Rather, instead of representing plain recipes for a better world, those metaphorical texts necessarily have to become applied by the individual reader.
Interestingly enough, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, an 1888 publication quoted in The Road to Vindaloo, an utterly fascinating study of the British love affair with curry, includes a plainer recipe, rather like a spiced paella, in its chapter on "Native Dishes" – but then its author, the redoubtable Flora Annie Steele, wasn't your average memsahib.
Make a plain fondant recipe.
In homage to these humble origins, I decide to start off with the plainest crumble recipe I can find, in Nigel Slater's Real Fast Puddings ("comfort food of the highest order").
How do you enjoy them, plain, in recipes, or in a restaurant?
As originally constructed, with just plain salt, this recipe delivers a really deep, pure turkey flavor.
-- yet sometimes recipes plain don't work.
Certainly it was Hannah Glasse, a Northumberland lass, who was the first to categorise such puddings as a speciality of England's largest county in her 1747 cookbook The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy: recipes published prior to this make no such attribution.
In fact, Oliver's whole recipe is plain odd: he purees bananas and milk, and then stirs in the caramel to make a strange hybrid layer, which tastes far too intensely of bananas and not enough of caramel.
Makes 18. 450g homemade Christmas mincemeat (see previous recipe) 250g plain flour 60g lard 60g butter Pinch of salt For the top A little milk Icing sugar Heat the oven to 200C/390F/gas mark 6. Sift the flour and salt into a bowl and rub the fats into it until the mixture resembles fine crumbs.
