Shortbread & Stickers

Escaping with butter & adhesives

The other day I spoke to my brother. He and his two little girls have just had a bout of gastric flu. His partner is away and he was alone dealing with all the liquid delights and diapers that three days of gastric flu for three people (two small) entails. Suffice it to say he wasn’t in the best of spirits.

And that’s before we’d even got onto the news.

I can’t engage with it at the moment he said. La la la la he sang, Head in the sand! Ostrich.

Sometimes I think this is the only option. Every time I resolve to read more of the real news I regret having done so, and go back to reading the lifestyle/culture section or my cookbooks. Perhaps it’s irresponsible. It’s also survival.

Last night I went to bed thinking that we are now living in an episode of South Park. A pouting, shouting orange tyrant in a bad, blonde toupee controls most of the Western world. A pouting, shouting bald tyrant controls the Eastern half of it. AI, a technology my other brother now uses to write his familial correspondence and do all his lesson planning, just convinced a boy in America to commit suicide. You really can’t make it up.

I don’t think ostriching need necessarily be about avoidance. Maybe down there in the sand there are good things to look at, good thoughts to think. Maybe there are good grubs to eat. We all need a little escapism, now and then. It’s essential. And that is what so much of art is about for me.

Take my adult sticker book. Have I told you about it? I keep meaning to dedicate an entire piece to it because I love it so. Do you remember how much you loved stickers as a child? One of my most poignant memories of childhood is the day we were driving back from a holiday in our battered old Volvo with my suitcase on the roof-rack. My dad hadn’t tied it on properly, and the suitcase came flying off on the motorway. We pulled over and I watched in abject horror as my beloved sticker scrapbook (and equally beloved fluffy snow tiger) were torn to smithereens by the heavy M5 traffic. This incident is burned onto my brain. I think that sticker book might be my first ever memory. It had recycled paper pages in pale sage green, sugar-paper blue and faded peach. It had a giant and much-coveted sticker of Mrs Tiggywinkle. It was my five-year-old world.

What if someone told you it was possible to love stickers as an adult to? This was, I am only semi-ashamed to admit, another Amazon suggestion, and along the The Sportsman at Home cookbook that was also recommended by Amazon, it may well be the best thing that has happened to me all winter. It is a large book full of 18^th and 19^th century pictures from natural history books collected by John Derian, some of which have been turned into stickers. There are flowers, frogs, butterflies, maps, sayings, sighing rosy-cheeked ladies, all as stickers! All beautifully illustrated and utterly soothing to look at. My phone, my desk, my notebooks, are now all covered with these stickers. I gift pages of them to my friends and their children. It gives me infinite joy. And it came from Amazon! You see, the modern world is not all misery and monsters.

And now to the other book currently mitigating my January. I don’t need to tell you cookbooks are great for escapism. They are particularly good because you don’t just escape in your mind, transporting yourself wherever the book is taking you (whether that may be a sun-soaked veranda in the Mediterranean or a cold kitchen in Kent,) Because it’s also an escape that is not a fantasy, but a reality, because you can cook a real thing from it and put it in your mouth and the taste of that thing will be transportative too. It may take you to the Mediterranean veranda the author is writing from, or a cold kitchen in Kent, or it may take you somewhere else entirely. It may take you to a place you had forgotten all about, where you first tasted that exact sort of burnt buttery sweetness, and now you are there again. Reading is one of the best forms of escapism, and so is cooking.

For a long time, I stopped buying cookbooks. This was a question of space and economy. I had so many. I also felt like maybe my own writing was constantly being too influenced by others, because I was always reading someone else’s cookbook. I now realise this is rubbish. Firstly, you can never have too many cookbooks (you can never have too many book books, in general) and secondly, you should never stop reading. Being a writer means you should read and read and read. It is possible (also probable) that some of your writing will ape the style of the authors you are reading, but more likely it will simply be subtly influenced by it, probably in a favourable way. At least that is how I feel. You are always, inevitably, influenced by the people around you. Especially your friends. I feel that my favourite cookbook writers are my friends. How can we not be friends, when he or she feels exactly the same way about roast chicken as I do?

The cookbook I am reading currently is The Sportsman at Home, by Stephen Harris. I feel emphatically that Stephen would be my friend. We feel the same about dairy products. Can there be any better basis for friendship? No book could have better suited my current mood. The subtitle (the bit that really explains what the cookbook is about) is ‘Flavoursome Recipes for Nostalgic Eating’. Nostalgic eating is very much what winters are for. Also, the cover is a moody, half shadowed photo of a leafy lemon and a bottle of milk (old-fashioned with the little foil lid). Two symbols so rife with nostalgia and my own personal preference it seems a book made for me. Finally, it has an entire ode to cream. Could it be more perfect?

The recipes are simple, classic, comforting. I decided to start with his shortbread, seeing as the Tiny Saint has developed an obsession with it after we brought back a tin of Walkers from England. In the photo it is thick, sandy and crumbly, sliced in old-fashioned fingers, and he describes it as being baked ‘medium rare’. He says this way you still get that wonderful taste of raw cake mixture that everyone loves, almost more than the cooked cake itself. I understand entirely what he means by this. It’s something about the butter still tasting of creamy cold butter, rather than melting into a background sweet fattiness, I think. I adore raw cake mix (and raw sweet pastry). And, so too, it seems, does the Saint. As we cut up our butter and threw it into the flour he picked nuggets out and ate them raw, smiling gleefully.

Mmmmmm, he said, putting another piece in his mouth and chewing.

We rubbed in the rest of the butter by hand, though Stephen (I assume he won’t mind me using his first name seeing as we are now friends) does it in the mixer. Then we mixed in the sugar and pressed it loosely into a tin. Baked and eaten warm or cold, it was bliss.

The Saint is learning his numbers. Now, every morning and afternoon, before and after nursery, he barters with me about how many shortbreads he can have.

Two, I say. Putting on my most severe face.

Six! he squeals, holding up all 5 fingers (his finger counting still needs work).

We settle on a reasonable three. He eats them slowly, washing them down with a glass of cold, creamy milk.

Escapism tastes good.

*

I didn’t change the recipe at all, but I think next time I will leave out a gram or two of salt, just to see. They are just sweet enough, and quite salty. Also, here he adds a small quantity of rice flour which helps make shortbread extra short (as in crumbly), but cornflour or semolina work very well too.

Makes 18-20

(makes one rectangle brownie tray full (9x6 inches)

280g plain or 00 flour

25g rice flour

15g of salt (!)

250g unsalted butter

110g caster sugar

Preheat the oven to 180°C fan (400° F).

Put the flours, salt and butter into a processor and blitz to fine crumbs (or do this by hand, by rubbing in)

Mix in the sugar.

Line your tin with baking parchment and then tip the mix into it and spread it out evenly. Don’t press down too much as it’s nice to have a little sandy texture left. Bake for 15 minutes or so, until golden at the edges. Cut into fingers whilst still warm.

Eat warm or cold, with full-cream milk if you’re a child/nostalgic, and milky tea or coffee if you’re not.