Domino Cake: 1898

What’s pink, plump and smells faintly of booze?

Hopefully you’ve given the correct answer – Domino cake – and not the answer that my soon to be ex-husband gave when I asked him: “you”.

What I’m trying to recreate today is probably better known under its modern day name “Battenberg cake”. Or rather, it’s a close variation of it. Or rather rather, it’s the cake that Battenberg cake is based on.

The origins of Battenberg cake are hazy to say the least. An oft-repeated story goes that Battenberg cake was created in 1884 to celebrate the marriage of Prince Louis of Battenberg to the Queen’s granddaughter, Princess Victoria. The novelty cake was supposedly presented to the happy couple with the alternating coloured panes representing the bond and unity between the groom, Prince Louis, and…his other Battenberg brothers. We don’t have a record of Princess Victoria’s reaction to being given a cake celebrating her husband and his family – but not her! – on her own wedding day, but the gift serves as an important reminder that, when it came to royal weddings from the past, the bride wasn’t necessarily the most – or even second most – important person there.

Princesses Irene, Victoria, Elisabeth and Alix: where was their bloody cake?!

Deep seated though this origin story is, there’s actually very little contemporary evidence to support it. Even the eminent food historian Ivan Day (who has written not one but three excellent blog posts about the history of Battenberg cake) could find little in the way of conclusive proof of the provenance of this cake.

Day points out that recipes for cakes with coloured sections wrapped in marzipan were published in England towards the end of the 19th century, but that the earliest cakes going under the name “Battenburg cakes” (with a ‘u’, not an ‘e’), originally had nine panes, which casts the whole four-Battenberg-brothers tale into doubt. Perhaps there were five extra secret brothers history is unaware of – in which case the cake maker should have been recognised as the most important wedding guest (have you ever tried to make an original nine panelled royal wedding cake?!) – but it seems unlikely.

In another blow to fans of the wedding cake theory, these nine sectioned “Battenburg” cakes didn’t appear until 1898 – a full fourteen years after the royal wedding took place. Queen Victoria – grandmother to the newly wedded bride – was considered something of a trend setter in her day. It seems unlikely that a brand new cake, created to honour the marriage between a member of the British royal family and a German prince (and his eight siblings?!) wouldn’t, therefore, have been copied in high society.

Whatever the truth is, the scaled-down four paned Battenberg cakes we’re familiar with today don’t appear to have been produced until the early 20th century when Lyons & Co. began to mass produce them. Again, the oracle Day suggests that the switch from nine panels to four may have been a decision based on what was easier to mass produce.

A four paned cake was going to be tricky enough to recreate in one morning, but nine panes was going to be a challenge. Furthermore, Domino cake wasn’t just content to up the cake content, but included additional ingredients like alcohol – making it a sort of grown-up version of Battenberg.

Domino Cake

The original recipe can be found in the Victorian magazine The Table, which was edited by Mrs Agnes Marshall: “Queen of Ices” and author of four highly successful books dedicated to the production of ice cream (which sort of makes it a shame she didn’t pick the better nickname “Ice Queen” instead.) As well as publishing cookbooks, Mrs Marshall was an successful entrepreneur and inventor, patenting a design for a machine which could freeze cream in five minutes and starting a business with her husband selling cookery products. Food historian Emma Kay called Marshall “one of the fiercest, most ambitious and successful women of her generation” and Robin Weir placed her on a par with other celebrity chefs of her time.

Despite her moniker, public knowledge of Mrs Marshall’s works is slim. This is partly because when she died in 1905 the rights to her works were bought by Ward Lock, the company that published Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. This publishing house was, unsurprisingly, not interested in publishing another Victorian cookbook and jeopardizing the lucrative market they’d cornered by promoting Mrs B’s relatively bland offerings at the expense of other 19th century cooks, so they let the collective works of Mrs Marshall fall into obscurity. The final nail in the coffin for Mrs Marshall’s reputation came in the 1950s, when a fire destroyed the archival collection of her works.

In the July 1898 edition of The Table, the recipe for Domino cake is under the fancy French name “Gateau à la Domino” and it appears to be an original Marshall creation, long before the time of mass produced cakes from Lyons & Co.

Mrs Marshall’s cake featured the classic nine paned pattern wrapped in marzipan, but it was decidedly more upmarket than similar “Battenburgs” of the time. For one thing, the marzipan contained maraschino and vanilla essence. The quantity and quality of ingredients were also greater than the average Battenberg, with lemon peel and almond essence being incorporated into the genoese sponge and an extra sweet apricot glace (rather than bog standard apricot jam) being used to hold the cake sections together.

I began by making the sponges, which Mrs Marshall called Genoise Paste. First, I mixed butter and lemon peel together then hand beat the mixture with sugar for ten minutes, or until my arm fell off. I added five eggs, baking powder, almond essence and 8oz of plain flour to the batter before dividing it into half and colouring one half red. Mrs Marshall called for “carmine” to be used to colour the mix red, which during her time would have been from the cochineal beetle. Despite my most lacklustre efforts, I couldn’t find enough beetles to squeeze a really good measure of liquid from and a promisingly juicy worm turned out to be an old pink shoelace. I had to use “Red Red” food colouring instead which was, in fairness, more red than any beetle could have produced anyway. And less…crunchy.

Once the batter was baking in the oven I started work on the marzipan – or almond paste, as Mrs Marshall referred to it. This was pretty straightforward but after ten minutes of vigorous butter-beating my arm was tingling in a peculiar way and I could hear my wrist click with every gesture, so I snorted at Mrs M’s suggestion to hand knead ground almonds (as a true entrepreneur, she advised using her own brand of ground almonds), icing sugar, maraschino and egg white into a stiff paste, and bunged it all into the blender.

When the cakes were cool, I cut them into 6×1 inch rectangles: four pink and five white. This meant we had a bit of spare cake left over, but I’m not sure anyone in my household saw that as a problem. At least, not one that wasn’t easily overcome.

The moment you need a tape measure to make a cake is the moment you have gone too far.

With the cake rectangles arranged in a checkerboard pattern on top of the rolled out marzipan, I heated half a jar of apricot jam with 2oz of caster sugar and a little water until all the sugar had dissolved and pushed the mixture through a sieve. This was the apricot glace which would stick the cake bits together.

Once each cake piece had been given a coating of glace, the marzipan was gently rolled up the sides of the cake and smoothed down. The edges were trimmed off – Mrs M was very insistent that the ends of the cake should not be covered – and the whole thing was given a light dusting of icing sugar.

Actually, not a bad wedding gift after all.

I stepped back. It actually looked like something resembling a Battenberg cake! In fact, it looked better than a Battenberg cake because of the extra five panes and for a mad minute I thought about applying to Bake Off; after all, hadn’t they used Battenberg as a technical challenge before? And here I was more than doubling the amount of squares like it was no big deal.

“Yeah, but that was a celebrity Bake Off,” my husband informed me. “It’s like the pre-school version of Bake Off where you get marks just for knowing how to use a spatula.”

Celeb Bake Off or not, I reckon Paul would have given me a handshake for this one; it had nine identifiable and pretty much identical squares, the marzipan was of an even thickness and, most importantly, there was no trace of a soggy bottom.

Though it looked very much like a pimped up Battenberg, the taste and texture was a little different. Despite containing sugar, icing sugar and sweetened jam it was still far less sweet than I was used to which I suppose just goes to show how sugar laden mass produced cakes can be. I was a bit worried the cake would be dry, but the apricot glace helped prevent that and the sweet apricot flavour went well with the other fruit and nut flavours.

What I was most surprised by was the marzipan, which was far less almondy than I expected. Instead, the primary flavour was a sort of bitter cherry thanks to the maraschino – not at all unpleasant, but not what I was used to. I found myself picking off the marzipan coating and eating it without the cake to try and pinpoint the exact flavours.

Overall, for a cake that required the use of a measuring tape, this wasn’t as complicated to make as I thought it would be. It was also really interesting to make something that looked so similar to a modern day favourite, but with just enough differences to make it slightly unfamiliar – it was like looking at another piece of a puzzle you thought you’d already completed.

In the end I have to take back my earlier, snarky comments about this being a wedding present. I don’t know how Princess Victoria might have felt upon receiving a cake celebrating her husband and his eight brothers on her wedding day, but if it had been me I wouldn’t have cared at all – as long as I didn’t have to share it with them.

Domino Cake

225g butter
225g plain flour
225g caster sugar
5 eggs
Lemon peel
Almond essence
Baking powder
Red food colouring

For the marzipan:
1 egg white
280g icing sugar
140g ground almonds
Vanilla essence
Dessert spoon of maraschino

For the apricot glace:
150g apricot jam
50g sugar
Dessert spoon of water

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C.
In a bowl, mix butter and lemon peel until smooth and white.
Add the sugar and beat well.
Add the eggs, baking powder and flour, a little at a time, and incorporate.
Add 8 drops of almond essence and mix.
Divide the batter into two halves. Leave one half plain and colour the other half red with a few drops of food colouring.
Portion the batter into two small baking trays (I used 25x17cm) and bake for 15-20 minutes.
Place the ingredients for the marzipan into a blender and blend until they form a stiff paste.
Place the marzipan into the fridge to firm up.
Once the cakes are baked, allow them to cool and the slice them into rectangles 6x1inch. You need 5 white and 4 red.
Heat the apricot jam with the sugar and water and when it is dissolved, push the mixture through a sieve.
Roll the marzipan out into a sheet about 1cm thick and brush a little apricot glace onto the centre of it.
Arrange the first layer of cake on top of the apricot glazed marzipan: white, red, white.
Brush the sides and top of the cake layer with apricot glace and arrange the second layer: red, white, red.
Brush the sides and top of the cake layer with apricot glace and arrange the second layer: white, red, white.
Brush the sides and top and then roll the marzipan up over the cake layers, smoothing it down at the sides until it covers the cake.
Flip the cake over so that the marzipan join is hidden along the bottom and trim off the excess marzipan.
Dust with icing sugar and serve with a cup of tea.

Turkey Twizzlers: 2005

If you ask any adult who was primary school aged in 2005 what the biggest event of that year was they’ll all say the same thing.

No, not the inauguration of George Bush, or the launch of Youtube. A few may comment that the biggest event might have been the first screening on the new Doctor Who, but they’d be wrong. I am, of course, talking about the time Jamie Oliver banned turkey twizzlers from school dinners.

If you didn’t live through this event you can’t understand just how deeply it shattered the nation. I’d go so far as to say no school dinner based scandal has ever rocked the foundation of our society like it since – including the horse meat fiasco of 2013 (actually, had turkey twizzlers not already been discontinued, they may have been caught up in that one too…)

For those of you who don’t know (and those of you who just love the drama of it all), in 2005 celebrity chef Jamie Oliver launched a nation-wide campaign to remove lunches that he saw as being overly processed and heavy in fat and salt from school canteens. His plan was to replace these “fast-food” school dinners with ones cooked from scratch that included wholegrain and fibre on the ingredients list, and vegetables that didn’t contain E-numbers. Had he simply sought to add healthy options to school dinners, rather than remove all the deep fried offerings from the menu, then it’s unlikely I’d be here today, reminiscing about these lardy, fatty, spirals of meat. But that was never his plan; Oliver was unwavering in his stance – all unhealthy food must go.

It was a daunting quest for an age when a school meal could be nothing more than a pastry shell filled with melted cheese served with a side of Panda Pop cola (another school dinner great, taken too soon.) My lovely village primary once served me a lunch of nothing but custard, for example. But when Oliver embarked on his campaign, in the mess of potato smilies and chocolate cement, there was one lunch that quickly stood out as a particularly nefarious meal: the turkey twizzler.

It’s hard to describe a turkey twizzler to someone who didn’t grow up with them. How do you explain the rationale behind making a meal for kids out of spirals of turkey scrapings from the abattoir floor, mushed to a pulp with lard and breadcrumbs, coated in sugar and spices, and deep fried in oil? It doesn’t matter, the point is kids went wild for them. Standing in the lunch queue the whispers would trickle down the line with growing excitement: “it’s turkey twizzlers for lunch!” You can imagine the despair when they became the object of Oliver’s wrath.

Sides were picked in preparation for the Great Twizzler Conflict and the media did its best to represent each one fairly: on one side – an alliance of fast food junkies with no plans to live beyond forty and freedom-fighting parents who feared their little darlings would explode upon contact with something as healthy as even a baked bean. On the other – organic loving, vegetarian hippies who ate nothing but pure sunbeams and crapped out smugness. The battle ground was readied, a time for the fight was decided and the war cries were heard: parents would meet outside the school gates at lunchtime.

And meet they did. In scenes not dissimilar to humanitarian aid workers handing medicine through the fences of detainment camps, mothers slotted McDonald’s fries through the lattice work of school gates for their offspring to fight over. Business savvy parents with dubious scruples ran takeaway rackets, collecting money for daily orders and delivering them to rabid pre-teen hoards through gaps on the playing fields. On the other side of the war, parents rallied round Oliver and formed vigilante groups, calling themselves Ninjas, and stormed school kitchens to ensure not one trace of fat was found. Others formed collectives and took it in turns to cook meals for the school community while alternative catering companies, ones who couldn’t even spell “turkey twizzlers” let alone make them, were being sought.

In the end, Oliver was successful, and despite manufacturers offering to rejig the recipe to reduce the fat content, turkey twizzlers were removed from school lunches before being discontinued towards the close of 2005. But the landscape of school canteens was forever changed. No longer did we live off carbohydrate and grease. When the whispers filtered down the line they carried messages of despair and dismay: “it’s runner beans again.” The fall of the mighty twizzler heralded the end of other school lunch staples and in 2007 the government introduced compulsory rules for school caterers to follow under the document “Nutritional Standards”. The document pointed out that, in 2007, nearly a quarter of all children starting primary school in England were classed as overweight or obese. Similarly, three fifths of five year olds showed signs of dental decay.

Initiatives to combat such startling figures were drawn up and included the “eatwell plate” – a chart highlighting what the ideal nutritional makeup of a child’s meal should be. These plans were rolled out to parents and schools; every classroom had a glossy poster of the eatwell plate and pupils searched it with growing anxiety: where were the chips? The nuggets? Goddamn it, where were our potato waffles? All gone. In their place: fish, legumes, wholewheat bread and pasta. With growing horror we realised an entire third of the plate was labelled “fruit and vegetables”.

The eatwell plate. I achieve this maybe once or twice a year. Credit here.

Fried food was to be “restricted across the whole school day” and could be served no more than twice a week. In addition to this, there were to be two days across the week where no meat, battered, breadcrumbed or pastry-based food was to be served and instead only wholesome vegetarian meals were to be dished out to fill hungry bellies.

Worse was yet to come. Under the new legislation, schools were banned from selling chocolate, confectionary or crisps. Cakes and biscuits were to be eaten only at lunchtime as part of the eatwell plate. Fizzy drinks were outlawed. Blackmarket tuck-shops boomed and kids took out payments from playground loan sharks when they couldn’t afford the extortionate prices for a packet of Smarties. You had to be careful, though; miss a repayment and the sharks would come round to your locker and break all your crayons.

Fortunately for me, I had ended my time in primary education by 2007 and had escaped to the land of secondary school and packed lunches. The eatwell plate lost its power over my cohort and became an object of ridicule in PSHE lessons. People ate KitKats with reckless abandon in the corridors, and the bins were overflowing by the end of the day with such brazen items as crisp packets and shop bought sandwich wrappers. It was like a paradise.

Cowed though the nation had become, hardcore twizzler fans never gave up the fight. Almost immediately after their demise, appeals sprang up to reinstate them to their former glory and a 2017 petition to “bring back turkey twizzlers” has been signed by over 27,000 people – and the number is still growing. In 2019, the Telegraph warned (or celebrated, depending on your view) that turkey twizzlers could even make a comeback to school canteens after a no deal Brexit.

Given that the turkey twizzler was a mass produced, factory manufactured item, rather than a recipe as such, recreating it with 100% authenticity was impossible. What I did find, however, was a list of ingredients from the original product. Some of the ingredients I’d only ever seen in chemistry lessons, and many of them were just strings of numbers and letters; hardly the sort of stuff available in Sainsbury’s. What I’ve tried to do, therefore, is stick to accurate ratios and focus on the main ingredients while leaving the additives out.

Turkey twizzlers were a peculiar food, not because of their ability to transform a nation into a furious, additive-reliant mob, but because of the amount of fat in them. Let me explain: turkey isn’t an exciting meat. It can be bland and underwhelming, but what it does have going for it is its low-fat content relative to other meat. So it remains a mystery to me why anyone would take the main selling point of turkey and flip it on its head by adding so much lard that, when cooked, just over 21% of a turkey twizzler was just fat.

The other weird thing about turkey twizzlers was that, despite the name, they only contained 34% of turkey. The rest of the twizzler was fat, water, rusks and additives.

No-one ate twizzlers in bumper cars, I don’t know why this is the image Bernard Matthews chose.

I started with the two percentages I knew I had and worked out that if I was to make 500g of turkey twizzlers I’d need no more than 170g of turkey meat. I chose turkey sausage meat as it contained on the label some of the additives I’d not been able to buy myself, without adding anything that wasn’t on the original twizzler list. The ingredients in twizzlers were listed in order of predominance, with the ingredients used in the greatest amounts listed first. After turkey (34%), the next ingredient on the list was water – but the “recipe” I found didn’t provide a quantity. Pork fat, however, was the third ingredient and I already knew that twizzlers were found to contain 21% of fat after cooking, meaning that the amount of water in my twizzlers had to be somewhere between 106g and 170g. I didn’t want sloppy twizzler, so I opted for a relatively reserved 110g.

Rusk was the fourth item before we embarked into a list of E-numbers and spices. I decided, therefore, that it had to be a relatively high percentage of a twizzler since so far there was nothing to “bulk up” the meat. I chose to add 100g, leaving about 15g or so wiggle room for spices, salt and flour.

The turkey, rusk, lard and water was blended in a food processor along with a tablespoon of flour and a teaspoon of salt until it resembled the infamous “pink slime” of reconstituted fast food. I shaped out five sausages and ran skewers through them before putting them in the fridge to firm up.

To create the iconic spirals that gave twizzlers their name, I cut into the sausages right to the skewer and angled up, so that the meat was sliced in one continuous spiral. Each twizzler was rolled in a mixture of BBQ, tomato, mustard and salt spices and then shallow fried in vegetable oil for a few minutes on each side. Because I wasn’t sure they were done I also finished each one off in the oven for fifteen minutes, just to ensure they were cooked all the way through.

By now the kitchen smelled like, well, the inside of a school canteen circa 2004. There was grease and oil spatter up the walls and a smoky, fried smell in the air. My skin and hair smelled like the inside of a deep fat fryer, no matter how much soap I scrubbed with. On the plus side(?!), I was inching ever closer to what promised to be an early grave as my turkey twizzlers finished off their cooking.

Once they were done I pulled the skewers out of them and marvelled at how springy and successful the spirals were. They were clearly a homemade version of the iconic school dinner, but they weren’t a bad take. Because they’d been made from scratch and I’d skipped all the additives, I even wondered if they might pass the government’s Nutritional Standards guidelines. Not likely, I thought, as the fat pooled off them and filled up a side plate.

The filter I used for this was called “nostalgia”.

Now might be a good time to admit something: I’ve never actually tried a turkey twizzler. Well, I had a clandestine forkful of one once, when my friend didn’t want to finish hers. My parents, wary of school dinners before the Great Twizzler Conflict even began, put me and my sister on the school register as being vegetarians – even though we weren’t. Rather than turkey twizzlers, beef burgers and chicken nuggets we were served cheese flan, cheese omelette and cheese quiche (which was cheese flan, but with a sprig of parsley on top to make it fancy.)

I don’t remember loads about my one mouthful of turkey twizzler, other than that I was seriously underwhelmed. It was chewy, fatty and the flavour was indistinguishable. My husband, on the other hand, had no restrictions placed on him, and punched the air with delight when I said I was going to try to recreate them. I therefore deferred to his judgement when deciding how successful this experiment had been.

The first tentative mouthful brought back the memory of the texture: crispy on the outside, springy and smooth inside. Though my twizzlers were larger than the original, I was pleased to see I’d pretty much nailed the springiness of the spirals in at least two of them.

In terms of taste – they were, as my husband put it “like turkey twizzlers without the MSG.” The flavours were very close to what he remembered in that they were a mix of fat and fried meat with a smoky coating, but without the chemicals and flavourings they lacked something of the fizz, the addictive quality, of the old twizzlers.

In the end we didn’t finish these beyond a few exploratory bites. As kids, the idea of deep fried lard and turkey might have been appealing, but having been part of the process I couldn’t wait to bin the lot and drink a pint of kale smoothie. In one afternoon I felt I’d done what Jamie had been trying to do for the best part of his career; in the end he hadn’t needed to campaign and fight against the pro-twizzler faction – all he’d had to do was teach people how to make them.

E x

Turkey Twizzler

170g turkey sausage meat
110g water
106g pork lard
100g rusks
1 tablespoon plain flour
1 teaspoon salt
Vegetable oil for frying

For the coating:
3g sugar
3g BBQ spice
2g tomato powder
2g flour
1/4 teaspoon salt

Add the turkey, lard, water and rusks to a food processor and blend until a smooth paste forms. Add the tablespoon of flour and teaspoon of salt to bind the mixture together more. If you think it is still too loose, add another spoon of flour.
Shape the turkey paste into 5 large or 6 medium sausages. Push a skewer through each one and place int he fridge for several hours to firm up.
Mix up the ingredients for the coating and spread over a plate.
Remove the meat from the fridge and with a sharp knife, cut up in a spiral from the bottom to the top of the sausage, making sure to cut deep enough to hit the skewer. You may need to wiggle the spirals down the skewer slightly to ensure even frying.
Roll each skewer in the coating and shall fry, one at a time, in a frying pan of vegetable oil.
Fry each twizzler, turning every minute, for about 7 or 8 minutes. Alternatively, you can bake them for 18 minutes at 180 degrees C.

Stuffed Goat: 1st Century

Time for a Roman one.

I’m working my way up to dormice but I’m not quite there yet. One day, I promise. Maybe.

The Romans were, like most ancient civilisations, extremely resourceful when it came to food. I suppose if famine was a very real threat, and you didn’t have supermarkets to just pop in to for bits and bobs, you’d learn pretty damn quickly how to use every part of an animal or which flowers were pretty and edible. To the modern cook, the Romans do seem to have taken that survival instinct to the extreme though; they didn’t just know how to survive on the weird and wonderful – they seemed, at times, to revel in it. In 2005, archaeologists excavating a food quarter in ancient Pompeii discovered the bones of a giraffe leg – complete with butcher marks – in the gutter of an ancient diner. Similarly unnervingly, the most famous Roman cookbook, Apicius, had not one, but two recipes for roasted flamingo and added, as a footnote, that if one fancied, “parrot [may be] prepared in the same manner.”

Of course, that’s not to say that every Roman ate this sort of nonsense everyday. Far from it. Flamingo tongue, for example, was considered a delicacy even for the wealthy – and the poor were lucky if they got within 10 feet of the grease of the plate (I’m assuming; I don’t actually know how greasy flamingo tongue is?)

Most Romans ate a diet of fish and meat or cheese, legumes, vegetables and bread; fairly normal stuff. Dormice didn’t appear on menus as frequently as popular history would have you think. Though Apicius appears to have been a manual used by experienced cooks (including slave-cooks), only the wealthier classes would have had access to some of the more frivolous recipes in it, and even then some of these recipes would have been enjoyed only at very special occasions; like eating caviar as a canape instead of in a sandwich (unless you’re like my husband’s grandfather, who was given some caviar as a gift but had no idea what to do with it and unknowingly created the most expensive butty in the world for his work packed lunch…)

I’ve talked a little bit about the background of Apicius here, but the headlines are basically that it was an instructional work to guide the accomplished cook in the preparation and cooking of everyday meals – as well as meals for banquets – for their wealthy masters. The name Apicius has been attributed to the 1st century gourmet Marcus Gavius Apicius, though historians now doubt he wrote the manual himself. More likely is that thanks to his reputation as an unrelenting glutton of the most expensive food (Pliny wrote that Apicius was “equipped for every ingenuity of luxury”), his name became a byword for “gourmand” and seemed a fitting title for the work, which was probably composed by a series of educated cooks.

Goat isn’t anywhere near the same “unusual food” league as flamingo tongue or giraffe. In fact, it’s relatively common in parts of the UK with high African and Caribbean populations, and in other countries it’s as easy to get hold of as chicken is here. My dad, who lived for a few years in Nigeria as a boy, enjoyed it regularly in curries. Unfortunately for me, the nearest butcher that sold goat meat (I couldn’t find it on Sainsbury’s shelves) was in Leicester, which is still in a strict lockdown. Much as I love historical cooking, I wasn’t about to take a jolly into a city still very much in the grip of a pandemic, so looked elsewhere and found that I could get goat meat delivered from the Dorset Meat Company, an ethical grass-fed, outdoor-reared butcher in my second favourite county. Win!

And…I could end the post there. You’d all be thinking that this was a lovely, educational experiment using ingredients I was unfamiliar with to create a semi-authentic Roman meal. But you’d be wrong. So, so, dead wrong. I almost didn’t write this post up, believing that the end result was so disastrous that there was nothing anyone would gain from reading it. Alas, my ego and need for attention spurred me on.

The recipe I attempted was one of 10 possible recipes in Apicius for goat. It was essentially a roasted dish, with an accompanying sauce. Some of the other recipes were pretty simple, such as kid stew which was cooked in chunks with onion, wine and various herbs and if I’d only stuck to these ones, there may have been a very different outcome to this experiment. The recipe I chose to follow, however, lured me in because of its precise measurements and quantities. That’s right, it was that most rare of historical recipes: one with exact instructions. I should have known it was too good to be true.

Aliter haedus sive agnus syringiatus: lactis sextarium unum, mellis unc. IV, piperis unc. I, salis modicum, laseris modicum. Oleum acetabulum, liquaminis acetabulum, mellis acetabulum, dactilos tritos octo, vini boni heminam, amulum modice.
“Another kid or lamb syringiatus: one pint of milk, 4 ounces honey, 1 ounce pepper, a little salt, a little laser. Oil, liquamen, a spoon of honey, 8 [ounces] crushed dates, a good glass of wine, a little starch.
Apicius, Book VIII

(Huge apologies for dodgy translation, I used a combination of Google translate and already translated versions to try and get as accurate picture of the original recipe as I could.)

Anyway, Sally Grainger’s version seemed to have converted most of the original quantities to modern day equivalents, so I used her translation as guidance. The first thing to do was to roast the goat. Underneath the original recipe was another recipe which appears to have become disjoined from the first, but clearly belongs to it as it gives instructions for preparing the raw goat. I was to rub the meat with oil and pepper and sprinkle on liberal pinches of salt and coriander seeds before roasting. So far, so simple and even delicious; the smell of meat as it roasted with coriander was mouthwatering.

Having never cooked goat before I’d done a little research and knew that there was a danger, thanks to the low fat content, of it becoming too dry and tough. In order to combat this, modern cooks (as well as Apicius!) advised regular basting throughout the cooking process. Some cooks even suggested cooking the meat in a tin foil tent to trap any escaping moisture. I rolled my not-technically-authentic foil out and dutifully shaped it so it would fit over the meat before setting regular timers on my phone to remind me to baste it.

The Romans took a lot of their understanding of insanity from the Ancient Greeks, and certain schools of thought taught that madness was a divine punishment; a common trope in Greek mythology or epics. The 1st century Roman physician Celsus subscribed to the belief that insanity could be visited upon a person by “phantoms” which could cause a person to descend in to one of two types of madness: the “depressed” or the “hilarious”.

I’m telling you this so you’ll understand why I decided, halfway through roasting the goat, to remove the cot sides from my toddler’s bed – a task that in itself took over half an hour – and then expected her to go to sleep without any issues. Whatever phantom it was that inspired me to do this was clearly a fan of schadenfreude.

I sat on the floor of the landing as the smell of roast goat grew stronger and shepherded my daughter back into her new bed when she appeared at her doorway, wildeyed and wailing, every 45 seconds. To add to the madness, the alarm on my phone went off every ten minutes to remind me to baste the meat. I ignored it nine times; the foil tent would have to do on its own.

After just over an hour and a half of battling the world’s most resistant toddler there was silence. I checked in on her: she had pulled her pillow and blanket onto the floor and had fallen asleep under the bed…we clearly had much work to do. The work would have to be done another night, though, because by this point it was almost 9pm and I hadn’t even started on the sauce to go with what I presumed was now incredibly burned goat.

As I headed back into the kitchen, I saw that the foil covering I’d been relying so heavily on to stop the meat from drying out had been left in a neat tent on the side – in my mad rush to take the cot-sides off my toddler’s bed I had forgotten to actually cover the goat with it. Any “hilarious” aspects of the phantom madness that had gripped me earlier began to fizzle away and were quickly replaced by “depressed” ones.

Truth be told, by this point I was ready to jack it all in and order a takeaway – I’d try a goat curry in the spirit of it all if necessary. But the masochist historian in me forced me to see this thing through to the bitter end, so I began work on the sauce.

I added the milk, pepper, honey and salt to a pan along with a little asafoetida. The ingredient “laser” was an ancient herb that has since become extinct, but was believed to be closely related to asafoetida, which made a reasonable substitute. While it was heating enough to dissolve the honey, I blitzed the dates with more honey, oil and liquamen – I used nam pla as a modern alternative. Nam pla has a very distinctive smell and despite being used in countless Thai recipes, it’s a smell I just can’t get used to. I fully understand that it transforms dishes with its umami flavour but once I smelt this I just couldn’t get the scent out of my unsophisticated nose and I knew I was going to struggle to eat dinner. Unfortunately for me, Grainger’s reading of the recipe called for a full 70ml of it – not an inconsiderable amount.

Once the dates and liquids had been transformed to a runny paste, I transferred it to a pan, added a small glass of wine and heated the mixture slightly. I strained the warmed milk and combined the two and stirred like a madwoman to try and stop it from curdling too much. Once I was sure I could stop stirring, I added a tablespoon of cornstarch to thicken it slightly over heat. I may have added too much because after a while the sauce became as thick as wallpaper paste, which did nothing to add to my anticipation of the meal.

The goat had been roasting on a low heat for about two hours now. I took it out, drained the pitiful amount of meat juice into the date sauce and rested the goat under foil to reach the warm but not hot temperature that it would have been served at.

Roman diners often ate roasted meat in slices and dipped each slice into small bowls of sauce, rather than cover the meat entirely. I decided to copy this method of serving: partly for authenticity reasons but also on the off chance that, if the goat wasn’t too tough, I didn’t ruin it by drenching it in cheesy smelling sauce. Despite being called stuffed goat, it actually wasn’t clear where the stuffing occured, and I wasn’t about to risk it by filling the meat with the dubious sauce.

We sat, apprehensive, in front of our plates until my husband went first and took a bite. He chewed thoughtfully. He chewed some more. After what felt like a solid minute of chewing, he stood up and wordlessly made his way to the kitchen to put some chips in the oven.

“Oh God, is it that bad?” I asked.

“No,” he lied (still chewing). “I just thought it would go with chips.”

I took a bite. The quality of the meat had been very good, so this tasted very similar to lamb with only a subtle “goaty” hint to it. However, my fears of it being too tough were right – it was so chewy that I felt like the stereotypical image of Henry VIII, tearing meat off in chunks with his teeth and eating with his mouth open, as I ate.

The sauce, though not as bad as I’d thought, failed to save the meal. It was too thick, for one, and clung to the meat rather than soaked it which therefore did nothing to alleviate the dryness. It was faintly sweet and creamy, but with an alcoholic tang. Though you couldn’t taste the fish sauce on its own, there was a lingering scent of it (I couldn’t work out if it was from the sauce or from remnants in my nose), and so with each bite there was a slightly cheesy retronasal smell that I found pretty off-putting.

In the end we continued determinedly through about 1/3 of the meal before giving up and sharing the bowl of chips. Late into the evening I made brownies, too; it seemed like that kind of night. I was determined not to waste the leftover goat, though, so I have plans to mince what was left and add it to a ragu.

Overall, the night did not end as I thought it would. My toddler was asleep on the floor, all the windows were open to drive the smell of fish sauce out and our dinner lay mostly uneaten on the side. I’m not saying an experiment with flamingo tongue would have been better, but it couldn’t have been much worse.

E x

Stuffed Goat

1kg goat (or lamb) leg
Small handful of coriander seeds
12g black peppercorns
300ml whole milk
110g honey
Pinch of asafoetida powder
4 dates
70ml fish sauce
70ml olive oil
150ml white wine
Tablespoon cornflour

Rub the goat with olive oil and cover in salt, pepper and coriander seeds. Roast, under a foil tent, for 2 hours at 160 degrees C. Baste regularly.
When the goat is roasted, take out and keep covered in foil. Begin the sauce.
Crush 6 peppercorns and add them and the rest of the peppercorns to a pan with the milk. Add 40g of honey, the asafoetida and some salt. Heat gently.
Grind the dates in a food processor with the rest of the honey, the fish sauce and oil. Transfer to a pan and add the wine. Heat.
Strain the milk and add it to the date sauce, stirring whilst adding.
Take the meat out of the oven and allow to rest a little. Pour the meat juices into the date sauce and stir.
Transfer the sauce to small dishes, carve the meat and serve at just above room temperature.

Leche Lumbarde: 15th century

My husband had an important work call to make on Tuesday morning. You know the kind – the ones you have to put in your calendar so you absolutely do not forget about them. The kind people ask “are you all ready for it? Let me know if you need anything.” The kind that you spend weeks worrying about and might, just might, treat yourself to some sort of calorie laden confection as congratulations for getting through it once it’s over.

In my husband’s case, this was an extra large bag of Haribo. He’d bought it a week or so ago in anticipation of The Call and lovingly stashed it at the back of the cupboard behind the beans and spaghetti hoops where it waited patiently for its time to come.

Unfortunately, that time actually came three days too early when, in a fit of sudden dinnertime anxiety about our terrible eating habits, I raided the cupboard looking for rice, wholewheat pasta or lentils to make something wholesome and disappointing with. As I pushed aside a jar of alarmingly red tikka sauce I saw the Haribo bag lurking in the shadows, hoarding its gummy bears, fizzy cola bottles and sour cherries.

It wouldn’t be decent to describe what happened next. Needless to say, my husband ate a plate of wholewheat spaghetti on his own as for some reason I wasn’t too hungry anymore.

And that was the end of that. Until Monday evening, when my husband turned to me with gleaming anticipation in his eyes and told me how much he was looking forward to devouring the Haribo after he’d got through The Call in the morning. They were really helping him focus on the prep work, he said. He didn’t know what he’d do without them as a motivator, he said. If something, anything, should happen to them, he’d be utterly destroyed.

Okay, maybe not as dramatic as that. The point was, he was an earnest and very nervous man and I was a terrible wife.

Obviously I replaced the bag (I’m not a total monster), and The Call went well. But it got me thinking about how I could crowbar it into this blog and the answer came thusly: make some medieval sweets.

Yeah nice one, not a tenuous link at all.

In my defense, when reading through the recipe for these I was struck by how they might pass as a medieval version of gummy sweets. So not totally tenuous..?

Medieval people knew very well about the setting properties of gelatin: recipes in Forme of Cury describe the process of cooking pig’s feet, ears and snouts – along with calve’s feet – in a mixture of wine, water and vinegar to make an enticing dish called Gele of Flessh. What I couldn’t find any evidence of, however, was sweet jellies. And if there were no sweet jellies then it wasn’t too much to assume that gummy sweets were out of the question as well.

Forme of Cury, **not** telling me how to make jelly babies.

I knew that by the end of the 16th century marmalade was being made that resembled something akin to gummy sweets (rather than our modern version); Hugh Platt’s 1600 recipe for orange marmalade was supposed to be so thick it could be served in jellied lozenges. Likewise, the popular 17th century sweet quiddany – quince paste – was supposed to be so solid it could be set in moulds and turned out without losing its shape. But I couldn’t find much evidence of this type of solid-set jam being made in England during the middle ages. A medieval dish from Forme of Cury called Connate came close to these 17th century pastes, but it used lard and raw egg yolk to set it, rather than pectin alone.

What I did find was Leche Lumbarde. Thinking back to my year 9 Spanish lessons I was fairly confident, before reading the whole recipe, that this would include milk – so I almost didn’t bother, thinking it wouldn’t be anything like what I was searching for. In reality, the Leche Lumbarde I found contained no milk, but plenty of dates and sugar (or honey) cooked in wine and set into slices. Okay, it wasn’t a jelly baby or a fizzy cola bottle but it was about as close as I could get.

Other medieval recipes for Leche Lumbarde included meat, such as the 15th century version from Thomas Awkbarow’s Recipes which started off by boiling brawn to a pulp, and the Forme of Cury version, which involved ground pork. It may have been that the makers of Haribo tried an edition of brawn or pork flavour gummy worms, but the packet that my husband had been so looking forward to seemed to rely mostly on fruit flavours, so I skipped these versions in my search.

The recipe I used came from Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books: Harleian MS. 279 & Harl. MS. 4016. Harlein MS. 279 seems to date from around 1430 and Harlein MS. 4016 dates from around 1450. The recipes within these manuscripts were heavily influenced by continental (especially French) cookery and many of the titles of the recipes have bastardised English names – the milk-based recipe Letlardes, for example, is clearly based off an earlier French one: Layt Lardé.

I still couldn’t shake the idea of the Spanish sounding name, though. And the more I thought about it, the more annoyed I was that I’d spent all that time in Spanish lessons only for history to deny that milk didn’t belong in recipes entitled “leche”. If many of the recipes in Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books were based on recipes from France, then surely it wasn’t outside of the realms of possibility that some Spanish influence had crept in too? There must be a connection, I thought – there must be an original, milk-based Spanish recipe for Leche Lumbarde that had somehow become muddled on its way to England.

A 13th century Spanish cookbook called The Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook had a recipe for “A Sweet of Dates and Honey”, which was almost near identical to the recipe I had for Leche Lumbarde. Unfortunately, this recipe didn’t contain any milk, so wasn’t all that helpful in proving the milky origins of the dish. Furthermore, given that 13th century Andalucía wasn’t the region referred to as Andalucía today, but instead referred to all the regions in Spain under Arab Muslim control, it was likely that the original name of this dish (which had been lost) would have been Arabic, so unlikely to contain the Spanish word leche, anyway.

After hours of research I still couldn’t find anything. And then, in desperation, I stopped pushing the very limited Spanish and access to medieval Spanish cookbooks I had beyond their extremes and banged “leche” into the online Middle English Compendium to see if it could point me in the direction of anything I’d overlooked.

“Leche” it sang back to me. “Of lesche, laiche, leske ‘a thin strip, a slice’. Cook. (a) A strip, slice; (b) any of a number of jellylike dishes prepared from various ingredients and usually cut into strips or slices.”

Oh.

I’d spent an afternoon chasing the belief that I was about to unearth the global transformation of a dish from its milky Spanish origins to a milk-less English sweet – a discovery that as far as I could see, no one else had made. For good reason, it turned out, because it didn’t bloody exist.

In this particular context, “leche” was truly nothing to do with milk at all. If I’d paid attention to the other, meaty versions of Leche Lumbarde I’d have seen that they too avoided milk. “Leche Lumbarde” was just another way of saying “sweet slices in the Lombardy fashion”. What the original Lombardy recipe that had inspired the 15th century English version looked like was anyone’s guess; I was too crushed to begin that particular treasure hunt and already on the way to the shop to buy yet more, consolatory, Haribo.*

What a fantastic waste of time. Are you going to cook now?

It was all turning into a bit of a disaster; I’d spent so much time chasing a misguided hunch that I had very little accurate history to talk about. In fact, I was at risk of having to include my dead-end research in lieu of proper information about the dish…

But onto the actual cooking. Milk or no milk, Leche Lumbarde was pleasingly easy to whip up and contained relatively few ingredients: dates, sugar, white wine and spices. Though the original recipe made it seem like there were lots of steps involved, in reality the last few sentences were guidance for what to do if the dish didn’t set properly; mine did, so I didn’t need to follow the end points.

Leche lumbarde. Take Dates, and do awey the stones; and seth hem in swete wyne; and take hem vppe, and grinde hem in a morter, and drawe hem thorgh a streynour with a litull swete wyne and sugur; and caste hem in a potte, and lete boyle til it be stiff; and then take hem vppe, and ley hem vp apon a borde; and then take pouder ginger, Canell, and wyn, and melle al togidre in thi honde, and make it so stiff that hit woll be leched; And if hit be not stiff ynowe, take hard yolkes of eyren and creme thereon, or elles grated brede, and make it thik ynogh; take Clarey, and caste thereto in maner of sirippe, whan thou shall serue hit forthe.
Two Fifteenth Century Cookbooks

First I heated dates in a pan of white wine – I chose a Pinot Grigio as the recipe specified “sweet” (though I’m not a big wine drinker and in reality it all tastes very similar to me; sorry!) The dates simmered for a couple of minutes until they were softened and just starting to fall apart. I added them – without the wine – to a blender and blitzed.

Why couldn’t it have been milk instead of wine?!

Once suitably pulverized, I added a spoonful of the now syrupy wine back to the dates, poured most of rest of the wine away (I set a couple of spoons aside for the final part of the recipe), and returned the dates to the pan. The recipe called for sugar to be added at this point but, like all medieval recipes, didn’t specify how much. I ended up settling for just under half the weight of the dates, aware that this was meant to be a sweet and should therefore be, well, sweet.

The date and sugar mixture was stirred into a thick paste and then heated until it bubbled. Though there was no indication of what temperature to cook it for other than until it was “stiff”, I checked with a food thermometer and took it off the heat at about 106 degrees C, to be sure it had at least passed the setting point of jam. In all honesty, it looked pretty thick and stiff before it reached this temperature but I wanted to make sure.

Once it was off the heat, I added a pinch of powdered ginger and a pinch of cinnamon, stirred it through and turned the whole lot out onto a covered board. It was still boiling hot, so rather than use my hands, as suggested, and risk melting the skin on my palms, I patted it into a rectangle with the flat side of a spatula.

It seemed like it was already thick enough to slice but if it wasn’t the recipe provided some strikingly helpful pointers, by medieval standards. To thicken up the mixture, it suggested, one could crumble in hard egg yolk or grated bread which would provide some additional setting qualities. As it was I only had to cool mine an hour before cutting it into slices (and shaping it into cola bottles).

So similar it’s like “Where’s Wally?” but with Haribo.

The final part of the recipe called for clarey – a type of spiced wine sweetened with honey – to be drizzled over the finished slices like a syrup. I added a spoon of honey to what was left of the date-infused wine I’d set aside earlier, added a little ginger and heated it. Once the honey had dissolved I let it cool a bit so it didn’t melt the sweets and drizzled a couple of teaspoons over the slices.

Did these taste like Haribo? No, not at all. Did they feel like Haribo? Also no. They were much stickier and softer than gummy sweets, so fans of very chewy sweets would be disappointed. In terms of taste, they were sweet but not painfully so; most of the flavour came from the dates, so it was a very sticky, jammy type of sweetness. It almost felt like eating the inside of a fig roll.

The wine made them richer and somehow smoother, but there was no discernible alcoholic taste. Similarly, the spices – ginger especially – gave each piece a kick, but it was a subtle heat rather than a strong flavour.

In the end I’d made a relatively small batch, enough for four medium/large slices (or leches, I guess.) It turned out that this size was right – pleasant as these date sweets were, they weren’t an acceptable replacement for real gummy bears or cola bottles and we found it hard to finish them in a way we’d never struggled with before with Haribo. I guess, if anything, this experiment taught me that replications, no matter how interesting, can never replace the authentic thing.

Oh – and that unless you have half a day to waste shouting at Google Translate and listening to the Spanish national anthem “to get into the right mindset”, it’s best to leave the proper research up to the experts.

E x

* If it turns out that I’ve made yet another mistake and that “Lumbarde” doesn’t, in fact, mean “in the Lombardy fashion” please be sure to highlight this by writing me a letter and popping it straight in the bin. Or, if you must let me know, email theforeignpantry@gmail.com along with a subscription to a years supply of Haribo.

Leche Lumbarde

100g pitted dates
200ml white wine
40g caster sugar
1/4 teaspoon powdered ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
(optional: tablespoon honey)
(optional: breadcrumbs or egg yolk)

Heat the dates in simmering wine until they are soft.
Remove dates from the wine and blend to a pulp. Set aside 3 tablespoons of wine and pour the rest away.
Place dates back into the pan and add 1 tablespoon of the wine. Add the sugar and stir until all incorporated.
Heat the date and sugar until it is thick and bubbling and can hold its own shape (about 105 degrees C.)
Remove from heat and stir in the spices.
If you don’t think the mixture is thick enough to cut when cooled, add in 50g of breadcrumbs or one hard boiled egg yolk, crumbled, and mix in thoroughly.
Tip mixture onto a non stick surface and shape into a rectangle a couple of cm thick. Allow to cool entirely.
Slice and, if adding the sauce, heat the remaining tablespoons of wine with a tablespoon of honey. Add a pinch of ground ginger and then drizzle over the slices.

Farts of Portingale: 1594

Settle down, settle down.

I’ll start by addressing the elephant in the room and dive right in to explain the name of this dish and answer the question everyone’s asking: Portingale simply means made in the “Portuguese-style”. In 1480 the merchant Martin Rodkyns imported 4,000 farts from Portugal at the surprisingly modest cost of 6s. 8d. (approximately £230 in today’s money) suggesting that supply of farts outstripped demand and/or farts weren’t valuable enough in their own right to tax heavily. Nevertheless, farts were clearly considered something of a treat and were served along with other “subtleties” at the enthronement feast of Archbishop Warham in 1504.

All clear? Excellent.

The second thing it’s probably good to get straight is that most 16th century culinary “farts” were small, lightly puffed up, air filled pastries. Naturally the name of this dish necessitates discussion of certain unpleasant wind-based bodily functions, so to avoid confusion over which type of fart is being discussed, I’ve tried to use “fart” when talking about today’s experiment, and the playground term “trump” to describe the revolting, odious, loathsome and uncouth blowing of hot air.

Part of what makes this dish so interesting is that the name is a bit of joke – both to us and to people of Renaissance England (this may be one of the few examples of humour surviving time travel to the 21st century!) The Middle English Dictionary shows that “fart” had been used to mean breaking wind since at least the 14th century – (in)famously in the Summoner’s Tale of the Canterbury Tales where a corrupt friar finds himself in the firing line of a particularly loud and noxious one – but its etymological roots go back much further than that.

So why, if the word “fart” meant what I’m halfheartedly calling “trump”, was it used in the title of a dish? Was it just an unfortunate typo that was repeated over and over again? If not, who was it who thought that a gazpacho of guffs; a fricassee of flatulence; a bowlful of bottom burps – call it what you want – was just what the diners of the country needed? Well, in this case it was Thomas Dawson; English foodie and writer of The Good Huswifes Handmaid for the Kitchen – a text on the main points of the preparation and presentation of meat.

Dawson’s entry for Farts of Portingale is infuriatingly cool; there are no puns and no tongue in cheek comments that lesser writers might resort to in order to make their writing seem more interesting and funny. (When my husband found out what I was making today he made me swear I wouldn’t make more than three fart jokes. I’m trying, I’m really trying.)

How to make Farts of Portingale.
Take a peece of a leg of Mutton, mince it smal and season it with cloues, mace pepper and salt, and dates minced with currans: then roll it into round rolles, and so into little balles, and so boyle them in a little beefe broth and so serue them foorth.
‘The Good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchen‘

“Alas,” she sighed. “All this meat and veg when all I really want is a good fart.”

You can see that in order to find any reason why these were called farts I had to dig a little deeper than Dawson’s recipe alone.

A second 16th century English recipe for farts that predated Dawson’s version by three years was markedly different; it included an early form of meringue, sugar and dough. Likewise, a 14th century French recipe called pets d’Espaigne also seems to have been some sort of bitesize pastry and meat treat and, jumping forward, the 1651 culinary text Le Cuisiner François included a recipe for small pastries called pets de poutain. The respective translation for both these dishes? “Spanish farts” and “whore’s farts.”

Even more interestingly, a lesser used French word for stuffing (which is essentially what Dawson’s recipe is) is farce. A very good linguist friend of mine (who probably never imagined she would need to use her skills to look up the linguist connections of the word “fart”) suggested that a humorous mistranslation of the French dish farce could be to blame for the English dish of “farts”, before the newly minted joke was translated back into French, pets. Whatever the truth, it’s clear the obsession with food-based farts wasn’t limited to English cuisine or any one type of meal.

The deputy chief editor of the OED, Dr. Philip Durkin, suggests that the common theme shared between these three dishes was that they all included dough which was intended to inflate slightly with hot air when cooking – could the puffed up quality be the inspiration for the name? It’s a possibly tenuous link, especially when you think about all the other historical puff pastry dishes that have existed separate from the “fart” motif, but it does highlight how difficult tracing the ideas and theories behind certain types of food can be. (Which is a fancy way of saying I give up and am happy to leave it to the experts to ponder!)

It would be easy to assume that Farts of Portingale was, as mentioned, a typo made by a careless (or teenage) writer that was then copied out over time – a slip up when writing a recipe for the similar sounding Portuguese tarts, perhaps. But given the prevalence of the equivalent word for “fart” in other European cuisines it seems unlikely – what’s more compelling is that the dish was actually part of a wider culinary theme. Furthermore, the use of crude humour in food isn’t uncommon; even today there exist recipes for French-Canadian “nun’s farts”, Italian palle di nonno (“Grandad’s balls”) and Sicilian cassatella di sant’Agata (“Saint Agatha’s breasts”.) Are we really prepared to believe that it’s only in the last few decades that humans have found mixing food and rude words together can create funny results, or that the people of medieval and Renaissance England didn’t find such crass things as farts amusing? (If you do it’s because you didn’t click on the Summoner’s Tale link. Gotcha.)

Anyway, after all this I was expecting to deal with a small pastry tidbit, in keeping with the other fart dishes I’d looked at. But instead I was met with another mystery: Dawson’s recipe made no reference to pastry at all. Was this because by Dawson’s time a fart could describe any dish of bitesize morsels? Or was it because the “fart” element wasn’t to do with puffed pastry after all, but something else? I had no idea. I also didn’t really care either; having spent a solid four hours destroying my internet history with searches like “farts in food” and “the history of farts”, I felt I’d reached the limits of my research ability.

Firstly, I blitzed some mutton in a food processor. To this mushed up mutton mince I added dates, currants, some powdered cloves, mace and salt and pepper. Once it was all incorporated I rolled the mixture into meatballs and brought a pan of good beef stock to simmer (unfortunately not homemade), which I plopped the balls – farts? – into one by one.

Each fart cooked for between five and seven minutes, by which time they had lost their vibrant bloody and raw colours and had turned a wholly dull grey/brown. Certainly, they were reminiscent of the colour you might expect a fart or “trump” to be, though thankfully they didn’t smell like one.

It was unclear whether these were meant to be served in the beef stock or not. I double checked with the medieval French version of the same dish (petz d’Espaigne) in The Viandier of Taillevent which seemed to suggest serving the farts without any of the broth they’d cooked in. Dry farts, if you like.

I did my best to arrange them in an appetising fashion, but it’s actually very hard to take a meatball photo that induces salivation – unless you’re IKEA, of course. Needless to say, the name of the dish meant put these little meatballs on the back foot a bit, so I felt an obligation to increase their attractiveness when I served them.

Soft focus, pointless greenery, finickety plating: it’s the grandslam of wankerish food photos.

“You go first,” my husband said immediately.

I bit into one.

“It’s fine!” I said with what I hoped was enough enthusiasm to disguise the relief in my voice.

They really were “fine.” More than fine, actually. The cloves were the dominant spice flavour but in a bold rather than overpowering way. Both my husband and I agreed that because of this we couldn’t stop thinking about Christmas, which seemed a bit weird in the middle of July, but there you go.

Overall these were like moist balls of very festive stuffing. Having never eaten mutton before, I was curious what it would taste like but I found that in these small mouthfuls, boiled in beef stock, the flavour was like a slightly game-y, richer lamb.

They were also surprisingly sweet. I’m always amazed at the power of the humble date and how much fruity sugariness it can pack and it was no different here. Dried fruit like currants and dates were important in 16th century cooking, partly due to their ability to add subtle sweetness, and were regularly imported. During previous centuries these fruits had been the preserve of the nobility but, as Clarissa Dickson Wright notes, by the end of the 16th century some of these fruits could be found in various recipes of the wealthy middle classes too – recipes such as Farts of Portingale.

At the end of writing, I’m still not sure I’m any wiser as to why these were called farts, or what made them “Portuguese”. All I can do is hope that the reasons for the name are mostly innocent and not based on any digestive issues one may suffer hours after eating a plateful of them. Fingers crossed.

E x

Farts of Portingale

500g mutton or lamb, minced
1/4 teaspoon of powdered cloves
1/2 teaspoon powdered mace
A good pinch of salt and pepper
60g pitted dates
60g currants
1l beef stock

In a blender, combine the mutton, spices, salt, pepper, dates and currants. Whizz until the dates and currants are minced and incorporated evenly through the mutton.
Heat the beef stock until it is simmering.
Roll the minced fart mixture into meatball sized portions and drop them into the beef stock – about six or seven at a time.
Cook in stock for no more than seven minutes.
Remove the farts with a slotted spoon and allow to drain on a warm plate while you cook the rest.

Chocolate Soufflé: 1861

It was world chocolate day yesterday, apparently. Normally these celebrations pass me by a bit – there’s a world meatball day, a coffee day, a hamburger day and a porridge day. Obviously I’m looking forward to 24th October – world tripe day – but mostly I’m a bit cynical and imagine that behind the merriment and random recipes there’s a big fat corporation greedily counting its money.

But it didn’t escape my attention that 7th July was designated world chocolate day. Call me boring, call me clichéd but that’s one food day I can get behind and you’ll be happy to know that I made sure to celebrate by eating as much of it as I could – chocolate biscuits, chocolate bars, chocolate cake, hot chocolate. All enjoyed with appropriate solemnity for the occasion, of course, and not at all gorged with reckless abandon as I attempted to prove the “share” part of a family sized bag of Buttons was more a guideline than a rule.

I’ve not done too many chocolate recipes, mostly because the glorious stuff wasn’t known about in Europe until the 16th century and so recipes containing it (in a modern format) are fairly limited. Its history is fascinating, though.

Who are these people that get paid to take photos of chocolate and how can I get that job?
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

There’s a lot of terminology around chocolate but modern experts tend to refer to cacao as the unprocessed plant or bean while chocolate is the word for anything made from the processed beans. Whatever you call it, chocolate in all its forms was a highly prized item. In pre-colonial Mesoamerica, where it originated, cacao was used as a symbol of wealth; when Cortés arrived to plunder Tenochitlan in 1519, he and his men witnessed a ceremony where Montezuma II was served over 50 jars of chocolate to drink. Cortés and his men might not have fully grasped the awesome display of wealth they were seeing, but to other Mesoamericans the excessive amount of chocolate drink would have signified Montezuma’s extreme power because of the number of beans needed to make so many drinks. Similary, a 16th century document tells us that cacao was valuable enough to the Aztecs to use as currency – in 1543 40 cacao beans were paid daily to workers in maguey fields.

The Spaniards didn’t think much of chocolate at first, describing it as “a bitter drink for pigs“, but brought it back to Spain nonetheless where it continued to be largely disregarded until someone realised that if you added cane sugar or honey to it, it suddenly became an indulgent sweet drink. By the 17th century sweetened chocolate drinks were being enjoyed by the rich all over Europe for its taste but also for its supposed medicinal and aphrodisiac properties (Casanova was apparently a great fan.)

It wasn’t until 1828 that Coenraad van Houten invented the cocoa press, which separated out the cocoa fats from the bean and left a powder which could be added to milk, much like a modern day hot chocolate. This process also meant that chocolate could be mass produced, making it cheaper and more available to the wider public. In 1847 J. S. Fry and Sons realised that combining the fat and liqour from pressed cocoa and adding sugar could create a mouldable solid and voila! the chocolate bar was born.

These early bars were dark and were enjoyed in small quantities as the taste was still fairly strong and bitter. Cadbury’s had some initial success in 1861 with boxes of luxury chocolates, branded ‘Fancy Boxes’. The small chocolates in these boxes were branded as indulgent gifts and were designed to be enjoyed in small dainty mouthfuls (a scientific impossibility as experts* on chocolate consumption have since discovered.)

Eventually, in 1875, the Swiss chocolatier Daniel Peter had the novel idea of adding milk powder (after trying and failing with liquid milk, which caused the chocolate to seize) and created milk chocolate, which was an instant hit. Rival chocolate firms scrabbled around to imitate the creamy taste and in 1905 Cadbury’s released the first Dairy Milk bar, which boasted a higher percentage of milk than any other competitor brand.

Is all this background info just your excuse to try different types of chocolate?

No, actually.

I don’t like dark chocolate. It’s high up on the list of sophisticated tastes that adult palates are supposed to enjoy that I don’t, along with red wine and liquor, blue cheese; strong coffee. In theory I should be a beacon of health, right? In reality I’ve overcompensated for not liking these foods by developing a palate as fond of sugar and fizz as that of a child – frosted cereal, milkshakes, entire jars of Nutella on one slice of toast. Okay, fine – it’s the palate of a child with irresponsible parents. So what? I had a great childhood and my fillings light up a room when I smile.

Because of this I was only sort of excited to try Mrs Beeton’s recipe for chocolate soufflé, given that it was published in 1861 – a full 14 years before anyone had successfully manufactured milk chocolate. My husband, who’s a certified signed up Adult(TM), was, however, delighted by the idea of this experiment (even though I made it for breakfast in rebellious solidarity with my inner child.)

First I separated four eggs and added a few teaspoons of sugar and flour to the yolks. Mrs Beeton then told me to add 85g of “best chocolate”, which unfortunately meant dark chocolate. I used Bournville because even though it wasn’t sold until 1908 – and it definitely isn’t the best quality – it was what was most readily available at 8:00am when I decided to make soufflé. I just had to hope that the average bar of 2020 Bournville chocolate was as good as a very good bar of 1861 chocolate. It took forever to grate, but eventually I had a small pile of very finely grated chocolate, which I mixed into the egg yolks.

My next deviation from the original recipe was to use an electric whisk to whip the egg whites into stiff peaks. Stiff peaks formed, I folded the egg whites into the yolk and chocolate mixture trying not to beat all of the air out of it. The soufflé was then portioned out into buttered ramekins and baked for 20 minutes.

Little fluffy clouds in a pool of sewage.

Once they were in the oven I found I was filled with dread that they wouldn’t rise and I’d be left with two deflated eggy messes. I started to do initially nonchalant but increasingly neurotic soufflé inspections: I began by wandering into the kitchen every couple of minutes to check on the oven, pretending that I’d left the milk out or the hob on. Then there were a couple of innocent peeks through the door to check that they were rising properly and before I knew it I was kneeling on the floor, face pressed against the hot glass, hissing “rise my beauties, rise!”

And rise they did. The second wave of dread washed over me as I read “the proper appearance of this dish depends entirely on the expedition with which it is served…if allowed to stand after it comes from the oven, it will be entirely spoiled, as it falls almost immediately.”

Entirely. Spoiled.

Has a more terrifying phrase ever been written? And what was worse is that it seemed totally unavoidable – I could have absolutely nailed the recipe, even use the very best of best chocolate – and it would all be for nothing if I shuffled instead of sprinted to the table when serving it.

I prepped myself for the worst, took a deep breath and whisked the soufflé’s from the oven so fast I was at risk of breaking the sound barrier.

“Stand back!” I roared at my husband as I ran to the table to photo them before they deflated.

In the end Mrs Beeton had maybe exaggerated the delicate nature of soufflé; yes, they sunk slightly within a minute or so of being out of the oven, but they were hardly “spoiled.” At least, not spoiled enough to render them inedible for breakfast.

Totally forgot to add powdered sugar when they came out of the oven which entirely spoiled them.

Not only did they look like chocolate soufflés, but they damn well tasted like them too; rich and dark without being too sweet. My husband particularly enjoyed this aspect to them because he said it made them feel “healthier”. Inside they were light and airy, but as they deflated they got a bit gooier and more unguent.

I didn’t finish all of mine because, well, dark chocolate. But my husband, buoyed by the seemingly wholesome nature of these, managed to finish off his own and the rest of my ramekin. Dark chocolate soufflé for breakfast: approved by Real Adults.

World chocolate day might be over, but I’m already counting down the days to next year when I can make a (milk chocolate) version of these again. Also, if someone could tell me the shortcut for the acute accent so that I don’t have to keep copy and pasting the “é” every time I write “soufflé” in the future, I would be forever indebted to you.

E x

* It’s me; I’m the expert on chocolate consumption.

Chocolate Soufflé

85g dark chocolate, finely grated.
1 teaspoon plain flour
3 teaspoons caster sugar
4 eggs

Preheat an oven to 160 degrees C.
Separate the egg whites from the yolks.
Whisk the egg yolks and add the grated chocolate. Mix.
Add the flour and sugar to the chocolate and egg yolk and whisk together until fully incorporated.
Whisk the egg whites to stiff peaks.
Fold the egg white into the egg yolk. Make sure not to over-fold to prevent the air escaping.
Butter two large ramekins and divide the soufflé mixture between them.
Place the soufflés into the oven and cook for 20 minutes. Do not open the oven door during cooking.
Remove the soufflés and dust with icing sugar. Serve immediately.

Meat Loaf: 1967

Before today I’d never made or eaten meatloaf before. Growing up, my whole experience of it came from watching American films from the 90’s where it was always presented as a bit of a disappointment: dry, bland and uninspired, occasionally with ketchup. None of my friends ate it either so it became something I thought of as semi-fictional, in a boring kind of way. I think there was only one film where meatloaf was made to seem dangerous and exciting, but it was part of a messy, short lived scene that ended with a pickaxe and bits of Meat Loaf all over the walls and floor. Other than creating some mildly conflicting emotions in 12 year old me (who, let’s face it, knew she shouldn’t be watching a DVD that featured so much leather and red lipstick on the front cover), this particular scene didn’t really change my opinion of the dish overall.

I’m unsure why I thought of meatloaf as this slightly ugly, dull meal in comparison to the fancy sounding terrine when they are such similar dishes. It’s probably because the word “terrine” evokes French elegance, upmarket restaurants and crisp white napkins whereas the word “meatloaf” sounds like something we’d all be fighting over in the dystopian wasteland of a nuclear winter as part of a futile effort to avoid resorting to cannibalism. Or maybe I’ve just thought about it too much.

“It’s really boring” I told my husband. “At least, I think it is. You probably won’t like it.” I showed him the ugly photo of lumpy meatloaf in Marguerite Pattern’s 1967 edition of Quick and Easy Cookbook in Colour.

“Well why are you making it then?”

I showed him the photo of Wurstel Sausage in Aspic which had been the alternative for my foray into the food of the 60’s and 70’s. He agreed I’d made the right decision.

A third 70’s dinner option. Credit here.

In theory meatloaf has been around for centuries because dishes of compressed minced meat have existed since ancient times. In Apicius there’s a recipe for Brain Sausage involving pulverised minced brain which is shaped and cooked in a pan and sliced into portions to be eaten cold. I would do anything for my love of historical cooking, but I won’t do that. I needed a modern, non-brain version to make instead.

Our modern idea of meatloaf first appeared in American print in 1899 – coincidentally just after the invention of the meat grinder. From then on it became a firm American staple, appearing in cookbooks and on dining tables for decades after. It wasn’t until 1939 that meatloaf made it to British print, however, by which time it had cemented its place as a versatile but fairly inelegant meal. The recipe I used for today’s meatloaf, taken from Quick and Easy Cookbook in Colour, appeared under the title “Made-up meat dishes” which did little to change my perception of meatloaf as something that wasn’t quite real, but I was prepared to change my mind. Besides, I was using my gran’s old cookbook which bore tell tale splatter marks from when meatloaf had been all the rage in the 70’s.

First I melted 1 oz. of margarine in a pan, added two chopped onions and cooked them until they were soft but not brown. I then added 3 oz. of mushrooms, flour and milk to form a white sauce and cooked until thickened. So far, so easy. I was actually quite pleased to see that the first two ingredients were vegetables and not meat; it somehow made the unappetising image in the book a little less daunting.

Once the onion/mushroom/white sauce mixture cooled slightly I added a combination of minced beef and sausage meat, a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce, two eggs, 3 oz. bread crumbs, a teaspoon of mixed herbs and 1 oz. of parmesan cheese (“Oh, you’re making a fancy meatloaf then”, my mum said when she found out the ingredients.) I then added 3 tablespoons of tomato puree which gave everything a disconcerting pinky/orange hue and reminded me of Rocky Horror again, before squidging it all into a loaf tin and baking for just over an hour.

The thing I hadn’t appreciated about meatloaf is that it’s often meant to be served cold. Patten’s recipe called for the meatloaf to be chilled in the fridge for a couple of hours once cooked before being sliced and served with a salad. I had intended to serve this for dinner, and by the time it was done it was already 7pm. I didn’t think my family would appreciate waiting another two or three hours for a meal that I’d done nothing but complain about since starting. It’s fair to say expectations weren’t high and tacking on an additional countdown to inevitable disappointment wasn’t something I fancied doing to my family – so I served it hot.

Sliced warm, it didn’t quite keep its intended loaf shape – entirely my fault, but not very helpful in boosting the overall attractiveness of the meal. That said, it didn’t look as awful as I’d imagined a whole tin of squashed meat would. There was a pretty satisfying brown and crunchy top to the meatloaf which, once broken, revealed a surprisingly tender and moist interior. I was delighted to find that the crumbly dryness I’d been expecting was no where to be seen – it was like eating a lasagne without pasta and was quite delicious.

The mushrooms and white sauce lent the whole thing a pleasantly silky texture as well as preventing dryness. The tomato paste gave a surprisingly strong “vegetable” taste that threatened to distract from the beef and sausage meat, a combination that worked quite well, although I would have preferred more sausage meat than Patten used in her recipe.

I wanted to see what it tasted like cold, though, so a couple of hours later I cut a slice from the refrigerated leftovers. The flavours had intensified, with the beef becoming more prominent in particular and the tomato taking a welcomed backseat. The texture had become a little chunkier and less smooth too – it was somehow more robust. Overall I think I preferred it cold, as Patten had intended.

Tastier but still kind of ugly when cold.

Despite my limited pop culture references leading me to believe meatloaf was a bland meal, I didn’t find it bland at all and my husband and daughter seemed to wolf it down. However, the overall presentation and fact that it was best eaten cold meant that it would be out of place at a dinner party.

If I was going to a picnic though, and wanted something that tasted great but didn’t make me look too try-hard, I would absolutely make this again. Likewise, I could see this being a much enjoyed family meal if I had time to prepare, cook and chill it properly. And that, I think, is the beauty of meatloaf. It’s not trying to be anything more than it is – occasional family meal, satisfying picnic lunch, theatrical aging rock star – it’s all good.

E x

Meat Loaf

28g margarine
2 onions
85g mushrooms
28g plain flour
1/4 pint of milk
2 eggs
Teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
Teaspoon salt
Teaspoon mixed herbs
28g Parmesan cheese
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
3 tablespoons tomato puree
85g pork sausage meat
450g minced beef
85g breadcrumbs

Melt margarine in a saucepan and add the onions, chopped. Cook until soft but not brown.
Dice the mushrooms and add to the softened onions. Cook for 1 minute.
Add the flour and stir through the mushrooms for 1 minute. Keep stirring to prevent lumps forming.
Once the flour has been absorbed, add the milk and stir constantly until the sauce is thick.
Remove from heat and allow to cool to room temperature.
Heat the oven to 200 degrees C.
Add the remaining ingredients to the onions and mushrooms and mix thoroughly.
Press the meatloaf mixture into a loaf tin and bake for 1 hour – 1.5 hours.
Remove from oven and allow to cool in the tin before transferring to a wire tray. Wrap the meatloaf in greaseproof paper and place in the fridge for 2 or 3 hours before cutting into slices.