This week, we all need a distraction. Too much bad stuff is too close to home for too many of us.
Food is a fine distraction and a bunch of people in my vicinity are talking about Jane Austen and about Bridgerton, sometimes in the same sentence but mostly in quite different conversations. I happen to have some well-tested recipes from events past. I actually have several cookbooks worth of recipes from Jane Austen’s family and from the south of England at precisely the right time, but the ones I’m giving here are tested and are delicious. They are, in fact, from a cookbook I wrote many, many years ago, when I was younger and more charming. They are in Australian English and I’m quite happy to translate if translation is needed. One dish is for summer and one for winter, for obvious reasons.
I hope these dishes improve your week.
Ice-cream
Ingredients:
Twelve ripe apricots
375 g icing sugar
600 ml cream
Method:
Pulp apricots. Blend with icing sugar and cream. Freeze it then mould it. Keep frozen until ready to serve.
Moonshine Pudding
Ingredients:
A loaf of thinly sliced bread
Butter
Currants
Glacé cherries
Candied pineapple
Other glacé fruit900 ml cream
6 egg yolks
½ nutmeg (grated)
Sugar
Method:
Layer the bottom of a baking dish with bread and butter. Add a layer of currants and candied fruit. Add another layer of butter, then more candied fruit. Continue until the dish is full.
Mix cream, egg yolks, nutmeg, and sugar. Pour the mixture on the pudding. Bake it in a moderate oven for three quarters of an hour.
And, if things get too bad, have this for breakfast and then go back to sleep:
Windsor Syllabub
Ingredients:
1 bottle of sweet sherry (750 ml)
6 dessert spoons sugar (or thereabouts)
1 ½ teaspoons nutmeg
1 teaspoon of cloves
Whisk
Add 1.200 l milk and 300 ml cream (thick, but not thickened).
Mix well and serve.
Whiny question: on the Moonshine Pudding, do you think Miss Austen’s shade would rebuke me if I used anything other than glacé fruit? When I make fruitcake I generally just use a mix of good dried fruit, but I find glacé fruits unpleasing. Signed, Soulless Yank.
Modern Australians use dried fruit, but that turns it into ‘Bread and Butter Pudding.’ When I first saw the recipe, I thought it was a class thing, but it’s not. The difference in taste with the different means of preserving fruit= is enormous. I’d make one of each and do a taste test, under these circumstances, and announce your identify to the world.
The dish changes the nature of glace fruit ie the sugar is not as intense. When the professional chef made it, he cut all the fruit up very finely and it was excellent… but not at all the same as the sugar-intense original fruit. When I made it, I cut the cherries, for instance, up in eighths, because this dish is not a vehicle for the fruit. Seriously, then, it might be worth trying just the once. It still may not be your type of food, but nearly SF banqueteers tried this the only time the dish has been public in Canberra, and some of those who avoid glace fruit loved it, some didn’t taste it at all, and some found it neutral. No-one hated it, from memory.