A Very Old Aunt of mine used to have brandy in addition to the milk... She lived to be nearly 100, so it didn't do her any harm (or it pickled her), but even so...

My best friend has hot water as an alternative to coffee when he thinks he's having too much caffeine. I don't mind it, but I'd rather have fruit tea.

The only time I came across the idea of having cream in tea was when a friend from America visited. We went to a local tea-room for a cream tea, and he insisted on having the thickly-whipped double cream in his tea. It took a long time for it to meld into the tea in his cup, and then his tea had globules of fat floating on the top. Truly disgusting.

But he loved it and said he wished he could have this at home all the time. I've never come across it since - no British person I know or have come across has wanted cream in their tea.

I've never in a lengthy life met a British or Irish person who drinks tea with cream in it - I think it's fair to say that it would be generally considered heresy! Doesn't it entirely clog up and cover the flavour of the tea, even if you don't add very much cream?

Julianne, that sounds horrible... I am imagining an entire tearoom watching in silent protest.

I've just finished going through all the books I have and table-ing the foods mentioned in them. I have all but 14 books:

Books I don’t have:
3. Princess
7. And Jo
9. Exploits
11. New House
17. Lavender
21. Island
30. Barbara
34. Mary-Lou
41. Trials
42. Theodora
45. Leader
46. Trick
49. Triplets
51. Jane

It's been an interesting thing to do ... Prefects, although it's average-ly long, only mentions what the girls eat on the day of the Sale, and the 'enormous cake' made by the Dommy Sci class for the sale. And all this happens right at the end of the book.

I haven't included the original Cookbook, becasue that stands alone, and lots of the recipes have already been made and commented on by others.

I can't remember if I mentioned this? I'm going to try to put together little meals as they're described, in some circumstances. I like the idea of creating Simone's supper meal for Joey in the Chateau, for example.

Oddly (!) I have all of these except Lavender, Trick and Triplets, so can go through and do the same with the others ! Will pm you the results

ETA Haven't got Jane either

I'm in the process of doing a read through and can do Trick, Triplets and Jane for you when I get to them - may be a week or 10days before I get that far (reading approx 1 a day atm)

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"About a week, I should think" said Christopher Robin

Oh - Dawn, that would be brilliant if you could ... I could email you the document becasue it has all the books ready to go, and you could just fill in the foods in those books. Would that be possible?

And Dear German Friend came down on Saturday and has returned t London with the task of locating several recipes of correct time and place to find for me. I asked about 'Kartoffeln' and she said 'they're potatoes' , so I said, 'I know they are. I need to know how they might have been cooked to bring forth comments about their 'difference-ness' to the more familiar UK potatoes.' So now she says 'probably boiled with a bit of chopped parsely stuck in at the end.' I can see that this would look different, but it wouldn't make much difference in terms of taste, would it?

Anyway. The Great Task continues. My blog collapsed - probelm with everyone's passwords, and I've been unable to reset it. I think it's some kind of problem with the site so I might find another. If I do I'll let you know, if you'd like that.

My August copy of the Good Food magazine arrived yesterday and there's a one page article extolling the culinary delights of Guernsey including a reference to gâche (apparently pronounced gosh) - I'd never realised it was a fruit loaf served in buttered slices... Sadly the article did not include a recipe but I've found one at http://www.bbc.co.uk/guernsey/content/articles/2004/07/22/gache_feature.shtml.

chattie wrote:My August copy of the Good Food magazine arrived yesterday and there's a one page article extolling the culinary delights of Guernsey including a reference to gâche (apparently pronounced gosh) - I'd never realised it was a fruit loaf served in buttered slices... Sadly the article did not include a recipe but I've found one at http://www.bbc.co.uk/guernsey/content/a ... ture.shtml.

How odd to talk about it in a food magazine and not give a recipe. Yes - I've used that one and it's very nice. It goes stale quite quickly, but it's fine toasted. Again, it has a huge amount of butter in it, which makes it very rich and I'm not sure how long it would have remained in the repetoire for war-time cooking. But then, when it's first mentioned it's right at the beginning, isn't it, in Exile (1940) and then again in Three Go (1949 - what would butter/fat rationing have been like then?

Oh, my goodness. I've just looked it up and butter rationing ended May 1954!!!! So for the Three to be treated to gache would have been a HUGE treat. Maybe they milked their own little Jersey cow herd and used the milk for their own things? But no - in Three Go it's given for tea at the Lucys'. Perhaps the schol sold milk or milk products on to those who could afford to buy them? The lcys are wealthy so they'd be OK, wouldn't they?

Dear German Friend has been locating recipes for me (some from her mother who still lives in Germany) and has just told me that when she wrote 'lard' she actually meant 'pork drippings'. Which is very interesting, because of course lard is refined pork fat, and I'm wondering if using pork dripping instead would give things a specific flavour? Not actually pork, if you see what I mean, just a flavour that might be hard to identify and would give foods a generally different taste to the one Joey and co. would have been used to?

I shall get some pork and render it down and then try the fat in some recipes.

I can tell you one difference nowadays between English potatoes and those you get in Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic and that is that the latter actually taste of something even when just plain boiled!!!

British potatoes are singularly uninspiring compared to those I can get over here. But I don't know whether this applied in the days of EBD or whether they have simply now lost their taste because of modern cultivation methods.

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Cestina's dolls houses - Where has the week gone?

Can it be partly attributed to the water used as well, I wonder?

What - to cook the potatoes in? No I don't think so. I have sneaked potatoes from the CR and Germany to the UK and they taste just as good there....

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Cestina's dolls houses - Where has the week gone?

Oh - I wish I could get some of them ... I've tried cooking Swiss food in the UK tat I've eaten in CH and it never tastes the same. Even if I use the correct flavourings and so on. Odd.

The volatile compounds that give potato tubers their scent (very important in how things taste) can indeed differ based on where the potatoes are grown. For example, see Longobardi et al., Food Chemistry 124 (2011) 1708-1713 for measurable differences in scent compounds from potatoes grown in three regions of Italy. The authors quantified volatiles from three different varieties of potato from each of the three areas, to eliminate the possibility that the differences were due merely to type of potato.

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Castor oil: Triacylglycerol from Ricinus communis containing hydroxy-fatty acids.

Which explains why 'proper' Jersey Royals are so vastly superior to the same variety grown anywhere else ... I always thought it was the seaweed used as fertiliser - though that may help, too

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http://stitchwords.blogspot.co.uk

This is very depressing ... it means that whatever I cook, however accurate it is in terms of ingredients and amounts used, it will never, ever taste 'right' because said ingredients will be English. Ha!

Dear German Friend has given me a little sachet of Sahnefest which she uses to make her locally-famous German Christmas Biscuits. I have no idea what is actually is, but it does make the biscuits taste 'different'. I've made them without and they lose something German somehow ...

She's also given me some other recipes which call for:

1 sachet Lebkuchengewürz
½ sachet of Pottasche

I have no idea what these are. Are they really necessary? I'll ask her, of course, but if anyone has any ideas here, please do let me know!

And I have a feeling that one of her recipes lists something really odd, like ammonia powder. Surely not?

But it is these 'odd-things-to-me' that make the resulting foods taste foreign. And therefore interesting and unusual. And fun.

Pottasche is presumably some form of potash (although I'd associate that more with making glass than making cake!), and Lebkuchen's that nice gingerbread stuff you get at Christmas. You could probably find out on Google.

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We really must stop eating like this ...

Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open.

But isn't potash made from wood ash? And why would one use a little sachet of Lebkuchen? Perhaps the 'gewürz' bit means it's something used to make Lebkuchen?

I seem to recall Sue Barton's maid making some biscuits using wood ash ... I'm going a-hunting.

Aha. Not biscuits:



Brilliant Alison! Here it is from google:

I'm not sure why she would put Sahnefest in her Christmas biscuits - it's something you tip in when whipping cream to make sure it holds its shape once whipped.

For certain biscuits Lebkuchengewürz would be essential - it's the flavouring used in German (and Czech) gingerbread. I suppose you can put all the different spices in individually as the recipe below does, but the sachet saves a whole lot of time and wastage. You will find the recipe for Nürnberger Lebkuchen here, if you scroll down. It's in both German and English and there is a note at the end of the German bit saying "** Pottasche = Kaliumcarbonat (pottasium carbonate; US recipes usually call for "baking soda" or "carbonate of ammonia")"

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Cestina's dolls houses - Where has the week gone?

Found this at http://www.homefamily.net/index.php?/ca ... gredients/

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Google can bring you back 100,000 answers, a librarian can bring you back the right one. Neil Gaiman