Raspberry Debacle

Are there any proper conventions for naming recipes? Desultory research turns up a woman who likes to name recipes after the characters in books she’s written, but I haven’t written any books. I have written most of a thesis (it’s why I haven’t been posting here for a few weeks); but my housemates might object to eating Instantiating the Characteristics of Barthes’ Ideal “Writerly” Text Risotto and Convergence of Critical Theory and Computer Science Cookies.

There must be trends in recipe-naming. Mediaeval or Renaissance cookbooks mostly seem pleasantly matter-of-fact, if occasionally opaquely spelt: “a pigge”, “Peacoke Sauce wyne and salt”, “A salet with harde egges”. The seventeenth century is much the same; “To bake Apricocks green”, “To make a Foole”. When there’s a divergence from the rule, it’s a bit embarrassed: “To make red Ginger-bread, commonly called Leach-lumbar”.

The matter-of-factness breaks down more in the nineteenth century; Mrs Beeton has a “Soup a la Cantatrice”, to improve the voice, and a “Useful Soup for Benevolent Purposes”, to, er, use for benevolent purposes. Recipes from the period start being named after people more frequently: “Dr. Dobell’s Flour Pudding” sounds particularly unappetising, though I’m not sure whether it’s the “Dr” or the “flour” that does it. By the 1950s half the recipes in existence seem to be named after people, many of them fictional and with no discernible relation to the food; He-Man’s Tuna Noodle Casserole, John Beresford Tipton Bars. By the fifties, recipe writers have also firmly established the policy of mentioning, in the recipe’s title, any unexpected ingredients — if you’re going to feed someone Pepsi-Cola Cake With Broiled Peanut Butter Frosting then they probably deserve to know what they’re in for.

These days the standard practice seems to be to specify the type of food, and also some distinguishing details or ingredients — more detail than a mediaeval-style “an cayke”, but stopping short of “chocolate-coffee cake with vanilla, salt, baking powder, butter, sugar and those little silver balls on the icing maybe, if there are any left in the cupboard, or hey, how about a broken-up flake”. My problem is that today’s cake has four distinguishing details (lemon, poppyseed, upside-down, pear), which is too many for a name.

Fortunately, professional chefs grapple with the same problem, as a forum discussion of “Roasted duck and goat cheese filled crepes with watermelon and cucumber syrup” demonstrates. The resolution they favour appears to involve the extensive use of nonwords; suggestions for the duck include “Quackenbaa Crepes” (ducks quack and goats baa, y’see) , “Cheese & Quackers”, and my personal favourite, “Roasduck in Crepes”. And who am I to go against the dictates of professional chefs?

Skeletor’s Up-Seed-Down Lempearake

Topping
80 grams white sugar
30 ml lemon juice
50 ml water
3 pears

Base
50 grams poppy seeds
180 ml milk
190 grams butter
150 grams caster sugar
zest 1 lemon
3 eggs
250 grams self-raising flour
50 grams almond meal
120 ml lemon juice

Preheat the oven to 190C/170 fan-forced, and mix the poppy seeds into the milk to soak.

For the topping, peel the three pears. Cut two of them in halves and remove the cores; chop the final pear into smaller chunks.

Stir the sugar, lemon juice and water together in a medium-sized saucepan over a low heat, adding the pears after a minute or two. Heat the mixture gently for five minutes, stirring occasionally (and carefully - try not to break up the pears).

If you have a silicon cake-tin, this is a good time to use it, just for the ease of unmoulding and the fact that there aren’t any gaps for the syrup to spill out of and coat the bottom of the oven in delicious pear juices. I know they’re supposed to do worse in tests, but would you rather have a really really nice cake and a clean oven, or a really really <i>really</i> nice cake and an oven filled with a thousand poppyseeds in charred syrup?

Alternatively, line a nine-inch round cake tin with baking parchment and place the whole thing on a tray in case any juices escape.

Put the big pear halves in the bottom of the tin, rounded side down; then arrange the smaller chunks of pear in the gaps, and pour in the syrup.

For the cake batter, cream the butter with the lemon zest and the caster sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, beating them in one at a time.

Mix the self-raising flour and the almond meal together in a different bowl, and stir a third of it into the cake batter. Next, stir the lemon juice into the batter, then another third of the flour/almond mixture; and finally, stir in the milk and poppy seeds and the final third of the flour mixture.

Spoon the batter on top of the syrup, and flatten it, then bake until a skewer inserted in the cake comes out dry or with a few crumbs clinging (ignore any syrup that comes out); it took about forty-five minutes for me.

Once the cake has cooled sufficiently (for a few minutes in a silicon pan, or an hour or so in a normal pan), invert it onto a plate and unmould.