Gamekeeper's Menu at the Parkers Arms

August the 12th is the Glorious Twelfth. It marks the first day on which grouse can be shot in the UK (unless the 12th is a Sunday, in which case the season starts on the Monday). The Glorious Twelfth is important in the game calendar as grouse are the first of the game birds to come into season, and so it marks the start of the shooting season for feathered game (partridge follow on 1st September and pheasant and woodcock on 1st October).

There had been reports that the 2013 season for grouse was going to be a good one and I had been following carefully the tweets of Stosie Madi, chef-patron of the Parkers Arms at Newton in Bowland as she prepared a menu highlighting local grouse, and then driving over to collect the birds from the gamekeeper of a prestigious local estate, and then finally preparing the birds, including some strangely beautiful photographs of the birds' stomach contents. No, really, just look:

Inside the gullet of a grouse pic 1 red currants a plenty how beautiful is that pic.twitter.com/jH9BoM9ork
— Stosie Madi (@parkersarms) August 13, 2013

The Gamekeeper's menu is a 5-course set menu made up of canapés, game and onion soup, a whole roast grouse with all the trimmings, dessert and petits fours.  All this costs just £30, which I wouldn't be at all surprised to pay elsewhere just for the grouse.

My canapés were some lovely, light, puffy potato fritters with an amazingly good homemade mayonnaise with (I think) a light hint of garlic.

Canapés: potato fritters

The first course was an onion soup. Not really a French onion soup, and not really an English onion soup, but, as it was made with a rich venison stock, definitely on-message for a Gamekeeper's Menu.  As it was a hot summery day, I was worried about a French onion soup being a bit heavy and a bit too cockle-warming.  It wasn't.

Local estate-shot venison and English onion soup with Dewlay Lancashire cheese toastie

I'm really not at all sure how what should be the heartiest of French bistro dishes could have been made such a light starter!

As good as everything else was, the highlight was always going to be the grouse.  A whole roast grouse comes on a lazy susan, accompanied by (going clockwise in the picture below) some ever-so delicate game chips, a finger bowl (you are going to get stuck into the bird with your fingers...), a superb celeriac purée, a big bunch of peppery watercress, pickled blackberries and a blackberry-damson cheese, terrific gravy and a little croute topped with the bird's heart and liver (and a rasher of bacon that really didn't need to be there.

Grouse and all the trimmings

Grouse liver & heart on crispy bacon and a croute.
(Apologies for quality of photo: the camera was fooled by the white pots)

Some traditionalists might bemoan the absence of bread sauce, but really I didn't miss it. Maybe it could be useful with older birds as the season progresses? But this was only the 14th August, with young birds, not hung at all.
The grouse had been roasted with some butter under the skin, butter flavoured with heather and herbs foraged on the self same moors on which the grouse had lived. The grouse had (of course) been perfectly cooked, was tender and had a great flavour: there was none of the bitterness to the legs that is often found (and why the legs are often left uneaten, or slow cooked separately).  It really was worth digging around the carcase to extract the last bits of delicious flesh.

After a little rest (and further hand washing, as there's only so much grouse juices you can remove in a smallish finger bowl), it was time for the custard tart made with local eggs from Slaidburn.

Slaidburn egg custard tart

Custard tart at the Parkers Arms usually takes the form of the Portuguese pasteis de nata. Lovely softly set creamy custard.  On the side is a quenelle of crème Chantilly with an elderflower confit/marmalade.

Finally, there were some little petits fours, in this case a couple of small cubes of the Parkers Arms signature dessert, Wet Nelly (a sort of cross between treacle tart and mince pie, with a wider variety of fruit).

Wet Nelly petits fours

The Wet Nelly is always jolly good, but I thought that these showed that it works better as a slice of tart, rather a small cube.

I remember thinking that if this was a Gamekeeper's Menu, there must be a lot of extremely well fed gamekeepers out there; and equally that there are probably a lot of gamekeepers who'd like to have eaten as well as I just had.

The Olde Spot Bistro, Higham, near Burnley

The Olde Spot Bistro

If you open a farm shop, or virtual any rural business, these days you need to have a café.  When Roaming Roosters opened, they didn't mess around. They opened the Olde Spot Bistro, which is without doubt one of the busiest restaurants I've seen in a long time.  Vast numbers are attracted by a no-nonsense menu of local produce, cooked in a straightforward, almost homely manner, but above all - and this is what is particularly notable - cooked with genuine feeling and no little skill.

Roaming Roosters is primarily a butchers, with chickens and pigs reared on-site: if you go to the toilets, at the end of the corridor a (locked) door provides a viewing platform on to the next generation of roast chicken and bacon.

Chicks not yet ready to go outside

As it's owned by livestock farmers, the menu is consequently meat heavy, but with a coy "don't tell the boys next door" fish section and a couple of token vegetarian dishes. The style tends to the homely and familiar, with a bit of a hint of the sort of dishes you last saw at a 1980s dinner party, but none of this is in a bad way.

Our starters included a really rather good prawn cocktail. Prawn cocktail has made something of a comeback in recent years, but generally in an ironic or deconstructed mode. Here it's unashamedly un-deconstructed, and in a large portion, complete with hunks of good bread. My only criticism would be the use of pre-pack butter portions, which (however many of them you're given) always look mean and are a waste of packaging - both things which really seem to be out of synch with the way Roaming Roosters and the Olde Spot Bistro operate. Odd.

Prawn cocktail

Garlic mushrooms are mushrooms baked in a cream sauce, heavily laden with garlic, and Sykes Fell cheese (a Lancashire-style cheese made with sheep's milk).  This is serious comfort food and, at the same time, not for the faint-hearted.

Creamy garlic mushrooms

A special of spicy prawns with garlic and chilli was a bit clunky, and wasn't the king prawns we had for some reason assumed it would be. Nothing a competent cook couldn't knock up themselves at home, but very tasty, and it's worth noting the prawns had by no means ended up being overcooked.

spicy prawns

For me, the star of the main courses is the burger, which to my mind is without doubt the best burger I've yet come across in Lancashire.  The beef patty itself is good meat and stays nice and juicy whether you order it rare or medium: it's also notably well-seasoned.  The burger is topped with a good mature cheddar, the excellent Roaming Roosters bacon (quite simply the best bacon I'm sure I've yet come across) and French fried onions, all in a good bap.  Good chips, some very good tomato relish and a bit of good salad round it all off.  I'm not sure why they bother with the silly squiggle of balsamic glaze though.

Terrific burger

No problem getting a properly rare burger here

A rib eye steak was a little thin for my tastes, but that's a factor of the size of the original beast and cutting the steaks to a price point. It was, however, very good steak (as you'd expect having a butcher's attached) and cooked exactly as requested.

Rib eye steak

A third main of belly pork was pretty good, but unmemorable enough that not even the photograph can really help fill in the details.

Belly pork, fried I think. Looks like a tomato or red pepper sauce?

There is a brief dessert section on the main menu, but this is supplemented with lots of special desserts on the blackboard.  Desserts are very much in comfort food mode too: large, filling, calorific and traditional.  The star for me is the really terrific jam roly poly pudding: excellent roly pudding, lots of jam and it all comes in a lake of custard. Satisfied-sigh-inducing stuff.

Jam roly poly

Sherry trifle too was spot on, very traditional and just a little sinful.

Trifle

Bread and butter pudding with a whisky glaze was unfortunately on the heavy side of bread and butter puddings, and we thought the whisky glaze was lost, probably in the re-heating process.  It would be best to give it another quick brush with the glaze while it's on the pass: that wouldn't really cost much and would give customers that little gosh-I-can-actually-taste-the-whisky feeling.

Bread & butter pudding with a whisky glaze

Sticky toffee pudding was an exception that didn't thrill.  The actual pudding element was just too big a portion in relation to sauce, and in any event wasn't the best we've tasted by far. The sauce had been over-reduced and had set on the plate meaning it wasn't really sauce any longer, just some semi-set butterscotch.  (The chef, Karl Reader has since been in touch to say that my photograph isn't their sticky toffee pudding, but is in fact a steamed treacle sponge pudding and syrup.  Well, that would explain why it didn't seem such a good sticky toffee, though I think my comment about the size of the piece of pudding in relation to sauce can still stand.  Presumably another diner was thinking their treacle pudding tasted more like sticky toffee?)

Sticky toffee pudding Steamed treacle sponge pudding

Fortunately a strawberry shortcake at a more recent, summertime meal, was jolly good, though - to be hyper-critical - it would have done it no harm had the cream been whipped a tiny bit less and maybe sweetened slightly.

Strawberry shortcake

I always enjoy The Olde Spot Bistro. It does not pretend to be anything it's not and does what it does very well indeed.  I believe it's still not a year old (my first visit was in November 2012), but is incredibly popular.  Both kitchen and front of house perform very well and very efficiently, allowing tables to be turned rapidly and repeatedly to help reduce queueing: I don't think I've ever seen anywhere that has such an amazing throughput of customers. Though you never feel rushed.

A Parkers Arms miscellany

I probably go to the Parkers Arms in the tiny Ribble Valley village of Newton-in-Bowland more than I go to any other local pub or restaurant.  The beer's good, the welcome and service are good (though occasionally struggle when under pressure on the busiest days).  But above all, the food is genuinely and consistently interesting and excellent.

I could fill this blog with reports of meals at the Parkers Arms (follow me on Twitter for blow by blow details in the future), but I thought for once, I'd just present a photograph gallery of images from recent meals in 2013.  Everything at the Parkers Arms is homemade (the only exception I can think of is the bacon and gammon which come from the excellent Roaming Roosters near Burnley), so rather than me repeating that in the caption to each photograph, please assume it.

I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as I enjoyed eating the dishes!

Starters

Game terrine with piccallili

Pastrami with  treacle bread

Stosie has now got her pastrami spot on, and as for that bread ... well that's almost worth the trip on its own.

The treacle bread

Cheese scone with tomatoes

 On this occasion, I'd asked for a small tasting menu, and this cheese scone was the first course out: not something I'd have ordered, but it was jolly good - a very light scone with a nice cheesy flavour

Beautiful buttery squid

Mushroom parfait

Curd cheese with grilled white peaches

Cured salmon with horseradish cream

Wild garlic custard with chicken scratchings

Main courses

Prawns and vegetables grilled on Stosie's new toy, a Primo BBQ.

 

Squid with extra hammy petits pois à la française

 

Lamb kofte - beautifully and delicately spiced, excellent hummus, tzatziki and baba ghanoush in the little pots

 

Beautiful, simple spring lamb

Spicy BBQ baby back ribs. Fab French fried onions too.

Grouse done properly

The grouse liver, kidney and heart

Desserts

 

Stosie's curd cheese with a variety of gooseberry preparations

Raspberry-vanilla slice

 

The pasteis de nata (Portuguese custard tarts) are a must if they're on the menu

Wobble factor!

Blood orange rice pudding

Tarte fine aux pommes

Grape tart

 

Pistachio turkish delight and marshmallow

A postscript: don't just take my word for how wonderful the Parkers Arms is. Here's Jay Rayner's review, published in the Observer on 22nd June 2014, in which he absolutely "gets it": http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jun/22/parkers-arms-lancashire-restaurant-review-jay-rayner

Product Recommendation: The Cumbrian Pig Company

There are two things you see too much of at farmers' markets in the north west: cupcakes and sausages.

Sausages have long been one of the things that butchers and other meat processors make to use up non-prime cuts that in the last 50 years or so have become much more difficult to sell. So it was naturally with the rise of farmers' markets and direct selling by farms that sausages would be one of the key products. They're also ideal for markets as they are both easy to hand out cooked and sliced to attract customers to your stall, and they make a pretty good impulse purchase. You might think twice about buying a large pork joint, but everybody has room in their fridge and stomach for sausages? They're like the sweeties supermarkets put by the tills.

The odd thing is that there are a lot of farms that seem to sell far more sausages than prime cuts. What happens to all the prime cuts?

The Cumbrian Pig Company is one that seems to deal mainly in sausages. But the difference is that these are extremely good sausages. Unlike many others, I've yet to come across any gristle or other nasty bits in their sausages, and their recipes are notably superior to most other producers I've tried: they always seem to me like tried and tested recipes, rather than some other producers, whose sausages "flavours" often seem to taste like something they knocked up the night before, hoping for the best, but able to rely on there being enough impulse buyers not to need to worry about how they taste. Some of the flavours are also rather interesting too. Whoever comes up with the recipes for Cumbrian Pig's sausages actually has a very good palate.

They have a range of varieties which they told me they rotate. I first came across Cumbrian Pig at the Cartmel Food Market (third Friday of the month) earlier this year, and so far there has been a different range each time I've come across them.

My most recent purchase was some Pork & Five Fruit Marmalade sausages. They were nicely, but not over-seasoned, with a good meaty texture and a very interesting flavour from the marmalade, which gave a nice agrodolce touch.

In the past I've Pork & Red Onion Marmalade, Pork & Damson, Pork and Rhubarb, and some others. Unlike some butchers who shall remain nameless, who have dozens of varieties which all taste them same (ok, yes, I'm talking about Cowman's in Clitheroe), all the Cumbrian Pig sausages I've had have been completely identifiably different.

Most recently, they also had some cured pork belly for sale. These were thick slices (not streaky bacon) which I just roasted as they were: bacon with crackling on! They would have made a good pancetta too.

See their website www.cumbrianpig.com for contact details and where to buy.

I have no connection with them, and this post is made out of admiration of the product, not for gain.