Join the morel crusade as Mike Shaw gives the Freemasons new belief
I am still a boy, only occasionally needing to scrape the downy bum fluff off my chin. “So you fancy a half pint of my foaming ale, do you, sonny?” smirks the landlord across the pumps. My school pal Hoppers looks even more callow, so he has pushed me forward to get us served. Only the third pub I’ve ever managed it in and I am still struggling to actually like the forbidden fruit of malt and hops. Ah, the bittersweet joys of under-age drinking long ago…
Fast forward half a century and more and there’s a different sort of epiphany going on in the same hostelry, The Freemasons At Wiswell, these days the very model of a country gastropub. Wiswell rhymes with ‘swizzle’, but you won’t be cheated by the offering at this destination on the fringe of the Ribble Valley.
The British morel season is vernal and short, April the apogee. Often found clustering under hedgerows, the ridged and pitted fungi are a prized delicacy. I am unsure where chef patron Mike Shaw sources his from. I should’ve asked. The dish he has just served, a morel stuffed with scallop in a vin jaune sauce as part of a six course set menu, is a portal into fantasy Gallic Michelin territory.
Greenfield-born Shaw has served his time at Raymond Blanc’s two-star Manoir and worked with Richard Neat in Cannes when that maverick Pied à Terre founder became the first Englishman to win a star in France. The classic training has always been evident in Shaw’s subsequent cooking nearer home. I’ve always been in awe of his patisserie skills. Now his new tenure at The Freemasons looks like taking this acclaimed food pub with rooms to a different level.
Under a previous incumbent Steve Smith it repeatedly featured in Top Gastropubs lists. Indeed it became the 2015 Waitrose Good Food Guide’s Number One Pub in the country. At one point it even leapfrogged the Michelin-starred Northcote down the road in the Estrella Damm Top 50 Restaurants list. Great times, but it has been in the comparative doldrums since. Now the revival is definitely on the way.
Not that it is forsaking its look of a film set for some Hollywood-imagined country inn It boasts more stag’s heads than you can shake a fox’s brush at and innumerable Dick Turpin meets Jorrocks country prints. You could imagine the Pickwick Club getting exceedingly jolly in the formal upstairs dining areas, which have been tarted up even more. The inn is a conversion of three terraced cottages, one of which was once a Freemason’s lodge apparently. Four beautifully appointed bedrooms have been created out of neighbouring property and remain a huge plus.
We’d have happily hunkered down in one after six fabulous courses for £85`:
Wye Valley asparagus, miso caramel, miso hollandaise; duck liver, blood orange, golden raisin, heritage carrot; Cornish crab, apple, pickled kohlrabi, preserved lemon, oscietra caviar; stuffed morel, scallop, artichoke, walnut, yellow wine sauce; salt marsh hogget, loin, braised belly, sweetbread ballotine, aubergine, tongue sauce; pistachio parfait poached rhubarb.
All lovely, but the star was that stuffed morel. Hand-dived dived scallops are made into a very light mousse, seasoned with sea herbs, steamed for 8 minutes in the morel, left to rest and then glazed with a double veal stock reduction. Shaw sits it on a Jerusalem artichoke puree and serves with a sauce made from a grand cru vin jaune, that oxidised wine speciality of the Jura. It’s finished with walnut oil.
This is the chef’s take on the kind of dish you might have found on the menu at Nico Ladenis’ London three-star late in the last century. In Padstow today Paul Ainsworth might stuff his mores with chicken mousse, with cured winter truffle, confit shallots and duck liver. Which all sounds a mite over-rich. In contrast Mike Shaw’s is light and spring perfect.
Freemasons at Wiswell, 8 Vicarage Fold, Wiswell, Clitheroe BB7 9DF
01254 822218.
