Hugh Laurie Archives - The Skittish Library

For something a little different this Valentine’s Day, why not make a little “Puff of Affection”, as apparently loved by the eminent eighteenth-century dictionary-compiler, Samuel Johnson. Or Robbie Coltrane, as he is forever in my mind’s eye.

I’d give one to Hugh Laurie, especially in the Prince Regent get-up. A puff of affection, that is.

As Johnson has it – it’s a little cake (“A kind of delicate bread”) for a Valentine (“a sweetheart, chosen on Valentine’s day”) to have for pudding (“1. a kind of food very variously compounded, but generally made of meal, milk, and eggs. 2. The gut of an animal. 3. A bowel stuffed with certain mixtures of meal and other ingredients.”)

“Puffs of Affection”

It is recorded that Samuel Johnson was very fond of these puffs. He refers to them as having been first made in honour of St Valentine, but that in his calendar the saint’s day came often.
Make a batter with 1 tablespoon flour and 1/2 pint milk, then add a beaten egg, 1 teaspoon sugar, the same of grated lemon rind, and a tiny pinch of salt. Butter some small moulds, pour a little of the mixture into each, just half filling them, and bake in a slow oven for 30 minutes. Turn out, sprinkle liberally with sugar, and serve hot.
Similar puffs are often served with syrup, and make quite a good stand-by pudding.

There’s a couple of odd things about the recipe. Firstly – flour, milk and eggs, flavoured with lemon, sugar and syrup. It’s pretty much a low-flour pancake, which seems a bit strange to have as a tradition merely a week after Shrove Tuesday. Secondly – one tablespoon of flour? I was interested to see how this would hold together with so little flour, and…well, it didn’t.

Not so much a Puff of Affection as a floppy slop. And no-one wants that on Valentine’s Day.

I tried again, upping the flour to that of my normal pancake recipe, 125g of flour with all the other ingredients kept the same.

These were much better in that they at least kept their shape, and they tasted, unsurprisingly, of fat pancake. But one of the charms of a pancake is its delicate thinness, and the fresh memory of a stack of them a week ago means this pales a bit in comparison. To be honest, I’d recommend a Valentine’s breakfast of a savoury bacon and cheese pancake instead.

Vintage Recipes – Invalid Cookery, 1902-1930

If you look at practically any general cookbook from Victorian times up to the 1940s, you’re likely to find a section that has now entirely fallen by the wayside in modern books – special recipes for the sickroom, often called “Invalid cookery”.

This is the kind of thing:

(This is where I had embedded a video of the Fry and Laurie period sketch on broth vs soup, and which doesn’t exist anymore, and is also not in any of their sketch books. Which is a shame because it sums up invalid cookery perfectly.)

Incidentally, I seem to remember the recipes for Talbot’s Broth and Henry’s Soup actually did appear on Ceefax as mentioned in the sketch.

Now we have Heinz Tomato Soup, Lucozade, and better medicine, perhaps these gently nourishing recipes aren’t needed so much anymore. But I do like the idea of a special menu if you’re unwell. It marks the occasion, in a way. Recipes included gruel in many forms, blackcurrant tea, barley water, invalid custard, toast water and beef tea.

I’ve also got a number of recipes for the slightly alarming-sounding raw beef tea. I haven’t got a certificate in food hygiene admittedly, but this sounds like rather a potential nightmare. I mean, it’s not quite Talbot’s fried bull penis, but still.

Raw Beef Tea

1/4 lb lean beef
1/4 pint water
Few drops of lemon juice

Remove all fat and cut the beef up finely.
Put into the water with the lemon juice.
Let it stand for 6 or 8 hours, pressing beef with a spoon occasionally.
Strain.
Serve in a covered spoon.

This is only given in cases where it could not be assimilated if cooked.

Here’s some more recipes for the sick. Not sure if I’d fancy tripe as the best of times, to be honest, let alone while under the weather.

From Mrs Rea’s Cookery Book, 1910:

From The Liverpool School of Cookery Book, 1902:

Liverpool Training School of Cookery book, 1902

From The Essex Cookery Book, 1930:

If you’re interested in this, I’ve previously posted about gruel and how Horlicks is the modern equivalent here – https://skittishlibrary.co.uk/vintage-recipes-gruel/

And I’ve tested out the nursery treat of Blackcurrant tea here – https://skittishlibrary.co.uk/vintage-recipes-blackcurrant-tea/