For the Love of British Food

It is a great shame in some ways that changes in our society and family lives has driven out afternoon tea as a regular meal fixture, because with it has gone much of the enthusiasm for baking at home that many women of my generation learned at home with our Mums and grandmothers and in domestic science lessons at school.  Some of our best-known TV chefs like Nigella Lawson, Delia Smith and Rachel Allen have started to reverse the trend and that is good news because without them, we might consign some of the most delicious British regional cakes to history within a very few years.  

I love to have a cake to slice or individual cakes for an afternoon snack when the writing ideas and energy are flagging or to offer an unexpected visitor.
  

Almost every county has a ‘signature’ cake or pastry and there are other cakes, adopted from abroad like the marzipan-covered Battenburg cake which have become unmistakeably British. If I had to name one cake that was typical of the whole country rather than a region, it would probably have to be a Victoria sponge sandwich. 

I have to diversify here into a little family story. The mark of a good sponge cake is it is depth, texture and moistness. My Mum was one of four sisters all of whom were good cooks, but one, my Auntie Ruby always excelled at getting her cakes to rise, and they became known as ‘Risborough’ cakes after where she lived at Princes Risborough in Buckinghamshire. There was a good deal of rivalry and sometimes a little spite and sisterly jealousy in this name-calling and some speculation about what she put in the cake.

Victoria Sponge is usually made with self-raising flour in the UK, but I wonder if she used plain (all-purpose) and added raising agents or added an extra pinch of baking powder to the self-raising. It may also have something to do with her oven which was part of an old-fashioned Aga solid fuel range that also heated the house. I’ll be giving my own recipe and alternative mixing methods in a future post.  

To return to the regional theme, I’ll name some of my particular favourites, gleaned from various books and websites, and from a scrapbook of handwritten recipes which I inherited from my Mum – probably one of the nicest things she ever gave me along with the enjoyment and creativity of home baking.  Continue Reading »