A deep-fried "treat", in honour of Marguerite

Mentioning the 1940s-themed bar Cahoots in my last post reminded me, sadly, of the passing a couple of months ago of the great doyenne of thrifty wartime cooking, Marguerite Patten, at the ripe old age of 99.

After a brief stint as an actress and then a demonstrator for the Frigidaire company, Marguerite came to public attention during World War II working for the Ministry of Food, suggesting recipes that made the most of rationed foods and broadcasting these and other tips and essential skills on the BBC radio programme Kitchen Front. After the war she started to appear on television cookery programmes, but remained adamant that she was not a celebrity chef, saying "To the day I die, I'll be a home economist" in a 2011 interview. She had a staggering 170 cookery books to her name, including the 1960 glossy bestseller Everyday Cookbook in Colour, which was hugely influential at a time when most cookery were printed in black and white without any pictures at all.

Alternative uses for tins no.4

While the tinned 'cocktails' I've tried so far (Bloody Mary beans, and the Pina Colada pineapple chunks of my previous post) have been somewhat lacking in their alcoholic content, that's not to say that you can't have a proper drink in a tin, should you wish to. There seems to be an growing trend in bars for using actual empty tins instead of glasses for their cocktails - here are two such examples I have tried recently:

"If you like Piña Coladas, and getting caught in the rain..."

...then you might have been disappointed by the sunny weather last Friday (10th July), but excited to have known that it was in fact National Piña Colada Day. I'm sorry not to have mentioned this important occasion in the drinks calendar in advance. While it might sound like this has been concocted purely as a marketing ploy, the piña colada is genuinely the 'national drink' of Puerto Rico, and is celebrated as such there annually on the 10th.

Elsewhere in the world though the celebrations are somewhat more commercial; had I told you about it in time, you too could have had a free Piña Colada last week - courtesy of Malibu, if you'd signed up on their pinacoladaday.co.uk website for a downloadable voucher, and joined their email mailing list. My apologies, I'm sure you're devastated to have missed out on enjoying and honouring this most sophisticated of cocktails, served up in a Malibu-branded faux-coconut cup.

But don't worry - you don't have to wait until next July to celebrate this most noble of drinks, or give away all your personal details to do so either. How so? Well, not all that long after buying the tin of bloody mary beans that featured in a previous post, I spotted this interesting-sounding tin of "Pina Colada" pineapple on the shelves of the canned fruit aisle. Was this part of a growing trend of tinned goods inspired by cocktails with an incredibly small amount of alcohol in them?

Kate & Wills & George &...

The weeks seem to be absolutely flying by at the moment - I couldn't quite believe there had been a gap of over a month between the last two posts I wrote, which really is terrible. And it's more than two months since I posted about the birth of the royal baby, whose name was later announced as Charlotte Elizabeth Diana, and was christened as such this Sunday just gone. What better excuse therefore to have a go at making that classic dessert, the charlotte.

While there are some quite fancy and fiddly versions of the dessert, such as the charlotte russe (with a Bavarian cream centre encased in sponge fingers), and the charlotte royale (which uses swiss roll instead and as you can see above, ends up looking weirdly brain-like), in its simplest form, a charlotte is made by lining a pudding basin or mould of some kind with bread, adding a filling of fruit and baking it in the oven. A Google search for recipes suggests that apple is the most common filling, but pretty much anything goes really, though I feel that berries, cherries and the like would take this a little too close to Summer Pudding, which is chilled rather than baked. I saw a couple of recipes for a pear charlotte, which as I happened to have a small tin of pear halves in my stash, seemed the perfect option.

Kate & Sidney

Even though it was one of their tinned pies that caused my old tin opener to give up the ghost, I don't hold a grudge against Fray Bentos. When I spotted one of the company's other products - a tinned steak and kidney pudding - on a special "Reduced to Clear" promotion in Tesco a while back, I was more than happy therefore to let bygones be bygones and give it a try.

There didn't seem to be any particular reason for it being reduced, as it was still well within its best before date. Not long afterwards though, I noticed that it had been replaced on the shelves by some steak and kidney puddings of a similar shape - but not in tins. Fray Bentos had relaunched the product in new, plastic packaging. Tesco had obviously reduced the price to get rid of the old stock, so thank goodness I bought the tin when I spotted it, otherwise I would have missed out completely. I don't care if the change means it's now suitable for microwave heating; a plastic-entombed pudding has no place on this blog, thank you very much.

This is a partly political blogpost...

Thinking it best to try to avoid politics on this blog, I hadn't intended to do a General Election-themed post. Well, I say that - I had considered trying a tin of "UKIPpers", but that seemed too spurious a link even by my standards, not to mention a woefully bad pun). I changed my mind however when I saw this article on the Guardian website on polling day, which suggests what each of the main party leaders might 'taste' like. If that sounds a little strange, it is - the article concerns a rare neurological condition known as lexical-gustatory synaesthesia, which causes people to be able to taste or smell words or sounds. One such synaesthete is James Wannerton from Blackpool, who for this article teamed up with artist Sam Cornwell to produce a series of photographs depicting the foods (and other substances) he claims to taste when he hears the names of the politicians.

To James, the very name 'David Cameron' creates the sensation, for some reason, of eating hard toffee, macaroons, cloth and blue ink; Ed Miliband tastes like vinegary chips, a school eraser and pine nuts; Nick Clegg like pickled onions, elastic bands, a meatless leg of lamb and a dribble of yoghurt; and Nigel Farage is an even more curious-sounding combination of rich fruit cake, the inside of a frankfurter sausage, fried onions, a few peas, a wet tweed jacket sleeve and a dollop of semolina.

The Royal (Name) Game

I awoke this morning to the news that HRH Duchess of Cambridge - Kate Middleton to the common man - had been admitted to hospital in the early stages of labour for royal sprog number two, and it was later announced that she had given birth to a girl, the first Princess of Cambridge to be born for 180 years, apparently. Hardcore royal fans had already been waiting outside the hospital for weeks, presumably as they have little better to do except wear red-white-and-blue and wave flags, but speculation as to the gender and name of the new baby had been rife for even longer. For those wishing to play the royal name game, the bookies are possibly still taking bets, though no doubt the odds for the favourite girls' names Alice, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Victoria will have been slashed now we know the baby's gender. Those punters who'd banked on a James, Arthur or Alexander will be sorely disappointed. Personally I was hoping for something a little more unusual for George's new sibling, such as "The Dragon" or "Townhouse" (think about it), but never mind.

Anyway, all this is of course just a very convoluted way of introducing another tin I tried recently - Baxter's Royal Game soup from their "Favourites" range. The game in question here is venison and pheasant, illustrated in part with a deer on the label, which reminded me of that scene in The Queen when Helen Mirren spots a stag when her Land Rover breaks down while out on the Balmoral estate. But Baxters have better reason for calling the soup "Royal" than just that, as they are in fact royal warrant holders ("By appointment to Her Majesty the Queen - Purveyors of Scottish Specialities"). I've never known whether holding a royal warranty means the companies do actually provide a supply of their products for the family, or whether it's just a ceremonial title. If they don't, Her Maj may be interested to know that Baxter's Soups are currently on offer at Sainsburys at 4 for £3 (I don't know how many tins of soup she gets through in a year, but at that price it might be worth stocking up).