Aaaaaand we’re back! We just missed Hurricane Irene in the Bahamas and are now coming to you from London, in a whirlwind of crappy airline seats, leaky rented ceilings, increasingly fecked-off emails to [insert demon estate agent of choice here] and wonderful, wonderful Ocado delivery guys.
London means eating all those things not around in Nassau… which means that this week we have mostly been eating sausages. Sausages on their own, sausage sandwiches, pasta with sausages and peas… Delicious, yes, but not very blog-worthy really.
Mum to the rescue then, with a kitchen packed to the gills with goodies, including a pound of perfect purple damsons, practically bursting with juices and just waiting to be set free. I should make it perfectly clear that, had my mum not fed me copious quantities of damson crumble at the weekend*, I would not have in a million years contemplated doing anything remotely as controversial as a savoury damson dish. But since both my tastebuds and thighs have been indelibly stained with the effects of that perfect pud, I decided to experiment. Get me.
So, consulting The Oracle (his Nigelness’s Tender Volume II) on damsons, two sauces were cited, one with sloe gin for gammon, and one with ginger and star anise for duck. Both sounded amazing, but it’s a bank holiday and I had no intention of battling shoppers intent on discounted sweatshop items. In went, then, what I had on hand: a slug of water, a larger slug of Barolo (the rest of the bottle to be used in an upcoming brasato with polenta this week), a couple of tablespoons of dark muscovado sugar and a couple of dark sherry vinegar, a fresh bay leaf, salt and pepper. The result was a blindingly fuchsia and sharply sweet sauce, eaten just warm with some baked gammon. A bit English, a bit Piemontese and wholly yummy.
*in a pudding double bill, no less, with Hugh Fearnley-Whitingstall’s elderflower panna cotta with gooseberry compote. Mr. R&R was in sugar heaven.
Gammon with a sauce of damsons and Barolo
Serves 3-4
Ingredients
- 1.2kg gammon – mine was unsmoked
- 1 onion
- 1 carrot
- 1 stick celery
- 2 bay leaves
- 350g damsons
- 2 tbsps dark muscovado sugar (to taste)
- 2 tbsps dark sherry vinegar (or red wine vinegar, to taste)
- 1/2 glass Barolo (or other fruity red wine)
- A handful fresh white breadcrumbs
- 4 tbsps interesting jam (I used fig, but redcurrant jelly or quince jam would be lovely too, and what about cherry or indeed damson?)
- 2 tbsps English mustard
Instructions
- Put the gammon in a large saucepan, cover with cold water and bring to the boil. Meanwhile, roughly peel and chop the onion, carrot and celery.
- Drain the joint and cover again with cold water, adding the chopped vegetables, a bay leaf and a few peppercorns. Bring to the boil and simmer gently for 55mins per kg plus 30 mins. Turn off the heat and leave in the cooking liquid until ready to glaze.
- An hour-ish before you want to eat, preheat the oven to 180˚C. Meanwhile make the damson sauce: wash the damsons in a colander, removing stems and leaves. Place in a medium saucepan with the wine, sugar, a good grinding of salt and pepper, the other bay leaf and a splash of water. Heat until simmering nicely for 10 minutes, until all the skins have burst. Now add the vinegar and continue to cook for 5 minutes. Sieve to remove the stones. Continue to heat for about another 5 minutes until it thickens slightly (you control the consistency, pourable or jammily spoonable, by how much you reduce it down). Taste carefully (it’ll be very, very hot) and add more vinegar or sugar as you judge necessary. Set aside.
- In a small bowl, mix together the breadcrumbs, mustard and jam. Remove the gammon from its cooking liquid (which you should keep, see below) and place in a roasting tin. Peel away the thick skin but leave the fat. Smear the breadcrumby jam all over and roast for 30 minutes until browning. Rest for a few minutes before carving into thick slices and serving with the warm damson sauce on the side. The crunchy crust will probably come away from the pork, but think of it a bit like the Christmas stuffing.
Leftovers
- Use the cooking liquid for the gammon to make a divine pea soup, with scraps of the gammon itself stirred into it
- Leftover damson sauce would be yummy with cold roast meats, chicken, duck, turkey orap pork, and I reckon could be portioned out and frozen very successfully for future post-Sunday roasts. If reduced down to a jam, it would be ace in sandwiches.
- Another idea might be to add it to a tagine-type dish, in lieu of dried fruits such as apricots or dates. A Moroccan sort of lamb stew perhaps, with some of the damson sauce stirred in to make it richly sweet and tart?
Preparation time: 3 hour(s)
Cooking time: 2 hour(s)
Number of servings (yield): 4
3 Comments on "Gammon with a sauce of damsons and Barolo"
The wife and I were shuffling around various food stalls and restos in London last Sunday and I kept seeing “Damsons” on the menu. I stayed silent but finally gave away my ignorance by asking, “What the hell are Damsons!?” She replied to me, “Plums.”
Moments like that – and now reading this blog post, when I wondered “What the hell is gammon?” – make me realize that my English-English food vocab is really, really tiny.
Anyway, I’ll have to substitute French ingredients and try this baby out!
You know, I was thinking to myself, “Shall I put in translations and/or wikipedia links to British terms” and then I thought, well where will it end? I’ll drive myself crazy with all the possible permutations and translations and before you know it I’ll be spelling flavour without the “u” and they’ll be knocking on the door to take away my passport.
Anyway, here’s another vocab lesson and variation rolled into one: those lovely mirabelle plums that are around in France now? They’re called greengages over here and would make a delish sauce too, I should have thought (as well as a stonking crumble, obviously)
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