John Nash: “Let them eat cake!”

“Let them eat cake!”

John Nash is a retired, well sort of retired, fruit farm manager in Kirdford who enjoys scribbling about life on the farm from the now to days gone by.

If there’s one thing that will always bring a smile to my face it’s a cake. Any cake. From a cream bun to a royal iced wedding cake, there is nothing to compare with the taste of one of these products of the baker’s skill.

I guess, like most folk, my love goes back to those tea times of childhood. Fighting over who should have the end slice of an iced loaf. Where even a slightly dry sponge cake could be made delightfully when broken up in a deep bowl and a liberal quantity of evaporated milk poured over it!

So it was a sad day when I first started my life in farming.

I shared living quarters with fellow worker Ken in a converted chicken shed, and meals were at a nearby café. Breakfast and dinner were supplied, but not tea… so no cake.

Then the farm’s ducks came to the rescue. To supplement their feed requirements the farmer had agreed once a week to clear all the stale goods from the local bakery. For myself and Ken this became a great treasure hunt on a Monday morning. The horsebox would be backed into the yard and the tailgate dropped. There before us was a mountain of bread, cakes, and assorted items that you find in any baker’s shop, from sausage rolls to pies and turnovers.

We pounced on this like starving beggars!

The bread was thrown out into long feeding troughs in the yard, the meat-containing objects followed (couldn’t take that sort of chance)… but the cakes. Oh Lordie… the cakes. Yes, they were a tad stale, but on average only slightly – at least to our taste – so we picked the best, filled our mouths, and put the tastiest-looking examples to one side for later consumption.

Any stomach that could take a pint of Jersey milk straight from the cow followed by thickly spread homechurned butter from the same source has no problem dealing with a slightly tough iced fancy and a mouthful of three-day-old cream bun!

The troughs were then soaked with the yard hose, the filling broken into small pieces with spades and the

ducks released for their share of the booty. They, like us, loved it! The one failure that I can recall, due to its unusual final result, was when a load rolled in one morning in early January with two sacks of Christmas puddings amongst the goodies. Now, I thought Christmas puddings lasted for years. These apparently wouldn’t for some reason. They’re were indeed very hard. We tried to break one open but even when being hit with a hammer they refused to offer themselves up for sampling. In the end we dumped them in one of the troughs and left them to soak overnight in the icy water. Next morning, nada. A thin film of brown sludge could be just scrapped off them, but otherwise solid. What had gone wrong with the baking I don’t know, but even the ducks gave up on them and we finally dumped them on the muck heap where I guess even after six decades they still repose. Some years later my own attempts in baking cakes was to finish with very similar results. I wasn’t confident enough to go for the complete beginning of flour, eggs, milk, water, etc, so it was with a bagful of ready-to-mix-and-bake packets that I ventured into my first – and last – attempt. I was going for my two favourite small cakes. Jam doughnuts and Chelsea buns. I did my best. Honest! I followed the instructions on the side of the packs to the letter. Well, I thought I did. Somehow, and I still don’t know how, I managed to replicate those aforementioned Christmas puddings. The family refused to eat them, and I confess I too gave up on the attempt. The final telling verdict on my kitchen skills was the contempt that all the garden birds showed to the delicious titbits I threw out for them. I ignored the remarks about them avoiding bent beaks from the brother-in-law and vowed to stick to boiled eggs in future. Still love cakes though, just that someone else needs to cook them! Anyone need any help in the kitchen? No? Thought not. John Nash ‘James Grieve’

An occasional mini-series on apple varieties… To make a slight change let’s look at a Scottish Apple.

In 1883 James Grieve of Edinburgh produced an apple which he named after himself. A very popular apple for many years until it faded from commercial orchards in the 1960’s as it can bruise quite easily and the rise of the supermarkets started to dictate the market place more than ever before. Despite this, in 1993 the Royal Horticultural Society awarded it their Medal of Garden Merit, showing their appreciation of the apple regardless of its loss of commercial use.

It’s a very useful apple in many ways. It will tolerate early frosts and still give a crop. It has a lovely sharpness that lends itself to juice and cider production and if left to fully ripen it has a lovely melting texture that is sharp but tasty. At apple identification on apple days around the country it’s an apple that often pops up so is still a popular garden variety. Still found in many nursery catalogs and garden centres around the country. John Nash