I have used my mother's 1982 omnibus edition of Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course so many times that the book almost falls open automatically at fruit crumbles. Our rhubarb is plentiful at present so I thought it could be time for an alternative rhubarb cake or dessert. So I turned to my maternal grandmother's original hand-written recipe book which has been added to and passed down in my family from before the First World War. I am certain of this because I discovered my grandmother listed in the 1911 UK Census (about a decade before she married) at the same address she has written in the front of her book.
My search for rhubarb puddings turned up a collection of recipes from the writer Ambrose Heath cut and pasted from the Manchester Guardian by my mother who inherited the book some time after her marriage - I would guess the mid 1950s. (Another recipe for bread puddings has the dateline Friday April 6th 1956). The instructions in these newspaper cuttings were those of an early age with details of how to make a 'canary pudding mixture' for rhubarb sponge, unfamiliar dry measures: 'the weight of an unshelled egg' and liquid measures: 'stew with a gill of water'.
Many recipes need adaptation, and these 1950s ones would have required both a journey back to the pre-metric years of my youth and a significant reduction in the proportion of sugar or syrup used, to take account of my diabetes. I have found even with the good and reliable Delia that the amount of sugar in a fruit crumble can be cut by at least a third to no noticeable effect. So I looked up a recipe promoted by Diabetes UK which I found in the magazine The People's Friend some time before we moved up here in 2014. Easy, freezable, clear, with metric and imperial measurements, and importantly for me, reduced sugar and information on how many calories per serving (approx 95g). I've now made it three times and it works.
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