Blue Orpingtons

My beautiful blue Orpington hens laid their first eggs this week, just in time to help with the Easter baking. I bought them in October, a sustained moment of extravagence at the end-of-season auction - the first lot went for slightly more than I wanted to pay, and so I bought the second lot for a little more than that.

They live in an Eglu just outside the kitchen window, where they anticipate my every move as they hope for yet more bread, more baked potatoes, perhaps a handful of weeds and seeds. I love their low contented-hen sounds, their busy-ness, their good-natured sibling banter ... and now, their eggs. What a treat.

Fooproof Yorkshire pudding

I've never been very good at making Yorkshire pudding. Years of cooking on an Aga meant that by the time the meat was perfectly roasted, there wasn't enough heat left for the puds. Years of pudding failure = deep-seated belief that my Yorkshires would always be a flat soggy mess.

But now, I have a foolproof recipe. I first came across it when I was cooking on the Miele stand at the BBC food show; we made the batter into toad-in-the-hole. Yesterday, I made a huge ballooning effortless Yorkshire. Eggs. The secret is eggs. Lots of them. Not quite Mrs Beeton ("take 2 dozen eggs"), but I reckon this method uses at least twice the usual amount of eggs, so of course it's not going to remain pancake-flat.

I've just spent a merry morning looking up recipes for Yorkshire pudding; Hannah Glasse, Jane Grigson, Elizabeth David, Mrs Ruffell, Michael Smith ... they're all more or less agreed on two eggs to half a pint of milk and enough flour for a pouring cream consistency. But here's an interesting thing: Yorkshire pudding is merely a parsimoniously thin version of batter pudding, one of the earliest dishes in English cookery - think thick Yorkshire pudding. Truth to tell, this would be a batter pudding if you chose too small a tin.

I got a lot of complaints last night about serving this with lamb. I think it's a shame to forego something so deliciously eggy for the sake of a tradition which is almost certainly invented. Next time we'll have it with roast chicken.

This is Jane Grigson's tip about what to do if there's any left:

On roast-beef Sundays, my mother's father, who had reached heights of power and respectability in the Bank of England, forgot what was due to his position and remembered the ways of the Northumbrian farm at Old Bewick which his family had come from. The roast beef went back to the kitchen after the main course, but the Yorkshire pudding remained to be finished up with sweetened condensed milk. I do not know how my grandmother took this - she prided herself on her desserts - but my mother shared his delight in the crisp and sticky pudding. When she had a home of her own, and a family, she passed his taste on to us who only remembered him, in spats and spectacles and pin-striped trousers, from old photographs.

Foolproof Yorkshire pudding

equal quantities by volume* of:

eggs
milk
plain flour

Mix the flour into the eggs; when there are no lumps, slowly mix in the milk. Season: you'll definitely need salt; you could add chopped herbs. Let stand for half an hour.

Heat fat in a roasting tin, pour in the batter, and roast for 20 minutes in a very hot oven (200C).

* last night I used four eggs which came to the 200ml mark in a jug (that volume of flour weighed around 100g). The tin I used measured 25cm x 35cm, and the result was a crisp and thin Yorkshire; a smaller pan would give you batter pudding with these quantities.

Nigella's chocolate mousse cake

It's the birthday season in this house. Lettice wanted chocolate cake, but not the "usual" one. So I made chocolate mousse cake, not quite following the recipe in Nigella's How to be a Domestic Goddess ... very rich and delicious, quick to put together. Tomorrow it's Eleanor's birthday, and she's ordered up a different chocolate cake - I'm just off to buy the ingredients.

Chocolate mousse cake
for a 23cm tin

350g dark chocolate
175g butter
8 large eggs, separated
100g muscovado sugar
100g caster sugar
1 tbs vanilla extract

Grease the pan. Melt the chocolate and butter in a double boiler. Meanwhile, beat the egg yolks and sugar until it is pale and creamy. Stir in the vanilla and the coolish chocolate mixture. Whisk the egg whites until they are peaky, then fold in (best if you loosen the mixture first with one spoonful of white, but I don't always remember).

Pour the whole lot into your tin, then put the tin into a larger roasting pan. Put all this into the oven, then add hot water from the kettle so that you have an inch or two of water.

Bake for 50 minutes. The top should be dry, but the inside will still be gooey. Don't even think about removing this from the tin until it is completely cold. It will crack as it cools; if it looks too much, dust with icing sugar.













































Related links

Homemade vanilla extract
Jennifer Paterson's adult chocolate cake
Nigella's fudge icing for chocolate cakes
Rich chocolate refrigerator cake
Dense chocolate loaf
Tartuffo - very rich, very delicious chocolate pud

Alfred's pancakes

Lettice and Charlotte made pancakes for lunch. Just because they could. I'm not sure what they did (apart from melt Mars bars to go on them), but this is Alfred's killer recipe:

Alfred's pancakes
for about 6

(please forgive the indecisive metric/imperial nature of what follows)

100g plain flour
pinch of salt
1 egg
1/2 pint of milk

Mix all these ingredients together until there are no lumps. Leave it to stand for half an hour. Just before you start cooking your pancakes, add a splash of fizzy water, enough to make the batter the consistency of single cream.

An egg for Easter

This morning Lucius found the first egg from our new bluebell pullets. No idea whether it was the little grey hen, or the brown one who is too timid to stray far from the cockerel.

Egg and bacon tart

I made a classic bacon and egg tart at the weekend (aka quiche lorraine, but I'm English). Utterly delicious, but the pastry - well, it wasn't as good as it could or should have been, and I need some help, as this has always been a weak area in my cooking.

The problem was that I was afraid of putting in too much water (which causes shrinkage), so I think I didn't put in enough, and so it didn't come together into a smooth paste, but was a sandy mess that had to be pressed into the tin. It was short and delicious, but only held together because I coated it with egg white after blind baking - essential for a custard tart, but I used the whites of two eggs rather than one.

Does anyone have a foolproof method for making shortcrust pastry? Or some tips? I'd be really grateful.

In the meantime, here's the recipe for the egg and bacon filling .... the simplest ingredients creating more than the sum of their parts. Not sure why we always give the French credit for this, because it's a classic of English cookery too. (Although Elizabeth Ayrton says in The Cookery of England that the 18th century English version had a pastry covering. Too rich, I think, for modern tastes.)

for a 23cm / 9" tin

6 rashers of smoked bacon
300ml double cream
2 eggs and two yolks
pepper
mace is the traditional flavouring, but I don't have any

Cut and gently fry the bacon - it's important to use smoked bacon, even if you normally buy unsmoked (which we do), otherwise the tart will taste insipid. Don't overcook it, you want soft pieces, not crisp ones. Spread over the bottom of the cooked pastry case (which, when ready, should have been brushed with egg white and given a further minute or two in the oven). Whisk the cream, eggs and yolks, pepper, and pour over the bacon.

Bake at 200C for 15-20 minutes, then, when it's brown but not burnt, turn the heat down to 160C for 10-15 minutes. Leave it to rest for five minutes before serving.

Related links

Two ways to make pastry without using butter - which I find much easier, as well as lighter eating
Shaken hot water pastry
Olive oil pastry

Lasagne topping

All of the children were home for lunch today, and my parents. Rare event. Lasagne for lunch - easy (necessary, since lunch was late because everyone was caught up with watching the final of the Australian Open). I'd cooked the bolognese yesterday, Lettice layered it with the sheets of pasta, while I mixed up the topping:

2 eggs, beaten
500ml 0% yoghurt
nutmeg
pepper

Mix all this together and pour on the top of your lasagne. Either, drizzle with a little olive oil, or grate on a little parmesan.

The result is a tangy topping, lighter and rather more interesting than a bechamel-based cheese sauce. It's also quicker - important if you arrive back from the station (fetching elder daughter) after your guests.

No photograph: you all know what lasagne looks like ;)

Quaking pudding

On Friday we went out for Lucius's office dinner in this lovely upstairs dining room at the Hind's Head at Bray, Heston Blumenthal's pub (not to be confused with his restaurant, the Fat Duck, a couple of doors down the High Street). Good food - thrice-cooked chips, that sort of thing.

I had a dandelion salad, bitter and wintery, with a little bacon and a quail's egg. Moules to follow, and then, for pudding (something I don't often eat), quaking pudding - a delicious modern take on a 17th century English baked cream which is turned out of a mould like a jelly ... and quakes just like a jelly shakes. Blumenthal's version is flavoured with cinnamon and nutmeg - masses of it - rather than the traditional English custard flavourings which would be more likely saffron or lemon zest, perhaps orange blossom water.

Elizabeth Raffald gives two versions in her book, The Experienced English Housekeeper for the use and ease of Ladies, Housekeepers, Cooks, &c, written purely from practice published in 1814:

To make a Quaking Pudding.

Boil a quart of cream, and let it stand till almost cold, then beat four eggs a full quarter of an hour, with a spoonful and a half of flour, then mix them with your cream, add sugar and nutmeg to your palate, tie it close up in a cloth well buttered, and let it boil an hour, and turn it carefully out.

To make a Quaking Pudding a second way.

Take a pint of good cream, the yolks of ten eggs and six whites, beat them very well, and run them through a fine sieve; then take two heaped spoonfuls of flour, and a spoonful or two of cream, beat it with the flour till it is smooth, and mix all together, and tie it close up in a dish or bason (sic) well rubbed with butter and dredged with flour; the water must boil when you put in the pudding. One hour will boil it; serve it up with wine sauce in a boat.

Pretty tricky in a modern kitchen, whichever recipe you go for. Heston Blumenthal, that extraordinary perfectionist, says he tried 50 versions before getting it right - part of that must have been playing with the flavourings, but I dare say it took quite a few goes to get the texture right, too.

Heston Blumenthal's definitive Quaking Pudding

100ml whole milk
400ml whipping cream
65g caster sugar
4 egg yolks
1 whole egg
35g brioche crumbs
a dusting of cinnamon and nutmeg (1g of each, if you want to be particular)
butter and flour to line the moulds.

Using your fingers, rub the moulds with softened butter. Place a coffee spoon of flour in each, then tap the mould, rotating it as you go. Once lined with flour, tip out the excess. Repeat with the other moulds. The butter and flour lining stops them sticking.

Preheat the oven to 100C. Warm the milk and cream with the nutmeg and cinnamon. Whisk together the egg yolks, whole egg and sugar for about five minutes. Pour the warm milk over the egg/sugar mix, tip into the moulds and cook in a bain marie until 90C — this should take about 45 minutes.


When you're served this delicious concoction at the Hind's Head, it comes with a little card giving an explanation of the dish:

The word pudding historically refers to a food that is contained in animal gut to hold it when cooking, like "Black Pudding" of sausages. In the 17th Century, cooks realised that they could make puddings by containing food in cloth bags or bowls; this meant that more sweet puddings could be made than before. One of the sweet puddings that was invented then was the "Quaking Pudding"; a light sweet, gently flavoured dish that gained its name due to the fact that it quakes and shakes like a jelly when it is served. Quaking Pudding was a staple in recipe books throughout the 17th, 18th and early 19th Centuries when it began to disappear from recipe collections.

It deserves to be better known.

HotM: lemon cream mousse

I've got a lot of lemons in the kitchen at the moment: it's hard to imagine cooking without using lemon, so I sometimes buy them forgetting that I've already got some, or that I've ordered some from my veg supplier. But it's okay, I can use up the glut easily - a squeeze of juice over steamed vegetables or grilled fish, perhaps a little zest as well. And, now, some puddings too.

In this house pud is almost always fruit-based. In truth there's not very much fruit in these little lemon pots, but zest is not only delicious but also very good for you: it contains limonene, which has cancer-fighting properties. If I'm using the juice of a lemon, I always use some zest. You need a MicroPlane zester to make this easy - they're expensive, but once you've got one, you'll use it every day.














I made these little creamy pots in two ways, and the photograph shows the difference. The first, quickest and easiest, is just good fromage frais mixed with lemon zest and a little sugar. I was going to sprinkle a little muscovado sugar over the top, like Barbados cream, but found I've run out. So they'll have to stay plain. The other pots are a little more special, because I've added beaten egg white to lighten the mixture, and a little gelatine for a soft set. You can see from the photograph the difference in volume, created entirely by the egg white.

Drain a 500g pot of fromage frais (you can keep the whey to make scones or muffins). Mix in the zest of two lemons, and a dessertspoon of caster sugar. That's it for the quick creams - just put them into four pretty pots or glasses, and sprinkle with muscovado sugar. Leave in the fridge for an hour or so for the sugar to "melt".

If you want to carry on and make lemon mousse, then soak two sheets of gelatine in water. When it's soft (which takes three or four minutes), squeeze out the water, and put the gelatin into a large bowl and melt it in the microwave. It says on the packet that this takes 10 seconds, but my experience is that it takes considerably less: one quick blast is enough. Add the cream mixture to the gelatine and mix thoroughly. Beat two egg whites until stiff, and fold into the lemon mixture. Pot. This is enough for four to six pots. Leave to set in the fridge.

The lemon cream is best made no more than a couple of hours before you want to eat, because it tends to separate a little, with a whey-y liquid which tastes fine but doesn't look very pretty; the lemon mousse can safely be made the day before.

It would be improved, I think, by mixing the zest and the sugar in advance, and leaving it to soak - you could do it the night before, and then mix the creams up quickly as you prepared a main course for a dinner party. And in June, both versions would be delicious with the addition of a little stewed redcurrant in the bottom.

I have a book of recipes from the Duchess of Devonshire, who lives at Chatsworth, one of the grandest houses in England (I don't suppose she did much of the cooking herself, but it's an interesting book). She gives a similar lemon cream, potted over a macaroon, which I should think would be good too. Macaroons, like meringues, are useful in a low-fat diet, because they use only the white of egg.







And please don't forget to send me your Heart of the Matter entries by this Sunday, 22nd April - joannacary AT ukonline DOT co DOT uk, with the permalink for the round-up next week.

Sorrel

This scruffy-looking plant is my sorrel patch. Every garden should have one: the taste of sorrel is like nothing else - and I've never seen it for sale anywhere, not even in France.

In some ways it's like spinach, only with a lemony sharpness to it, and none of that Popeye'd metallic feel on your tongue. Just like spinach, it cooks down to nothing - a sludgy khaki-coloured nothing, rather than that deep rich yet bright spinach green. You can use young leaves raw in a salad to add piquancy.

It's an easy plant. Mine grow in an east-facing bed, with poor stony soil, and no attention from anybody, except harvesting. I was given two or three roots, probably in the autumn. It's a perennial plant, the sort that looks after itself, and just appears again when the days are noticeably longer, the air a little warmer. Now is a good time to sow seed, and I don't think they're particularly difficult to propagate. I should think they'd do well in a pot, although I haven't tried.

Grow it near the kitchen, so that you can easily keep picking a succession of young leaves - they appear out of the ground all summer like red spears before unfurling a shield-shaped leaf. Cookery books tend to specify "a handful", and that's because you can't buy it. Don't worry too much about quantities, but remember that however you are cooking your sorrel, one handful per person is plenty, even though it cooks right down, because even the young leaves have a strong taste.

This week our roast chicken was accompanied by a little mess of sorrel cooked in the water that clung after washing. Three or four minutes in an uncovered saucepan, keeping an eye on it, keeping it moving with a wooden spoon, cooked at the last minute whilst dishing up the rest of the meal. Next time I might stir in a little fromage frais to make a sauce. Or serve it with fish. Or add it to an omelette. Sorrel makes all of these dishes special - and keeps people guessing, since it is not well known in this country.

A real treat, even if gardening is not really your thing, although it may be if you have found this link through weekend herb blogging (this is the first time I have taken part in a blog event, so please forgive me if I've done it wrong).