Rouxbe

Crème Brûlée is more a classic English pudding than a classic French dessert. Jane Grigson describes it as the 'best of all English puddings' and discusses its origins in her 'English Food'.

It is most frequently associated with Oxford and Cambridge College dinners. Indeed its origin is usually accredited to Trinity College, Cambridge, although Jane Grigson provodes evidence for an origin in the eighteenth century (it appears in Elizabeth Raffald's "The Experienced English Housekeeper".

To be fair, there were earlier sightings in France. Helen Saberi, writing in Alan Davidson's Penguin/Oxford Companion to Food mentions its appearance in a seventeenth century French cooking treatise (Massialot: "Le Cusinier roial et bourgeois (1691) but points out that it subsequently fell into disuse in France.

I have only very rarely come across it in France, where crème caramel is much more usually found on the menu.

(Julia Child et al's claim that it is actually a Creole dish appears to be without foundation)

Dr Christopher Bunch
Oxford UK

Excellent tutorial. Thank you.

There is sometimes some terminological confusion between whole meal and whole wheat (at least in the UK). Wholemeal flour is only 'wholemeal' if it is the product of grinding the whole grain. Whole wheat flour is a lesser product, and according to Wikipedia "In Canada, it is legal to advertise any food product as "whole wheat" with up to 70% of the germ removed."

"With so many ways to cook eggs there is really no wrong way to do it."

Indeed. I happily use both methods - depending on my mood and whether I want to eat the egg hot or cold. For a standard hot boiled egg for breakfast - eaten out of the shell - I put the egg in cold, bring to the boil, then turn off heat and time: 3 min for soft/runny, 4 min for medium, etc.

For cold 'hard' boiled eggs I find the alternative method more reliable: 'soft' boiled eggs seem easier to peel when cooked this way. My timings tend to be lower than yours as we don't keep eggs in the refrigerator, but in a cool larder. (And anyway they don't last long enough to go off!)

A great lesson: thank you, but perhaps the question in your quiz about bloodspots is a bit ambiguous - unless one is familiar with Boolean logic. There are two statements in the stem: one asserts that blood spots are due to a ruptured blood vessel during egg formation (true), the other that they shouldn't be eaten (false). Thus the correct answer to the whole question is 'false': an answer 'true' would require both statements to be true. As it happens, the lesson did not say whether or not it is OK to eat them (I reckon it's fine), but just that 'you can remove them if you like', so perhaps the second statement is unnecessary.?