Mealie Bread with Sweetcorn

Strange how things combine. Barry Simmonds posted some pictures of old mincers on Facebook, which reminded some of the group of how, as kids, they helped make mealie bread. Then the next day, Sainsbury's had a BOGOF offer on sweetcorn, so of course I had to try it. I started out with the recipe from the Heritage Publishing South African Cookbook (ISBN 9781919750590) but it was an unmitigated disaster - a glutinous lump with the texture of a dumpling. Having consulted an expert (Felicity) I was told that the problem was with the mealies. They need to be on the elderly side and getting a bit dry so I needed a different recipe to use sweetcorn, which a little research among mum's material turned out. It called for tinned sweetcorn so a little adjustment was needed but the result was just about spot on:

175g (3 quite large cobs) Sweetcorn

36 ml (2 Tbsp) Oil

250 ml (1/2 cup) Milk

2 very large Eggs

175g (3/4 cup) Mealie Meal

175g (3/4 cup) Flour

15 ml (3 tsp) Baking Powder

5ml (1 tsp) Salt

36 ml (2 Tbsp) Sugar

Cut the sweetcorn kernels off the cobs with a very sharp knife and then scrape to get the bits that are left. Mince.

Beat together the oil, milk and eggs. Add the sweetcorn and then blend in the dry ingredients. Put in a greased mould and then steam for two hours.

I didn't have a steamer so used a 1.5 litre (3 pint) souffle dish which I covered in foil and steamed on three blocks of wood in a cast iron casserole. I actually did this in the oven at 160 C but I suspect it would have worked just as well on top of the stove. I put in enough boiling water at the beginning to come about a third of the way up the side of the souffle dish and topped it up after an hour.

Tasted just as good as mum's.

Selby Cake (Tart)

When we were kids the family lived on a small farm that my grandfather Forrester bought in about 1912 when he retired. My mother was born eight years later when her father would have been sixty six, going on sixty seven so I never met him. In nineteen fifty six, though, we moved back to the farm. (For a number of reasons. In the first place, my father had decided to give up work and go full-time preaching so he was going to be away a lot. Secondly, mum’s brother Archie had married and, with two small children, they had built a house elsewhere and were moving away from the farm so my granny and my two maiden aunts would be on their own and, thirdly, mum was pregnant with my brother, Steve.)

The result is that we were now a core household of Granny, Aunts Alice and Hilda, Mum, Dad (most of the time, actually) and us kids.

It was a baking household and the Selby Cake was one of Auntie Alice’s regular standby recipes. If visitors were expected she’d bake a Selby Cake. If something was needed for a church evening, Selby Cake. If we were going to visit friends and a cake was required then a Selby Cake was always in order.

I never knew the origin of the name. My father often teased Auntie Hilda about an admirer called Michael Selby and perhaps he gave them the recipe. Nowadays I wonder if the name comes from the town of Selby in Yorkshire. There are a couple of recipes for Selby Tart on the internet and, although they do seem to be more tart than the cake that Auntie Alice used to bake, she always added some sort of parenthetical ‘(tart)’ to the name when she talked about it and her recipe (in the Baptist Women’s Association book of Budget-beating, Well-proven, Appetising Recipes, Port Shepstone Baptist Church 1981) is for ‘Selby Cake (Tart)’.

Selby Cake (Tart)
125g butter
1 well-beaten egg
125g sugar
400g flour
5ml Baking Powder
3ml salt
40ml Jam

Cream the butter and sugar. Add egg. Sift in flour, salt and baking powder. Reserve about a quarter of the mixture and spread the rest in a greased, floured 23cm pan. Spread the jam evenly and then cover the top with flakes of dough (squeeze them out between thumb and forefinger) so that they touch but don’t join.
Bake for 30 minutes at 180˚C (350˚F) Gas Mark 4

Notes

Auntie Alice’s original recipe gave no guidance on how much dough to leave for the covering and I left too little. I think a quarter should do but I left less and actually had to excavate a hole in the cake to get some more after the jam was on.

The quantity of jam was also not specified and I think I used about 40 ml, but it needs a thickish layer and you may need to adjust that as well.

You can find alternative recipes for Selby Tart at http://whatsforsupper-juno.blogspot.com/2009/11/vals-apple-and-apricot-selby-tart-with.html and Recipe Curio : http://recipecurio.com/selby-tart-recipe-typed-sheet/

Romany Creams

With Alice back in London, I was looking for something to try and found a recipe for Romany Creams in the Baptist Collection Biscuit Book compiled by the ladies of the Port Shepstone Baptist Church. For those who don’t know them, Romany Creams are one of the classic South African special occasion biscuits – a chocolate and coconut sandwich held together by chocolate icing, something that ex-pat South Africans import all over the world.

My first attempt didn’t turn out very well. The recipe calls for 125 ml of boiling water, added with the coconut, and then the addition of extra flour until the mixture leaves the bowl and ingredients don’t stick to your hand but, when I had added almost half as much flour again as was in the original recipe it still seemed too soft.

Discretion being the better part of valour, I decided to go ahead to the baking and see what happened. The result tasted pretty good but looked a bit anaemic and collapsed on the baking tray so, with advice from Alice, I decided to make some adjustments. For the second batch, then, I added 50 grams of dark chocolate to darken the mix and changed the method slightly to add the water last on the basis that I could stop when the texture was right.

This time round, I also decided to check the quantity conversions so measured the ingredients and then weighed them and found, by chance, at least part of the problem last week. Two cups of flour turned out to weigh more than the 240 grams in the recipe – closer to 400 grams, in fact – and, with that adjustment, the texture of the mixture was just about right and I ended up adding the full 125 ml of water.

The result was the recipe below, which turned out well in both texture and flavour. I will try this again in a couple of weeks time and I shall try substituting the cocoa with a hundred grams of dark chocolate to strengthen the flavour and colour and I’ll keep you updated on the result.

Romany Creams (Gloria Tarboton)

INGREDIENTS
250g Butter
50g Dark Chocolate
250g Castor Sugar
400g Flour
60 ml Cocoa
5 ml Baking Powder
3 ml salt
200g Desiccated coconut
3 ml baking powder
125 ml boiling water
Chocolate for filling.

METHOD

Cream the butter and sugar and add the melted chocolate. Add the sifted dry ingredients and then the coconut. Then add as much of the water as necessary so that the mixture rolls into a ball without sticking to the hands or the sides of the bowl. Put teaspoons-full (or use a biscuit maker) onto a greased baking tray and bake at 180˚C (350˚F), Gas mark 4 for 15 minutes. When cool sandwich together with melted chocolate.

Mum's recipes - Part 1

Over the years, my mother has sent me a variety of recipes collected by the family. The recipes have arrived in a variety of units of measure and, sometimes, with somewhat inscrutable cooking directions. This blog is a record of my attempts, with the help of Alice, my daughter, to test and standardise the recipe book as a family property. The intention is to standardise the units of measure – something that will require a bit of trial and error – and to expand the methods on the basis of real cooking experience.

Alice was home for the weekend a couple of weeks ago and we cooked the first two recipes on Sunday 4th September 2011 and, perhaps because Alice was there to fine tune the method, they came out with very little in the way of problems. In particular, the problem we had was finding the right temperature for the lemon cake with two complexities. The first was what, exactly, the term ‘in a medium oven’ means. A quick phone call to mum gave the answer 180˚ C – Gas mark 4, but this didn’t allow for the fact that we were using the fan oven so we started cooking at 170˚. Fortunately Alice assessed progress ten minutes into the baking and turned the temperature down to 160˚ with an excellent outcome.

Mum had cautioned us not to overcook and let it dry out, which Alice assessed perfectly – beautifully moist.

Lemon Cake (Isobel Sanderson)

170g butter
200g sugar
2 eggs
Lemon rind
300 ml flour
5ml Baking Powder
3 ml salt
55 ml milk
For the lemon drizzle
80 grams sugar
Juice of 1 lemon

METHOD

Cream butter and sugar then add eggs and lemon zest followed by dry ingredients alternately with milk.
Bake in a 23 cm cake tin in a moderate oven (180C (160C fan) / gas mark 4 / 350F) for 25 – 30 minutes.
While the cake is baking, dissolve the sugar over gentle heat in the lemon juice. Pour this over the cake as soon as it comes from the oven.

Spicy Fruit Loaf (Jack Meikle)

240 ml cake fruit
250 ml brown sugar
250 ml water
80 g butter
2 ml nutmeg
5 ml cinnamon
5 ml ground ginger
2 ml salt
475 ml plain flour
5 ml bicarbonate of soda
3 ml baking powder

METHOD

Boil together fruit, sugar, water, butter, spices and salt for 3 minutes. Allow to cool slightly and fold in sifted flour, bicarbonate and baking powder. Add a little water if necessary to dropping consistency. Bake in a loaf tin at 160C / Gas mark 3 / 325F for ca. 60 minutes