Fried bread

"Not to be confused with fry bread." Wikipedia

I sat for a while at my desk trying to think of something to write about but gave up and went away to read my next book group book - my chosen book - The Offing by Benjamin Myers - a somewhat romantic and nostalgic coming of age story set after WW2 - romantic but not in the way you might think. I guess Romantic with a capital R as in Wordsworth and co. Which sounds very dismissive which is quitewrong because it's a rather beautiful book. Anyway there was a passing reference to fried bread, which in tune with the nostalgia of the book brought back memories of my youth and the full English breakfasts I was more or less ordered to eat every day because that's what my mother thought I needed before a day of school.

I had other ideas - breakfast has never been my thing - but I did remember the fried bread - probably the delicacy that I kept until last, because I was one of those people who always keeps the best for last. I now think that the pure deliciousness - and, let's be honest - the sheer badness of this from a health point of view - was derived from the dripping in which it was fried.

Dripping was my mother's major frying medium, also spread on toast for a snack. It was made by putting all the leftover fat, from various cuts of meat, but mostly the Sunday roast I guess, in a dish which was permanently in the oven, so that every time the oven was turned on the fats melted and melded together just a little more. When melted it was poured into the ceramic dish that was kept in our stone larder, added to the fatty mixture that was already there. Well eventually it might have been transferred to our tiny fridge, but certainly I remember it being kept in the stone larder. Today I learnt that in Yorkshire it is called 'mucky' fat. The 'mucky' being pronounced as 'mooky' I'm guessing.

Well there were no vegetable oils for cooking back then. At least I don't ever remember any, and so dripping, or very occasionally butter was the medium used - even for commercial fish and chips. No - there was lard - which is very similar to dripping. Today, of course, it is considered unhealthy - well it is very high in cholesterol - and cooking oils of an ever expanding variety it seems to me - are available and preferable. Dripping has mostly disappeared. Recently I have tried to sort of resuscitate the idea, by pouring leftover fat from this and that into a glass container and storing it in the fridge. It's not the same as dripping though, because the fat is 90% oil of one kind or another, with a bit of butter and very occasionally some meat fat from a roast. But we don't have many of them.

But I stray from the topic of the day. Of course.

I have done the nostalgia bit - crispy and fat soaked slices of ordinary white bread fried in a frying pan and served with the morning's fried egg and bacon. Yum but oh so bad for you. On to the variations.

The first one that I thought of was a somehow Ottolenghi connected Fried bread to go with just about everything. I was partly right - Ottolenghi related, but actually a recipe from Ixta Belfrage in her book Meczla. Alas the recipe is not online, but I guess fundamentally it is just rounds of pizza dough deep fried, having been pierced with a knife before frying. Perhaps the only distinctive thing is that Ixta likes to:

"Blowtorch the bread after it's been fried so it tastes both deep-fried and charred."

They do look delicious although that may be the way they are finally presented in the book, on top of her Pineapple salsa, with a burrata and raw onions, tossed in olive oil on top, with a side of charred Padrón peppers.

Nigella, in her review of the book, was certainly impressed and said:

"I should, by rights, recoil in horror at the notion of deep-frying — the interior temperature of my house feels like being surrounded by bubbling chip pans as it is — but it’s the Fried Bread To Go with Just About Anything (think bread dough, formed into little rolls, which are then plunged into hot oil) that I’m dreaming about making first." Nigella Lawson

In her introducution to the recipe Ixta mentions that this was sort of inspired by the fried pizza of Naples - which is not the fried pizza that I know of - a proper pizza but fried rather than baked in the oven. This is pizza dough, folded over a filling and then fried. The fillings are various but apparently most often include ricotta. Below are genuine but anonymous street food versions and one made by Lorraine Elliott of Not Quite Nigella - Panzerotti pizza pockets

Panzerotti is just one of the Italian words for this Italian version of fried bread which are fundamentally a southern Italian thing, but others are pettole and zeppole, and sfinci which I think I mentioned when I posted about doughnuts a little while ago. For really they are very closely related things, as doughnuts are fundamentally fried bread as well. The distinction today, I guess is that we are talking about a savoury thing, not a sweet one.

Although - to go back to England again - this is a jam fritter, about which there was a bit of a stir, when Delia put them on the menu at her Norwich restaurant at the football stadium. She and her husband are major shareholders in the Norwich football club, in case you didn't know. It's her other passion - well that and religion. She's apparently gone all religious in her retired old age. Jam fritters by the way are a jam sandwich, dipped in batter, deep fried and sprinkled with icing sugar. A peculiarly English sweet treat I guess. Although probably not all that different from French toast, which has had a post all of its own.

Nations all around the world have their own versions of fried bread, but I won't do that - mostly because SBS has a fairly wide summary already. However, I'll just mention these A'ja (bread fritters) from Ottolenghi - and Tripoli as made in his book with Sami Tamimi Jerusalem, and some very intriguing looking fried baguettes as served in Vietnam.

There is one other version of fried bread that does probably require a special mention

Frybread, otherwise known as Navajo fried bread.The version shown is a recipe from Mayuri's Jikoni website. As shown here, it looks a little like Ixta's Fried bread to to with almost anything and a variation of the fried pizza that I saw, but with rather more Central American type toppings.

The original however:

"has a complex cultural history that is inextricably intertwined with colonialism and displacement of Native Americans. The ingredients for frybread were provided to Native Americans to prevent them from starving when they were moved from areas where they could grow and forage their traditional foods to areas that would not support their traditional foods. Critics see the dish as both a symbol of colonization and a symbol of resilience." Wikipedia

The move mentioned above was in 1864 and was an enforced walk of 300 miles from Arizona to New Mexico. Other pictures that I saw showed them most usually as stuffed like tacos, or as above.

I guess in some ways this is a bit of a postscript to my post on doughnuts - also a pretty incidental idea from triviality - in that case a discarded Krispy Kreme wrapper, in this a couple of words in a novel. Which just shows that something to learn is all around you. If you care to look.

YEARS GONE BY

September 24

2024 - The frustrations of lucky dips

2023 - Life, the universe and everything on your plate

2022 - Now what?

2021 - Arancini - Sicilian leftovers

2020 - Missing

2019 - Waste not, want not

2018 - Nothing

2017 - How times don't change

2016 - Nothing