon sun provided the perfect full stop to a splendid weekend and we left Adrian and David to get on with their real lives as we went to watch the sister marriers prepare for Mayday while trying hard not to think of The Whicker Man.

I am pretty sure it wont be three years until I am back there having some more of Adrian’s Duck Confit. That is, of course, if I can get a table.