Books and cakes - 49

    "Wimsey gratefully took in the cosy sitting-room, with its little tables crowded with ornaments, its fire roaring behind a chaste canopy of velvet overmantel, and the silver tea vessel winking upon the polished tray. 'I feel like Ulysses, come to port after much storm and peril.'

    He bit gratefully into a large and buttery muffin."

    So muffins it had to be - the yeasted variety, of course - made following Elizabeth David's advice to use olive oil instead of the traditional lard or butter, and baked on the hob rather than in the oven.

    In English Bread and Yeast Cookery (where there is an extensive, comprehensive chapter on muffins and crumpets) she quotes Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, writing in 1974 when he was in his nineties, recalling how in his youth,

"muffins would come in their heated covered silver dish along with salt cellar, china tea, cream and folded napkin, and be set down at my elbow by a club waiter still in the livery of the Regency, knee-breeches, silk stockings and buckled shoes ... and all for no more than a shilling."

    The Fenchurch St. Paul Rectory may not run to a servant in livery, but Mrs. Venables' muffins were very well received by Lord Peter Wimsey after his car goes off the road in the snowy, desolate Fen country of East Anglia at the beginning of Dorothy L. Sayers' The Nine Tailors. It's a terrific book, and you can read all about it here.