Monday, March 22, 2010

English tarts

If you thought scones were an English dessert, you don't know dick:
  • Bakewell tart is a small pastry filled with eggs and ground almonds, covered with jam
  • Banoffee pie is pastry filled with bananas, toffee, cream and boiled condensed milk
  • Bread and butter pudding - not to be confused with bread pudding - are slices of buttered bread scattered with raisins, covered with an egg and milk mixture, and baked.  (For bread pudding you use stale bread that is soaked and squeezed dry--but that's a French thing.)
  • Christmas pudding (or plum pudding) is usually made with suet (beef fat), dried fruit and nuts, steamed, and served with hard sauce (butter and sugar creamed with rum, brandy, or whiskey).
  • Clotted cream is a thick yellow cream made by heating unpasteurised cow's milk and then leaving it in shallow pans for several hours, until the cream rises forms buttery "clots." (It has a minimum fat content of 55%, and is fantastic on scones.)
  • Crumble is stewed fruit (such as apples or rhubarb) topped with a crumbly mixture of butter, flour, and sugar and baked until crisp
  • Eccles cake is a small, round cake made from puff pastry, filled with currants (small raisins), and topped with demerara (turbinado) sugar.
  • Fool is puréed fruit (typically gooseberries) mixed with whipped cream and sugar
  • Jam Roly-Poly is a flat-rolled suet pudding, which is then spread with jam and rolled up.
  • Mince pies are filled with mincemeat, a preserve containing apple, raisins, sultanas, and spices.  These are served in individual portions, and were once banned in England.
  • Spotted dick is a pudding made from suet and currants. (The "spotted" part is easy, but nobody really knows why it's called "dick.")
  • Sticky toffee pudding is a moist sponge cake, sometimes made with finely chopped dates or prunes, covered in a toffee sauce.
  • Summer pudding is stale slices of white bread layered in a deep bowl filled with berries, such as raspberries, strawberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants, and blackberries, then refrigerated until the fruit juice has soaked into the bread.
  • Trifle is made from layers of sponge cake, fruit, thick custard, and whipped cream
  • Treacle tart is a shortcrust pastry with a filling of golden syrup (similar to corn syrup), lemon butter, and breadcrumbs, served warm with cream.
In England, "pudding" refers to any type of dessert. And scones are served with tea as an afternoon snack, never as a dessert!

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