Hello, welcome to Sunday Sauce, a weekly recipe newsletter designed to inspire your Sundays in the kitchen. This week’s newsletter contains a recipe for slow-roasted leg of pork with creamed corn.
With a Nebraskan for a mother, we ate a fair bit of sweetcorn as kids. To this day Christmas lunch is not Christmas lunch without the presence of my grandma’s scalloped corn, a powerful, insanely rich casserole of sweetcorn and cheese and cream and eggs that has no place on a festive table but whose absence would cause something approaching a mutiny in our family. A good late summer tea would, in my memory at least, always involve heavily buttered sweetcorn, an improvement on the enjoyable but undeniably faffy globe artichoke that preceded it early in the summer.
Woody Allen’s aphorism about sex and pizza can not be applied to sweetcorn. When it is bad, or badly deployed (on a pizza, for example), it is very bad. Very very bad, as someone might say. I’d rather eat an Ohioan cat. At its peak, though, and cooked with a little care and attention, it’s truly up there with the best in-season vegetables - your asparagus, your rhubarb, your jersey royals and whatnot. My personal apex remains an ear of grilled corn dredged through smoked garlic butter and eaten while watching Dodgy perform at the Isle of Wight Garlic Farm Festival 12-or-so years ago. That something could taste that good while enduring music that bad is a testament to its true perfection.
The corn is now popping out of the garden and seems to have benefitted from a wet spring and a half-decent summer. There is a lot of it, and most of the ears are fully loaded, where some summers bring the disappointment of peeling away husk after husk to find largely kernel-free corncobs. Sad. Very very sad.
We had friends coming for a late lunch on Sunday, which is always fun when it finally arrives but you do tend to spend the day wondering how to fill the hours. I’m allergic to brunch so that wasn’t an option. In the morning I’d popped a leg of pork in a low oven with fistfuls of herbs and shallots and garlic and set off for a run, mostly to justify the big lunch that would follow. I ended up running along scratchy bridleways and through muddy fields, arriving hot and bothered at Fountains Abbey where we met other friends for a coffee and a wander.
We faffed and fannied and dilly-dallied, by which I mean the kids did while we tried to generate some forward momentum. The abbey is admittedly a very fun place for kids to tear about attempting to do real damage to themselves, so we were torn between letting them get on with it and wanting to have a proper walk. At one point we stood halfway down the valley to the east of the abbey, watching them clamber Blytonishly over the consequences of Henry VIII’s excessive libido, saying how lovely it was, none of us quite wanting to be the snowflake parent who suggested that maybe that bit was quite high and maybe they shouldn’t be so far up there? Which eventually we did and it was and they shouldn’t have been.
We dragged them down the valley along the River Skell for half a mile or so, before turning back in the direction of the car park. We were deep in conversation about mid-life crises and taramasalata, for some reason. Then we turned around and all five children had disappeared. Still in faux-relaxed parent mode we shrugged and continued, assuming they’d catch us up. Some minutes later, from deep in the woods, high up the escarpment to our right, we heard children’s voices. Pondering the steep cliff face directly in front of us we reached the conclusion that someone ought to go and do something. As the only person not strapped to a baby or leading a dog, I was nominated, and climbed up the muddy incline to the top, where I found the three boys mastering gender stereotypes by playing soldiers and walloping each other with sticks. The girls had, in turn, decided this was a bit much and retraced their steps to the safety of the footpath.
By the time we got home I found to my deepest dismay that the pork had had a fair bit longer in the oven than was optimal, and I busied myself making a braising liquor in which it could gently bathe, and then turned my attention to the creamed corn.
And the creamed corn is so incredibly good that you could honestly serve it with old boots and people won’t notice.
The recipe is based on - if not fully faithful to - Sean Brock’s in his excellent book Heritage
.
Leg of pork with creamed corn
Serves 6
for the pork
1.5kg rolled leg of pork
salt
12 shallots
a head of garlic, cloves separated
big bunches of thyme, rosemary, bay and sage
a little olive oil
200ml white wine or cider, plus another 100ml
500ml pork or chicken stock
for the creamed corn
8 ears of sweetcorn
olive oil
salt
4 shallots, peeled and sliced
4 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced
400ml double cream
a bunch of thyme
white (or black) pepper
salt the pork generously all over and leave, ideally overnight but an hour is better than nothing.
rinse off any excess salt and pre-heat the oven to 140C. Boil the kettle and pour the boiling water over the shallots. Leave for a few minutes before peeling. Put the shallots, garlic cloves and herbs in a roasting pan and toss in the oil along with a pinch of salt. Sit the pork on top and pour in the wine. Cover tightly with baking parchment, then tin foil, and bake for 2-3 hours until tender.
meanwhile, make the creamed corn. Remove the husks from the ears, then one at a time hold a sweetcorn cob vertically in a bowl and cut off the kernels as if you were winnowing kebab meat from a döner machine. This is far more straightforward than it may sound.
heat a good slosh of olive oil in a large saucepan over a high heat and add about half of the kernels and a good pinch of salt. Fry hard until lightly caramelised, then remove and set aside. Add a little more oil and gently fry the shallots and garlic until soft, maybe 10 minutes, then add the other half of the sweetcorn and the cream. Bring to a gentle simmer and cook for another 10 minutes until the corn is tender. Blend thoroughly then pass through a sieve back into the saucepan, along with the pre-fried corn and the thyme. Simmer gently for 20 minutes. Check for seasoning and add salt and some pepper. Remove the thyme. The creamed corn can keep warm until needed, or be reheated as and when.
when immaculate and not at all overcooked, remove the pork from the oven to rest. When cool enough to handle, carefully remove the skin and lay it flat on a baking tray. Season with a little more salt and put in the oven. Turn it up to 180C and leave it there to tick over until well crackled - 30 minutes should do it.
meanwhile, discard the herbs, then remove the shallots and garlic from the roasting tray to join the pork wherever it’s resting, and put the roasting tray over a medium heat. Add the remaining white wine or cider and scrape up all the good bits stuck to the bottom. Add the stock and bring to a boil. Simmer away while you get everything else lined up to serve.
slice the pork and serve with a chunk of crackling, a large spoonful of creamed corn, a couple of shallots and garlic cloves, and the gravy. We had cavolo nero and some beetroot on the side. You may have whatever you want.
"Mid-life crises and taramasalata." A title for a culinary memoir if ever there was one.