I passed onto the BBC the fact that several of you lovely people have contacted me to ask for recipes from Home Comforts. The equally delightful Beeb web people have suggested that along with me sticking them up here, you might want the clips available permanently, and not just on iPlayer, where they will die imminently. At the moment it’s just the recipes I’ve actually been asked for (EPIC salad and Slippery Bob kangaroo brain fritters therefore aren’t included).
If you do want to feast yer eyes, herewith the links. They may become embedded if I can work out how to do it.
Another James Martin: Home Comforts-related post, this time about carrot jam, the recipe for which I have had several requests. I first cooked carrot jam for a laugh. A friend emailed me the recipe for it as published in an 1858 copy of the English Domestic Woman’s Magazine. The EDWM was one of Samuel Beeton’s titles, and Isabella Beeton, of The Book of Household Management fame, cut her culinary writing teeth within its pages. She compiled a column called ‘Cookery, Pickling and Preserving’, out of which would eventually come the idea of the Book of Household Management. It’s still the best known historic recipe book in Britain, and had never been out of print, despite its many, many flaws. One thing is does have going for it is that it does tend to have a recipe for everything, including carrot jam. Beeton’s version, which will either have been plagiarised, as per most of ‘her’ recipes or, possibly, given it appeared first in the EDWM, sent in by a reader, is a rare thing when it comes to her recipes – it’s brilliant. Plus, the instructions are spot on. She tells you straight that it won’t last without brandy: it doesn’t. Blue mould, folks! Here’s her recipe.
This one is from an c.1888 edition of the BoHM, but the text is the same as that in the English Domestic Woman’s Magazine in 1858
This is classic mock cookery, and it works, If you don’t tell people it’s carrot jam, they will ponder, purse their lips, and eventually guess at apricot, mainly because it looks orange (and the almonds and brandy are confusing). It’s also indicative of a strong tradition of lower class cookery which isn’t always talked about as much as middle and upper class cuisine now. We tend to rely on books as sources for recipes. Cookery books are usually aspirational and/or didactic, and they rarely reflect the everyday – just think about whether any one, or indeed, several, cookery books on your own shelves, taken out of context and without you saying things like ‘I’ve never cooked that’, or ‘I don’t use that recipe because I’ve got one in my head that’s better’, would give an accurate view of what you eat over the course of a week. Plus, the stuff that’s fancy is more interesting for people to watch on TV.
Carrot jam is a very practical recipe. No need for expensive fruit – sugar is pretty cheap by the end of the 19th century – and carrots glut and don’t keep that well. And it’s tasty, so everyone’s a winner. The recipe knocks about for a while, but disappears from the 1930s editions of Beeton and, we can only presume, the wider culinary repertoire (if it was ever part of most people’s repertoire, which is impossible to tell. The fact a recipe is in a book is no guarantee it was ever cooked). Then comes the Second World War and, with it, rationing, the Dig for Victory campaign and a massive carrot glut. Cue carrot madness. The Ministry of Food wanted people to eat the glut, so promoted carrot recipes through the various channels at their command – The Kitchen Front on the BBC, the official pamphlets, and by spreading the rumour that carrots help you see in the dark. They encouraged the idea that that was how Allied bomber pilots were so accurate in night flying, which also helped muddy the waters of exactly how far advanced experiments with radar were. Meanwhile, to help with gluts of fruit, extra sugar rations were available for jam making…the stage was set for a carrot jam comeback!
Whenever I cook carrot jam, I’m greeted with nostalgia and cries of ‘that’s a wartime recipe’. And so it is – but the wartime version was a adaptation of a somewhat earlier recipe. (The same is true of many rationing recipes – poverty cooking has always made use of grown or foraged ingredients, and ever lacked fat, sugar and meat). The wartime version omitted the brandy and the almonds, and just contained sugar and carrots. There’s slightly less sugar to carrot pulp, and the lemon flavour was provided by lemon essence, or boiling apple peel in a bag.
The version I made for James Martin: Home Comforts, was the wartime one, which can be found here, on the website of the endlessly fascinating World Carrot Museum. If you really want to make it at home though, I’d recommend the Beeton one above, substituting a few drops of almond essence (check the label and try and get bitter almond essence) for the bitter almonds, (which can be challenging to obtain due to the bit where they contain cyanide). I’d also suggest using jam sugar (the stuff with added pectin), so that you get a decent set – it’s quite sloppy otherwise – and taking the whole lot a couple of degrees above the standard set point of 104.5c. I never bother with the wrinkle test – a decent digital thermometer is every cook’s friend. Have fun.
Jam pan in action. TKMaxx sometimes has them, if you really really want one of your own.Looks like apricot preserve….
Here is the full clip, which is now up permanently on the James Martin: Home Comforts website, thanks to the lovely BBC listening to all your comments about wanting the recipes and deciding it would be a good idea. Stuffed Lettuces and Kedgeree are also up.
Avid admirers of James Martin, or anyone half-watching TV on Saturday mornings while trying to remember what a weekend is all about, will probably have noticed the second series of his eponymous Home Comforts on BBC2. I was on six episodes, cooking up various historic dishes, from kangaroo tail soup through to mayonnaise-laden 1930s salads. The slots were intended to give people an insight into British cuisine in the past, and how it related to each episode’s theme (not always an easy task, for the themes were resolutely modern). However, I’ve had several requests for certain of the recipes (not, amazingly, the brain fritters), so I’ve decided to post them up here rather than continually cut ‘n’ paste into emails. I’ve been told by several publishers that there isn’t a market for historic food in a modern culinary context, so do let me know what you think of them….I’m plotting a sort of ‘EP’ book, with the aim of proving or disproving this hypothetical lack of market. Watch this space (etc).
So, stuffed lettuces, as seen on the Veg Patch Dinners episode, which was somewhere in week 2. The past is full of recipes for ingredients, like salad, which we wouldn’t dream of cooking today. Not all of them are great, but generally I’m all up for a bit of lettuce soup, or cucumber ice cream. Worth keeping an open mind, anyway. Herewith original recipe:
M.A. Fairclough (1911) The Ideal Cookery Book. Full text available online at archive.org
I used baby gem lettuces, but you can use anything with a reasonably tight leaf structure and a bit of flavour. Trim the bottoms off, and simmer for about 5mn. You want the leaves to soften enough that you can manipulate them and they won’t just snap. Remove from the water and drain (tongs are your friend here), and when they are cool enough to handle, you need to gently peel back enough leaves to form a decent layer around your stuffing, but not so many you don’t have any room for said stuffing. Gently remove the middle of the lettuce (good nails help here).
Parboiling lettuces
You need to have a bowl of sausage meat ready – I made my own with minced veal, a bit of suet, chopped herbs (mainly parsley and sage) and spices (mainly pepper and mace), a handful of breadcrumbs and some salt. You can easily use decent quality sausage meat (you’ll struggle to get decent stuff in a supermarket though, so I’d try a butcher). Chopped bacon is also always a good addition. Shape the sausage meat into cones, to replace the middles of the lettuces. Plonk the cone in the lettuce and carefully replace the leaves you peeled back around the meaty cone so that you have a nicely stuffed lettuce.
Forming sausagemeat into cones with lettuce leaves open ready to receive it.Cone of sausagemeat being inserted into lettuce leaves. GENTLY!
You now need to tie the lettuces up. I tend to string them as I would a joint. Then you simply bake the lettuces in the oven, in a pan with a load of roughly chopped vegetables in the bottom (onion, celery, carrot are standard, along with a bouquet garni, i.e. bunch of herbs tied in a bundle), plus some gammon steaks or bacon offcuts. If you’ve added bacon to your sausagemeat you may decide you’ve got enough bacon (though, generally, I don’t think you can ever really have enough bacon). Lay the lettuces on the veg, and pour over some stock. Veal stock was generally regarded as the best stock, but chicken is fine. or chicken and beef stock mixed – whatever you have. Stick a lid on the pan and bung it in the oven at 180c for about 15mn. If in doubt as to whether they’re done, use a meat thermometer.
Strung lettuces, nestling gently on a bed of veg.
Remove the string, keep the lettuces warm, strain the stock, thicken it with cornflour or arrowroot, or whatever your preferred method, taste it and beef it up if it needs it, and pour over the lettuces. The brown sauce referred to in the original recipe isn’t the bottled goo we associate with a full English breakfast, but is broadly similar, in that it’s dark, rich and umami-rich. Good substitutes are things like miso (but watch the saltiness in the seasoning), mushroom ketchup, tomato puree and even marmite.
Incidentally, some versions of this involve deep-frying the lettuces. Up to you. I found the heady combination of open-pan deep-frying being a massive cause of house fires, my own proven ability to injure myself significantly with hot oil, and the fact we were filming in the grade 1 listed Audley End House to be persuasive in the matter of sticking to baking them. Even without the added element of danger, I found them delicious, but I suspect a great deal depends on the quality of your gravy and your meat filling. Let me know how you get on.
Result!Also result – by now rather cold and mildly congealed due to lengthy filming. Still tasty, though. I suspect they’d be quite good lunchbox fodder.
Here’s the full clip, which is available on the James Martin: Home Comforts site now, due to popular request! Woo, etc.
Such are the scenes, that, at the front and side Of the Twelfth-cake-shops, scatter wild dismay; As up the slipp’ry curb, or pavement wide, We seek the pastrycooks, to keep Twelfth-day; While ladies stand aghast, in speechless trance, Look round – dare not go back – and yet dare not advance. (William Hone, 1825)
The Queen’s 12th Cake, 1849 from the Illustrated London News.
At the start of this year I went on holiday to Nice (very nice). It meant I was there for Twelfth Night, which fact had occurred to me about three weeks earlier, mid-lecture, and caused me to lose my train of thought entirely and splutter a bit. I lived in France for a few years as a teenager, and hadn’t been back there at that time of year since, and, as I failed to find my lecture words, what was really going on inside my head was a sort of massive yippeeeeeee. I’d only just clocked that me in France + Twelfth Night = galette des rois. And so it was, that every boulangerie and pâtisserie that we passed (ogled), for the days preceding the 6th January was bursting with seasonal, pastry-based goodness. The queues on the 5th were out of the door. Everyone seemed to have their special galette bag, advertising that year’s new design of ceramic fève, hidden inside to choke the unwary. It made me very happy. But it also made me muse, for we used to be the same in Britain. We’ve lost many many traditions, but that of the Twelfth Cake seems to have gone so entirely, it doesn’t even live on as a vague idea. Most people have never even heard of Twelfth Cake here, yet it thrives in France. What’s going on?!
So, as we speed fast away from another Christmas, it seems apt to post an entirely untimely post on a lost British tradition. It’s not that untimely – I’ve only just polished off the last of the mince pies, which I swear were breeding in their cosy tin. Still, for most people Christmas is a distant memory. Indeed, it sometimes seems that Christmas in the 21st century starts around September, and ends promptly, just after dinner on the 25th December. How different to the medieval and early Tudor festival, which started in early December with the advent fast, and really got going on the 24th or 25th December (it depended whether you counted the start of the day from the evening of the night before). You then had 12 glorious days of feasting until Twelfth Night, on the 5th or 6th January (see previous explanation – there doesn’t seem to be a hard or fast rule, and it’s time and culture dependant. In some countries the 24th December is still the key day for the Christmas feast). Each day was associated with a different saint, and could include different customs and foods. There’s an excellent blog post about it all here.
Twelfth Night, therefore was rather more than just a day when people were all back at work, starting diets, going ‘dry’ in the most depressing month of the year, and generally rubbing salt into their Christmas-induced wounds. It signalled the end of the feast season, and the start in earnest of the new year. The early Christian Church harnessed all the various pre-Christian shenanigans to religious festivals, in this case to the Feast of the Epiphany, when according to the Christian mythology, kings from afar brought gifts and knelt before the new-born Jesus. For that reason, it’s also known as the feast of the Kings, and for many centuries we ate King or Twelfth cake as part of what was really quite a small list of date-specific foods. Today, for example, we think of Christmas pudding and mince pies as specific to Christmas Day, but in the past, they were more ‘seasonal with a Christmas bent’ – eaten throughout the winter, not just on Christmas Day itself.
Anyway, back to Twelfth Cake. The concept goes back to the medieval period, when the cake would have been a yeast-risen rich fruit concoction. Each side concealed, respectively, a dried pea and a dried bean, with men and women taking slices from each side until a Twelfth Night King (He of the Bean) and Queen (she of the Pea) were revealed. They’d lead the dancing, or be forfeit, or whatever was customary at that gathering. By the 18th century, when the first printed recipes start to appear, the pea/bean selection process had been replaced by a set of cards with characters on. The various cake-eaters would select a card at random and play that character for the evening. The cake would be cut later. Surviving pictures often depict the cake, which could reach epic proportions, with one or two crowns on top. But that’s easy….They seem to have been a popular choice of baked goods not to cook in-house, and I suspect that they may have been one of the reliable best-sellers for pastry-cooks and confectioners at the time. One advert shows a Twelfth Cake decorated with figures, presumably those commonly depicted in the Twelfth Night cards, and probably made from sugarpaste pressed into moulds. But late Georgian Britain was a place of epicurean and sensory delight – why stop at people and crowns?
The Regency 12th Cake – complete with Prince of Wales feathers
Here’s Hone again, as per the opening ditty: ‘In London, with every pastrycook in the city, and at the west end of the town, it is “high change” on Twelfth-day. From the taking down of the shutters in the morning, he, and his men, with additional assistants, male and female, are fully occupied by attending to the dressing out of the window, executing orders of the day before, receiving fresh ones, or supplying the wants of chance customers. Before dusk the important arrangement of the window is completed. Then the gas is turned on, with supernumerary argand-lamps and manifold wax-lights, to illuminate countless cakes of all prices and dimensions, that stand in rows and piles on the counters and sideboards, and in the windows. The richest in flavour and heaviest in weight and price are placed on large and massy salvers; one, enormously superior to the rest in size, is the chief object of curiosity; and all are decorated with all imaginable images of things animate and inanimate. Stars, castles, kings, cottages, dragons, trees, fish, palaces, cats, dogs, churches, lions, milk-maids, knights, serpents, and innumerable other forms in snow-white confectionary, painted with variegated colours, glitter by “excess of light” from mirrors against the walls festooned with artificial “wonders of Flora.” This “paradise of dainty devices,” is crowded by successive and successful desirers of the seasonable delicacies, while alternate tapping of hammers and peals of laughters, from the throng surrounding the house, excite smiles from the inmates’. Tongue-in-cheek? Yes, but still, what joy!
The recipe for Twelfth Cake remained an old-fashioned one, well into the 19th century when yeast-risen cakes were on the decline. To be honest, I’ve never found much difference between a rich fruit cake with yeast in, and a rich fruit cake with well-whisked eggs in. The sheer amount of fruit just outweighs everything else. By the middle of the 19th century, both the recipe and, increasingly the concept, was starting to look a bit anachronistic. The combined forces of Dickens, publicity around the Royal Christmases (think: tree), and mid-19th century soul-searching was changing the nature of Christmas. It had already moved from an uproarious popular and religious festival, to something fashionable folks seemed a little ashamed of. Many aspects were outlawed during the interregnum, and there’s no doubt that when it re-emerged, blinking, into the light in the Restoration, it had lost something. Celebrated, yes, but often behind closed doors, by the end of the Georgian period Charles Lamb was lamenting Father Christmas’s ‘shrunken girth’, while declaring, with a ring more of hope than certainty, that he was still a ‘lusty fellow’. (Father Christmas was, at this time, a sort of Father Time figure, and not a jolly quasi-Cardinal with a habit of slipping down chimneys and furkling in people’s stockings).
The Twelfth Cake, therefore, was in danger. More than that, it was in mortal decline. Increasing emphasis on Christmas Day, and not Christmastide, meant that Twelfth Night celebrations seemed a little outmoded. People were back at work, now living a much more urbanised and less agrarian society than that in which Twelfth Cake had been born. The fruit cake itself remained popular, but was increasingly rebranded, stripped of its fun and potential for disruption, as a Christmas Cake. Bleuch.
So what remains today? The sixpence in the pudding – obviously derived from the pea/bean/token custom, only made its appearance after the final demise of the Twelfth Cake. Crowns in crackers, reminiscent of the paper crowns sometimes used to show who’d found the bean. It’s not a lot. Yes, we still have Christmas Cake, but it makes no sense when you really stop and think. Surveys suggest it’s not always liked. Too much, after all that Christmas food (because now we seem to cram 12 days of feasting into one). Pointless, when we have similar flavours in the pudding. Etc etc. And quite so.
I’d like to make a plea to bring back the Twelfth Cake. Start planting the seeds now. Get your friends and families used to the idea. Then – go for it. As garnish and outlandish as you can make it. Pea, bean, the whole works. Paper crowns, saved from Christmas.
We were all ILL, ok.
As a spur, here’s my cake from this year – well into the spirit of garishness detailed above. And, just to show how far I go in the name of research, because I sought out and ate both of these (actually, more than one in the case of the first one), here are two modern variations on the theme, from France, where a version of Twelfth Cake still thrives. Both the galette des rois (puff pastry, almond and booze custard) and the gateau des rois (orange flower water flavoured mildly disappointing brioche) have ceramic tokens in. Both are available only in January (mainly). Both come with crowns. Both have their culinary origins in the early 19th century, based on the recipes, so they’re a positively modern twist on the theme. You can do it too.
Galette des roisGateau des rois
Further reading -*William Hone, The Everyday Book, London 1825 and later editions: full text at archive.org here -Bridget Henisch (1984) Cakes and Characters -JAR Pimlott (1978) The Englishman’s Christmas
-Recipe for modern galette des rois from Raymond Blanc (heavenly) here -And another one, with lovely descriptions of the modern tradition from Trish Deseine here -Food historian Ivan Day still uses original wooden moulds to make a suitably joyful Twelfth Cake every year, which you can see here along with a selection of recipes. (He also runs cookery courses including one on Christmas food – not running 2015 but back in 2016, he assures me).
Note While researching this entry, I kept coming up against what seems to be a fairly new and exciting food myth, which suggests Queen Victoria banned Twelfth Cake in 1870. Never a proper reference given. I’ve searched the statue books, and can find no trace of any such thing. Doesn’t mean there wasn’t some legislation which affected the demise of the cake, but I am somewhat cynical. Is this another case of The Simnel Cake Rubbish, or The Great Afternoon Tea Invention Myth? Or does anyone out there have firm evidence (i.e. and pretty much limited to, a copy of the act)? I might have to have a rant about food myths in a future post.
Musings on food and history 