After a flurry of posts in December 2021, I well and truly failed in 2022. I managed just the one post at the start of the year, then a whole 12 months passed by, and now 2023 is here. Was I so ridiculously busy that I didn't have a spare moment to put pen to paper, or finger to key? No, of course not. I am just useless, and achieved very little all round last year. By contrast, in the real world, a great deal happened. Here in the UK we had four Chancellors, three prime ministers, two monarchs and an Accidental Partridge in a pair of shorts in the "I'm A Celebrity" jungle.
In my defence, I did manage a couple of half-written posts, but got no further with them than that. I took advantage of the extra Bank Holiday given to us for the Queen's Platinum Jubilee and made a decent stab at a post related to the celebrations, but I didn't finish it, the summer flew by, and then after her death in September, it felt like I might have missed the boat. Just goes to show, you should always strike while the iron is hot.
But with more time having now passed, it feels a little less weird to be returning to the subject of that post, so I hope it will not be felt inappropriate to anyone. Given that I'm writing this the week that Prince Harry's autobiography comes out, I think fans of the Royal Family will have enough to get upset about anyway.
In 1953, a competition to find an original recipe to celebrate the crowning of the young queen gave the world Coronation Chicken, which back then was a light summery dish in its own right, but in recent years seems to have been relegated to a fairly bog-standard sandwich filling. Done well though, it can still be a pleasant addition to a buffet table. As far as I know, there were no similar recipe competitions for the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977, even though it was widely celebrated at the time with street parties, a vast range of merchandise, and even commemorative products such as Co-Op's cans of Jubilade, a strawberry-flavoured fizzy drink.
A post this summer on the Instagram page of Princes (the tinned food manufacturers, that is, not Wills or Harry) revealed that the company had produced a special Jubilee cookbook for the occasion, offering recipes for a celebratory tea party using their products. One of these was a riff on the traditional Coronation Chicken, using tinned tuna instead, but to give it an extra royal twist, it was served up in lemons carved to look like the Queen's most famous accessory. That's right - "Queen Lizzie's Lemon Handbags with Coronation Tuna". Who wouldn't want to recreate a recipe like that? I know I did.
The most complicated part of the recipe was definitely the handbags themselves, requiring a certain amount of dexterity with a sharp knife to remove two wedges from the upper half of each lemon, leaving a narrow strip to act as the strap of the bag. Then the remaining flesh had to be carefully excavated from the lower half of the lemon to give space for the filling, and from underneath the strap so as not to tear it. It's not easy to achieve, particularly when your lemons are already quite small, and slightly further shrivelled being very much past their best. Expect to spray lemon juice everywhere, including in your eye.
That achieved, it is simply a case of making a fairly standard Coronation dressing/sauce with mayonnaise, curry powder, mango chutney or apricot jam, and mixing in raisins and a drained can of tuna. I didn't have any raisins, but realised there were some sultanas in the packet of Bombay Mix I had in the cupboard. No real point trying to fish them out - I just chucked in a handful of the mix in for extra crunch. And while I did have mango chutney to hand, I decided to keep things on-brand with Princes, and instead used some of their tinned mango and pineapple chunks.
I decided to bring things slightly more up to date on the tuna front though, opting instead to use a tin of TUNO - a brand of vegan seafood substitute which I'd been meaning to try for a while (as such, it feels vaguely appropriate that I should be writing about it 7 months later, in Veganuary). There has been a huge increase in the number of meat and fish substitutes on the market in recent years, but it is perhaps not as new a concept as you might think. This tin was from a company called Loma Linda, who claim on the tin to have been providing "sustainable plant-based protein since 1890". Would Queen Victoria, on the throne at the time, have been amused? I think probably not.
While it did look a bit like slightly mashed-up tuna, I was reminded more of the contents one of those pouches of posh cat food for overly-pampered pets. I suppose there was something of the sea about its taste, though it was hard to really place quite what. Texturally, it didn't strike me as being like anything that might have once been swimming around - the little nuggets were soft but rather chewy, and if I'd had to guess I would have said it was tofu. Or is that what "textured soya protein" actually is? I have no idea. I suppose you could just about convince someone that it was pieces of surimi, the stuff used for those seafood sticks that people refer to, inaccurately, as crabsticks. But it certainly didn't taste anything like tuna, as the look and name of the product was (to my mind) hinting towards.
Anyway, none of that really mattered much, as I was tossing the stuff in a sweet, curried mayo and shoving it in a lemon handbag, with an extra little sprinkle of Bombay Mix on top. As a lemon shell isn't particularly enjoyable to chomp through, I then had to dig it out again with a spoon to eat it, like a yoghurt. Some hot brown toast served alongside to spread it on might be good.
Fast-forward 45 years to the Platinum Jubilee, and there was a national competition to come up with a dish to celebrate the occasion, a dessert this time. While administered by Fortnum and Masons, the poshest of grocery shops, the competition was open to anyone to enter, and indeed more than 5000 entries were received from the public, giving their recipes for a Platinum Pudding. These were whittled down to 5 by a panel of judges which included the Queen of Cakes herself (Mary Berry), and then the winner announced as Jemma Melvin from Southport, whose recipe was a Lemon Swiss Roll and Amaretti Trifle.
Delicious no doubt, but given that it involves making a swiss roll, lemon curd, an orange and lemon jelly, custard, amaretti biscuits, a Mandarin coulis, and 'jewelled chocolate bark' from scratch, it all sounded a bit too much of an effort. Admittedly some of the elements could be shop-bought, but I'm not so much of a trifle fan that I felt I needed to try it. Plus this one has no booze in it, I suppose making it suitable for everyone, but that seems a wasted opportunity to me. Then I spotted that the Mandarin coulis part of the recipe specifically called for tinned mandarins, so obviously I had to give that part a go, but I would need to scale it down somewhat, as the FOUR tins of mandarins the recipe called for were clearly going to produce a lot of coulis.
I definitely added too much arrowroot as the coulis ended up having a bit of a white-ish tinge to it. So it didn't look all that great, but was nevertheless quite nice with a bit of cake, for a semi-trifle experience.
[N.B. If you're making the whole trifle, the order of assembly from bottom to top is: swiss roll (with the curd as its filling), jelly, custard, amaretti crumbs, then the coulis, whipped cream, more crumbs and shards of the chocolate bark to finish.]
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| [Here's one I didn't make earlier] |
The real highlight of the Jubilee celebrations was, however, the pre-recorded sketch where the actual Queen met Paddington Bear for afternoon tea at the palace, telling him that she too enjoyed a marmalade sandwich, but rather than under her hat, she kept hers in her handbag. Not the lemon variety, but possibly the marmalade was? Who knows.
It was arguably even better than when she met James Bond for the Olympic Opening Ceremony in 2012. The sketch proved so popular in fact that after her death, hundreds of Paddington soft toys were left at the gates of Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, and even a load of marmalade sandwiches, until people were asked to keep it to just floral tributes to stop attracting vermin. A drawing went viral online of the Queen walking off into the distance, hand-in-paw with Paddington, which was quite charming, even if it left the more cynical among us questioning whether this meant Paddington was supposed to represent the Grim Reaper.
Just crack open a tin, decant the contents (which looks not unlike a coulis itself, but is actually just Seville orange pulp and shredded rind) into a heavy-based pan, and boil it up with sugar and any other flavoursome additions you care for. I used shredded ginger and ground cardamom seeds.
After about 15 minutes you can test if it's done by spooning a little on a plate and allowing to cool; if the surface then wrinkles when touched, it's ready to be poured into sterilised jars. I ended up with an extremely dark-hued marmalade as I had used muscovado sugar as well as basic white granulated, but that also gave it a slight treacly flavour, which I rather liked.
Then you're ready to use it as you please. I'll return to some suggestions for using up marmalade (as well as any of the remaining pulp, if you didn't use the entire tin) in another post. I'd say your best bet is probably on toast. Or, like Paddington and Her Late Maj, in a sandwich, wherever you care to store it for safe-keeping. Hats off to the Queen - there'll never be another like her.
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