St. John's
26 St John StreetLondonEC1M 4AY
St. John's is the first legitimately interesting restaurant I've been to in London. Located just outside the city's main meat markets, the restaurant makes no apologies for what it does. There's no artifice. No trendiness, no black clad waiters - just straightforwardly prepared meat from every part of the pig, cow, and the lamb.
If you're interested in hard to find meats particularly, St. John's is the place to come. Despite my relatively wide experience in hunting down exotic foods, I had never seen salted, dried Pig's liver, offered as an appetizer or anything else. Sadly, I was somewhat suffering the aftereffects of an unfortunate dinner the night before (on which more later), and I felt that it would have been expecting a little much of me to have a go at it, but the dried beef with celeriac I had instead was delicious. Indeed, it was probably the high point of the meal for me - the slight tinge of mustard in the celeriac, combined with the delicious beef, somewhat like an unspiced pasterma in texture and color, was really great. Combined with some surprisingly good, and obviously house made bread (there is a bakery on site), this was just the kind of thing I needed after a steady diet of trendy but bad cooking. Honest, good, plain, food.
The main course of fava beans and rabbit was disappointing only because of its excessive saltiness. I suppose a little bit of inaccuracy is to be expected with a place like this, but the stew was so salty as to be a little unpleasant. Still, the meat was well cooked, and the fava beans, just in season, were entirely delicious. More of the crusty whole wheat bread served to mop up the juices - though I would entirely skip the side dishes. The potatoes particularly are simple boiled red potatoes - not worth bothering with at a restaurant.
St. John's continues its straightforward recipe for dessert. Cherry tart, chocolate cakes, trifles, pudding - these are all stalwarts of the British palate. I ordered the first of those, and it was good - really a sort of very short cake dotted with cherries more than the pie an american might initially think of. All the rest looked good as well - not sophisticated, of course, but decent enough. Given what the rest of my restaurant experiences have been like here (so depressing I haven't even been able to write about them), St. John's is a big step up. Of course, this shouldn't be a surprise. This is Britain's indigenous food, done with skill, and some bite. St. John's quality suggests that this is the best direction for anyone interested in finding good eating in London to go.
7/23/2004
7/19/2004
Back in the depths of time, Plainsman (of the blog Southern Appeal) asked the following question in the comments section of Mr. Poon's blog - "what does a "Triscuit" have three of that a "biscuit" only has two of? ". Though at first it seems like one of those funny unanswerable riddles, there is actually a sensible answer - or at least, the beginnings of one.
What a biscuit has two of, of course, is bakings. If you happen to speak French or Italian, this is relatively obvious, though I didn't notice the connection until someone pointed it out to me in passing - bis cuit literally means "twice baked". At some point in history, people figured out that if you baked a bread like cracker twice - once at high heat for shape, and then again at extremely low heat for a long time to drive the moisture out - you got yourself a hard, extremely unpleasant, but durable food. The "hard tack" of the US Civil War, embedded indelibly in my mind by a much read copy of Rifles for Watie, was exactly this sort of creature. With the advent of preservatives and so on, the Civil War ration morphed into the sort of salted cracker we eat today - no longer necessitous of dipping in hot water to soften, but still a distant cousin of its formidable relation.
But in England, Wales, Scotland, and the rest of the United Kingdom, what we call cookies are called biscuits. As any suburban mother or gluttonous law student will know (ahem), the normal sort of cookies you make at home aren't baked twice, but once. So are the British entirely off base? I suppose the first answer from any offended British readers of mine would be to point out that Americans don't follow very sensible naming practices either - what we call a biscuit (that is to say, a sort of salty scone) has even less to do with crackers than do cookies. But second, there's a clear missing link between the hard savoury cracker and what we think of as a cookie - the subject of my brief foodly digression for today is the glorious biscotti, a sweet but rock hard cookie of considerable longevity.
There's actually no specific recipe for biscotti. All are made of flour, sugar, and some sort of fat, but aside from that, things vary considerably by taste and region. For example, I've seen recipes with heavy doses of butter, little butter but egg yolk, and neither of those but olive oil. Flavorings range from liquers to my (favorite) of high quality chocolate shavings, with some dubious innovations in between. For the more conservative among you, this recipe from Mario Batali is representative of the most sophisticated school, a far cry from the over-heavy concotions sold at many coffee shops. Regardless of recipe, though, what all biscotti have in common is a traditional baking method.
This consists of a double process very like what I describe above as to crackers. Once the dough is chosen, you first knead the ingredients briefly, and then form the delicious mess into a sort of log, or loaf. The proto cookie is then baked at relatively high heat, on a cookie sheet, until slightly risen but uncoloured. The point is to get the dessert substantively finished in the first baking - and if you're like me, much of the loaf won't survive past this point. But if you manage to keep some of it intact, you then slice the loaf into thick, half moon shapped cookies, and bake them again at low heat, until extremely dry, golden, and done. If you then put them in a relatively air tight tin, they'll last for weeks - though they're good enough to eat in the next few days anyway. I certainly have never had the problem of stale biscotti, though if you do, I've heard they make a nice addition to ice cream.
So having resolved the connection of biscuits to cookies to crackers, I'm not sure the Triscuit is baked three times. Maybe the name is a joke - or a meaningless play on words. And it's possible that the inventor meant to say that if a biscuit is dry and flavorless, a triscuit is even more so - believe it or not, Kraft's famous cracker is a product of the early 20th century's health freakery. But the Triscuit's age does suggest to me that the inventor was aware of the biscuit's double provenance, and thought to take advantage of it with a catchy name we still think kind of clever today. Not that any of this means I'm likely to make Triscuit bruschetta, but it's still good to know.
What a biscuit has two of, of course, is bakings. If you happen to speak French or Italian, this is relatively obvious, though I didn't notice the connection until someone pointed it out to me in passing - bis cuit literally means "twice baked". At some point in history, people figured out that if you baked a bread like cracker twice - once at high heat for shape, and then again at extremely low heat for a long time to drive the moisture out - you got yourself a hard, extremely unpleasant, but durable food. The "hard tack" of the US Civil War, embedded indelibly in my mind by a much read copy of Rifles for Watie, was exactly this sort of creature. With the advent of preservatives and so on, the Civil War ration morphed into the sort of salted cracker we eat today - no longer necessitous of dipping in hot water to soften, but still a distant cousin of its formidable relation.
But in England, Wales, Scotland, and the rest of the United Kingdom, what we call cookies are called biscuits. As any suburban mother or gluttonous law student will know (ahem), the normal sort of cookies you make at home aren't baked twice, but once. So are the British entirely off base? I suppose the first answer from any offended British readers of mine would be to point out that Americans don't follow very sensible naming practices either - what we call a biscuit (that is to say, a sort of salty scone) has even less to do with crackers than do cookies. But second, there's a clear missing link between the hard savoury cracker and what we think of as a cookie - the subject of my brief foodly digression for today is the glorious biscotti, a sweet but rock hard cookie of considerable longevity.
There's actually no specific recipe for biscotti. All are made of flour, sugar, and some sort of fat, but aside from that, things vary considerably by taste and region. For example, I've seen recipes with heavy doses of butter, little butter but egg yolk, and neither of those but olive oil. Flavorings range from liquers to my (favorite) of high quality chocolate shavings, with some dubious innovations in between. For the more conservative among you, this recipe from Mario Batali is representative of the most sophisticated school, a far cry from the over-heavy concotions sold at many coffee shops. Regardless of recipe, though, what all biscotti have in common is a traditional baking method.
This consists of a double process very like what I describe above as to crackers. Once the dough is chosen, you first knead the ingredients briefly, and then form the delicious mess into a sort of log, or loaf. The proto cookie is then baked at relatively high heat, on a cookie sheet, until slightly risen but uncoloured. The point is to get the dessert substantively finished in the first baking - and if you're like me, much of the loaf won't survive past this point. But if you manage to keep some of it intact, you then slice the loaf into thick, half moon shapped cookies, and bake them again at low heat, until extremely dry, golden, and done. If you then put them in a relatively air tight tin, they'll last for weeks - though they're good enough to eat in the next few days anyway. I certainly have never had the problem of stale biscotti, though if you do, I've heard they make a nice addition to ice cream.
So having resolved the connection of biscuits to cookies to crackers, I'm not sure the Triscuit is baked three times. Maybe the name is a joke - or a meaningless play on words. And it's possible that the inventor meant to say that if a biscuit is dry and flavorless, a triscuit is even more so - believe it or not, Kraft's famous cracker is a product of the early 20th century's health freakery. But the Triscuit's age does suggest to me that the inventor was aware of the biscuit's double provenance, and thought to take advantage of it with a catchy name we still think kind of clever today. Not that any of this means I'm likely to make Triscuit bruschetta, but it's still good to know.
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