This month we’re looking at gin and it’s a surprisingly good alcohol to cook with. This recipe combines gammon and gin, but you can substitute chicken quite successfully (that recipe will come later). All my enthusiastic tasters agreed that this sauce was much better than the sometimes stodgy, floury and cloying parsley sauce which usually goes with gammon.

Serve with immediate mashed potato, or cheesy, creamy bread, and buttered spinach, or fried potatoes and courgettes.

It also goes really well with a gooseberry sauce.

NB Allow time for marinating.

Other gammon recipes on Saucy Dressings are:

• Gammon with marsala damson sauce
• Gammon, ginger ale and mustard

Recipe for gammon marinated in gin

Serves 2

Ingredients

• two good thick gammon steaks
• ¼ cup/60 ml gin
• 1 medium garlic clove, crushed
• some chopped rosemary (about 2 teasp)
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 120ml/½ cup dry cider (or you can use dry martini). I think Merrydown Vintage Dry is good, Kingston Black is better… and I also like Green Goblin oak aged – it’s medium dry, drink the rest of the bottle (or buy another) together with this dish.
• about 4 tbsp crème fraîche or Greek yoghurt – depending on your taste
• Indonesian long pepper

Method

1. mix the garliic, rosemary, gin and most of the olive oil and pour it over the gammon, leaving it as long as you can out of the fridge
2. heat the rest of the oil in a frying pan and add the gammon and the gin liquid. reduce about ten minutes.
3. start making the potatoes and the buttered spinach.
4. turn the meat. add the cider. reduce for another ten minutes or so.
5. remove the meat and leave to rest while you ‘deglaze’ – reduce further if necessary and scrape in all the nice bits of meat sticking to the pan
6. remove the pan from the heat, let it cool down a bit and then whisk in (use a cappuccino whisk) the crème fraîche.
7. add a few grinds of Indonesian long pepper.