The kitchen is turning into a meringue factory. On Saturday it is the annual fund raising supper of the music society. It is also a day when I'm working, so when we were discussing the menu I announced that I was not prepared to take a day off to do any last minute cooking, but was willing to make meringues, as they could be done in advance. My offer was accepted, which as far as I'm concerned was a plus. Last year I had to take two dozen portions of chicken casserole, and the one before I was asked to contribute vast quantities of apple crumble. Neither transport easily in the car, and it was a relief in the year of the chicken when the rest of the weekend passed without news of a mass outbreak of food poisoning in the village.
The organisers have come round this year to my reservations about assorted amateur cooks running up huge vats of main courses in their own homes, which may or may not fit in their domestic fridge, then transporting them in their cars, which certainly lack chiller capabilities, before they are reheated on the gas burner in the village hall. Instead they have outsourced the main course, leaving the committee to do the starting nibbles and the puddings. As a matter of interest, if you buy in a main course from a caterer cold, and reheat it yourself, you don't pay VAT on it. If you have it delivered already heated, you do. Isn't the UK tax system wonderful?
The secretary was rather vague when asked how many meringues she wanted, saying only that we were catering for sixty people, but not all of them would want meringues. That doesn't narrow things down very much. Somebody else is making chocolate brownies, so who knows how many will want meringues? Half? Three quarters? Only a quarter? And will they want one meringue or two? I always imagine them coming in pairs, squidged together with cream, though I am sure that on Saturday people will be left to add their own cream. The right answer seems to be somewhere between thirty and ninety, which is quite a range of uncertainty.
I don't mind the supper concert, but if I hadn't agreed to be on the committee I wouldn't go. It isn't really my sort of thing, sitting in the hall of a village where I don't live, with people I don't necessarily know, while local amateur musicians perform their stuff. At least by now my fellow committee members have given up trying to persuade me that the Systems Administrator would like to go. Apart from the amusement of imagining that, as in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, fiction and reality had blurred, and that one was actually living in a sequence from Lucky Jim, the prospect of spending an evening making polite conversation with village worthies while listening to madrigals is the sort of thing to make the SA's blood run cold. The committee members don't even get to do the full whack of sitting down, because we are running about serving the main course and clearing plates.
I made meringues last night, and another set are in the cool oven of the Aga as I type. Tomorrow I'll do some straight after breakfast, then probably a second lot at lunchtime and a third in the evening, unless when I do the maths again I think that two more batches should be sufficient. When you make that many meringues, you end up with a lot of egg yolks, so I have offered to make cheese straws as well. There are already some egg yolks in the freezer, and a pan of golden syrup flavoured custard cooling in the fridge, en route to being ice cream, and tomorrow's lunch will be a bacon flan, which will use a couple more.
I was worried that I didn't have enough large tupperware storage boxes, but Tesco didn't have any big ones, and then in a fit of inspiration I thought that if I run out of conventional containers I can use a honey bucket. It might confuse my fellow caterers briefly and not in a good way, given my horticultural background, since they do look a lot like those white plastic tubs you can buy pelleted chicken manure in, but they are made of food grade plastic, and are airtight.
Probably after all this there will be boxes of meringues left over, but I'm sure my colleagues will eat them. I'm not buying them cream, though.
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