Suet crust? There's a blast from the past. Suet, the dense fat that surrounds beef kidneys, is out of favour. In most households these days it gets an outing, at best, once a year in the Christmas pudding. Assorted calorie counters and health boffins who adhere to the dietary orthodoxy that saturated fat is the antichrist, maintain that suet should be avoided like the plague.
Well, watch this space; the whole saturated fat thesis is shakier than we are led to believe. Dissenting doctors and nutritionists are popping up left, right and centre, and even butter (hurrah!) is being rehabilitated as a fat with several health benefits.
From a cook's point of view, suet is desirable because of its high melting point, which produces a multitude of air holes. In the right hands, it makes a light, smooth pastry.
My mother-in-law, a woman too wise to jump on any faddy nutritional bandwagon, has stuck to her lifetime habit of making steak and kidney pudding with a suet crust, a dish that is a rarity in this day and age, but one that is eaten up enthusiastically by everyone who gets to taste it. She is a torchbearer for culinary tradition, but encouragingly, reinforcements are at hand. A younger generation of cooks is rediscovering the delights of suet.
When we visited Jekyll's, the restaurant in the Queen's Hotel at Bridge of Allan, chef Paul McNeil had venison suet pudding on the menu. We had to try it, not just for suet pastry's scarcity value, but also because it shows originality and freshness of thought to serve it in a non-traditional pairing with venison.
Nor did it disappoint. The pastry was marbled on the outside, agreeably crumbly within and gooey where it came into contact with the meat, a tender stew, interestingly, and successfully flavoured with fresh sage.
Although the individual pudding was ample in its own right, it came with a generous serving of pink venison fillet, caramelised shallots and a quenelle of pumpkin purée with a surprisingly concentrated flavour.
My main course of ballotine of rabbit, where moist fillets were rolled with a gently orange-scented forcemeat, green with herbs, rolled in thin cured ham then roasted, was also refreshingly different. I love it when chefs have the guts to kick the farmed salmon and chicken supreme off the menu to make way for an edgier, less ubiquitous protein.
The rabbit came with absolutely wonderful Savoy cabbage cooked with cream and bacon in the style of that estimable south-west of France chef, Pierre Koffman, along with an opulent potato mousseline, made all the better - let's really annoy the health police here - by the addition of generous amounts of butter and cream.
One starter worked - a limpid ham broth with pearl barley, root vegetables and a slippery ravioli filled with smoked ham hock. Serving this likeable soup in an ugly bowl more suited to a motorway café did it no favours, however.
The other starter, wild mushrooms and artichoke heart given the à la Grèque' treatment (that's cooked in a sort of hot vinaigrette with wine and/or water) was let down by an over-poached duck egg too firm to ooze, its eye-wateringly vinegary fumes, and the dominatrix presence of wholegrain mustard, a condiment that needs used with the utmost restraint.
Desserts came up trumps. An apple and calvados bread and butter pudding didn't really shout out either apples, or Calvados, but it was golden, puffy and quivering within, pretty nice, in fact, with asubtle cinnamon ice-cream and warm crème Anglaise.
The pistachios in the chocolate and pistachio mousse seemed to have gone AWOL, and the promised cappuccino foam didn't materialise, but the dark chocolate mousse itself was well-made.
The Queen's Hotel itself is a handsome old building with pleasing proportions. It has been done up in a thoroughly modern manner, with lots of grey slate, black walls, and dark wood with the odd bit of rivetted copper, a tribute to the village's now spent copper mine. Well done the owners for stripping the place of every last vestige of parochial hotel dowdiness.
Two matters puzzle me about Jekyll's, however. Why is the wine list so limited, and how can such a demonstrably capable chef serve up such despicable bread? £
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