Recipe Roadtest: The Proof of the Pudding. . .
If you have read Part One, you’ll know that I have been troubled recently; suffering from cake envy. After my last poor attempts to make one, every time I eat someone else’s sponge creation, I slather and chomp but with an underlying niggle that I wish I could do the same for others. Nigel Slater’s guidance failed to see me cross the finish line so I turned to Delia to add some lift in my mixture.
The result? A Victoria sponge made up of two separate halves with a layer of whipped cream and raspberries in between where the main purpose of the mixture was to level-up the tessellating wonkiness of the sponge discs. The good news was that is looked okay, and didn’t taste too bad either. It had the texture a nd appearance of an actual cake. The making of it was a different story, in fact a scene of semi-carnage, lacking the sense of control I normally enjoy in my cooking. It was a good advert for the reintroduction of a more rigorous home-economics programme in our schools.
Having turned to Delia’s How to Cook Book One, I sifted flower, holding the sieve high above the mixing bowl to bring as much air into the mixture as possible - creating a snowy beauty that your average downhill skiier would have been honoured to carve-up. All good so far. Introducing the other ingredients, things were looking all too easy. Then I ‘mixed them together with an electric hand whisk’. At this point, it started flying up the walls, over the hob, onto my apron, and generally everywhere except where I had hoped it would be. Enough remained in the bowl to make a cake. Such excellent news. It was at this point that I wanted to raise my hand. Food instruction in writing is all very well but it does rely on a certain amount of trial and error. A teacher would definitely have been useful, there to give me that sour-faced look of disapproval mixed with the same useful tip she’d just given all the other egg-covered pupils. I styled-my way through the whirling dervish of cream-coloured ooze I found myself in, using the classic wooden for an old-school rescue.
I placed the spring-form tin containing half the mixture firmly to one side of our unevenly heated fan oven. At thirty minutes, it had risen. Not prettily or as evenly as I had distributed my mixture but it had risen but this was marked improvement from Nigel’s all-butter lead-cake.
I improvised the construction phase, spreading a layer of jam on the two halves, adding whipped cream and fresh, halved raspberries. The result was a slightly uneven but moist and fluffy cake which looked solidly cake-like. Delia’s instructions had been clear, precise and even gave tips on how to improvise with the mixture’s consistencies. I forewent the passion fruit and mascarpone filling because I have a belief about making a sponge cake - hence my obsession with making one. That it should be simple and that it should not cost the earth. There is nothing more homely than cleverly making a thrifty cake for friends with your own hands, then sitting around enjoying it with some chat.
In this case, it is with a cup of Sunday morning coffee and a musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Well, each to their own.
My next ambition in this pursuit is to follow a recipe in Eliza Acton’s recipe book of 1854 entitled Modern Cookery for Private Families.The language may be slightly impenatrable and they are referred to as “sweet poisons” but if there’s one area of British cookery which hasn’t shifted much in the last century and a half, it’s a nice cake.
Levi Roots’ Reggae Reggae Cook Book
I’m not a huge fan of celebrity chefs. In fact I’m not a huge fan of celebrity. To me, the recognition that the bloke in that film we’re watching was also in that other thing we saw at the cinema, (and I think he’s married to that other girl who was a child actress and was maybe in a couple of episodes of The Bill once - yes, really!) registers pretty low on my radar of stuff that really matters.
But Levi Roots, I have time for. He is not a grasper of the limelight. He does not love the sound of his own voice (except of course when he’s singing in one of his many musical incarnations). No, this man has lived - I mean really lived. He’s crossed the world, been inside, been nominated for a MOBO, brought up a family, been a fixture of the Notting Hill Carnival and of course he’s been on BBC2’s Dragon’s Den with his guitar and subsequently launched his own range of cooking sauces which are now supermarket bestsellers.
So given the similarity between the cover of this book and a bottle of his famous Reggae Reggae sauce, isn’t this book just another cynically executed phase in the commercial plan masterminded by Dragon’s Den Dragon Peter Jones? Well yes and no. Yes - in that it is a paint-by-numbers exercise in which Levi’s child-like style of writing is invoked to bring us his brief autobiography which is then woven quite clumsily throughout the book with sections of Caribbean recipes with bright photographs on colourful pages. Be warned though that the prose themselves are reminiscent of Roger Red Hat, and when recipes don’t fill up a page, a jaunty creole saying - with much-needed English translation - is slapped on in there to keep you going. If you understand them all on first reading, you’re a better man than I, as in ”When yuh neighbour beard catch fire, tek water wet fe yuh - Learn from others’ mistakes”.
And no - in that despite its obvious commercial motivation, I really like this book. It is bright, colourful, inspiring and unyieldingly happy. It gives a simple introduction to Caribbean cookery, which as Levi (real name Keith in case you’ve always wondered) highlights has not really permeated wholesale into British culture. I live in South East London near to Brixton (where he lived with his parents and was caught in the crossfire of the Brixton race riots) and Peckham where every day of the week, shop-fronts are opened-up and piled-high with yams, okra and sweet potato. And yet I have bought more bottles of RR sauce from Sainsbury’s than I have bought rice n’ peas or Jerk chicken from one of those stalls. So in my eyes, he has already made it more accessible by his sauce to us supermarket-shopping whiteys than previous generations were exposed to. It may only be a sauce but it’s a start.
I don’t think Caribbean cooking has really made its way into the culinary heart of our nation. When wondering exactly why, I am brought to mind of an episode of the 90s sit-com Chef with Lenny Henry in which he, for one episode, turned his talents as Head Chef away from the French-influenced modern European cuisine in which he specialised to the dishes of his motherland. In particular, when he produced a spread which included Caribbean favourite ‘cow-foot and bean’. Needless to say it didn’t go down all that well with is wife. Indeed in this book are recipes for cornmeal porridge, Rasta pasta and special coleslaw which don’t feel that inviting to me - but the majority of it looks good. Warming, gentle spices which originated mostly from India are blended with goat, beef, lots of chicken and preserved fish (including the intriguing blocks of saltfish which came about through the necessity of having to preserve food in the hot climes of the Carib). I am looking forward to trying a cook-up of rice n peas with curried goat when the weather warms a little more into BBQ season.
If you want a fun cookbook that will walk you through the basics of rasta-style cookery, I cannot think of one which could do it with more zest for life, enthusiasm or simplicity. It brings a lot more than that though - this is more inspiring in terms of the life story it tells, allbeit demolishable to the average reader in about twenty minutes. Levi’s unsquashable, entrepreneurial spirit should be inspiration to us all and it permeates through to every page. Cheesy at times and occasionally repetitious (with the phrase ‘dragon-slayer’ making a few appearances too many for my liking - we get the pun Keith and it was clearly Peter Jones’s idea to say that anyway), you cannot help but feel encouraged in your daily life by the fact that he used his last tenner to get a cab to the filming of an episode of Dragon’s Den which was to change his life so dramatically. After what had gone before, it sounds like he deserved a break.
If all celebrities were as interesting, full of life, happy and downright hungry for it all as Levi, I might even start reading OK magazine.
Recipe Roadtest: My First Cake, Nigel vs Delia
We all love a bit of cake, don’t we? And it’s pretty cheap to buy: even a posh, moist, rich chocolate cake from a stall or bakery would set you back less than a tenner. So why would we want to make one? Well if you enjoy your cooking, the feeling that you couldn’t make a Victoria sponge if you want to can be somewhat frustrating. It’s like being a good tennis player with the backhand of an old man swatting a fly.
I don’t mind sharing that I already have some notches in the wooden spoon of failure. Trusting Nigel Slater, as have done for so long, to help teach me in all ways culinary, I thought he’d be the man to help locate my very own baker within. I was a little disappointed however, when a year ago I selected from his book Appetite, a recipe for ‘a simple cake to be served with summer berries’. I invested in the requisite equipment - springform tin, greaseproof paper, spatula - and of course the basic ingredients. I followed the recipe word-for-word, pre-heated the oven and slammed it in, bristling with pride and anticipation following my (by this stage, many hours of) planning, toil and well-floured sleeves. It came out smelling great and looking like someone had run it over. I simply couldn’t understand.
The answer was simple - I had estimated my quantities, which as any baker will tell you is pure suicide. Neither did I own an electric mixer at the time so resorted to the old-fashioned bowl and spoon approach. (There was just something about all those arty pictures in his books of wooden-handled vegetable knives handed down through the family and chopping blocks which have been in use since the Crimean War that lulled me into thinking this would be a charming, yet still workable option.)
So then - a year, a set of electronic scales and a Kenwood mixer later, and it was time for my second attempt. Miraculously, the cake came out exactly the same. Heavy a lead, it was a fat disc of rather buttery, sweet dough. It tasted ok but as I’d baked it for some visiting friends, i felt slightly embarrassed but worse than that - I was mystified.
Taking a moment to reflect and regroup as I ate a wedge of the dense cake with my tea, I considered my options (incidentally - what it lacked in texture, it more than made up for in terms of buttery-goodness!). I would crack this baking malarky, and being relatively self-sufficient in these matters, I wanted to find guidance in the printed page. So who could help me in the endevour? Scanning my cook-book shelf, I spotted the almost unreadably pale spines of Delia’s How to Cook Book One. My mother had bought this for me around the time I went to University. It struck a chord as I mooched this time around because I remember the effectiveness with which she had taght me to make a decent omelette. Could the woman with such an excellent grasp of simplicity, mastering the basics and of explaining things to her readers in plain language be the one to help my mixture rise?
Well as I was guided through the process by the section of the book entitled Cakes and Biscuits for Beginners (sounded promising!) and roadtested her Classic Sponge Cake (with passion fruit filling), I certainly hoped so.
Click back soon to check out the thrilling conclusion. There will be icing sugar up the walls, there will be emotions - but above all there will be pictures. . .