Time for crumpets
And female cooks who've inspired me
Let’s talk about homemade crumpets. Have I lost you already? Hear me out on this one. They are quick, easy and so delicious – worth a go on a weekend morning I promise, not least for the comfort factor.
Some recipes contain milk, but I follow a method that just requires plain flour (I use Waitrose spelt flour), warm water, sea salt, baking powder, a pinch of caster sugar, dried yeast and butter. Store-cupboard ingredients - you don’t even need eggs. The trickiest bit is getting used to turning out the crumpet rings, but I have a few tips.
I made a batch the other morning, C and I ate a couple and headed out, leaving the rest in the warming oven of our ancient Aga for the other boys to have toasted with butter and jam when they got home from their park run. What better welcome?!
Recipe for Crumpets
You’ll need four crumpet rings - I bought these non-stick ones.
Ingredients (makes about 10-12):
350g plain flour
450ml warm water
1/2 tsp sea salt
2 tsps baking powder
large pinch of caster sugar
10g dried yeast
50g unsalted butter, for greasing
Whisk the flour, warm water and sea salt together in a large mixing bowl for two minutes. Add the baking powder, sugar and yeast and whisk for another minute. Cover the bowl with clingfilm and leave in a warm place for 20 minutes. The mixture should start to look nice and bubbly.
Grease the crumpet rings well with unsalted butter and place in a pre-heated frying pan over a medium-high heat. Ladle crumpet batter into each up to the half-way point. Heat for 1.5 minutes then reduce the heat to low and cook until they begin to appear set, are coming away from the edges of the rings and you can see bubbles on the surface - about another 4 minutes. (The lower heat prevents the bottoms from singeing.) The crumpets in the picture above are not ready for flipping btw.
Use a palette knife to check if you can loosen the crumpets from the edges of the rings and remove each one with the aid of a tea towel or oven glove. Flip the crumpets over and finish cooking for 30 seconds before removing from the pan.
NOTE: In practice, I sometimes find it hard to extricate the crumpets from the crumpet rings, so I flip the whole ring over, crumpet and all and push it down to finish cooking. This means fewer perfect holes on the surface, but Dom’s solution is to cut them in half before toasting. Sacrilege. But, whatever.
Toast and spread with butter. Happy Days.
This week, I thought of writing about kids being happier if they eat fish fingers - that was an actual story in The Times today – or again on our life in Cornwall, but instead I am inspired by this story in Vogue. It’s titled ‘7 chefs on the women who inspired their culinary voices’ and it got me thinking about the women who have inspired my love of cookery.
1. Top spot has to go to my mum…
I remember I’d bought some prepared frozen Bramley apple (I often do for crumbles) about two years ago, and she said “what on earth have you done that for?!”. This farmer’s wife had no idea why you wouldn't gather them from your tree or adjacent barn and peel then chop them yourself.
“Mum!” I said in a rather exasperated way. “I am a busy woman. I am trying to save time.” To be fair, she takes a number of shortcuts herself these days, but when I was growing up, dad milked a cow so she separated the milk and made her own cream and butter. On a daily basis she’d make pastry, pies, pasties the size of your head, stews, roasts, buns, biscuits, cakes etc. She entertained brilliantly. So number one spot has to go to mum.
2. Aunty Carolyn…
Mum’s sister (it could be that something runs in the family…), my Aunty Carolyn and Uncle Anthony ran a hotel for most of my childhood on The Roseland. It was called The Roseland House Hotel. They cooked the food themselves and did so beautifully. If home was all about mum’s rustic and hearty fare – there was always half a cow in the freezer – then the hotel always felt to me to be THE fine-dining scene. Aunty Carolyn would occasionally let me into her walk-in fridge, bestowing precious gifts of ripe cherries or chocolate ice cream. She showed me how to de-vein king prawns when I was about 8 - a favourite food and so my adoration knew no bounds.
3. Eleanor Maidment…
Eleanor was food editor when I worked on Waitrose Food. One of the wonders of that place was that every single recipe in each issue got tested in the kitchen next to where we all sat and worked, so we all got to taste everything. In the years I was on the magazine, I remember being influenced by the Hemsley Sisters, Alice Waters, Anna Jones and Georgina Hayden, but most of all, Eleanor. She really cared about and knew what was healthy - her recipes contained lots of wholegrains, pulses (she has just written a book on the subject), eggs, spices, vegetables - wonderful food. I still make her yoghurt pancakes, sour cream rhubarb cake and quick omelette with crab, flash-fried cabbage and lime.
4. Delia Smith…
Just has to be. Mum followed Delia Smith, as did all the home-cooks in the 90s. We watched her programmes. In my mind, the festive season proper only begins when Delia’s Christmas comes out.
5. Anna del Conte…
When I want an authentic Italian recipe, I turn to Anna. She is the oracle and I so enjoyed spending time with her when I worked on Waitrose Food. Her autobiography is fascinating and her take on British food habits always made me smile. (We use far too much garlic and our predilection for mustard is due to dead taste-buds.)
6. Rachel Carson…
This is a bit out there, and she wasn’t technically a cook but, mum read Carson’s Silent Spring and it was from that point she began developing ideas about what we should and shouldn’t eat. She’d buy organic when it wasn’t fashionable and talk about avoiding pesticides and practices that harmed the soils and our bodies. So from my childhood I took that message on and it’s why I scour food labels, buy organic or the best I can afford and pay attention to how meat was reared or plants grown.
There will be others. Must be others, but these are six that spring to mind this March evening. I wonder which women have inspired you?