Pastry, and a frangipane filling

Because my blog is my kitchen notebook, and because I keep having to look up these recipes ... and because, if you think you can't make pastry, these just may transform your baking (they have mine).

1. Shortcrust pastry

200g STRONG flour
100g unsalted butter
1 egg
1 tbsp water

Blitz all in the processor until it forms a ball.

This is enough to line a 23cm tart tin, but it goes a great deal further if you roll it at room temperature and then chill it. It doesn't seem to make any difference to the finished pastry. Chill for half an hour, and bake blind before filling.

2. Sweet shortcrust

250g flour (I use strong flour for this, too; it's a kind of superstition, and I do not know if the gluten is responsible for my success with these pastries)
125g unsalted butter
85g caster sugar
1 egg

Proceed as for shortcrust.

3. Frangipane

This is enough to spread on a 23cm tart tin (or 6 individual tarts). You can either spread jam underneath, or arrange fruit on top.

50g softened unsalted butter
50g caster sugar
1 egg
50g plain flour

Blitz to a soft cream.

Bake at 160C for 20-25 minutes.

Tarte tatin

I made Tarte tatin for pudding the other night; it's an indulgence, but an enjoyable one - Lucius said it was the best thing I'd ever cooked, and he was still talking about it the next day. It's very rich, so not for everyday .... but it's perfect for friends, as you have to make it early so that you don't burn your mouth on the caramel.

I followed the instructions on the box of the de Buyer tarte tatin tin I bought from Lakeland; so delicious there's no need to look for another recipe. By the way, you don't need to have a special tin for this: any heavy-duty oven-proof tin would do (a Le Creuset frying pan would be ideal, provided it doesn't have a wooden handle).

This is a very good way to use up slightly-past-their-best apples; I know we're supposed only to use the freshest produce we can, but we also need a few strategies to combat waste in the kitchen. My grandmothers used to cook up wrinkled apples, and so do I.

Tarte tatin
(it says for 2-4, but I'd say this would easily do 6)

20cm tin

shortcrust pastry (I used ready-rolled Dorset puff, a truly excellent product)
85g butter
200g granulated sugar
4-5 apples (800g is specified, probably unpeeled weight)
juice of half a lemon

Use the tin as a guide to cut a circle of pastry 2-3mm thick. Prick the pastry and put in the fridge.

Peel and core the apples. The recipe says you should end up with apple halves; that's too fiddly for me, and quarters looked fine in the finished dish. Drop them into a bowl of lemon juice as you work.

Put the butter and sugar into the pan, stirring constantly for about five minutes until the mixture starts to become golden. Arrange the apples over the caramel (pour in the lemon juice too) and keep cooking, without stirring, for 15 minutes.

Now give it five minutes in a very hot oven (250C is suggested; I used 220C on fan, and that was quite fierce enough).

Next, arrange the pastry over the apples, tucking the edges under. Put the tin back into the oven for 15 minutes (have a quick peek just before the end, you don't want the pastry to burn).

Cool the tin for 25 minutes before turning out onto a dish. It will come away easily and firmly in one piece, glued together by the caramel. Eat lukewarm.

The recipe ends with this instruction: Lovers of Tarte tatin savour it without whipped cream nor vanilla ice cream to appreciate its authentic taste. To be honest, anything with it would be overkill.

Lemon pots

My sister brought Meyer lemons from her garden in California. It's impossible to buy a Meyer* lemon here, so it was a wonderful gift - they have a scented taste quite unlike other lemons. So, something special. But my sister's only here for a few days, and I don't want to spend them chained to the stove.

These little citrus pots take moments, although you'd never guess. They're rich, so tiny quantities - a shot glass would work well, if you don't have ramekins (which, in truth, are too big; I half-fill mine). Perfect. So there was time for a walk by the river in the snow, even though we were nine for dinner.

Lemon pots

75g sugar
300ml double cream
one lemon

In an ordinary saucepan, melt the sugar in the double cream. Add the juice of a lemon and pour into tiny pots or shot glasses. Put them in the fridge, and by the time the cream is cold, it will have set. I generally use the zest, too, because I value the sharp taste over a truly smooth appearance.


* Just before my sister arrived, David Lebovitz, who used to be Alice Waters' pastry chef at Chez Panisse, posted interestingly about Meyer lemons, with a recipe for lemon curd

Plums in muscovado

Breakfast this morning: yoghurt with stewed plums. Bliss. The plums were slightly past their best, but fully revived with a little muscovado sugar. So much flavour there's no need for spice. 20 minutes, covered, in a moderate oven.

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.

Custard

I'd forgotten, til I made it in front of an audience of about 200 at the NEC on Thursday, how easy it is to make custard. If you use a double boiler, which takes longer, you don't have to stand and stir continuously.

As custard is the unctuous basis of many a good pud - trifle (which is what I'm making today), ice creams - it's worth taking a little trouble. And not much point in using cornflour: eggs will thicken the custard without the kind of help food manufacturers resort to.

Here, I'm following Fergus Henderson's recipe (from Nose to Tail 2), which has too much sugar for my taste - I'd halve it, unless it was going to be the basis of an ice.

The main problem with making your own custard is the amount of washing up it generates, even if you double up. A couple of saucepans, endless bowls, wooden spoons - and now I'm reminded why so many sieves hang in my kitchen.

Custard

450ml milk (you could use cream if you wanted)
2 whole eggs
2 egg yolks
1 tsp vanilla essence
85g sugar

Heat the milk and vanilla essence. Beat the eggs and sugar and strain into a large bowl. When the milk is almost at boiling point, strain it into the egg mixture, stirring vigorously to prevent the mixture from curdling. Now put the bowl over a pan of boiling water. At this point, you can let it alone to a considerable extent; it will need only the occasional whisk.

When it's as thick as you'd like, cool it by pouring it into a bowl.

Wholemeal apple & almond cake

Delicious, with a hint of cinnamon. Eat warm from the oven as pud, or cold for breakfast/elevenses. Much nicer than the appley-cinnamony pastry I had in Selfridge's yesterday. There's a strong taste of almonds, even though they're cut 50:50 with flour (so economical).

It's from Hugh FW's new book, Every Day; he made it with pears on his show last week (you may need to be in the UK for this link to work).

Apple and almond cake

150g butter
125g caster sugar
2 eggs
75g wholemeal self-raising flour
75g ground almonds

for the apples

4-5 eating apples
25g butter
1 heaped tbsp granulated sugar
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon

20cm springform cake tin
pre-heat the oven to 170C

Peel and core the apples, cut them into wedges and fry gently in the butter and sugar. When they are nearly tender, add the cinnamon and take off the heat.

Beat the butter and sugar together; add the eggs, then the flour, then the almonds. Scrape into the tin, smooth over, arrange the apples on top, spoon over the juices from the frying pan.

Bake for 40-45 minutes (until a skewer comes out clean). Leave for a while before unclipping the tin (although this is probably going to fall apart anyway).

Notes:
* I made it on the spur of the moment to use up some apples that had been sitting around for a few days; there were six, not quite too many.
* I had only 140g butter in total; the apples were fine in 10g, and the cake was fine with 130g. So no need for the full 175g.
* My cake is a little stodgy ("but good stodgy", said Amy) because I used plain wholemeal and forget to put in baking powder.
* The apples sit nicely on top of this cake, but when HFW made it with pears, they sank down almost to the bottom.


Related posts

Apple tart - Alfred once ate half of this at one go
Hugh FW's wonderful ginger cake
Easy almond ring cake - another pudding-y cake, better served with a little fruit

Quick plum tart

Last night was the last time until Christmas that all six of us will sit down together to eat. So I made a quick pudding - I went into the garden in the gloaming, picked a few sticky-sweet Victoria plums, halved and stoned them and put them on a sheet of puff pastry which I'd brushed with jam made from last year's crop. 15 minutes in a hot oven. Mmm ... except for one thing: those fabulously sweet plums turned sour in the oven. Any ideas why this should be?

A lighter crumble mix

Traditional English crumble mixture uses equal quantities of butter and flour, and a bit more sugar (say, 4oz butter, 4oz flour, 6oz sugar). Last night I put a lighter crumble topping on some very sharp stewed plums ... using ground almonds meant I could use less butter, and gave the crumble a pleasing nubbly texture too.

These were the proportions I used:

125g plain flour
85g butter cubed
4 tablespoons caster sugar
100g ground almonds

Blitz the flour and butter to breadcrumb texture, stir in the sugar and almonds. Put on top of prepared fruit (or some pre-stewed fruit) and bake for half an hour at 180C if the fruit is already cooked, longer if not.

No pic, this post is mainly for my reference

Beechdean ice cream

We went to the Theatre Royal Windsor last night to see a very good whodunnit ... disappointing that it was only about 1/3 full - normally on a Thursday it's pretty full, so perhaps everyone was at home watching Britain's Got Talent. Hope there's a better turnout for Brief Encounter next week.

As usual, fantastic Beechdean ice cream in the interval .... reading the label, it's produced on a farm which is very close to home, as well as the theatre. What a treat.

When we emerged, the ferris wheel was lit up and still spinning furiously, but we couldn't work out whether there was anyone in it or not.

Yoghurt and lemon cake

I don't keep butter in the house when the young are away, which made it tricky this afternoon when I took it into my head to cheer myself up by making a lemon cake. But then I remembered Turkish yoghurt cake, and found a good recipe in Claudia Roden's Arabesque. It's a soufflé of a cake, no butter, not much flour, eggs, yoghurt and a lemon. Just the thing.

Turkish yoghurt cake - yogurtlu tatlisi

4 large eggs, separated
100g caster sugar
3 tbsp plain flour
400g Greek strained yoghurt
grated zest of a lemon
juice of a lemon

Beat the egg yolks and sugar until it is pale. Beat in the flour, then blend in the yoghurt, zest and juice. Whisk the egg whites until they are stiff, then fold into the cake mixture. Pour this into a non-stick baking tin - I use a 23cm clip-ring tin which I grease with olive oil.

Bake at 180C for 50-60 minutes, until the top is brown. Eat warm or cold.


PS you can serve this with a syrup made with 150ml water, 25og sugar, 1 tbsp lemon juice, and the finely grated zest of an orange ... Claudia Roden says she doesn't bother, and neither do I.

PPS picture to follow - I meant to save this as a draft until the cake came out of the oven, but hit publish instead ... I've been a little distracted for the past couple of weeks, which is why I need cake!

Very quick, very delicious chocolate pudding

Fabulous Easter pud - make it with the best chocolate you can find. I make it with Willie Harcourt-Cooze's Peruvian or Venezuelan, but anything darkly delicious will do. It's (more or less) his recipe, too - they come on the inside of the wrappers.

I've got one sitting in the fridge for dinner tonight. I may make another for lunch tomorrow ... it's the work of moments, only you'd never guess.

Tartuffo
for 8-12 (it's v rich)

180g cacao, grated
300ml double cream
150g icing sugar

Melt the chocolate. Whip the double cream to soft peaks, add the sugar. Let the chocolate cool a little, then beat it into the cream. Pour this mixture into a mould lined with cling film - this is enough for a small loaf tin. Chill.


Related links

Jennifer Paterson's adult chocolate cake - particularly good with Willie's cacao
Nigella's fudge icing for chocolate cakes
Rich chocolate refrigerator cake
Dense chocolate loaf

Apple tart - Alfred's new favourite

This apple tart is quick and straightforward as apple tarts go, and there's the added oomph of thriftily boiling up the peels in the syrup mixture. It's the prettiest apple tart I've ever made, thanks to a new-to-me way of dealing with the fruit: peel the apples whole, halve them, dig out the core, slice them and leave them in their halved shape so that you can easily fan them out in circles on the pastry. Obvious really, but it had never before occurred to me.

Apple Tart
for an 8-9 inch tart lined with your usual pastry

5-6 dessert apples (I used Jazz apples, grown in Kent)
a little butter
sugar

Heat the oven to 200C (400F).

Peel and slice the apples. Arrange them on the chilled pastry. Dot with tiny slivers of butter (or melt butter and brush it over - I would have, but my pastry brush is moulting, and I found this just as effective). Bake for (up to) three quarters of an hour, turning once or twice.

Meanwhile, put all the peelings into a saucepan with a couple of tablespoons of sugar and as little water as you can. Bring to the boil and simmer for 15-20 minutes. Strain - it will be beautifully rosy coloured. You might then want to boil some of the liquid off if you think it's not thick enough.

Give the tart a minute or two to settle out of the oven, then brush with the apple-y syrup.

Serve warm, or at room temperature. Very good. Alfred ate half in one sitting.

Jennifer Paterson's adult chocolate cake

Very rich. A little less sugar next time. And half the quantity, unless there are 20 for dinner.

225g 85% plain chocolate
225g unsalted butter
280g caster sugar
5 eggs

Grease a 22cm cake tin. Heat the oven to 180C.

Melt the chocolate in a bowl over simmering water. Add the cubed butter towards the end. Beat in the sugar.

Meanwhile, beat the eggs until they are frothy and foamy, then fold into the chocolate mixture until everything is thoroughly combined. Pour into the cake tin and cook in a bain marie (a couple of centimetres deep, cold water is fine) for one hour.

Let the cake cool in the tin, then put into the fridge. Do not eat warm.

JP says: It's a killer. She's not wrong.

A Christmas Eve feast

We're having our Christmas feast here tonight: smoked salmon, delicious roast lamb with lots of vegetables. I've made little lemon pots for pudding, and mince tarts, and then there's cheese and fruit. All the children are here (my girls are wrapping all my presents for me, I can hear them chatting by the fire next door ... very soothing).

Now I'm off to get dressed in the half hour before my oldest friend and my parents arrive. Suddenly, after the usual Christmas Eve pressures, I feel Christmassy. Lovely to have everyone under one roof - I always get it in the neck for saying that, but it's true.


The lemon pots are quick and simple: melt 75g sugar in a 3ooml tub of double cream. Add the juice of a lemon and pour into tiny pots or shot glasses. Put them in the fridge, and by the time the cream is cold, it will have set. Mmmm

The mince pies were particularly easy: I bought a jar of very standard mincemeat, and jazzed it up with the grated zest of an orange and a little armagnac. I made pastry with 240g flour, 120g butter, and the juice of the orange. I then pressed this with a wooden stick into the tiny holes of my tart tin. I then put the pastry into the fridge to rest for an hour before putting a little mincemeat into each tart and putting them in a very hot oven (220C) for 10 minutes.

Alfred says that he likes them to have lots of icing sugar (or what he calls sweet flour) ... and the more sugar they have, the better he likes them. They're also my father's favourite.

Bread and butter pudding

There's a lot of leftover bread in this house this week ... most of two loaves of bread gets eaten at breakfast by ten oarsmen, which leaves a couple of slices. So, bread-and-butter pudding for dinner. Quick, easy, delicious - all the virtues.

This story is about the perils of following a recipe. I got out Tamasin Day-Lewis's Kitchen Bible. Very rich: 600ml of cream and full-fat milk with eight eggs. Eight! Diana Henry was more down-to-earth with two eggs to 600ml. I can't remember which of them thought that 300g of sultanas was a good plan for the 12-slices-of-bread + 600ml of custard. The sultanas needed soaking (in the leftover tea, ordinary strong Indian tea), so I measured 300g, then remembered I was doubling the recipe, added 300g more, thought it looked too much, glanced back at the recipe, and, reassured, got on with it.

Well, I could have made four b&b puds with that many sultanas! I put more than half of them in, but couldn't fit in any more. Fretting about this, I forgot to put any sugar in the custard (and only realised when I woke up this morning). But none of this imperfection seemed to matter: it was all gone in moments.

Bread and butter pudding, for 6-8

Soak a handful or two of raisins - I used tea, but you can use alcohol. Butter stale bread (trim off crusts), and arrange it in a gratin dish. I used a mixture of white and wholemeal. Sprinkle the raisins over, and some finely grated lemon zest.

Mix two or three eggs with 600ml of milk and as much cream as you'd like. Add a little vanilla essence. Also some sugar to taste (!). Pour this mixture over the bread, and let it stand for a while (perhaps a quarter to half an hour). This takes care of last-minute panic when you're feeding a crowd.

Bake in a moderate oven for about 25 minutes, until the custard is set. Both the recipes used a bain marie (although they avoided the word, as it frightens people), but I have never bothered, without detriment. However, I did cover the puddings loosely with greaseproof paper so that the sultanas didn't burn.



Related posts

Home-made vanilla essence
A basic white loaf
Herb stuffing - another use for stale bread

Spiced Christmas clementines, part 2

These clementines filled the house with their spicy scent this morning when I came down to let the dogs out, make tea, and fetch the newspapers in from the bottom of the drive. Just as Giorgio Novelli remembers from his childhood Christmasses.

They took moments to prepare yesterday before we went to the cinema. I put them in the oven when I took out dinner, then switched it straight off. The morning, I only needed to put a little quince liqueur into them before putting them into the oven as it heated up for lunch. I took them out before it got up to temperature, and let them rest at room temperature until we were ready to eat them.

Delicious. Full instructions in yesterday's post. Just two things: if you use clementines rather than oranges, you won't be able to put in as much as a tablespoonful of liqueur; and put the liqueur in over the dish you're going to use to bake and serve the fruit, because then you won't waste any of it, and there might be a little to spoon over (as you can see, I used a tiny funnel, but only because I have it). Also, if you've got a sweet tooth, you might want to put a grain or two of sugar in at the same time (or use a sticky liqueur).


PS St Trinian's may be the best film I've ever seen ... it's a very silly, highly enjoyable, very English romp, a sort of pantomime on film, complete with Rupert Everett as both pantomime dame and baddy. It was filmed about a mile from here, as the crow flies. Then again, there are plenty of serious candidates for best film ...

Spiced Christmas clementines

As you know, I'm always on the lookout for puddings which are predominantly fruit, but a little more exciting than just eating the fruit. It's not that we eat much pudding, just that I like to know that when we do, it's delicious and as healthy as a pudding can be. So when I saw this recipe in the paper last weekend, I knew I'd have to try it. This is a recipe from Giorgio Novelli's mother, one which she made each Christmas: She put the spices and fruit into a very hot oven and then just turned off the heat. You'd wake up to this amazing smell and you knew at once which day it was.

This is a kind of Christmas cake without the cake, a Christmas pudding without all that steaming. Or suet.

I'm making this tonight, for lunch tomorrow, when my parents are coming. I've prepared the fruit, we're just off to the cinema to see St Trinian's (how can you resist Rupert Everett in drag??), and I'll put it in the oven after I've finished cooking supper when we get back.

Mama Novelli's spiced clementines

whole clementines
vanilla pods
star anise
cinnamon sticks
Kirsch, or whisky, or Cointreau - or quince vodka

Blanch the clementines in boiling water for 30 seconds, to soften the skins, and to melt away any wax used for preservation (you'll avoid this if you buy organic, although I know it's not always easy or possible). If your fruit is waxed, you'll get a whitish bloom which you can gently rub off with kitchen paper while it's still warm.

Pierce each clementine at the top, and stick with spices. Put on a baking tray.

Put the fruit into a very hot oven, and switch it off straightaway. Leave them overnight. It really is best to do this overnight, because the oven takes a very long time to cool right down (I know this from making moonblush tomatoes, another overnight-in-a-cooling oven process).

In the morning, the fruit should be dry to the touch. Pull out the spices, and spoon a tablespoonful or so of your chosen alcohol into the fruit. Put them back onto the baking tray, and then put them into a warm oven, 150C, for 15-20 minutes to absorb the alcohol. Leave to cool.

To serve, cut in two, and scoop over vanilla ice cream / whipped cream / creme fraiche.

Very low fat Christmas pudding

I've made a version of this Christmas pudding once or twice in the past - one without suet (rock solid saturated animal fat), butter, or oils, just held softly together with eggs. I should think you could take out one or two of the egg yolks if you really wanted to reduce the saturated fat content - only then I think you'd need a little more spice, because the taste of an egg is in the yolk. No pictures, because I'm not making a pudding this year.

This is quick and easy. Worth making. Easy, because all you have to do is assemble, weigh and mix the ingredients. Quick, because that's it. Except that you have to make it ahead (which is a plus), although not weeks and weeks unless that's what suits. And except that you need to cook it twice for several hours. But you don't have to stand over it while it's cooking. So, as I said quick and easy. Wholesome ingredients and not a trace of an e-number. The only fat is in the three egg yolks, so it's ideal for those watching their cholesterol, as this will feed a lot of people.

Very low fat Christmas pudding
for up to 10

650g mixed dried fruit
200g fresh wholemeal breadcrumbs
100g soft brown sugar
50g ground almonds
finely grated zest of 2 oranges
1 1/2 tsp mixed spice
3 large eggs
150 ml brandy

Measure everything into a large bowl. Stir well. Oil a large pudding basin, pour in the mixture. Cover with foil. You need to put a little pleat in the centre to give the pudding room to rise, and fix it tight (you can use string; these days I have some special cookery elastic bands which I got from Lakeland). Put this into a large saucepan, add enough cold water to come 2/3rds of the way up the bowl. Cover, bring to the boil, then simmer for 3 hours. You don't need to do anything apart from check the water level after a couple of hours. If it's low, add a little boiling water from a kettle.

The pudding needs to steam again in the same way for two hours before eating. OR, if you make the pudding in a plastic bowl, you could microwave it, because a microwave oven is basically a steamer, and therefore cooks steamed puddings to perfection in very little time. (As to timings, you'll have to consult your oven manual.)

Notes:
After the first cooking I nearly always let this cool in the water, because it's less of a palaver. It's quite a good idea to change the foil before storing this somewhere cool, but I don't always bother. But the second time you cook it, you're really only heating it up, and you will need to get it out of the pan without burning yourself. One way to do this is to pull a long sheet of foil, long enough to cover the bottom of the saucepan and hang out on both sides. Fold this into three lengthwise, for strength, then drape it over the pan. Put your pudding basin onto it, and then, later, you can lift out the pudding using the foil cradle. Or you could use an old (clean) tea towel.


You can choose whatever fruit you like: figs are traditional (that's why the Victorians called it figgy pudding); I think candied peel is disgusting, even when I've bought the best and cut it myself; I'd rather have sultanas than raisins; if you're going to use cherries, the half-dried ones you can buy these days are nicer here than glace cherries.

Spice: either use mixed spice, or make your own mixture of cinnamon and nutmeg, perhaps a cloves.

If you want to add coins to your pudding, don't bother wrapping them up. Much better clean them - effortlessly, by soaking them overnight in Coca-cola. They'll turn out sparkling mint-clean - and you'll never again drink any cola drink.

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.