In this case it means nothing more than getting a deep pastry tart filled with a nutmeggy mixture of cream, sugar and eggs rather than the expected jug of creamy yellow sauce, ‘I’ll have a pot of tea and a custard’ being a request for a hot drink and an individual tart rather than a dish of sweet sauce.
I fear for the custard. It is as old-fashioned as a slice of Hovis or a clothes brush. It belongs to a world of fire-tongs, antimacassars and black-and-white television. The appreciation of sinking your teeth into the soft, almost damp pastry of a custard tart and feeling the filling quiver against your lip is not for the young. The true enjoyment of a custard (as opposed to the pleasures of custard) is something that only comes with age, like rheumatism, bus passes and a liking for Midsomer Murders. I am probably the only person in England to regularly buy a couple of custards from Marks who is still in possession of his own teeth.
The way you tackle a custard is as much a ritual as the way you eat an ‘original’ KitKat. First you take the tart from its box, then, with the help of your fingernail, you separate the tart from its foil container. It is essential to get it out whole, without denting the fragile pastry edge. Regulars find that pushing up from the bottom helps. You then set about eating the tart either by picking it up and tucking in, or, more likely, as you are obviously a custard tart sort of person, cutting it neatly into quarters. There is something graceful about this last method. What you do with the foil container is not really a matter for this book, but my guess is that it will be crushed, perhaps fold upon fold with an almost origami-style neatness, until it is ready for the bin.
Mrs Penny-Pincher saves butter papers. A little wad of them in the fridge door, kept neatly folded for greasing cake tins before she bakes her weekly Victoria sponge. Anyone with a pair of nostrils knows that butter gets fridgy if you don’t use it quickly enough, even when you keep it in one of those annoying little compartments in the fridge door. Heaven knows how old some of Mrs P’s butter papers are by the time she gets round to using them. She may be saving a penny or two but seems oblivious to the fact that she is actually greasing her cake tins with rancid butter.
She makes stock with every bone and carcass she is left with; uses every manky vegetable in the rack for soup; keeps used tin foil in a pile by the cooker. At the shops, first port of call is the reduced-to-clear bin. Not out of necessity – Mrs P is hardly on the breadline – but out of the possibility of saving a penny or two on a dented tin or a bashed Swiss roll: ‘Well, it will be pretty bashed when I’ve put it in a trifle.’ It makes sense, until you consider that you have to buy custard, cream and a tin of fruit cocktail in order to make the most of your thrifty purchase. Normally not known for taking risks, the economical cook is nevertheless willing to take a punt on the can with no label on it. The chances are it will be baked beans, but what the hell, you never know your luck It might be tinned peaches.
So, you have spent far longer shopping than you intended, getting rather carried away with the new Gary Rhodes saucepan set, and now you are late to pick up the kids from school, and there’s a queue at the checkout. Of course there’s a queue at the checkout. There is always a queue at the checkout. You start looking at your watch, and then burning your eyes into the neck of the person in front (always helps), daring them to start chatting with the checkout girl, or having the audacity to have some unpriced item in their basket that needs a price check.
All appears to be going well, and you are just reminding yourself not to be such a pessimist, when your heart sinks. The person in front is paying with vouchers cut from a magazine. In terms of annoyance, this is akin to being behind the woman who ferrets in the furthest reaches of her purse for the correct change – ‘No, I’ve got it, it’s in here somewhere, dear’ – the man whose charge card is refused, the person who finds a leak in their packet of washing powder and has to wait while a runner goes and gets a replacement. Each voucher has been religiously snipped along the dotted line, and despite the honesty with which such people no doubt spend their carefully collected booty, each has to be matched to the contents of the shopping trolley by the cashier.
Standing behind them in the queue, hopping from one foot to the other, and knowing you were late for the kids last week too, you can’t help wondering if they are redeeming the voucher against something they would have bought anyway, or are simply buying something to get money off it. You know very well they really would have preferred the almond fancies, but the voucher was only redeemable against cherry Bakewells. So cherry Bakewells it is.
These islands are rich in local recipes, and you could probably eat a different cake in every town from Land’s End to the Hebrides. Cornwall’s peel-flecked heavy cake would keep you going until you got to feast on Devon’s cream-filled chudleighs, before moving swiftly along through treasures such as Somerset’s crumbly catterns, Dorset apple, and the sultana-spiked Norfolk vinegar cake. On the way you could snatch a Banbury cake, a Chorley cake, one of Yorkshire’s fat rascals or a nice slice of treacly parkin. You might also like to include Richmond maids of honour, Shrewsbury cakes, orange-scented Norfolk sponges and curranty Pembrokeshire buns.
Then there is Pitcaithly bannock (a sort of almond shortbread studded with chopped peel), Westmorland pepper cake with cloves and black treacle, and something called Patagonian black cake, named for the Welsh families who emigrated to work in the South American gold mines. Richmond, Rippon, Selkirk, Nelson, Grantham and Goosenargh all celebrate their existence with something for tea. This is little Britain in a cake tin.
At four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, cake in hand, we can toast almost any county, city or fair we choose. We can say thank you for the harvest or well done to the sheep shearers, we can salute a wedding or wave goodbye after a funeral. There are temptations to raise a glass of Madeira to Shrove Tuesday and First Footing, to Twelfth Night and Hogmanay, to mop fairs and matrimony. On a Sunday we can thank the Lord with a slice of bible cake or scripture cake, godcakes (but naturally, no devil’s food cake) or church window cake, better known as Battenberg. Then there’s sad cake, soul cake, sly cake and shy cake; cakes for spinsters, cakes for the navy, cakes for the Queen. There is almost nothing in this country for which a cake hasn’t been named.
It would be wooden spoons at dawn if any single place tried to claim gingerbread as its own. Instead different territories have laid their claim by adding a little something to the basic butter, sugar and treacle mix. Whether it’s beer and ground almonds in the recipe from Fochabers, the oatmeal in Orkney’s broonie or the honey that Welsh cooks have been known to stir in, every area seems to have left its stamp. Visitors to Nottingham would no doubt have delighted in the scent of cinnamon from the sticky little cakes sold at the Goose Fair, and while Yorkshire cooks threw in caraway seeds and ground coriander, the Lancastrian bakers next door stirred in marmalade and a teaspoon of mixed spice. Irish recipes have included the worthy note of wholemeal flour and the unabashed luxury of preserved ginger, while Scots drizzled black treacle into their parlies, the little ginger drops so beloved of the Scottish Parliament. The most famous of all, from Grasmere, is barely gingerbread as we know it, being a secret recipe more akin to a biscuit, tender and crumbly and without a hint of treacle, yet blessed with the distinctive notes of brown sugar and butter and the essential whiff of the treasured spice.
Sawdust and scrubbed wood, the wince-inducing scent of fresh blood, men in white coats with Brylcreemed hair and hands like sausages – the traditional butcher’s shop was where you went for black pudding for breakfast and a nice chop for your tea. You stood in the cool