Lemon polenta cake means it’s birthday time in our house. A sack of polenta has a solid heft; plump, sturdy and chirpily yellow. You could have a good pillow fight with a bag of polenta. But, birthdays aside, sometimes a pudding is what you need. So this is my polenta cake/pear pudding crossover deluxe. I’ve […]
Month: March 2010
Gloomth
I’ve found a sensational word….. gloomth. It was invented by the Gothic novelist Horace Walpole (1717-1797) to describe a place that was both shadowy and mysterious but airy and sophisticated too. Walpole had a way with fashion as well as words. My favourite outfit of his is a huge and intricately carved solid wood cravat. […]
EDAM aka Egg Dressed As Mouse
I’ve always been dubious about food in disguise. A whole poached salmon with overlapping scales of sliced cucumber and a reproachful stuffed olive for an eye is more taxidermy than dinner. And a plump brown mound of chicken liver pate dressed up to look like a Christmas pudding with a sprig of holly on top […]
Don’t call it stew
Stew is a horrible word. We stew in our own juice when we deserve what’s coming to us. We get into a stew when we’re cross. So why would we want to eat the stuff? Mrs Ramsay, matriarch of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, knew that. She didn’t waste time on stew. She served […]
Smoked ham baked for six hours in a black treacle jacket
This is the James Dean of the ham world – smoky, langorous and with the coolest black jacket in town. There are only two ingredients – a hunk of smoked pork loin and a jar of black treacle. Dollop a fat spoonful of treacle or molasses onto a large square of silver foil. Slap the […]
Plum tree
I have a dilemma. My neighbours have given me a Victoria plum tree. There it is, in the wheelbarrow, waiting rather anxiously for the clumsiest gardener there ever was (me) to lower it into its new home. But if neighbours are going to be so neighbourly, shouldn’t I give them something in return? Wouldn’t a […]
Why the eggs are on the roof
When I was ten, my mum’s best friend Sally told me that if I threw an egg onto the roof of our house and it landed perfectly, it would never break. I loved that story. It’s true that some eggs soared right over the top and landed in a mangled mess in the grass on […]
Seville orange marmalade
Preserves aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. I have a cupboard full of brown, sludgy tomato chutney, which looks so repulsive I can’t even face tipping it into the bin. I knew it was a disaster from the beginning. The kitchen was thick with the astringent stench of vinegar, a smell that clears a […]