Do you cook to impress?
When we feed others, do we choose recipes to show off? Or should we take pride in effortless simplicity? Plus, a gorgeous and minimal effort recipe for rhubarb fool.
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All the very best, Sue.
The New Yorker published a great piece by Ruby Tandoh this week entitled The Studied Carelessness of Great Dessert.
As usual with Tandoh’s writing, it made me think. In the piece, she explores the performative aspect of feeding people, in particular, dessert, the ultimate showcase for vanity cooking. How much effort do we want to look like we’re making when we serve dessert, she asks, having just spent two days constructing a vast croquembouche tower for a dinner party. Should she opt for ease and simplicity rather than making such an obviously mighty effort? Or is taking a deliberately relaxed approach to cooking - a ‘studied carelessness’ - just another kind of showboat cookery?
The I’ve-barely-bothered approach has been on my mind while developing recipes for a new book. Finding that sweet spot where achievably inventive meets reassuringly easy is a challenge. It requires confidence to write recipes that don’t involve much work, and also for readers to make them (will they be delicious if there’s minimal effort involved?). One particular dish that I’ve been playing with and thinking about in this respect is the traditional English pudding, fool.
It’s made by folding fruit (in various forms) through whipped cream (or custard) and traditionally served in little glass dishes. In her book Good Things, Jane Grigson writes that fool comes from the French verb fouler to crush, which made sense to her, as fruit was traditionally mashed or pushed through a sieve before joining the cream. In her later Fruit Book, Grigson corrects herself. She says fool is another of those linguistic follies that abound in traditional English cookery, like trifle and whim-wham (the latter being a trifle without custard).
Fools might have a reputation for being simple puddings, but they’re also renowned for being delicious. The dish is connected to Northamptonshire, Grigson writes, citing evidence from Kettner’s Book of the Table (1877). Young folk from the area, ‘after eating as much as they possibly can of this gooseberry fool’, apparently used to roll down a hill and begin eating it again. Northamptonshire gooseberry fool must have been quite something.
Grigson includes eight recipes for fools in her Fruit Book including an unusual one that uses ‘wild’ dried apricots from Afghanistan and their kernels. I’d never heard of these fruits before and had to look them up. It turns out they’re completely dry whole apricots, so rock hard that they need soaking overnight before use. The stones also require attention: cracking open, kernels removed and chopped.
Another fool recipe in the Fruit Book is a sumptuous one by Elizabeth David involving prunes, an array of other dried fruit and red wine. Elsewhere, Grigson includes ideas for melon, papaya and persimmon fools, which surprise me, as I associate this pudding with ingredients traditionally grown in Britain. She also offers a fool featuring custard instead of cream.
The point is, that while fools have always been relatively simple to make (although still requiring a certain amount of manual labour before the arrival of kitchen appliances), they’ve never been quotidian fare. When fresh seasonal fruit was still prized, and when cream was fresh and rich and properly delicious, fools were an absolute treat. In fact, my dear Florence White, in Good Things in England, describes a strawberry and raspberry fool recipe from 1823 – raspberries, strawberries, sugar, cream and orange flower water – as a ‘luxury’ one.
So here I offer you a sublime but ridiculously simple fool. It’s so very good. But would I serve just a bowl of cream and rhubarb to friends who came for dinner? I doubt it. But I will join Ruby Tandoh in trying to change my attitude.
Rhubarb fool
I used homegrown rhubarb for this – not the candy pink forced stalks – which I stashed in the freezer last summer. To make the compote I put 450g chopped rhubarb stalks into a heavy pan, added 75g caster sugar and the juice from an orange I’d zested for something and needed using up. I simmered the rhubarb until it collapsed and the juices had reduced a little, and set it aside to reach room temperature before blitzing to a puree and fooling around with it.
I’ve used half cream, half crème fraiche (Greek yoghurt is terrific too), as it’s light and lovely. I find 100% cream is just too rich.
Serves 2
100ml Greek yoghurt or crème fraiche
100ml double cream
1 tsp icing sugar
¼ tsp rosewater
150g rhubarb puree, plus two extra spoonfuls
1. Beat the yoghurt, cream, icing sugar and rosewater to soft peaks.
2. Gently fold the rhubarb through the cream – use a fork for a rippled effect.
3. Spoon into glasses or glass dishes.
Do you cook to impress?
That’s so funny, I am right in the middle of the process of making Nigel Slater’s rhubarb fool! I just put the syrup into the fridge to chill... I am cheating and melting some ice cream instead of making custard from scratch
Sounds delicious! I’m not one for the impressive dish, unless by impressive you mean as from-scratch as possible, without any processing and additives. But I like to wow people with how good healthy options can be.