A pot to lacquer pork with - recipe

Published Oct 1, 2014

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Cape Town - You may be wondering, somewhat covetously I hope, about the copper pot in the picture below.

It would cost a small fortune to buy in Cape Town, which is the only reason I don’t have an entire fleet of them in my kitchen. Apart from two old beaten copper pans that serve as wall decorations in a humble bid to give my rather ordinary city kitchen a soupcon of elan, if one can indeed have a soupcon of elan without being thought pretentious, I have until recently had no usable copper pot.

This one was bought for me by my daughter during a visit to the south of France, where she picked it up for a measly e5. Gobsmacking.

But we have a culture where anything that’s deemed sought-after in the kitchen department gets slapped with a whopper of a price tag. I reckon we’d have to fork out seven or eight hundred smackers for this little heavy-bottomed gal. Yet my daughter was able to buy it for less than the price of a bottle of cheap plonk in Cape Town.

It’s just perfectly put together, this gorgeous French pot. Deep yet slim, stylish yet practical, like a Parisian mademoiselle-about-town dipping in and out of fashion boutiques before meeting a friend for coffee and macarons. No problem, that, for a Parisian. They don’t put on weight. Like so many Londoners across the channel, life in the capital keeps you on your feet as you whip here and there during your working day.

We’re too office-bound, we are. We need to get out there, break away from the desk, and meet downtown or uptown, nor just across the road from where we work, as is our habit. Look at Londoners, they’ll think nothing of getting two tubes at lunch time to meet a friend for lunch and do the same routine to get back.

There’s quite a lot of French in my kitchen, come to think of it. The five orange saucepans, in declining sizes, aren’t newfangled ones but 1960s Le Creuset, the ones with wooden handles. I was very lucky to have been given them while we lived in the UK. More recently the kindness of family and friends has added to the range an ivory tagine, an orange utensils jar and salt and pepper cellars, and a fiery red rectangular skillet.

Add to all this my ancient iron frying pan and sundry lovely oldies, I’m happy to have a bit of depth to my kitchenware rather than splurge on everything that’s hot, steely and curvaceous.

But a copper pot that I could use daily was a missing essential, and I was chuffed to be given it. It warranted being used for something special, so this week I decided to try my hand at a lacquer, which is a dark, syrupy glaze that comes from Asian cooking. A lacquer can be used for a game bird such as quail or pheasant, for duck breast, for pork belly or, in this case, shoulder of pork.

The way I see it, a lacquer needs pretty much all the essentials of a good Asian mix of flavours, the sweetness, the tanginess, something a little sour, saltiness and heat. Most lacquers have garlic in them but the trick, I think, is to leave the garlic cloves whole, as the lacquer must be silky and smooth.

Frankly, with this recipe I was winging it (okay okay, Daisy, I always wing it). By OMG did it work. How delicious was this? We were all oohing and aahing, with the home chef feeling well buttered up with all the compliments.

Here’s what I did.

 

Lacquered pork shoulder, ribs or belly

50ml soy sauce

2 Tbs veldblom honey

2 Tbs Van der Hum liqueur

1 Tbs cider vinegar

2 cloves garlic, whole

1 tsp finely ground ginger

1 tsp fivespice

Grinding of black pepper

Into a heavy-bottomed pot, whether or not it’s copper, pour 50ml soy sauce (I used dark roasted), 2 Tbs veldblom (fynbos) honey or similar, 2 Tbs Van der Hum liqueur, 1 Tbs cider vinegar (red wine vinegar or other will do), and add 2 whole garlic cloves, 1 tsp ground ginger, 1 tsp Chinese fivespice, and a fine grinding of black pepper.

Bring to a gentle simmer on a low heat and simmer, stirring often, for about five minutes for the flavours to meld and the lacquer to thicken a little and become beautifully syrupy. Use this to glaze strips of pork belly, pork chops or a larger joint of pork shoulder, as I did. Very rewarding, and aptly so for a very lucky dad.

Weekend Argus

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