It bought great pleasure at the table this morning and received great feedback, including that it tastes ‘like a giant hot cross bun.’ John commented that Ruth was a huge fan of saffron and I was pleased to have found a good way to use the spice that recalls her legendary cooking powers in some small way. I can recommend the recipe highly. I got it from Allrecipes.com which is kind of like Ravelry for the home chef.

In other news my mysterious xmas knitting is being blocked, the Christmas preparations are well underway and my plans today mostly involve mince-pies and cake icing.

I am extremely inspired by the Tudor Feast at Christmas programme on BBC four that I watched last night. For those who missed this programme, it was based in Haddon Hall and involved the recreation of a Tudor feast. Food was procured, prepared, cooked and presented in the manner of the time, according to old recipes passed down through generations of the family who still own Haddon Hall. Most interesting to me was the revelation that the sugar work was done in Tudor times by the ladies of the house. Sugar was preposterously expensive and rich lords and ladies didn’t trust their servants not to steal it. On the programme one of the historians in charge with recreating the feast created a Marchpane. This essentially seemed to be a solid block of marzipan, iced in royal icing and gilded with real gold leaf. It was the crowning moment of the feast, affirming the extreme wealth and power of the homeowner when it was presented to him in front of his guests.

Tudor eating seems to be altogether a more brutish, gristly, meaty, sooty, dirty kind of cuisine to that enjoyed today. Blood, earth, ash and bone all feature at various stages and the average Tudor Feast was consumed largely in fistfuls and ‘gobbets.’ I hope our Christmas dinner tomorrow won’t so massively resemble a Viking food-orgy… but it would be nice if our Christmas cake could be as beautiful as the Marchpane.