An Unexpected Cookbook: The Unofficial Book of Hobbit Cookery (10 page)

The real trick to this is making sure everything is about the same thickness. If thick asparagus is in season, get a thicker cut of fish. If your grocer only stocks the thin stuff, opt for less period authentic filets of Tilapia or Swai instead of Haddock or Cod.

If you’re still full from Elevenses, make yourself a wonderfully satisfying light meal with a piece of fish, some asparagus, and a bowl of home made mushroom soup.

This moist, decadent spring bread embodies all the simple joys of the English countryside that were lost in the gritty industrialized cities. Rural children were often sent out to collect fresh strawberries, with the adults knowing full well that they’d come home with as many berries in their bellies as in their baskets. The fresh picked berries mixed with this morning’s cream and farmhouse butter would make a simple, economical treat beyond the imagination of the children’s city cousins. Tolkien spent part of his childhood in both worlds, and said his time in Industrial Era Birmingham left him with a keen appreciation of wholesome country food.

1 c / 200 g sugar

½ c / 115 g butter

2 eggs

2 c / 250 g flour

2 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

1 ½ c / 110 g chopped strawberries

½ c / 100 g chopped almonds

½ c /130 ml heavy cream

Preheat your oven to 350F / 180 C.

While the oven heats up, cream together the butter, sugar and eggs. In another bowl, whisk the flour, baking powder, and salt.

Chop up a cup and a half of fresh berries collected around the Shire and add those to your sugar mix. While you’re at it, throw in half a cup of chopped almonds or your favorite nuts to give it a nice texture. Drown that decadence in a cup of heavy cream, because strawberries and cream are delicious together.

Once the fruit and nuts are well integrated, add your flour mix. Beat it until the lumps just barely disappear. You don’t want to overwork the dough or mangle the strawberries too badly.

Pour the batter into a heavily buttered loaf pan and bake at 350F / 180C for 50-60 minutes, or until the top is golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

This is best served with even more fresh strawberries. Confidentially, if you’re feeling a bit anachronistic, it also pairs exceptionally well with either vanilla or strawberry ice cream. Just keep in mind that as a new world ingredient, vanilla (and chocolate!) would be completely unknown in the Shire. They might have seen ice cream, but that treat was only enjoyed by those wealthy enough to afford an ice house to chill it and household servants to make it.

The Hobbit
has such a timeless feel that it’s easy for modern readers to completely miss the book’s very first joke. While all classes enjoyed a pot of late afternoon caffeinated goodness, in Tolkien's day, there was a social distinction between high tea and low tea. High tea was more like a working man’s early supper complete with plenty of cold cuts, hearty breads, and filling chunks of cheese with whatever sweets the family could afford on the side. Its name came from being eaten around a high table, as often as not, the only table the family owned.

Low tea, on the other hand, was an aristocratic snack time of dainty pastries and tiny pieces of cake served in the parlor, arranged on a low table - hence the name. Working class people who wanted to impress an honored guest would lay out a low tea for them, which Bilbo struggles to do when Gandalf arrives. His frustration comes from having his refined low tea unceremoniously turned into a high tea.

Over time, we’ve abandoned the concept of low tea, but when The Hobbit was first published, readers Tolkien's age and older would’ve instantly been in on the joke.

In honor of the tea Bilbo tried to set out, these period recipes are all for sweets you might find in a working class household. A handful of plum heavies, a couple gingersnaps, last week’s shortbread, and three day old carrot cake would make a respectable offering to impress a dignified guest.

Carrot Cake’s popularity is directly proportionate to the availability of cheap sugar. Sugar and honey were incredibly expensive during the Middle Ages, so sweet root vegetables like carrots and beets made their way into all sorts of desserts. By the time of Tolkien's Victorian childhood, sugar was cheap and readily available in both the country and the city. However, he wrote
The Lord of the Rings
against the backdrop of World War II. Rationing was in effect and sugar was once more rare and precious, meaning carrot cake was once again one of the few treats people could realistically afford.

In fact, at the height of rationing, this cake would have required one adult’s entire month of egg rations, three weeks of butter rations, and half a month’s sweets rations - if all of that was available in the first place. Tolkien doubtless had plenty of dry, crumbly cake as people stretched their scant sugar, butter and eggs while still trying to make the occasional festive treat.

3 1/2 c / 400 g grated carrots

½ c / 100 g currants or minced raisins

¼ c / 50 g minced golden raisins

2 c / 260 g whole wheat flour

1 ¼ c / 160 g butter

4 eggs

¾ c / 150 g sugar

3 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp ginger

¼ tsp allspice

¼ tsp nutmeg

pinch cloves

Make yourself a nice cup of tea. Since you have a kettle full of hot water anyway, soak your dried fruit in a cup of it.

While the fruit soaks, grate 3 ½ c of carrots. Once they’re torn down to shreds, attack them with a chopping knife a few times to mince them into smaller pieces. If you want to save muscle, you can peel the carrots then put them through the fine grind of a food processor.

Cream together the butter, eggs, and sugar. Add the shredded carrots and mix well.

In another bowl, mix the whole wheat flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, ginger, allspice, nutmeg, and cloves. Whisk it all together until all the dry ingredients are evenly distributed.

Remember your dried fruit? Drain the water and add the currants and raisins to your flour. By soaking them first, you not only rehydrated the fruit a little, but also made the outside nice and sticky. The flour mix should cling to it now. Floured fruits tend to stay put in batter instead of sinking to the bottom of your cake.

Once your fruit is floured, you’re ready to introduce your carrot mix to your flour mix. Beat them wet and dry ingredients together the flour barely becomes smooth. You don’t want to overwork the batter.

Pour the batter into half a dozen heavily buttered ramekins or cake tins.

Bake at 350F / 180C for 25-30 minutes, or until the top is a dark, crunchy brown and a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean. Alternately, you can pour it into a 9x9 square cake pan and bake for 45-48 minutes.

This medieval inspired carrot cake is less sweet, more dense, and notably spicier than most modern versions. The cream cheese based sugary icing familiar to most American readers is almost unknown in the UK. If you don’t like to eat your cake plain, try dusting it with a light coating of powdered sugar or following the British example of pouring a little custard on top.

VEGAN VARIATION

Since butter rations were scarce during rationing, people regularly substituted margarine. You’re following a long standing tradition here. The less standard substitute comes in the form of eggs. Instead of just leaving them out, as most people would’ve done during rationing, try whisking together ½ c ground flax seeds and ⅔ c water. Let that sit until it becomes gelatinous, then add it to the batter. Double the spices to make up for the flavor of the margarine.

Chocolate and vanilla may seem ubiquitous today, but they’re actually both new world beans. That means Tolkien explicitly excluded them from the Shire, even though both flavors were quite popular in Victorian England. Plum Heavies were the cheap, kid's cookies of their day.

Victorian country cooks would knead in a handful of diced plums plus a little extra sugar into any scraps of leftover pastry. Once that was rolled out, they’d cut the pastry into small, child sized bites with a 1-2 inch / 2.5 - 5 cm cookie cutter. Once baked up nice and crunchy, the durable pastry could be stored at room temperature for a week or more. This made them equally good treats for good behavior or parental bribes when you just need to put something in your kid’s mouth in order to hush them up.

If you’re feeling traditional, Plum Heavies should be made with whatever leftover dough you have around spiked with whatever dried fruit is handy. Chopped raisins and currants were just as popular as plums.

For folks who don’t happen to have a lump of leftover pastry dough sitting around after making some second breakfast hand pies or luncheon Steak and Ale pie, here’s how to make these rural Victorian treats from scratch.

2 ½ c / 500 g flour

1 c / 225 g butter, softened

½ c / 115 g sugar – plus extra for dusting

½ c / 115 g minced plums

2 tbsp milk

1 tsp cinnamon

1 egg, beaten to glaze

Beat the butter, sugar, cinnamon, and milk until you have a dense, fatty mess. Sweeten it up by adding in your minced plums (or other fruit.) Once those are thoroughly integrated, add the flour.

It’s time to give up on stirring and just use your hands. Really work the flour into the buttery mix. Once everything is well integrated, knead the dough a few times for good measure.

Roll the dough out to about ¼ inch / 6 mm thickness. Attack the dough with a small, round cookie cutter about 1 ½ inches / 3 cm wide. Remember, the goal here isn’t a giant American cookie. It should be just big enough for 2-3 bites. These don’t inflate much, so you can squeeze a lot of them onto a cookie sheet. Keep at it until you finally run out of dough.