Books and cakes - 62

    When deciding what to bake to go with our reading of Isabel Colegate's The Shooting Party  (post on it here), I had a look at Agnes Jekyll's excellent Kitchen Essays for I remembered a chapter on 'a winter shooting party luncheon'. Sure enough, Lady Jekyll provides for the guns and their womenfolk, and the keepers, beaters and loaders, too, giving advice on the location of the luncheon - in the book, Sir Randolph's boathouse does the job admirably - the practicalities of crockery and cutlery as well as appropriate cooking and serving vessels, and even the floral arrangements: "Autumn fern and beech leaves give a touch of beauty, or a gay basket ... holding a bunch of spindleberry or butcher's broom, of forest evergreen or Christmas holly ..."

    As to the food itself, what the author suggests is hearty, uncomplicated, and no doubt very welcome, and regarding sweet things she offers "jam or spiced apple puffs, covered-in cheesecakes or mince pies", but then goes on to give a recipe for "Burnt House Cake", a rich but egg-less fruitcake.

    I was going to try this, but having been asked to repeat last week's apple cake, I thought it sufficiently in the spirit of Lady Jekyll's food that it - with a variation - would do, and here it is:

Cover 100g of dried cherries with marsala and leave for several hours (or over night).

Beat 250g of butter with the same quantity of caster sugar. Add 250g of self-raising flour, 100g of ground almonds, 100g of chopped walnuts, 100g of plump sultanas, 5 eggs, the cherries and their liquid, and two cooking apples peeled, cored and diced. Mix lightly to combine.

Bake in a lined tray (13"x9") for 30 minutes at gas 3/170deg.C/on the rack on the floor of the Aga baking oven. Leave to cool in the tin.

    Agnes Jekyll ends her shooting party chapter thus:

    "For some the best hour will come with the walk homewards in a gathering dusk, the winter sunset aflame in the west, and, as Dorothy Wordsworth puts it, 'The country very solemn in the last hour of twilight; it calls home the heart to quietness.' "