Opinion

In praise of beef dripping, the flavour of childhood

We've all become slaves to 'sell-by' and freezer storage dates 
We've all become slaves to 'sell-by' and freezer storage dates  We've all become slaves to 'sell-by' and freezer storage dates 

I’ve been having a fridge-freezer clearout. You know, the ‘cook double, freeze half’ carry-on only works for the organised woman-of-the-house with a plethora of Tupperware boxes and an inexhaustible supply of freezer bags.

Also the discipline to pack and stack methodically, labelling and dating each container and rotating their placement according to recommended freezer-life. I just bung it all in at random, remember their contents and roughly how old they are. This system makes for some interesting culinary combinations when thawed. Chilli con carne on a bed of carrot and parsnip mash anyone?

We’ve all become slaves to ‘sell by’, ‘use by’ and freezer storage dates. I wouldn’t recommend one of my latest discoveries – prawns with a ‘use by’ date last March 22.

My formative years were fridge and freezer free. There was a meat safe in the backyard. Milk bottles stood up to their necks in a large saucepan of cold water on the stone flagged scullery floor beside a ‘food cabinet’ with pierced metal shelves for butter, cheese and newspaper-wrapped vegetables – and the fastest runner was despatched to the corner shop for a shillin’y block of ice-cream while the adults finished their dinner. Leftovers, (if any) were recycled into shepherd’s pie, bubble and squeak, potato-cakes or chicken soup.

Mothers shopped daily and the consume-by date of most perishables was today or tomorrow. My mother wouldn’t eat anything out of a tin except mandarin oranges and never used a stock-cube in her life. A sticky-necked bottle of gravy browning adhered to an upper shelf. Her herb and spice collection comprised exactly two – nutmeg and sage, one for semolina pudding, the other for the Christmas turkey.

Yet the mouth-watering memory of those predictable homecoming dinners remains with me. I used to push open the letterbox and inhale – Monday, shepherd’s pie, Tuesday, brown stew, the Saturday smell of vegetable soup and, blipping away creamily in the oven, rice pudding with raisins in it. Fridays were 50/50. On the one hand there was fish with chokey bones in it, compensated for by gloriously thick-cut chips cooked in beef dripping.

Beef dripping was a mysterious thing. It lived in the food cabinet in an enamel bowl, a vaguely repellent-looking substance, the drained off juices of serial Sunday roasts, but under its greasy, grey lid of solidified fat lurked a rich and tasty thick brown gunge, which, when melted, was flavoursome beyond compare. Everything fried was fried in beef dripping. I’d hang around waiting for a ‘gravy dip’ – a slice of bread dunked in the pan where steak or chops were frying. Sprinkled with salt, it was a savoury treat.

On Fridays, the entire contents of the enamel bowl were emptied into the chip-pan, where they bubbled and spat and rose dangerously high when the chip-basket was lowered in. Chips cooked, the dripping was strained and returned to its bowl to be topped with the residue of the next roast’s juices. Sunflower oil? Thin, bland-tasting stuff by comparison.

I get depressed trawling my trolley round the supermarket on my weekly shop, every aisle a confusing multiple-choice of ready made everything – soups, sauces, puddings, pastry, five varieties of gravy and vegetable cooking oils in forty shades of yellowy-green. How different are my domestic ethics from my aspirations. Guiltily I load the trolley with my mother’s gimlet eye upon me as I pay double for pre-prepared vegetables and ‘bought’ cake.

Consider my delight when recently, on a local restaurant menu, I spotted ‘beef dripping chips’. I ate them with closed eyes, cast back into eight-year-old cholesterol-laden ecstasy. Last week, the Guild of Fine Foods named Irish butcher James Whelan, Supreme Champion of the gourmet foods Great Taste Awards 2015, for his finest quality beef dripping.

You too can relive your childhood. The aforementioned product can be purchased for £6.95 (!) per pound weight pack from Harrods, London.

What price nostalgia nowadays?

A