I had fun yesterday. Much needed, after a heavy work week and with two more to come (it's my peak season, and it is not easier doing it all in the one chair instead of zipping round the UK interviewing folk). Pottering busily in the kitchen with intermittent twitter chat was precisely the kind of antidote required. Thanks to everyone who kept me company.
#HeritageKitchen is a very open hashtag, but I think most people went into family memories if they were doing that aspect of the cookalong. Which I did too, but I also wanted to play with historical cooking, and other concepts of heritage. And to cook All The Things, apparently.
Historical cookery part 1 was the very reliable Boodles' Fool, which I cooked out of my #ConfinedBookswap book, Victory in the Kitchen. I'd gladly eat this again, though preferably not at a West End men's club. Lemon, orange, cream, sponge. As the original author, Georgina Landemare, had it "like trifle, but nice". (I quite like trifle, but this was in fact nice. I finished it today, having overdosed on pudding yesterday. It keeps nicely.)
Part 2 was a terrifying 16th century posset recipe, where I went very awol from the East Riding Archives' advice, made a sherry syrup and a custard, mixed the two, and only *slightly* curdled it. Which I think isn't how posset is meant to work, but there are limits on what I'll drink. (I couldn't drink it all, and the cold version was, pleuk, I'm afraid. Still, it worked enough for test purposes.)
Heritage is also background, of course, and I've mentioned my Swedish granny a bit here. She didn't cook classical Swedish food at all (apart from a Christmas spread, and even that's a bit bastardised and mixed with German foods). But I've been interested in Swedish cooking on her behalf for a long time, and was a bit sad last year not to have any semlor in Lent. This year, obvs, no semlor-fetching will happen, so I essayed making my own.
My yeast is definitely not dead:
The recipe I've linked is way more reliable on timings than my cookbook version, so these almost burned. But six were salvageable and I have had two, filled as is traditional with marzipan and cream. And today, less marzipan but some passion fruit curd, which was *chefs kiss*
It was lovely to cook something new to me, especially baking which isn't really my thing. And it's lovely to have something I associate with central London, rather than actual Sweden. I first tasted these at a Scandi crime fest in Spitalfields, and I've bought them at two cafes I'm very fond of. But in an emergency, I can now make my own...
London's really on my mind at the moment. I don't know if you've seen our population seems to have dropped 700k in one year. It is *very* quiet. And it's a bit like Christmas - discovering that so many people don't think London is home, so they've skedaddled in a crisis. But it is my home. I was born here, my parents were born here (my grandparents, not so much, but that's how it goes). Losing almost 10% of population in a year is, um, terrifying. I hope we can rebound.
So I finished with two pieces of London cooking from the 1970s. My mum, learning 'English' cooking from books (carefully annotated, because she didn't grow up with any of this - there's a page on kids' parties which I mentioned yesterday I had almost all of at my parties. That's because Mum had never been to an ordinary birthday party, such as we might take for granted, so she got it from books). And then learning from a zillion other cuisines, because why not when Penguin was making it easy. I enjoyed Stef and Andrew and Katie talking cookbooks for their cookalongs - somehow these core texts keep on resonating.
I made Robert Carrier's take on Scandi (or a very simple version of it): Norwegian seafood salad (prawns in dill and lemon, on account of an absence of all lettuce locally, and not wanting a full meal which would require smoked haddock too):
And by request, I resurrected the recipe-less memory of 1970s frankfurter and chip salad. As a dish, not as terrifying as I remembered. As a concept of what my folks brought back from overseas travel c1971... argh. The story is twote from about here.
So this was all fun, if a tad indigestible in total. I am not short of snacks for this week, that's for sure.
And it's good to have a thing to look forward to. This was a bit of a saviour in a grim time. Two more diary dates:
- 13 Feb Confined Cocktails are of course pre-Valentine, or Galentine, or anti-Valentine. Let's have some fun...
- 20 March (yes, it's a way off) is our birthday. So we're going to celebrate.
Our first birthday! Wow one year!! A year that has changed our lifes: I’m wondering how deeply this change has sunk into our hearts. We’ll see.
ReplyDeleteAnyway it brings new special friends, virtual ones but with whom spending time is a plesure.