Dried mushrooms add dense flavour to stocks and stews. Many kinds can be easily bought - porcini from Italy, wood or cloud ear mushrooms from China and so on. It is actually very easy to dry your own. Since mushrooms are things which I readily keep in the house in case a gang descends, drying my own has become something that I do with the surplus which sometimes arises. Slice them, lay them out on a baking tray and put it into an over at 50 degrees C (I am lucky to have an oven which goes down to this low temperature.). This usually takes about 12 hours, but I check them from about ten hours onwards. Let them cool and you can either then store them in a jar, or grind them up to add to a stew or broth.
Drinking straws are hollow straws used for taking drink. Wonderful flubbery bubbly sounds can be made as you reach the bottom of the glass.
Drumkain is a rinded Scottish hard cheese produced completely by hand on the family farm, using raw milk from three selected herds of Ayrshire cows. Produced under modern hygienic conditions, the traditional cheese making methods bring out the unique flavour and texture particular to this style of cheese.
The drumstick bean is a green, bean-like fruit of the horseradish tree which really looks like a drumstick, being a long stick-like pod. The pod is a delicacy used in fish stews or mixed vegeetable dishes. Both pods and leaves are relished. The flavour of the pods has been compared with peppery asparagus and they have the texture of marrow. The outer pod is not edible and the beans only when young.
A method applied to meat which involves wrapping it in muslin and then hanging it. This allows the enzymes in the meat to break down the fibres, increasing the tenderness. It also loses moisture, which intensifies the flavour. It results in dark coloured meat with yellow fat and great flavour.
A name for Warner's King, a variety of yellowish green cooking apple known since the late 18th Century and which cooks to a sharp purée. It is first recorded as 'King apple' but was renamed when it was sent by a Mr Warner to Thomas Rivers. It received the Royal Horticultural Society Award of Garden Merit in 1993. This late-season variety is harvested from late September in South-East England and is at is best from then until December.
The Dublin Bay prawn, Norway lobster or langoustine is like a small, elongated lobsters, pale pink when cooked, with long, narrow claws and a delicious flavour. The tail meat, with the shell removed, is known as scampi in the UK. In fact, scampi now are more likely to be reconstituted other fish, but the Italian scampo is the tail of the Dublin Bay prawn and this is what scampi should be. But there are so many other delicious ways to serve these succulent, sweet shell fish it seems a pity just to dunk the tails in breadcrumbs and fry them.
