February recipe: Apple lattice tart

Apple lattice tart

Apples are generally associated with late summer and autumn, and indeed the peak of the English apple season is in September and October. However, many apple varieties, especially cooking apples, store for several months, and so some apple varieties are effectively in season all winter.

This pretty apple tart can be made with any variety of cooking apples, so it can be enjoyed right through the autumn and winter. Here’s the recipe.

Apple lattice tart

Pastry

4 oz (approx 125 g) strong plain flour

1 Tablespoon (1 x 15 ml spoon) icing sugar

2 oz (approx 50 g) butter

1.5 oz (approx 35 g) lard

Filling

1 lb (approx 450 g) cooking apples

2 Tablespoons (2 x 15 ml spoon) golden syrup

Juice of 1 lemon

1 teaspoon (1 x 5 ml spoon) ground cinnamon

Grease a shallow flan dish about 7 to 8 inches (about 18 to 20 cm) in diameter.

Peel and core the cooking apples. Chop into chunks about half an inch (approx 1-1.5 cm) cubed.

Put the apple chunks, lemon juice, golden syrup and cinnamon in a saucepan. Cover and cook gently for about 15 minutes (the time will vary according to the apple variety) until the apples are soft.

Rub the butter and lard into the flour and icing sugar until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.

Add about a tablespoon (about 15 ml) of cold water and mix with a knife. The mixture will start to stick together. Squash it into a ball of dough.

Cut off about a quarter of the dough and set aside.  Roll out the other three-quarters into a circle and line the flan dish.

Spread the cooked apples in the pastry case.

Roll out the remaining pastry and cut into strips.  Lay the strips crosswise on top of the apple filling to form a lattice.

Bake in a hot oven at about 190 C for about 30-35 minutes until the pastry is golden.

Serve hot or cold, with natural yoghurt, cream or ice cream.

I normally expect to get 6 slices out of this quantity, but it depends how big a slice you like.

Note that the pastry is quite firm when cold, but when hot the pastry is very crumbly and will tend to fall apart.  If you’re serving the tart in a situation where you need it to stay in neat slices when cut, I recommend serving it cold!

If there is any left over the tart will keep for several days at room temperature.  I’ve never tried freezing it.

February recipe: Topfenstrudel

Topfenstrudel is an Austrian dessert with a curd cheese filling interleaved with layers of thin strudel pastry.  I don’t think it’s particularly a winter dessert, except that I heard about it from someone who had been ski-ing in Austria, so it’s associated in my mind with snow and mountains.  I’ve adapted the filling to use cream cheese, which is more easily available in the UK than curd cheese.

I rolled the pastry for this recipe out to about 15 inches by 20 inches (about 35 cm by 50 cm), and in theory it should be thinner than that if you can manage it. I stopped at this because the filling is fairly liquid, and I was concerned about it leaking out through breaks in the pastry if the pastry was any thinner.  I gather that strudel pastry is supposed to be rolled out so thin that you can read a newspaper through it.  Not sure I am ever going to manage that, but there’s the standard to aspire to!

Topfenstrudel

Strudel pastry

4 oz (approx 125 g) plain flour

1 Tablespoon (1 x 15 ml spoon) vegetable oil

4 Tablespoons (4 x 15 ml spoons) water

0.5 teaspoon (0.5 x 5 ml spoon) white wine vinegar

Filling

1 oz (approx 25 g) butter

1 oz (approx 25 g) light brown soft sugar

4 oz (approx 125 g) cream cheese

1 egg, separated

Rind of 1 lemon

2 fluid ounces (approx 50 ml) single cream

To make the pastry

Mix the flour with the vegetable oil, vinegar and water to make a soft dough.

Wrap in cling film and leave to stand for 30 minutes to 1 hour, while you make the filling.

To make the filling

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy

Beat in the cream cheese, egg yolk and lemon rind.

Stir in the cream.

Beat the egg white until stiff.  Fold into the cream cheese mixture.

To assemble the strudel

Grease a large baking sheet.

Roll out the pastry on a floured work surface as thinly as possible, aiming for an approximately rectangular shape.  I rolled this pastry quantity out to about 15 inches by 20 inches (about 35 cm by 50 cm).

Brush the pastry with melted butter.

Spread the filling evenly over the pastry, leaving a margin of about 1 inch (approx 2.5 cm) round all the edges.

Starting from one of the short sides, fold the 1 inch pastry margin over the filling.

Fold the 1 inch pastry margin over the filling along each of the long sides.

Starting from the first short side, roll up the strudel like a Swiss roll.  When you get to the other short side, moisten the last 1 inch pastry margin with water and seal it to the roll so that the filling is fully enclosed.

Very gently lift the strudel roll onto the greased baking tray.

Brush the top of the roll with milk.

Bake in a hot oven at about 180 C for about 30 minutes until golden.  Don’t worry if some of the filling leaks out through one or two breaks in the pastry; it seems to set quite quickly as it cooks and this seals the break, so most of the filling stays in the strudel.

Serve hot, cut into slices, with cream or ice cream.  I cut this into six servings.

February recipe: Lamb and chick pea curry

Spices and root vegetables make this simple curry a warming winter meal. It can be made with lamb or venison, and the vegetables can be varied according to taste and availability. If using dried chick peas, remember to soak them in advance. The curry can be frozen, so you can make a double quantity and freeze half for an instant ready-meal later.

Serves 4

Lamb and chick pea curry

4 oz (approx 125 g) chick peas
8 oz (approx 250 g) lamb (or venison), cubed
1 onion
6 oz (approx 150 g) cooking apple
1 lb (approx 450 g) vegetables (swede*, parsnip, turnip, leek, celery)
2 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon (1 x 5 ml spoon) ground cumin
1 teaspoon (1 x 5 ml spoon) ground ginger
2 teaspoons (2 x 5 ml spoon) ground coriander
4 oz (approx 100 g) chopped tomatoes
2 oz (approx 50 g) sultanas or raisins
Approx. 0.5 pint (approx 250 ml) water or stock

Soak the chick peas overnight in cold water. Rinse the soaked chick peas, put in a saucepan with plenty of water, bring to the boil and simmer for 1 – 1.25 hours until cooked. Drain.

Cut the lamb or venison into pieces about 1.5 cm (approx 0.5”) cubed.

Peel and chop the onion. Peel, core and chop the cooking apple. Peel and chop the vegetables. Peel the garlic.

Fry the lamb or venison in cooking oil over a medium heat until browned.

Add the chopped onion, apple and other vegetables and fry gently for a few minutes until starting to colour. Stir in the crushed garlic.

Stir in the spices and mix well. Add the chopped tomatoes, cooked and drained chick peas and dried fruit. Pour in the water or stock, season with salt and black pepper, and bring to the boil.

Simmer over a low heat approx 1 – 1.25 hours until the meat and vegetables are cooked.

Serve with rice and mango chutney.

Can be frozen.

*Short for ‘swedish turnip’. This is the English name; in Scotland the vegetable is called ‘neep’ (as in the dish ‘neeps and tatties’), and in North America I think it is called ‘rutabaga’.

February recipe: Treacle tart

Treacle tart is simple to make and delicious to eat, especially on a cold day. Comfort food for the fag-end of winter. It’s made with golden syrup (not black treacle), breadcrumbs and lemon.

Treacle Tart

Serves 4-6

Pastry
3 oz (approx 75 g) plain flour
3/4 oz (approx 20 g) butter
3/4 oz (approx 20 g) lard

Filling
4 oz (approx 100 g) golden syrup
1 oz (approx 25 g) breadcrumbs
Juice and rind of half a lemon


Grease a flan dish about 7 in (approx 18 cm) diameter.

Rub the butter and lard into the flour until it resembles fine breadcrumbs.

Mix with a small amount of water until it forms a soft dough. If too sticky, add a little more flour. If too dry and flaky, add a little more water.

(Or you can use ready-made shortcrust pastry if you prefer).

Roll out on a floured board, and line the flan dish with the pastry. Keep the pastry trimmings to make decorations.

In a small saucepan, mix the golden syrup, breadcrumbs, lemon rind and lemon juice. The easiest way to weigh out the golden syrup is to stand the pan on the scales and spoon syrup directly into the pan to the required weight. Two large tablespoons (15 ml spoons) of golden syrup is about right.

Warm the syrup mixture gently over a low heat until the syrup is liquid, and mix well.

Pour the syrup mixture into the pastry case. Roll out the spare pastry and use to make leaves or other decorative shapes, and arrange these on top of the tart.

Bake in a hot oven at about 200 C for 25-30 minutes until the filling is set and the pastry is golden.

Serve hot or cold, with cream, custard or ice cream.

If there is any left over, the tart will keep for three or four days at room temperature.

February recipe: Stir-fried sweet and sour pork

I’m usually getting to the end of the winter root vegetable crop by the end of February, and this goes well with the leeks that are usually about the only crop left in the garden. It makes a nice change from casseroles and suet puddings, especially when you want a meal that can be ready in minutes.

You can vary the vegetables more or less as you see fit, depending on taste and availability. I hadn’t been organised enough to grow a batch of bean sprouts when I made this, but bean sprouts go very well in this dish.




Stir-fried sweet and sour pork (serves 2)

8 oz (approx 220 g) boneless pork steak
1 piece root ginger, about 1” (approx 2 cm) cube
1 clove garlic
Half an onion, or 3-4 spring onions
Half a green sweet pepper
Half a red sweet pepper
6 oz (approx 150 g) leeks
2 oz (approx 50 g) mushrooms
1 Tablespoon (1 x 15 ml spoon) cooking oil

For the sweet and sour sauce:
1 dessertspoon (1 x 10 ml spoon) cornflour
1 dessertspoon (1 x 10 ml spoon) clear honey
1 dessertspoon (1 x 10 ml spoon) soy sauce
2 dessertspoons (2 x 10 ml spoons) wine or cider vinegar
1 dessertspoon (1 x 10 ml spoon) tomato puree
Approx 5 dessertspoons (approx 50 ml) water

Cut the pork into thin strips, about 1/8 inch (approx 3 mm) thick.
Peel the root ginger and shred into thin matchsticks.
Peel and chop the onion. If using spring onions, trim, cut into pieces about 3 inch (approx 6 cm) long and slice in half or quarters lengthwise.
Remove the seeds from the sweet peppers and cut into roughly 1 inch (approx 2 cm) squares or strips.
Wash and trim the leeks and cut into slices about 1/4 inch (approx 0.5 cm) thick.
Peel the mushrooms and quarter if small, or slice if large.

Put the ingredients for the sweet and sour sauce into a cup and mix to a thin paste.

Heat the cooking oil in a wok or frying pan.
When hot, add the pork strips and fry on a high heat for 1-2 minutes.
Add the onion, ginger, peppers and leeks and fry for another 1-2 minutes.
Add the mushrooms and crushed garlic, and fry another 1-2 minutes.
Pour the contents of the sauce cup into the pan, stirring all the time, and cook until thickened (about 30 seconds).

Serve immediately, with rice or noodles.

February recipe: Chocolate chip shortbread

Shortbread is another of those seemingly simple recipes that turns out to have as many variations as there are cooks. Some recipes stipulate butter, some vegetable fat, some a mixture of the two. Some use oatmeal, ground semolina or cornflour as well as, or instead of, wheat flour. Some tell you to cook the shortbread at a low temperature for a long time so that it doesn’t colour at all, others tell you it should be pale golden and one or two say golden brown. Some recipes just use fat, flour and sugar, others add various additional ingredients such as chopped cherries, almonds or chocolate chips. Some shape the mixture into rounds, some into fingers and some into segments of a large circle (“petticoat tails”). You take your choice, according to personal preference. I make several variations, and in the winter chocolate chip shortbread tends to be the most popular. Why in the winter? Because in the summer the chocolate melts on your fingers.

Here’s the recipe:

Chocolate chip shortbread

6 oz (approx 170 g) self-raising flour
4 oz (approx 125 g) butter
2 oz (approx 60 g) light brown soft sugar
2 oz (approx 60 g) chocolate chips, or chopped chocolate (milk or plain, as you prefer)

Grease a square shallow baking tin about 7” (approx 18 cm) square.
Mix the flour and sugar in a bowl.
Rub in the butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.
Stir in the chopped chocolate or chocolate drops.
Press the mixture into the baking tin.
Bake in a moderately hot oven about 180 C for about 20 minutes until golden brown. If you prefer pale shortbread, bake in a moderate oven about 150 C for about an hour until pale golden.
Cut the shortbread into fingers while it is still in the tin and still hot. Leave to cool in the tin for at least 5-10 minutes before trying to remove it, as when it is hot it is very crumbly and inclined to break up.
Lift the shortbread fingers out onto a wire rack to finish cooling
Keeps in an airtight tin for a week or two. In theory.

February recipe: Bedfordshire Clangers

“As the days begin to lengthen
So the cold begins to strengthen”

--Old saying

Statistically, February is the month with the lowest average minimum temperature, according to the Meteorological Office’s thirty-year data for England. So this no doubt explains why my thoughts at this time of year turn so often to hot, filling dishes featuring suet pastry or dumplings. Last year I posted a recipe for goulash with dumplings.

Here’s another comfort-food recipe for a cold winter day, a steamed savoury suet crust roll that goes by the name of Bedfordshire Clangers. Always ‘Clangers’ plural, even though a single large roll is made. It’s a traditional dish in the south midlands region of England, around the counties of Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire, hence the ‘Bedfordshire’ component of the name.

As for ‘Clangers’? Well, one theory is that it comes from a Northamptonshire dialect word ‘clang’, meaning ‘to eat voraciously’ (see the British Regional Cooking website – scroll down). But no-one really knows, so your guess is as good as anyone else’s.

I can, however, be fairly confident that it doesn’t derive from the British children’s television series The Clangers, about a family of knitted aliens who lived under saucepan lids on the Moon. Shame.

Here’s the recipe.

Bedfordshire Clangers

Serves 2

Suet crust pastry

6 oz (approx 150 g) self-raising flour
3 oz (approx 75 g) shredded suet
1 small cooking apple (about 4 oz, approx 100 g, when prepared)
1 oz (approx 25 g) raisins

Filling

6 oz (approx 150 g) shin beef or stewing steak
2 oz (approx 50 g) kidney (about 1 whole lamb kidney)
Half an onion (approx 3-4 oz, approx 75-100 g)

Mix the flour and suet in a bowl.
Gradually add cold water, mixing well after each addition, until the mixture forms a soft but not sticky dough. If the dough is sticky, you’ve added too much water, and need to mix in more flour until it stops being sticky.
Or you could buy ready-made suet crust pastry, if available.
Roll the pastry out on a floured work surface to an approximately square shape and about one-eighth of an inch or about 0.25 cm thick. It will probably end up about 12” (about 30 cm) square.
Peel the apple and chop it finely.
Scatter the chopped apple and raisins evenly over half the pastry square.
Fold the other half of the pastry square over so the fruit is sandwiched between two layers of pastry.
Turn the pastry so the short side is facing you, and roll the pastry gently so that the raisins show through. You want a rectangular shape that’s at least twice as long as it is wide (the exact proportions don’t matter).

Chop the shin beef into 0.5 inch (approx 1 cm) dice.
Snip the white central core out of the kidney and chop into small pieces.
Peel and chop the onion.
Mix the beef, kidney and onion in a bowl and season with salt and black pepper.
Spread the meat and onion mixture evenly over the whole of the pastry rectangle, leaving a border of about 0.5 inch (approx 1 cm) clear round all the edges.
Roll the pastry up from one of the short ends like a Swiss roll, so the meat and onion is enclosed within the pastry crust.
Wrap the roll in tinfoil.
Steam for 3 hours or so.
Serve cut in slices, with a green leafy vegetable and gravy. (I find there’s no need for potatoes with the dish, as the suet crust pastry is quite filling enough).

I’ve never tried freezing this, because I suspect that the pastry would fall apart when it was reheated. But I haven’t got a microwave, and it’s quite possible that reheating in a microwave would put less strain on the pastry than re-steaming it. So by all means give it a try.

Variations:
If you don’t like kidney, substitute the equivalent weight of extra beef.

Solmonath (February): the early English calendar

Before they converted to Christianity and adopted the Roman calendar, the early English (‘Anglo-Saxons’) used a calendar based on the cycles of the sun and the moon.

Summary of the English calendar

The year was a solar year, and the two most important dates were the summer solstice (Midsummer, the longest day of the year) and the winter solstice (Midwinter, the shortest day of the year). The winter solstice was called Guili, or Yule, and is the origin of our word “Yuletide” for Christmas – for more details, see my earlier post. Each new year began at Yule.

The year was divided into two seasons, governed by the spring and autumn equinoxes (the points when the day and night are of exactly equal length). The season when the days were longer than the nights was called summer, the season when the nights were longer than the days was called winter.

Months were reckoned by a full cycle of the moon. Since Bede tells us that winter began at the full moon of October, the months presumably also began at the full moon. The number of days in a solar year isn’t an exact multiple of the number of days in a lunar cycle, so there are 12-and-a-bit lunar months in a year. As a result, the English months moved around in relation to the solar year. Every so often an extra month was added at Midsummer, making a 13-month year, to keep the months aligned roughly with the seasons.

We know this from a contemporary document, Bede’s On the Reckoning of Time, written in 725 AD. Bede was concerned mainly with teaching his students how to calculate Christian festivals, such as that perennially knotty problem of the early Church, the correct date of Easter. Fortunately for the scholar of early England, however, Bede kindly added a chapter (Chapter 15) explaining how his people had calculated months before they adopted Christianity. It provides the main documentary evidence we have for the pre-Christian English calendar.

February – Solmonath, or Month of Cakes

The second month of the year, corresponding roughly with the Roman (and modern) month of February, was called Solmonath.

‘Monath’ is the Old English word for a month, and the direct ancestor of our modern English word ‘month’.

‘Sol’ is the Old English word for ‘mud’, see the online Dictionary of Old English. So Solmonath can be prosaically translated as ‘Mud Month’, which, as anyone who has ever walked across a ploughed field or tried to dig a vegetable garden at this time of year can tell you, is entirely appropriate to the usual weather.

Some people have suggested that ‘sol’ should be translated as ‘earth’ or ‘soil’ rather than ‘mud’, and so Solmonath might have a less prosaic meaning, perhaps more like ‘Earth Month’ or ‘month when the earth was honoured’.

Others have noted that ‘sol’ with a long ‘o’ is the Old English word for ‘sun’ (see the Old English dictionary). In temperate Europe, February is the time of year when the increase in day length that begins at the winter solstice becomes really noticeable (as observed, quite by chance, by a commenter on my earlier post this month), so it’s possible that ‘sol’ in the month name might refer to this visible returning of the sun.

According to the Old English dictionary, ‘sol’ in Old English could also mean a wooden halter for animals. So I’ll toss in another theory – perhaps ‘sol’ in the month name referred to the collar oxen wore to draw the plough, and Solmonath meant something like ‘Plough Month’? I hasten to add that as far as I know that theory is my invention and I haven’t seen it elsewhere.

Whether Solmonath was the Mud Month, the Earth Month, the Sun Month or the Plough Month doesn’t really matter. Bede tells us something even more interesting about it:

Solmonath can be called “month of cakes”, which they offered to their gods in that month.

--Bede, On the Reckoning of Time, Chapter 15. Translated by Faith Wallis.

The reference to cakes is reminiscent of an Old English charm for making a field fertile, the Aecerbot or Field Remedy. The charm survives written down in a manuscript dating from the tenth or eleventh century, though it may well be derived from a much older tradition.

Take then each kind of flour and have someone bake a loaf [the size of] a hand's palm and knead it with milk and with holy water and lay it under the first furrow. Say then:

Field full of food for mankind,
bright-blooming, you are blessed
in the holy name of the one who shaped heaven
and the earth on which we live;
the God, the one who made the ground, grant us the gift of growing,
that for us each grain might come to use.

--Aecerbot, translated by Karen Louise Jolly

The surviving wording of the charm is Christianised, but it doesn’t take a very great leap of the imagination to suggest that the god who was being asked to make the field fertile could just as easily be a non-Christian deity. Kathleen Herbert has argued that the deity being petitioned was an earth goddess (Herbert 1994).

Whatever the deity, Bede’s description of cakes being offered to ‘their gods’ is certainly consistent with a rite similar to that described in the Aecerbot charm.

There is no (surviving) Old English word ‘sol’ meaning cake, and it has been suggested that Bede was mistaken about either the name of the month or the tradition attached to it. I would be very reluctant to think that we know more about Bede’s culture than he did, so I personally would take his word for it. It is worth noting that he says Solmonath “can be called” the month of cakes, which may indicate that “month of cakes” was an informal name like a nickname, or that the month could have several names. Another suggestion is that the cakes offered to the gods were called something like sun cakes, from the ‘sun’ meaning of ‘sol', in which case February, Solmonath, might mean something like Sun Cake Month.

References

Full-text sources available online are linked in the text.

Bede: The Reckoning of Time. Translated by Faith Wallis. Liverpool University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-85323-693-3.
Herbert, Kathleen. Looking for the Lost Gods of England. Anglo-Saxon Books, 1994. ISBN 1-898281-04-1.

February recipe: Goulash

One of the great compensations of the cold, damp, dark days of winter is that you get to eat comfort food, like dumplings. I have no idea whether dumplings have a long history, but they are so simple and filling that they ought to have been a staple of peasant cookery since the dawn of time, or at least since milled flour became widely available. I make no claims at all for the authenticity of the goulash recipe. I suspect that in this form it can’t go very far back, since paprika, tomatoes and green peppers don’t sound like the sort of thing that would have been widely available on the plains of Hungary until fairly recently, but successful traditional dishes tend to adapt to new ingredients. I can certainly recommend it as a simple, satisfying meal on a dank winter day. It also brings back happy memories of a popular climbers’ and hikers’ pub in Keswick in the English Lake District, whose home-made goulash with dumplings and garlic bread is a splendid end to a day on the local hill, Skiddaw.

The recipe serves four, and can be made in quantity and frozen. I happen not to like sour cream with it, but if you do, go right ahead. I generally use a cheap cut of beef, like shin or skirt, which suits the long slow cooking. When time is short, I make it with good pork sausages, in which case you add the potatoes along with the other vegetables and the cooking time is 30-40 minutes instead of two hours. It should also work with other cuts of beef, or with lamb or mutton, if you prefer. You can vary the vegetables according to taste and availability, and the quantity according to appetite.


Goulash (serves 4)

For the goulash:
1 lb (approx 500 g) shin beef, skirt of beef, stewing steak or other cut of your choice
1 large onion (about 6-8 oz, or about 150-250 g)
12 oz (about 350 g) parsnips or carrots
1 green pepper
2 cloves of garlic
2 sticks of celery, if liked (if you don’t like celery, replace with more carrot or parsnip)
4 tsp (4 x 5 ml spoon) paprika
Half a tin of chopped tomatoes in tomato juice (approx 6 oz or 150 g)
1 tsp (1 x 5ml spoon) demerara sugar
1 tsp (1 x 5 ml spoon) dried oregano, or dried mixed herbs if preferred
8 oz (approx 250 g) potatoes

For the dumplings:
4 oz (approx 120 g) self-raising flour
2 oz (approx 60 g) shredded suet
1 tsp (1 x 5 ml spoon) dried sage

Cut the beef into pieces about 1 inch (about 2 cm) square, if it isn’t already diced.
Peel and chop the onion.
Peel and slice the parsnips/carrots
Remove the seeds from the green pepper and chop.
Slice the celery if using.
Peel and crush or finely chop the garlic.
Heat butter or cooking oil in a large heavy-based saucepan, and fry the meat cubes until browned.
Add the chopped onion, carrots/parsnips, pepper, celery (if using) and garlic. Fry until browned.
Reduce the heat and stir in the paprika, then add the tomatoes, sugar and oregano.
Pour in about half a pint (about 250 ml) of water. Season with salt and black pepper, then cover the pan and bring to the boil
Reduce the heat to the lowest possible setting and simmer for around two hours, stirring from time to time and adding more water if it begins to boil dry. (Don’t attempt to cook it over a higher heat for a shorter time – I’ve tried and it doesn’t work very well)
Mix the flour, suet and dried sage in a small bowl, season with salt and black pepper, and mix to a firm dough with a small amount of water. Shape into 8 dumplings.
Peel the potatoes and cut into dice about 1 inch (about 2 cm) square. Add the potatoes to the beef stew and stir well.
Put the dumplings on top so they are half submerged in the stew, and simmer for another 20-30 minutes. The dumplings get half-boiled and half-steamed and will swell to about twice their original volume as they cook.
Serve with bread, noodles or spaghetti, with a spoonful of sour cream if liked.