I made another rhubarb pie last night. We've got the rhubarb, and I had some cream that needed using up. I bought the cream on Monday, and only noticed as I stood in the checkout queue that it was relatively short dated, with just two days to go. I couldn't face abandoning my shopping on the conveyor belt and holding up the queue while I went to root around to see if I could find a pot with a best before date a week hence, so stuck with it.
The pudding did not come out the same as previous attempts, but bad scientist that I am, I changed two variables at once so can't tell you why that was. My first change was to interpret the instruction to add a pinch of cream of tartar to the egg whites more liberally. I was not brought up to add cream of tartar to whisked egg white, and am not clear how large a pinch is, but yesterday I made it the amount that forms a pile on the end of a teaspoon handle. Which doesn't sound very scientific either. My set of steel measuring teaspoons goes down to 1.25cc, and it would be easier if Diana Henry could give some guidance in terms of fractions of a teaspoon. 1.25cc is a quarter.
The egg whites whisked up beautifully, voluminous and silky, so I think that using cream of tartar in a more than symbolic quantity made a difference. Thinking back to domestic science at school, which I actually thoroughly enjoyed, despite the thinly disguised view of the school and my parents that it was only meant for the academically less able, I could remember a laborious explanation of sorts as to why I should heat the milk when making mashed potato, but nothing about cream of tartar. After consulting the oracle of Google I am little the wiser. It stabilises egg whites when whisked, allowing them to hold more air and withstand heat better, and it does this by affecting the way the proteins interact with each other as they are denatured by the mechanical stress of whisking, but that's not really an explanation, more a long winded description.
However, I then made a second change, which was to substitute single cream for the milk in the recipe. I only needed 150 ml for the pudding, but bought a 300 ml carton because that was all that I could see, thinking vaguely that I'd use the rest to make a quiche, without really focusing on the fact that the Systems Administrator was going out, I was going out, and there wasn't going to be an occasion for us to eat the quiche before the cream went off. I looked hopefully at the pot, but it didn't say Suitable for Home Freezing. I could have poured the second half down the sink, but that seemed a waste, and I suddenly thought that I could use it in the pudding instead of milk.
Perversely, this brilliant and frugal solution only occurred to me after I'd driven down to the village to buy more milk, because when I came to cook and looked in the fridge there was almost none left. I left a little note on the kitchen table in case the SA got back while I was out, having visions of the SA finding a Marie Celeste kitchen, with the ingredients and utensils spread out on the table, my laptop fired up with the recipe, but no cook anywhere on the premises. The petrol to drive to the village probably costs about the same as half a pot of Waitrose Essential single cream, but there you go.
The pudding mark III, fired up with cream of tartar and enriched with extra dairy fat, rose up extraordinarily, bursting open like a round of soda bread that's been scored across with a knife before cooking. Once cooled, it collapsed unevenly, leaving a slightly sunken top cracked like a limestone pavement. It tasted fine, if anything slightly creamier and more lux than the original recipe, but looked pretty dodgy, not something you would serve up at a supper party with pride. Though at least it looked so bad it would be pretty clear that you had gone to the trouble of making it yourself, and weren't passing caterer's food off as your own. Apparently people do that, though why you would go to the trouble of inviting your friends to your house and then lie to them beats me.
Anyway, that's breakfast for the next five or six days sorted out.
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