Juxtabook

As my Typead blog has dispppeared I will be republishing a few of my favourite blogs. This, from 2009, is a reflection on food, books and family history made more poignant now, in the run up to Christmas, because Mum is no longer able to make the cake of my childhood.

…their mother worked out how it was for me and usually sent a bit of whatever was being manufactured in her kitchen – rabbit pie, a couple of current tea cakes, two or three curd tarts. So, over the weeks, a splendid repertory of North Riding Dishes was performed amanti bravura to an applauding Londoner, dishes Mrs Ellerbeck had helped her mother bake, who had helped her mother bake who …Sometimes I’d share this bounty with Moon and it was he who suggested that we were eating disposable archaeology.

J L Carr: A Month in the Country

Thirty pages into the Carr and thoroughly enjoying it, I came across the above quote which considering the fruit cake I was eating at the time seemed apt. Christmas, now that we’re coming to the end of it, seems to be the time for disposable archaeology. In our house the artifact is called Bun Loaf and is a sort of mildly spicy fruit cake make in large loaf tins. It was this I was eating whilst reading this morning. 

Bun Loaf is our Christmas cake though it is un-iced and doesn’t look like the traditional item.  My mother made this year’s exhibit and has done for the last 6 years or so. Before that my maternal grandmother made the Bun Loaves (yes, loaves, one just isn’t enough) for the preceding 50 or so years. She remembers her mother making them and having to carry the uncooked loaves to the bakers for cooking. My grandmother and her younger sister had the tins balanced on the flat back of the long piece of wood used to scrub clothes against in the wash tub; they then carried this ‘plank’ with the loaves on between them. She remembered slipping with their heavy load on the steep streets of Everton in ice laden Decembers. In my grandmother’s day it was served on her Royal Albert Old Country Roses china and there was probably a bit of doily work going on there too. In our house my husband, who loves the cake, hacks chunks off and sandwiches it with wensleydale cheese before, well wrapped in grease proof, it gets shoved in his pocket whilst he is out in the countryside. My grandmother would not have approved! In her honour I photographed a slice in the traditional Royal Albert surrounding, though the plate is newish and not one of hers, but rather a present from another elderly relative.

What is the edible ‘archaeology’ in your house?

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After writing the above in 2009 I later made this short post on the same subject:

I thought everybody had bunloaf at Christmas until I grew-up and got about a bit more! Then I realised hardly anyone had heard of it. Every so often I google the term to see if I can find anything else about its origins and today happened across this piece which talks about its presence in Swallows and Amazons, a book I shamefully have never read. Is it true? I do hope so! It would seem from the article’s references to the Cumberland coast and the Isle of Man, and my family acquiring the recipe in Liverpool that the Lancashire/Cumberland coast seems to be its main location. Has anyone else heard of it? My mother’s version is very similar to the recipe quoted in the article: no eggs and definitely no tea or beer.

I did read and thoroughly enjoy Swallows and Amazons straight after this post!

We stock both Arthur Ransome and JL Carr books in both used and collectable (ie signed or first editions) condition.