The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook (19 page)
Makes 12
Breakfast Before Class
Breakfast is not just an important meal for Muggles; it's important for wizards too — but it's especially important at Hogwarts because that's when the owls arrive to deliver letters and packages from home. The flood of owls can be a bit much if you're receiving fan mail or hate mail, like Hermione after she was written up in a newspaper by reporter Rita Skeeter in
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
(Chapter 28) or like Harry after he gave his fateful interview in
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
(Chapter 26).
How many different foods do
you
eat for breakfast every morn-ing? One or two, maybe. A bowl of cereal. A muffin and hot chocolate if you have the time. Pancakes and sausages if someone loves you very much (or it's a holiday). If you don't completely skip this important meal, then how about a breakfast of bacon and eggs, sausages, fried bread, fried tomatoes, fried mushrooms, kippers, black pudding, baked beans, and toast and marmalade? Oh, and don't forget the porridge with cream and treacle.
What an enormous amount of food for breakfast. But that's the traditional English breakfast for you. In the 1700s the upper classes, and later also the Victorian middle class, were served all of that and more. This heavy-duty meal is also called the full English fry-up, but today our cousins across the ocean eat much the same things that we do: plain old cereal or a muffin and coffee in the morning. But not to worry — you die-hard Harry Potter fans can still find the traditional fry-up at some British hotels and bed-and-breakfasts if you ever travel to England.
In the Great Hall, we find a mix of the traditional and modern. Some mornings find Harry eating humdrum cereal, but other mornings he enjoys toast and marmalade, porridge with treacle, kippers, sausages, or fried tomatoes.
This chapter does not include a recipe for toast, although Victorian cookbooks devoted chapters to the art of making toast properly. Today, with toasters and toaster ovens, it's pretty simple if you just pay attention. If you don't want to make your own marmalade, you can find this favorite topping for toast next to the jams and jellies in your local supermarket. Treacle or golden syrup can be found at a specialty food store and some supermarkets, or you can substitute maple syrup, light molasses, or corn syrup.
Nothing says “Welcome home to Hogwarts” like sausage. You'll find sausages on the menu throughout the Potter books — most notably at the welcome feast that kicks off the new school year (see
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
, Chapter 12). In that memorable scene, Dumbledore starts to announce the Triwizard Tournament — and is rudely interrupted by the bizarre-looking Professor Moody, who bursts into the Great Hall and without so much as a how-do-you-do helps himself to a sausage.
The Greeks didn't just run around naked throwing disks at each other, wearing laurel wreaths. They also ate sausages, as described in a comedy by Greek playwright Epicharmus brilliantly titled…
The Sausage
. Fifteen hundred years ago the Greeks figured out that you can use up and also preserve all the scraps of meats and unwanted parts of the animal by mixing it with a lot of salt and turning it into sausages. Sausages come in many shapes and forms, one of which is a fresh mixture of ground meat with a filler such as bread crumbs that is formed into patties or sausage shapes and fried.
½ pound ground veal
½ pound ground pork or beef
1 cup fresh bread crumbs
1 teaspoon grated lemon zest
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon ground sage
1/8 teaspoon dried marjoram
1/8 teaspoon ground thyme
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 egg yolks
2 tablespoons butter or margarine
Combine all the ingredients except for the 2 tablespoons butter or margarine in a large mixing bowl and mix well.
Heat the butter or margarine in a skillet on a medium-high flame. Form the meat into sausage shapes and fry on each side, turning often, until the sausages are well browned.
Transfer the sausages to a paper-towel-lined plate. Repeat until all the mixture is used up.
Serves 6
The morning after a harrowing encounter with the dementor on the Hogwarts Express, Harry restores his peace and good humor with a little help from his friends — and sausages and fried tomatoes for breakfast (see
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
, Chapter 6).
Did you know that until the mid-1700s the British thought tomatoes were poisonous? They weren't far off the mark, though. Tomatoes are indeed related to the deadly nightshade, and the stems and leaves of the tomato plant do contain toxins. So when the tomato came to England in the late 1500s, it was cultivated as an unusual plant to look at. Thank goodness, someone finally figured out that we can eat them, and they began to appear in cookbooks in the 1700s.
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 medium-size red ripe tomatoes, sliced into ¼-inch slices
Flour for dredging
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Hot buttered toast, for servin
Heat the oil in a skillet on a medium-high flame.
Dredge the tomatoes in the flour and fry them on both sides until they are golden.
Transfer the tomatoes to a paper-towel-lined plate and sprinkle with the salt and pepper. Serve immediately with hot buttered toast.
Serves 4
Gilderoy Lockhart can't seem to stop embarrassing Harry, whether it's before the start of term or the first day of classes, when eggs and bacon are served for breakfast in the Great Hall (see
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
, Chapter 6). Poor Harry, the forced breakfast chef at the Durs-leys', also serves bacon and eggs on Dudley's birthday after being warned he'd better not burn it (see
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
, Chapter 2).
Who doesn't enjoy eggs with bacon on a weekend morning when there's actually time to make it and eat it? Feel like you're at home with Harry with this centuries-old breakfast classic. Throw in fried tomatoes with toast and a bowl of porridge to pretend you're eating the traditional English breakfast, which contains too much food for normal people to eat even occasionally.
2 slices bacon, diced
2 large eggs
1 tablespoon milk or heavy cream
Salt and pepper to taste
1 ounce English Cheddar cheese, shredde
Heat a skillet over medium-high heat. Add the diced bacon to the pan. Cook, stirring occasionally, until it reaches desired crispiness.
Break the eggs into a small bowl and beat with a fork until completely combined. Add the milk or cream and stir to combine. Add the salt and pepper and stir to combine. Pour the egg mixture over the cooked bacon in the pan, and as soon as they begin to set (become cooked), stir with a wooden spoon, moving them around and over until completely cooked.
Spoon the eggs onto a plate and top with the shredded Cheddar cheese.
Makes 1 serving
Marmalade shows up often in the Harry Potter books; it's just that British. In one breakfast scene, Hermione determinedly avoids discussing her busy schedule and asks for the marmalade in response to Ron's questions (see
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
, Chapter 6).
How'sthis for a sweet little story? A Scottish merchant brought his wife a load of bitter Seville oranges, not very edible. Instead of saying, “What do you expect me to do with these?” as an ordinary housewife might have done, she marched into the kitchen to experiment, and thus orange marmalade was born.
3 oranges
2 cups sugar
2 cups water
Place the oranges in a medium saucepan and cover with water. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer and cook for 1½ hours. Remove the oranges from the pot to a cutting board. Discard the cooking water and rinse the pot.
Peel the oranges and scrape off the pith (the white underside of the peel), using a metal spoon. Discard the pith, as it's bitter. Mince the orange peel and add to the clean pot. Chop the peeled oranges, discard the pits, and process in a blender or food processor until smooth. Pour through a sieve, pressing down with a rubber spatula to extract as much juice as possible. Discard the pulp and add the juice to the pot, along with the sugar and water. (As the mixture boils, it will expand like crazy, so make sure your pot is large enough to handle at least double what you're putting in.)
Cook the mixture over medium-high heat, stirring constantly, until the sugar is dissolved and it begins to bubble. Clip a candy thermometer to the side of the pot, and continue cooking, stirring constantly, until the mixture registers 220°F on the candy thermometer. Remove from the heat.
Makes enough to fill one 14-ounce jar
If you don't have a candy thermometer, you can do the wrinkle test: Put a small amount of marmalade on a saucer and cool it in the fridge. In the meantime, turn off the flame. When it's cool, push the edge in with your finger; if it wrinkles, it's done. Otherwise, reheat the marmalade, cook it for a few more minutes, and try again.
What's more filling than a bowl of thick, sticky porridge? Harry loads up on this wholesome brain food while asking Ron about his schedule. Ron worries about Potions with the Slytherins: will Professor Snape favor the Slytherins as rumored? Little does he know! (See
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
, Chapter 8.) Even the evil and toad-like Professor Umbridge has some porridge — while glaring at the teachers who dare to discuss in her presence the mass outbreak from Azkaban (see
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
, Chapter 25).