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This post complements the special podcast episode I made for my £3 monthly subscribers on the topic of sourcing and cooking the organs of the central vervous system – brain, spinal cord and eyes – a most taboo topic. Inside you will find the episode itself as well as my method to prepare brains for cooking as well as a few recipes – should you get your hands on any.
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As promised on the ‘School Meals Service with Heather Ellis’ episode of the podcast, I have written a recipe for a stone-cold school dinners classic for my monthly subscribers. I went for the pink-sponge and custard because quite a few people have mentioned this as a favourite on social media, so it was the obvious choice. Heather Ellis said on Twitter that there were several different colours of these sponges: I also remember brown (though I don’t think it was chocolatey, just coloured brown). Others remembered white, and I wondered if yellow was perhaps a colour? Let me know your thoughts/memories.
Listen to the podcast episode here:
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Filed under baking, Britain, cake, Desserts, food, General, history, Recipes, Twentieth Century, Uncategorized
I have been meaning to give you this recipe for that most beloved of teatime treats, the humble malt loaf for ages; indeed, I have had a jar of malt syrup sitting in my food cupboard for at least three years I bought especially for this post. Well, hopefully, it’s a case of ‘the best things come to those who wait’.
For those of you unaware of this stalwart of the British teatime spread, let me explain what it is. It is a member of a tribe of baked goods known as tea loaves. They are tea loaves because they’re eaten at teatime, but also because they contain tea. They are easy to make and also contain dried fruit, and usually do not contain any butter, and should instead be eaten spread liberally with it. They are loaf-shaped but are a type of cake. A malt loaf specifically is made with malt syrup and black treacle, and like Yorkshire parkin, it needs to be left awhile to turn nice and sticky. Before we get to the recipe, let’s have a look at the history.
Looking into the origins of the malt loaf has been rather difficult; I can find a recipe for malt loaf in the June 1930 edition of the Derbyshire Times and Cheshire Herald. It sounds like a malt loaf: dark and sticky, but black treacle is used not malt syrup.1 It seems to be called a ‘malt’ loaf because of the brown, malted flour used, which is not the same. Other malt loaves certainly contained malt syrup; beloved British brands Hovis and Allinson made them. However, these loaves were of the regular sort: loaves of white bread ‘improved’ by the addition of malt syrup.2,3 The malt syrup improved the colour and flavour and produced a moister loaf. Again, not the same.
And so, we must turn to the iconic Soreen malt loaf, which has been baked in Manchester since the 1930s. The recipe, which has supposedly never changed, was invented by Danish immigrant John Rahbak Sorenson who lived in Hulme, Manchester. He first opened a business selling bakery equipment, before starting his own bakery in Beswick, where he sold his ‘Sorenson Malt Loaf’. He sold the business in 1938, but the loaf continued to be baked, the only thing that changed was its name.4 Today, the factory resides in Trafford Park (home to Manchester United FC), where it cranks out 300,000 loaves of Soreen per day.5
Their recipe is a secret, but we do know that they use wholemeal flour; in fact, it is because of the inclusion of wholemeal flour that Soreen is marketed as a health food.4 That it is sticky with sugary syrups undoes this claim somewhat, but the combination of easily digested sugars and slow-release complex carbohydrates apparently make Soreen a favourite food for athletes.
Well, their recipe is a secret, but mine is not and it’s a tried-and-tested one. I used to make these sticky loaves for my little traditional market stall back in the day, and the recipe is based on one which appears in Gary Rhodes’ excellent book New British Classics.6 It is easy to make, but I must advise you about the flour: it must be sifted. It’s one of my most hated kitchen tasks, and I avoid it whenever possible, but in this case it is necessary. Wholemeal flour does tend to clump in the bag and seeing that the wet and dry ingredients need only the briefest of mixing, you need to be sure your flour is lump-free. That said, don’t forget to tip the bran left behind in the sieve back into the sifted flour.
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References
This post and it’s accompanying podcast episode are for £3 monthly subscribers. If you would like to become a subscriber and access this post and all the other premium content on the blog click the link below:
After talking to Lindsay Middleton about her online resource Dishes for the Sick Room, an exciting deep dive into the invalid cookery recipes found in the cookery books of Glasgow Caledonian University, I decided to have a go at making some barley water.
If you haven’t listened to the episode of the Podcast episode Invalid Cookery with Lindsay Middleton, you can do so below:
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As I mentioned last post, I used Elizabeth David’s research on the medieval and early modern bread roll called payndemayn (medieval period) or manchet (medieval and early modern), to recreate my own. The two words at one point, it seems, were interchangeable. There are many spellings of payndemayn, the root of this word being French, pain demesne, from the Latin panum dominicum, the lord’s bread.[1] The word appears in medieval manuscripts such as Forme of Cury. Manchet is believed to be a contraction of the word payndemayn – main – and cheat, the name for another, similar bread made from refined flour that wasn’t quite as white as the really good stuff. Main and cheat eventually became manchet.[2]
It was ‘the lord’s bread’ because the small bread rolls – weighing in at around only 7 ounces (200 grams) – were so expensive that only the lord, at the head of the top table, would receive one. The small loaf would be cut by the lord’s server as described here in the Boke of Keruynge (the Book of Carving) written in 1513:
…take a lofe in your lyfte hand. & pare y lofe rounde aboute / than cut the over cruste to your souverayne, and cut the nether crust, & voyde the parynge, & touch the lofe no more after it is so served.[3]
The over crust, being considered the best part was eaten by the lord, and the rest divided up and given to whomever he so pleased. This is the origin of the idiom the upper crust we sometimes use when referring to the upper classes.
There are mentions of this bread all over, but there are no real recipes in the Middle Ages. There are several mentions of these loaves in recipes though, take this recipe for ‘Soppes Dorre’ from fifteenth century manuscript Harl.4016 (c.1430):
…take a paynmain, And kut him and tost him, And wete him in wyne, And ley hem in a dish, and caste [almond flavoured] syrup thereon.[4]
Elizabeth David went to great lengths in writing English Bread and Yeast Cookery to try and get an idea of what these breads were really like, gleaning cues from several sources and combining them. The earliest decent recipes and descriptions crop up in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but there are no complete ones: sometimes the ingredients are listed, but the amounts or the shape of the loaves are not given; other times, the shaping is described but the ingredients are missing. She also used artwork from the era to work out the likely shapes.
It seems that they were also enriched with milk and/or butter and/or eggs, or none of the above, so perhaps something rather like a brioche (sometimes). Elizabeth took the information and created a flour mix of plain white flour, with some strong white flour and a little wholemeal flour, to replicate the lower gluten, not-quite-white nature of the wheat flour used at the time. She enriched her dough with butter and milk, avoiding egg. It put me in mind of my recipe for Cornish/Devonshire splits. She liked that in some descriptions the loaves were oval in shape. To replicate this, she made a deep slash in the dough before it went into the oven. However, I much preferred the sound of Gervase Markham’s 1623 way of shaping his loaves. He instructs us to take the risen dough and
mold it into manchets, round, and flat, scotch [cut] about the wast to give it leave to rise, and prick it with your knife in the top, and so put it into the Oven, and bake it with a gentle heat.[5]
He stabs their tops so that they wouldn’t rise too much in the oven.
I used my Devonshire splits dough as the basis of my manchet recipe, which, as it turned out, was pleasingly very close to Elizabeth’s, except – of course – I used much less salt than she. I decided to make some in the oval shape preferred by Elizabeth, and some like those described by Gervase Markham.
By the way: coincidentally just as I was cooking and researching this post, esteemed food historian Ivan Day posted on his excellent Instagram page a photo of Markham’s manchet, showing that scotched waist, along with some other breads of the same era. Here’s a link to his post, if you want to take a look at those.
Subscribers get access to special blog posts, Easter eggs from my podcast, and a monthly newsletter. You can become a subscriber by following this link
This recipe is for my subscribers. Read more of this content when you subscribe today and support the blogs and podcast. Subscribers get access to special blog posts, Easter eggs from my podcast, and a monthly newsletter. You can become a subscriber by following this link.
References
[1] David, E. English Bread and Yeast Cookery. (Grub Street, 1977).
[2] Hieatt, C. B. & Butler, S. Curye on Inglysch: English culinary manuscripts of the fourteenth century. (Oxford University Press, 1985).
[3] de Worde, W. The Boke of Keruynge. in Early English Meals and Manners (ed. Furnivall, F. J.) (The Early English Text Society, 1897).
[4] Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books. (The Early English Text Society, 1888).
[5] Markham, G. Country Contentments, or The English Huswife. (I.B., for I Jackson, 1623).
Filed under baking, bread, Britain, cooking, food, General, history, Mediaeval Age, Recipes, Seventeenth Century
This pudding has been on my ‘to post’ list for absolutely ages. It has become of my favourites, though as you will discover as you read the post, not everyone agrees with me. I’ve called it a forgotten food, but it is still well-known in Ireland. It was popular in many parts of England too, but it doesn’t seem to get made anymore. Carrageen pudding is a set dessert akin to jellies, blancmanges and flummeries, but it is made from the gelatinous seaweed carrageen, also known as Irish moss. It used to be gathered in Yorkshire and South-West England, going by the name ‘Dorset Moss’.1
I first made it in 2015 as part of one of my semi-regular Pud Clubs; I always liked to make one risky pud, and carrageen pudding was it. I flavoured it the traditional way with sugar, lemon and brandy. I didn’t particularly like the taste: there was something of a Lemsip about it. If I remember rightly, it was voted worst pudding of the day. However it wasn’t the flavour that put people off; it is more gummy than a gelatine set dessert, and doesn’t dissolve cleanly in the mouth. As John Wright puts it: it doesn’t have an acquired taste – it barely has any – ‘more of an acquired texture.’2 That particular Pud Club was the closest I’ve seen anyone get to vomiting at one of my paid food events.
I returned to it later in the year after I’d had the idea for a seaside-themed popup restaurant, and though I could use it in the dessert course. I refined the recipe, adding some whipped cream to give it a mousse-like texture and flavoured it with elderflowers. I combined it with a gooseberry sherbet, and I was pretty pleased with it.
Carrageen is a common seaweed found throughout the coasts British Isles, except for parts of Lincolnshire and East Anglia.2 It is found in rockpools, is branched and a dark red colour. The wonderful food writer Theodora Fitzgibbon describes it as ‘a branching mucilaginous seaweed found on all rocks in Ireland’, which does not sound appetising, I realise. She goes on the comfort the reader, telling us that ‘it does not taste at all marine when properly prepared.’3 It is picked and dried in the sun, typically in April and May, and during the process it lightens from a dark red-brown to a creamy brownish beige, tinged with a pink-red hue.
To prepare carrageen, it is reconstituted in cold water, drained and then simmered in fresh water. It quickly turns viscous, bubbling away like the contents of a witch’s cauldron. The gloopiness is caused by the release of a trio of closely-related carbohydrates together called carrageenan.2 To extract it properly, the whole lot has to be squeezed through some muslin (cheesecloth). These carbohydrates are not digested by the body, and are therefore an excellent source of soluble fibre. Indeed, carrageen has been used as a treatment for a range of stomach and digestive complains and it ‘is considered extremely salutary for persons of delicate constitutions’.4 Its viscosity also made it a common treatment for sore throats and chest complaints. It also ‘fills plaster pores, makes wallpaper dressings…and fixes false teeth.’1
Today carrageenan is commonly found in factory foods. For example, fat-free yoghurts no longer able to set properly are thickened with carrageenan. It is perfectly safe to eat, but foods that contain it should be avoided, because its inclusion is a dead giveaway that the food has been highly processed. Eat your yoghurt lipid intacta.
Don’t let my previous description put you off making this dessert; I really think I have the recipe right. The texture is good and is certainly better than using cornflour to set desserts.
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References
British Food: A History 