Bloody mary muffins on Bake Off… and why not?
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Version 0 of 1. Mary has never had a bloody mary. That was the first problem. Never had a bloody mary! Imagine that! Not a single bloody one. Last week was a big news week and what with all the EU wrangling you may have missed Wednesday night’s bombshell: Mary Berry, the cookery queen, has never drunk a bloody mary. This was revealed after I tried and failed to dazzle her with my “bloody mary muffins”, as part of the The Great Sport Relief Bake Off. The expression that crossed Mary’s face as she bit – denoting a nasty shock received by someone hoping to be delighted, as if a groom had turned at the altar to see his bride approaching in a Dumbo onesie – will live with me for years. Its soundtrack will be the noise of Mary’s harrowed cough, later in the show, on first forkful of my “sea salt sponge”. When I agreed to take part in the Bake Off, I just thought it would be nice to earn some money (albeit, despite my best attempts at haggling, for charity). I’ve been on maternity leave for nearly a year. Only Connect has been running on TV, but we recorded the whole series in a nervous hurry last April when I was eight months pregnant. Monday after Monday for 29 weeks, viewers have watched me lumber across the set and thought: “Boy, Mrs Mitchell is taking her sweet time to shift that baby weight.” I’m like the counter-argument to Abbey Clancy. I’m joking. Our viewers don’t notice that sort of thing. If they’ve muttered anything, it’s: “I think the answer is ‘branches of German mystic thought’, but that fat woman is obscuring one of the clues.” Anyway, I like The Great British Bake Off. I was flattered to be asked. Little did I suspect that I really would go on an “emotional journey”. It was a journey that placed me at an exact point on the trajectory of modern feminism, as precisely as Professor Henry Higgins can place a man 22 miles north of Gloucester. First, we were asked to make muffins, which I’ve heard are a breakfast food. What could be nicer, I reasoned, than to create one out of my own favourite Sunday morning pick-me-up: a bloody mary. If you’d like to find out whether I was right, mix 400g of sifted flour with four teaspoons each of baking powder and celery salt, two teaspoons of black pepper and half a teaspoon of bicarb. Then whisk 16 tablespoons of milk together with four tablespoons each of olive oil, ketchup and Worcester sauce, one tablespoon of vodka, four teaspoons of Tabasco and four eggs. It was remarkable how sad I felt when Mary’s face fell at Muffingate Combine the wet and dry ingredients, then fold in 300g of sunblush tomatoes (do not use fresh) and a drizzle of red food colouring for festivity. Divide the mixture between 20-25 muffin cases and bake for about 20 minutes (or until they seem risen and cooked). Once they’ve cooled a bit, stud them all over with tiny pieces of fresh celery, drizzle with lemon and serve with a shot of vodka. Nice or not nice? An irrelevant question. The point is they taste like a bloody mary. In muffin form! Perfect for all but two sets of circumstances: it’s your week to cater the AA meeting, or you’re trying to amuse the palate of someone who’s never drunk a bloody mary. The competition itself is only a bit of fun, against a charity backdrop of serious trauma, but it was remarkable how sad I felt when Mary’s face fell at Muffingate. Paul Hollywood is a very likable, bright and funny chap, but whether or not he got my culinary joke (and I think he did) was neither here nor there, emotionally. Mary Berry, however… Somewhere in the nexus of my identity as a wife and mother, and hers as the nation’s grandmother, lay a very bruisable relationship between hope and approval. I enjoyed the show enormously, but this was a dark undercurrent. An undercurrant, if you will. For the “showstopper round”, we had to bake a cake that represented “the extreme sport we always wanted to try”. For me, there is none. Therefore, I chose round-the-world yachting on the grounds that it is, at least, an extreme sport you can do while sitting down and drinking a cup of tea. As a keen admirer of Heston Blumenthal and the concept of light-hearted food theatre, I decided my cake would not only look like the sea but taste like the sea as well. I’m not an idiot. I didn’t put prawns in it. It was the usual cakey blend of eggs, butter, sugar etc, with a sprinkling of Maldon sea salt in the sponge and a salted caramel icing. The top was iced with salty coloured waves and studded with allsort jellyfish because nothing is as appetising, come teatime, as a portuguese man o’war. It isn’t very salty – just enough to give you a light tang of beach holidays as you bite into a slice of the sea. I shall put the full recipe on my blog at victoriacoren.com, where I hope people will bake it because I think this is a funny and delicious cake, but Mary Berry practically choked on it. Here’s the thing: Mary Berry didn’t want “food wit” from Generation Blumenthal; Mary Berry wanted a cake from the timeless forever. Sugar, not vodka. Chocolate, not salt. Simple, tasty pies that have been baked for hundreds of years by women who look after their husbands and children in warm, floury, well-run homes. In Mary’s disappointment, I felt ashamed. I looked in the mirror and saw a crop-haired commie, messing about in a boiler suit while my baby wailed for milk and better women flirted with my husband. It is weird, the relationship between people and food. It’s always deeper than you think. It always stands for something else. And that’s where I am on feminism’s timeline: I can only have been born in Britain in the 1970s. My first instinct was professional, to be avant-garde and interesting, to entertain and compete. And yet my deeper instinct was to feel genuine shame, when an older woman thought I couldn’t cook. |