It’s from the first book I taught them to cook, about cookery lessons in an east London comprehensive.
There’s also my school recipe for Marmalade. How did I get fifty students to each end up with a well set jar of this delicious sweet and sour jam? I don’t know.
The recipe is on this link. Notice there is no pectin used.
In Valencia last week, the streets were filled with Seville orange trees laden with fruit. They are too sour to eat so the 10,000 trees get left alone.
The city harvests the oranges in January each year and uses the fruit for juice and perfume making. Dundee marmalade has passed them by!
In January the streets of Valencia are filled with orange trees, laden with fruit.
In the 1950s, Britain produced 1 million chickens a year – today it is over a billion. Intensive farming in the late 1960s reduced the price of chicken.
In 1972, chicken was too expensive for me to cook at school and there was nothing in the textbooks or exams.
One day I will never ever make rough puff, flaky and puff pastry again. It will be struck off by the exam boards when they realise it is a high fat waste of my student’s time. We might show videos about it as a piece of history. A nonsense done by daft cookery teachers in the 1970s and silly fun shown on old TV game shows.
Cream horn tins bought in charity shop as piping bags.
One day a factory will make it and we can buy it in supermarkets ready made if we really want to cook with it. The cream horn tins will be thrown away. My students won’t know the meaning of mille feuille.
Eccles cakes, sausage rolls and jam puffs will be bought in cake shops unless a future government puts a ban on them or labels them with big red sticker to show they are very high in fat.
No more pastry made from lard or cheap fishy margarine from county supplies. No more struggling on hot summer days trying to get lumps of fat in between layers of fatty pastry. No more scraping off sticky failures from my work surfaces.
No more greasy baking trays for me to soak after school in the butler’s sink full of boiling water and caustic soda.
No more fatty cooking that drips through the shelves of the oven, splatters the oven sides and glass doors and covers the oven with blobs of grease.
My cookers need an industrial cleaning company to come in after these pastry lessons and remove the amount of grease that has accumulated from these wretched high fat pastry dishes.
After school I spend hours lying on the kitchen floor, scraping out layers of fat and scouring the trays at the bottom of the oven with endless Brillo pads to stop black smoke from billowing out when the ovens are lit.
There is a limit to the cleaning greasy oven punishments I can hand out to naughty students to help with this task!
And no, the school cleaners do not want to do this job – it is not part of their role according to Jim the caretaker.
The exam has been renamed Food and Nutrition. We learn about healthy eating and cutting down on saturated fat. Fatty pastry lessons must stop.
Jenny Ridgwell 