Omelette and a Glass of Wine (39 page)

Robert May gives several different variations on his ‘black tart stuff’ recipe, one of which includes damsons.
A True Gentlewoman’s Delight
also gives a formula for black tart stuff. My own version is the result of experiments with these different recipes. I find it a delicious and refreshing cold fruit purée. As a pie filling it is rich and dark without the cloying and heavy qualities of mincemeat. It has also a certain originality which provides a small surprise at the end of the meal.

Exact proportions of the different dried fruits are not important, but as a rough guide, use ½ lb. of good large prunes, ¼ lb. of raisins (Spanish muscatels are the best for flavour and colour, stoneless Australian or South African raisins are cheaper) and 2 oz. of currants, plus ¼ pint of red table wine or ⅛ pint of port.

Put the prunes in an earthenware oven dish, with the wine and enough water to cover them. Leave them, in the covered pot, in a very slow oven, anything from gas no. ½to 1 or 290°F., to gas no. 3 or 330°F., for 2 to 3 hours or longer, until they are very swollen and completely soft and have absorbed most of the liquid. During the final hour or so of cooking put the raisins and currants previously well washed, in a separate oven pot, and with water to cover them, to bake.

Stone the prunes, sieve them, with any remaining juice. Strain and discard the water from the raisins and currants. Sieve them. Mix the two purées together.

Serve well chilled in glasses, or in one large bowl, with a layer of thin pouring cream floated on the top, and with sponge or shortbread fingers.
¹

When the purée is made a little extra port can be added by those who like a stronger flavour of wine.

These quantities fill six glasses of about 3-oz. capacity. The purée keeps well in the refrigerator, so it is economical to make a batch and store it.

A note for teetotallers: I have several times eaten another modern version of this dish in which black coffee rather than wine is used for flavouring the dried fruit.

QUINCE FOOL

Quarter and core the quinces but do not peel them; put them in a vegetable steamer – the kind known as an adaptable steamer, which looks a bit like a colander, and fits on the top of the saucepan,
not
a bain marie or double boiler – over a pan of water, and cover them. Steam until they are quite soft. Sieve them. Into the hot pulp stir caster sugar (about 6 to 8 oz. for 1½ lb. of quinces, but this is a matter of taste). When quite cold fold in about ¼ to ½ pint of fresh cream.

This is my version of a quince cream recipe from the note book of Mrs Owen of Penrhos in Anglesey, 1695.

DRIED APRICOT FOOL

The way to get the maximum flavour out of dried apricots is to bake them slowly in the oven instead of stewing them. They emerge nicely plump, with a roasted, smoky flavour which I find irresistible; although only, it must be said, if they have been dried without the sulphur dioxide used as a preservative for dried fruit. To get good dried apricots it is nowadays necessary to shop for them in wholefood and health food stores.

Put ½ lb. of fine dried apricots to soak in water just to cover for a couple of hours – or overnight if it is more convenient. Cook them, in the same water and without sugar, in a covered oven-pot at a moderate temperature, gas no. 3, 330°F., for about an hour. Strain off the juice. Put the apricots through the coarse mesh of the vegetable mill, and into the resulting purée mix about 4 tablespoons of honey – the amount depends upon the quality of the apricots as well as upon your own taste – and then stir in about ¼ pint of thick, slightly whipped cream. A good addition to dried apricot fool is a spoonful or two of freshly ground almonds.

Serve chilled in glasses or cups. Enough for four.

RHUBARB FOOL

Rhubarb fool is made in just the same way as gooseberry fool, but needs an even larger proportion of sugar, preferably dark brown, and it is very necessary when the rhubarb is cooked to put it in a colander or sieve and let the excess juice drain off before the purée is made and the cream added.

Rhubarb fool is a very beautiful dish – and to me the only way of making rhubarb acceptable. The brown sugar, incidentally, gives rhubarb a specially rich flavour and colour.

A NINETEENTH-CENTURY TRIFLE

‘Cover the bottom of the dish with Naples biscuits,
¹
and macaroons broken in halves, wet with brandy and white wine poured over them, cover them with patches of raspberry jam, fill the dish with a good custard, then whip up a syllabub, drain the froth on a sieve, put it on the custard and strew comfits
²
over all.’

Frederick Bishop,
The Wife’s Own Book of Cookery
, 1852

It is rarely appreciated that in Bishop’s day, a Trifle was not a nursery pudding squashed anyhow into a common fruit bowl, but built up into a pyramid in an elegant stemmed glass compote dish. Crowned with its frothy whip and scattered with coloured comfits, the Trifle was a very pretty dish for a party. Eliza Acton, in
Modern Cookery
1845, referred to a special trifle-dish. So did Mrs Beeton, in the first edition of
Household Management
1861, and gave two illustrations of it, a black and white one on p.750, and a coloured one on plate VI. She garnished her built-up Trifle with strips of bright currant jelly, crystallised sweetmeats or flowers. Coloured comfits were rather old-fashioned, she thought. In her day cream was 1s. per pint and she estimated the total cost of her trifle at 5s. 6d.

ALMOND SHORTBREAD

A good and simple shortbread to serve with syllabubs, fruit fools, and creams.

3 oz. plain flour; 3 oz. unsalted butter; 1½ oz. of caster sugar; 1 oz. of ground almonds; ½ to 1 oz. of rice flour or cornflour.

Crumble the softened butter into the flour, sprinkling in the rice flour or cornflour at intervals, as and when the butter seems to be getting sticky. Add the almonds and the sugar.

The ingredients should not be worked too much. Grainy pieces will disappear in the cooking.

Spread the mixture into a 6-inch sandwich tin or tart tin with a removable base. Press it down lightly and smooth over the top with a palette knife. Prick the top surface with a fork.

Bake in the centre of a very slow oven, gas no. 2, 310°F., for an hour and a quarter, until the shortbread is a very pale biscuit colour.

Leave to cool in the tin, but before it is completely cold cut into small neat wedges. Enough for four people

Booklet published by Elizabeth David, 1969

*

In its original form my article on Syllabubs appeared in the very first number of
Nova,
in March 1965. The historical recipes which I had included in my typescript were, however, omitted from the published article, and these, together with several for English fruit fools, and a new introductory essay, were published in
Queen
magazine in the summer of 1968, in the days of Hugh Johnson’s editorship. On that occasion the article was illustrated with reproductions of Thomas Lowinsky’s wonderful twenties designs for table centres, drawn originally for
Lovely Food,
his wife Ruth’s book published by the Nonesuch Press in 1931.

For its next reincarnation, I rearranged, revised and slightly augmented the text of the
Queen
article, replacing the new introductory essay with the original one from
Nova,
and in 1969 published it in booklet form under the title
Syllabubs and Fruit Fools.
It was the last of a series of four little booklets which I published myself and sold to Elizabeth David Ltd. for the Pimlico kitchen utensil shop I had launched in 1965. Two years after the publication of the Syllabub book disagreements with my partners over policy matters led to my resignation as chairman and director of the firm and eventually to my total severance of all connection with it. When the booklets were finally sold out, I did not reprint them. The first of the series
, Dried Herbs, Aromatics and Condiments,
1967, formed the nucleus of my
Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen,
Penguin 1970. Another
, The Baking of an English Loaf,
1969, an article first published in
Queen,
December 4th 1968, was eventually incorporated, much rewritten, in my
English Bread and Yeast Cookery,
Allen Lane 1977. The fourth
, English Potted Meats and Fish Pastes,
1968, is reprinted in the present volume, pp.216–229. The retail price of the Herb and the Bread booklets was 2/6d, the Potted Meat and the Syllabub ones were all of 2/9d.

I give these bibliographical details because from time to time I get asked for them by collectors and booksellers.

1.
Published by Constable, 1964.

2.
The spelling is Max Beerbohm’s.

1.
Rhine wine.

2.
Sherry.

3.
Cassia bark, an alternative to cinnamon, cheaper and less pungent.

1.
Miss McNeill has since died.

1.
The editors of the 1971 OED missed Lady Grisell Baillie. Their earliest mention of an epergne is quoted as 1775.

2.
For the syllabub, sweetmeat glasses and glass epergnes of the eighteenth century see Therle Hughes
Sweetmeat and Jelly Glasses.
Luttcrworth Press, Guildford 1982.

1.
No. There had been earlier published recipes, notably in Mary Eales’
Mrs Eales Receipts
1718, and Vincent La Chapelle’s
The Modern Cook
1733. Both authors had derived their ice cream recipes from earlier French sources. Mrs Glasse’s raspberry ice cream recipe, however, appears to be her own.

1.
A redcurrant and whisked egg white confection made in a similar fashion was once a great favourite of my own. In the context huff means a puffed head.

1.
See the recipe on page 245.

1.
At this period sponge fingers.

2.
Sugar-coated coriander or caraway seeds.

Operation Mulberry

Every August or early September for the last few years I have been lucky enough to receive a present of ripe mulberries from a magnificent old tree in the garden of Rainham Hall in Essex. I use them to make a Summer Pudding or a water ice. Last year I added a new dish of mulberries and almonds to the repertory.

SUMMER PUDDING OF MULBERRIES

For a small pudding, enough for four people, you need 1 lb. of home-made white bread at least two or three days old; 2 lb. of ripe mulberries; about 6 oz. of white sugar; a Pyrex soufflé mould of 20-oz. capacity.

Cook the mulberries with the sugar until the juice runs.

Line the mould with narrow, crustless slices of bread. These must fit the dish exactly, with no spaces for the juice to seep through. This task is made quite easy if you dampen the bread slightly so that it can be pressed into the shape you need.

Pour in the warm mulberries, with just a little of their juice, reserving the rest for later, and leaving enough room at the top for a covering layer of bread slices. When these are fitted into place put a flat plate or saucer
inside
the dish. On top put a 2-lb. weight. Transfer the pudding to the refrigerator, where you may safely leave it for several days. It is in fact all the better for a prolonged wait in the cold. The juice is best stored in the freezer.

Turn the pudding out into a deep plate or a dish with room to hold some of the juice reserved for pouring over it. Don’t swamp it though.

With this most delicious version of summer pudding – raspberries and redcurrants make the next best – you need a jug of good rich cream of pouring consistency.

A note: if you don’t make your own bread try white bread from a
Greek or Italian bakery. On no account use a factory loaf. I did once, in the interests of discovery. The experiment was expensive (a waste of good raspberries), disastrous and conclusive.

A MULBERRY AND ALMOND DISH

Mix 12 oz. to 1 lb. of mulberries cooked with sugar as above with 1 ½ to 2 oz. of fresh soft white breadcrumbs and 1 ½ to 2 oz. of skinned and finely ground almonds.

Serve chilled, in narrow goblets or white china cups, with a little cream floated on top.

The mulberry-almond-bread combination is a good one. It was suggested to me by an Italian recipe for a sauce or relish called
sapore de morone
which appears in
Epulario
, first published in Venice in 1516. According to Lord Westbury,
Handlist of Italian Cookery Books
, Florence, 1963, this work, attributed to Giovanni Rosselli, is in reality taken from the same Maestro Martino manuscript used in the earlier and better known
De Honesta Voluptate
by Bartolomeo Sacchi, printed in Venice in 1475.

I suspect that the mulberry sauce – we are not told for what manner of meat it was intended – may have originated somewhere in Asia Minor and was perhaps brought to Italy after the Venetian conquest of Constantinople in 1204 A.D. It could equally have come via Persia or Afghanistan where, as in Turkey, the berries of the white or silk mulberry are dried to provide a supply for the winter. In the
Epulario
sauce the berries – whether white or black we do not know – are uncooked, crushed lightly in a mortar, spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg – no sugar – and pressed through a fine cloth sieve together with the pounded almonds and breadcrumbs.

MULBERRY WATER ICE