CLARION CALL FOR CHRISTMAS

Christmas is round the corner and across the UK, pubs are hoping to lift the doom and gloom of the last year by injecting a dose of festive flavour into customers’ lives. The Good Pub Guide’s County Dining Pub of the Year 2008,The Hand and Trumpet near Betley, a small market town near Crewe listed in the 1086 Domesday Book, has finished drawing up its most versatile, easy on the purse strings, Christmas menu yet, with a helping hand from professional stock and gravy maker, Essential Cuisine…

Everything’s in hand
After such a bleak year, eating out at a country pub with great cask ales, roaring open fires and spades of character sounds like heaven. This Christmas, it’ll virtually be therapy.

Technically, the Hand and Trumpet in Main Road, Wrinehill, has been celebrating Christmas with punters for some 200 years now. There was, however, a blip in its colourful history, with the watering hole standing empty for years until being bought and lovingly restored to its former glory by Brunning and Price, which owns 15 pubs nationwide, in 2005.

You could say, then, this is the Hand and Trumpet’s third Christmas and, in line with its quality without pretensions philosophy, head chef Dave Edwards and his seven strong kitchen team have put together a festive menu of honest, unfussy, but really tasty, fresh food. Good local produce is relished and food is cooked simply, without cutting corners.

“Many of our chefs come from Rosetted restaurants and, although we’re part of a group, we pretty much have free reign to decide how we draw up menus and create what we feel is right,” said Dave, who has been in the industry for 20 years, most recently as head chef at Crewe Hall. “We’re about food you can cook at home, using the finest ingredients, and we’ve drawn up a Christmas menu that reflects this, whilst being that bit special.”

If you wanted traditional with a twist, for example, you could go for creamy white onion and caramelised chestnut soup, followed by roast turkey with all the trimmings and the Hand and Trumpet’s Christmas pudding with brandy butter ice cream.

Alternatively, you could opt for potted smoked salmon and trout with horseradish and chive crème fraîche, roast pork loin stuffed with apricot and lemon thyme, and iced parfait of mandarin, meringue and pistachio with passion fruit sauce. Due to demand from the ‘ladies’, Christmassy salads have also been introduced, from cured pigeon, black pudding, beetroot and bacon salad to crispy lamb, feta, date and mint salad. 

The economic downturn is part and parcel of Christmas this year, paving the way for a more flexible approach and a keener eye on pricing. “We are not a two for one, which our customers understand and love, but we know we have to keep the costs down,” said Dave.

“We’ve kept prices relatively low this year and introduced a lot more lighter options for that bit more choice. If customers don’t want to pay £9.95, for example, there are £6.95 options, something we’ve been pushing on our main menu, with a definite increase in sales.

“Quite uniquely, we’ve also introduced a two course Christmas menu for £18.95 in addition to three courses for £23.95, which gives customers that extra flexibility.

Festive flavour
Great sauces are key to finishing a Christmas menu off perfectly, according to Dave, but pub chefs dedicated to ‘completely homemade’ can find themselves in a quandary over the busy festive period, during which the Hand and Trumpet expects to serve 2,000 covers a week.

Stock can take around 18 hours to make, sauces themselves even longer to reduce down, and, like the Hand and Trumpet, many pubs have trainee chefs who simply do not yet have the skill base to consistently master the process.

The Hand and Trumpet has found the perfect compromise, which will play a part in making Christmas dishes such as its creamy white onion and caramelised chestnut soup, traditional turkey roast, breast and confit leg of guinea fowl with lentils and bacon and red wine sauce.

“To do a proper stock from scratch is extremely time consuming and, in reality, we do not have the time. As an industry, we also do not have the skills we once did, and while we are very lucky to have three great lads as trainees, many of today’s young chefs do not necessarily know how to prepare stock from scratch. They are also less keen to work anti-social hours to complete what can be a longwinded process.

“These days, you also don’t want to be leaving the stockpot on overnight, it’s not cost effective or safe. What we do then is have a 100ltr stockpot in which we roast off the bones in the usual way, add bay leaf, then add pre-prepared stock to speed up the process.”

The only pre-prepared stock Dave will use to guarantee that coveted kitchen made taste is the range from Essential Cuisine, expert producer of stocks, glace, jus and gravy for the professional chef. “This Christmas, we’ll mostly use Vegetable, Turkey and Beef,” said Dave.

“The main reason we use them is that they incorporate extra, intense flavour into our sauces, and give them a lovely, homely feel, particularly in our gravy.”

Being a special occasion, Dave will also be using Essential Cuisine’s Glace range to add extra class to Christmas dishes; Beef Glace in the braised beef bourguignon, Game Glace in steak and venison and mushroom pudding, and Lobster Glace in the sauted prawn salad.

Available in 600g jars at around £17, Essential Cuisine’s Glaces are rich, meaty and can be used as a stock reduction for casseroles and hearty stews; a little goes a long, long way. They add a wow factor to Christmas dishes, whether you use them in a sauce or as a glaze.

“When you are a chef, you can judge whether something’s good or not and these are fantastic products that enhance what you are doing,” said Dave. “They are the best of their kind on the market and I would personally recommend them.”

The Hand and Trumpet, which seats 150, has six starters, seven mains and seven puddings, as well as coffee and mince pies, on its Christmas lunch and dinner menu, which runs from Monday, November 30 to Thursday, December 24 alongside the usual blackboard menu.


05/11/2009|