Seventy, not out. That’s a pretty good innings by anyone’s standards. A septet of decades in the same job; no promotion, no pay rise, just proper good old fashioned graft, for seventy years. Seriously impressive. I feel like we should all chip in and buy her a watch or something?
Yes, the hour is almost upon us: Platinum Jubilee week. Time to unroll the bunting and wheel out Brian May for his annual CBE duties. Will you be celebrating? Middle England is all a-tither with plans of street parties and excuses to get blottoed on gin. Flags and grain alcohol… God save the queen! Soon households the length of Blighty will frantically search their attics for that old pasting table to stick out in the cul-de-sac in a sausage roll and vol-au-vent covered caterpillar the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the war. Sales of sherry will go through the roof. Asda will sell out of that ham formed into the shape of a teddy bear’s head. Aldi will announce an almost identical version. The entire country will rejoice together in an orgy of weak orange squash and Vera Lynn. Mark this time in your diaries, good people, for years from now when your children’s children gaze up at you from your knee and ask, Where were you on the Platinum Jubilee, dear grandparent? your chest will swell with pride as you answer, Here, little Ariana, in this very street, on this very chair, sunburnt and rat-arsed on continental lager and tiramisu.
Right now I’m holed up in a remote forestry cottage in the deepest, darkest Borders; I can’t see there being too many street parties up here. There’s no street for a start. But for much of the country 2-5 June will be one long, here’s hoping hot, glorious weekend of monarchy-based fun and festivities. Oh yes, you read that right: four whole days, people. We’re living Tim Martin’s wet dream.
Being up here in Border country I’ve been blissfully unaware of the building momentum around the Jubilee celebrations. Most of my time has been taken up growing a layer of downy fur against the cold. Yesterday, though, I ventured onto Twitter where the term #PlatinumPudding was trending hard. Apparently there has been a competition, run by Fortnum & Mason, to find the dessert of the Jubilee – the X-Factor of puddings, if you will – with each dish being submitted by members of Her Majesty’s public in the hope of being crowned victor. The winner has just been announced: Jemma Melvin, a 31-year old copywriter from Southport, earning herself not only a place in British culinary history alongside such greats as coronation chicken and Victoria sponge, but also a spanking great trophy, an F&M hamper, afternoon tea, and a lifetime spot on the guest list at Lorraine. (I’ve never understood why we’d need to know her age, this baffles me. It’s a trait of the tabloid press to insist on publishing the subject’s age that’s as peculiar to Britain as the Jubilee itself. You may as well tell me her height, or her shoe size. Anyway, I digress…)
The Platinum Pudding! I needed to know more so I ran it through Google. A word of warning here: if you plan to do the same, make sure you search for ‘platinum pudding’ and not ‘platinum cake’. It turns out they are two very different things (though either would make for a cracking street party). Jemma’s winning pudding is the Lemon Swiss Roll and Amaretti Trifle, and y’know what? It looks pretty damned good! I’d smash that, no worries. She based the pudding on the fact that lemon posset was served at Her Madge’s wedding; so lemon posset became lemon curd, furled up inside slices of Swiss roll in place of the traditional trifle sponge, which is then set in a St. Clement’s jelly; custard next, amaretti biscuit, mandarin coulis, and a full udder’s worth of softly whipped cream; top it all off with white chocolate shards, et voilà! A pudding fit for a queen.
It does look impressive, particularly in that goblet bowl. A truly celebratory dessert… which got me thinking: just how much would it cost your average home cook to recreate the Platinum Pudding? Well, there’s one way to find out.
Oh no, no I’m not actually going to make it. The place I’m staying in right now is 40 minutes from the nearest supermarket, we’re on bottled gas, spring-fed water, and we have to boil a saucepan just to make a brew. Also, I can’t be arsed. But what I can do is search for the ingredients online and make a pretty accurate guess. So that’s what I’ve done. The recipe has been published on Fortnum & Mason’s website, you can find it here. I totalled up all of the ingredients needed for the recipe and worked out their exact cost using the cheapest suitable product available on Asda’s online grocery service. Then I worked out roughly how much energy would be needed in kWh to power both an oven and a stove top for the minimum time required to prepare the various elements of the trifle. Using Money Saving Expert’s tariff picker, I found the best dual fuel tariff available in my home (non-Borders backwater) area and used that £/kWh rate to work out the energy costs. So excluding any fuel costs to get to and from the supermarket, the cost of running the refrigerator (which we can presume would be running anyway) and the energy needed to use electric mixers, whisks, or any other gadgets, this is what I came up with:
Cost of ingredients: £22.93
Best gas rate in my area: £0.05 /kWh
Best electric rate in my area: £0.22 /kWh
*Total oven baking time: 20 mins plus 15 mins preheating time @ 0.87 kWh = 0.51 kWh
∴ Gas cost = £0.025 / Electric cost = £0.11
(* 0.87 kWh rate based on the average energy taken to heat a standard A-rated oven @ 180°C)
**Total stove cooking time: 60 minutes @ 0.91 kWh = 0.91 kWh
∴ Gas cost = £0.045 / Electric cost = £0.20
(** 0.91 kWh rate based on the average energy taken to bring 1 litre of cold water to the boil).
So, the best case scenario given the figures used would put the cost of recreating the Platinum Pudding at £23.00.
Now to the important question: who cares? Well, the reason I wondered about this is that the Platinum Jubilee celebrations are intended as an everyman’s jamboree, as a chance for every person from every background to let down their hair and have a good old knees up after two years of pandemic puritanism. The problem is that the celebrations come on the back of unprecedented borrowing, a Covid and Brexit -powered increase in food costs, an energy crisis that looks set to worsen before it gets better, and a government that is so out of touch with the common public that it sees the opening of record numbers of food banks as something to boast about rather than be deeply ashamed of. Property prices are rocketing, rental prices are ridiculous, petrol and diesel are effectively now luxury items – how can you entertain spending £23 on a trifle when you only have £40 to feed a family of four for a week? Even if, as the recipe suggests, you manage to divide your trifle into 20 portions (not in my house, you won’t), that’s still £1.15 per portion. Most primary schools and hospitals are given less than that to provide an entire meal.
Alright, I know I’m tilting full left here, I can’t help myself. Nobody’s forcing anyone to spend £23 on making a lemon trifle. It’s just that I can’t help but feel that this whole competition has been a bit of a missed opportunity. If it was truly to be a dish for everyone then it would have made so much more sense to place a cap on the cost of making it; a tenner, say. But then the thing was run by Fortnum & Mason, and when you think of the Queen’s grocer the word budget seldom springs to mind – at the end of the day it’s basically an overblown marketing exercise to help shift more of their hampers. But still…
So in summary, what am I trying to summarise? I’m buggered if I know. It’s May, there are 30 mph winds outside, and to be perfectly frank I’m sitting under a duvet costing somebody else’s recipe because it’s warm and cosy and it means I don’t have to move. Still, at least it was my choice to be here; for 2.1 million others, it isn’t.
Happy jubilee.
EMRE GRUB 