Raspberry Debacle

12 September, 2007

Vegan chocolate-banana-coffee ice-cream: a food, not a hat

Filed under: dairy-free, gluten-free, icecream, summer, vegan, vegetarian — Holly @ 9:13 am

Vegan chocolate ice-cream in a wine glass, with spoon.

My problem with ice-cream has always been the drips, more virulent than any other foodstuff (except maybe tomato sauce on spaghetti, flung out in all directions as the strands are slurped up). It was years before I could eat an ice-cream without getting at least a few drops on my clothes; I’d hide beneath paper napkins while I ate and — if it was really nice ice-cream — surreptitiously suck the drips out of the paper when I was done.

I find it surprising that there isn’t (unless I’ve missed something) a bigger overlap between “food” and “clothes”. Obviously food-clothes wouldn’t last very well, but surely that means they’d be ideal for an ostentatious display of wealth, something that food and clothes individually have always been used for: “look, I have so much food I can dress in it, such vast resources I can afford clothes that I’ll want to throw out in a day or two”. But instead, food in clothes is generally fake, made from plastic or fabric.

There’s Adam and Eve and their (traditional) fig leaves, which you can stir-fry and eat. There’s Carmen Miranda, and other more muted versions of the “fruit on a hat” idea. But apart from that, there’s just occasional “look at those zany scientists/artists/bakers, making dresses out of wine/chocolate/cream-puffs” news stories, though to be fair the news stories wouldn’t exist if the zany scientists/artists/bakers themselves didn’t. The cream puffs were
for a wedding; the chocolate for a fund-raising fasion-show (”then there were those who feared it would melt, fall off and embarrass us and the model wearing it”), the wine for the causes of art. It was “inspired by the skin-like layer covering a vat of wine that had been contaminated with bacteria and gone “off”", it breaks easily, it tastes like “a kind of chewy, slightly alcoholic sludge”, and apparently further research could make it a “viable option” for commercial use (I’m beginning to understand better why food-clothes are uncommon; perhaps “further research” will involve replacing it with, eg, cotton).

Back in the realms of folklore, Scottish brownie-critter Aiken Drum started out as the Brownie of Blednoch, wearing a kilt of rushes; he worked hard on a farm until they tried to give him a pair or normal trousers, at which point he ran away in a panic. Alternatively, he was an aspiring soldier:

An’ his coat was o’ the guid saut meat,
The guid saut meat, the guid saut meat,
An’ a waistcoat o’ the haggis bag,
Ay wore Aiken Drum.

Nowadays, his children’s-song appearances have him wearing nothing but food: “his coat was made of good roast beef” and he played upon a ladle. In more recent variants he’s even given spaghetti hair, fish-stick pants (I don’t see how these would work), pizza eyes (ditto), and whatever other foodstuff the singer feels like adding in.

Beyond this, there’s nothing: bracelets with tiny candy beads, coconut shell bras, occasional flippant edible dresses or comedy underwear, rice-paper hats to eat and astonish your friends. And this, from a Scottish parish newsletter:

Tea and cakes were then served and the competition for ‘an edible brooch’ was judged as follows: 1 Barbara Robertson, 2 Maureen Simpson, 3 Margaret Leslie. Mrs Jean Morrison gave a comprehensive vote of thanks ending a very pleasant evening. Anyone wishing to join the guild, should go along on the first Thursday of each month.

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15 August, 2007

Chocolate Raspberry Crumble Cake

Filed under: cake, dessert, fruit, gluten-free, summer, vegetarian — Holly @ 12:09 pm

Chocolate raspberry crumble cake, seen from above

Chocolate makes everything seem nicer. Stealing £140,000 worth of an unspecified product: pretty nasty. Stealing £140,000 worth of chocolate flakes: well, quite endearing, at least superficially. Stealing £140,000 worth of chocolate flakes and then offering them to ice-cream sellers: positively charming.

This seems to be a fairly consistent rule. A seven-metre-high scrambled egg sculpture would be repulsive. Make it out of chocolate, and suddenly it’s fine (although having a sculpture “modelled after the Rockefeller Center, Empire State Building and Chrysler Building in the United States” does, sadly, seem to mean “er, shaped like a big rectangle”). Squirrels stealing pieces of dog flesh: slightly alarming. Squirrels stealing chocolate eggs: delightful. And if you’re approached by cocoa bean thieves trying to sell $150,000 worth of beans, of course it’s going to be more exciting and less scary than if they were trying to sell you $150,000 worth of stolen TVs.

One of my favourite chocolate stories is set centuries ago, in the 1600s. Spanish colonists in Mexico had a habit of drinking hot chocolate everywhere, even in church, but their bishop — perhaps understandably — wasn’t too keen: sure, a few popes had decided that chocolate wasn’t a food, as long as it was drunk in water instead of being mixed with milk or eggs or chickpeas (chickpeas!), but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t distract from the sermon. The bishop banned chocolate in his church; the colonists responded by trooping off to another church; the bishop responded by excommunicating them; they, in turn, responded by killing him with a cup of poisoned hot chocolate. (Allegedly.) Somehow the mere presence of chocolate makes this a friendlier, if no less murderous, incident. And sure, the Aztecs sacrificed a lot of people to a lot of gods — but then they settled down with a nice mug of hot chocolate afterwards, so they can’t have been all that bad.

I’m not advising you to embark on a new career as a thief, or to begin sacrificing passers-by to Tezcatlipoca, but if by chance you’ve already started and you’re looking for a way to appease your horrified friends, you could do worse than bringing them a slice of this cake. It really is very nice.

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7 August, 2007

Ins, Outs, and Chilled Mulled White Wine

Filed under: drinks, fruit, gluten-free, summer, vegan — Holly @ 9:52 am

Three glasses of mulled white wine, with a bookcase in the background.

EDIT: Hello, everyone here from gluten-free forums! If you’re interested in gluten-free recipes, I have an archive here; about two thirds of the recipes on the site are gluten-free, and I’ll be posting another gluten-free cake recipe later in the week. If you’re here because you’re upset by the line about gluten intolerance in the post below, then I’m sorry to have upset you. The piece is intended as a parody of articles about food trends, written in-character by an imaginary food writer. However, I realise some of you recognise this and still find it offensive, and I don’t like upsetting people, so I’ve edited the joke to get rid of the line that seems to have been the specific cause of your anger. I should perhaps explain that I’ve been doing a lot of gluten-free cooking over the last year, and I do realise that gluten intolerance (and the specific subset of it that is coeliac disease) is a real, and serious, condition; but I can see that the tone of the piece perhaps implied that I’d just picked it as a random “funny” disease. Feel free to stick around for the recipes; the cake coming later in the week really is very very delicious. END EDIT

It’s always hard to keep track of which foods are fashionable. A few weeks ago, the Observer told me that strawberry cornettos are in, for example; who would have thought it? But at the same time, tiramisu is unfashionable despite its similar redolence of the 80s. It’s simply much too popular. Out: truffle oil, chocolate lava cakes, butternut squash, chicken breasts. In: foie gras speakeasies, bread. Oh, it’s all so difficult!

The main trouble with comprehensive in-and-out food lists is that everyone else reads them, so the “in” foods become popular, and then they’re “out” again, all within six months. To make things worse, the lists are usually published at the end of a year, so those of us in July or August are left without guidance. Fortunately, I’ve managed to get hold of an advance copy of next year’s Official Food Ins and Outs, and I’m ready to share them with you. Only with the help of the list can you can be safe from the risk of serving your friends pesto (in for quick-service restaurants, so out for the rest of us, I’m afraid).

IN: Portable pizza ovens. Back in the sixteenth century, many households had no oven. Instead, it was common practice to send a loaf of bread or a cake out to the local baker, who would pop it in his oven once he was done for the day. This is no longer necessary for most of us, but what are we to do about pizzas? It’s famously difficult to make home-made pizza that lives up to good restaurant pizza, simply because home ovens don’t get hot enough. This doesn’t mean you should give up on making your own! Once the weather has cooled down, ice-cream vans will take out their freezers and fit super-hot ovens instead. Consider prepreparing three or four pizzas in a range of flavours, and when you hear that tinkling Greensleeves you’ll know it’s time to run out to the street and get them cooked properly.

OUT: Putting cocoa percentages on chocolate wrapping. This used to be IN, but now it’s filtered down to Magnums and Cadbury. The thing to do with mid-level chocolate wrapping these days is to attribute abstract nouns and emotions to the different varieties; see Newtree’s FORGIVENESS, Chuao’s PASSION, Dagoba’s ECLIPSE.

IN: Truffle booths. At the moment the truffle booth is an underground movement, but it’s heading mainstream. Customers pay for a private booth in a restaurant, and a selection of truffles is wafted in front of them while they breathe deeply.

OUT: Food processors. It just tastes so much better if you chop it by hand.

IN: Remember perfectly spherical watermelons, square tomatoes, and all the rest of the “grow things in moulds so they’re a weird shape” fad? It goes back at least as far as the nineteenth century, when glass cucumber straighteners came into fashion. Relatedly: you know how corsets can deform the ribs and permanently change someone’s waist shape, if worn consistently enough? By 2009 you can expect cattle corsetry to be the big new thing: buckle in the young cows and wait for exciting rib shapes on your table come 2010.

OUT: Gluten intolerance. The Atkins people started eating bread again years ago, after all.

IN: Brownie intolerance. Brownies are cheap, easy and delicious, so they’re ubiquitous these days, and the only way we can get them off menus is to develop an allergic reaction en masse.

OUT: Truffle booths. Yes, already. It was a fleeting moment of popularity; you had your chance, and you missed it.

IN: Heritage cutlery. In the past, good cutlery was inherited; only an arriviste would buy her own. Look for heritage cutlery to make a resurgence soon, though due to changing standards of serving size, nineteenth-century salad servers may need to function as twenty-first century spoons and forks.

OUT: Vegetables. Vegetables are everywhere these days, which means top chefs are already looking elsewhere for inspiration. The behind-the-times tastebuds of the masses might mean that potatoes are still listed on the menu, but the with-it restaurants will treat you well if you ask, quietly, for a side-dish of mashed squirrel instead.

IN: Mulling. Give it a couple of months and we’ll be firmly into Autumn, and mullers will spring up everywhere. This may be your last chance to get some mulling done before the rush.

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30 July, 2007

Mice, and also blueberry and blue cheese salad

Filed under: fruit, gluten-free, salad, summer, vegetarian — Holly @ 11:45 am

Blueberries, walnuts and blue cheese.

We currently have a mouse. Or several mice, it’s not really clear; nobody’s ever seen more than one at a time, but if it’s a single mouse then it’s very very good at finding its way back from a distant garden, and also at making a scritching noise on two sides of the room at the same time.

Apparently mice only need three grams of food a day, so it seems quite churlish to deny them that, but on the other hand it’s quite churlish for them to skitter across the floor and jump around the side of the oven. Non-human animals aren’t supposed to be in the kitchen unless they’re very very cute, or else food.

This does point at an obvious solution to the mouse problem. It’s surprisingly difficult to find mouse recipes online — they’re all tangled up with a lot of badly-spelt mousse — but not impossible. It turns out that mice are a staple food in some parts of Zambia, for example, where broody couples are said to be longing for a son so that he can kill mice for them.

Zambian mice are generally boiled and dried before they’re eaten, and there’s even a song to mock cooks who don’t realise this, and try to prepare them differently:

Some do not know how to cook mice.
Some do not know how to cook mice.
Onion, tomatoes in the mice.
Onion, cooking oil in the mice.

Elsewhere Alice Thomas Ellis, in Fish, Flesh and Good Red Herring, reports on a woman who cooks mice to her own, distinctly non-Zambian, standards:

In 1920 when I was four years old an old woman who lived near my family in Radlett and whom I used to visit on every occasion I could find, would give me sugar mice to eat. These were made by skinning mice, which she had caught in an ordinary mousetrap, emptying them and then tying them by the tail to a wooden spoon where they were suspended into a strong sugar syrup in a cast iron saucepan over a slow heat. After some hours (or days) the mice became crystallised and, when they were cold, she would give me one to eat. They were delicious and even the bones were crisp and edible.

Outside of Zambia and Radlett, fried mice have been used as a cure for whooping cough and bedwetting. Neither of these are currently major household problems but we’ll be getting a new housemate in a few weeks, so who knows?

The only problem that remains is catching the mice. A study sponsored by the Stilton Cheese Makers’ Association confirmed last year that mice aren’t all that fond of cheese, and would prefer to eat fruit, grains and nuts; so keeping some cheese in for old times’ sake, this blueberry salad seems like a pretty decent bet for luring a delicious mouse to a trap.

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6 July, 2007

Duck and Cherry Salad

Filed under: birds, fruit, gluten-free, meat, salad, summer — Holly @ 12:19 pm

Cherry and duck salad, close-up

There’s a story that the Egyptian caliph al-Aziz was very fond of cherries; so fond that he had a servant in Lebanon who tied cherries to the legs of carrier pigeons, who would fly them to Egypt each day for the caliph’s breakfast.

And then there’s another story, an old English carol, about Mary and Joseph walking in a grove of cherries. Mary asked Joseph to bring her some cherries, since she was with child and could hardly climb up to fetch them herself; Joseph responded, peevishly, with “let him pluck thee a cherry that brought thee with child”. At this point the unborn Jesus communicated with the cherry trees and asked them to bow their branches down, so that Mary could “have cherries at command”.

These supernatural and superexpensive lengths don’t seem excessive; cherries are really really nice, in strong contention for the coveted position of “my favourite food”. I’ve happily eaten a pound at a sitting, though perhaps that isn’t really such a lot - compare it, for example, to the mountains eaten by Elizabethan forerunners of today’s competitive eating (recorded by Horatio Busino, an Italian visitor to England in the early seventeenth century). Back in the early 1600s, cherries were sold in London streets still on their branches, and “it was an amusement to go out into the orchards and eat fruit on the spot, in a sort of competition of gormandize between the city belles and their admirers”.

It’s an odd competition, but no odder than “tie cherry stalks into a knot to demonstrate that you’re good at kissing and/or oral sex” (neither of which traditionally involve tying things into knots with your tongue, unless I’ve misunderstood something grievously). If you’re going put bits of cherry into your mouth for competitive purposes, it might as well be the bits that actually taste nice. On one occasion, back in Busino’s time, a young woman ate twenty pounds of cherries at a sitting, outdoing her closest competitor by two and a half pounds, and a character from Katherine Mansfield’s In a German Pension by sixteen:

He sat down, tugging at a white-paper package in the tail pocket of his coat.

“Cherries,” he said, nodding and smiling. “There is nothing like cherries for producing free saliva after trombone playing, especially after Grieg’s ‘Ich Liebe Dich.’ Those sustained blasts on ‘liebe’ make my throat as dry as a railway tunnel. Have some?” He shook the bag at me.

“I prefer watching you eat them.”

“Ah, ha!” He crossed his legs, sticking the cherry bag between his knees, to leave both hands free. “Psychologically I understood your refusal. It is your innate feminine delicacy in preferring etherealised sensations…Or perhaps you do not care to eat the worms. All cherries contain worms. Once I made a very interesting experiment with a colleague of mine at the university. We bit into four pounds of the best cherries and did not find one specimen without a worm.”

This was more or less true; the young woman who ate twenty pounds of cherries must have eaten at at least half a pound of worms in the process. Even now, home-grown cherries are likely to be riddled with the things. There’s no point in examining them for clues, either - the eggs are laid through a hole so small as to be invisible, and any hole big enough to see is an exit, where the fat white worm has wriggled out. This means that cherries without a hole in them are, if anything, more dangerous, since any worms will still be inside. The only solution seems to be to break each cherry open before eating it - or if you’re only a bit concerned, to drop the cherries in water, and throw out any that float as probable worm-harbourers.

Despite all this talk of worms, I’m still intending to get some cherries as soon as I’ve finished this post. Ideally, of course, I’d have them tied to the legs of birds and flown in through the window, but perhaps I’d choose ducks rather than pigeons. For midsummer a week or two ago we had a twelve-course lunch-turning-into-dinner (full menu here), and the duck and cherry salad was easily my favourite course, so having all the ingredients delivered in one easy bundle would be ideal. (Yes, I know I said salads were universally pointless. It turns out I just wasn’t including enough summer fruit.)

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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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