Consuming Interest

Anyone for Tennis Cake?

By ELIZABETH DAVID Maureen piped rosettes of cream expertly round the trifle. It was going to be a large party but she was nearly through: just the drip-mats and the ash trays to distribute in the lounge and the sand- wiches to garnish.

Years ago I cut this opening paragraph from a short story in Woman's Own.

Maureen, it presently emerges, is suffering from a fear of Life. Her kitchen is her refuge from Reality, her forcing-bag her comforter. Her sister and her sister's friends, a flighty crew, are taking advantage of Maureen's gifts as cook- parlourmaid and her self-effacing nature to give any amount of parties for which Maureen makes all the preparations.

Reading a newly-published cookery book out today, it has struck me that what Maureen Sly- boots was very likely up to all the time was prac- tising her competition-cookery on her tiresome sister and thoughtless friends, and serve them jolly well right.

Cooking for Prizes* is a bit of a worry. On one level it is carefully thought out, clearly written and useful. There is much to be learned from it. We are given all kinds of instructive information, such as what effects certain acids or raising agents have on certain flours, which flours are best for ,what pUrpose, and how by rough experiment to tell one from another (although not how to get the one you need), why a cake cracks open at the top, why it sinks, how to stick the marzipan round a Tenths Cake or Bat- tenberg Square, why the fruit in jam rises to the top of the jar, why pastry is too brittle, too soft, too thick, too thin, why it does something known to the baking trade as creeping.

So far, so good. It is when it comes to an obsession with the supposedly professional ap- pearance of cakes and jams, biscuits, buns and pastries that the prize-gaining approach to cookery at village and county shows comes unstuck.

'Often,' says Mrs. Richardson, 'it is not the quality of the products so much as the lack of care in preparation or finishing off that loses marks.' Quite so. Quite rightly. Up to a point. Beyond that point cooking for prizes parts com- pany from cooking for eating.

Well do I remember a cookery journalist colleague of mine describing a competition at which she was once asked to help judge.

On the grounds that the flavour of the gateau under consideration for the first prize was totally without distinction, my colleague dissented. She was sharply reminded that flavour was a minor point. 'Look,' said her co-judges, 'at the masterly way that young woman handles the forcing-bag.'

Maureen rides again when Mrs. Richardson goes into detail about how to win prizes for jam tarts. (I cannot help calling to mind a saucy Edwardian postcard I once possessed, which bore the -caption, 'Tarts are Nicest when they are Warm.') We are told how to pipe the jam into the pastry cases, how thick, what colours, what kinds, which contrasts are most likely to catch the judge's eye. Nothing about the quality of the jam. To me it is a waste of good jam to sieve it, as you have to if it's to go through a forcing-bag. What's wrong with learning to put it in neatly with a spoon? And if it's poor jam, why prizes?

The whole book is an odd medley of such contradictions. Mrs. Richardson has most like- able common sense. 'There is no feeling in a wooden spoon, and that goes for electric mixers too. . . . Learn to use your hands,' and she also insists a good deal on doing the right things for what I cannot help thinking are the wrong reasons. The yolks of eggs from free-range bens improve the appearance of a cake; over-flavour- ing and over-colouring are most undesirable, especially for competitions. 'Cooking compounds' —i.e., vegetable fats—are much advocated on the grounds that they cream easily with the sugar for cake, incorporating the maximum amount of air. (Mrs. Richardson couldn't by any chance be a little bemused by advertising slogans, could she?) Butter is excellent for puff-pastry and shortbread, 'not so good for cakes except for improving flavour.' (My italics throughout.) A recipe for 'a good firm home-made aspic jelly' calls for Marmite, gelatine, water, lemon juice, tarragon vinegar, salt, pepper. Good-looking perhaps. Firm, no doubt. And the taste? Eh?

Mrs. Richardson thinks that competitions im- prove standards of cooking. Certainly they should. In fact do they, when so little impor- tance is attached to flavour.?

I think the point is that if you learn to cook decently according to commonsense rules and with a view to your food being eaten it will taste nice and usually it quickly follows that it also looks nice, in a homely kind of way; a more ac- ceptable way, one would have thought, than pre- senting dishes smothered with irrelevant decora- tion, which is always suspect, and in competition cookery more often than not copied from mass- produced commercial examples or the photo- graphy food (again, believe me, little to do with food for eating) shown in magazines and cookery books.

Few home-cooks, after all, have access to the stylish, casual-looking handiwork of the first- rate professional, and if decorate we must, let's do it with a little lighthearted fantasy of our own devising. If we are ham-handed anyway, we shan't derive much benefit from Mrs. Richard- son's advice to stencil a pattern on a biscuit dough with the aid of a plastic doyley.

Cecilia Scurfield, author of Home-Made Cakes and Pastries, j' also recently published, reeks little of chemistry or commercial bakery standards.

* By Alice Richardson. (Mills and Boon, 12s. 6d.) t Faber, 9s. 6d. $ Faber, 6s. 6d. She does give well-worked-out quantities, tim- ing and temperatures, but appears to worry more about the taste of her cakes than their air ratios. Her ingredients are butter, fruit, chocolate, almonds, hazel nuts, rum, coffee, spices, natural flavourings. If the stuff doesn't cream easily, You just go on working it until it does. All the same, as one would expect from the author of Home- Baked,t that lovable little volume on yeast cookery, the recipes read as if they would work and produce cakes tasting as they should, although, it would be wrong to jump to hasty conclusions. The point is, that it is Mrs. Scurfield's approach which sends you, in the first place, hot-foot to the mixing bowls and the roll- ing pins. Mrs. Richardson's doesn't. But when something goes wrong, it will be a help to be able to refer to her book.