Perhaps MM will rustle up some delicious pancakes for us tomorrow, Trike - proper ones with lemon juice and sugar, not some of the weird creations featured on the internet - abominations such as chocolate pancakes and green-coloured pancakes.


http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2011/mar/03/how-to-cook-perfect-pancakes


From the Guardian article:


Elizabethan pancakes.


Interestingly, the oldest recipe for pancakes as we know them comes from an English cookery book – the Good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchen (1594 edition) – but it's even richer than the modern incarnation: a pint of "thicke Creame", 5 egg yolks, "a good handful of flower" and 2 or 3 tablespoons of ale, seasoned with copious amounts of sugar, cinnamon and ginger... "the result is a horrible mess" with these proportions ("one can only imagine the author was either careless or had gargantuan hands"), but once I've added enough flour to make it into a more workable consistency, I manage to create a pancake, of sorts, from the mixture. It's so meltingly rich it's all but impossible to flip, which is clearly no good at all: tasty, but more of a chaser to some roasted peacock and a goblet of sack than one for the modern kitchen.

Puritan pancakes

The 17th century ushered in more sober tastes – Gervase Markham's 1615 recipe uses two eggs, a "pretty quantity of faire running water," cloves, mace, cinnamon and nutmeg, all beaten together, "which done make thicke as you think food with fine wheate flower". (No one can accuse these old-school food writers of being prescriptive.) Spice aside, they're pretty dull things; rubbery and heavy. Cream may be taking things too far, but milk is a must.

I'm with you Temp ... Lenten pancakes should always be very simple fare, but I do feel that just a wee bit of milk drizzled into the mix is not too extravagant ...  at least not according to granny's auld recipe. But one should never be indulgent. So pancakes should only be very simply dressed with just a squeeze of sharp lemon ... never with sugar, spices, chocolate, honey, nor any other high falutin modern embellishments!

Although I have to admit that I'm still licking my whiskers over the two tasty morsels Trike posted earlier on his 'purr-n-fur' moggy thread ...



The little cutie-roughtie-toughtie on the left looks just like my little Swartje, who's actually coming up to her 20th brthday ... and so probably about the same age as the cutie-roughtie-toughtie on the right. 

PS :
But in all seriousness, my grandfather may have met that good-looking young scout/sailor...  

Grand-dad was the skipper on the private yachts of Col. Buckley, and Buckley, while he principally made his money from  massive sheep farms in New Zealand, also owned Worth House in Sussex (a not inconsiderable country house and estate) as well as owning a couple of Scottish islands. Buckley (who I believe never married) was keen on yachting, and my grand-dad, who by then had had a long service as a seaman principally on big sailing ships, was retained as skipper for his yachts from about 1900 until the mid 1920s (and was further retained up to WW2 by his nephew who was the sole inheriter of the Buckley estate). Colonel Buckley was a close friend of the explorer Ernest Shackleton, and when Shackleton set out on his 1908 Antarctic expedition Buckley went with them from Lyttleton, New Zealand as far as the first pack ice, returning on the supply ship. Buckley and Shackleton used to go yachting together around Scotland, with granddad as skipper, and it's then that they may have met that stapping young scottish scout, James Marr, who Shackleton eventually took on as the cabin boy for his 1921 expedition.

Et voila.

PPS : Sad is indeed the way of the world but having jokingly said what a good-looking chap the scout James Marr was, I then had to check his age just so there was no hint of inpropriety .... when the photo was taken in 1921 he was 19, Questie the cat however was only about 1 year old.

Meles, you should invite your neighbours round on the 18th June for some.........

............

The BBC are at it again, copying ideas from Res;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05nc7ph

Here you are, MM, a little Easter treat to rustle up in your kitchen, a scotch egg - with a Cadbury's creme egg in the middle.


                                                                         


I apologise on behalf of my countrymen........

... and presumably then battered and deep-fried in lard.

 

And there was I thinking of serving deep-fryed sheep's eyes dipped in chocolate on Easter Day as a sort of joint homage to the Vikings and the Conquistadors - when creme eggs in Scotch eggs is so obviously an eminently more appetising idea. Thanks for the pointer ferv.

. and presumably then battered and deep-fried in lard.

Heresy, MM, never lard. Beef dripping of course.  

A bit different to Fortnum and Mason's "Chotch egg" - a combination of venison, egg, dark chocolate and juniper:



.... but then F&M's eggs are £3.95 each.

" ... the dark chocolate and Juniper slowly complements the gamey flavour perfectly, leaving you with a rich taste on the palette."

Sounds yummy, especially as it's without the revolting, cloying, sickly-sweetness of a Cadbury's Creme Egg.

Here's one to try for Easter ... Robert May's recipe for A Monstrous Egg, from 'The Accomplisht Cook' (1685):



The sweet and spicy version is probably the one most suitable for Easter ... though I'm not sure if the local supermarket stocks whale ambergris these days.

ferval wrote:

Now you've got me thinking of the only poem I know which includes a followable recipe, Douglas Dunn's 'Rataouille'. Not the most unusual dish but delightful, as is the poem.

Are there any other culinary poems?

It's well past 'Stir-Up Sunday' and so strictly it is far too late to be making your Christmas pud's for this year, but on the theme of culinary poems I've just come across this little bit of seasonal verse, from The Huddersfield Chronicle and West Yorkshire Advertiser (Saturday, December 21, 1867). With its contrived rhymes, sometimes running painfully between verses, I'm afraid I can't help but imagine it being recited in the voice of Pam Ayers.

CHRISTMAS PUDDING.

To bread-crumbs and flour, three ounces of each,
Add three eggs and six ounces of suet,
Chopped fine, and one-sixth of a nutmeg or more,
So long as you don’t overdo it.

A good pinch of mace, and of cinnamon ground,
Or in other words carefully grated;
Half a pint of new milk, a spoonful of salt
A teaspoon I ought to have stated.

To this add some raisins (Malaga) well stoned
And some currants washed clean and washed nicely,
And of each half a pound, or as some people say,
Of either eight ounces precisely.

Then of citron and lemon an ounce and a half,
Half the former and one of the latter;
Four ounces of sugar – the moist kind will do –
Which will form an exceedingly rich batter ...

...Or mixture. The eggs to a cream should be beat
With the spices, and then by degrees
The milk may be added according to taste,
And the other ingredients to please.

Now taking for granted the pudding is made,
And the water is boiling like fun;
Tie it up in a cloth, pop it into the pot,
And boil – seven hours – till done.