Tweets Instead of Telegrams for a Sort-of-Centenary

A quick return here to Marguerite Patten's 500 Recipes:Canned and Frozen Foods, the day after what would have been her 100th birthday. The occasion was being marked yesterday by the Guild of Food Writers, inviting readers, cooks and bloggers to take part in a cookalong of sorts, preparing and eating some of her recipes and sharing the results on Twitter with the #Marguerite100 hashtag, which would either have amused or confused her - possibly both. I was a little late to the party with this offering, but thought it was still worth posting nonetheless.

I'd had a tin of raspberries in my stash for a very long time, but had yet to find anything I particularly wanted to do with them. With its recipes listed by tinned ingredient however, Marguerite's book made it easy to find some ideas to inspire.

I decided to go for her Raspberry Cream recipe, which seemed like a fairly quick and easy option, and unlike her scotch eggs that I made previosuly, sounded fairly virtuous too. And more to the point, I had all the ingredients to hand.

But first, the raspberries themselves. Marguerite notes that "canned raspberries are rather soft, so are not really good for decorating cakes and pastries. The flavour, however is extremely good." She's certainly not wrong on the first two fronts - mine prove to be soft almost to the point of falling apart, and while they do still resemble raspberries, I doubt you would get very far on the Great British Bake-Off by crowning your Showstopper with these.


As to the taste though, I don't think I would go as far as "extremely good". Obviously having been heated through, tinned fruit is never going to bear much resemblance to fresh, and as they're in syrup rather than juice, you need to think more along the lines of the more concentrated flavour of raspberry jam than the fruit's wonderfully summery fragrance in its natural state. But to my palate there was an oddly savoury backnote to these as well, perhaps a result of having had the tin knocking about for too long (it was already well out of date by the time I opened it).

The syrup is actually quite nice though, having taken on the rich colour and some of the flavour of the fruit, and reminds me of a slightly thicker version of the cartons of raspberry-flavoured Ribena that were a frequent fixture of my lunchboxes when growing up. They don't seem to make that one any more, which is a shame as I liked it more than the original blackcurrant, and inifinitely more than the strawberry version (which for some reason they still make, but to my taste was unutterably foul.)

But I digress. To the recipe - Marguerite Patten's Raspberry Cream:

You will need (for 4 servings):

1 large can raspberries     1 1/4 oz. quick cooking rolled oats
2 apples                             2 oz. sugar
1/2 pint water                     1 - 2 egg whites

Method:
1. Drain the raspberries
2. Peel, core and quarter the apples and cook in water until tender
3. Soak oats in raspberry juice and add to apples with sugar (as my raspberries were in syrup, I omitted the sugar)

4. Cook for a few minutes










5. Rub through a sieve and allow to cool









6. Add stiffly beaten egg whites and finally the raspberries






7. Chill before serving (in individual glasses, if you're feeling fancy like I was at the time)

So, how was it? Well...ok. With the raspberries and oats, there was a hint of the Scottish dessert cranachan about it. But of course the missing ingredient from that classic (apart from the whisky) was cream. I really should have been more suspicious of a recipe that calls itself Raspberry Cream and yet doesn't actually contain any of the good stuff.

Here it is the egg whites, beaten until stiff, that provide a light, mousse-like and ever-so-slightly creamy texture, but taste-wise the absence of any fat is sadly very noticeable. At best, this tastes like a not-very-inspiring raspberry mousse or whip, made with raspberry jam and with a hint of raw oats about it. Not really selling it, am I? But with a bit of whipped cream instead of (or in addition to) the egg whites, some toasted oats and a slug of whisky, this could have been vastly more tasty. I think basically I just wanted some cranachan. I should have just made that, really.


But it's also not the most attractive-looking dessert ever, as the raspberries are added as they come from the tin, not being rubbed through the sieve like the apple and oat mixture. Being so soft though, they tended to break up when mixed in after the egg whites - which in turn I was being careful to avoid knocking all the air out of through overmixing - leaving the dessert with little globules of red and white among the pinkish mass, and hence giving it the look of something slightly...medical. I'm not entirely sure what, nor did I want to think about it too much, for fear of putting me off eating it. But I think rubbing the raspberries through the sieve as well might have been a good idea, to give a more appetising uniform pink colour to the dessert.

So, this certainly isn't one of Marguerite's greatest hits - but when you've written as many as she did over her ever-so-nearly-a-century, you've got to accept - as I'm sure she would have - that they're not all going to be classics. But she herself was a class act without doubt.


A small aside - a huge admirer of Marguerite's work is the cook and writer Nigel Slater, who admits in his wonderful memoir Toast to having spent many hours during his youth poring over the pages of her Colour Cookbook, rather than the adult magazines favoured by his peers. Nigel uses the framework of short chapters evoked by the memories of different foods he ate at the time to tell the story of his growing up, from the loss of his mother at an early age (the day after an argument with her about mince pies), getting used to living with an abusive father and his equally difficult new partner (whose secret lemon meringue pie recipe was, however, superb), to leaving home to go to catering college and finally getting a job at the Savoy Grill. This extract comes from the episode 'Tinned Raspberries':

  A few weeks after my mother died we had tinned raspberries for tea. 'Can I take mine into the other room, Daddy?'
  'If you're very careful. There's lots of juice.'
  I hold the dish with both hands and wonder why he put quite so much juice in. But it is glorious juice. As garnet red as the stained-glass window behind the altar in St Stephen's, the heady smell wafts up like wine. I put the fruit carefully down on the little red-and-white footstool that Dad calls 'the poof' and drag it across the pale dove-grey carpet. Raspberries are the most gorgeous of the tinned fruit we have. Better than peaches, apricots, figs, even strawberries. And there is so much juice. My favourite.
  I'm dragging the stool across the carpet and keeping a close eye on the juice leve which is lapping at the edges of the dish. One of the front legs hits to rug in front of the fireplace and from now on everything is happening in slow motion. The stool judders and the dish bounces slowly off on to the carpet. It is upside down. I calmly walk into the kitchen and pick up the white dishcloth from behind the taps. 'You haven't?' yells my father and again, 'You haven't?'

What happens next makes for both hard and heart-breaking reading - but you'll have to buy the book yourself to find out. And I highly recommend you do, not just as there are also chapters entitled Tinned Ham, Heinz Sponge Pudding, Tinned Fruit, Fray Bentos Steak and Kidney Pie, and Tinned Beans and Sausage, but because like all Nigel's writing, you really can taste every word.