Baking from abroad

Jennifer Forrest, 12, preparing chocolate chunk and apricot biscuits using her grandmother's Kenwood mixer.

The Kenwood mixer used by Eve Poole to fill the tins with baking. It is still used each week by her daughter and grandchildren.

The Jammy Dodger from the United Kingdom is no match for the Shrewsbury biscuit Vivienne Allan ate as a child.

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As a child, the fragrant smells of home cooking - especially baking and more particularly biscuits - were delicious temptations for my sister, brother and me to raid the cupboard and find the latest batch of afghans smothered in chocolate icing, yoyos in perfect creamy alignment and Shrewsbury biscuits with their round hole in the centre displaying the raspberry jam filling.

Then there were belgian biscuits with pink jelly crystals lightly sprinkled on top of white icing and of course melting moments, which were small mounds of absolute perfection.

My mother made them all.

She learned from my grandmother, who in turn learned from her mother and so it went; back, we knew, to the old country, to Warwickshire in England.

My grandmother's kitchen was substantial.  As a 60-something adult I try to fit myself back into my 5-year-old shoes and perhaps conclude the kitchen was measured differently by such young eyes.

But no, it was without a doubt very substantial.   The back door to the house in Crinan St, Invercargill, opened into the scullery  all cream walls and wooden tongue-and-groove shelves where the cream and green pots were layered alongside the earthenware baking bowls.

The scullery led into the main kitchen with a huge wooden dining table at its centre, the coal range at one end and at the other end a door that was always open, leading to the pantry. 

This was a wondrous affair where shelves were crammed with the fruits of my grandmother's preserving and jam-making efforts; large bins containing flour and sugar were topped by more shelves that held the general grocery items needed to feed a full house.  

My father was one of seven children and my grandmother fed them all in that kitchen.  She was the cook, the baker, the master chef whose biscuits were kept in cream-coloured tins.  

She taught her daughter-in-law as best she could although, truth to tell, her pupil was not renowned for her small pieces.  She was more an apple strudel guru. 

My mother didn't know a thing about baking when she arrived in Invercargill.  She was a war bride, not yet 20 and fresh from military service in the Middle East.  Her cooking ability was minimal and her knowledge of baking even less.

My grandmother, however, was a great tutor and taught as much by demonstration as by instruction. Mrs Beaton was the staple cookbook, augmented by the hand-written recipes passed down from generation to generation. Fittingly, one of my mother's first gifts from my grandmother was her own recipe book, a green hard-backed A5 notebook with the pages indexed alphabetically. 

In the biscuit category the favourites remained afghans, yoyos and Shrewsburys with Belgian biscuits and melting moments almost as popular.  

My mother's forays into baking were tentative until the arrival of her first and only Kenwood mixer  a glorious, gleaming piece of apparatus that took up a large part of our kitchen bench.  After that she whipped up batch upon batch as far back as I can remember.

With such a heritage of biscuit making, it came as a shock to find nothing comparable in the United Kingdom when I went there in 2005.  My first inquiries not long after we arrived were directed to the Bedford hospital chef, a delightful cook who was well practised in the art of baking as well as producing nourishing meals for inpatients and visitors alike.  The hospital restaurant boasted a small cafe where eclairs and Danish pastries were displayed in calorific profusion, yet there was not a biscuit in sight.

``The dog or the country?'' was the serious response.  

I explained what they were and how they looked.  No, not a single one.  

Again my explanation. Again the negative response.  

He simply must know what I meant. When I described what the biscuit looked like, I received a cautious response to try the supermarket and look for Jammy Dodgers. 

I was going to say they sounded like a team of American footballers, but refrained and headed to Sainsbury's.  Sure enough, there they were.  Uninspiringly plain, disappointingly bland with no hint of lemon in the shortcake, they were nothing like the biscuits of home. Months later, I walked into a small cake stall in London, situated between two home stores in Tottenham Court Rd.

There on the counter was a single Shrewsbury biscuit disguised as a Jammy Dodger beautifully wrapped in cellophane and tied with a narrow green ribbon.  I paid 2 for two biscuits sandwiched with jam and took them home.

They weren't what we knew  there was no lemon zest to the shortcake  but they were infinitely better than the packeted variety. The story doesn't end there.   Last year, I went to lunch in a cafe in St James Park owned and operated by Oliver Peyton, a master chef of some renown in England and head chef of the National Gallery.  There for sale was a cookbook with tempting recipes and magnificent images reproduced courtesy of the gallery.  

I flipped through the display copy and  on page 64, opposite a full page painting by Johannes Vermeer, was a recipe for Jammy Dodgers. 

Oliver Peyton prefaces the recipe with a caution: ``These are shortbread biscuits sandwiched with jam. Don't be tempted to spread the jam too thickly because the biscuits won't hold together. Then again, don't skimp on it.  High-sugar jams are too slippery, so use jam with a high fruit content and crush the pieces of fruit with a fork before spreading. 

For some reason dodgers are always round, but there's nothing to stop you making them into fingers, or any other shape you fancy.''

Then he provides the recipe with detailed instructions about how to make them and finish them off.  It could be Mrs Beaton with her words of wisdom about the art of good biscuits worded 100 years ago.  And, apart from the lemon zest, they taste just like Nanny Poole's Shrewsburys. 

Of afghans, Belgians and yoyos, there remained no sign, but, funnily enough, I saw Anzac biscuits for sale in a bakery and cafe just off Portobello Rd in Notting Hill not long before coming home. 

It turned out they were made by the New Zealand owner.   He said they were immensely popular.  I bet.