Crumpets

"The only true essentials of a winter tea are a pot of tea and a plate of crumpets, butter nestling in an almost melted pool on the little pancakes' toasted crusts, the holes, all 50 of them (at the last count) full to the brim. In a perfect world the butter - in this case I think it should be salted - will run down your fingers as you tear at each freshly toasted crumpet with your teeth. Never cut a crumpet - you should tug and suck at the same time." Nigel Slater

Crumpets are comfort food. They're not good for you. The other day I had fasted for two days straight and then had to get up at 5.45 and drive halfway across Melbourne and back. I promised myself that I would have coffee with crumpets and jam when I got back home - I had even bought some the day before. The quality of the jam is important of course - my own home-made - but they were manna from heaven on that cold morning. I have talked about them a bit before when I talked about breakfast, but I decided to do a slightly more in-depth study this time.

The first thing to note is that this is yet another peculiarly English thing. Well maybe technically Welsh, as the name is derived from the Welsh 'crempeg' meaning a pancake or fritter. As far as I am aware there are no crumpets anywhere else in the world. Although. It is a kind of thick pancake after all - made from a stiff yeasty batter, not a dough and obviously there are all manner of pancake like things around the world. But I don't think any of them have the holes. Which apparently are quite hard to get and are what really makes a crumpet a crumpet. Of the articles that I have read on how to cook crumpets many of them say it takes a bit of skill and that getting the holes is tricky. I have never tried it - well it involves yeast - and I'm not generally that lucky with yeast. If you want to give it a go, Felicity Cloake of The Guardian gives a rundown of various options, and gives a recipe which is an amalgam of several sources I think. Delia, of course, has a recipe, as has Jamie Oliver. Nigella does not though. Maybe it's too lower class for her.

The Guardian quotes Elizabeth David and indeed I had gone to the master to check. Her book English Bread and Yeast Cookery would tell me all I wanted to know I guessed. And indeed it did - and then some. After a lengthy introduction in which, in her usual schoolmarmy way, she dismisses bought ones - "Crumpets, or at least terrible travesties of them, can still be bought in England", she raises the matter of the difference between a crumpet, a muffin, pikelets, pancakes and oatcakes. The muffins she refers to here are not the blueberry and/or chocolate muffins that are so popular at the moment, but the breakfast muffins that you can buy in packets. I might do something on this another time. Then she goes on to give a selection of some thirty or forty recipes dating from 1747 to almost the present day. It's all really quite fascinating and I'm sure somebody somewhere has written an entire book - or maybe an entire website on the subject. Suffice to say they have been around for a very long time. It's all otherwise a bit esoteric.

The other interesting thing she drew attention to was the other meaning of crumpet - "a piece of skirt, any likely young woman, a girl with whom someone is having a passing affair", which apparently was the meaning of muffin in earlier centuries. Both of them have overtones of affection to them I think - muffin and crumpet in a sexual sense that is. Why would you describe a sexy girl in those terms though? Comfort food? Is a tart less comfortable? Well maybe.

Anyway I don't think I'm going to make any any time soon but I shall probably buy some of those terrible travesties from the supermarket from time to time. Our new toaster even has a crumpet setting on it!