July recipe: Fried mackerel fillet with gooseberry sauce

Fried mackerel fillet with gooseberry sauce

July is peak season for gooseberries. They are traditionally used in desserts and preserves, and I’ve previously posted recipes for gooseberry fool, gooseberry jam, and gooseberry pie.

Gooseberries can also be used in savoury cookery.  Their sharp sweetness goes especially well with pork or oily fish such as mackerel.

Here’s a quick and simple recipe for fried mackerel fillets with a sweet and sour gooseberry sauce, ideal for dinner on a summer evening.

Fried mackerel fillet with gooseberry sauce (serves 2)

2 fillets of fresh mackerel

1 Tablespoon (1 x 15 ml spoon) olive oil

1-2 shallots, or half a small onion

4 oz (approx 125 g) fresh gooseberries

1 teaspoon (1 x 5 ml spoon) demerara sugar

1 Tablespoon (1 x 15 ml spoon) lemon juice

1 Tablespoon (1 x 15 ml spoon) cider vinegar or white wine vinegar

1 Tablespoon (1 x 15 ml spoon) chopped fresh herbs (I like mint, sage, or oregano, or a combination thereof)

Peel and chop the shallots or onion.

Top and tail the gooseberries (this means cutting off the stalk at one end and the remains of the flower at the other).

Fry the onion or shallot gently in olive oil for a few minutes until softened.  Add the gooseberries and continue to cook gently for another few minutes until the gooseberries have produced some juice.

Add the sugar, lemon juice, vinegar and chopped herbs. Season with salt and pepper.  Mix well.  Leave the sauce to simmer, uncovered, over a low heat while you fry the mackerel fillets.

Melt a knob of butter in a frying pan over a moderate heat.

When the butter is melted and starting to foam, make sure it is spread out over the bottom of the frying pan and put the mackerel fillets in, skin side down. Fry the fillets for about 3 minutes.

Turn the mackerel fillets over and fry the other side for 2-3 minutes.  The flesh should be opaque and a knife should slide in easily.

Remove the mackerel fillets from the frying pan, transfer to a plate, and pour the gooseberry sauce over them.

Serve with new potatoes and salad or a green vegetable of your choice.

 

July recipe: Pork pie

A home-made pork pie is ideal as part of a summer meal for a group of family and friends, especially if you don’t care for barbecues or feel like a change.  It also works very well as part of a picnic, or for an effortless dinner after a long day at work – once cooked and cooled, it needs no further work, just cut a slice and serve with salad.  It’s also surprisingly easy to make, as hot-water pastry is very forgiving. 

Here’s my recipe.

Pork pie

Pastry

10 oz (approx 300 g) strong white flour*

4 oz (approx 125 g) lard

0.5 teaspoon (0.5 x 5 ml spoon) salt

Hot water to mix

Filling

1.25 lb (approx 500 g) minced pork

4 oz (approx 125 g) smoked streaky bacon (or back bacon if preferred)

1 teaspoon (1 x 5 ml) ground nutmeg

1 Tablespoon (1 x 15 ml spoon) fresh sage leaves (or other herbs of your choice)

8 oz (approx 250 g) carrot

Grease a deep cake tin about 6 inches (approx 15 cm) in diameter.  If the tin doesn’t have a loose base, fold a long strip of tinfoil into three lengthwise (so you get a triple-thickness strip), and lay it across the bottom of the tin and up the two opposite sides.  Make sure it is long enough to extend well past the top of the tin so that you can grasp the two ends easily.  The tinfoil strip will help to lift the pie out of the tin after it is cooked.

Rub the lard into the flour and salt until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs.

Stir in approximately 6–7 Tablespoons (6–7 x 15 ml spoons) of very hot water and mix well.  The mixture should form a ball of stiff dough.  If it is floury and flaky, add a little more hot water. If it is too sticky, add a little more flour.

Set the pastry aside for a few minutes to cool.

Chop the bacon into small pieces.

Peel, wash and grate the carrot.

Chop the sage (or other herbs) finely.

Mix the minced pork, chopped bacon, grated carrot, nutmeg and chopped herbs in a large bowl and season with ground black pepper and a little salt.

Roll out three-quarters of the pastry into a large circle.  Line the greased cake tin with the circle of pastry, pushing the pastry well down into the corners.  If the pastry tears, dampen the edges with water and press them back together.

Put the filling into the pastry case and press down firmly.  Fold the edges of the pastry case down over the filling.

Roll out the other quarter of the pastry into a circle big enough to make a lid.  Dampen the ring of folded-down pastry with water, and put the pastry lid on top.  Trim off any excess pastry.

Roll out the pastry trimmings to make decorations of your choice for the top of the pie.

Brush the top of the pie with milk.

Cook in the centre of a slow oven, about 150–160 C, for about 2 to 2.5 hours, until the pastry is golden brown.

Remove the pie from the oven, and run a palette knife around the sides of the tin to loosen it.  Don’t try to take the pie out of the tin yet.

Cool the pie in the tin on a wire rack.

When the pie is completely cool, run a palette knife around the sides again to make sure it is still loose.  Then press up the loose base of the tin (if it has a loose base), or lift the pie out of the tin using the tinfoil strip.  Don’t try to take the pie out of the tin until it is completely cold, or there’s a risk it may collapse.

Serve cut in slices.

I generally get 8 to 10 slices out of a pie this size, although it depends how large a slice you cut.

The pie will keep in the fridge for several days, so you can make it well in advance, or eat it over several days.

*’Strong’ flour is the kind used for making bread.

July recipe: Gooseberry pie

Early to mid-July is the peak season for gooseberries, those delicious and versatile culinary berries that can be used to make gooseberry fool, gooseberry meringue pie and gooseberry jam, among others.

This recipe is for a simple gooseberry pie topped with a rich and crumbly pastry that is halfway between shortcrust pastry and shortbread. It is especially nice served cold a day or two after being made. You can use either green or red gooseberries, or a mixture.

Gooseberry pie (serves 6)

Pastry
6 oz (approx 150 g) plain flour
1.5 Tablespoons (1.5 x 15 ml spoons) icing sugar
3 oz (approx 75 g) butter
1.5 oz (approx 40 g) lard
Approx 1 Tablespoon (approx 1 x 15 ml spoon) cold water to mix

Gooseberry filling
1.5 lb oz (approx 700 g) gooseberries
3 oz (approx 75 g) light brown soft sugar

To make the filling

Wash the gooseberries. Top and tail them (i.e. cut off the stalk at one end and the remains of the flower at the other).

Put the gooseberries in shallow heatproof pie dish approximately 8” (approx 20 cm) diameter.

Sprinkle the sugar on top of the gooseberries, and mix in.

To make the pastry

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

Gradually add sufficient water to mix to a soft dough. If the mixture is floury and flaky you need a little more water. If it is sticky you have added too much water; add a little more flour. (Or you could use ready-made pastry if you prefer).

Roll out the pastry thickly to make a circle just a little bigger than the pie dish.

Place the pastry on top of the gooseberries and sugar in the pie dish and trim the surplus pastry off from the edge.

Roll out the pastry trimmings and cut into pastry leaves for decoration (or other decoration of your choice).

Brush the top of the pie with milk, and sprinkle with a little granulated sugar.

Bake in a hot oven, approx 180 C, for approximately 30 minutes until the pastry is golden brown.

Serve warm or cold, with cream, natural yoghurt or ice cream. The pie will keep for several days in the fridge.

I expect to get 6 slices out of this recipe, but that depends how big a slice you like.

July recipe: Chard and cream cheese lasagne

Chard, also known as spinach beet or perpetual spinach*, is a type of leaf beet, mainly available in summer and autumn in the UK. It’s a green leafy vegetable looking a bit like a more robust version of spinach, but whereas spinach tends to run to seed in hot weather, chard will happily carry on growing until the first frosts.

The young leaves can be eaten raw in a salad like lettuce, larger leaves are cooked like spinach. I generally regard chard as more or less interchangeable with spinach, and use whichever happens to be growing in the garden at the time. So you could also make this recipe with spinach instead of chard, or with a mixture of the two, according to preference and availability. Being July, it’s chard season at the moment, so here it is made with chard.

Chard and cream cheese lasagne

Serves 2

10-12 oz (approx 300-350 g) chard leaves
Half an onion
1 large clove garlic
4 oz (approx 100 g) cream cheese or ricotta cheese
0.5 teaspoon (0.5 x 5 ml spoon) grated nutmeg
0.5 oz (approx 10 g) butter
2 teaspoons (2 x 5 ml spoon) plain flour
Approx 0.25 pint (approx 150 ml) milk
2 oz (approx 50 g) cheddar-type cheese, sliced
Approx 4 oz (approx 100 g) dried lasagne sheets**

Wash the chard leaves thoroughly. Cut out the thick central stalk from each leaf. Put about a teaspoon of butter in the bottom of a large saucepan, and put the chard leaves on top. Don’t add any extra water, the drops of water clinging to the leaves after washing will be enough to steam the leaves. Put a lid on the saucepan and cook over a low heat for about 10 minutes, stirring several times during cooking to make sure the leaves at the top get swapped for the ones at the bottom of the pan. The chard will wilt and soften, and will cook down to a fraction of its original volume. When it’s a soft dark green mass, it’s cooked. Remove from the heat and drain, pressing the cooked leaves with a wooden spoon or spatula to squeeze out excess moisture. Leave to cool.

Peel and chop the onion. Chop the chard stalks. Peel and crush the garlic. Fry onion, chard stalks and garlic in about a tablespoon of cooking oil over a low heat for 5-10 minutes until the onion is soft and starting to colour. Remove from heat.

Chop the cooked chard leaves, and stir into the onion mixture. Stir in the cream cheese and nutmeg, and season with salt and pepper.

Now make a white sauce. Melt the butter in a small saucepan. Remove from the heat and stir in the flour.

Blend in the milk a little at a time, stirring thoroughly between each addition to remove any lumps (remember to scrape any lumps off the back of the spoon). Bring to the boil, stirring all the time until the sauce thickens. Remove from the heat.

Grease an ovenproof dish about 7” (about 18 cm) square. Spread one-third of the spinach and cream cheese mixture in the bottom of the dish. Top with a layer of lasagne sheets. Spread another one-third of the spinach and cream cheese mixture on top, and cover with another layer of lasagne sheets. Spread the last one-third of the spinach mixture on top, and pour the white sauce over. Top with the sliced cheddar-type cheese. (You may find you end up with three or four layers of lasagne rather than two, depending on the size and shape of your dish and the size and shape of your lasagne sheets. Adjust as necessary, just make sure that the lasagne and the sauce layers alternate with each other and that you start and end with a layer of sauce).

Cook in a moderate oven, approx 180 C, for approx 35 minutes until the cheese is golden and bubbling.

Serve with salad or a green vegetable.


**You could use fresh pasta, but the weight will be different from dried pasta.


*Sharp-eyed readers of Paths of Exile may have noticed a mention of growing spinach in a vegetable plot. I imagine it as a spinach beet of some kind, as leaf beets have been grown in Europe for centuries. Chard is probably the nearest modern approximation.

July recipe: Gooseberry jam

There’s something very pleasing about home-made jam. Gooseberry jam is among the easiest to make, as gooseberries are fairly high in pectin so the jam will set without long boiling.

You can use green gooseberries, red gooseberries or a mixture of the two, depending on taste and availability. Green gooseberries produce a bronze-coloured jam, and a fifty-fifty mix of green and red gooseberries produces jam of a delicate pink colour. As far as I can tell there’s no difference in the flavour.

The quantity below will make about three or four medium-sized jars of jam. You can start eating it straight away, or it will keep indefinitely provided the seal of the jar isn’t broken.





Gooseberry jam

2 lb (approx 1 kg) gooseberries
2 lb (approx 1 kg) sugar. I usually use granulated sugar

Wash the gooseberries.

Top and tail the gooseberries – i.e. cut off the stalk at one end of each berry and the remains of the flower at the other. This tends to be a fairly slow job, so you might like to
find something to listen to on the radio before you start.

Put the gooseberries in a large saucepan.

Cook over a very gentle heat until the juice starts to run. I never need to add any extra water. Then simmer for 15 – 20 minutes until the fruit is soft enough to mash with a wooden spoon. You don’t actually have to mash it, and I usually don’t because I like whole fruit jam, but it’s a good indicator for when the fruit is ready to go on to the next stage.

Add the sugar and stir until it has dissolved (a minute or so).

Bring the jam to a full rolling boil – this means lots of bubbles across the whole surface of the liquid in the pan. Don’t lean over the pan and keep any children or pets out of the way. Boiling jam will sometimes spit, and as it is both hot and sticky it can give an unpleasant burn.

Boil until the setting point is reached. To test for setting point, scoop out a teaspoonful of jam and drip it onto a cold plate. It will form a pool. (If it forms a bead, your jam is ready – take it off the heat straight away and proceed to the next step). Wait for the pool to cool (30 seconds or so), then push it horizontally with your finger. If the surface wrinkles, the jam is ready. If the pool stays liquid, keep boiling for another 2 minutes and test again. I usually find this jam reaches setting point after about 10 - 15 minutes boiling.*

Remove the jam from the heat, and pour into clean glass jars. I find the easiest way to do this is to pour from the pan into a heatproof jug, then use the jug to fill the jars.

Seal the jars immediately. I seal jam jars with a layer of cling film and then a screw-top lid, but you can use any method of your choice as long as it is air-tight.

Let the jars cool, label them, and store in a cupboard until needed.

You can scale up the quantity as you see fit, but remember that you need plenty of space in the pan for the jam to boil without boiling over. If the pan is about half-full after you put the sugar in, that should be about right.



*I am told that a sugar thermometer makes it easier to recognise setting point. I’ve never used one, so can’t comment. The old-fashioned way works for me.

July recipe: Raspberry jam

Once upon a time, so long ago that she has no doubt long forgotten it by now, a lady named Alianore expressed interest in a recipe for raspberry jam. This summer is the first season since then that I’ve made raspberry jam, as I don’t usually have surplus raspberries for preserving (thanks to the local blackbirds).

The lemon juice contains pectin which helps the jam to set, and also adds a slightly sharp flavour to the finished jam. I like the sharp flavour, but if you don’t, you could use commercial pectin instead of lemon juice. I’ve never used commercial pectin so I can’t give you any advice, but the instructions on the packet should tell you how to use it. If you don’t use either lemon juice or commercial pectin, raspberry jam can take for ever to reach setting point, and this is usually a Very Bad Thing as long boiling tends to result in a rather dark and excessively sticky jam. So I strongly recommend you add pectin in some form or other.

All the books tell you to use perfect and slightly under-ripe fruit for preserving. I am sure they are right. However, I tend to use jam as a repository for the berries that get squashed during picking and transit, and I can confirm they work perfectly well in this recipe (but see above for the importance of adding pectin in some form).

Here’s the recipe.

Raspberry jam

1 lb (approx 450 g) raspberries
1 lb (approx 450 g) granulated sugar
Juice of half a lemon

Remove the stalks from the raspberries and check that the fruit is in good condition. A bit squashed is OK.
Put the fruit and lemon juice in a large saucepan. If liked, you can add the lemon zest as well.
Heat gently for a few minutes until the juice starts to come out of the raspberries.
Add the sugar and a small piece of butter (about the size of a hazelnut), and stir until the sugar has dissolved.
Bring to the boil. Don’t lean over the pan and keep any children or pets out of the way. Boiling jam will sometimes spit, and as it is both hot and sticky it can give an unpleasant burn.
Boil at a full rolling boil – this means lots of bubbles across the whole surface of the liquid – until setting point is reached. To test for setting point, scoop out a teaspoonful of jam and drip it onto a cold plate. It will form a pool. (If it forms a bead, your jam is ready – take it off the heat straight away and proceed to the next step). Wait for the pool to cool (30 seconds or so), then push it horizontally with your finger. If the surface wrinkles, the jam is ready. If the pool stays liquid, keep boiling for another 2 minutes and test again. I usually find this jam reaches setting point after about 10 minutes boiling.
(I am told that a sugar thermometer makes it easier to recognise setting point. I’ve never used one, so can’t comment. The old-fashioned way works for me.)
Remove the jam from the heat, and pour into clean glass jars. I find the easiest way to do this is to pour from the pan into a heatproof jug, then use the jug to fill the jars.
Seal the jars immediately. I seal jam jars with a layer of cling film and then a screw-top lid, but you can use any method of your choice as long as it is air-tight.
Let the jars cool, label them, and store in a cupboard until needed. It doesn’t need to mature so you can start eating it the following morning if you like.

This quantity makes about 1.5 lb of jam (two medium-sized jars). You can scale it up as you see fit, but remember that you need plenty of space in the pan for the jam to boil without boiling over. If the pan is about half-full after you put the sugar in, that should be about right.

Litha (July) and Trilithi: the early English calendar

Before they converted to Christianity and adopted the Roman calendar, the early English (‘Anglo-Saxons’) reckoned time using a system of lunar months. Each cycle of the moon, probably from full moon to full moon, was a month. The year began at the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. There were two seasons, summer, when the days were longer than the nights, and winter, when the nights were longer than the days (See my earlier post for a summary of the early English calendar.)

The sixth and seventh months of the year, corresponding approximately to the Roman and modern months of June and July, were called Litha. Like its counterpart in the winter, Giuli (from which we get the word Yule), Litha was a double-length month, or two months of the same name, placed either side of the midsummer solstice. See my June post for the possible meaning of Litha.

Bosworth and Toller’s Old English Dictionary says that the first Litha month (corresponding roughly to modern June) was called “se aerra Litha” and the second one was called “se aeftera Litha”. Kathleen Herbert says that the information in Bosworth and Toller comes from Bede’s treatise On the Reckoning of Time, and from later English scholars who commented on it such as Aelfric and Bryhtferth (Herbert 1994). The distinguishing terms ‘aerra’ and ‘aeftera’ aren’t in Bede’s account, so I presume they come from one of the later commentaries, but I haven’t verified the source. As I understand it, the meaning is closer to “the earlier Litha” and “the later Litha”, rather than “the month before Litha” and “the month after Litha”, so “Litha” refers to the name of the months and not to a date that occurred at the junction between them.

Trilithi

Bede, writing in 725, tells us:

When an embolismic year occurred (that is, one of 13 lunar months), they assigned the extra month to summer, so that three months together bore the name “Litha”, hence they called the year “Trilithi”.

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

This neatly demonstrates both the problem with a lunar-solar calendar and the early English solution to it. A solar year refers to one complete cycle of the sun from one midwinter solstice (or any point of your choice) to the next. This is a natural way to reckon time in an agricultural society living at temperate latitudes, where day length would be an important determinant of agricultural activities. But it is rather long to be the only unit used to measure time.

The lunar month, covering a complete cycle of the moon from one full moon (or any other point of your choice) to the next, is a shorter unit of time, conveniently intermediate between the long unit of the solar year and the short unit of the solar day. Thus a lunar-solar calendar gives you three units of time each of a different order of magnitude, so you don’t have to express time periods either in tiny fractions of a year or in very large numbers of days. Great.

Unfortunately, the problem is that none of these natural units of time are exact multiples of each other. A lunar month is 29.53 days. A solar year is 365.24 days. There are 12.37 lunar months to a solar year. So the lunar months won’t line up neatly with the solar year. Suppose you start your lunar-solar calendar at a time when the full moon also falls on the midwinter solstice, so both the year and the first month of the year start on the same date. The second month of the year starts at the next full moon, the third month starts at the full moon after that, and so on through the year. But 12 lunar months only take 29.53*12 = 354.37 days to complete. So by the time the next midwinter solstice comes round, at 365.24 days, the moon is already 10.87 days past the full. What do you do? Do you start the new year when the moon was full? In which case the year won’t match the solstice. Or do you start the first month of the new year at the solstice? In which case the months won’t match the phase of the moon.

I can imagine priests, druids and learned folk tearing their hair out over this infuriating astronomical feature. Some cultures settle on a purely solar calendar and let the months go out of phase with the moon (our modern Western calendar does this), others settle on a purely lunar calendar and let the year go out of phase with the sun (the Islamic lunar calendar does this). Others adopt a hybrid system, adding an extra month when necessary to bring the lunar months back into line with the solar year – a sort of “leap month”, if you like, in the same way as the modern Western calendar adds a day (almost) every four years to keep the calendar synchronised with the solar year. This extra month is called an intercalary month.

Clearly the early English applied this hybrid approach, adding an extra month to Litha to keep the lunar months in line with the solar years. This would happen every two or three years (every 2.72 years to be precise), so a “Trilithi” year would be pretty common. It could have been decided by calculation, by observation, or a mixture of both. If you kept a count of the observed full moons starting at the midwinter solstice each year and the second Litha full moon happened before the midsummer solstice, you would know it was a Trilithi year. If you also kept a count of the days and alternated between 29 and 30 days for a lunar month, you could calculate the date of the full moon even if the weather was too cloudy for a direct observation.


References
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.

July recipe: Gooseberry fool

Fruit fools involve combining a fruit puree with custard or whipped cream or both, and go back to at least the seventeenth century, if not earlier. Gooseberries are the first of the summer cooking fruits to come into season, and a gooseberry fool makes a delightful and easy summer dessert.

The recipe works equally well with green or red gooseberries, or a mixture.








Gooseberry fool

8 oz (approx 250 g) gooseberries
2 oz (approx 50 g) sugar
1 oz (approx 25 g) butter
5 fl.oz (approx 140ml) double cream

Wash the gooseberries.
Top and tail them (snip off the stalks and the flower ends from the top and bottom of each berry).
Put the gooseberries in a saucepan with the sugar and butter.
Heat until the butter has melted and the sugar dissolved, then cover the pan and simmer for ten minutes or so until the fruit is soft and starting to break up.
Remove from the heat and crush the fruit with a wooden spoon. You can puree it in a food processor if you like, but I never do. If you don’t like pips, you can sieve the puree, but I never do this either.
Leave to cool.
Taste the gooseberry pulp and add more sugar if wished.
Whip the double cream until stiff.
Stir the gooseberry pulp into the cream.
Divide between four glasses and chill in the fridge for at least an hour or overnight before serving.

If you like larger portions, divide the mixture between two or three glasses instead of four.

July recipe: Summer pudding

Most recipes for summer pudding tell you to use raspberries and redcurrants, so for years I never made it. I prefer to eat raspberries fresh, and on the rare occasions when the canes produce more than we can eat, I make the surplus into jam. It was only recently that I came up with the idea of trying summer pudding with blackcurrants (yes, I am slow on the uptake), which are just a little too tart to eat fresh and which make marvellous puddings. July is prime blackcurrant season, so here’s my recipe. You need decent white bread for a good summer pudding – I’m afraid mass-produced blotting-paper sliced white just doesn’t cut it. I make my own bread (it’s not difficult), so I’ve included the bread recipe as well.

If you don’t like blackcurrants, replace them with raspberries and redcurrants in about a 2:1 ratio, and reduce the sugar.

Summer pudding always looks to me, as a non-expert in the history of food, as if it ought to go back centuries, but apparently it’s a twentieth-century invention. Which just proves there is such a thing as progress.

Oh, and by the way, don’t skimp on the cream. Summer pudding itself contains no fat at all if you use my bread recipe, so you’re entitled to a free hand with the cream.

Summer pudding (serves 6)

1.5 lb (approx. 700 g) blackcurrants
6 oz (approx. 150 g) sugar
8 oz (approx 250 g) good-quality white bread, a day old
Double cream to serve

Wash the blackcurrants and remove the stalks.
Put the blackcurrants and sugar in a saucepan and simmer for 3-4 minutes to soften the fruit and get the juices to run. Remove from heat.
Cut the bread into slices about 0.25-0.5 inch thick (about 0.5-1 cm thick).
Cut a piece from one slice to fit the bottom of a 2 pint (approx. 1 litre) pudding basin.
Reserve enough bread slices to cover the top of the pudding basin, and put them to one side.
Cut the remaining slices into fingers and fit them around the sides of the basin. Cut off any bread that sticks out above the top of the basin. Fill in any gaps with small pieces of bread. Some people find it easier to dip the bread in the blackcurrant juice first, as this helps it to adhere to the sides of the basin and gives it an even colour.
Pour in the fruit and sugar mixture. It doesn’t matter whether it’s still hot or has cooled down.
Cover the top of the fruit mixture with the reserved slices of bread.
Put a small saucer or plate on top, and weight it down with something heavy. I use a plastic milk carton full of water, which weighs about 1.25 lb (approx 600 g), and this seems to work quite well.
Stand the weighted pudding overnight in the fridge, on a plate or tray just in case any juices spill out.
Next day, serve the pudding cut into wedges, with plenty of cream to pour over it. If you’re feeling really confident, you can turn the pudding out onto a plate before serving it. I generally just scoop the servings out of the pudding basin.
Any left over will keep in the fridge for several days, though once cut it will start to collapse (and it would therefore be a good idea to leave it in the basin, rather than turning it out, if you’re intending to eat it over several days).
It won’t freeze, though you can make it with frozen blackcurrants.

Plain white bread (makes 1 x 8 oz [approx 250 g] loaf)

5 oz (approx 130 g) strong white bread flour
0.5 teaspoon (0.5 x 5 ml spoon) sugar
0.5 teaspoon (0.5 x 5 ml spoon) dried baking yeast
Water to mix

Put about 25 ml of boiling water and 25 ml of cold water into a cup. Stir in the sugar. Sprinkle the dried yeast on top.
Leave for 10-15 minutes for the yeast to froth up.
Put the flour in a bowl and make a hollow in the centre. Pour the yeast liquid into the hollow and mix well. Gradually add more water until the mixture forms a soft dough.
Knead the dough for a minute or two.
Put the dough back in the bowl and leave for 45-60 min to rise.
Knead again for a minute or two. Shape into a loaf. Put the loaf on a greased baking sheet and leave for another 45-60 min to rise again.
Bake for 25-30 min in a hot oven (approx 250 C) until the loaf is golden brown and sounds hollow when tapped on the base.
Cool on a wire rack.

The above quantity will make a loaf of about the right size for the summer pudding recipe. If you want to make more bread, double up the quantities as needed. The yeast quantity as given above is generous for the amount of flour, chiefly because trying to measure less than half a teaspoon is a pain. I usually make it in larger quantities, and use a teaspoon of dried yeast to raise 1 lb (approx 500 g) of flour. Dried yeast may vary by brand, so read the instructions on the packet. I use Allinsons Traditional Dried Active Yeast, which is available at most UK supermarkets, but I have no idea at all what the equivalent might be in other countries. I also have no experience with the ‘easy bake’ yeasts where you put the dried yeast straight in with the flour, so if you’re using those you’re on your own.
The bread can be eaten hot the day it is made (delicious with butter melting on it), cold the following day, or can be frozen as soon as it has cooled. Or you can use it in summer pudding.