Marmalade as meditation

"I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges or scrub the floor."

DH Lawrence writing to Arthur McLeod, from 'Villa Igea', Villa di Gargnano (Brescia), Lagodi Garda, Italy. 17 January 1913.

The selected letters of D.H. Lawrence
By D. H. Lawrence, James T. Boulton
Compiled by James T. Boulton
Published by Cambridge University Press, 2000

It seems DH Lawrence may have been onto something.

With thoughts of the future spinning in my head the past few weeks, I took some time out yesterday to make some marmalade. (I drew the line at scrubbing floors.)

I used a recipe from an 1845 cookbook, and apart from a brief moment when I was perplexed as to what the 'straw' may be* that I was to pierce the tender oranges with, it was a very easy recipe to make.

ORANGE MARMALADE Procure Seville oranges, stew them till they become so tender, that you can pierce them with a straw, changing the water two or three times. Drain them, take off the rind, weigh the pulps, previously taking out the pips; and supposing the quantity to be six pounds, add seven of sugar; boil it slowly till the syrup be clear, then add the peel, having cut it into strips. Boil it again and it is finished. This is a new method, and found to be excellent as well as economical. Seville oranges are in their best state at the end of March or beginning of April.

The practical cook, English and foreign, By Joseph Bregion, Anne Miller, 1845

And at the end of the day, I had around six months' supply of marmalade for my breakfast toast.

DH Lawrence was right, it is amazing how the nature of shredding the rinds can be almost a meditative experience, as can the stirring of the boiling pot.

In today's world we have a tendency to see repetitive tasks as tiresome chores, something to be endured and something to get through as quickly as possible.

In doing so, we are missing an opportunity to enjoy the experience of taking time out to do something productive. Chores can instead be a time when we can focus on the task at hand, dismissing the day's concerns from our minds.

When I am working on creative writing pieces, some of my best ideas come about when I an doing 'a chore' such as washing the dishes.

What repetitive tasks do you do to unwind or cheer yourself up?

* thank you to the Before Our Time Twitter followers who offered opinions about the nature of 'a straw' in my hour of need.

A load of flummery

Flummery (n.)

1. A sweet, soft oatmeal based pudding

2. Meaningless ceremonies and nonsense flattery.

So there I was driving my car, stuck in slow-moving traffic one afternoon last week, when all of a sudden a word pops into my head.

Flummery.

For no apparent reason this word cavorted about, did a couple of cartwheels and disappeared, leaving me wondering, What exactly is flummery?

What I did know was that it is a magic word. Say it aloud and you'll agree. Flummery. It just tumbles off the tongue, and cascades over the lips.

But I wasn't so sure what the meaning of the word was. I had a vague idea that it was a type of dessert. Perhaps a fluffy, fruity one? I guessed there may be sponge involved?

So it was off to Google University to find out.

What I discovered is that 'flummery' means a lot of different things in different places and times. The flummery recipes on websites such as http://www.bestrecipes.com.au/ or http://www.taste.com.au/ look positively delicious: light, summery, fluffy concoctions full of fruit flavour and mostly set with gelatine.

Digging a little deeper however, I found flummery's origins were not so tasty.

According to the The British Food Trust's Great British Kitchen Cookbook, "Flummery occurs in manuscript menus for Scottish feasts as early as the fifteenth century. The ingredients varied but the basis was always soaked cereal, the liquid from which sets to a clear jelly". The base could be flavoured (usually with orange juice or rosewater) and topped with cream and honey and sometimes alcohol.

I found a recipe for what seemed to be a traditional Scottish flummery, such as would have been made and prepared before our time and I decided to give it a go.

I'm warning you, the making of flummery requires commitment. It's a three-day process.

Day One: Soak 75g of fine oatmeal in cold water (enough to cover), stand and leave for 24 hours.

Day Two: Strain off the liquid, discard. Pour 1.2 litres of fresh cold water over oatmeal. Leave to stand for another 24 hours.

Day Three: Strain liquid into a saucepan, pushing as much liquid out of the oatmeal as possible. Discard the oatmeal. Add the juice of two oranges, and 25g caster sugar. Bring to the boil, reduce heat, stir while simmering for 10 minutes until the mixture thickens...

After 20 minutes of stirring the simmering mixture I accepted it was never going to thicken, much less set. And besides, it seemed incredibly unappealing.

The next step of the recipe called for 150mls of double cream to be stirred through the cooled (thickened) mixture before pouring it into bowls to set.

At this point, I decided not to throw good cream after bad flummery and I abandoned my experiment.

This is not an unusual experience. I have had mixed results in the past with recipes from before our time that needed to thicken and set. Who could forget the bad blancmange that had the colour and consistency of snot?

I have a theory about this, which I welcome your comment on. My theory is based on absolutely no solid evidence or rigorous research, just pure hunch. I think that some of our ingredients don't necessarily have the same qualities as they may have had a century or more ago.

Is our oatmeal more refined than the 15th Century Scottish oatmeal was? Does ours contain less starches than are required to set the rogue flummery?

Has anyone ever made an oatmeal flummery that set? Or do you have other old recipes that don't work as well as they used to?

Book Blasts from the Past

While visiting Mum in Western Australia last week I came across this amongst her cookery books. A cookbook put together by the local Anglican Ladies' Guild. The book is undated but likely to date from about 1964.

I was looking for a quick and easy banana cake recipe. Mrs P. Webb, a relative by marriage, submitted this one.

I needed this book, distributed in 1966, to work out the measures.

And I loved the little advertising gems.

Imagine, five pounds to install your hot water system. Lucky you indeed. Mathematicians out there - how much is this in today's dollars?

Hold the mayo

“Mayonnaise sauce is best served separately in a tureen or sauce boat with the salad either cut up or the lettuce in pieces.”

Australian Enquiry Book of Household and General Information
for the Cottage, the Villa and the Bush Home
by Mrs Lance Rawson
first published by Pater & Knapton, in 1894.
Facsimile edition reproduced by kind permission
of the State Library of New South Wales, 1984, by Kangaroo Press

Mayonnaise is one of those foods that I’d always suspected probably tastes better if you make it from scratch, but I’d never actually done so. Then I spotted a recipe for it in Mrs Rawson’s book. (The instructions in italics under each photo are Mrs Rawson’s)

Ingredients: 3 or 4 eggs, 3 teaspoonfuls salad oil*, 1 teaspoonful vinegar, pepper, salt.

Strain the yolks of the eggs into a basin, and set it in a cool place – in the ice chest if you have one.

(well, yes Mrs Rawson...I am somewhat fortunate, and I do indeed have an ice chest. Although they're called refrigerators now.)

Let it stand an hour or two, and then take a spoon and begin to stir round and round (not to beat).

Add salt, stirring well; then a few drops at a time of the salad oil. The quantity of oil depends on individual taste; some people like a lot of oil.

When half the oil is well mixed, put in in the same way some good vinegar and keep adding oil and vinegar in these proportions until you get sauce the thickness of thick cream, then add pepper and more salt, if necessary.

The oil and vinegar must be added by degrees or they will not blend smoothly and the amount of both will depend upon the quantity of sauce, and also the consistency you like it.

At this point I abandoned the good counsel of Mrs Rawson. The mayonnaise was looking a little like beaten egg yolks and tasted just like them too.

So I took to the bowl with a whisk to lighten the colour and aerate the mixture.

To deal with the lack of taste, I added the juice of half a lemon.

And a teaspoonful of Dijon mustard.

I used the finished mayonnaise on a Waldorf salad. In spite in their initial skepticism, the household’s verdict was that it was worth the effort involved. I'm not sure it would meet with the approval of mayonnaise purists, but we thought the taste was more acceptable with the addition of the lemon and mustard.

* Salad oil is any edible vegetable oil: corn oil, peanut oil, sunflower oil, olive oil etc. I used an Australian extra virgin olive oil.

Do you have the stomach for blancmange?

One of my favourite books growing up was Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. I read it many times, and I know I wasn’t alone. Although it was published originally in 1868 and is set in the far-off world of four sisters growing up through the American Civil War, it has been a staple on the reading lists of generations of Australian girls.

As is often the case when we read fiction set in another time or place, I encountered in that book things which seemed alien or strange.

What, for instance was the ‘blanc-mange’ that Jo took next door to the neighbour, Laurie in Chapter Five?

“Here I am, bag and baggage,” she said briskly. “Mother sent her love, and was glad if I could do anything for you. Meg wanted me to bring some of her blanc-mange; she makes it very nicely, and Beth thought her cats would be comforting.”

“That looks too pretty to eat,” he said, smiling with pleasure, as Jo uncovered the dish, and showed the blanc-mange, surrounded by a garland of green leaves, and the scarlet flowers of Amy’s pet geranium.

“It isn’t anything, only they all felt kindly, and wanted to show it. Tell the girl to put it away for your tea; it’s so simple, you can eat it; and being soft, it will slip down without hurting your sore throat…”

From these passages, I assumed it was a foodstuff of some kind, that it had to be made, and that it was cool and soft. The only reference I’ve ever heard in contemporary conversation to blancmange was someone in my mothers’ group referring to her post-pregnancy stomach as having the consistency of blancmange which, without being too unkind, I took to mean soft, squishy and perhaps a little wobbly?

So, what is this mysterious blancmange? Armed with my trusty Household Cookery book from the Emily McPherson College of Domestic Economy in Melbourne (1945), I set about to find out.

Sure enough, Section VIII devoted to Hot and Cold Puddings, contains three ‘Blanc Mange’ recipes: plain, chocolate and lemon.

So I started with the plain. Simple enough ingredients: milk, sugar, cornflour, lemon rind and a bayleaf.

An easy recipe to follow too, although I can’t emphasise how important the word “stir” is in the “stir to the boil” instruction. The cornflour thickens the milk very quickly, and the slightest distraction on the part of the cook could result in a lumpy, burnt mess. (Yes, I almost learnt that the hard way.) The blancmange sets overnight in a wetted mould.

I served it with a strawberry compote. All members of my household were underwhelmed. They said it lacked flavour. I thought the flavour was subtle. I was being kind.

So then I tried the Lemon Blanc Mange, which was a little more complex to make. I’m not sure it really qualifies as a blancmange in the strictest sense, as it doesn’t actually have any milk in it, and every definition I found of the word ‘blancmange’ in various dictionaries contained somewhere within it, the words ‘milk’ or ‘milky’.

The lemon blancmange was made with a water base thickened with arrowroot, and then folded with whipped egg whites.

The addition of lemon rind to the boiling water sure packed a punch flavour-wise, but the end product had the appearance and consistency of snot.

And it certainly didn’t hold its shape when I turned it out of the mould. I’m not sure what went wrong. Perhaps arrowroot today isn’t quite what it used to be in 1945?

The Chocolate Blanc Mange, which is just a variation on the plain recipe (no lemon rind, but melted chocolate instead) I made into small portions as a lunchbox treat. Mindful of the ‘lacking in flavour’ accusations, I doubled the amount of melted chocolate in the recipe. See below for my tweaked version of the recipe.

My oldest daughter was delighted with the end result. It’s a bit like some of those chocolate desserts you can buy from the supermarket, but without any additives in the ingredients. It wasn’t much cheaper than the supermarket options though (I made ten 70gm serves for around 45c each) because I used good quality chocolate. If I had skimped on the amount of chocolate and used a cooking chocolate instead, the unit cost would have been a lot lower.

My overall verdict on blancmange? It wobbles. There is just no other way to describe it. Blancmange would be a great food for someone recuperating from an illness, as it literally slides down the throat. The chocolate version was the most palatable, and kids seem to find it fun to have that as a treat.

In general, however I think it should stay firmly within the pages of classic fiction.

Chocolate Blancmange

600 mls milk
4 tablespoons cornflour
2 tablespoons sugar
1 bay leaf
60gm chocolate, broken into small pieces
Splash of vanilla extract

Blend the cornflour with a little of the milk in a large jug. Heat the rest of the milk in a saucepan, with the bayleaf. Once heated, pour over the blended cornflour.
Return to the saucepan and stir to the boil. Add the sugar and continue stirring while the mixture cooks for three minutes. Remove the bayleaf. Reduce the heat.
Add the chocolate pieces and splash of vanilla and stir while the chocolate melts.
Pour into a wetted mould (or individual containers for lunchbox treats) and leave to set in the fridge overnight.
Turn out onto a pretty dish.