Fan-tastic

Who cares about trading restrictions when you’ve got the Edmonds cookbook? It started with breakfast – Scrambled eggs and Cheese eggs – fairly self explanatory with cheese eggs being scrambled eggs + cheese (truly ground breaking stuff). I am the number one fan of cheese but I think that the eggs were better without cheese.

It may be a simple thing but this may be the first time I’ve ever scrambled eggs in a pan rather than the microwave – I can hear the gasps of horror from the audience. I am a microwave person, not very 1966 I know but it does have its uses for defrosting, reheating and cooking scrambled eggs. Oh yes and I cook the majority of my vegetables in the microwave – is that another gasp of horror from the audience? I actually feel quite ashamed about my use of the microwave, but perhaps there are lots of people out there the same as me? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to bake my Christmas cake in there or roast a leg of lamb but how else would I soften the butter and get the broccoli just right?

The chapter preceding Eggs (where scrambled and cheese eggs reside, unsurprisingly) is cold sweets. I seem to have neglected the cold sweets section – perhaps it was the Cardrona carrot incident? So I thought it was time to pull finger as they say. In the interests of science I thought I would make Spanish cream and simple Spanish cream.

Now there is a slight misnomer here seeing that I managed to stuff up simple Spanish cream and yet had no problems with standard Spanish cream. Perhaps it is just me. Shall I run you through the recipes? I think I shall.

Spanish cream (see left)– gelatine is dissolved in milk, beaten egg yolks are added and the mixture is heated until thickened. Cool. Add beaten egg whites, chill.

Simple Spanish cream (see right) – dissolve 1 packet of lemon jelly crystals in hot water. Mix eggs with hot milk. Cool both mixtures. Mix when cold. I seem to have an issue with waiting until things are cold so the first lot of jelly and water ended up full of little bits of curdled milk when I started mixing when the two were still lukewarm. Sigh. Make more jelly. Let it cool properly – et voila – it works, who would have thought it was such a good idea to follow instructions…

So which was better? My preference was actually for the simple version but they were quit different. The standard was quite rich and had too much gelatine – In colour and consistency it was a little like the food version of latex rubber. A little less gelatine and it may have been a different story perhaps.

So far it wasn’t even lunchtime – so it was Edmonds for lunch as well – cream cheese toasts to be exact. Cheese, cream, boiled eggs, Worchester sauce, salt and pepper. Spread on toast, grill. This required me to sieve boiled eggs yolks - what an immensly satisfying thing to do! I was pleasantly surprise by my little mound of yellow yolky sand. All in all the finished result was not bad – a little strong perhaps. What was cheese like in the 60’s? We used tasty, perhaps I need to get something a little less cheesy? I garnished, as suggested, with gherkin fans. These made it. The world needs more gherkins and particularly in fans. Fantastic – don’t excuse the pun, it doesn’t deserve it.