Too late to celebrate St David’s Day, the patron saint of Wales, but how about St Piran? His day falls tomorrow, March 5, and all over Cornwall there will be celebrations for their patron saint.
Saffron has been a precious spice in our store cupboards since the earliest times- Frances Bissell
St Piran’s flag, the white cross on black is regarded by some as the county flag, by others as the emblem of the Cornish people, and it is something you will see on cars and in windows once you cross the River Tamar at Plymouth, from Devon into Cornwall.
It was at this time of year that Tom and I went to live on Cornwall for a few months to make my television series, Frances Bissell’s West Country Kitchen for West Country Television. I could not help but be struck by Cornwall’s ‘otherness’, and the feeling that I was in another country, increasingly so as we travelled west.
The rest of the country was locked down in cold winter weather, but when we arrived in Cornwall, the primroses were just to be seen. Then, after Easter, they carpeted the ‘Cornish hedges’, interspersed with bluebells, campions and wild garlic. The hawthorn hedges changed from being thorny, black spindles to soft drifts of green.
Nettles grew thickly by the mill pond, and a soup of nettles as a starter for the evening dinner, perhaps with some wild garlic, if I could find a patch in the untamed part of the garden, was on my mind more than once. But I never got around to it.
On the hillside overlooking the village of Lanlivery with its pub, the excellent Crown, and its church of St Brevita, home was a converted water mill with a spacious kitchen in which to film and an Aga on which to cook, so much more agreeable than staying in a hotel and filming in a studio.
The first weeks were taken up with the ‘recce’, places to film, people to meet, food to describe and we happily explored, from one end of the county to the other, in cider orchards and bakeries, in dairies, pork butchers and smokehouses, uncovering Cornwall’s fascinating kitchen.
The Cornish pasty is probably the best known survivor of the era before the days of school and works canteens when substantial portable meals had to be devised.
Having thought that the recipe for the true Cornish pasty was immutable, I was pleasantly surprised to discover how many variations there are in the fillings.
Meat, potatoes, onions and turnips, and various combinations of these ingredients, are most often referred to, but a Cornishman describing school lunches, tells how some were filled with meat and potatoes, some egg and bacon, some apple and yet another, rabbit.
I have also come across recipes, which include liver or kidney, and a 1922 recipe from St Ives which includes carrot.
In the 1930s, a contributor to a collection of traditional English recipes, ‘Good Things in England’, describes the Cornish pasty with “pastry joined at the side” and the hoggan made without potato joined across the top. The ‘tiddy oggie’, however, is a Cornish pasty filled with potatoes.
We loved the bakeries in Cornwall, with their heavy cakes, lardy cakes, congress tarts, and saffron cakes. And these are not just quaint treats for tourists. One of the local grocers in Lostwithiel always had saffron and fresh yeast.
Saffron has been a precious spice in our store cupboards since the earliest times. These slender, dry red filaments, almost insignificant in themselves, add a rich colour, fragrance and inimitable flavour to food, qualities which were much prized in mediaeval times throughout Europe and not just in Spain.
Most of the saffron we buy is probably from La Mancha in Spain, although it also comes from Egypt, Greece, Iran, Kashmir, India and Morocco. It is also very easy to imitate the appearance of dried saffron, although not its flavour, with the dried petals of the safflower from which safflower oil is derived.
I have seen packets of dried safflower being sold in the souk in Tunis to unsuspecting visitors, delighted at its cheapness. There is a Cornish saying, “as dear as saffron”, and in the Philadelphia commodities market in the 1700s, saffron was “worth its weight in gold”.
Although we are more accustomed today to use saffron in risottos, paellas and bouillabaisse, there are a number of traditional English recipes using saffron which are still made today, such as saffron cake and saffron buns. Numerous recipes are to be found, some using the rubbing-in method, some using the melted method.
Hilary Spurling in Elinor Fettiplaces Receipt Book gives an Elizabethan version in which the butter is melted in sack or sherry. Hannah Glasses’s 18th century recipe offers the option of including caraway seeds, but she writes, “I think it rather better without.”
I do too. On the other hand, I like her suggestion of rosewater, another favourite English ingredient of the time, and one found in some of the many Cornish versions of saffron cake still in existence.