Today is the shortest day. From now on the days theoretically lengthen, though as sunset slips later than today's 15.47 over Colchester, sunrise gets later as well, so that by the end of the month we'll have only five minutes extra daylight. By the end of January we'll have an hour and twenty minutes more, and by the June solstice nearly nine hours of extra light. It's a turning point in the year, to be celebrated if you like being outside. Not that evenings by the fire aren't very nice.
The pudding worked fine and I can now reveal that it was a Lancastrian lemon tart, taken from a clipping out of the FT that I've had stuck in my cooking file for many years without ever having made it before. I failed to write down either the date or the name of the journalist, but I recognise it as being the Financial Times from the pink paper, and the general house style. You didn't get a colour photo of a detail from a still life with game fowl, fruit and vegetables by Juan Sanchez Cotan in the Evening Standard.
It is a multi-layered pudding, but very straightforward as long as you can start long enough in advance to allow for all the stages, and it has the great advantage for entertaining that it is good cold, so can be made in advance. You line a ten inch flan dish with shortcrust pastry and bake blind, then allow to cool completely. I pricked the bottom of my pastry all over with a fork like Long Lankin pricking all over with a pin, and the bottom still ballooned up in cooking. Following which I poked a hole in it to allow the steam to escape and tried to push it down, then worried that the filling would leak through the hole and I'd end up with a soggy bottom. The recipe suggests six to eight ounces of pastry for a dish of that size, which is about right. I used seven and a half, being five plus half of five, and wouldn't fancy my chances lifting the sheet of pastry intact if I'd gone down to six ounces in total. All of these amounts are finished weight of pastry, unlike some old books that give the weight of flour to use in making the pastry.
You cover the cooled, cooked pastry with a layer of home made lemon curd. The recipe is emphatic that it must be home made, for both taste and texture (I am beginning to think the author must have been Philippa Davenport. That sounds like her). Lemon curd is not difficult, although as the article doesn't tell you how to make it you need a book, or the internet. I halved the quantities given in The Good Housekeepering Complete Book of Preserving, and used two lemons, two eggs, two ounces of butter and six ounces of caster sugar. Grate and squeeze the lemons, add the juice and rind to the other ingredients and cook gently in a double boiler until it looks done. Which is when it coats the back of your wooden spoon. I think gently is the key word, otherwise I'm not sure what I'd do with sweetened lemon flavoured scrambled egg. You put it through a sieve before it cools, which gets out any stringy bits of egg white or lumps of rind, and it sets as it cools.
On top of the lemon curd you add an almond sponge made with four ounces of unsalted butter, four of caster sugar, four of ground almonds, two eggs, and the grated rind and two teaspoons of juice from another lemon. I disobeyed the injunction to grind my own almonds, on the grounds that life was too short. You dice the butter, just melt it, stir in the sugar and then the almonds and finally the eggs and lemon. The tart is cooked in a hottish oven. The recipe said thirty-five minutes at 200 C or gas mark 6, but we don't do gas marks or degrees, and I thought that over half an hour in a fairly hot oven sounded like a recipe for burned sponge, so our tart got twenty minutes at the bottom of the top Aga oven, and another ten towards the top of the bottom oven. The surface was a shade darker than I'd have liked, and could have done with a minute or two less, but it wasn't burned.
Lemon curd keeps for up to a month in the fridge, so I made the curd on Friday and the rest of the tart on Saturday for lunch on Sunday. It is a good tart, and as I said very handy if you want something you can do in advance. The other recipe in the same article was for a Belvoir lemon pudding which included the last minute addition of beaten egg white with diced dessert apple stirred into it and cooked for three minutes until just set. Which all sounds very nice, but when I invite people for lunch I'd like to talk to them, not disappear for ten minutes in the middle of the meal to mess around with meringues.
Addendum The electronic mouse zapper in the garage didn't catch anything last night, so I moved it to the greenhouse where mice have eaten the leaves off all my pots of Muscari. I had caught one in the greenhouse, though, which drowned in the watering can. I found its floating corpse like Kevin Spacey in American Beauty.
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