Cooking

Most families have their own cooking lore, developed through accident and necessity into an unimpeachable canon of family food. The culinary canon of my childhood seems quaint, now that I live in California. Orange juice was a Christmas day treat. Corn on the cob was a summer treat (though we bought it frozen – in fact, I never saw a cob with the leaves around it until I was 18 and came to America for the first time). We competed for second helpings by gnawing off every bit of flesh till the cob was as bald as a loofah.
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I just had a deliciously sweet cantaloupe. How did I know how to pick it? My favorite* chef, Chef Susan aka Chef Q posted some advice on the topic recently. Not only is she an amazing cook and baker, she is also an excellent photographer so her posts are illustrated with helpful images. I forgive her for all the pounds I gained last year due to her cooking (hey, at least I finally started a regular exercise regime) and thank her not just for all the great meals I’ve had the good fortune to experience, but also the helpful material she shares online.

[*] It’s actually a tie with my Mom, but she’s not officially a chef. Of course, that hasn’t stopped her from publishing a cookbook (see some of her recipes here).

Photo credit: Susan Beach

… and, increasingly, fat British too.

For Europeans, one of the really disconcerting things about visiting the United States is the size of the meals. Ok, there’s the phenomenon that the restaurant staff will let you take home what you don’t or can’t eat (and that’s an idea that many Europeans feel uncomfortable with), but there’s still the fact of the sheer volume of stuff that gets put on your plate. It seems it wasn’t always this way. Via someone in my del.icio.us network, I came across this article on how portion sizes have changed in the US over the past twenty years. And not only are American meals bulkier, they’ve also increased two or three times in calorific value. That can’t be good.

A few Thanksgivings ago my wife heard the analytical marxist’s wife and elder daughter quietly bemoaning to one another the absence of “that iced pie that Harry always brings”. No, not mince pie, but the glorious confection presented below. I gather that it is under threat from healthy living—The Independent says that sales of Mr. Kipling’s Bakewell tarts are declining alarmingly. Well, I quite like Mr. Kipling’s Cherry Bakewells, but they are a pale imitation of the easy-to-bake home made version. And in America, no-one seems to have encountered it before, but everyone seems to love it. If you adopt it, you can call this one the crooked timber bakewell tart, if you like. The lemon icing, by the way, was my eldest daughter’s touch—she suggested it when she was 5. Precocious little bugger.

Its simple. Start with a basic flaky pastry crust in a 10 inch pie pan, and bake at 350 for 10 minutes. Smear 6-8 ounces of raspberry jam evenly over the base of the crust (the higher quality the jam the better the outcome, I promise). While the crust is baking, make the cake mixture. Pour the cake mixture over the jam, and try to cover the jam. Bake at 350 for another 20-30 minutes. Allow to cool. Then cover with an icing made from the juice of one lemon and enough powdered sugar to make a thick paste. Alternatively, skip the icing, and serve hot with Bird’s Custard, or cream.

For the cake mixture:

4oz (1 stick) butter
4oz (1/2 cup) sugar (granulated, or bakers)
3 eggs
6 oz (3/4 cup) self-raising flour
several drops of almond essence

To make the cake filling, cream butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, add almond essence (tastes vary—I like to really taste the almond essence but not everyone does), then mix in the flour.

One last thing. Lots of recipes say to use ground almonds instead of flour, or to go half and half. I’ve never found that works, producing a slightly greasy taste in the cake. If anyone can explain what I’m doing wrong….

It seems that everyone else around here is just too quietly dignified to mention that Crooked Timber has been listed as one of the world’s fifty most powerful blogs by The Guardian.

But not me. So: Woo hoo!

It seems appropriate, then, to follow up Henry’s recent post about bookshelves with a notice that Matt Christie is offering wooden shelves to the public at a reasonable price. (They are much more attractive than some I’ve seen lately.) Matt also turns out chopping blocks.

These item are all made by hand from actual crooked timber. Contact him via pas au-delà for rates.

Anybody who combines woodworking with Blanchot deserves a plug on the 33rd most powerful blog in the world. The precise metrics used to determine that ranking are probably among the Guardian’s trade secrets, of course.

This is a very simple summer dessert from Katie Stewart’s Times Cookery Book. My mother made it twice in the seventies, and the memory lingered till she finally donated one of her two copies of Katie Stewart to me a couple of years ago. It’s as good as I remembered it being.

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In response to popular demand (well, a single request from vivian) I’m going to try to do a semi-regular recipe post. I’m aiming for one every couple of weeks or so, but if Eszter, Belle and others join in perhaps we’ll manage weekly. I’m hoping they join in, because my recipes tend to be so be so unhealthy that we’ll kill off the readership.

Today’s recipe is Treacle Tart. Treacle Tart is completely familiar to our British readers, but unheard of by most of our US readers (and I don’t know about the rest of you). If you have a Whole Foods near you you can find Golden Syrup in the syrup section, or, amazingly and very cheaply, at amazon. (It’s also great on pancakes or, if you don’t care what the neighbours think, and I don’t, on toast).

Update: Of course, all our American readers have heard of treacle tart, I apologise. As the last person left in the world who has not read Harry Potter, I didn’t realise that treacle tart had become world famous. This is it, and golden syrup is the key. Now American CT readers can delight their children. Serve with heavy whipping cream, unwhipped. Or, if you dare, Bird’s Custard.

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Becks at Unfogged and Scott Lemieux both wonder why the hell the New York Times publishes articles like this.

FOR some people, the most elusive aspect of owning a vacation home that sits beyond big-city borders isn’t finding the time to enjoy it. It’s finding someone to service the deluxe appliances inside.

“We called Viking over the holidays every year,” Rosemary Devlin said of her half-decade-long (and mostly futile) efforts to schedule manufacturer service for her mutinous dishwasher. The appliance was installed along with a suite of Viking cousins when Ms. Devlin and her husband, Fay, whose main house is about 20 miles north of Manhattan in Irvington, N.Y., built their six-bedroom ski house on Okemo Mountain in Ludlow, Vt.

The Financial Times (which has its biases, but is still in my opinion the best newspaper out there), has an entire bloody weekend supplement devoted to this kind of stuff, with the classy title How To Spend It. While a fair number of its readers are presumably City types who can afford the pieds-a-terres and fancy toys lovingly detailed in its pages, I would imagine that most of its readers aren’t. Someone who I was chatting to about this recently suggested that it’s an aspirational thing; while most of its readers can’t afford this stuff, they’d like to be able to, and are more likely to buy a newspaper that allows them at least to daydream about it. Or perhaps the marketing types think that readers would prefer to be addressed as if they were in a position to “Spend It” even when they aren’t. Any other plausible explanations?

Apologies as this is too late for most of our readers outside of the Americas, but hopefully still in time for some. Below the fold is my blog entry from exactly four years ago. All the best for 2007!

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The British “pro-war left” blog Harry’s Place, to which we still link in our sidebar, has recently expanded its roster of bloggers. One of the new crew, Brett Lock, has now posted a lengthy diatribe about the sinister campaign that has led Palestinian schoolgirls to bake a Pizza in the shape of a Palestine that appears include Israel too. This on the basis of an article in a small circulation London local paper. I thought this kind of thing—objectively terrorist cake-blogging—was the preserve of Fafblog or The Onion, or of wingnuts like Malkin (remember the “crescent-shaped” UA93 memorial?). Whatever next?

First, I would like to thank all the participants in the seminar for their generosity in time, effort, and spirit. It is a rare treat to have such a collection of intelligent and knowledgeable individuals comment on one’s work; more rare yet is to have such fair minded and thoughtful remarks. I hope to be able to reciprocate with an equally fairminded response to the main claims each of the participants have made. Of the readers I beg patience, then, as each comment is substantial and each deserves, in turn, a response. These are mostly designed to be read each section in companion to the commentary to which it responds.

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Laura berates her readers for not coming up with America’s most popular Cookbook author in response to her plea for good cookbooks. Unlike Laura, I rarely get recipes from the internet. Sometimes I make them up; other times I reverse engineer them (upcoming later this week; my reverse engineered recipe for Tesco’s fresh pesto). My own favourite cookbook of all is out of print: Katie Stewart’s wonderful Times Cookery Book; my mum gave me the more beaten up of her two copies a few years ago and I treasure it no end. But the best internet recommendation I got was in this thread; cranky observer recommended Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible. She leads you through both the stages and the science of baking good cakes; I’ve yet to have a failure. Better still is The Bread Bible; again, she shows how you to deal with yeast and flour, and tells you enough of the science to instill the necessary patience. I have had failures with this, but not many, and because the book is so well designed I’ve actually learned from the failures!.

The Economist gives us yet another rendition of “Western Europeans have it too good to realize how badly they need reform.”

Another great week for Europe: Things must get more hellish in Italy and France before they stand any chance of getting better

THEY are two seemingly unconnected events, but they yield a common, depressing conclusion. The events were the decision by France’s government to tear up its controversial law creating a more flexible job contract for the young, and the razor-edge outcome of Italy’s rancorous election. The conclusion: the core countries of Europe are not ready to make the economic reforms they so desperately need—and that change, alas, will come only after a diabolic economic crisis. … their voters are not yet ready to swallow the nasty medicine of change … too many cosseted insiders … The real problem, not just for Italy and France but also for Germany, is that, so far, life has continued to be too good for too many people: there is not yet a general consensus that their economies are in serious trouble … There is one depressingly certain way to remedy the failings in the core European countries: to bring on a more serious economic crisis. This week will surely have brought that a lot closer.

This combines a few arguments that are true and important (there are problems of equity with sclerotic labour markets that discriminate against the young) with much that is quite bizarre – the claim that Europe’s fundamental difficulty is that “life has continued to be too good for too many people.” Would that we all had such problems. Most interesting, perhaps, is the mode of analysis that the Economist’s editorial writer employs – the suggestion that what we need is a really nasty crisis to alert people to their real interests. Which is a dolled up version of the old Marxist trope that we need (as David Lodge’s Fulvia Morgana puts it) to ‘eighten ze contradictions’ if we are to bring through the revolution. Keynes famously quipped that those “who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” The Economist, which appears to believe that there’s no intellectual debate to the left of the New Republic owes rather more to defunct Marxist theorists than it imagines.

I rarely agree with Michael Gove, but am, like him, mortified by the prospect of Marmite being sold in plastic (scroll down past the weird stuff on punk to “Love it, Hate it…”; sorry I’m late on this, I just got the cutting from my mum). I usually plan my transatlantic trips to coincide with the time I anticipate a domestic Marmite crisis, and have it for lunch most days still (it’s not an acquired taste for me, I’ve loved it since I can remember).

As for scraping the last bits out of the jar; I’m a bit disappointed in a future Tory cabinet minister not knowing what to do: pour in a little boiling water, shake it up, and use the liquid for stock, sir. They should put that on the jar, perhaps.