Winter Comfort Food
When
the weather is freezing we all turn to hot, filling foods to warm us up. One
of the favourite tea time treats for generations of people in Britain is the simple dish
of crumpets.
Crumpets are a type of bread, made with flour and yeast,
and formed into small, flat 'cakes' of about 3½inches in diameter. You can make
your own crumpets from scratch if you have the time, but most people buy them
already baked, and ready to be heated up and eaten.
'from scratch' means 'from the start', in this case, from
the basic ingredients.
I bought these crumpets in Tesco's, one of our major
supermarkets. In the winter months in Britain you can purchase crumpets in most
bakeries and food shops. They are a cheap food to buy. I think these cost about
60p for a pack of 6 crumpets.
As a fresh food, the packet has a 'best before' date,
indicating that the crumpets should not be eaten after this date, as they will
have become stale.
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You
never eat crumpets cold from the packet. The crumpets need to be heated on
a grill or in a toaster. In the past people would toast them over an open
fire, using a long toasting fork to place the crumpets as close to the
flames as possible. Some people still use this method if they are lucky
enough to have a log or coal fire, but most people now use a toaster or
the grill pan of their oven. Although the crumpets
look cooked when you take them out of the packet, the idea is to toast
them so that they are nice and hot and a bit browner on the top. Toasting
also makes the top of the crumpet nice and crispy. If I heat them under
the grill I also toast them briefly on the underside, as I like this to be
crispy too! If you look at the crumpet you will see
that the surface is full of holes (made during its initial baking). When
you have toasted the crumpet you spread butter on the top of the crumpet
whilst the crumpet is still hot, and the butter melts and dribbles down
into these holes. Some people prefer crumpets just
with butter on them. When they are really fresh they are delicious like
this.
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 It is also good to add a topping to the crumpets. I like jam on my
crumpets. Here you can see I have added blackberry jam ( a personal
favourite) but most jams taste good on crumpets. If you want a savoury
topping then melted cheese is also nice. In fact,
you can have both sweet and savoury at once! There is a tradition of
eating a chunk of cheese with some sweet dishes (fruit cake for instance)
and I think that a piece of cheese is very nice when eaten with these
jammy crumpets. If you want to try this I
would suggest a fairly strong type of cheddar. Very mild cheese does not
work well for this I think. Some other varieties of British cheeses suit
this too. You could have some
Wensleydale cheese for instance, just like Wallace and Grommit! It
tastes good with sweet dishes. To learn more about this cheese click on
this link - www.wensleydale.co.uk Crumpets
are normally bought as a snack to have with a cup of tea, but they are
also often served as an afternoon snack in cafes and tearooms in the
winter months. They can be bought as a single item or may be included in a
set 'afternoon tea' with sandwiches, cakes etc. Crumpets are really a
seasonal dish, so are harder to find in the summer.
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