Question: What do you call leftovers of a traditional English dessert consisting of a mixture of strawberries, meringue, and whipped cream?

Answer: Read on to find out. (Although, if you don’t recognize the dessert, you might want to google “strawberries, meringue, and whipped cream” to give yourself a chance of working out the answer.)

This blog-writing is a rum business. As last week drew to a close, I realized that publishing the blog this week would be a challenge. With Shavuot falling on Sunday night and Monday, and Sunday taken up with baking challa etc., making chopped herring, and sundry other chores, I had limited time for writing a post. (How fortunate it is that we count the Omer and get plenty of warning about when Shavuot is coming.) So, I spent last Friday deciding on a topic for this week, and some of Friday evening and Shabbat afternoon plotting out in my head how I was going to tell this week’s story.

Sadly, I woke on Sunday morning, with a sinking feeling and the realisation that I was less than happy with what I had planned to write; on the other hand, I didn’t feel there was time to regroup. And then, as I was doing something in the kitchen (of which more later), a whole other post leapt almost fully formed into my mind. So, there you have it! Sometimes I choose the post, and sometimes the post chooses me. This week is definitely one of the latter.

I feel sorry for Bernice (not as sorry as she would sometimes want, but she’s learnt to take what she can get). When we married, she didn’t know how to boil an egg, as it were, having been raised by a mother who firmly believed that “you’ll have plenty of time to cook when you’re married”. I did know how to boil an egg, and also how to poach a whole salmon (it’s a long story that will have to wait for another time), but little more than that.

Now, almost 49 years later, I bake the bread, brew the beer, mull the wine, make the liqueurs and a couple of flashy desserts – ice cream, chocolate meringues, tiramisu – and pickle cucumbers, leech olives, make piccalilli, chutney and jam…and chopped herring. (All of which, I hasten to add, I only started relatively recently.) So, I basically do all the fun stuff that’s high-profile and gets noticed. (No, I’m not proud, since you ask, but it is how it is.)

Meanwhile, Bernice does everything else, which basically means that she has been putting one or two healthy and delicious balanced meals on the table every day for half a century. I think they call it division of labour, but Bernice, I believe, has a different name for it. All I will say on the subject is that she was a good cook as soon as she started, and she continues, unbelievably, to be a better and a more adventurous cook with each passing year. I count my blessings after every meal.

As mentioned above, one of my party pieces is tiramisu, and when Bernice was discussing with Esther what she should make for dessert on Shavuot. (I’m ambivalent about cheesecake in Israel, since you can’t get the really dry curd cheese to make a proper dry, baked Anglo-Jewish cheesecake – the kind that you can’t eat without a cup of tea, because it sucks all the saliva from your mouth.) Esther suggested I make my tiramisu – a dessert based on the principle that anything containing liberal quantities of coffee, chocolate and alcohol cannot possibly fail). Since our guests on Monday were Esther and Ma’ayan, we thought we should fall in line.

As it turned out, we had friends round for dinner last Wednesday night. How exotic and bizarre that sounds…and how wonderful it was just to relax around the table and catch up with everyone’s news. Bernice suggested that I make a small tiramisu for Wednesday, and another small one for Shavuot. I made the first and we finished two-thirds of it on Wednesday. Bernice then pointed out that I didn’t need to make another. She isn’t eating sweet desserts at the moment, and I really didn’t want half a tiramisu staring at me from the fridge while I desperately try and at least not put on more weight before my hip-replacement surgery, scheduled for the end of May.

The problem was that I didn’t really like the first tiramisu all that much, for two reasons: the coffee and the coffee. Let me explain. The recipe that I use calls for soaking ladyfinger biscuits in a mixture of very strong coffee and coffee liqueur. I always used to make a strong mixture of instant coffee, but now, infected with my daughter’s food snobbery, I make the coffee in my Nespresso machine. However, I forgot this time how strong to make it, and I badly underestimated.

In addition, we suddenly remembered that we had no coffee liqueur. We had been unable to find it when we finished the bottle last time I made tiramisu, and then forgot to keep looking! This time I winged it with a blend of brandy and chocolate liqueur, but the end result wasn’t the same, hardly tasting of coffee at all. In addition, I felt the texture was a little drier than I like it.

So, on Thursday we went in search of coffee liqueur, and actually found some. I decided that I would attempt to make a small mixture of very strong coffee and coffee liqueur, pour it alongside the bottom stratum of biscuit on the exposed face of the remaining third of the tiramisu and gently tilt the dish so that the biscuit soaked up the liquid. When the bottom layer of biscuit was well moistened, instead of quitting while I was ahead, I decided to tilt the dish further so that the liquid would reach the top layer of biscuit. I don’t know if you’ve read The Tipping Point. If you have, you will probably guess that I crossed it with the tiramisu, and two blocs from the centre of the strip of dessert separated off and tumbled across the dish.

Question: What do you call leftovers of a traditional English dessert consisting of a mixture of strawberries, meringue, and whipped cream?

Answer: Well, a traditional English dessert consisting of a mixture of strawberries, meringue, and whipped cream is known as an Eton mess, so leftovers might well be called a half-Eton mess.

Which is what I had at that point. I didn’t panic. Listening to some of Esther’s tales from the professional kitchen has taught me that almost any dish can be salvaged from disaster, and what the diners don’t know won’t kill them. I simply eased the two breakaway blocs back into place, and dusted some more cocoa powder over the cracks, where the white cheese layer had been exposed.

The question now is whether my deconstructed/reconstructed tiramisu will be a success. By the time you read this, Esther and Ma’ayan, the family foodies, will have tasted the tiramisu blind. When Esther reads this, I’ll learn whether I got away with it. By the time you read this, the proof of the pudding, as they say, will already have been in the eating.

Of course, it isn’t only in the kitchen that I get considerably more than my just desserts. (Apologies!) For example, Bernice goes to the mall, buys clothes for Tao, buys a padded envelope and brings it home. I print an address label, stick it on the envelope, and pack the clothes. Bernice then goes out and posts the package at the post office. This last task alone is an experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone. So, about 98% of the total effort is Bernice’s.

Then, lo and behold, when the package arrives in Portugal, I discover that I have equal billing. I am truly blessed.