Category Archives: Food history

Lavender and Lovage – book review đź“–

Lavender and Lovage – cookbook review đź“– “By interleaving smaller stories and anecdotes between the recipes, Karen’s woven a holistic, beautiful book, where the recipes only make full sense with the voice, and vice versa”

Lean pasta sauce – Salsa magro

Salsa magro, or lean sauce. A delicious, unusual tomato based sauce – adapted for modern kitchens from a late 1800s recipe

Hot Water crust pastry technique – and wild boar and apple spiced hand raised pie recipe

Hot water crust illustrated technique – with wild boar & apple spiced hand raised pie recipe

Iced Souvaroffs with rhubarb and apricot jams and pistachio cream

Now – who’s excited about the imminent new series of the Great British Bake Off? Almost everyone involved in the Twitter baking community for a start! I’ve included some of my illustrations in this recipe to help you make these Souvaroff biscuits. This year the fab and lovely Baking Nanna and Rob Allen have put togetherContinue reading “Iced Souvaroffs with rhubarb and apricot jams and pistachio cream”

Strawberry and cream Souvaroffs – the original jammie dodgers

These petit four sablĂ©s have been adapted from a very old French recipe I found (late 1800s). Although it was a French recipe, these biscuits had an intriguing Russian name and I tried to research where they came from or who they were named after. I discovered one or two French websites that claimed theContinue reading “Strawberry and cream Souvaroffs – the original jammie dodgers”

Alice in Wonderland Victorian fancies

This was a little project I’ve been hatching for a while. It combines a bit of research into Victorian treats, a bit of illustration and drawing and some recipe reverse-engineering. It also marries an homage to Alice in Wonderland in its 150th birthday year (as I love the story and, in particular, John Tenniel’s originalContinue reading “Alice in Wonderland Victorian fancies”

Esterházy torte – nut dacquoise layer cake

Esterházy cake is a dacquoise layer torte originating in Budapest in the late 1800s. It was created (as many famous/regional speciality cakes are) by a confectioner keen to impress one of the great houses of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire and one of its members in particular, Prince Paul III Anton Esterházy de Galántha. Its longevity asContinue reading “Esterházy torte – nut dacquoise layer cake”