Tag: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Cherry Almond Tart

Posted October 13, 2022 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 3 Comments

Today marks the final recipe in my JONATHAN STRANGE & MR. NORRELL menu. This is one of my favorite books so of course I’m sad to be done, but I’m also SO grateful that I have a job that lets me bring fictional food to life. Living the dream!

Today’s recipe is inspired by the cherry almond tart Jonathan Strange eats while in Spain helping the British army during the Peninsular War. In the book, Strange eats almond tart with dried cherries, which I interpreted to be cherry almond tart using army rations. For my recipe, I decided to make what I felt the army cook was trying to recreate: cherry frangipane tart.

Since I’m new to making frangipane, this recipe is a bit of a conglomeration. I started with my standard pie shell recipe and made changes based on cherry frangipane tart recipes by Fresh Hunger, The Sunday Baker, and Kitchen Trials. I also used a combo of those recipes to come up with my filling. This was a really fun experience! I especially appreciated Sunday Baker’s tip to turn the cherry halves cut-side-up to prevent extra liquid from leaking into the tart.

Since cherry and almond are two of my husband’s favorite foods, I don’t think he minded at all that I had to tweak this recipe 3-4 times before I was happy with it. I hope you enjoy the results at much as he did!

Salad of Beet Root

Posted September 29, 2022 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 0 Comments

I’m a sucker for a good autumn salad. I’ll take hearty greens, roasted root veg, spiced nuts, soft cheese over a tomato-and-cucumber situation any day. Yet I’ve never had a chance to make one for the blog, so when I saw one mentioned in JONATHAN STRANGE & MR. NORRELL, I knew my time had come. Plus, I knew a beet salad would go perfectly with the other dishes I had planned for my Strange & Norrell menu—wigg buns with orange marmalade, a honeyed Cornish hen pot pie, and an opulent dessert I’m keeping secret for now. 😉

I added honey to my roasted beets to tie them in with both the pot pie entree and the vinaigrette I drizzled over the salad at the end (a honey Dijon variation on my go-to vinaigrette recipe). I wanted robust, earthy greens that would hold up to the deep flavor of the beets, so I used some kale and beet greens (never pass up a chance to use edible root veg greens in your salad—turnip greens are amazing too!). For salt and crunch, I included some bacon and toasted pine nuts.

An autumn salad craves soft cheese, so I went with goat cheese since it’s appropriate for the English countryside setting. Stilton would be even more appropriate, but I couldn’t get any. Up to this point, my salad is pretty much a standard beet salad, so I wanted something unusual to set it apart. Apricots were the answer to my prayer—sweet enough to brighten up all the other flavors, while rich enough not to get overpowered.

I ate this with my sister after I finished taking pictures, and we absolutely devoured it! In fact, she normally doesn’t like goat cheese, but she loved it here. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did! 🙂

Pie of Honeyed Hummingbirds: Honeyed Cornish Hen Pot Pie

Posted September 15, 2022 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 0 Comments

In JONATHAN STRANGE & MR. NORRELL by Susanna Clarke, there is a scene in which the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair orders an array of fantastical dishes from a restaurant: roasted wyvern, salamander with pomegranate relish, a pie of honeyed hummingbirds, and more! I wanted to be sure to include one of these amazing dishes in my menu, so I chose the pie of honeyed hummingbirds.

There’s no description of the pie in the book beyond the name, though it was obviously a savory poultry pie, so I had lots of room to get creative! I decided to use Cornish hens as my “hummingbirds” (partridge or grouse would be even smaller, but I decided to stick with what people can easily find in a grocery store). I roasted the hens in honey-lemon glaze and used mead (honey wine) in the filling’s creamy broth. Since this is an autumn menu, I added seasonal flavors like pumpkin, leek, and sage to create a delicious, rich, just-slightly-sweet poultry pie. Garnish the crust with a sage leaf hummingbird for that added touch of whimsy, and you’re all set to feast with the malevolent Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair. . . if you dare! 😉

Old-Fashioned Wigg Buns with Orange Marmalade

Posted September 1, 2022 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 2 Comments

Today I’m thrilled to begin a menu for one of the best books I’ve read in a long time: JONATHAN STRANGE & MR. NORRELL by Susanna Clarke. It is a historical fantasy that follows the story of two gentlemen magicians whose partnership and eventual rivalry change their world.

Despite the book’s unbelievable length (over a thousand pages!), I found myself wanting to read as slowly as possible, just so I could stay immersed in Clarke’s world. I love how she takes magical elements and seamlessly weaves them into a realistic 19th-century English setting. The aesthetic is reminiscent of gothic fantasy, making it a perfect autumn read, yet the book is narrated like a biography or piece of academic research, which grounds it. The merger of fantasy and reality is helped by footnotes that reference dark folklore and works of magical scholarship alongside historical figures like Napoleon and Lord Byron.

In keeping with this realistic setting, I wanted today’s recipe to be an authentic historical dish. In the book, Stephen Black, a butler who is more than he appears, is offered a wigg bun with marmalade. Wigg buns are lightly sweetened rolls that were popular in the late 18th century. They were traditionally spiced with caraway. I must confess to hating caraway, so I used other period appropriate spices: allspice, nutmeg, and cloves. The recipe below is an authentic late 18th-century recipe I found on Savoring the Past, which explores historical living (it’s a great source of culinary info from that era. I’ve use their collection of online historical cookbooks for past menus). This was really fun to try, and I especially enjoyed making “barm,” the historical alternative to modern dried yeast.

As for the marmalade that accompanied Stephen’s buns, I used a slightly tweaked version of a recipe I found on Mon Petit Four, since I’d never made marmalade before. I love this recipe because it’s super easy to follow, doesn’t use a lot of ingredients, and successfully avoids the bitterness that can happen in homemade marmalade. It takes a couple hours, but a lot of that time is spent waiting for things to boil. Plus, it’s easy to scale up without much added cook time. It was super delicious, I’ll definitely make it again. Enjoy! 😀