‘Hello, dear, how nice of you to call.’
‘You’re not busy?’
‘Not in the slightest. Billy’s out, errands. I’m rattling around, bits and bobs.’
‘Your meringue, for pavlova, I wondered, only if you don’t mind, well, whether I might trouble you for the recipe. John so loves yours, sticky and fluffy, he always says. Is there a knack? I can never...’
‘Why of course, dear. Have you a pen? I noticed John had seconds.’
‘Not just seconds, but thirds. I was mortified. I told him as much in the car.’
‘Poor, John. Leave him be, dear. It was flattering.’
‘In front of the vicar? I mean.’
‘Four whites. Have you something to write on?’
‘Fire away.’
‘Stainless steel bowl, I wipe it around with a clean cloth, then with a cut lemon. Any grease and the whites won’t come up as I like them. Separate the eggs using the shell. Never with your hands, again, the grease is a curse for lightness.’
‘Back and forth between the shells, you mean?’
‘And no yolk, not a scrap. Four clean whites. Clean whisk, much the same as the bowl, wiped clean, cleansed with a cut lemon.’
‘Same one?’
‘Waste not want not.’
‘Quite.’
‘Now, you have an electric whisk?’
‘Kenwood.’
‘Splendid. Before anything else, pop the oven on, 100 centigrade. Remove all your racks.’
‘Noted.’
‘Set your whisk into the centre of the egg and start it up. Let it swim this way and that a little, but nothing violent, let it do the work. Have the sugar nearby. I use golden caster.’
‘I thought you might.’
‘What you give up on pristine whiteness you get back four-fold on the crack of the crust. And if you’re patient with the cooking, you’ll still have that light meringue centre.’
‘Marion mentioned icing sugar.’
‘Hence the whiteness of hers. A little one dimensional in flavour, would be my only note.’
‘I’m inclined to agree, and the silver balls are just as likely to crack a tooth.’
‘Your whites will soon be frothed and white. You’ll want to pay attention at this point. As soon as the whisk starts to leave defined ribbons, you’ll want to start adding your sugar. For four egg whites, I add one heaping tablespoon of sugar per egg.’
‘You don’t weigh it?’
‘I never have, dear.’
‘And when do you stop?’
‘The whisking?’
‘Indeed.’
‘As soon as the last sugar is added. In fact, truth be told, I count three potatoes; one potato, two potato, three potato, stop.’
‘Three potatoes from the last spoonful of sugar.’
‘Exactly. Your mix will be glossy and stiff, it ought to leave proud peaks as you remove the whisk. Don’t go back, mind. Don’t plunge back in if you’re unsure.’
‘No doubt I’ll be unsure.’
‘Press on.’
‘Noted.’
‘You’ll have a baking tray that fits your oven.’
‘The one it came with?’
‘The very same. Now, place a little dollop of your meringue mix in each corner, just a thimble full, less perhaps. Tear off a sheet of parchment and press it into each corner. This should secure it in place.’
‘Clever.’
‘Using your sugar spoon, dollop eight to ten handsome mounds of meringue onto your sheet. They used to make us draw it out, ten little circles, with a protractor, at least two inches between them. I tend to do it by eye. Be mindful, the meringues will spread.’
‘I might draw it out. If you think it’ll help.’
‘It likely will, at least until you’ve done it a few times.’
‘My thinking exactly.’
‘Now don’t dilly dally. The minute you’ve completed your dollops, pop the tray into the centre of the oven. Close the door and do not reopen it. Do you have a timer?’
‘John has a stopwatch?’
‘You’ll want to cook these unfettered for an hour. I’ll leave it to you to negotiate the time keeping. After an hour, turn the oven off. Leave it closed until completely cooled. I tend to make them last thing at night. Nightmare if you’ve got them in there and you need the oven for something else.’
‘All night? And they won’t dry out.’
‘That’s exactly the thing, you are drying them out. Very gently, mind.’
‘So that’s the knack of it?’
‘I suppose it is.’
Recipes are an oral tradition. The word is derived from Latin, recipere, meaning: to receive. To receive instruction, to receive prescription, to receive inspiration, to receive wisdom. We have lost our oral tradition in England, more so than any other of our friends in this United Kingdom. There must once have been a English tradition for storytelling, for sharing things verbally, but it hasn’t hung around, not as much as the gallic tradition for song and story, for instance. This is not the forum to pick apart the why of this, I’m well aware of that, but perhaps it is a good place to consider what this lost oral tradition might have cost us.
Well, for a start, can we all agree that we’ve lost almost any sense of what English food was, much as we might have an idea of what it is now? Save for militant underground factions protecting little morsels of tradition her and there; or the enlightened preachers showing us the new reality of our amorphous and amoebic food culture; or the authentic voices capturing recipe after recipe after well-tested recipe that legitimises or reframes or repositions or reexamines or repurposes our cuisine, their cuisine, this cuisine, that cuisine; save for all this writing, or that writing, or her writing or his writing, we have lost a sense of what we were, how that’s impacted what we are, what we might be.
The slightly trite dialogue above might have been taken from my suburban childhood, remembered, misremembered, made up, but it does recall a genuine scene. This was the 90’s, there was no internet, there were cookbooks, sure, but mainly from a narrow canon, mainly slim volumes with thorough instruction but limited breadth.
So, if Joan knew a way with meringue that Judith was intrigued by, they would discuss it. In this way, Judith’s mother-in-law’s Mulligatawny made its way (physically, initially, although verbally too,) onto the boats in Bombay (as it was known when she boarded the boat), where it was sampled by her fellow passengers, the recipe much discussed, some additions and amendments suggested, these revisions trialled, their success or failure much considered, and a version of the current version told and retold, made and remade, so that now Judith makes a Mulligatawny for the annual golf club winter open day that people will travel from as far afield as Bromley and Brighton to get a styrofoam cups-worth, with absolutely no intention of considering joining the golf club in the slightest.
A flight of fancy again. But you see my point.
Why bang on about this? I suppose out of frustration. My day-to-day work is the work of creating recipes, creating and refining, testing and retesting. Boxing off every misleading avenue that a home cook might go down, perfecting salt and spice and sweetness and sourness to the nearest 1/8th of a teaspoon, measuring pot and pan and tray and tabletop so that this, rolled like that, folded and filleted and frothed like so, might just go in there, cook like that, rise like this, taste like that.
How is our loss of oral tradition to blame? The direct line, for me, is that by losing the custom of orally sharing recipes, we’ve lost our instincts as cooks, we’ve lost the wisdom borne of experience, the instinct borne of trial and error. We need our written recipes to eliminate chance, prescribe for difference, flatten experience, so that if A plus B plus C equals X, we’ll get a dish worthy of instagram, and if not, the recipe writer’s not worth toffee.
The thing is, a recipe is not a prescription, it is not a guarantee. As cooks we’re dealing with thousands of variables, some in our control (ingredient, seasoning, heat, technique,) some completely random (faulty machinery, humidity, sunlight, other people,) so that when all things are considered, it is essential for us cooks to know that a recipe can never ‘work’. Nor can a recipe ‘fail’. We are more likely to fail a recipe rather than the other way round. It’s the little things; the sounds, the smells, the quirks, the visual clues. And those things live in our memory, especially when told rather than read.
I wonder how much of the dialogue above you can remember? How many eggs and how much sugar were needed? How was the bowl made clean? When was the mixture whipped enough?
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