Woolsthorpe apple sauce; or, small, sour, and influential to mashed, sweet, and wholesome.

The best-laid plans of mice and men--but then Summer. That is one way of explaining the lack of updates from our cooking postdoc in recent months. Not only is Summer the time of year when many a pleasant evening is spent in a pub garden, and sunny afternoons are for walking down to Grantchester in search of cheese scones; Summer is also conference season, and the period when both home-grown crops (those beans, again) and research are harvested. In the latter case, harvesting means "writing up papers"."Writing blog entires", on the other hand, is put on hold.

As good as this Summer had been, Fall inevitably had to follow, with all the chilly rainy days and obligations that season entails. Confronted with these things, and with harvests completed, this postdoc felt he was in need of inspiration. Philomath being too far away, and not accessible by UK public transport, he turned his attention northward instead, to Lincolnshire.

Isaac Newton looms large over Cambridge, and indeed Natural Philosophie in general. It was at Trinity College Cambridge that the young Newton was educated, and later became a fellow and Lucasian professor. But it was in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth in the county of Lincoln that he spent his formative years, experimented with prisms, and got inspired--by an apple tree. For once, this is a good story that appears to be based in actual fact, as Sir Isaac himself acknowledged the input a particular fruit tree had on his theory of gravity...

While Newton is one of the most influential scientists of all times, and his bones rest in prominence in Westminster Abbey, his humble assistant in his search for scientific discovery quietly remains in Lincolnshire, still blossoming in Spring, flourishing in Summer, and producing a bountiful harvest in Fall. Yes, the original apple tree, sire of the apple tree outside of Trinity College, is still there, and still inspires. After a road trip with a kind friend with a car, our postdoc was able to not only behold Newton's apple tree, and sample its fruit, but also bring, at the price of a 50 pence coin, a little piece of Lincolnshire worthy of a genius home: a small bag of unassuming and somewhat sour cooking apples, packed with hidden treasure, came down to Cambridge, and forms the basis of today's blog content.

Ingredients:
-5-6 cooking apples (Sir Isaac's are of the Flower of Kent variety)
-1 lemon
-1/2 cup of brown sugar
-1 stick of cinnamon
-a pinch of salt

Peel the apples, core them (save the seeds for planting), and quarter them. Peel off about four or five strips of lemon. In a pot, mix the ingredients, including the cinnamon stick and the sugar, and add enough water to cover everything. Cut the lemon in half, and squeeze the juice from the half lemon into the pot. Add a pinch of salt.

Turn on the stove and wait for the water to boil. Then turn down the heat and let simmer for about half an hour. In the meantime, prepare the jars. Clean the jars carefully, using boiling water. 

Taste the sauce to make sure it is sweet enough; if it isn't, just add a little more sugar. If it is on the sweet side, add some more lemon juice (you still have a reserve half lemon, right?). Once you're satisfied with the level of sweetness, and once the apple pieces feel soft enough, fish out the cinnamon stick and the lemon peel. Then pour off surplus apple juice into a glass as necessary (it is a pretty yummy drink in its own right), then mash up the apple pieces using a wooden spoon or a potato masher. 

Fill up your jars with apple sauce, and you're done. Enjoy with yoghurt or porridge for breakfast, or with vanilla ice cream for dessert. Feel inspired.

Serving suggestions: Taylor's of Harrogate breakfast tea, "Martin Carthy" by Martin Carthy on the side. 

Arise!; or, Yorkshire Pudding.

Yet again, the Swedish-Cantabrigian food blog has been dormant for a (large but still finite) number of months. If the last previous entry had later than August, at least the postdoctoral research fellow could have claimed to have been hibernating--but more than six months would have to be considered somewhat excessive.

So what has happened in the meantime, after the harvest of the last of the beans? Well, our blogger has moved to a new house; same neighborhood, but new and improved, and with a housemate.  He has joined a Cambridge college and occasionally eats there, and enjoys informal after-dinner conversations with fellows and students over coffee, in leather armchairs. He has written papers and has taught a class to students doing the so-called Part III. He still listens to a lot of music and gets stuck on pretentious reading projects. New crops have been planted, and will no doubt be documented to excess over the course of their growing period, and when they get turned into meals.

Occasionally, when he is not doing math, the Cantabrigian Swede-Pole cooks. Sometimes he teams up with his housemate and invites friends over for dinner, and sometimes such dinners occur on Sunday and require traditional delights, such as the legendary Yorkshire Pudding. Here is how to make them in your own home, be it in Yorkshire, Sweden, Oklahoma, or elsewhere.

Ingredients:

-250ml of white all-purpose flour
-200ml of milk (milkman-delivered)
-4 eggs

-salt & pepper
-vegetable oil

Set the oven to 230C/440F. Using a measuring cup, fill a plastic bowl with 250ml of flour. Add four eggs one after the other, while mixing flour and egg in the process. Add the milk, and beat the combined ingredients into a batter. Keep beating the mix until it is completely smooth. Season with salt and pepper.

After the batter is ready, take out a muffin tin, and pour a little vegetable oil into each hole. (Yorkshire pudding was allegedly originally known as dripping pudding and made using dripping from the roast it gets served with.) Slide the muffin tin into the oven for a couple of minutes to heat up the oil. The trick is to make sure the tin (and the oil) is very hot. In the meantime, transfer the batter to a jug for easy pouring. Once you're satisfied that the oil is hot enough, take out the tin and carefully fill each hole roughly 2/3 of the way up with batter. And into the oven the proto-puddings go.

Watch the spectacle of the rising pudding: first, not much happens, but soon they start gaining in volume, and escape, mushroom-like, out of the confinement of the tin pits in which they are trapped. Amazingly, the batter doesn't simply overflow--it just keeps on risin'. Eventually, this process terminates, and the little puddings concentrate on getting their tan on.

Now, by decree of the Royal Society of Chemists, a candidate pudding must achieve a height of at least 4 inches/10cm in order to be awarded the prefix "Yorkshire".  Hence, as you remove the puddings from the oven after approximately 7 minutes, keep your fingers crossed you will be eating a genuine Yorkshire delight. (If you are very pedantic, and concerned about quality control, measure each individual pudding before allowing it to join you at the table. Your friends may, however, think you are insane.)

In any case, serve the puddings warm, with lots of yummy gravy. Don't forget roast potatoes and plenty of vegetables!

Serving suggestions: "Blue" by Joni Mitchell on the side; a bottle of Simcoe IPA by Kernel Brewery in London.