In his column in the 5 December issue of New Statesman, Will Self, on the subject of wine, quotes his French translator who says “when I have a glass of wine, I’m imbibing the region where it comes from.” Self ponders this and suggests that “when an English person drinks wine, she’s sucking up a social class”.

Is that also what’s going on when people drink craft beer? Is it becoming an accessory for those who aspire to, or wish to emphasise, middle class credentials?

We like to think that beer is in the process of being stripped of any specific class associations — that it’s becoming socially mobile, as comfortable at an Islington dinner party as in a working men’s club. But maybe we’re kidding ourselves.

Either way, there’s plenty of work to be done before beer is quite welcome to a seat at the shabby chic dining table in front of the Aga. The Cheese Shop in Truro — one of the most middle class shops you can imagine — has wine, port, sherry, sparkling cider, soft drinks… but not one drop of beer. Not even a politely packaged Fuller’s Vintage Ale getting dusty in a corner. Shame.

This agonising over snobbery and social class isn’t going to end anytime soon, we’re afraid. It is much on our minds.

From Flickr Creative Commons, taken by Renaissancechambara.

We usually leave recipes to the experts but make the occasional exception when it comes to foods which are an inextricable part of our beer culture.

In Britain, after several beers, when everything else is closed, you can always rely on the kebab shop and everyone’s favourite guilty pleasure: lamb doner kebab. No-one would dream of eating one while sober. The great round of meat is often referred to as an “elephant leg” because it is so heavily processed that it’s hard to be sure exactly what it is composed of. Meat, fat and salt are the three main ingredients but beyond that… Asbestos? Industrial grease? Who knows.

Nonetheless, they are delicious, and we decided to make one at home so that we could feel a bit less grotty eating it.

We were inspired partly by Kenny McGovern’s The Take Away Secret although we ended up adapting his recipe substantially for our own. The main tip we picked up from McGovern is the importance of garlic powder. It’s the magic ingredient in most fast food.

Ingredients (for 2-3)

Kebab

* 300g lamb mince or cubes of stewing lamb

* One lamb’s liver

* 30g porridge oats

* 1 tbsp plain flour

* spice and herb mix: tbsp garlic powder, tbsp italian herbs/mixed herbs, tsp Cayenne pepper, tsp salt

For cooking the kebab

* 1 tomato

* half an onion

To serve

* bread of your choice (naan, pitta, Turkish pide, etc.)

* salad of your choice

* chilli sauce, garlic mayonnaise, etc., to taste

Method

1. Grind up all of the kebab ingredients until they form a fine, cohesive paste. If the mixture is too liquid, add a handful more oats.

2. On a piece of oiled clingfilm, form into a log or loaf. (N.B. it won’t look nice between this point and when you slice it. Sorry.)

3. Wrap it up in the clingfilm like a sausage, twisting the ends until it forms a tight roll. Put that in the fridge for a few hours.

4. Heat the oven to 120 degrees centigrade. Remove the meat from its wrapper and put it on a lightly greased non-stick roasting tin or baking sheet. Put slices of tomato and onion on top. Cook at 120 for two hours, turning after an hour.

5. When it is browned all over, take it out of the oven and leave it to rest for 10-15 minutes while you prepare your bread and salad. Then slice it as thinly as possible along its length. An electric carving knife would probably work best but a bread knife is a good alternative.

6. Layer bread, salad, meat and sauces.

7. Eat with a flimsy plastic fork on a blood-spattered pavement, after dark, with the sound of sirens  in the distance.

And here’s our chicken doner recipe, now sadly outdated. We’ll be reviewing and rewriting it soon. Short version: more garlic powder!

As everyone knows, the weather in England is rubbish. Even when it’s sunny, you can be fairly sure there will be a shower just as you’ve set up your picnic.

In May, we were faced with a long bank holiday weekend where the rain didn’t stop in London, but we decided to ignore it and go on another tapeo (tapas crawl). Sod the rain. We were going to pretend we were in Spain.

If you treat a crappy Greene King pub like you would a Spanish bar, it’s not half bad. The tourists just added to the atmosphere, and our two halves of cold Kronenbourg didn’t taste any worse than Mahou does in Madrid. And they had some decent olives to nibble on. Result.

Next up, the Queen’s Head and Artichoke. As a pub, it probably wouldn’t be our cup of tea, but as a tapas bar, it was great. They let us sit at the bar to drink our Bitburger and had a proper, convincing tapas menu, which we ordered bits and pieces from over the course of an hour or so.

Finally, we headed for the Norfolk Arms. It’s more of a restaurant than a bar despite being (we think) somehow related to the previous place. They were a bit sniffy because we didn’t want a table and a full meal but they put up with it. We put away some serrano ham, a few Estrella Damms and, finally, a couple of glasses of sherry.

When we left, it was still raining, but we’d very successfully banished the bank holiday blues.

I have very happy memories of visiting Poland. Chief among them is the great joy I experienced in Wroc?aw when presented with a free — yes, free! — plate of bread and dripping with my first pint at Piwnica Swidnicka.

Since then, I’ve also enjoyed it at as ‘schmaltz‘ in various places in Germany, most notably Klosterbräu in Bamberg which has several varieties, including goose fat.

They say you shouldn’t eat greasy food with beer and, yes, if you’re carrying out any kind of formal tasting, it’s probably a bad idea. But, in the real world, nothing makes a wheat beer zing like a piece of rye bread spread thickly with spicy, salty, onion-laced lard.

These days, it’s thankfully very easy to get schmaltz/smalec in the UK in any shop which stocks Polish foods.

The one I bought to eat with my beery bread had a higher meat content than some (try saying “mechanically recovered chicken and pork” without saying “mmmmmmm”…) and was very satisfying indeed. Sometimes, you’ll find it in tins; in blocks like butter or lard; or in glass jars. It’s cheap however it comes.

Let’s be clear, though: it is not health food.

That salad I had with it cancels out the fat, though, right? Right? And it’s normal to have shooting pains in your left arm, isn’t it?

If you like your grease cut with other fats, why not give Obazda a go?

Bailey

I’ll be telling you tomorrow all about my personal favourite snack for accompanying beer — something I prefer even to pork scratchings, and which is even filthier — but, to make the most of it, I’ll need some special bread. So, today, I’m sharing the recipe for a dark rye bread with a couple of extra beer-geek tweaks.

Ingredients

• 250g strong white bread flour
• 200g rye flour
• a large handful of malted barley (I used pilsner malt)
• 1 tablespoon of caraway seeds
• 1 tablespoon of cocoa powder (for colour)
• 3 tablespoons of dark brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon (or 1 sachet) of fast acting dried yeast
• 1 teaspoon of salt
• 330ml of slightly warmed beer (I used Cooper’s Stout).

1. Put all the dry ingredient (flour, sugar, malt, cocoa powder, caraway, salt and yeast) into a big pile on your work surface.
2. Make a well in the middle.
3. Add the beer bit by bit, mixing between each addition, until you have a big, slightly wet, shaggy ball of dough. (Your hands will be a mess but one of these might help.)
4. Knead it until it becomes smooth and pliable (10-15 minutes). Something I learned about bread making recently: if the dough isn’t soggy and horrible to work with for the first five minutes, it’s too dry.
5. Put a drop of oil in a bowl. Put the dough in and turn it round in the oil until it’s lightly coated. Cover with a carrier bag.
6. Leave somewhere warmish (the kitchen is usually fine) for one or two hours or until doubled in size.
7. Knock it back down to size and then push it into a small cane basket coated with rye flour. If you don’t have one of those, just shape it on a floured baking sheet. Cover it with the carrier bag again and leave for another hour or two.
8. About 30 mins before you’re ready to bake it, if you’ve got one, put a pizza stone in the oven to heat at the maximum temperature.
9. When the loaf is ready, turn it out onto a floured baking sheet (or a peel). Be careful — you want it to retain it’s shape. Then, with a really sharp knife, cut three or four slashes across the top.
10. Put it on the pizza stone to cook.
11. After 20 mins, turn the oven down to about 180 degrees centigrade.
12. After another 20 minutes, check if it’s cooked. It should be dark and sound hollow when tapped.
13. Leave it to cool completely on a rack before slicing.

Bailey

While it seems there are some divided opinions on whether it’s ever OK to bring your own food into a pub, there are plenty of restaurants which let you provide your own booze, because they don’t want to or can’t get an alcohol licence.

This came to mind when a friend told us about a BYO Thai restaurant in Walworth in south London (Mama Thai, 235 Walworth Road, London SE17 1RL).

The nearest tube is Elephant and Castle. It’s a cheap and cheerful thai place without a licence (so technically BYO) but has struck a deal with the off licence next door to let you order what you want. They have a surprisingly good selection of bottled beers which you can order. Off hand, I remember there were Left Hand beers from the US, but I’m pretty sure they had a lot of Belgian, Czech and other European ones.

Given the appalling state of the beer on offer in most restaurants (“So my choice is Chang or Tsingtao…?”) and how fussy we’ve become about what we will and won’t drink, BYO is the perfect solution.

Here’s a directory of BYO restaurants put together with wine in mind, but we’d be interested to hear your recommendations.

To accompany some noodles, we went for two mainstream Japanese beers we picked up at Arigato supermarket in Soho — Yebisu lager and Asahi Black.

Yebisu proudly calls itself an ‘all malt beer’ and, yes, there is a real toasted malt flavour. All in all, this pale lager is not an exciting beer, but it is a satisfying, moreish and likeable one. A notch above the central point of bland on the Grim-to-Great™ commercial lager rating scale.

Asahi Dry, which is what we see most often in the UK, is brewed here under license. Asahi Black, however, is imported from Japan. It’s after the manner of a German schwarzbier — smooth, creamy and with soft cocoa flavours, rather than the bitter roastiness of a stout. It reminded us particularly of Bernard Dark, but with less body and a much less intense flavour. A winner, and possibly also a good way to lure non-beery chums into drinking something with a bit more character than Foster’s.

We thought an ice cream beer float sounded like a good idea and others (notably Mark Dredge and Zak Avery) have raved about it.

As I was staying up to watch the Superbowl, I thought I’d give it a go with two of my favourite American imports, Brooklyn Chocolate Stout and Ben & Jerry’s.

And, do you know what? It was horrid.

The lovely dark chocolate roastiness of the beer became metallic and cheesy. The two ingredients cancelled each other out.

I had to pour it away.

Boak