RECOLLECTIONS OF TASTE
French and English childhoods were nurtured with comforting puddings and other soul-warming sweets. When I consider the food recollections that make me smile the most, they are my non-English, non-French mother’s versions of them, like baked rice pudding, bread pudding, and blueberry crisp. I remember a short stint of bread baking at our house when I was really young, mainly by invoking its aromas. In our post, “The Scent of Recollection,” we noted that baking breads, cakes, rosemary, and tea-soaked madeleines were particularly powerful in triggering memory.
We found some wonderful recipes that reminded us of our real or imagined tender years, and we enjoyed playing.
Crumbly sweet tea breads, made for perfect tea parties, both for little girls and ladies. This one called "Tipsy Turvey Bread," from “Steampunk Tea Party: Cakes & Toffees to Jams & Teas - 30 Neo-Victorian Steampunk Recipes from Far-Flung Galaxies, Underwater Worlds, & Airborne Excursions
“Lady Elsie’s recipe is a closely guarded secret, passed down through the family as a legacy from Lady Violet. Its gloriously crumbly texture has been known to divert gardeners from re-painting roses and urchins from chimney-cleaning duties, and when the Red Queen came for tea, she was thoroughly distracted and quite forgot to demand anyone’s head.”
Photo: Courtesy of Amazon
Slathering on some extra nostalgia, Hewitt taps into the Victorian obsession with naughtiness.
Hewitt claims that the eldest and naughtiest Victorian children each loved this innocent cake a particular way: “It is eaten cold and sliced and spread with butter by the eldest, and warm with ice cream by the naughty youngest child.”
Check out the recipe below, along with Hewitt’s neo-twist: gorgeous flavored sugar lumps for your spot of tea.
If you read the text in Hewitt’s pages above, you now know “Tipsy Turvey Tea Bread” is a favorite base for “Bread and Butter Pudding,” arguably the most loved English nursery pudding.
We found a lovely “Bread and Butter Pudding” recipe on Cauldrons and Cupcakes, and another contributed by Judi Dench in a beautiful new cookbook, called “Made With Love: The Meals On Wheels Family Cookbook
Dench’s pudding is made with Panettone, which is similar to Tipsy Turvey Bread, in that it is a dried-fruit studded crumbly sponge soaked with eggy custard. See below.
Providing more than a million meals a day for seniors across America, Meals On Wheels Association of America is the oldest and largest national organization of its kind. Each sale of “Made With Love: The Meals On Wheels Family Cookbook” helps to end senior hunger in America.
While warm Bread and Butter Pudding is what we might want when we want to reminisce in the “chilly hours and minutes of uncertainty” on a cold mid-winter’s day, it’s July now, so Summer Pudding is what we’d rather remember at the moment.
Summer Pudding is cake, soaked with summer berry juice, bursting open summer’s glory as your spoon digs into its core treasures. We found a swoon-inducing version in “Home Made Summer
by Yvette van Boven
1 pint (300 g) fresh strawberries, hulled and halved (big ones quartered)
2/3 pint (250 g) fresh blackberries
1/3 pint (100 g) fresh red currants
1 ½ pint (500 g) fresh raspberries
¾ cup plus 2 tbsp (175 g) superfine sugar
3 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
7 square slices stale white bread
Crème fraîche or sour cream for serving
With a nod to both earlier sweet observations by Proust, and more recent, scientific studies of rosemary and lavender as memory sparkers, we present, “Rosemary Madeleines.” We fooled around with an adapted Patisserie Lerch recipe we found on Smitten Kitchen, via Dorie Greenspan’s “Paris Sweets: Great Desserts From the City's Best Pastry Shops
Photo: Courtesy of Robin's Dinner Night
Rosemary or Lavender Madeleines
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter at room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 eggs
2 teaspoons chopped rosemary OR lavender blossoms
1/2 teaspoon lemon zest
1/2 teaspoon orange zest
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Special equipment: Madeleine pan, buttered and floured
Preheat the oven to 375ºF.
1) Cream together the butter, sugar, brown sugar, and salt until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes.
2) Sift together the flour and baking powder. Mix in the rosemary OR lavender, lemon zest, and orange zest.
3) Alternate mixing the eggs and sifted dry ingredients into the butter mixture. Cover the bowl and chill the batter for about an hour.
4) Fill the Madeleine molds about two thirds full with the batter. A piping bag makes this a more neat endeavor.
5) Bake for 6 to 7 minutes, until the madeleines spring back to form when poked in their centers.
“Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh had gone through; I dream of what it may go through. I record here the actions of optical nerves, of taste buds, of sensory perception. And, I think: I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence.” - Sylvia Plath
“Steampunk Tea Party: Cakes & Toffees to Jams & Teas - 30 Neo-Victorian Steampunk Recipes from Far-Flung Galaxies, Underwater Worlds, & Airborne Excursions” By Jema 'Emilly Ladybird' Hewitt, (David & Charles, 2013). This book is a gorgeous mad-hatters’ treat for a modern, albeit nostalgic, Alice.
“Made With Love: The Meals On Wheels Family Cookbook,” by Enid Borden (BenBella Books, 2012). This book helps you to not only remember your own family but also the families of others.
“Home Made Summer,” by Yvette Van Boven, (Stewart,Tabori & Chang, 2013) This a a visually beautiful cookbook, with luscious recollections and new ideas from restauranteur and food stylist Yvette van Boven.
“Think of van Boven as the activities director of your own culinary summer camp . . . Home Made Summer is a happy book, fun to look at, fun to read. It’s downright frivolous, in fact. And that’s what summer is all about.”
“Vintage Cakes: Tremendously Good Cakes for Sharing and Giving
Read about recollections all this week in Arts/Design, Food/Drink, Mind/Body, Place/Time, Nature/Science, and Soul Impact. And enter our photo competition this week. The theme: Recollections (Deadline, July 7th, 2013).
