#431 Murrumbidgee Cake

I think it’s fair to say that if it wasn’t for Jane Grigson – and therefore this blog – I wouldn’t be doing what I do now. Cooking and writing for a living was not what I had in mind when I started it; I just needed a way to practise writing for my PhD! I didn’t really know who Jane Grigson was, but I could see by the book English Food sat on my shelf, which someone else had bought me, that it was comprehensive and would be a challenge.

Jane Grigson died in 1992, but her voice and ethos certainly spoke to me loud and clear. Since her death, her influence is still strong for those in the know. But how do you get people not in the know to discover her? It’s certainly not by walking into a bookshop. I make a point of going into one and heading straight to the cookery section; only very rarely is there a Jane Grigson book to be found, yet there is often several by her contemporary Elizabeth David.

Jane and Sophie Grigson (Rex Features)

Her death shocked and saddened people, and her family felt it the strongest, yet after her death her daughter Sophie discovered something in Jane’s kitchen. “We were sitting around shell-shocked, but then I found a Murrumbidgee cake in her larder. A beautiful thing, rich, dense, a favourite of hers. I cut slices of it, and we ate them, and it was wonderful. Her last gift to us.”

Jane would buy these cakes in Oxford, eventually getting hold of a recipe after several years of searching and put it in English Food. It’s a fruit cake so full of dried fruit and nuts that there’s barely any cake batter, rather like American fruit cakes, she says. The cake takes its name from the Murrumbidgee river in Australia, so how it ended up in Oxford I don’t know.

First of all, line a 2 pound loaf tin with greaseproof paper and set the oven to 150°C. Next, mix together the fruit and nuts in a large bowl: 7 ounces of whole Brazil nuts, 5 ounces of whole walnut halves, 8 ounces of halved stoned dates, 3 ½ ounces of candied citrus peel, 6 ounces of glacécherries, 3 ½ ounces of raisinsand the grated zest of a lemon. Phew!

Now mix 3 ½ ounces of plain flour with ½ teaspoon each of baking powder and salt and five ounces of caster sugar. Sift these over the fruit and nuts, getting your hands in there to make sure they all get coated.

In a jug, beat 3large eggs with a teaspoon of vanilla extract, pour into the fruit and flour and mix well until you have a stiff batter.

Pile in the mixture into the tin, pressing down the fruit and nuts and smoothing as well you can; I found this very tricky as there is so little cake batter but it all turned out okay in the end.

Bake for two hours, testing the mixture with a skewer to see if it’s baked, if during the bake, the cake looks as though it’s getting too brown, cover with brown paper.

Cool the cake for 10 minutes and turn out onto a clean tea towel and make several holes in the cake with a skewer. Feed it with some alcohol; Jane suggests brandy or rum, but you can use any spirit or liqueur you like, I went with rum. Wrap the cake in the towel, cover with cling film and pop in the fridge. Every week, for one to two months, feed with a little more alcohol.

#431 Murrumbidgee Cake. This was a wonderful cake! I know fruit cakes like this are not everyone’s cup of tea, but I have to say it beats a Christmas cake hands-down, and as just as Jane says, there’s a good richness to the cake but without the sweet icing that usually adorns a fruit cake. The fruit was soft and the cake mixture deliciously moist. It’s quite an expensive cake to make, unless you eat a variety of dried fruit and nuts anyway and have them in your larder, but it is definitely worth it. It may not have become a British classic, but it is a Grigson family classic, and that’ll certainly do for me. 9/10

#367 Hot Red Pepper Jelly

Chilli peppers and sweet bell peppers have never really been absorbed into our eating culture. I cannot think of a single English (or indeed British) dish that uses it. You do find some sliced red pepper on a salad, but that’s about it. When Portuguese and Spanish explorers brought them back from their travels to the New World, many of the Southern European and Northern African countries quickly assimilated it into their cooking. Of course, peppers are most successful in Asia. Who can imagine an Thai, Indian or Pakistani curry without it?

Whenever I cook with peppers – sweet or hot – it is always in a curry or an Italian pasta sauce. Well with this recipe I think that Jane Grigson is trying to use peppers in a very English way. In fact it comes from her daughter Sophie Grigson, now a very successful food writer in her own right. I think it is a very British preserve; a clear sweet jelly cut with a bit of vinegar to make it certainly savoury.

Halve and core 2 pounds of cooking apples such as Bramleys seedling, but don’t chuck out the cores (they are a valuable source of pectin). Chop the flesh and blitz in a food processor. Tip them into a preserving pan or stockpot with the reserved cores. Tip in 15 fluid ounces of cider vinegar to prevent the apples from discolouring. Next, deseed and roughly chop 3 red peppers and 4 red chilli peppers. Blitz those up too and add to the pot.

Bring to a boil and simmer for a good 20 minutes. At this point there will be an absolutely delicious smell. Savour it – the smell from this aromatic sharp concoction is wonderful! Strain the hot mixture through a jelly bag and allow it to drip overnight.

Next day, measure the volume of juice you have and pour it into you pan. Stir in granulated sugar – you’ll need a pound for every pint of juice. Once the sugar has dissolved, turn up the heat and boil for 20 minutes.

Normally, the apples alone have enough pectin in them to easily set a jelly like this, but the chilli peppers somehow interact with the pectin and prevent it from happening. To get around this problem you need to add extra pectin which comes in the form of a viscous liquid or a powder. Grigson suggests using 3 fluid ounces of liquid pectin (e.g. Certo), but you could use a sachet of pectin powder in its place. Whichever you use, mix it well into the boiling jelly. Test for a set using a thermometer; 104⁰C is what you are looking for. This will take about 10 or 15 minutes of hard boiling. It is important to note that you shouldn’tfollow the instructions on the packet. Pot the jelly into sterilised jars.

#367 Hot Red Pepper Jelly. This was very refreshing and delicious – the sweet jelly combined with sharp vinegar is a great one that really brought out chilli flavour as well as chilli heat. It was very good with cheese. 8.5/10

The time has come…

This morning I am off for my wisdom teeth out. I haven’t quite managed to make the shed-load of ice-cream that I’d planned to. I am trying to be healthy though, so it’s probably not a bad thing. I have, however, made a shed-load of soup. I’ve done three Grigson ones, and I’ve picked ones that are liquidised, so that I can drink them out of a mug or with a straw. I’ve made tomato and carrot, watercress and green pea. Yumbo! I shall write up the recipes throughout the week.

I’m not particularly nervous about getting them taken out – but I am worried about how sore it’s going to be afterwards. I had a choice, you see, of having all four out at once, but with a general anaesthetic or have pairs out in two sessions with a local. I chose the former; best to get all over and done with, I reckon. It’s going to be sore though. At least I get to laze about for a couple of days – I’ve been busy working on the PhD, and the data collection is so very BORING, so I’ll be nice just to watch crap telly.

Speaking of telly, I watched Market Kitchen on UKTV Food the other day. If you haven’t seen it, it is actually very good. It’s filmed in Borough Market in London and lots of good chefs and food writers go on it. It also has the lovely Matt Tebutt presenting. Anyways, Jane Grigson’s daughter, Sophie was on it cooking Singin Hinnies – a favourite of hers and her Mums. She was saying that, had Jane not died, she would be 80 this year. She spoke of Jane’s upbringing in Sunderland, where people were so poor that the kids didn’t have shoes even in the wintertime. Everyone ate Singin Hinnies, though, from Rich, Middle Class (like Jane) to The Poor. I’ve never had them. I shall endeavour to cook them soon. Most importantly, Sophie said that English Food is her favourite of her mother’s books.