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.

Vegan chocolate-banana-coffee ice-cream (requires food processor and icecream machine.)

This recipe is vaguer than usual; I lost the piece of paper I noted it down on so it’s from possibly-unreliable memory. I’ll try making it again later in the week and be able to remove this note, I hope.)

1 cup cashews
1/2 cup hot coffee
1/2 cup hot water
1/4 cup cocoa
2 tablespoons dark (vegan-edible, eg Lindt 70%) chocolate, broken into little pieces
1/2 cup sugar
1 ripe or overripe banana
Pinch salt

Grind the cashews small in a food processor; it should be mealy rather than lumpy in texture.

Dissolve the cocoa and the sugar in the hot water. Put the chocolate in the coffee and leave it for a minute or two, and then stir until the mixture is relatively homogenous. Add to the cocoa and hot water.

Put the banana in the food processor and reduce it to a pulp, then mix it together with the cashews and the chocolate-coffee liquid. Add the salt and keep mixing.

Freeze in ice-cream machine according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Best eaten within a day or two, and it gets very hard so remember to take it out of the freezer a good half-hour or so before you’re planning to serve it.

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.

Chocolate Raspberry Crumble Cake
Base
1/4 cup semisweet chocolate, diced small
1/2 cup cocoa
1/2 cup butter
3/4 cup sugar
3 eggs, beaten
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla

Topping
1/3 cup cocoa
1/3 cup ground nuts (that’s “nuts that have been ground”, not groundnuts; hazelnuts, almonds and peanuts are all good)
2/3 cup flour (gluten-free is fine)
1 teaspoon baking powder (gluten-free is fine)
pinch salt
3 tablespoons white sugar
3 tablespoons brown sugar
1/2 cup butter
1 cup raspberries
1/4 cup chopped nuts

Preheat the oven to 160 C, then grease and flour a nine-inch cake tin.

For the cake base, melt the butter and the chocolate in a saucepan over a low heat. Allow to cool for five aminutes before stirring in the cocoa. Whisk to remove lumps, then stir in the sugar, vanilla, and eggs.

Pour the mixture into the base of the cake-tin, and put it in the oven for ten minutes.

Use that ten minutes to prepare the topping. Melt the butter; then allow it to cool for a minute while you mix the cocoa, ground nuts, flour, sugars, baking powder and salt. Pour the butter over the dry mixture and stir it in.

After the cake has been cooking for ten minutes, take it out and lay the raspberries on top carefully. There should be a slight crust by now that prevents the raspberries from sinking to the bottom.

Sprinkle the crumble topping over the raspberries (you mave have to crumble it up a bit with your hands as you do so), and then sprinkle the chopped nuts over the top of that and return the cake to the oven for another half-hour.

Can be served warm or at room temperature.

The way food looks affects the way food tastes. At school, I used to put green food colouring in my common-room-fridge milk, and although it meant I drank blue hot chocolate for a year, it also meant it was usually someone else’s milk that got stolen. On a World War II ship, the cook once found he’d run out of cherry-flavoured jelly; to still the complaints of the crew, he put red food colouring into the lemon jelly, and everyone was happy. If you give someone chocolate yoghurt in the dark and tell them it’s strawberry, experiments show they’ll believe you.

Where this gets really interesting is when the appearance of food begins to completely overwhelm the taste. Mediaeval cooks would sew half a pig to half a chicken and call it a cockatrice; their Victorian followers would make carefully-coloured ice-cream in asparagus moulds (”to produce this fancy ice you will require at least eighteen asparagus moulds made in pewter, and procurable at most ironmongers”, the instructions read).

Wedding cakes come at the modern peak of food-for-show. They’re rarely cheap, often massively expensive, and they usually taste, well, pretty nasty. This is where the cake rental companies that have been in the news lately come in. They provide a fake wedding cake with a tiny portion of real cake in a drawer, and a slit you can put a knife through for the ceremonial slicing. The bride and groom pretend to cut the cake together; they pull the little real slice out; and then the cake as a whole is wheeled off to be surreptitiously replaced in the kitchen with “here’s one I prepared earlier”-style slices of another cake entirely.

This seems, on the face of it, a pretty ridiculous idea, but fake cakes aren’t new. The rulesets (pdf) of cake-decorating competitions often allow the use of a styrofoam “cake dummy” instead of a real cake base; and if you’re more concerned with appearance than taste, why not? In fact, I almost want one, just to have lying around the house (”what’s that?” “oh, it’s just my cake dummy”). I’m not, however, convinced by the idea that “a fake cake displayed on a kitchen counter or dining room table is especially appealing when a home is for sale and on display for potential buyers”. The recommended cake in this version is papier-mache and uniced, and I can’t imagine it would stand up to close inspection, or that most people wouldn’t find it quite creepy (though perhaps a papier-mache oak tree and/or third bedroom would add to the resale value).

I lack the patience and skill for cake decorating; the closest I get to food whose appearance overwhelms its content is a two-pepper soup (where “pepper” in this context means “bell pepper” or “capsicum”). At first it just looks pretty, but give everyone a skewer and they’ll happily draw patterns until it’s gone cold. If you can manage to persuade them to stop drawing for a few minutes and eat it, they’ll find it tastes pretty good as well.

Distracting Two Peppers Soup

Four red peppers
Four yellow peppers
4 tablespoons vegetable oil
4 cloves garlic
2 onions
1 litre veg stock
2 potatoes
1 tomato
1 tablespoon tomato concentrate
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds
1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds
1/4 teaspoon turmeric
1/4 teaspoon paprika
pepper
salt
120 mililtres double cream

Cut the red and yellow peppers into sections and remove the seeds. Rub the sections in two tablespoons of the vegetable oil and put them in an oven at 200C to roast until they start showing blackened sections on the skin, about twenty-five minutes. Take them out of the oven and put them in a plastic bag for fifteen minutes (this should make them easier to peel).

Peel the peppers, but don’t worry too much if you can’t get all the skin off.

Chop the onions and garlic, and then heat a tablespoon of vegetable oil in each of two large saucepans. Fry half of the garlic and onion in each one until the onion starts going translucent, usually less than five minutes. Add half a litre of vegetable stock to each saucepan, then add the red peppers to one and the yellow to the other. Next, peel and dice the potatoes and add one to each pan, and then chop up the tomato and add it to the red-pepper pan along with the tomato concentrate.

Add half the cumin, coriander, and fennel to each soup, then the turmeric to the yellow and the paprika to the red. Add pepper and salt to taste as well (I tend to end up with about 1/4 teaspoon salt, unless the vegetable stock was very salty or unsalty).

Simmer the soups until the potatoes are beginning to fall apart, then take them off and let them cool.

Blend the soups, one at a time, in a food processor or with a stab mixer (if you aren’t going to clean it off between soups, do the yellow soup first). If you blend it thoroughly you shouldn’t need to strain it.

Shortly before you want to serve the soup, reheat it in separate pans, adding 60ml of cream to each pan.

Serve by pouring each soup into a jug, and pouring from the two jugs simultaneously (and slowly) into opposite sides of the bowl. This soup doesn’t have as much cream as some two-pepper soups, so it isn’t quite as thick, which means it might be a good idea to serve at the table - the soup can be disturbed quite badly if it’s carried around too much.

Offline sources: Wansink, Brian. Mindless Eating. Bantam Dell, New York: 2006.

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.

Mulled White Wine
750 ml white wine, maybe something Riesling-y (raspberry tea works too, if you’d rather it was less alcoholic)
100 ml apple or pear juice
100 ml dessert wine
50 ml brandy
50 ml honey
100 g strawberries or cherries (or both if you like)
1 orange or lemon
2 cinnamon sticks
1 teaspoon cloves
1 teaspoon whole coriander seeds
4 or 5 green cardamom pods
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

Put the wine, juice, dessert wine, brandy and honey in a saucepan over a low heat.

Slice the orange into rounds, dehull the strawberries and cut them in halves, and break the cherries in two to take the seeds out. Add these to the saucepan as you go.

Add the cinnamon, cloves, coriander, nutmeg and the little brown or black bits from inside the cardamom pods.

Warm gently, not allowing it to bubble, for twenty minutes to half an hour, adding a little lemon if it’s too sweet, or more honey if it’s not sweet enough.

Strain through a sieve into a container and chill, covered, for an hour or two. Serve over ice.

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.

Blue Salad
(based on the Blue Heaven Salad from Lou Jane Temple’s Death By Rhubarb)

Salad
1 head butter lettuce
1 cup walnuts
1 cup crumbled stilton
1 cup blueberries
1 tablespoon olive oil

Dressing (requires food processor)
1/4 cup raspberries
2 tablespoons raspberry vinegar
2 tablespoons honey
1 teaspoon soy sauce
1/4 cup olive oil

Blend the raspberries, raspberry vinegar, honey and soy sauce in a food processor, then mix in the olive oil gradually, blending as you go. This can be done several hours in advance.

Fry the walnuts for a few minutes in the olive oil, until they start to smell delicious and walnutty, then set them aside to cool.

Crumble the stilton, and mix gently with the blueberries and fried walnuts.

Rinse the lettuce and pat or spin it dry, then put the leaves onto four plates. Separate the mixed stilton, blueberries and walnuts between the plates. Stir around the raspberry dressing to recombine, if it’s separated at all, and then dribble it over the top, to taste. (I only use about a tablespoon per serving, but I don’t really like salad dressing.)

Serves 4.

Back in the nineteenth century, English moustaches were huge, waxed and worn on every forelip that could muster them. This caused problems: the nineteenth century was also a key tea-drinking period, and if you dangle your waxed moustache above a gently steaming cup of tea, the wax melts. Even if your moustache manages to hold up its magnificent peaks through strength and bloodymindedness, it’s still going to get tea in it.

Fortunately, ingenious nineteenth-century potters found a solution: the moustache cup. A small ledge sits across the top of a teacup, and tea-drinkers rest their moustaches on top of the ledge, sipping tea through a little hole while keeping their waxed ends safe.

In these modern days of less complex teacups, it would perhaps be possible to guard one’s moustache by drinking directly from the spout, as teapot designers originally intended; or, venturing into the less distant past, by making tea so repellant that you have no desire to drink it. In the seventeenth century, when tea was still in the process of being introduced to Europe, one set of instructions suggested that the drinker

beat up the yolks of two new-laid eggs with a dessertsponful of fine sugar and then mix them with a pint of hot (but not boiling hot) China tea that has been poured off the leaves.

Apparently the scrambled-egg tea drink

discusseth and satisfieth all rawness and indigence of the stomack, flying over the whole body into the veins, and strengtheneth exceedingly and preserves one a good while from the necessity of eating.

I find it quite easy to believe that I would be relieved from the necessity of eating for some time after eggy tea, yes.

If you can ignore the bit where they’re pouring it onto eggs, though, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a great period for tea in Europe, mostly because nobody was quite sure how to make it or what its effects were. Maybe it was an evil drug (William Cobbett, campaigner against the evils of tea, claimed that tea “is, in fact, a weaker kind of laudanum, which enlivens for the moment and deadens afterwards”); maybe it was the best thing ever.

For some reason, anti-tea activists were particularly keen on involving pigs in their experiments: Cobbet suggested that people who doubt the poisonous nature of tea should

put it to the test with a lean hog: give him the fifteen bushels of malt and he will repay you in ten score of bacon or thereabouts. But give him 730 tea messes, or rather begin to give them to him, and give him nothing else, and he is dead from hunger, and bequeaths you his skeleton, at the end of about seven days.

and the anti-tea Mr Hanway reported an experiment which showed the apparently dire results of, er, scorching a pig’s tail with hot tea.

On the other side, though, there were anecdotes demonstrating that tea was a healthful tonic:

The Princesse de Tarente [...] takes 12 cups of tea every day, which, she says, cures all her ills. She assured me that Monsieur de Landgrave drank 40 cups every morning. ‘But Madame, perhaps it is really only 30 or so.’ ‘No, 40. He was dying, and it brought him back to life before our eyes.’

To be fair, this last is from Madame de Sévigné, who also reports that, for example, the fair-skinned Marquise de Coëtlogon drank too much hot chocolate during her pregnancy and as a result gave birth to a small black child. Plus she doesn’t report any experiments involving pigs, so she can’t be very reliable.

Desperate to settle the matter of whether tea is a harmful drug or a delightful healthgiver, but without any pigs at hand, I recently conducted an experiment with two housemates, an aunt, and a small boy, whereby I denied them sandwiches and cake and fed them only tea and scones. They’re still alive, twitching their big hairy ears and wiggling their curly little tails, so presumably that settles it: tea is healthy, and also these scones are pretty nice.

Cranberry Buttermilk Scones
(Changed minimally from these scones, which suggest clotted cream and raspberry butter to accompany)

5 tablespoons buttermilk
225 grams self-raising flour
Pinch of salt
85 grams butter
50 grams golden caster sugar, plus a little extra for sprinkling
1 medium egg
50 grams dried cranberries

Preheat oven to 220C/200 fan-forced, and line a baking tray with baking parchment.

Sift the flour into a bowl, then add the salt. Cut the butter into squares and rub it into the flour until the mixture resembles coarse breadcrumbs, then stir in the sugar.

Beat the egg together with three tablespoons of the buttermilk, and then stir this gradually into the flour mixture until the dough starts forming a coherent whole. Once it begins clumping together add the cranberries, and continue to stir until it’s beginning to cling together in a big lump. Knead it lightly for a very little while, less than thirty seconds. If the mixture is too sticky, add a little extra flour, and if it’s too dry, a bit of extra buttermilk, until it’s at a playdough-like consistency.

Lay the dough on a floured surface and roll it out to two or three centimetres thick. Cut out the scones using a scone-cutter or glass that’s about five centimetres wide, and lay them on the tray, gathering up the leftover scraps of dough and rolling them out again till you’ve used them all up.

Brush the tops of the scones with the remaining buttermilk and then sprinkle a little sugar on top (or dust them with flour if you’d prefer), then cook for about 10 minutes, until they look golden and cooked on top and on their bottoms.

Serve with butter and jam, or cream if you really insist.

Offline sources: Alice Thomas Ellis, Fish, Flesh and Good Red Herring. Virago Press.

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.)

Duck and Cherry Salad
(Loosely adapted from an Epicurious chicken, raspberry and mango salad.)

dressing
4 tablespoons cherry vinegar (I found mine at the shop at Kew Gardens)
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon soy sauce
Pinch salt
Pinch cayenne pepper
1 garlic clove, minced
1 teaspoon orange zest
1/3 cup olive oil

salad
3 duck breasts (preferably not skinless)
1 radicchio lettuce
4 spring onions
3 cups cherries
1/2 cup pine nuts

For the dressing: whisk together all the dressing ingredients except the oil until thoroughly combined, or shake them up in a jar. Pour in the olive oil, whisking as you go, and keep whisking for thirty seconds or so after you have a homogenous liquid. This can be done a day in advance, and kept (covered) in the fridge.

For the salad, take the three duck breasts and score the skin diagonally a few times, and then again in the other direction, to make a diamond grid pattern. Heat a frying pan over a medium heat, with a very little oil; a few sprays of spray oil should be enough, or a teaspoon of non-spray (the duck fat will melt and provide more than enough, once you’ve started). Put the breasts skin-side-down in the frying pan, and fry for 10-12 minutes, then turn over. Keep frying (turning again if necessary) until the duck is as done as you like it - you can cut into it to check, since you’ll be slicing it for the salad anyway. I kept cooking mine until it was brown all the way through, because I was serving it cold, but if you’re serving yours warm then maybe leave it slightly pink in the centre.

Once the duck’s done, take it off the heat and set it aside to cool; it can be served warm, at room temperature, or cold, though if you do put it in the fridge, take it out ten minutes before serving time to allow it to warm up a little.

Cut the meat of the cherries away from the stone, approximately halving each one. Chop the spring onions finely, then mix them in a bowl with the pine nuts and the halved cherries.

Separate the radicchio leaves in another bowl.

Whisk the dressing again if it’s separated at all. Pour some of the remaining dressing on top of the radicchio, and some on the cherry/nut/onion mix (depending on how much dressing you like; make sure you keep a couple of tablespoons spare, though).

Toss the radicchio leaves and shake them off a little, then lay them out on six plates. Mix the cherry/nut/onion mix as well, and then lay it on top of the leaves (using a fork or a slotted spoon, to let excess dressing drain away).

Rub each duck-breast with a teaspoon or so of the spare dressing, then cut the breasts in half diagonally. Slice each half into four or five slices, and lay on top of the plates.

Serves six.

One of my favourite things about food is that every recipe must have been invented by someone. Somebody decided, in the days before electric mixers, to beat egg whites with sugar for half an hour and then plop them in the oven; someone decided to stick some chopped-up cow inside the cow’s own intestine. It’s as if Archimedes, getting in his bath and noticing the water level rise, had cried out “Eureka! We can use this to measure the volume of objects, oh and also I bet if we took the displaced water and made it really warm and put carrots in it then they’d go soft and a bit delicious.”

Because a lot of foods are the result of what seem to be massively unintuitive decisions, a lot of food origin stories will attribute a new recipe to a happy accident; someone left corn out on the bench too long, someone else cut their french fries too thin in order to aggravate an awkward customer. My very favourite food origin story concerns the lamington, an Australian cake made from squares of sponge, often joined together with strawberry jam, dipped in chocolate icing and then desiccated coconut. Wikipedia’s version of the story:

Lamingtons are most likely named after Charles Baillie, 2nd Baron Lamington, who served as Governor of Queensland from 1896 to 1901. However, the precise reasoning behind this is not known, and stories vary. According to one account, the dessert resembled the homburg hats favoured by Lord Lamington. Another tells of a banquet in Cloncurry during which the governor accidentally dropped a block of sponge cake into a dish of gravy, and then threw it over his shoulder, causing it to land in a bowl of desiccated coconut or peanut butter. A diner thought of replacing the gravy with chocolate and thusly created the lamington known it today.

This is the most fantastic food origin story ever, replying on:

1. a baron; who
2. eats sponge-cake over a dish of gravy; and who on
3. dropping the cake into the gravy is sufficiently infuriated to
4. fish it out only to
5. throw it over his shoulder, where it meets the work of
6. somebody who left a dish of desiccated coconut lying around at a banquet, and who is probably not the same person as the one who
7. naturally responds to this by looking at the gravy and suggesting it be replaced with chocolate.

This is without even addressing the claim that the dish might not have contained coconut, but instead peanut butter. Or the alternative suggestion that lamingtons might have been named after the baron because of their resemblance to his homburg hats, which… well, this is a homburg hat, from Hats in the Belfry:

And this is a lamington:

(from manthatcooks)

I don’t know, perhaps barons get special homburg hats that are shaped like boxes and covered in diamond shards.

The main trouble with lamingtons, for those of us who don’t live in Australia and can’t get them at the local bakery, is that they’re a pain to make; you have to stab the sponge cake with a fork and drip chocolate icing on it while you rotate it slowly (dropping the squares in the chocolate and then tossing them over your shoulder doesn’t actually give you a complete covering, it turns out, and also can get really messy when you miss the bowl of coconut). My current solution is to make lamington-style cupcakes, with a swirl of jam in the batter and lamington icing on top. Non-Australians will also bite into these without fear, which is not necessarily the case with the traditional lamington; whether you consider this an advantage or not depends, I suppose, on how much you like them.

Lamington Cupcakes
cakes
4 tablespoons strawberry jam
125g butter
125g caster sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
1/4 teaspoon salt
125g self-raising flour
2 tablespoons milk

icing
100ml cream
100g dark chocolate
50g desiccated coconut

Preheat oven to 190C/170C fan-forced and set out 12-15 cupcake cases on a tray.

Warm the strawberry jam until it’s thinner and more liquid (either microwaving it ten or twenty seconds at a time and stirring in between, or in a saucepan).

Cream the butter and sugar, then add two eggs and mix them in; then the salt and vanilla.

Add half the flour and stir that in; then the milk; and then the rest of the flour.

Once the mixture is thoroughly combined, get the thinned jam (rewarm it if you have to). Spoon it into the cake batter in four or five separate spoonfuls, scattered around the bowl, and then mix very slightly, just enough to swirl the jam in a little - taking the spoon twice around the bowl, slowly, was enough for me.

Spoon the batter into the cupcake cases until they’re two-thirds full, then cook (rotating the tray after ten minutes) until they’re golden on top and springy to the touch, about twenty minutes.

Once they’ve cooled, warm the cream (in a microwave or a saucepan), then pour it over the broken-up chocolate. Stir it after a minute or two; and then again after another minute or two, until the chocolate’s melted and the mixture is thick and glossy.

Put a teaspoonful of the mixture on top of each cupcake and smooth it out to the edges, then either sprinkle coconut on top or dip the cupcakes icing-down in a bowl of coconut.

Lamington Truffles

If you have ganache left over, you can make lamington truffles: just add a bit of jam to the ganache (not more than a quarter of the volume of the ganache itself), mix it in, refrigerate the mixture until it’s solid, and then roll it into little balls and roll them in coconut. These taste less like lamingtons, and more like balls of chocolate.

So, first I made flippant comments about “Convergence of Computer Science and Critical Theory Cookies”, and cookies that reference other cookies. Then I made some small loaf cakes with brownies for a base. Then Leonard pointed to his 2003 post on meta-desserts — desserts that reference other desserts.

As he points out, desserts can basically be piled on top of each other indefinitely, or at least until you hit the ceiling. This is why I like baking: you can leave out major ingredients, accidentally replace them with something else, freeze or heat up the result or cover it in chocolate sauce, and then when you’re finished you can chop it up, cover it with cream, mix it with fruit — and chances are it will still taste good.

However, there are limits, and also classificatory difficulties. What are the fundamental dessert types, the metaphorical atoms of dessert, or “dessertoms”? A brownie is very “stable”, which is to say it can be combined with many different desserts while still remaining delicious — but surely it isn’t a fundamental dessert type: a brownie is basically just a sulky teenage cake. A crepe, on the other hand, probably is a fundamental dessert type, but it’s a relatively unstable one — it won’t taste good if you put it on a cookie.

Furthermore, desserts can be transformed not just through the application of another sort of dessert, adding dessert type A to dessert type B, but also by the application of a Dessert Function. Dessert Functions are things like “freeze it”, “put nuts on it”, “take out all the flour”, “cover it in alcohol and set it on fire” — stuff you can do to any dessert that has a good chance of leaving it edible, or better still transforming it into an exciting new dessert.

Clearly this is a topic that requires for further discussion:

1. a rigorously defined vocabulary;
2. extensive research to discover the fundamental dessert types;
3. some sort of consistency in what “applying dessert type A to dessert type B” actually entails; and
4. Lots of little pictures on graph paper.

Well, if we have a Meta-Dessert Conference and Party, I can bring number 4.

I call it “A Sketch towards a Taxonomy of Desserts and Meta-Desserts”, though I’m thinking of adding a subtitle as well. I’ve listed dessertoms: cookie, cake, sweet bread, pastry, crepe, crumble, fruit, chocolate, cream, custard, egg-white-and-sugar, and ice-cream. (Obviously this is a very broad-grained study, and further research would be well-advised to, eg, clarify that the broad category of “cake” can itself be divided into a number of fundamental types which can have transformations enacted upon them while still remaining cake). These run along the top of the page; following a column down, you can see what might happen to each dessertom when a different dessertom is applied to it (to apply Dessertom A to Dessertom B, you either (a) use Dessertom A as a component ingredient in making Dessertom B; or (b) put Dessertom A inside Dessertom B; or (c) put Dessertom A on top of Dessertom B, in roughly that order of preference).

I’ve also included seven Dessert Functions: shrink, freeze, chill, put in food processor, heat, add leavening, and remove leavening. At this point I ran out of graph paper, and had to leave out “add nuts”, “squash”, “take out flour” etc, but just because they aren’t on the page doesn’t mean they aren’t equally valid.

To reference the entries on the sheet I will refer to the Dessertom in brackets, and prepend the applicable operation: the notation for applying Custard to Crumble is therefore Custard(Crumble); performing Freeze on Chocolate is Freeze(Chocolate). The result of the operation is indicated by an arrow: Freeze(Chocolate) -> Frozen Chocolate.

Many Dessertom-plus-operation combinations provide a dessert that already exists as a major (albeit not fundamental, except in the case of Freeze(Custard)) dessert in its own right, for example:

Chocolate(Cream) -> Ganache
Add Leavening(Crepe) -> American Pancake

I have labelled these in blue.

Many combinations provide something that, though not extant as a major dessert type, is widely eaten or seems like it would be nice:

Put in food processor(Cake) -> A big pile of cake crumbs
Custard(Custard) -> Loads of custard

I have labelled these in green. Finally, dessertoms are not infinitely stable: many, such as “crepe” and “sweet bread”, are actually very unstable, and can easily turn into a dessert that would be horrible. For example:

Freeze(Sweet Bread) -> Frozen Bun
Crepe(Chocolate) -> A crepe hidden in a chocolate bar

I have labelled these failed desserts in red.

A RED DESSERT SHOULD HAVE NO FURTHER OPERATIONS ENACTED UPON IT. You will just be throwing good ingredients after bad. Blue and green desserts, however, can be taken back up to the top of the chart, where they can have another dessertom or dessert function applied to them, at some risk of “flaring”, or turning red (particularly if you operate within an unstable row — “heat” or “freeze” for example). Many quite widespread desserts are the result of iterative runs through the chart, hence:

Chill(Add Alcohol(Cake(Custard(Cream(Fruit))))) -> Trifle

This is a sixth-order dessert, five steps removed from a first-order dessert, the “dessertom” we met earlier. My small brownie-based cakes (recipe later in the week) are slightly more complex:

Shrink((Chocolate(Cream))(Remove Flour(Chocolate(Cake)))
(Chocolate(Remove Leavening(Chocolate(Cake))))
-> Brownie-bottomed mini-cakes

Which is to say, a chocolate cake without leavening (also known as a brownie) has chocolate (chips) added to it, and then has flourless chocolate cake applied to it, and then ganache applied to that. And then it’s all shrunk. Terminology: a third-degree fourth-order dessert, perhaps? Three separate desertoms, with the most extensively developed having undergone four operations.

The most urgent question facing meta-dessert studies today, then, is: what would be the highest-order dessert that still tastes good? Note that you can apply the same operation more than once within a dessert’s construction, but doing it twice in a row reduces down to a single operation:

freeze(freeze(cake)) = freeze(cake)

Furthermore, I think a rule reminiscent of Chess’s threefold repetition rule is called for: if the same sequence of two or more operations occurs three times, then the dessert is over. Hence, no seventieth-order desserts that are just fruit and cream on top of fruit and cream on top of fruit and cream on top of etc.

The whole chart is here, though unfortunately non-Flickr members can’t see it at its proper size, and a medium-sized version visible to all is here.

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”.

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.

Rhubarb and Fig Tart (requires a medium-sized tart tin)
Pastry:
(This is my current favourite gluten-free pastry, but it’s quite crumbly, so if you don’t need it gluten-free then any slightly sweet shortcrust pastry is good).
110g potato flour
110g yellow corn flour
150g butter
50g caster sugar
1 egg, beaten
Cold water

Rhubarb filling:
250g rhubarb
25ml water
25g sugar
1 teaspoon finely-chopped rosemary

Almond filling:
150g butter
150g caster sugar
Pinch salt
1 egg, beaten
150g almond meal
1 tablespoon lemon juice

Topping:
2 or 3 figs
50g almond flakes

For the pastry, sift together the flours, then dice the butter and rub it into the flours until the mixture looks breadcrumby.

Make a well in the centre. Beat the egg; mix it in, and add cold water as needed to make the pastry cohere into a lump (not more than a couple of tablespoons). Split into two balls - one consisting of two-thirds of the pastry, the other the other third - wrap them separately in cling film, and chill for an hour or so.

Chop the rhubarb coarsely, and put it in a saucepan with the water, sugar and rosemary. Heat over a low to medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the rhubarb has mostly broken down into threads and the whole is thick and spoonable. Cool.

When the pastry’s chilled, take it out and preheat the oven to 180C.

Grease the tart tin. Roll out the larger ball of pastry into a circle to cover the base of a medium tart tin; use the other third to cover the sides, by taking a section, rolling it into a snake, and then pressing it along the side of the tart tin (and into the base pastry, where they touch). Given the crumbliness of the pastry, you’ll probably need to do this in four or five sections, rather than all at once.

Cover the pastry loosely with greaseproof paper and weigh it down with dry peas or pastry weights or the like, and cook for ten minutes; then take the weights and paper off and cook until the case starts to get slightly golden, probably another ten minutes or so.

Lower the oven temperature to 160C.

For the almond filling, cream the butter, salt and sugar until light and fluffy. Stir in the egg, then the ground almonds and lemon juice.

Spread a thick layer of the rhubarb mixture over the base of the tart case, filling it around halfway or just less. Spread the almond mixture over this, enough to take it not quite to the top of the tart.

Slice the figs, and press the slices gently into the top of the tart, and then press the flaked almonds around the edge of the tart.

Bake until the almond mixture is golden all over, probably an hour or so. Ideally, serve warm with some sort of delicious ice-cream, and without any poison.