Becky Bakes…

We’re very lucky to live so near to the coast and my regular exercise is usually taken walking by the sea. The first decision is whether to turn right at the bottom of the road where I’m soon to be on the prom heading in the direction of town and the pier with all the hustle and bustle then the bird reserve, the docks and the river Orwell. If I turn to the left I’ll be on the grassy cliff top heading for The Dip and the golf course, eventually The Ferry and the river Deben. Since March I’ve purposefully been turning left in order to avoid the increasing number of socially-spaced gatherings which make my path quite tricky. That is until this week when I turned right. It was a delight to suddenly catch sight of people I’ve missed for so long…beach hut owners and ex-pupils as well as long term friends. It really shook me though, when one usually cheery lady didn’t give me her wide grin and wild wave and her eyes had lost their twinkle. We stood and chatted for many minutes, maybe twenty or more as she told me about the loneliness lockdown has brought. I thought she might cry, so instinctively put my hand on her shoulder. The sunken eyes looked at me and she said I was the first person to touch her since March. She hadn’t/hasn’t seen her family and only 3 people have knocked at her door. So here’s a challenge for you, dear reader. Make a batch of Jammy Shortcakes – you’ll get 20, that’s 4 more than the recipe intends. Wrap the extras and take them to a person who lives alone. Chat for a while and then pause, give them a chance to tell you how they feel. And wait.

Quails, pullets, hens, ducks, goose, ostrich. Speckled ones, white, cream,brown, blue/green ones. So many to choose from, but my guess is that we mostly choose hens eggs and in this country they are mostly brown these days. The amazing thing is that with all that variety, their structure remains the same – shell, membrane, thin white, thick white, balancers, yolk and germinal disc. They are the most versatile of all our ingredients, whether soft boiled, hard boiled, scrambled, coddled, baked, fried or poached (which is my favourite)not to mention the magnificence of meringues. I remember a wonderful lunch in Lavenham where we were all intrigued by the offer of a crispy egg. Lunch took a while to arrive and the explanation was that so many of us had chosen the dish it gave the chef problems. It was served with kedgeree and we discovered the egg(s) had been lightly poached, then coated in egg and breadcrumbs and quickly deep-fried. Amazing and yes, tricky. Watching Gordon Ramsey wielding a hand mixer and making a cake earlier this week, he looked uncomfortable until he took hold of the first egg and cracked it on the side of the bowl, mixer still whirring, then the second egg and the third. Very cavalier, in my book. What about checking for shell fragments? This week I made another ginger cake and dutifully checked for shell, then in the tiny bowl I’d chosen, gave it a casually quick mix before adding it to the mixing bowl. When I poured the batter into the tin there was a blob of unmixed white and yes, yolk too. I found a clump of baked yolk in the cooked cake and haven’t served it. Yellow amongst the brown doesn’t look good! The moral of the story? Cavalier isn’t clever.

Sugar, not jewellery. Most of the sugar beet grown in the UK can be seen in the fields of East Anglia. Harvested in the late autumn, great lorry loads trundle to Bury St. Edmunds where they are processed in the steam-belching plant next to the A14. It’s a process that uses vast quantities of water, not least because the great, gnarly tubers are so dirty. After washing they are chopped, cooked, mashed and then the liquid evaporated off to give us the grains we expect. My cupboard has various versions – granulated, caster, icing,soft brown, demerara, muscovado…not to mention the golden gran and the cubes. As a child it seemed everyone needed sugar in their tea. No longer rationed it was considered a staple and was sprinkled on cornflakes and even strawberries – in fact we had a special “sugar caster” to enhance the experience ! Then a chap called John Yudkin exploded the myth by writing “Pure, white and deadly” (1972) in which he explained how unnecessary and harmful sugar really was. It caused uproar and was denounced by the industry and government. Yet it’s been reprinted twice and is now considered wisdom well ahead of its’ time. Nobody needs sugar – it’s found in all fruits, many vegetables (think sweetcorn) and even in milk. Yet without it our cakes won’t rise as the chemistry involved in baking is finely tuned. Reducing the amount of sugar in a cake will result in failure and you won’t eat the whole cake anyway ! White gold refers to the slave trade when sugar cane was exported all over the globe. My father’s earliest memory was of walking by a ship moored at Ipswich docks and being thrown a piece of sugar cane to chew on. Thank goodness that at least humble mangelwurzel was modified to create the sugar beet we now know.

I remember going into a restaurant in Hatfield in 1980 where we were met by a bank of microwave ovens behind the refrigerated display. All the starters and desserts on the menu were cold, whilst the main courses had been cooked ahead and frozen, so our conversation was punctuated by frequent pings as the chosen meals were thawed and heated. I had never come across anything like it – but the food was delicious so we went back time and again taking family and friends to experience this innovation. Although microwave ovens were never intended for domestic use, the novelty of speed in the kitchen rapidly gained popularity and I found myself teaching their use in school and demonstrating their use to the Horticultural Society. A marble cake cooked in a ring mould still looked like a steamed pudding and tasted pretty bad, so was decorated with melted chocolate and raspberries. I still rarely make use of my m/wave and only this week discouraged a friend from melting her butter this way – an “A” level pupil suffered by overtiming his block, it was molten in the middle whilst still appearing as a firm block. Overheard in a supermarket – “we don’t need one of those taking up space on the worktop”. What’s your view ?

A; When it’s a sponge! As someone who grew up in the sixties and seventies I was taught by very straightlaced ladies in an all-girls school. The consequence was that every subject was given an equal footing. Housecraft included. We learned the traditional rules behind food production and presentation, with the end of year exams testing our knowledge. So a cake has 4 main ingredients; fat, sugar, flour and eggs. It keeps well because of the fat content and other ingredients can be added to make it flavoured. A sponge however, only has 3 ingredients – eggs, sugar and flour. No fat, hence “fatless sponge”. It doesn’t keep beyond the day it was made and so often was put into a trifle – trifle sponge. Think Swiss roll, sponge flan (remember those?) Well I suppose nowadays these things aren’t important to most people but having learnt them I find it hard to let them go and they do actually have a relevance. Like scone cutters, but that’s another story…..

It’s a question I’ve often been asked and sometimes I can remember exactly where I found them. One of those is the Flapjack recipe. I was working at a school in Hertfordshire, job-sharing with a lovely lady called Judith. In those days we taught commodities – meat, fish, eggs, milk, cheese etc and methods – creaming, rubbing-in and melting. The pupils brought their ingredients from home and so flapjack with syrup often finished up on the floor of the oven after an almost volcanic eruption. Reading the daily newspaper I came across a recipe for Oat bars which looked promising – melted method but flour to stabilise it all. Judith tried it, then continued to make it for her family for the rest of her life ! Other recipes are clearly from magazines. Prima in autumn 1997 gave me some wonderful Christmas recipes and my old cookery notebooks from my school days yielded the fork biscuit one. So you see they come from so many different places, but I keep going back to the tried and tested ones – there’s a lot to be said for reliability. I still have some precious recipes which I’m reluctant to share – foremost is Granny Pat’s chocolate cake…I promised some young people I’d keep that just for us – sorry !

We were lucky enough to be living in northern Italy and found wonderful shopping opportunities – silk factories, Armani outlets and the Alessi factory , which required a car ferry across Lago d’Orta. There we had a chance to survey all the wonderful kitchenalia, mostly stainless steel but some plastic. On the bottom of each was a coloured sticker – in stock/out of stock/available as a second etc. So, there were many friends and family members who received gifts from there and of course I took advantage of it for myself and the ubiquitous lemon squeezer is one of those pieces. It’s sometimes seen in glossy magazines and on the occasional TV advert but is also in several museums around the world as an example of elegant design and engineering. And it works very well, too.

Over the period of the lock down it has been difficult to find supplies of flour. We know that is down to problems with packaging in small quantities for domestic use – there’s plenty of flour being produced. What has amazed me is the variation of ingredients in short supply in different parts of England. A friend in the northwest has found butter unavailable in her nearest large supermarket ; another friend couldn’t get baking powder or chocolate chips. Then the yeast ran out. I’ve been putting dessert pastry on my list for weeks as I want to make a particular dish to show you. I wonder if we have , truly, become a nation of bakers ? I remember when Delia made a chocolate pudding using liquid glucose, only available from chemists in those days. Our local pharmacy resorted to a large sign on the door announcing they had none, so don’t even ask ! Are the shortages related to popular chefs creations this time ? Maybe we will find out what is happening, when this is all over.

In my last school, Friday afternoons were devoted to “activities” for the senior pupils – and of course one of those activities was Cooking. Over the years these mixed-age groups requested some interesting recipes and we had fun making pasta, pancakes and profiteroles to name just a few. One particular merry band was keen to find the very best Brownie. So each pupil made a different one, from the bottom-of-the-range packet mix to, you guessed, the ultimately successful one that I still make today. We sat and tasted our way through all eight of them to discover this was the one and it took me a very long time before I ate Brownie again !

During this period of lockdown we have been making two videos most weeks, so we have several ready to share with you over the coming weeks. What that means though, is that there is often quite a lot of cake in our kitchen. Clearly we have to taste it, but I can assure you we don’t eat it all. For several weeks, friends and neighbours have been sharing in the “tasty morsels” as I described them to the daughter of an aged friend. I welcome comments from the recipients and some don’t hold back ! There is a list of dishes still to make and I expect there will one or two requests amongst them, particularly for a “self-saucing” lemon pudding – remember that one ?