It’s winter here in Gisborne, an hour’s drive north-west of Melbourne at the foot of Mount Macedon. Typically we get a few relatively mild frosts over winter and there are usually several light falls of snow on the mountain every year. Although the winters here are nowhere near as cold as in the UK, because of my cultural background as the temperatures drop my thoughts still turn to traditional comfort food.
Most years I’ll make at least one batch of faggots. A faggot is a meatball made with minced pig’s liver, breadcrumbs and suet and flavoured with sage. I like a nice faggot – especially with onion gravy, mushy peas and either mashed or roast potatoes. Faggots aren’t part of traditional Australian culinary culture and I’ve never seen them for sale here in supermarkets or restaurants. But with my British upbringing I’m strongly in favour of faggots.
Originally peasant fare made with the cheapest ingredients, faggots have recently attracted the attention of some of the UK’s top chefs. I came across an interesting recipe on the BBC recipe database by Antony Worrall Thompson for Faggots with onion gravy which includes pig’s liver, belly pork, and pig’s heart with mace, chives and sage served with a delicious-sounding gravy made with roasted red onion wedges and red wine.
What a far cry from the Brain’s faggots we used to get for a weekday dinner as kids growing up in the late sixties/early seventies on the Gower near Swansea. In those days Brain’s faggots were bought frozen from the supermarket in aluminium foil trays ready to be heated up in the oven. They’re still a favourite in the UK according to reviews and blogs but now they’re called Mr Brain’s faggots.
According to allbritishfood.com faggots were once also known as 'poor man's goose' or 'savoury duck' and the word faggot is a corruption of fegato, the Italian for liver. See Wikipedia for more information on the etymology of the word faggot.
I am lucky enough to own a copy of Mrs Beeton’s Household Management, the ‘new’ edition, published fifty years after the original. Her recipe for faggots follows:
1½ lb of pig’s liver
½ a lb of fat pork
2 eggs
1 large onion
Pig’s caul
Nutmeg
Sage
Thyme
Basil
Salt & pepper
Chop the liver and onion rather finely and cut the pork into small dice. Put all together in a stewpan, add salt, pepper, sage, thyme, and basil to taste, cover loosely, and cook slowly for about ½ an hour, but it must not be allowed to brown. Drain off the fat, let the preparation cool slightly, then beat and add the eggs, nutmeg to taste, and sufficient breadcrumbs to form a fairly stiff mixture. Mix thoroughly, then form into squares and enclose each one in a piece of caul. Place them in a baking-tin, add a little good gravy and bake until nicely browned. Serve with good gravy. If preferred the mixture may be pressed into a well-greased baking tin, cover with caul, and cut into squares when cooked. Time - 1½ hours. Sufficient for 7 or 8 persons.
| Pig’s caul or caul fat is a lacy translucent layer of fat which surrounds the intestines of cows, sheep and pigs. It is used for making sausages, pâtés, terrines and faggots so that they hold their shape when cooked. Interestingly, given the similarity between the English word faggot and the Italian fegato already mentioned, there is a traditional Italian dish called Fegateli di maiale allo spiedo which is made with pig’s liver wrapped in caul fat. This recipe is from Italianmade.com: 4 pork livers
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| Clean the liver, remove skin and cut into 1 oz pieces. Place the caul fat in water for about one hour so that it will soften. Then cut into rectangles 5 x 3 inches. Wrap each piece of liver in the caul fat with a bay leaf. Bring the olive oil to high heat and fry the livers so they become browned on all sides. Remove from pan and serve immediately. |
There are similarities also between the faggot and the Scottish haggis. This traditional haggis recipe is from Scottishrecipes:
1 sheep's stomach bag
1 sheep's pluck - liver, lungs and heart
3 onions
250g beef suet
150g oatmeal
salt & black pepper
a pinch of cayenne
150mls of stock/gravy
Clean the stomach bag thoroughly and soak overnight. In the morning turn it inside out. Wash the pluck and boil for 1½ hours, ensuring the windpipe hangs over the pot allowing drainage of the impurities. Mince the heart and lungs and grate half the liver. Chop up the onions and suet. Warm the oatmeal in the oven. Mix all the above together and season with the salt and pepper. Then add the cayenne. Pour over enough boiled water over the pluck to make the mixture watery. Fill the bag with the mixture until it's half full. Press out the air and sew the bag up. Boil for 3 hours (you may need to prick the bag with a wee needle if it looks like blowing up!) without the lid on. Serve with neeps and tatties [mashed turnips or swede and potatoes].
This recipe corresponds with Mrs Beeton’s recipe for haggis. She refers to the sheep’s stomach bag as the ‘paunch’, includes nutmeg rather than cayenne in the mix, together with lemon juice. She also suggests adding stock or gravy to the mixture in the bag rather than water. She too reminds the reader to take ‘care that sufficient space is left for the oatmeal to swell: if the paunch be over-full, there is the possibility of its bursting’.
The Scottishrecipes website also includes an ‘easy’ Haggis recipe:
2 lamb kidneys
350g lamb shoulder
125g beef suet
250g beef liver
1 cup oatmeal
1 cup stock (reserved from boiling the meat)
2 pureed onions
salt & pepper
Boil the meat for about an hour and allow to cool. Then chop the meats into wee pieces but grate the liver. Toast the oatmeal in the oven in a shallow dish and shake occasionally. Mix all the ingredients together. Pop into a well greased glass bowl and cover with several layers of foil and steam in a pan of boiling water for two hours. Serve with neeps and tatties.
Nostalgia and the desire for something warm and tasty to eat on a chilly day still makes me hanker after the traditional and simple Welsh recipe for faggots I found in a little book called Favourite Welsh Recipes:
1 lb (500g) pig’s liver
2 medium onions
3 oz (85g) shredded suet
4 oz (115g) fresh breadcrumbs
1 teaspoon fresh or ½ teaspoon dried sage
Salt and pepper
½ pint beef stock
Set oven to 350° F (180° C) or Mark 4. Make the breadcrumbs in a food processor and set aside. Process the liver and onions. Mix in the bowl with the breadcrumbs and stir in the suet, sage and seasoning to taste. Form the mixture into 12 balls and place in a well greased, shallow ovenproof dish. Pour the stock into the dish. Cover with foil and bake for around 30 minutes then remove the foil and cover for a further 10 minutes or so until the faggots are browned. Remove the faggots from the dish and keep warm. Use any stock that remains (and the scrapings from the dish) to make the gravy.
I used lamb’s liver for a recent batch with considerable success. I have some concern about the conditions pigs are kept in and, while my local supermarket has recently started to stock delicious Otway free range pork and bacon, they haven’t got free range pig’s liver yet. Like Mrs Beeton I also added a beaten egg to ensure the mix held together. I used homemade chicken stock instead of beef because that’s what I had in the freezer. This is actually a very quick dish to prepare especially if, rather than forming the mix into meatballs, you press it into a greased loaf tin and make a meat loaf.
