CLANDESTINE CAKE CLUB

I first heard of Clandestine Cake Club one day at work. I was browsing NPR articles while eating my lunch and caught sight of a blog post titled “Why Britain Has Gone Mad About Baking.” My gut reaction was has Britain gone mad about baking? When?! The answers to those questions are: Yes and 2011.

Clandestine Cake Club was started by a retired British woman named Lynn Hill. She began a blog and website with this idea that she would personally facilitate strangers meeting together at secret locations to share cakes. NPR credits Hill (and the bad economy) with igniting a new national interest in baking. Hill has an informative website that shows a short documentary about CCC and pictures from recent gatherings. Looking at the photos, my mouth started to water. Depending on the size of your gathering, there are several cakes being passed around, and you can eat as much as you want. The sheer number of cakes and different bakers means there’s quite a lot of variety. It’s something of a cake buffet, which doesn’t really exist in the real world.

Immediately I started thinking about hosting a Clandestine Cake Club event at my house as an attempt to explore British culture for my blog. I pitched the idea to my friends, and they were very enthusiastic. They even looked the other way when I announced the incredibly strict rule that you have to bring a cake. You can’t bring brownies or muffins or pies or tarts or...in a sweepingly dramatic move...cupcakes. I didn’t really understand the need to be that strict about a dessert gathering, and most of my friends didn’t really understand it either. Maybe it’s a British thing. Anyway, we decided that at least the first time we’d play by the rules and all bake a cake.

I was sort of in awe as my friends marched into my dining room with their cakes a couple of weeks ago. There was a buttery raspberry summer cake with Haagen Daaz to go on the side (Beth: “I don’t care if bringing ice cream breaks one of the rules”); a chocolate peanut butter sheet cake with Reese’s pieces and peanut butter cups sprinkled on top, a tropical bundt with toasted coconut, and a moist lemon bundt. My friends had pushed aside their busy schedules to make these perfect little desserts because I asked them to. I was so touched by this. Even those that told me frankly they found the rules limiting and arbitrary had followed them so I could write this blog post about it.

Without planning it, we had such nice variety. I think we had all made a new recipe--something we’d wanted to try or thought sounded good but never brought to a potluck or made for a dinner party. That’s the great thing about a cake club meeting after all. If you’re on the fence about a recipe or worried that something will flop, it doesn’t really matter. Yours won’t be the only dessert. People can choose to eat your disaster cake or they cannot. My almond hazelnut gateaux (I thought I’d push the envelope and make a French cake) with a moussy chocolately filling was one I’d considered making for the past 10 years but had kept flipping past in my cookbook. It was a little bit dry for my taste...and a cake that was better paired with coffee at breakfast time than for dessert. Now I know that.

As much as we grumbled about Lynn Hill’s rules, we were religious in following her second one: everyone gets to take cake home. That’s the most fabulous part of Clandestine Cake Club. At the end, when the glasses of Pimm’s and lemonade and the cups of Twining’s have been drained, everyone divies up their leftovers. The next couple of mornings we woke up to a refrigerator full of cake, and Adam—who was initially insulted that I hadn't invited him to the club—stopped complaining.

Clandestine Cake Club is a worldwide phenomenon, but there aren’t too many chapters yet in the United States. I suspect that’s because there are so many rules, because most people with good sense are a little bit leery of going to a last-minute secret location to meet a bunch of strangers with baked goods. Even in inviting people I knew to come to my home for the event, I violated the whole clandestine principle of the club. The only thing clandestine about our meeting was that my kids didn’t know about it—and then that’s not true because Nicky woke up right before it began and refused to go back to sleep.

If my friends and I aren’t joining Lynn Hill’s official group we can’t call it a Clandestine Cake Club anymore; she has the name trademarked. We could call ours Cake Club, but then that still discriminates against desserts like cupcakes and brownies, and I don’t know if I agree with that. Of course then it’s a slippery slope from here. Soon the group will be getting together in sweat pants over break ’n bake cookies and pints of Ben & Jerry’s and maybe all of the nicety will be gone from it. But if I know my friends, attendance might even be higher given those standards.

To join a Clandestine Cake Club near you or to create your own, visit Hill’s website. For recipes, visit the Recipe section, Hill’s blog, or purchase the cookbook, which will finally be available in the States in August. You can pre-order here.

#27 H.P. BULMER LTD

 

One of my favorite things about my husband Adam is his “when in Rome” mentality when it comes to food and drink. It explains why we once sampled a really unfortunate Lebanese yogurt dessert called achta bil asul (sp?) at a tapas restaurant in Georgetown (Adam: “It doesn’t sound good, but I’ve never had it before. Have you?”); why we once dined at USA Steak Buffet in Washington, Pennsylvania where I overheard a man say to his son, who had a plate filled with nine pieces of Salisbury steak: “Boy, ain’t you hungry?”; why we dined on fried alligator once in Louisiana until Adam whispered the word “reptile” and the appetizer suddenly transformed into a rubbery blob in my mouth. On a much happier note, it explains why Adam was willing to try Strongbow cider when we visited England a couple of summers ago. Strongbow is made by H.P. Bulmer Ltd., which holds a Royal Warrant from Her Majesty the Queen as “Cider Makers.”

Adam and I aren’t beer drinkers. That’s not a popular statement anymore; everybody and their brother brews beer at home and speaks fluently this language of “stouts,” “lagers,” and “IPA’s.” Cider is beer-ish, I’ll give you that, but in its aftertaste it departs from the bitterness of beer and veers towards the sweet familiarity of apple. Adam and I were sold on it the second we tasted it in a little English pub a few kilometers from Heathrow. For someone as stubbornly opposed to beer as he used to be, this change of heart is impressive.

I think there’s a pretty large segment of the American population that has never even tried hard cider. While you’ll rarely see it advertised here, I easily found several British advertisements (and here). In the U.S., cider sales make up less than 1% of total beer sales, but in the UK, 45% of all apples grown there are used to make cider. Of that huge market, Bulmer's makes 65% of the cider sold annually.

According to a Wall Street Journal article published last summer, beer producer Heineken (which now owns Bulmer’s in the UK) has taken over distribution of Strongbow within the United States. Previously it was imported and distributed by the Vermont Hard Cider Company, maker of Woodchuck cider—which sits at the #1 spot in the U.S. Strongbow is #2. There are some incredibly surprising little tidbits in the WSJ article. For one, sales of beer in the U.S. have been declining in the past three years. Second: cider drinking is evenly split among men and women in the U.S. (I had assumed a large female majority). Third: hard cider fell out of favor in this country in the 19^th century when it was overtaken by beer, but recently it’s shown a resurgence in popularity. Sales are way up.

Queen Elizabeth II granted Bulmer’s a Royal Warrant in 1955 but—like many of these warrants—I’ve wondered when she ever has time to kick up her heels and drink a glass. That said, just this week the British press sharpened its focus on the royal family, speculating about the Queen’s unusual opening speech to Parliament. There were two oddities at this year’s event: Prince Charles was present with his wife Camilla even though he hasn’t attended an opening in 17 years…and the Queen failed to announce her upcoming travel plans on behalf of the State, as she usually does. Seemingly the 87 year-old monarch is beginning to limit her role, and her son is making plans to fill her shoes. Will the Queen leave the throne before her death or simply trust Prince Charles to take over more of her responsibilities as she ages? Stay tuned. Let’s hope she’s able to rest and take care of herself in these last years she’ll serve as monarch.

Where to buy: The best Strongbow you’ll ever drink will be one you buy on tap and drink in a British pub. Short of that, the bottled variety tastes a little better than the canned if you buy it stateside. If you’re in Chicago, you can get one out at English.

#26 WAITROSE LTD

One of the difficult things about writing about the British royal family is that the story is ongoing and actively changing. Last week I was all prepared to write about another warrant holder and then Margaret Thatcher had to go and die. We certainly can’t ignore her death, especially when her relationship with the royal family—and most especially with Queen Elizabeth—was such a fascinating one. At first it was something of a challenge to tie Thatcher into a blog about products that hold a Royal Warrant, but then I remembered her father’s oft-touted occupation. He was a grocer. Waitrose Ltd. holds warrants from both the Queen and the Prince of Wales as “Grocers and Wine & Spirit Merchants.”

Waitrose is somewhat interesting among the Royal Warrant holders. It’s a place anyone in the UK has easy access to, which isn't true of some of the fancier shops and purveyors on this list. The company dates back to a small grocery shop called Waite, Rose & Taylor that opened in West London in 1904. It was acquired by the John Lewis Partnership, its current owner, in 1937 and the first Waitrose grocery store opened in 1955. Today the store’s 280 branches are seen as upscale but not inaccessible.

Of all of the obituaries and editorials I read in the British press after Maggie’s death, the most interesting one (to me) was written by Andrew Marr in the Daily Beast. He delved into the sometimes tumultuous relationship between the Iron Lady and the Queen, centering one of his anecdotes on a barbecue. 

Marr starts right off by calling the relationship between the Queen and Thatcher “difficult.” They were just so different. Thatcher was the ultra-conservative daughter of a British shop owner who had worked hard to make a name for herself in British politics by the late 1970s. As she swept into office, Thatcher brought with her reform-minded supporters who were distrustful of the monarchy and tired of the way things had always been done. Queen Elizabeth’s life had always been marked by privilege and wealth. By being a member of the royal family she found herself the target of a political movement that detested the gluttony of the monarchy. One can only imagine the depth of Queen Elizabeth’s feelings toward Thatcher and her political ideals (the Queen’s job is to remain Switzerland on politics, but it’s widely believed she leans to the left). Despite this uneasiness, Thatcher was incredibly respectful of the Queen—even to a fault, argues Marr.

He describes a barbecue that took place at Balmoral, the royal family’s Scottish home away from Buckingham Palace. The barbecue was offered as a solution to a somewhat bizarre problem that presented itself when Thatcher came into office. England had long been led by male prime ministers and male kings. After a fancy royal dinner, the men would adjourn to one room to talk politics, the women to another to talk about more frivolous things. With both the Queen and Thatcher holding the highest offices in England, the social setting became awkward. Who should talk to whom? Who should sit where? It was decided that an outdoor barbecue would be such a casual setting that it wouldn’t be necessary to separate into groups based on gender. Everyone could mingle.

It goes without saying that Sheryl Sandberg would have a field day with this one, but let’s push past the obvious sexism here and focus on the decidedly more trite concept of an English barbecue. Is this a thing? I didn’t think this was a thing. Americans barbecue. This is our thing. The British wouldn't even know where to begin, right?

When I researched this on GoogleUK I found out that a.) I am wrong and the English are actually really into barbecuing and b.) the term “english barbecue” has a meaning of its own. Urban Dictionary defines it as such:

The English BBQ normally takes place in wet or threatening weather condition. He, the man of the house, shows his family how to light the BBQ using several pints of high octane fuel. He then cooks chicken drumsticks that are black on the outside and still bleeding in the middle. Sausages are also black on the outside while being raw in the middle.

What's funny about this stereotype is that Marr describes the exact same scenario in his story. On the typical second night of the prime minister’s visit to Balmoral, Prince Philip himself would prepare a barbecue meal for everyone in attendance. The meat would be “’a beautifully cooked but very rare piece of beef...which didn’t suit Margaret at all, she hated rare meat.’” Surprisingly, the Queen would busily work alongside Philip. An anxious and ever-ready to please Thatcher couldn’t stand being waited on by a monarch and would annoy the Queen by constantly offering to help. As Marr explains: 

Once, as the Queen handed around and then gathered in plates, Mrs. Thatcher, upset to see her monarch doing a menial job unaided, kept trying to stand up and help. Eventually the Queen hissed: "Will somebody tell that woman to sit down?"

The story seems emblematic of their relationship: a prime minister with a strong sense of authority and deference only trying to help, and a Queen who could neither figure out how to relate to her or how to help feeling irritated by her.

I couldn’t help feeling irritated as I tried to convert a British barbecue sauce recipe I found on waitrose.com to one I could make in my own kitchen. I was thrilled to find this recipe used other Royal Warrant products like Coleman’s mustard powder, Lea & Perrins worcestershire sauce, and Tate & Lyle’s golden syrup. Still, there was a little bit of trial and error as I tried to substitute tomato sauce for Soffrito Passata and brown sugar for demerara sugar. At times I would have given anything to have Margaret Thatcher helping me barbecue, even if she was a Conservative. 

Where to buy: If you live in the UK, Waitrose has 280 branches for you to visit. If you live in the States, you’re probably limited to cooking recipes from the website and hoping you can one day experience Waitrose in person. Hopefully we can all be so lucky to skip down those aisles soon, as Kate Middleton sometimes does.

The Waitrose photo at the top of this post was taken by John Phillips.

Barbecue Sauce/Marinade adapted from waitrose.com

1/2 tsp. ground ginger
1/2 tsp. mustard powder
1/2 tsp. paprika
1 T olive oil
1 shallot, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
15 oz. can tomato sauce
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
3/4 cup brown sugar
2 T worcestershire sauce
2 T golden syrup
1/4 cup orange juice
salt and freshly ground black pepper
4 boneless skinless chicken breasts

Directions:

Over medium high heat, cook shallot in olive oil until carmelized. Add tomato sauce and garlic and cook for another five minutes before adding ginger, mustard powder, paprika, vinegar, sugar, worcestershire sauce, and golden syrup. Cook for another five minutes, then add orange juice, salt, and pepper to taste. Allow sauce to cool completely.

Pour about 2/3 of the barbecue sauce into a gallon-size freezer bag and add the chicken. Refrigerate for at least one hour and up to 24 hours.

Grill chicken breasts until cooked through, brushing every 2-3 minutes with reserved sauce.

Oops

I just saw an update on Facebook from Queen Elizabeth's Fan Club that today is her 87th birthday. I will admit to you right now, without hesitation, that I had completely forgotten this.

I knew this was her birthday, deep down. This morning I even thought about this date (April 21st) and thought...something important happened today...but what? I'd been thinking about it for awhile even and wondering what the blog should do in honor of the day. The fact that I then forgot about it is testament to...my busy life? How bad of a blogger I am? The fact that I should give up this project that sometimes seems like such a chore?

I just collapsed into an afternoon nap with a heavy sense of failure. I wish my life weren't so hectic. I wish I had time for all of the things I want to do and that not so much of my day was devoted to picking Cheerios up off the floor and convincing little ones to go to sleep at night, to not wake up at quarter til 5 in the morning. I also wished this past week hadn't been filled with such terrible distractions: the bombing of the Boston marathon; the industrial explosion in the small town of West, Texas; the violent manhunt in Greater Boston; and the anniversaries of American tragedies like the Oklahoma City bombing. We also celebrated Nicholas's first birthday but not without remembering how scary it was for him to be born at 34 weeks last year and to then spend three long weeks in the NICU before he could come home. This has been such a surreal week.

In 1992, after the very public collapse of Prince Charles's marriage to Princess Diana and after a fire destroyed much of her beloved Windsor Castle, Queen Elizabeth spoke candidly to the English people (or as candid as you can be when speaking in Latin):

"1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an Annus horribilis."

For Queen Elizabeth, this is about as personal as a public speech has ever gotten. She admitted not only personal sadness but also personal humilitation. She showed herself to be human. This sentiment can sum up this past week so well too. It's not one on which my country can possibly look back with undiluted pleasure. It's just been a horrible week.

On this day, her official birthday (in England her birthday will be celebrated later in June when the weather is better, and I can relate to that too!) let's hope the Queen can look back on the past year as an Annus mirabilis. Let's hope the same for the year ahead.

God save the Queen. (And God help me get through the rest of this busy day).

#25 KELLOGG'S

I don’t eat cereal. We might as well get that out into the open now. One of the things that disgusts me most in life is to see someone else fill a bowl with cereal and then cover it in milk. There’s a certain smell to it I can’t handle, not to mention something very graphic and disturbing about the noise of someone chewing on grains soaked in liquid. If this person is really into their cereal—like my husband and son sometimes are—they might even end this treat by drinking the milk out of the bowl. That’s when I have to leave the room. I guess this aversion makes me a really strange, suspect kind of person. Most people think so. That’s why for months I’ve been avoiding a Royal Warrant I’m not sure what to do with: Kellogg’s. The American cereal company has held a warrant from HM the Queen, since 1955, as “Purveyors of Cereals.”

The best possible outcome for my experimentation with Kellogg’s cereal would be that I come away from this project actually liking cereal, right? If I start eating it with milk, even better. If you’re holding your breath expecting this conclusion, I should let you down now. This isn’t the same story as Wilkin & Son’s. But it’s still a great story. Do you know anything about Kellogg’s? I didn’t. This is a fantastic company with an amazing history.

The cereal company got its start in Battle Creek, Michigan, in the late 19^th century, at a sanitarium connected with the Seventh Day Adventist church. The sanitarium offered a program of physical exercise and convalescence to strengthen patients sick with myriad diseases. According to The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink (a book I found somewhat offensive both because of the corn-on-the-cob on its cover and the entries on “Kentucky Fried Chicken” and “ketchup” that followed that on “Kellogg’s”), its famous patients included Henry Ford, J.C. Penney, and Thomas Edison. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg managed the institution and worked in the so-called “experimental kitchen and food laboratories in which original research is constantly bringing out new facts and products.” Kellogg eschewed the typical diet of late 19^th century Americans, which he believed to be too heavy on meat and dairy products. He instead advocated a vegetarian lifestyle and the benefits of eating fiber. Kellogg worked to make grains more palatable for the sanitarium’s invalid patients, many of who could not chew hard, crunchy grains. Together with his brother William Keith (W.K.), he invented flaked cereal by pressing grains of wheat and corn between rollers to flatten them before baking them in the oven.  

According to the company’s website, W.K. Kellogg began Kellogg’s in 1906. As American consumers shifted from eating protein-heavy breakfasts to those that centered on whole grains, Kellogg’s continued to expand its presence in a growing market by catchy advertising campaigns. The company also sold each box of its cereal with W.K.’s signature appearing on the front so that customers could distinguish his boxes of cereal from his many competitors’.

 

Kellogg’s also introduced popular new products like Bran Flakes in 1915 and Rice Krispies in 1923. It was in the early 1920s that Kellogg’s first began selling its cereal in the United Kingdom. The company has remained relevant through especially difficult decades in American history by responding to them effectively. During the Great Depression, Kellogg cut the average workday of his workers and added a fourth shift to his factory in Battle Creek to spread money among more workers. In the 1940s the company produced K-rations for American soldiers serving in World War II. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, Kellogg’s continued to introduce brand names that are still household names today: Corn Pops, Frosted Flakes, Special K, Froot Loops, Apple Jacks, and Pop-Tarts among them. It responded to the nutrition and fitness crazes of the 1970s and 80s by continuing to emphasize the nutritional value of its low-fat, high fiber whole grain products. At the turn of the century, Kellogg’s remained relevant by acquiring new brands: among them Bear Naked, Kashi, and Gardenburger.

So many of these Royal Warrant holders have a company story marked by a time of intense prosperity and then decline. If Kellogg’s is currently in decline, is a thing of the past, that’s not obvious. Just last year the company made an aggressive move into the world of snack foods by acquiring the Pringles brand from fellow Royal Warrant holder Proctor & Gamble. A company with historical roots in a small sanitarium in Michigan is today a worldwide powerhouse.

This mention of sanitariums reminded me of Prince Philip’s mother, Princess Alice of Greece. When I read Robert Lacey’s biography of Queen Elizabeth, Monarch, I was struck by the paragraphs describing the very difficult life Alice had after her family was forced out of Greece. Alice suffered an emotional breakdown after her marriage ended, and she spent a good deal of time in a Swiss sanitarium under the care of Sigmund Freud. Philip’s relationship with his mother was strained; she was remarkably absent from his young life because of her own problems. When an aged and declining Alice came to live with the royal family at Buckingham Palace in the 1960s, it was awkward to say the least.

Lacey writes, maybe somewhat coyly, that Alice “added an illuminating dimension to the family life.”  Alice was near-deaf and a chronic smoker, and her presence was often announced by “clouds of tobacco smoke, accompanied by fits of bronchitic coughing.” Alice had founded an order of Greek nursing nuns, and before her death she took to wearing the habit associated with their order. The image of a Greek nun smoking and playing her favorite card game, Canasta, in Buckingham Palace created something of a spectacle, as did Alice’s tendency to fight bitterly with Philip even if she did call him by his childhood nickname of “Bubbikins.”

Princess Alice might have spent her last years acting just as flakey as the cereal invented by the Kellogg brothers in Battle Creek, but she was welcomed at Buckingham Palace. According to Lacey, Queen Elizabeth was respectful and kind to her ostentatious mother-in-law and known to keep her company and chat with her animatedly.  Members of the palace staff wondered how they could communicate so easily since Alice was so hard of hearing. Lacey writes that “Elizabeth II enjoyed getting to know her unusual husband’s highly unusual mother, and she supported her religious charities generously” and that they were known to have animated conversations “despite her deafness.” The young princes Edward and Andrew grew fond of their grandmother and frequently went to her quarters to play Chinese Checkers.

It’s really interesting that a family so concerned with its image, with how it looks to other people, made room for someone like Princess Alice and ignored her oddities. It wasn’t until well after Princess Alice’s death in 1969 that the royal family learned just how deserving she was of her last comfortable days in the palace. Lacey writes that: “the princess had given shelter, while living in Nazi-occupied Athens, to the widow and children of Haimaki Cohen, an Athenian Jew, rebuffing the enquiries of suspicious gestapo agents by playing up her deafness and appearing to be less than bright. She saved the Cohens from transportation...”

I’m left wondering (and maybe Queen Elizabeth was too) if Princess Alice wasn’t also playing up her deafness and pretending to be less than bright while she lived at Buckingham Palace with the royal family. Was the smoking, card-playing nun pulling one over on her uptight Protestant relatives each time they turned their backs? I hope so. Or maybe Alice’s age and lack of inhibition finally left her room to freely be herself, just as unique as W.K. Kellogg hoped his signature would appear on every box of his cereal.

Where to Buy: Literally anywhere.

#24 SWEDISH MATCH INDUSTRIES

 

I wrote several months ago about my mother-in-law bringing back a huge bag of Royal Warrant products for me after she took a work trip to England. I’ve mostly exhausted the list of what I got—with my entries on Heinz, Charbonnel etWalker, Robinson’s barley water, and Brasso metal polish to show for it—but there are still a few items left. The strangest is a box of Bryant & May matches. Swedish Match Industries has held a Royal Warrant from Her Majesty the Queen since 1972 as “Match Manufacturers.”

Matches have fallen out of fashion a bit, don’t you think? People don’t smoke cigarettes as much now as they used to, and if they do they’re much more likely to use lighters than to reach for a matchbook. We have one of those long-handled lighters that we use to light candles around our house, and other than that we don’t have much need for a device that can start a good quick fire. That’s why I was surprised by how taken I’ve become with my little box of Bryant & May matches. I admit I’m rationing them and I’ll be sad when they run out.

What would make one match better than another, or better than an American variety you could go get at Walgreens right this second? I’m happy to tell you. For starters (that’s a pun), these are the fastest-lighting matches I’ve ever seen. Ready, set, done. Anyone who’s ever gone through three or four of those cheap matchbook matches before successfully lighting a candle or a cigarette knows what I’m talking about. A match that doesn’t want to light is a pain in the ass. When these matches light up, they do it with so much gusto that I’m reminded of lighting a sparkler on the 4^thof July.* They sizzle and pop with the most satisfying sound, and each time I wonder for a split second if the match I’m holding is about to start shooting off little pink or green or blue fire stars. This week I’ve also been reminded of the ritual of lighting a match—of needing to be responsible and somewhat grown-up to do it and of doing something that you don’t usually do unless for a special occasion: a candle-lit Valentine’s dinner with someone you’re crazy about, lighting a bright wax number on a child’s birthday cake, or finding yourself a quick source of light should the power go out. I’m also really keen on the great smell they give off when you first light them. You don’t get that from a lighter.

Even if I like my matches, I admit I’m not so taken with the box they come in. The photograph on the front shows four people, all dressed in white, just sort of standing around outside near the ocean. Presumably they’re…having a barbecue? But you don’t know because you can’t see any food or anything like a grill or a spatula or a set of tongs, and ultimately it’s just sort of a tease. What are those people doing out there? I ask myself each time I look at the matches.

 

Even odder than this incomplete picture is a small red box containing a stick figure with a flame on its arm and neck. The text next to that reads: DANGER! FIRE KILLS CHILDREN.

Errr…yes. Yes, it does. This is one of the more obvious warnings I’ve read on a product in a long time. It’s almost as good as that warning you sometimes see on packages of peanuts that they were processed in a facility containing nuts.

But back to DANGER! FIRE KILLS CHILDREN. Everyone can agree that a child shouldn’t be playing with this box of matches. What’s maybe not so obvious when it comes to what harms children is, well, bad parenting. Take, for instance, the astounding amount of literature criticizing the parenting methods of Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip. Every biography I’ve read of the Queen or her children opines about their parenting skills. At first I completely ignored these sections of her biographies, specifically any criticism of her. So what if she left a very young baby with a nanny so she could tour the world? That’s what royals do, maybe. So what if they sent Prince Charles off to a boarding school in northern Scotland—Gordonstoun, which was the subject of an article last month that revealed anew just how much he hated the place—instead of to nearby Eton, so that he could make a man out of himself at the tender age of 13? What business is that of mine, right? So what if Philip was aloof and rarely present for Charles, so that Philip’s uncle and a close family friend—Dickie Mountbatten—stepped into this fatherly role, especially once Charles was in his 20s? Maybe I just don’t have the full story. But...I guess I’m starting to lose my nerve apologizing for these people.

If you can throw a rock and hit someone with a nasty story to tell about the Queen’s parenting, it’s comparatively harder to dig up anything about Bryant & May. The company dates back to the mid-1800s, when its factories in London and Australia supplied matches to the British Empire. The East End factory is most famous for the strike that took place there in 1888, led by its mostly female workers who demanded better working conditions. If you’re interested, Louise Raw’s 2009 book Striking a Match: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and Their Place in History is a fantastic read. 

Bryant & May underwent a series of mergers with other, competing matchmaking companies beginning in 1901, and full ownership of the company was taken by Swedish Match in 1987. The factories in London, Australia, Liverpool, and Northern Ireland (a photo of the former one in London, below, was taken by Fen Fahey), were closed down in the late 1970s/early 1980s. The company name is still registered by Swedish Match, but there’s not much more left of it. A unique collection of Bryant & May matches, as well as older fire-starting devices from around the world, can be found at the Science Museum in South Kensington.
 

It strikes me (that's another pun, and I'm sorry) that I'm not getting what I want this week, either from learning more about the royal family or from researching these matches that I love so much. The royal family just doesn’t often look good on paper; it’s flaws and foibles are so ugly and obvious. You don’t have to look very hard to bump into them. The Bryant & May company as it exists today is somewhat similar. Despite its long history, it’s now owned by a Swedish company that doesn’t make its matches domestically and that also produces a wide array of cigarettes and chewing tobacco. Neither of these stories is one I particularly want to tell.

Where to buy: I honestly think you can only buy these in the UK. If I'm wrong, I’d love to know.

*Is it in good taste for an American writing a blog about British royals to mention the 4^thof July? Maybe not.

#23 TATE & LYLE PLC

There are people who don’t need to eat large amounts of sugar and saturated fat to get through the dark and dismal winter months. Those people are alcoholics. If you’re not an alcoholic and you’re looking for something to keep you busy while you’re stuck inside for the next few weeks, you might turn to baking, which I’ve done recently. Tate & Lyle plc, the maker of Lyle’s golden syrup, holds a Royal Warrant from Her Majesty the Queen as “Sugar Refiners.”

Lyle’s golden syrup is one of those quintessentially British foods for which Americans don’t really have a substitute. The British seem to use it in the same way we might use Karo syrup here—in baking, in sauces, in lieu of maple syrup on pancakes. Maybe the most appealing thing about buying Lyle’s is that it doesn’t appear to be made of corn. In the United States, everything is made from corn. This sweetener that doesn’t rely on it seems like something special to me.

And it is special. The company’s history dates back to 1881, when Abram Lyle and his three sons began operating an English sugar refinery on the banks of the Thames. In 1883 they first invented their golden syrup, which they refined from the sweet and sticky liquid produced by sugar refining. The company registered its “lion and bees” trademark symbol in 1904 and has used it ever since; it’s a reference to the Old Testament story of Samson in the Bible. Between the two world wars, Abram Lyle & Sons merged with another sugar refinery, Henry Tate & Sons. (Tate was the same Tate who the famous British art museums were named after). The company has held a Royal Warrant since 1922.

I first heard of Lyle’s golden syrup a few years ago because one of my co-workers at my first job in Chicago was British. He knew I loved baking, so one day he put in a special request for a dessert called caramel slice. I had no trouble finding recipes for this yummy caramel-filled and chocolate-covered shortbread bar (the name “slice” is most commonly used in Australia, where it refers to a bar cookie), but I did have trouble finding golden syrup. I finally gave up and used corn syrup, and that turned out to be a disaster. The caramel filling was way too runny, and the taste was all wrong. My friend was nice about it, but he finally admitted it was nothing like the dessert he remembered from home.

I tried my first caramel slice two summers ago in London at Café Nero, that ubiquitous London coffee chain with a shop in Westminster. I’ve wanted to get my hands on a decent caramel slice ever since, and I admit this is one of the royal warrant products I most wanted to try when I began this blog. I’ve been so thrilled with it all the way around—the surprisingly vibrant and beautiful copper color of the syrup when I opened the tin, the smooth and satiny caramel sauce I made on my stovetop last weekend, and the fantastic bar cookies Adam and I have been snacking on all week.

The recipes I pulled and combined to make my own caramel slice hybrid all came from Australian cooking websites. I found myself getting pulled into their quirky derivation of the English language: the absence of articles before nouns; the use of the metric system in the kitchen—which seems so odd to Americans dependent on the oddities of the English system; and the reference to exotic food products like copha, a vegetable shortening made from coconut oil. My Internet foray into Australia made me think about Australia when it was part of the British Empire, when it was one of many distant lands under the rule of the English monarchy.

 

To educate myself more about British imperialism, I checked out Piers Brendon’s fabulous new book The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997. This book is a tome, which I will either never finish or will owe the Chicago Public Library a large amount of fines for, or both, but I couldn’t resist bringing it home this week. If you think about it, and Brendon has done a lot of that, the story of the United Kingdom in the 20^th century is the story of a crumbling modern empire. While Queen Elizabeth has served for decades as a consistent and unifying tour de force for the British monarchy, she’s also watched as her country has lost a good deal of power and control on the world stage. Without this vast empire to govern—and with a fully capable Parliament handling law-making—many wonder how the monarchy can continue to function without it too crumbling, just like the flaky shortbread crust of so many caramel slices.

Where to buy: I ordered my little tin of golden syrup on Amazon. In Chicago, I've seen it for sale at Spencer's Jolly Posh Foods.

Caramel Slice

Shortbread crust:

1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 cups flour

Caramel filling:

1 can sweetened condensed milk
2 T. Lyle’s golden syrup
½ cup butter

Topping:

1 ½ cups semisweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Combine butter and sugar, then flour, until the mixture is crumbly and has several pea-sized pieces. Grease the bottom and sides of a 13x9” pan and press shortbread mixture into an even layer in the pan. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until shortbread is firm but still soft. Let cool.

On stovetop, combine milk, golden syrup, and butter and bring to a boil over medium heat. Simmer over low heat, stirring constantly with a whisk, for five more minutes, until caramel mixture has thickened. Pour over cooled shortbread crust and refrigerate for 3-4 hours.

Melt chocolate in a double broiler or in the microwave and pour over firm caramel layer. Refrigerate for another hour before cutting bars into squares. Tip: Don’t wait too long to cut these; the harder the chocolate gets, the harder they are to cut.