Spoiling the ship

There is a saying that one should not ‘spoil the ship for a hap’orth of tar’. This means that it is possible to spoil something by cutting corners financially – in the case of the saying; a ship, which needs more tar than it is given.

This axiom is also applicable to food. By this, I mean the type of ingredients one might choose to use in the preparation of a particular recipe, rather than any shortcuts with elements of the method.

A friend of mine used to run a catering company. We were both interested in food and she once told me of a conversation she’d had with a third party, in which that person had suggested how she intended to prepare a trifle, which is a popular dessert in Britain, especially on special occasions.  Frankly, its magic is lost on me; the whole thing seems rather like nursery food, and in any case, looks a mess once a few portions have been served from it. However, I feel that this allows me to be a bit more objective about it, as I don’t have a personal axe to grind, as it were.

The starting point was chocolate Swiss roll with a green mint filling. This was to be covered with lime ‘Angel Delight’ (a convenience product) and topped with ‘Dream Topping’ (another convenience product). The decoration was to be ‘hundreds and thousands’ but when these are added too far in advance, the colour bleeds out from them, rendering the appearance rather unattractive. To the genuine trifle connoisseur, this concoction would be an abomination and a completely unacceptable corruption of the original dish. As I understand it, for example, a ‘proper trifle’ contains sponges soaked in sherry (or other fortified wine), fruit (or jam), custard (preferably home-made) and a topping of whipped cream – with maybe a few flaked almonds. 

It would be true to say that this trifle variant would be considerably cheaper to make than its pedigree counterpart and this is what often causes the problems with preparing food; namely the substitution of cheaper and inferior ingredients.

For example in a cookery demonstration I saw some years ago, the speaker was preparing a chocolate sponge cake and advised the audience to use drinking chocolate powder. This would, in my opinion, produce a vastly inferior result, because this product contains a proportion of powdered milk and sugar. The finished cake would taste overly sweet and not strongly enough of chocolate. Cookery writers would either recommend using cocoa powder (which contains neither milk powder nor sugar) or possibly melted chocolate containing a high percentage of cocoa solids, in order to maximise the chocolate flavour, bearing in mind that other components of the cake mixture (flour, sugar, fat and eggs)  will dilute any flavour added. Continuing on the topic of cakes, I would always use butter in their preparation, and unsalted butter at that, because the flavour is much superior. This is particularly true for shortbread, which just doesn’t taste right if fats other than butter are used in its preparation. I am also against using margarine for different reasons; a topic I deal with in another blog on this site.

Something I had never heard of previously was also pointed out recently by a friend, namely the substitution of lemon curd for the home-made lemon filling in a lemon meringue pie. When we discussed this, I commented that the cookery writer Delia Smith even recommended making your own lemon curd to fill a lemon sponge cake as (and I quote) “most commercial lemon curds are unspeakable”.

Appearance is not always a failsafe guide to the palatability of the finished dish either; the photo at the start of this post shows a chocolate cake I prepared earlier this year, in which the problem was not that I hadn’t used cocoa; rather that I had mistakenly added a large amount of bicarbonate of soda instead of baking powder, rendering the cake effectively inedible. My husband and I managed one piece each before consigning the remainder to the food bin.

I don’t charge for my content. but if you would like to make a donation, you would be welcome to do so using the form.