Raspberry Debacle

1 June, 2007

Death by Rhubarb and Fig Tart

Filed under: dessert, fruit, gluten-free, spring, vegetarian — Holly @ 10:43 am

Pretentiously-photographed tulip and rhubarb-and-fig tart.

Another brilliant thing about South London: the charity shops. Yesterday it was Lou Jane Temple’s Death By Rhubarb, tagline: “At Cafe Heaven, the souffles don’t fall, but the bodies do”.

Cover of a book called Death by Rhubarb

It’s a “culinary mystery” from 1996 in which cafe-owner Heaven Lee “turns sleuth to save her restaurant”, and it has a fantastic disregard for genre boundaries. “Tonight they were sharing three Blue Heaven salads, and a double macaroni and cheese”, the main text says, and then there’s a recipe for Blue Heaven Salad. “You’re right, Pearl. What would this street do without you, you and your gingerbread?” says a character, and then there’s a recipe for Pearl’s Gingerbread Upside-Down Cake. The series also seems to be charmingly autobiographical; character Heaven runs Cafe Heaven, writer Lou runs Cafe Lulu.

There are now seven books about Cafe Heaven, including A Stiff Risotto (I feel like there’s a pun here I’m not getting?), Red Beans and Vice, and Bread on Arrival. I particularly like Bread on Arrival for being the wrong way round: instead of death being smuggled into a seemingly innocent meal, it’s a meal being smuggled into a macabre situation. Presumably ambulance attendants rush a dying patient to the hospital, and when they get him there he’s… been replaced by a life-size bread mannequin? I don’t know, the charity shop only had the first two books in the series.

The question, anyway, is whether I should take this as inspiration to rejig Raspberry Debacle as an ongoing mystery. The answer is “almost certainly not”, but I’ve been preparing possible renames, just in case:

  • Rest in Peas (restinpeas.com is unfortunately already registered, though there’s nothing there)
  • Vegetable Stir-DIE
  • Um, Scrambled Legs?
  • Fig-or Mortis?
  • Capital Bun-ishment?
  • I know, A Sudden Tart Attack!
  • This isn’t as easy as it looks, though
  • Portobello Mush Doom? Monosodium Glutafate?
  • Gluten-free chocolate cake but it isn’t really gluten-free and someone’s allergic to gluten oh no, though maybe that should just be called Gluten-FULL Chocolate Cake?
  • Last Dill and Testament

Ivy, Battersea’s bakingest postgrad, sighed as she looked at the body in the kitchen. “I don’t know where you’re going to keep it,” she said. “There’s no room in our fridge, and you know Patriona doesn’t like meat in hers.” Patriona was their housemate — she was a vegetarian and gluten-intolerant!

“It’s not mine,” Ivy’s boyfriend Keath replied, stroking his beard in a puzzled way, because he had one.

Ivy sighed again, and looked up the stairs. “Cory!”, she called, “is this your body in the kitchen?” Cory was their other housemate. He had short hair.

There was a bit of hilarious misunderstanding while Cory thought she’d meant his actual body, that he lived in and typed with and things, because that’s the natural assumption surely, what with people not usually leaving bodies in the kitchen. Finally, however, the misunderstanding was cleared up.

“Maybe it’s Patriona’s?” Cory said.

Ivy phoned Patriona.

“No,” Patriona said, “I didn’t leave a body in the kitchen. I’m a vegetarian and gluten-intolerant, remember! I hope you get rid of it before dinner, anyway, remember Robert and, I mean, um, Zobert and Snosh are coming over. Did you say you were making a tart?”

“Oh!” Ivy said. “The tart!” She ran to the oven, and pulled out her Rhubarb and Fig Tart just in time.

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19 April, 2007

Chocolate Polenta Cake, Strawberry Ice-Cream, and Useful Kitchen Gadgets

Filed under: afternoon tea, cake, fruit, gluten-free, icecream, spring, vegetarian — Holly @ 11:05 am

Chocolate polenta cake, a strawberry, and strawberry ice-cream from above

After I’d ordered my ice-cream maker, but before it arrived, there was an article (in the Guardian, I think) claiming that ice-cream makers were the most useless of kitchen appliances, with a high cost-to-use ratio springing from the combination of their price (twenty-five to fifty pounds) and the fact that nobody actually uses them. Several weeks of ice-cream-maker ownership has reassured me that this is not the case, but in matters of science instinct must give way to analysis; so today I have chosen to compare my ice-cream maker to a number of other kitchen appliances. This will allow me to work out whether it really is useless, or whether the Guardian is just talking charming nonsense.

The electric tablecloth: No longer available in shops, the electric tablecloth is, er, an electric tablecloth. You can stick bulbs into it and they will light up, and if you spill a drink on it, you will die.

  • Pros: an interesting demonstration of the Edwardian idea that electricity is good with everything (compare the home instruction book Things A Lady Would Like To Know, which recommends, for cramp, “Be electrified through the part which uses to be affected, or hold a roll of brimstone in your hand”, and for deafness, “be electrified through the ear”).
  • Cons: No longer commercially available. Oh, also the death thing.

A self-winding fork for spaghetti: Like the electric tablecloth, this 1937 experimental model is not comercially available.

  • Pros: Spaghetti can indeed be quite difficult to eat decorously.
  • Cons: Almost entirely useless; inventor intended it as a joke; early twentieth century novelty kitchen items are slightly amusing, through the magic of passing time, but people are still selling these, zanily no doubt.

The inside-the-shell electric egg scrambler: A needle is inserted into an egg. The electric scrambler’s scrambling process is initiated, and the needle jiggles around for eight seconds. You then have a pre-beaten egg, which you can either crack open and use as you will, or boil to get a homogenised pale-yellow boiled egg.

  • Pros: Won’t kill you; apparently not intended as a joke; quite small.
  • Cons: Homogenised pale-yellow boiled eggs? What? What?

Duck press: A duck press costs $1500 (expedited shipping not available), and is used for pressing barely-cooked duck until all its duck juice comes out. We learnt about duck presses from a recent programme on Edwardian food (housemate Brendan has already posted about it) but they’re still being manufactured and used; La Tour d’Argent apparently served its millionth pressed duck in 1996 (#253,652 was for Charlie Chaplin).

  • Pros: For an extra $60, you can get a duck press with little duck feet; duck press can perhaps be multipurposed for pressing garlic, trousers, Oxford University, etc.
  • Cons: Takes up quite a lot of bench space.

My ice-cream maker: £36, compact, batteries included, makes delightful ice-cream and sorbet.

  • Pros: You don’t even need to pre-freeze the bowl. You just put the whole machine in the freezer (it’s quite small, but I can measure it if anyone wants one and is worried about whether it would fit in their freezer), and then a few hours later you have ice-cream. Ice-cream!
  • Cons: £36 is a fair wodge of money; and while it’s in the freezer the machine makes little shivery grinding I’m-cold-let-me-out-please noises whenever you walk past the fridge. If you’re in the habit of anthropomorphising kitchen appliances (or drawing sad faces on them), you might find this troublesome.

There’s some competition from the duck press, but I think it’s clear that the ice-cream maker is in fact the least useless kitchen appliance, and furthermore the only one that’s necessary for making chocolate polenta cake with strawberry ice-cream.

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13 April, 2007

Galangal Raspberry Friands, and Using Up Leftovers

Filed under: afternoon tea, cake, fruit, gluten-free, spring, vegetarian — Holly @ 11:19 am

A blueberry friand and a raspberry friand

I’m dreadful at using up leftovers. Occasionally I make stock from a leftover roast, but then a week later I still haven’t used the stock for anything and it’s growing cloudy in the back of the fridge. I bake at a rate of about 120% of our household baked-goods consumption rate (and then booby-trap the baking trays, to decrease the chances of other housemates contributing to the problem), and the last slice or two of any given cake ends up in the bin. When I do manage to use leftovers, as often as not it’s in a more expensive meal than I would have cooked otherwise, after I’ve spent twenty minutes searching for recipes with everything I have to use up (kale, roast beef and banana pasta?), and then another fifteen running down to the supermarket for half the ingredients.

Obviously this is a bad thing and I need to to get better-organised, and also more local friends who eat a lot. Also obviously, it’s the result of the historically and socially unlikely luxury of being able to easily get more food than I need. Certainly the idea of using leftovers appeals to me immensely, but I’m unlikely to start rinsing the dressing off uneaten salad and freezing the carefully dried leaves, or rubbing old tealeaves on the bathroom mirror to clean it (apparently you have to buff it with a soft cloth afterwards to, er, wipe the tealeaves off). I do enjoy and use wartime advice like “if only a small amount of [lemon] juice is needed, prick one end of a lemon with a fork. Squeeze out the amount needed and store the lemon in the ice-box” (from the 1940s Foods That Will Win The War And How To Cook Them); but modern squeamishness has me cringing at the same book’s chapter on gelatine. (Gelatine is good for using up leftovers in a number of ways, all of which boil down to “get a load of gelatine, mix it with a lot of leftovers, leave it all in a mould to set, slice, optionally give dish a name including the word ’surprise’.” This technique is consistent regardless of whether the leftovers are fish, fruit, cheese, rice, or coconut and celery.)

The use of leftovers I find most startling and delightful comes from the bijoutiers. Perhaps everybody knows about them except me, but I’d never even heard of them until yesterday, and they’re brilliant. They worked in Paris, particularly around the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries but existing in some form until the middle of the twentieth, and they would walk around to embassies and restaurants and oversupplied wealthy houses, collecting the leftovers, tossing them into a basket: pie-crusts and boiled eggs, chicken wings, scraps of raw pastry, squashed fruit, nuts, uneaten vegetables. Back in the markets, the bijoutiers would arrange the leftovers on tiny plates, in jewel-like patterns, and sell them on; sometimes to hungry passers-by, sometimes even to restaurants, who would add them to their own menus.

In Versailles the waste was even more extravagant, and elaborate meals would be sent from the royal table untouched. The leftovers market differed correspondingly; no bijoutiers to collect the scraps, but rather the Versailles kitchens setting everything out in the market themselves:

The foods that come from the King’s table, and those of Princes, are barely touched when they go on sale. The bourgeois are not embarrassed to serve them since anything that was on a Prince’s table is said to be both delicious and safe to eat. At least a quarter of Versailles lives off of the food once served on the royal table and the cooks of his Majesty are, in fact, preparing foods for lowly stomachs for which these culinary masterpieces were never intended. Huge fish go untouched from his Highness’s table, or that of the Count of Artois, to a hat maker’s table, to the delight of his little family, who feed on succulent dishes and no longer need to cook for themselves.

This is the sort of leftover even I could eat consistently: elaborate delicious meals with absurd ingredients, available cheaply and conveniently. As it is, though, the only sort of leftovers I manage to use up with any regularity are egg whites and egg yolks, and that’s not much of an accomplishment: the solution to “oh, I have some leftover bits of egg” is usually “RAPID EMERGENCY CAKE: INITIATE BAKING PROCEDURES NOW”. Reasons to bake are not something I generally need more of, so egg-yolks become ice-cream or dense and gooey cakes, while egg-whites become friands, uneconomically (almond meal is not a cheap way of using up anything) but deliciously.

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4 April, 2007

Chocolate Mousse Cakes and counterfeit food

Filed under: cake, dairy-free, dessert, gluten-free, spring, vegan — Holly @ 9:29 am

Close-up of vegan chocolate mousse

Huckleberries are a real fruit!

This is important. Back in my first year of high-school, we played a class-wide game in a music lesson, and one round involved thinking of fruit that started with the same letter as your name. This is, okay, clearly not a great game anyway, since (1) you get into arguments about what constitutes a fruit and what a vegetable, arguments which music teachers and competitive twelve-year-old girls aren’t necessarily qualified to answer (but which they’ll be very keen to address anyway); and (2) people named, say, Beatrice (blueberries, blackberries, boysenberries, bananas) have an advantage over people named, I don’t know, Holly. Still, I would have pulled through the round, with “huckleberry”, if the teacher hadn’t deemed huckleberries entirely nonexistent, a character name rather than an actual fruit; and since I’d never seen one, I assumed she knew better than I.

But now it turns out they really do exist, and they really are a fruit. Bears like to eat them! There’s even a trade in fakes: “Al Hedman, who produces Larchwood Farms Huckleberry Jam, said an illicit trade in counterfeit huckleberry products has been going on for years with inferior blueberries or other farmed berries being substituted for Montana’s tart, wild bounty”!

It’s probably contrary to Mr Hedman’s intent, but my main thought on reading his complaint (after “they are too a fruit! I knew it! Every moment of success that Beatrice has had since 1994 should have been mine“, anyway) was “brilliant, I can make counterfeit huckleberry cake with blueberries.” I love the idea of food masquerading as other food, and surely counterfeiters — whose income and freedom depends on their expertise — must know better than most what works and what doesn’t.

Most counterfeit food is offputtingly unsuitable for cakes. It’s non-organic meat and vegetables substituted for organic, with surreptitious farmers “spraying ‘organic’ crops with chemicals under the cover of darkness”. It’s farmed salmon fed artificial colouring so it’ll look nice and pink. It’s counterfeit brand-name food, with Ferrero Rocher’s brand-name being trademarked in China by the rival company that was counterfeiting its chocolates, and brands like Coca-Cola and Kraft having similar problems. At the same time, it’s Kraft being sued for its guacamole dip that contained less than 2% avocadoes; it was eventually relabelled a “guacamole-flavoured dip”.

Tofu seems the best possible counterfeit food: inoffensive and pointless in itself, but confusingly good at pretending to be something different. Freeze and fry for a plausible chicken! Crumble it up for scrambled eggs! Dry it and tan it and wear it as a coat or hardy boots, for all I know, stretch it out and use it as violin strings, roll some in a pile of dust to make a charming pet hamster. And make mousse out of it: the vegan chocolate mousse at 101 Cookbooks is fantastic and resilient, absorbing pretty much any flavours you could plausibly want a mousse to have and just sitting there, wobbling gently.

Mousse, of course, is ideal for putting on cakes.

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30 March, 2007

Vegan Potato Salad and food colouring

Filed under: gluten-free, salad, spring, vegan, vegetables, vegetarian — Holly @ 1:15 pm

A kale-and-chickpea salad.

Salad is just rubbish, isn’t it? In the past five years I’ve shared a house with two vegans, two vegetarians, and three meat-eaters, and in all that time I’ve had one salad that tasted nice. I keep trying: I use recipes, I use “these vegetables all taste nice” logic, I order meals with salad in restaurants, and it just doesn’t work. I get a perfectly nice pasta dish… that somebody’s left to go cold and manky. Some delightful lettuces and tomato… that someone’s covered with a greasy slick of oil. Chickpeas and lemon and a load of crunchy stuff is still fundamentally going to taste like lemony chickpeas, and one mouthful of lemony chickpeas is enough for me.

Salad is the one food where almost every recipe includes something that you’re supposed to add “for colour”. There’s nothing wrong with colour; it might not affect the taste, but it affects our experience of the taste, and that’s the important thing. Fifty percent of us assume our cordial is lime-flavoured if it’s coloured green. The semi-arbitrary association of “blue” with “raspberry” developed partly because customers just couldn’t tell the difference between strawberry and raspberry flavourings without some sort of colour cue. I’ll put food colouring in orange cakes, and it does make them taste more orangey to me, even though there’s no flavour in it.

At the end of the nineteenth century the burgeoning margarine industry was famously kept in check by legislation controlling not the sale of margarine but its colour (which is naturally white); in the US, margarine that had been coloured an attractive yellow was taxed at forty times the rate of its uncoloured equivalent. In New Hampshire, Vermont, Minnesota, West Virginia and South Dakota, margarine could only be sold at all if it was coloured pink (at least until the Supreme Court demurred). Even the packaging had to be unattractive, predating similar “smoking may cause lung cancer” labelling laws by decades:

In this connection, one state requires that a black band at least three inches wide be painted around the container. Another state requires the use of labels painted with lamp black and oil on all containers of butter substitutes.

And because people like things to look the right colour, this set the stage for profitable dodges:

Another man who made a highly profitable find in the food field in recent years is Leo Peters, originator of the “Pak” margarine package, made out of plastic and containing a capsule for coloring. By merely kneading the “Pak,” a housewife can give a pound of margarine the appetizing hue of butter. It took Peters a long time to put the idea across, but once it was accepted by manufacturers he began collecting royalties estimated at $1,000,000 a year.

So adding something for colour: fine. But salads don’t just have ingredients added for colour. They seem to exist at all just for the sake of that colour, to throw a pie or a bit of meat or something else that actually tastes good into relief. They’re not a decent food that I’d want to eat anyway, with a bit of adornment to make them more enticing: they’re a food that I keep trying because it makes plates look better, and because other people seem to approve, but which there’s never any point in eating. Salads aren’t horrible, they’re just pointless and dreary. They take up space on the plate, but maybe it’s time to start getting smaller plates, or saving money by having reusable crumpled cellophane, instead of wasting five minutes a day chopping up spring onions and radishes, both of which, frankly, taste of nothing at all.

The only reason I haven’t given up on salad entirely is… well, d’you remember I said that I’ve had one salad, ever, that tasted nice? Yes, well, that one tastes really really nice. It has spring onions. It has radishes. I taste the spring onions and radishes as I chop them up, and they still taste of nothing, but then I put them in this salad and they’re delicious.

It doesn’t even look very pretty, which, since “looking pretty” is the one thing most salads are good for (you can’t even throw them, they just fall into their constituent parts and get on your clothes), puts it at a disadvantage. But it doesn’t need to look pretty. It stands around on street corners and sneers at the pretty salads as they go by, and the pretty salads drop their heads and rush onward because they know it’s better than they are.

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27 March, 2007

Lemon and Raspberry Icecream Cakes, and germs

Filed under: cake, fruit, gluten-free, icecream, summer, vegetarian — Holly @ 11:32 am

Two lemon almond-and-gelati cakes

There’s nothing intrinsically better about having an individual-serving cakelet rather than a slice of a communal cake. With a communal cake, the hungry people can have a big slice, the full people can have a little slice, and then when the full people realise they’re not full after all they can have a little more; it’s all very easy. With individual desserts, it’s one-size-fits-all, and unless you’re happy passing leftovers across the table, uneaten half-cakelets just sit there taunting anyone who would have liked seconds.

And yet cakes like these ones make me dissolve into envy: look! A whole cake for each person! Tiny muffins, too small to halve, are the same, and even cornish pasties: food that mustn’t be shared, food still in its ideal complete form, and it’s all yours so you can lick it if you like, or stick your face in it, or cut it into twelve tiny slices and eat them one at a time, and nobody can stop you. I’ve spent the last month intermittently yearning for some dessert rings, so that I too could mould perfect individual desserts; and then I realised that a dessert ring was essentially a £4 cylinder with a hole in the top, such as could be made by, say, cutting the bottom off a paper cup.

Using paper cups isn’t just cheap, it’s also historically appropriate, since paper cups were developed in response to the desire for individual servings. Until the late nineteenth century, communal drinking supplies mostly consisted of “some water” and “a single cup chained nearby”, which worked fine until people found out about germs:

In contrast to this staring death cup (as represented by the Minnesota Board of Health), early-twentieth-century paper cups were marketed as Health Kups, and in a culture postdating romanticism but predating goths, is it any surprise that the Health Kups were the more popular? Even church-goers were fretting about the crumbs floating in their single communion vessel, and digging up logical justifications of individual versions (sadly not marketed as Kommunion Kups):

It has also been claimed that Christ, when he said, “This is my blood of the New Testament which is for many,” pointed to that one cup which he had used, and thereby designated the use of one and only one cup. We shall for a moment concede them the point, however, we shall ask, Where is that cup to which Christ is claimed to have pointed? If that particular cup was “the blood of the New Testament,” then wherein are we justified in celebrating the Lord’s Supper, since we have not that cup? Again, were it possible to produce the identical cup which Christ used, how were it possible for all Christians to drink from that one cup? The absurdity of this argument against the individual cup lies in carrying it to its logical end; namely, producing that cup to which Christ is claimed to have pointed, and then use no other in administering the Sacrament. It would require long years for that one cup to make the circuit, and many would never have the divine pleasure of communing with Christ.

The societal fear of germs was of course a new and enormous thing, causing changes in everything from sanitation to fashion, playing a part in the decline of petticoats and beards: “it is detrimental to the health to allow our beards to grow into such germ-carriers, and in addition it is characteristic of laziness. Besides tickling the ladies they are a harbor for germs”. There are even slightly implausible stories of “a 1907 experiment in which two men kissed a young woman after walking through Paris”, one bearded and one unbearded, in order to compare germs ( “but of course it is vital for the experiment, Pierre! Now do it again, oui. And now you, Auguste. This time open your mouth, my little test subjects, we must get all the germs out, for science”).

In conclusion, we’ve established today that if you have a beard and want to rub it in some food, it’s probably best to go with individual servings instead of one big cake; and as individual servings go these are pretty delicious. (They’re also rabidly inappropriate for the end of winter, full of frozen raspberries and cold, but “seasonal appropriateness” versus “chance to use EXCITING NEW ICECREAM MACHINE that MAKES ICECREAM in the FREEZER and it goes WHIRR and ICECREAM” is a pretty uneven competition.)

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