As promised on the ‘School Meals Service with Heather Ellis’ episode of the podcast, I have written a recipe for a stone-cold school dinners classic for my monthly subscribers. I went for the pink-sponge and custard because quite a few people have mentioned this as a favourite on social media, so it was the obvious choice. Heather Ellis said on Twitter that there were several different colours of these sponges: I also remember brown (though I don’t think it was chocolatey, just coloured brown). Others remembered white, and I wondered if yellow was perhaps a colour? Let me know your thoughts/memories.
Listen to the podcast episode here:
Subscribe to get access
Read more of this content when you subscribe today. A monthly subscription costs just £3 (about $3.80 USD). You get access to my premium blog content, my Easter eggs page (with ours of clips to listen to!) and my monthly newsletter.
This post complements the episode of The British Food History Podcast called ‘The School Meals Service with Heather Ellis’:
Speaking with Heather Ellis on the podcast about the School Meals Service and school dinners really fired off some food memories, good and bad. If it has in you too, please let the School Meals Project know about them – and let me know about them too – there’s a postbag episode of the podcast coming in just two or three weeks’ time. Three stuck in my mind: sago or tapioca pudding, pink sponge and custard, and Spam fritters. Of those, my favourite is sago/tapioca pudding – it genuinely is one I cook at home regularly. I know it was called frogspawn by children across the country, but if made well, it is delicious. Honest.
For anyone unfamiliar with it, it is one of a tribe of puddings known as milk puddings which are essentially a starchy ingredient cooked in milk and sweetened with sugar, but in my opinion, they need to also contain cream and flavourings such as bay leaves, vanilla or lemon rind. The best-known of these is rice pudding, but there are also semolina, macaroni and arrowroot puddings. They became popular in schools because they were an excellent way of providing children with their calcium. Sago and tapioca come in the form of small balls or pearls, which turn translucent when cooked in liquid – tapioca pearls are used to make the ‘bubbles’ in bubble tea.
Sago and tapioca can be used interchangeably in recipes and taste the same, but there is a difference between the two; sago comes from the sago palm and tapioca from the cassava plant. The former is found in India and some parts of East Africa, and the latter in the Americas. The starch is extracted from the plants’ pithy centres by grating and squeezing. It is then suspended in a little water to make a paste, which is then passed through a colander to form little pellets that are then dried.[1]
Both are very much associated with Empire, and recipes using sago begin to appear in 18th-century cookery books. In Sarah Harrison’s The House-keeper’s Pocket-book sago is simmered in water and flavoured with sugar, cinnamon and lemon.[2]Elizabeth Raffald has a complex, red-coloured sago pudding containing red wine, sugar, bone marrow and egg yolks. She does have a simpler version closer to what we would recognise today: sago simmered in milk and cream, and flavoured with sack, sugar, eggs and nutmeg.[3] Through the 18th and 19th centuries, the typical way to prepare the pudding would be to cook it on the hob and then bake it in pastry. Mrs Beeton uses sago in two more recipes: a sweet sago sauce for desserts and a sago soup.[4]
If you are unsure about making sago or tapioca pudding (or returning to it after eating the runny school kind of years past), the great food historian Alan Davidson provides some words of encouragement: ‘[I]t is sometimes despised by the ignorant, that is to say, persons who have no knowledge of how good they are when properly made.’ He casts down a caveat, however: ‘[The] texture delights a few cognoscenti in Britain but is repellent to the majority and has no doubt contributed to the virtual disappearance of the pudding from British tables.’[5] And I say that it is a crying shame. It is rarely included in cookery books anymore, not even those specialising in puddings. Justin Gellatly is a fan though, and there are a couple of recipes in Helen Thomas’s excellent Pudding Book, but that’s about it.[6]
If you like the blogs and podcast I produce and would to start a £3 monthly subscription, or would like to treat me to virtual coffee or pint: follow this link for more information.Thank you.
The typical way to cook the pudding these days is to either bake it I the oven or cook it on the hob, and I provide methods for both, though I prefer the latter. It is quick to make and, despite what other recipes say, requires no soaking – just a careful swish in some cold water.
I’ve left the amount of sugar to you. If you intend to eat the pudding with sweet jam, go for around 90 grams, if you are eating it on its own, or with tart fruit like rhubarb or gooseberry, perhaps use 120 grams of sugar.
Serves 6 to 8 people, depending upon greediness. If more appropriate, half the amounts.
Around 30 g butter (if baking)
120 g sago or tapioca pearls
90–120 g caster sugar
1 litre full-fat milk
150 ml double cream
Flavourings: 3 or 4 strips of pared lemon rind, a lightly-crushed fresh bay leaf, a few drops of vanilla extract (or replace caster sugar with vanilla sugar), almond extract, cocoa, etc.
Oven method:
Preheat the oven to 160°C. In a baking dish of 1¼ litre capacity dot the bottom with small knobs of butter. Place the sago pearls in a jug and pour over plenty of cold water to release any starch. Pour through a sieve and then scatter the sago over the base of the dish with the sugar, milk, cream and flavourings. If using cocoa powder, whisk it into the milk before pouring into the dish. Place in the oven and bake for 60-90 minutes, stirring every now and again to disperse lumps. When the time is up, and you want a browner top, you could place it under a hot grill for a few minutes. Leave the pudding to stand for 10 minutes before serving.
Hob method:
Wash the sago pearls as described above and place them in a saucepan with the remainder of the ingredients, bar the butter. Bring slowly to a simmer, stirring gently. Leave to simmer for around 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. After the 15-minute mark, keep a closer eye on it: cook a further 10 to 15 minutes, but stir more frequently, scraping any stuck bits from the base. Sago pearls stick and catch easily!
Stop cooking when the pearls are soft and gelatinous. Let the pudding stand for 10 minutes before serving. If it seems a little on the thick side, stir a little more milk through it.
References
[1] Beeton, I. (1861). The Book of Household Management. Lightning Source; Davidson, A. (1999). The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford University Press.
[2] Harrison, S. (1751). The House-keeper’s Pocket-book And Compleat Family Cook (5th ed.). R. Ware.
[3] Raffald, E. (1769). The Experienced English Housekeeper (First Edit). J. Harrop.
[6] Gellatly, J. (2016). Bread, Cake, Doughnut, Pudding: Sweet and Savoury Recipes from Britain’s Best Baker. Penguin Books Limited; Thomas, H. (1980). The Pudding Book. Hutchinson & Co.
This pudding has been on my ‘to post’ list for absolutely ages. It has become of my favourites, though as you will discover as you read the post, not everyone agrees with me. I’ve called it a forgotten food, but it is still well-known in Ireland. It was popular in many parts of England too, but it doesn’t seem to get made anymore. Carrageen pudding is a set dessert akin to jellies, blancmanges and flummeries, but it is made from the gelatinous seaweed carrageen, also known as Irish moss. It used to be gathered in Yorkshire and South-West England, going by the name ‘Dorset Moss’.1
I first made it in 2015 as part of one of my semi-regular Pud Clubs; I always liked to make one risky pud, and carrageen pudding was it. I flavoured it the traditional way with sugar, lemon and brandy. I didn’t particularly like the taste: there was something of a Lemsip about it. If I remember rightly, it was voted worst pudding of the day. However it wasn’t the flavour that put people off; it is more gummy than a gelatine set dessert, and doesn’t dissolve cleanly in the mouth. As John Wright puts it: it doesn’t have an acquired taste – it barely has any – ‘more of an acquired texture.’2 That particular Pud Club was the closest I’ve seen anyone get to vomiting at one of my paid food events.
I returned to it later in the year after I’d had the idea for a seaside-themed popup restaurant, and though I could use it in the dessert course. I refined the recipe, adding some whipped cream to give it a mousse-like texture and flavoured it with elderflowers. I combined it with a gooseberry sherbet, and I was pretty pleased with it.
My ‘Buttery by the Sea’ menu from 2015
What is carrageen?
Carrageen is a common seaweed found throughout the coasts British Isles, except for parts of Lincolnshire and East Anglia.2 It is found in rockpools, is branched and a dark red colour. The wonderful food writer Theodora Fitzgibbon describes it as ‘a branching mucilaginous seaweed found on all rocks in Ireland’, which does not sound appetising, I realise. She goes on the comfort the reader, telling us that ‘it does not taste at all marine when properly prepared.’3 It is picked and dried in the sun, typically in April and May, and during the process it lightens from a dark red-brown to a creamy brownish beige, tinged with a pink-red hue.
Dried carrageen
To prepare carrageen, it is reconstituted in cold water, drained and then simmered in fresh water. It quickly turns viscous, bubbling away like the contents of a witch’s cauldron. The gloopiness is caused by the release of a trio of closely-related carbohydrates together called carrageenan.2 To extract it properly, the whole lot has to be squeezed through some muslin (cheesecloth). These carbohydrates are not digested by the body, and are therefore an excellent source of soluble fibre. Indeed, carrageen has been used as a treatment for a range of stomach and digestive complains and it ‘is considered extremely salutary for persons of delicate constitutions’.4 Its viscosity also made it a common treatment for sore throats and chest complaints. It also ‘fills plaster pores, makes wallpaper dressings…and fixes false teeth.’1
Carrageen a-bubbling away
Today carrageenan is commonly found in factory foods. For example, fat-free yoghurts no longer able to set properly are thickened with carrageenan. It is perfectly safe to eat, but foods that contain it should be avoided, because its inclusion is a dead giveaway that the food has been highly processed. Eat your yoghurt lipid intacta.
Don’t let my previous description put you off making this dessert; I really think I have the recipe right. The texture is good and is certainly better than using cornflour to set desserts.
My recipe for carrageen pudding
Subscribe to get access
Read more of this content when you subscribe today.
A subscription gives you access to premium content and costs £3/month. You’ll find extra recipes and posts, as well as access to my Easter Eggs page on the blog containing deleted scenes from podcast episodes as well as a whole extra mini-season. Follow this link for more information.
It is always an exciting day when I happen upon an ingredient I have never cooked or eaten, but have read about. I was, therefore, very excited when I approached the market stall of organic dairy farmers Hook & Son at London’s Borough Market at the end of December last year. They specialise in raw dairy products – indeed, it was spotting raw milk and butter that originally piqued my interest – but then I saw on their products list amongst the more typical dairy produce: colostrum. I immediately bought some (along with some excellent raw salted butter).
Colostrum is the name given to the milk produced by female mammals from their mammary glands for the first few days after giving birth to their young. It is very rich and is particularly high in protein: in the case of cows, around five times the protein of whole milk. Because it is the milk produced in order to give a newly-born calf a nutritional boost, it is not a commercial product. A calf should not be ‘deprived of this first natural aperitif’ as Dorothy Hartley put it.1 Whilst this is true, the reality is that there is a great deal of surplus colostrum ever since dairy cows have been bred to produce huge amounts of milk following the agricultural revolution of the 18th century. It was surplus because the highly nutritional colostrum – the beestings (sometimes spelt beastings) as they were called – gave calves diarrhoea.2 Some was reserved for motherless calves.
Leftover beestings would be sent into the community in jugs where it was considered a great treat. ‘It could not be bought’, Florence White tells us, ‘the farmer’s wife used to send a jugful to some of her oldest and best customers’, she would insist that the jug came back unwashed. Superstition held that ‘[t]o return the jug washed [would] bring about the death of the new-born calf.’3 It is today a niche foodstuff, and is typically considered ‘unmarketable’. Today colostrum is dried into powder and sold as a supplement to calves that would otherwise miss out in this very important food.4
Colostrum has been described as ‘golden yellow and as thick as double cream’.1 Well as you can see from my photograph, mine was certainly golden in colour: like a rich egg yolk custard. Upon inspection, however, it did not seem thick at all; in fact, I’d go so far as to say that it appeared watery. I tasted it and rather than it tasting lusciously creamy, it lacked sweetness. In fact, it had an almost savoury minerality about it. It still tasted nice; just not what I was expecting.
As colostrum comes to just the barest simmer, it thickens noticeably
Colostrum in the Kitchen
Being rich in fat and protein, colostrum was a foodstuff in its own right, but it was more often consumed cooked. This special milk has a rather curious property in that when it is poured into a saucepan and heated, it thickens just like a custard without having to add egg yolks or cornflour. The reason is down to the proteins. Regular whole milk contains broadly three types of protein: casein, whey protein and immunoglobulins (aka antibodies). The vast majority of the protein is made of casein in whole milk. This protein is temperature stable and doesn’t unfold (‘denature’) when hot. Therefore regular milk doesn’t gel or thicken. Colostrum however is very high in whey proteins (5x more than whole milk) and immunoglobulins (80x more than whole milk), both of which denature between around 55°C and 70°C.5 There is so much protein that colostrum will thicken and set like a custard all on its own. There can be so much protein in there that it has to be diluted with milk.
More typically, it was made into a thick ‘porridge’ with sugar and various flavourings: in Yorkshire it went under the name ‘bull jumpings’,6 in Wales it was called pwdin llo bach (calf’s pudding),7 but more generally, it was called beestings pudding. It is made by simply heating colostrum in a saucepan with sugar, some spices and dried fruit. It could also be set in the oven if more convenient. In fact it could be baked inside a pastry case like a Yorkshire curd tart (but without the curds or eggs!).
There was a certain amount of trepidation when I made mine – I thought that perhaps it would be too thin to thicken up. Well I needn’t have worried, it thickened readily with a pleasant slight graininess, just like a curd tart. Whilst it did feel rather odd to be eating colostrum, I have to admit it was a delicious milk pudding – one I heartily recommend.
Beestings pudding hot
If you like the blogs and podcast I produce, please consider treating me to a virtual coffee or pint, or even a £3 monthly subscription: follow this link for more information.
Beestings Pudding
Beestings pudding takes a matter of minutes to make. It tastes very much like the filling of a Yorkshire curd tart, especially if the pudding is flavoured with allspice. If you like, the pudding can be baked in shallow dish, or even better, a blind-baked sweet shortcrust pastry base. Follow the instructions for baking a Yorkshire curd tart if you fancy having a go at that.
Serves 4
500 ml colostrum
60 g caster sugar
60 g raisins
Pinch salt
Pinch freshly grated nutmeg or ground allspice
Place all of the ingredients in a small saucepan over a low to medium heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar.
When the sugar has dissolved, turn up the heat to medium. It’s a bit like making custard now, but the heat can be higher: keep stirring until the beestings thicken – as if by magic – as it comes to a simmer.
When the beestings are thick like creamy, but slightly granular, porridge, it is ready.
Divide between four bowls and serve, or refrigerate and eat cold.
Beestings pudding cold
References
Hartley, D. Food in England. (Little, Brown & Company, 1954).
The Medical Times and Gazette (1857).
White, F. Good Things in England. (Persephone, 1932).
Foley, J. A. & Otterby, D. E. Availability, storage, treatment, composition, and feeding value of surplus colostrum: a review. J. Dairy Sci.61, 1033–1060 (1978).
Hege, J., Ghebremedhin, M., Joshi, B. L., Schreiber, C. & Vilgis, T. A. Soft gels from bovine colostrum. Int. J. Gastron. Food Sci.23, (2021).
Brears, P. Traditional Food in Yorkshire. (Prospect Books, 2014).
As I promised in my last post, I have a second cheese recipe for you that uses a traditionally-made British cheese. Harvey & Brockless sent me a whole loads of excellent cheeses and other goodies, and tucked in there was probably my favourite British blue cheese, Isle of Wight Blue:
‘Established in 2006 by mother and son Julie and Richard Hodgson, Isle of Wight Cheese Co. flagship blue is soft and creamy with a bluey green natural rind and blue veins.’
Beautiful Isle of Wight Blue (pic: Harvey & Brockless)
It’s strong, yet mellow and very creamy. Nothing like a Stilton at all (I love a good Stilton too, of course).
This is exactly the sort of cheese Professor Peter J. Atkins and I were talking about in my podcast episode about the British cheese industry, and how there is a resurgence in traditional styles and methods: softer cheeses made in small batches in small farms – before the behemoth that is Cheddar came along!
This cheese, because of its blue cheese flavour, low acidity and smooth consistency, is perfect to make into an ice cream. Cheese ice creams used to be popular, hitting a peak in the Regency period: indeed, the Prince Regent himself tucked into Parmesan cheese ice cream. My ice cream, like Prince George’s, is sweetened, but it is not over-sweet. It’s very simple to make – a case of mixing soft cheese into some cream and sugar. A curdy, hard or crumbly cheese would not work here.
I’ve combined it with a dessert classic: pears poached in red wine. There’s a recipe in Forme of Cury for it, so it really does have quite the vintage. The poaching wine is sweet and spiced and is reduced to a delicious, tart and slightly fiery spooning sauce. On the side: a nice digestive biscuit.
This is a well tried-and-tested recipe: it’s popped up on restaurant and pop-up restaurant menus in the past, but I originally made it as part of The Telegraph Fabulous Foodie competition all the way back in 2015. It was judged by none less than Xanthe Clay, John Gregory Smith and Jeremy Dixon and it took me to the grand final. So if you are still unsure as to whether you’ll like it, take it from them, not me, that it is good!
Give it a go, you won’t be sorry. Also, see below for an excellent way of using up left over ice cream and sauce.
In a bowl, break up the cheese as best you can and beat into it one third of the cream. You won’t be able to blend it in perfectly, but a little texture is no bad thing.
Sift the icing sugar with the reminder of the cream in a second bowl and whip until just slightly floppy, then fold into the cheese.
Freeze it in an ice cream churn if you have one. Alternatively, place in a tub, pop in the freezer and beat it with a small whisk every 20 to 30 minutes or so until it becomes too difficult; at that point you are done, and it can be left in the freezer until required. If you don’t want to freeze it, you can whip the cream a little more and use it like clotted cream.
For the pears:
4 to 6 unripe conference pears
500 ml red wine
100 g caster sugar
1 cinnamon stick
2 long peppers (or ¼ tsp black peppercorns)
¼ tsp ground ginger
Peel the pears, leaving the stalks intact. Slice the bottom so that the pear is able to stand up sturdily. If you have one, use a melon baller to remove the core from beneath.
Bruise the cinnamon stick and long pepper (or crack the peppercorns) and place in a pan with the wine and sugar. Put over a medium-low heat and stir to dissolve the sugar. Once dissolved, add the pears.
Bring to a simmer and cover the pan, turn down the heat and poach until tender. This will take around 20 minutes. The pears won’t be completely submerged, so to ensure an even colouring from the wine, turn them half way through cooking.
Remove the pears and set aside. They can be stored in the fridge for up to four days.
Now make the syrup: turn up the heat and bring the wine to the boil and let it reduce by around three-quarters or more, until viscous. Pour into a jug or jar and allow to cool.
To serve:
Remove the ice cream from the fridge around half an hour before you want to serve. Place a pear in the centre of a plate – it may need another trim at the bottom if it’s been in the fridge a day or two – and carefully spoon a couple of teaspoons of the syrup over the tip of the pear.
Place a biscuit next to the pear – I used a homemade digestive (post coming soon), but a hob-nob would also work very well – and place a scoop or quenelle of ice cream on top the biscuit.
Leftovers: there will probably be leftover ice cream and syrup, the latter of which keeps for weeks. Treat yourself to a very grown-up ice cream cookie sandwich using digestives instead of cookies, cheese ice cream instead of vanilla, and red wine syrup in place of raspberry sauce.
This post complements the episode ‘Christmas Special 2021: Christmas Pudding’ on The British Food History Podcast.
On Stir Up Sunday I made my Christmas Pudding, using Sam Bilton’s Great Aunt Eliza’s plum pudding recipe, and now it is time to cook it and get it ready to serve for the big day. If you missed the first postclick here to catchup.
I fed the pudding a couple of tablespoons of rum (but brandy is also good) twice, and I found the best way to do this was the untie the pudding, open the top and sprinkle in the rum, before retying with fresh string.
On Christmas Day, get your big pot of boiling water just like you did for the first boiling. Simmer the pudding for 2 hours, making sure the pudding doesn’t touch the base of the pot and scorch.
When ready, remove from the pan and gingerly cut away the string and carefully unwrap the pudding; don’t worry too much about it breaking because it develops a skin made from the flour that had been dredged on the cloth before its first boiling, keeping it all together. Pop it on a serving dish with a sprig of holly.
When you want to serve it, flame with rum or brandy, turn the lights down and carry it into the dining room. There will be applause.
I served the pudding with rum butter, but you can also serve it with brandy butter (which I must admit, I don’t like as much as the rum butter), or good old custard. I’ll be publishing a post tomorrow with my recipe for brandy or rum butter.
If you like the blogs and podcast I produce, please consider treating me to a virtual coffee or pint, or even a £3 monthly subscription: follow this link for more information.
The pudding was delicious, I must say, and it will forever be my standard, so thanks again to Sam Bilton for her letting me use the recipe.
Listen to the podcast episode for more information, including the history and folklore surrounding Christmas pudding, plus a cooking spot, and a handy guide to flaming your pudding safely and effectively!
There’s nothing more Cornish than a good blob of clotted
cream on a lovely cream tea. Unless you are from Devon of course, then there’s
nothing more Devonian than a good blob of clotted cream on a lovely cream tea.
For those not in the know, clotted cream is a very thick
cream with a much higher butterfat content than double (heavy) cream; weighing
in at 64% and 48% respectively (for comparison, single cream is 18% fat, and
full-fat milk is around 4%).
Clotted cream has a long history in Devon and Cornwall, and
it is reckoned that it was first introduced to England by Phoenician settlers around
2000 years ago. Phoenicia was on the eastern Mediterranean coast in, what is
now Syria, Lebanon and northern Isreal. The clotting of cream was a way of
preserving buffalo milk. By removing the watery liquid, leaving mainly
butterfat, the growth of spoilage organisms is retarded. The folk of Devonshire
knew of its efficacy in this area; it was said that not even a witch’s breath
could turn it sour.
If you have ever tried it, you will know that clotted cream
– aka clouted cream or scalded cream in older books – is absolutely delicious
and is well worth buying. It is possible to make your own and there is a recipe
at the end of the post of you would to try your hand at it.
The best thing about it is the buttery, nutty crust that
forms on the top as part of the manufacturing process. It is made by gently
heating rich milk or cream in large shallow pans to a temperature of 80 to 90°C,
the heat traditionally coming from cinders or charcoal. Once the buttery crust
had formed, it was carefully but quickly moved to a cool place and sat upon
some slate so make the cooling process as rapid as possible; the cold shocking
the thin skimmed milk into sinking quickly and making a layer underneath the
thick cream. These days, it’s all done with centrifuges, which is rather less
romantic.
Once completely cooled, the clotted cream was lifted away
with cold, wet hands and mixed in cold, wet wooden bowls to remove the last of
the watery milk. It was then layered up in pots. I found a 1755 home recipe
from an Elizabeth Cleland who recommended sprinkling rose water and sugar
between the layers – the result must have been delicious!
The left-over skimmed milk, by the way, was taken away and
either drank or used to make scones or Devonshire splits.
From the point of view of butterfat extraction, clotted
cream is a much more efficient method than basic skimming techniques. The
reason it is not the standard technique, I assume, is that double skimming requires
no heating or centrifuges, tipping the balance of economy in double cream’s
favour. Couple this with the fact that modern refrigeration and pasteurisation
is doing the lion’s share of the preserving today means that the process of
clotting cream is no longer required for that purpose. We eat it for the sheer
love of it (ditto smoked fish and meat).
Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management says that
there are two types of clotted cream: Devonshire and Dutch. She goes on to
explain the difference – Dutch clotted cream is thick enough to stand a spoon
up in. Now, in my (humble) opinion, it ain’t clotted cream unless you
can stand a spoon up in it, so I can only conclude that English clotted cream –
at least from a Victorian Londoner’s point of view – was relatively runny
compared to that of today’s
Clotted cream is used to make ice cream, some biscuits and as a topping to the old-fashioned pudding Devonshire junket, a sweetened milk dessert set with rennet, producing curds and whey. It can be used to enrich sauces and soups too but use with caution – things can end up too rich.
Rodda’s is the largest producer of clotted cream and is based in Cornwall. There is much debate between the folk of Devon and Cornwall as to whether the cream should be added before or after the jam. Nick Rodda reckons his grandfather knew why:
We always put our cream on top because we are proud of it, Devonians are slightly ashamed of theirs, so they cover it up with their jam.
I must confess to siding with the Devonians on this one.
It’s all down to what you think the buttery cream’s role is. The argument goes
something like this:
The Cornish: it is the cream, and you wouldn’t put cream under
your fruit salad/trifle/fruit tart etc, now would you?
The Devonians: it is the butter, and you wouldn’t spread
butter over the jam on your toast/crumpet/muffin etc, now would you?
Your choice.
If you like the blogs and podcast I produce, please consider treating me to a virtual coffee or pint, or even a £3 monthly subscription: follow this link for more information.
Home-Made Clotted Cream
All you need to make your own is some double cream, an oven
and patience.
Before…
Preheat your oven to 80°C. Pour around 1 litre of
double cream into a wide, shallow ovenproof dish, place it in the oven and
leave in there for 12 hours. If you are really patient, leave for 18 hours to
achieve a darker, more delicious caramel-flavoured crust.
…after
Carefully remove from the oven, cover with kitchen foil and
pop straight into the fridge to cool quickly and undisturbed.
Once fully chilled, lift the clotted cream from the dish and
layer up in pots. I filled three good-sized ramekins with mine. The amount of
skimmed milk at the bottom will vary depending upon how long you left the cream
in the oven for.
The cream keeps for 7 days in the fridge.
References:
Clotted Cream, RS Chavan, A Kumar & S Bhatt,
2016, In Encyclopedia of Food and Health
The last in a quartet of gooseberry posts – I promise I will change the subject next post.
In my honest, humble opinion this is the best
gooseberry dessert recipe. It’s old-fashioned and simple to make – gooseberries
are baked with a little brown sugar and a knob or two of butter, all covered in
cake sponge. The berries are still very sharp and are perfectly balanced with
the warm, sweet sponge. This is much more superior to the better-known Eve’s
pudding – stewed cooking apples covered in sponge cake. I suspect this would work
excellently with blackcurrants.
This recipe crops up in my traditional English or British cookery books, but I first heard of it from Jane Grigson (as I have many dishes) in her book English Food.
For the pudding, you can make any amount of topping, it’s
dependent upon whether you like a thin or thick layer of sponge and the
dimensions of your baking dish. I used a soufflé dish of diameter around 7
inches/18 centimetres. I think this is a good amount for this size, and for
most family-sized dishes.
The sponge is made using the all-in-one method, so make sure
your butter is extremely soft to ensure a light topping.
Scatter the sugar and dot the butter on the bottom of your
baking dish and cover with the gooseberries; you are aiming for a generous
single layer of them.
Place the butter, flour, caster sugar and eggs in a bowl and
beat together with an electric mixer until the mixture is smooth and
well-combined. Using a large spoon or spatula, add the cake batter in big
spoonfuls over the gooseberries and level it, you don’t have to be very neat
here, the baking batter will flatted itself out.
Place in the oven and bake for around an hour until the top
is a deep golden-brown colour.
Serve immediately with custard or lightly-whipped cream sweetened with a little icing sugar.
If you like the blogs and podcast I produce, please consider treating me to a virtual coffee or pint, or even a £3 monthly subscription: follow this link for more information.
Last post I wrote all about the mediaeval dish Blanc Mange, an almond and rice stew served with chicken or fish. Obviously, I couldn’t let the opportunity pass to give you a recipe for the dessert blancmange we know and love (or hate).
Blancmange went from a savoury to a sweet dish somewhere
around 1600 – 1604 is the earliest recipe for it I can find that sounds like
the pudding we eat today.
When one thinks of blancmange, a shuddering over-sweet pale
pink mass doused with cloying raspberry flavouring is imagined. This is not a
proper blancmange. When I make one, I go back to basics.
photo: unknown
Blancmange should be a simple affair: cream, milk, sugar and
almond extract set with gelatine. In the recipes from earlier than the 20th
Century, the gelatine would have been prepared in house from calves’ feet or
pigs’ trotters. There was an alternative setting agent called isinglass which
is made from the dried swim bladders of fish.
By the way, the pronounced almond flavour of almond extract is not supposed to emulate that of regular almonds, but of bitter almonds which were high in cyanide and therefore used in small, highly aromatic doses. Other things were sometimes added to this basic mixture: lemon zest, cinnamon, brandy and rose water all crop up in recipes through the centuries.
If you like the blogs and podcast I produce, please consider treating me to a virtual coffee or pint, or even a £3 monthly subscription: follow this link for more information.
The blancmange went rather downhill once you could buy it in packet form. The almond extract or bitter almonds replaced with almond flavouring and instead of gelatine, cornflour was used. This is the dessert that many people hate. I must confess to quite liking the preparatory blancmange, but then, I’ll eat anything. It shouldn’t be called blancmange though, as it is quite a different beast; fake flavour and thick cornflour base making the final pud less jiggly and delicate. I suppose that after the realisation you could set custard with cornflour instead of egg yolks, the ‘magic’ formula was applied to blancmange.
I like to serve blancmange with a compote of cherries
flavoured with a dash of kirsch and some delicate shortbread biscuits, but it
is pretty good served all on its own. Who needs panna cotta!? If you want to
turn the blancmange out of its mould, it is worth brushing the inside with a
thin layer of sunflower oil so that it is easier to turn it out.
Makes 600 ml:
250 ml whole milk
gelatine leaves (see method)
100 g caster sugar
300ml double cream
1 tsp almond extract
Heat up the milk in a saucepan and as you wait, soak the gelatine leaves in cold water – check the instructions in the packet and use the correct number to set 600 ml except use one leaf fewer than instructed – you want a good wobble.
A good wobble…
When the milk is very hot, squeeze out the excess water from
the gelatine and whisk it into the milk along with the sugar. Once dissolved,
add the double cream and almond extract. Pour into your mould or moulds, cover
with cling film or a plate and refrigerate overnight. If you like, you can whip
the cream until floppy and stir it through the milk when it is just warm. This
way you get a mousse-like consistency – good if you want to serve it at a
dinner party.
To turn out the blancmange, dip the moulds in hot water for
around 10 seconds. To make it release you may have to carefully coax the blancmange
from the inside edge of the mould with your finger; if you can move it away
easily, it should come out. Place a serving plate on top and quickly flip it
over – the blancmange should release, if not, simply dip it in the water for a
further 10 seconds.
Once turned out, you may find that some of the blancmange has
melted, so tidy up the plate with a piece of kitchen paper before serving.
I’m carrying on the medieval almond milk theme (I will move away from this topic, I promise) with another post on what could be described as mediaeval England’s national dish – blanc mange. Blanc mange – literally white food – was a simple stew of poultry and rice poached in almond milk. Over the centuries, it evolved into the wobbly dessert we know and love (or hate) today. In France almond soups thickened with rice or bread are still eaten, so it appears that the blanc mange diverged into two different dishes: cold pud and creamy soup.
Blanc mange wasn’t just popular in England, but over the whole of mediaeval Europe. It began life as a Lent dish of rice, almond milk and fish such as pike or lobster, but people liked it so much that it was eaten at every meal, where the fish could be substituted with chicken or capon. Outside of Lent it could be flavoured with spices such as saffron, ginger, cinnamon and galangal, seasoned with verjuice, sugar and salt. It is thought that the dish originates from the Middle East, the part of the world we imported rice and almonds.
It’s worth mentioning that although a Lent dish, no commoner
could afford this meal even in its most basic form– imported rice and almonds
were very expensive, as were farmed chickens. This was commonplace food for the
richer folk of society.
Here’s an example of a blanc mange recipe from around 1430:
For to make blomanger. Nym rys & lese hem & washe
hem clene, & do þereto god almande mylke & seþ
hem tyl þey al tobrest; & þan lat hem kele. & nym þe lyre of
þe hennyn or of capouns & grynd hem small; kest þereto wite grese &
boyle it. Nym blanchyd almandys & safroun & set hem aboue in þe dysche
& serue yt forþe.
This recipe seems to be for a blanc mange served cold or warm;
the rice is cooked in the almond milk and cooled while the capon or chicken is poached
separately. Saffron and almonds are sprinkled over the dish before serving.
If you like the blogs and podcast I produce, please consider treating me to a virtual coffee or pint, or even a £3 monthly subscription: follow this link for more information.
I’ve looked at a few recipes and they don’t really change over the next two hundred years – always chicken or fish, rice and almond milk and a few mild spices, sometimes served hot, sometimes cold and often adorned with slivered almonds fried in duck or goose fat and a sprinkle of sugar, all before being served forth. They also seem extremely bland with most recipes containing no spices at all. That said, many of our favourite foods are bland: white bread, mashed potatoes, avocados and mayonnaise all belong in the bland club, so bland does not equal bad. In fact, bland food is usually comfort food, and I strongly suspect that this is what is going on here, a bland white food, served at every meal no matter how grand. Blanc mange was mediaeval comfort food, the macaroni cheese of its day!
The blanc mange went from a chicken and rice dish to wobbly
pudding somewhere around 1600 it seems. A 1596 recipe uses capon meat, ginger,
cinnamon and sugar, and is pretty much identical to the recipes from 1400, but
then I find in Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book of 1604 that she gives
instruction for a cold sweet. She describes a moulded dessert set with calves’
foot jelly (i.e. gelatine), almonds, rice flour, rosewater, ginger and cinnamon.
Mediaeval Blanc Mange
I’ve combined the methods of several recipes from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The important thing to remember is that mediaeval almond milk would have contained sugar, salt and a little rosewater, so if you want to use the modern shop-bought stuff, you might want to add a little of all three for authenticity. Alternatively, you can have a go at making some yourself.
The spices I went for were ginger and cinnamon, but you can
add white pepper, galingale and saffron too if you like.
The only thing I have done differently to the original
recipes is to leave my chicken on the bone; bones stop the chicken drying out
in the cooking process and flavour the dish.
1 chicken jointed into 8 breast pieces, 4 thigh pieces and 2
drumsticks, skin removed
3 tbs duck or goose fat
white rice measured to the 300 ml line of a jug
½ tsp each ground cinnamon and ginger
1 ½ tsp salt
small handful slivered almonds
Demerara sugar and more salt for sprinkling
Pour the almond milk in a saucepan and heat up to almost
boiling. Meanwhile, in a large saucepan melt one tablespoon of the goose or duck
and when hot, tip in the rice. Stir to coat the rice grains in the fat, then
add the spices and salt. Add the chicken pieces and hot almond milk and stir
just once more.
Turn the heat down to low, place on a lid and simmer gently
for 25 minutes.
When the time is almost up, fry the slivered almonds in the
remaining fat until a deep golden-brown colour.
Serve the chicken and rice in deep bowls with the almonds, salt
and sugar sprinkled over.
There you go, pretty easy stuff really. And the verdict?
Well, it was quite bland, but pretty tasty with all of the adornments, and the
flavours developed a lot over night when I reheated some. The sugar wasn’t as
weird tasting as you might expect, and the mild scent of rose water really
lifted the dish. The almonds fried in duck fat were amazing, and I’ll certainly
be stealing that idea. Will I make it again? Probably not, I must admit, but it
was an interesting experiment. Next post, I’ll give you a very easy recipe for
a proper dessert blancmange, one of my favourite things to eat. Until then,
cheerio!
British Food: A History 