Summer desserts

High summer is not a time for baking, so cakes, pies and puddings disappear from the repertoire for a couple of months more.

Nevertheless, we still want to finish our meals on a sweet note, so let us make the most of summer’s harvest in refreshing fruit salads.

For special occasions, we might want to make something a little more elaborate. Cool, pale, creamy desserts are the perfect partners for summer fruit, whether peaches in sweet wine, sliced nectarines in orange juice, or mixed berries, whole or in a purée.

My favourites include panna cotta, coeurs á la crème and the perfect crème brûlée, or burnt cream, as I prefer to call it, because the origins of this luscious dessert are hotly debated, by both francophile and anglophile cooks.

Neither L’Art Culinaire Francais nor Le Repertoire de la Cuisine, has a recipe, yet both are comprehensive manuals of classic French cooking and exactly where one would expect to find a recipe for crème brûlée.

It does not appear in either the homely Tante Marie or Pellaprat’s La Cuisine Familiale et Practique, nor even in Larousse Gastronomique.

The nearest thing to it in Larousse is La Creme Anglaise, which is none other than a stirred, not baked, egg custard, made by pouring scalded cream or milk over egg yolks, beaten with sugar, cooked further and then chilled until set.

This recipe and technique, on the other hand, is to be found in English recipe collections dating back to the Middle Ages. The Ordinance of Pottage, a 15th century collection, has a recipe for ‘creme boyled’, which is essentially as described above, and flavoured with saffron.

We find it, too, in the Elizabethan kitchen, and then fairly regularly from the 18th century onwards. Mrs Mary Eales, confectioner to Queen Anne, has recipes for ratafia cream and sack cream, which are the same flavoured custards, as does Hannah Glasse in 1717.

The version with the crunchy, caramelised topping is to be ound as long ago as 1769, as ‘Burn’t Cream’, in Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English Housekeeper, although Marcel Boulestin, the French chef who made his home in London in the early part of last century, and who enjoyed the dessert many times at Trinity College, claims it was invented by his contemporary, Mr Hartmann, the Swiss head chef at Trinity.

The dish was then known as ‘Crème brûlée á la Trinity’. However, Florence White, in Good Things in England, describes how the recipe was brought to Trinity by a Scottish undergraduate in the 1860s.

It was rejected by the kitchen, but when the undergraduate became a fellow, in 1879, it quickly became part of Mr Hartmann’s repertoire. And of course, the Scottish kitchen, even today, reflects many French influences, in the names of utensils as well as ingredients and cuts of meat.

But I prefer to name it for the woman who first put it in print.