All I want for Christmas is a Sausage Roll

With every passing year I miss England more. I have even been experiencing nostalgia for the English food of my youth.

My mother was not a great cook. How could she have been, when shortly after her marriage she was forced to cook with things like Spam and Snoek, and everything was rationed. There is a special place in my heart for her blackberry and apple pud, a mixture of blackberries and sliced apples placed in a suet dough-lined basin and covered with more dough and greaseproof paper all tied down with a pudding cloth and string, so that the whole business could be steamed for hours in a saucepan of water to mouth-watering goodness. And dripping. How can I explain dripping?

I have great memories of Sunday lunches after the war. Perhaps the cabbage was a bit over-boiled, but her roast potatoes were scrumptious (I can do those) and her roast beef, lamb and pork were delicious. Especially the pork. The joint always had a topping of the most tasty and crunchy, and probably heart stopping, crackling. Producing crackling seems to be a forgotten art, even in Britain, though I am delighted that a Mr. James Waghorn , suitably inspired by a bath and a few gins, has come up with a formula for crackling. The fact that the formula can also be found in the New Scientist is a little alarming.

Birthday parties, and special teas such as Christmas, had a predictable formula: jelly (that’s jello in the US), canned fruit with evaporated milk, trifle, celery sticks (don’t ask) and sausage rolls. I am longing for a decent sausage roll. I tried a few weeks ago to reproduce the sausage roll of my youth. They were a dismal failure. I am sure it helps to have a good English sausage, but I ought to be able to come up with something more appetizing than Jimmy Dean sausage surrounded by soggy puff pastry.

I have been getting much pleasure from an English food blog, Jam Faced . His photos are marvelous, and what a sea change there has been in British cuisine. My parents would not have given the time of day to bubble and squeak transformed by anchovies. Today’s post is adorned with a mince pie. Dare I hope that by Christmas he will have moved on to sausage rolls?