#329 John Evelyn’s Tart of Herbs

John Evelyn was a very influential diarist who left quite a legacy. He was from a well-to-do family in South-East London, but being the second son, had no rights to the estate (unless his brother died without having a son himself). So, to make up for this he decided to become a scholar and travelled France and Italy in search of knowledge during the tumultuous time of the English Civil War. He wrote several books, witnessed the Great Fire of London, and was friends with Christopher Wren and Samuel Pepys. He lived during the reigns of Charles II, James II and William III and Mary II. He was talented landscaper, designing the gardens at Sayes Court, London. He became quite chummy with Charles II and was a founding member of the Royal Society. One of his books, called Sylvia, or a discourse of Forest Trees declared the tragedy befalling the country’s trees that were being felled for fuel to the glass factories. The book was responsible for the planting of millions of trees – quite the modern conservationist!

During his later years, he planned to write an encyclopaedia of horticulture, but only got as far as the first chapter. This chapter was published as a book in its own right in 1699, titled Aceteria and it is from this book that this recipe comes:

An Herb-Tart is made thus: Boil fresh Cream or Milk, with a little grated Bread or Naples-Biscuit (which is better) to thicken it; a pretty Quantity of Chervile, Spinach, Beete (or what other Herb you please) being first par-boil’d and chop’d. Then add Macaron, or Almonds beaten to a Paste, a littlesweet Butter, the Yolk of five Eggs, three of the Whites rejected. To these some add Corinths plump’d in Milk, or boil’d therein, Sugar, Spice at Discretion, and stirring it all together over the Fire, bake it in the Tart-Pan.

These sorts of sweet vegetable-based tarts were commonly eaten as a pudding during wintertime when there was no fresh fruit to be had. I had heard of carrots being used in this way, but not spinach! So, with an air of dubiousness I followed the updated version that Jane Grigson provides which surprisingly only contains spinach…

Begin by cooking 2 pounds of spinach in a pan with a little water and salt. Cover the giant pile with a lid and simmer until it collapses – about 5 minutes.

From this…

…to this!

Let it cool before draining and squeezing out any liquid, and then chop it.

Mix an ounce of breadcrumbs with ½ pint of single cream in a pan and slowly bring it to the boil. Meanwhile soak 2 ounces of currants or raisins in some warm milk. Into the cream, stir the spinach along with 1 or 2 ounces of macaroon crumbs (for a recipe see here), 2 ounces of butter, 2 whole eggs and two egg yolks, 2 to 3 tablespoons of sugar and the raisins and milk. Stir the green slurry over a low heat until everything is well-incorporated. Add more sugar or macaroon crumbs and grate in some nutmeg to taste.

Line a 9 to 10 inch tart tin with some puff pastry and pour in the spinach mixture. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes at 220⁰C (425⁰F) until the pastry has begun the brown, and then turn the heat down to 180⁰C (350⁰F) bake until the filling is set, about 30 to 40 minutes.

This should be eaten hot or warm with some cream for pudding.

#329 John Evelyn’s Tart of Herbs. Well this was certainly a strange one and I haven’t made up my mind as to whether I liked it or not. There was no attempt at masking the flavor of the spinach, but it did marry surprisingly well with the fruit and other sweet things as well as the nutmeg. Even though everyone ate it quite happily we weren’t sure if it was a dessert, and after my fourth slice, I still wasn’t sure! I think it could be very successfully reproduced as an amuse-bouche or hors d’oeuvre though. An interesting winter-warmer, though maybe not for a pudding course. 7/10.

#326 John Farley’s Fine Cheesecake

My friends Ashley and Jason were throwing a bit of a party last weekend and it was a pot luck party, where everyone brings some food. We don’t have such things in England, but I shall try and introduce them as they are a great idea. I thought it would be a good opportunity to sneak in a couple of historical desserts from the eighteenth century, so I made the delicious sweetmeat cake and this cheesecake.

When one thinks of cheesecakes, one wouldn’t think of England – there’s plenty in mainland Europe and America of course – yet we have been making them for a quite a while, the Yorkshire curd tart being the most well-known. John Farley’s has some delicious, and very eighteenth century ingredients: sweet macaroons (the almond kind, not the coconut kind), fragrant yet earthy ground almonds and heady rose or orange-flower water. If you can’t find almond (‘French’) macaroons anywhere, here is a recipe. It is a little strange in that it should be served warm; all the cheesecakes I have ever eaten (baked or not) have always been served cold.

These sorts of puddings were very popular – there are no less than seven cheesecake recipes in Elizabeth Raffald’s 1769 book, The Experienced English Housekeeper. John Farley’s book The London Art of Cookery was published in 1783 and included eight cheesecakes, with most of the recipes being copied word-for-word from Raffald’s book. The cheeky bleeder. I don’t think that he was trying to pass the recipes off as his own, he was just producing a compendium of recipes suitable for housewives and servants. He wrote it whilst he was head chef at The London Tavern. I think I will try some more of these cheesecake recipes.

To make the cheesecake, begin by lining a 9 inch flan tin with puff or shortcrust pastry. Griggers says that in the eighteenth century puff pastry would have been used, so I went with that so the cheesecake would be as authentic as possible.

Now beat the filling ingredients together: 8 ounces of full fat cream cheese, 2 big tablespoons of double cream, a tablespoon of orange flower or rose water, 4 large egg yolks, 2 ounces melted slightly salted butter, 3 ounces of crushed macaroon crumbs, 3 ounces of ground almonds, 3 ounces of caster sugar and up to half a freshly ground nutmeg. Whew!

Turn the mixture into the line tart tin and bake at 180⁰C (350⁰F) for 30-40 minutes until the top is nicely browned. Eat the cheesecake hot or warm, with cream.

#326 John Farley’s Fine Cheesecake. It may look a little pale and pasty, but this really was a fine cheesecake indeed! The filling was not of a typical baked cheesecake because of all the almonds and macaroons in there. The cheese flavour was definitely present though as was a hint of perfume from the rose water. It all certainly suited modern tastes. Eating it warm seemed like a strange idea, but it was very good, especially with some cool cream poured over. We need to bring back the English cheesecake! 9/10

#321 Sweetmeat Cake

This recipe is apparently Jane Grigson’s favourite of the eighteenth century sweet tarts apprently. A sweetmeat is really any delicious sweet morsel – in this case candied orange peel, but I expect you can use any candied fruit or spice. The sweetmeats are scattered in a pastry case and covered in a sweet filling before being baked. I couldn’t really find any British recipes, though I found a couple of mentions in nineteenth century stories; I have no idea where Jane got hold of this one. I expect she pored over many a book in the National Library.

I did actually find a mention in a Canadian journal from the 1910s that sweetmeat cakes were made using honey thickened with breadcrumbs as a filling – this wasn’t a surprise as this sweetmeat cake (a tart, really) was the predecessor to one of my favourite puds, the treacle tart (as an aside she gives a brief description of a treacle tart, but not a proper recipe, not sure why she didn’t include this obvious one in the book).

Well, wherever she got it from, here is the recipe:

Preheat the oven to 180⁰C (350⁰C).

Start off by lining a nine inch tart tin with either shortcrust or puff pastry (I went with the former). Next, chop 2 ounces of roasted hazelnuts and 4 ounces of candied peel and scatter them over the pastry.

Mix together 2 large eggs, 2 large egg yolks, 6 ounces of caster sugar and 6 ounces of melted salted butter. Once thoroughly beaten, fill the tart with the mixture.

Bake for around 35 to 40 minutes until the top has turned a delicious golden brown. The tart will rise in the oven, but then sink when you take it out. Griggers says to eat it warm with cream, but it was pretty good with some nice vanilla ice cream too.

#321 Sweetmeat Cake. A fantastic and easy-to-do pud! The mixture turned into a slightly chewy toffee and its sweetness was perfectly counteracted by the still slightly bitter candied peel. Plus the hazelnuts lent a neutral earthiness and some texture. One major reason for this, I believe, is that I used home-made candied orange peel (see here for the post); it really made a difference. The bought stuff is too sweet, with too little bitter flavour and in pieces that are too small. This is well worth a try and even better than treacle tart! 10/10

#318 Baked Almond Pudding I

I made this almond pudding because I found that I just happened to have all the ingredients for it, so I thought why not? I had bought a load of baking ingredients for the Thanksgiving desserts for which I was in charge, you see.
This is the second of two almond puddings (I did Baked Almond Pudding II a while back) that have absolutely no introduction from Griggers. It is strange that a recipe she obviously thought so good and so English that it had to have two recipes devoted to it should be basically unknown. However, a quick bit of research later, I found that these puddings were popular from the eighteenth century. The recipe closest to this one in English Food, appears in Mrs Rundell’s Domestic Cookery from 1859.

The almond tree drawn by Elizabeth Blackwell 1737

This recipe requires bitter almond essence – it is quite easy to find online these days – and it is quite important to add some. The essence really gives any almond-based dessert a hit of almond aroma that the subtly-flavoured domesticated almond cannot provide. The bitter flavour is provided by benzaldehyde and cyanide – in time past, any king eating anything that tasted of bitter almonds, would have had good reason to start panicking! The essence just contains the benzaldehyde, so don’t worry, you won’t cark-it from using it. It is very difficult to get hold of bitter almonds themselves, but a good substitute is the nut inside the kernel of an apricot.

To make Almond Pudding I, begin by mixing together 4 ounces of melted butter, 8 ounces of ground almonds, 5 bitter almonds or a few drops of bitter almond essence, 2 tablespoons of double cream, a tablespoon of brandy, 4 or 5 heaped tablespoons of sugar, 2 egg yolks and 2 whole eggs. The mixture can then be turned into a greased shallow pie dish. Grigger says – as does Mrs Rundell – that you can line the pie dish with some sweet shortcrust pastry to make it go further. I had some left-over pastry and seeing as this dessert was for the Thanksgiving meal, I took their advice. Bake the pudding for around 45 minutes at 190⁰C (375⁰F) until there is a nice golden crust on the pudding.

Serve with some more sugar, butter and brandy, she also says.

#318 Baked Almond Pudding I. Much more cakey than the previous almond pudding, and as nice. It seemed rather bland – there wasn’t enough sugar and it would have been improved greatly if the pastry hah had a thin layer of raspberry jam. That said, it did get more moist and flavourful as it got older. An okay pudding that could be made very good with some minor alterations. 5/10.

#309 Sticky Toffee Pudding

Sticky toffee pudding has got to be one of the best – if not the best – of all English desserts. It is quite a recent invention – a chap called Francis Coulson cooked it up, as it were, in 1948. For a pud that is just over 60 years old, it has become such a cornerstone of English cooking I cannot imagine life without it. It was created as an antidote to the lean post-war rationing, and was packed full of butter, brown sugar, cream and dates. Many people thought this was too much of an extravagance and were quite shocked by its richness. Curiously, Francis Coulson was the first hotelier in England to include a hairdryer in every room. Don’t say I never give you interesting facts.

Because the sticky toffee pudding is such a treat, I have been saving the recipe for a special occasion, and as Hugh was over in St Louis on a visit, I thought it very appropriate. I also invited some mates from work for some drinks too. I had never made one before, and crossed my fingers that it would be as delicious as the ones I have eaten in restaurants or purchased from the excellent Cartmel Village Shop in the Lake District. Good though the Village Shop is, have a go at making one yourself. You will not be disappointed.

Begin by greasing a 7 inch square cake tin with butter. Chop 6 ounces of stoned dates, place in a pan and pour half a pint of boiling water over them. Bring to a boil and then take off the heat and stir in a level teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda and leave it be whilst you get on with the cake mixture.

Cream together 2 ounces of softened butter with 6 ounces of caster sugar. Next, beat two egg and add them to the butter and sugar in stages. Fold in 6 ounces of self-raising flour, then the dates and their juices and half a teaspoon of vanilla extract (not essence, people!). Pour the mixture into the cake tin and bake for 30 minutes at 180°C (350°F).

Whilst it bakes, make the sticky toffee sauce by melting together in a saucepan: 7 ounces of soft dark brown sugar, 6 tablespoons of double cream, 4 ½ ounces of butter and half a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Simmer for around three minutes until a luscious sauce develops.

When the pudding is cooked, pour and spread a little of the sauce over it and put in the oven for a further 5 minutes. Cut the pudding into squares and serve it hot with more of the toffee sauce. Personally, I like it with either double cream or vanilla ice cream.

#309 Sticky Toffee Pudding. Without a doubt, the most delicious pudding from the book so far. The cake had become dark and sticky; the brown sugar preventing it from being too sickly. So good that I insist you go out and make this for yourself – no bought pudding could be as good as this. Fantastic, fantastic, fantastic 10/10.

#301 Yorkshire Curd Tart

Hello there! I’m still not up and running in St Louis with blog recipes just yet as I am still getting the apartment sorted and using spare time to explore this amazing city. However, rain has stopped play for Dr Buttery and there is a raging thunderstorm happening outside so this is the perfect opportunity to fill you in on the final recipe I made in Houston.

When I was packing up my stuff in the old apartment I noticed I had all the ingredients for a Yorkshire curd tart just lying about, so I thought I’d conjure one up to take into work for us all to eat whilst we were packing up the laboratory, which also had to move from Texas to Missouri as well as us. I reckoned it would go down well as it is essentially a sort of cheesecake, and cheesecakes are loved all across America. I find it strange that the English too love cheesecake, and yet ignore the ones that come from their own country. We are such weirdoes.

Nobody had heard of this tart at work, but that is no surprise, as most people outside of Yorkshire haven’t heard of it either which I think of strange as it is my favourite sweet tart of all time. I had never made one however, as it is very difficult to get your hands on curd cheese these days – and cottage cheese or cream cheese WILL NOT DO, says Griggers. Luckily I had some essence of rennet that I used many moons ago to make the Devonshire junket. I had brought it back with me on my last visit to England at Eastertime. Always thinking, is I.

Woman Milking a Cow by Karel Dujardin

Anyways, if you are to make a proper curd tart, you need to make your curds from the freshly calved mother cow’s first milk – called colostrum – which is extra-creamy. Unless you have your own cows, this isn’t really practical, so to emulate this use Jersey milk. What I did was use normal whole milk and mixed it with some of the half-and-half I had left over from making the trifle. (Brits: half-and-half is the closest to single cream I can find). Also, proper curd tart should be spiced with allspice (called pimento, I think, in the USA). Here’s a little quote that Griggers uses in her introduction to the recipe, though she doesn’t source it:

‘In this part of Yorkshire, what is called “clove pepper” and known to the southerners as “all-spice” is still largely used to flavour cheesecakes.‘

To make the curds, warm the milk and creams, if using, in a pan to 37°C (97°F).

I used around two pints to get just over eight ounces of curds. Take off the heat. Follow the instructions on your rennet and add the appropriate amount to the milk. You can also add a couple of tablespoons of buttermilk too if you have some, though it is not necessary. Leave the curds to develop for a few hours and when they have set pour the lot into some double-layered muslin (cheesecloth), or you could use a clean pillowcase too (as I did). Allow to drip overnight at room temperature. If things are a little blocked up, give the whole thing a stir and a scrape with a plastic spatula.

The curds should also take on a pleasing fresh, mild cheesy smell. Once it is properly drained, put the curds in a dish and refrigerate.

Now you have made the curds, you can make the tart filling…
First of all line an 8-10 inch tart tin with shortcrust pastry. Next cream together 4 ounces of butter and 2 ounces of sugar in a bowl before stirring in 8 ounces of your curd cheese, 4 ounces of raisins or currants, a rounded tablespoon of wholemeal breadcrumbs, a pinch of salt, two beaten eggs and a good amount of allspice or nutmeg. Pour this into your pastry case and bake in the oven at 220°C (425°F) for 20 to 30 minutes. Easy!

#301 Yorkshire Curd Tart. This transported me straight back to Yorkshire and my childhood! This recipe is amazing, and I am so glad I made it. I wonder why it took me so long to get around to making it? The centre was moist and sweetened by the dried fruit rather than copious sugar. It is the “clove-pepper” that is the secret ingredient of course; be bold with it, you need at least a good half-teaspoon. A delicious tart that is going into my repertoire! 9.5/10.

#300 Trifle

Trifle (ˈtraɪf(ə)l), n.: A matter of little value or importance; ‘a thing of no moment’ (Johnson); a trivial, paltry, or insignificant affair.
Oxford English Dictionary

Dr Samuel Johnson: Trifle hater

(but then he was a grumpy old bastard and did hate everything)

Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle
Michelangelo

Michelangelo: Trifle appreciator

Is there nothing more English and impressive than a properly made trifle? I don’t think so. Indeed, it is the reason I have saved it for the landmark 300^th recipe. Although its original meaning is one of ‘little value or importance‘, the trifles upon the Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian banquet table had gained a great opulence becoming a splendid centerpiece lavishly layered up with brandies, sherries, wines, custard, cream, macaroons, cake, syllabub and cream, not to mention the candied fruits and comfits to decorate the top. Mrs Beeton shows off some of them in her Book of Household Management so that other cooks could emulate them in stately homes across England.

A plate from Mrs Beeton’s Book of Houshold Management,

the trifle is on the bottom left

The trifle did start out from humble beginnings and was simply a fruit fool made up of puréed fruit and whipped cream. The earliest mention of the word trifle in the sense of a dessert, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, comes from the book A worlde of wordes, or most copious, and exact dictionarie in Italian and English by John Florio published in 1598. However, as the dessert became a vehicle for shrewd cooks to use up left over biscuits and cakes, it quickly evolved into a more complex dish altogether.

So what makes a trifle? By the mid-eighteenth century, it had pretty much become the layered beast we know of today, though there was no fruit involved. It was made of macaroons soaked in wine followed by a layer of custard atopped by a syllabub and ‘different coloured sweetmeats and small shot comfits…figures and flowers‘, according to Elizabeth Raffauld’s 1769 book, The Experienced English Housekeeper. Trifle purists today insist that this sort of trifle is the classic recipe and if a trifle were to contain fruit and – heaven forbid! – no alcohol then it is simply not a trifle.

By the early nineteenth century, there were many more additions – spiced cake and fruit jams and jellies for instance, often cream was exchanged for syllabub.

Then, in the twentieth century, the trifle had its downfall. Here is what Jane Grigson says about the pud:
‘A pudding worth eating, not the mean travesty made with yellow, packaged sponge cakes, poor sherry and powdered custards.’

That is her entire introduction to the recipe! I have to say I used to love (and still do love) my Mum’s trifle; a layer of tinned fruit, Swiss roll and jelly, with powdered custard and then whipped cream. I remember once trying a ‘proper’, i.e. sherry, trifle and it was simply disgusting. I hoped that the trifle in here would both look and taste impressive, but all I could think of was that vile sherry trifle and the stomach-churningly rich Whim-Wham I made a couple of years back for the blog.

So, with a certain amount of trepidation, I started to construct this pudding worth eating. Hopefully everyone who was coming round to my apartment would also think it worth eating too…

The first thing you need to do before you even consider making your trifle is to get hold of a nice bowl or dish to hold it in. I went for a classic stemmed glass trifle dish, nice and big and only $15. Bargain.
Now for the trifle itself: Start off by placing eight or so large macaroons in the base of your bowl. Break up some to fill in any gaps that may be there. By macaroons, I don’t mean coconut, but the old fashioned almond, or French, macaroons. These are quite tricky to get hold of and you won’t find them in a supermarket or even most bakeries. The best thing to do is phone around some French bakeries, or do as I did and keep it real by actually make your own. I took elements from an eighteenth century recipe by Elizabeth Raffauld and a contemporary one by Martha Stewart (see it here). Next, pour ¼ of a pint of a good dessert wine over them; Griggers suggests Frontignan, Malaga or Madeira wine. I went with Frontignan – not tricky to get hold hold of, but does more often go under the pseudonym of Muscat wine. Along with the wine, add two tablespoons of brandy.

Next make the custard by boiling a pint of single cream in a saucepan (any Americans out there, use coffee cream or half and half). Whilst you wait for it come to a boil, whisk together two large eggs, two large egg yolks and tablespoon of plain flour in a bowl. When the cream comes to a boil, tip it over the eggs whisking vigorously as you go, then pour it back into your saucepan and stir over a low heat for a few minutes until it becomes nice and thick. Add sugar to taste – I went with around three tablespoons in the end. Remember to make it slightly sweeter than you prefer as cold food will not taste quite as sweet as hot. Pour the custard over the soaked macaroons and allow to cool. In fact it is best to leave it over night.

Don’t be thinking that there is time for idling though, for there is a syllabub to conjure up! The syllabub recipe has already appeared in the blog before so I won’t go through it here. Check out the recipe here and use the same wines as before to make it. Note that the syllabub requires an overnight steep as part of its prep.

When the custard has firmed up, spread a good layer of raspberry jam over it and then spoon over the Everlasting Syllabub. Lastly, decorate with ratafia biscuits and some sweetmeats such as candied peel and comfits. Jane says to avoid tacky things like angelica and glace cherries, but I went with those nice cherries in syrup that are stones but have their stalks intact.

Leave the trifle somewhere cool for a while – a larder or pantry is better than a fridge, but in Houston, the refrigerator is the only option!

Groan!

#300 Trifle. Three hundred recipes also means I am two-thirds of the way through English Food and what a recipe to choose! It took a good amount of time to make, but it was so, so worth it. The sweet wines blended perfectly with the light, fresh creams and custards in such a wonderful way, and the almond biscuits on the top and bottom layers gave it a nutty, scented quality and the sweet raspberry jam lent a subtle fruitiness. There was no hint of alcoholic acridity like I expected. In fact I had two helpings and then when everyone had left, I polished the rest off! Excellent, excellent, excellent. And worth eating! 10/10.

Don’t I look pleased with myself!?

#297 Raspberry Pie

The tale of this pie is of personal pain and anguish. Let me tell you the tale…

It was my work-buddy Chandra’s PhD thesis defence yesterday and she requested that I made this pie rather a cake for when she came out. Great stuff, thought I, any excuse to make something out of the book, plus the raspberry is my favourite fruit so it has got to be a winner. This pie is an eighteenth century pie and requires the fruit to be cooked in the pastry casing and then in the last five minutes, a custard to be poured in through the hole in the pastry. This was the usual way to make a fruity pie in those days, apparently. Anyway, Griggers says to serve it hot or warm, so I nipped back to my apartment to make it. I popped the pie into the oven and got the custard – or caudle as it was called then – ready.

Unfortunately the raspberries were so juicy that there was no room for any caudle, so I ran over the road and bought some straws from the shop with the inspired idea that I would suck the spare juice out. Hoping the pie had cooled slightly I attempted to suck some out – I think because time was becoming an issue I didn’t notice the fact that this was 170°C fruit syrup too much, but then as I realized just how much syrup there was, my nervous system kicked in. Cue much wincing and swearing. After about 15 minutes of this, I had finally cleared enough space to pour the caudle in. Mouth pretty sore, but not major damage done. Popped the pie back in the over for its final five minutes and rushed it back to Rice University. It was only whilst driving down towards work that I noticed the skin of the roof of mouth sloughing off and dangling upon my red raw tongue. She had better bloody like this pie. Luckily it went down well. On returning home later that evening, I rinsed my mouth out with Listerine before bed. More agony. Then, in the morning, I thought I would clean my tongue as well as my teeth as it was burnt and may have had some nasty bacteria there trying to infect the poor thing. Bad idea. I left for work with bleeding tongue. Hopefully it won’t go gangrenous and I won’t have to have my face removed.

To make the pie, you need to start with the pastry. In the eighteenth century, puff pastry will have been used, but Griggers goes for the sweet rich shortcrust and gives an ingredients list for it. Sieve 12 ounces of plain flour along with 2 tablespoons of icing sugar and a pinch of salt into a large bowl. Next, add 8 ounces of cubed butter or a combination of butter and lard. Use a mixer or food processor, to rub the butter into the flour. If you like to keep it real, use your hands or one of those pastry cutters as I did. The important thing is to keep everything as cold as possible – use butter straight out of the fridge and turn that A/C as low as you can! Once the butter is rubbed in, add an egg yolk (keep the white) and two or three tablespoons of ice-cold water, enough to bring everything to a dough. Don’t worry if you add too much, you can add some more flour. Knead the dough briefly and then pop it in the fridge to rest and firm up again.

Preheat your oven to 190°C (425°F) and place a baking sheet on one of the shelves. Now roll out two-thirds of your dough and line your pie dish with it. If it is warm in the kitchen, roll it out on some cling film, this will stop it from breaking up. A top tip for you there. The dish needs to be 2 to 3 inches deep, Griggers doesn’t mention a diameter, but I went with an eight inch diameter one. Now arrange a pound of raspberries in a layer in the pie and sprinkle over 4 ounces of sugar (or less, if the raspberries are particularly sweet).

Roll out the remainder of the pastry to form a lid, gluing it on with a brushing of the reserved egg white. Trim the edges and decorate if you wish – I went with a mortar board motif, seeing as it was a PhD defence. Brush with more egg white and sprinkle with sugar. Make sure you leave a good-sized hole in the centre. Place in the oven on the hot baking tray and bake for 15 minutes before turning down the heat to 190°C (375°F). The point of the hot baking tray is so that the pastry bottom crisps up before the raspberries give up their juice, preventing a soggy pastry bottom to the pie. The pie should be cooked until the pastry is nicely browned and crisp, around 40 minutes.

Whilst it is cooking, prepare the caudle: bring 4 fluid ounces of single and 4 of double cream to a boil in a saucepan. As soon as boiling point is reached pour them over two egg yolks, whisking vigorously to prevent making scrambled eggs. In the final 5 minutes of cooking, take the pie out of the oven and slowly pour the caudle into the pie using a funnel and return to the oven so the caudle can thicken. Serve hot or warm. Oh, she makes it sound so easy. Looking back, it would have been better to pile the raspberries in the middle slightly so when it collapsed there would have been some space for the caudle. It was also suggested that instead of using a straw, I should have used a baster or a pipette or something. Retrospect is a wonderful thing.

#297 Raspberry Pie. Ah, the raspberry. There is nothing better than stumbling across some wild raspberries when walking in the woods. The pie itself was reminiscent of the French clafoutis, where fruit is cooked in custard in a pastry case, though without the lid. I love raspberries, I love custard and I love pastry, so this could not have been a disappointment. I have to say it was delicious, even though I my taste-buds were not working at their best at the time. The caudle had thickened up and mixed with the juice, and it wasn’t overly sweet either. Jane says that you can use any soft fruit for this pie – gooseberries work particularly well apparently – so I shall be definitely this again whenever there is a glut of soft fruits. Though without the second-degree burns this time. 8.5/10.

#293 Mrs Beeton’s Chocolate Soufflé

I’ve cooked quite a few – and eaten quite a few – soufflés in my time, but this is my first sweet one. It comes from the great Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, or to give its full title, The Book of Household Management Comprising information for the Mistress, Housekeeper, Cook, Kitchen-Maid, Butler, Footman, Coachman, Valet, Upper and Under House-Maids, Lady’s-Maid, Maid-of-all-Work, Laundry-Maid, Nurse and Nurse-Maid, Monthly Wet and Sick Nurses, etc. etc.—also Sanitary, Medical, & Legal Memoranda: with a History of the Origin, Properties, and Uses of all Things Connected with Home Life and Comfort. Those Victorians do go on, don’t they? The book is actually a collection of articles that she published in The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine between 1859 and 1861, and although she conjures up imaginations of austerity and matronliness, she actually died at the rather young age of 46 of tuberculosis, or consumption as the Victorians called it, and her great masterwork was published when she was just thirty years of age.

I’ve been putting off doing the sweet soufflés not because I don’t like the idea of them, but because I like to make desserts in advance and soufflés require a certain amount of time and concentration before baking immediately – not something I have the inclination to attempt after cooking a main meal (and perhaps polishing off a few glasses of wine). However, I thought that it was about time I tackled one, and it turns out that it is quite straight-forward, and although the whisking of egg whites and folding them into the chocolate mixture does need to be done at the last minute, much can be prepared in advance.

Preheat your oven to 190°C (375°F) and butter a cake tin (I used a 6″ one), so you can pop the soufflé straight into the oven. Separate four eggs, place the whites in a large bowl, and beat into the yolks 3 heaped teaspoons of caster sugar, a heaped teaspoon flour and 3 ounces of good quality grated dark chocolate. Now whisk the egg whites to the stiff-peak stage, remove a spoonful of egg white and mix it into the chocolate mixture to ‘slacken’ it. This makes it easier to fold the rest of mixture into the egg whites without losing the air. It is also worth mentioning that using a metal spoon to fold in your egg whites also helps to reduce loss of air. Pour the mix into the buttered cake tin, scatter a little more caster sugar and bake for 20 minutes. Mrs Beeton says to pin a napkin around the tin and bring it to the table straight away before it falls. Serve with pouring cream.

#293 Mrs Beeton’s Chocolate Soufflé. This was a very good soufflé. It wasn’t very sweet, which really showed off the bitter chocolate taste. In fact is tasted just like a whipped up mug of cocoa. The chilled cream – which Americans don’t seem to use on their desserts – in combination with the hot soufflé, really set it off. The only problem was that 20 minutes was a little too long; the centre of the soufflé wasn’t soft, as I like it to be, so it’ll be 15 minutes in the future. That’s my only gripe though. 7.5/10.

#291 Burnt Cream or Crème Brulée

Often considered a French dessert, Crème Brulée was thought to have come out if the kitchens of Trinity College, Cambridge via the sister of a librarian there, others think from an Undergraduate from Aberdeenshire in the 1860s. When the student graduated, so did the pudding and it became a favourite of the college. This is all nonsense because a recipe can be found in The Experienced English Housekeeper by Elizabeth Raffauld which was published in 1769 (I have a facsimile of it). Grigson gives three recipes for it – the first, from the librarian who called it a Crème Brulée, the second and third – both dating earlier – called it Burnt Cream. Jane Grigson got a bee in her bonnet about whether the dessert had French or English origins. Where did Raffauld get her recipe from? It is a question that cannot answered, it seems, as the two nations’ cuisines are overlapped and interwoven so much since the Norman conquest of 1066. She did find a sixteenth century English manuscript with a recipe for burnt cream though, which was written around the time that Charles II came back to England after returning from exile in France.

I did this pudding whilst I was in England to go after the roast pork. I’d been wanting to do it for a while, as it is a pud I really enjoy, but mainly I just wanted to get the blowtorch out and melt the sugar. I’d never done it and it has always looked such a satisfying thing to do. None of the receipts ask for a blowtorch, but rather a very hot grill or ‘salamander’, as overhead grills were called in days of yore.

There are three recipes given by Jane, I went with the first, which was also her favourite, from a 1909 book called The Ocklye Cookery Book by Eleanor L. Jenkinson:

Place the yolks of six eggs in a bowl and bring a pint of double cream to the boil and let it boil for a full half-minute. Quickly whisk the hot cream into the eggs and return the mixture to the pan. Cook on the very low heat until the cream thickens somewhat – it should coat the back of your wooden spoon. I then sweetened it with a little sugar and added some extra flavor with some orange-flower water (lifted from Raffauld’s recipe). Don’t cook for too long or on too high a heat, as the eggs will scramble. If you think the eggs have scrambled, pass the whole lot through a sieve. Pour the custard into a shallow dish and let it chill in the fridge for as long as possible – overnight, if possible. If not possible (as it wasn’t for me), place it in the freezer as soon as it has cooled down to set. To burn the cream, scatter it with a thin, even layer of caster sugar and pop it under a very hot grill until it turn to a lovely melted caramel. Or use a blowtorch. Put it back in the fridge to harden.

For the sake of completion, here are the other two recipes:

From Domestic Cookery by a lady (Maria Rundell), 1848

‘Boil a pint of cream with a stick of cinnamon, and some lemon peel; take it off the fire, and pour it very slowly into the yolks of four eggs, stirring until half cold; sweeten, and take out the spice, etc.; pour it into the dish; when cold, strew white powdered sugar over, and brown it with a salamander.‘

From The Experienced English Housekeeper by Elizabeth Raffauld, 1769

‘Boil a pint of cream with sugar, and a little lemon peel shred fine, then beat the yolks of six and whites of four eggs separately; when your cream is cooled, put in your eggs, with a spoonful of orange-flower water, and one of fine flour, set it over the fire, keep stirring it till it is thick, put it into a dish; when it is cold sift a quarter of a pound of sugar all over, hold a hot salamander over it till it is very brown, and looks like a glass plate put over your cream.‘

#291 Burnt Cream or Crème Brulée. ‘The best of all English puddings‘ says Griggers. Well I’m not sure of that, but it was pretty good. The cream tasted very light due to the heady perfume of the orange-flower water and the crackling caramel was satisfying to smash and delicious to eat. It wasn’t quite as thick as I expected to be. We all dug in with spoons, not bothering with bowls. I expect several of us now have herpes. Overall, a pretty good recipe – I think I will try it again with the lemon and cinnamon flavourings from the 1848 recipe. 6.5/10