Addison Embroidery
at the
Vicarage

This recipe was adapted from the BBC Good Food website and it originally included white chocolate. Quite a nice biscuit though, but not outstanding, I should probably have added the 85g of white chocolate chips the recipe recommended – or perhaps I could have added a mashed banana as we are very fond of bananas and custard.

Custard biscuits

140 g butter cubed

175 g caster sugar

1 egg

1/2 teasp vanilla extract

225 g self-raising flour

85 g custard powder

Heat oven to 180°/ 160° for fan oven/Gas Mark 4

Line 3 baking sheets with baking parchment.

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add egg and vanilla and beat well. Sift in the flour and custard powder and mix until a dough forms.

Roll the dough into little balls, about the size of walnuts and place about 3cm apart on the baking tray, giving them a little press to flatten.

Bake for about 12  minutes until very lightly golden. Remove and cool on a wire rack.

Custard biscuits

Garden birds are very low key at the moment  – they are presumably shivering in the trees as the weather refuses to get much warmer. As if in compensation, larger birds have been more high profile. A local pheasant and his wife strut up and down the road and parade in and out of the back gardens and nascent wheat field beyond. In general pheasants seem rather unintelligent birds, but this couple have obviously worked out that when there’s a shoot nearby, sticking near to houses is a good idea. From time to time the male knocks on the glass door with his beak, perhaps to enquire whether we have seen their egg(s). The vicar had in fact spotted an egg  in the flower bed by the back door. At first we thought it was one left over from the Easter egg hunt whose chocolate had turned lighter in the rain and odd hours  of sun, but a bit of research has revealed it to be a pheasant egg abandoned or unsuccessfully sat upon. Having just been reading Jemima Puddleduck to the small person, I fear the female pheasant too may be a poor sitter.

At the same time, the front lawn has been the occasional resting place of three Mallard  ducks –  two drakes and a female – all very companionable and no fighting.  But this year there has been no sign of the swans in the oil seed rape where they sit, twenty or thirty together as if they’ve mistaken the  ploughed and planted furrows for a the eddies of river water. Curious about this, a little delving reveals that the swans are having a feeding stop over on their migration path and, being grazing animals just like rabbits, cows or deer (just like?), they are quite simply making the most of an easily accessible salad plate.

Fifth embellished patchwork star (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Bouncing in the car across Cornwall from the Eden Project near St Austell back to St Ives and our temporary home, daughter No 1 and I realised we had been so taken by the allurements of the giant biomes that we had given very little thought to the china clay whose abandoned workings lay beneath and around the Eden Project Park. What exactly was China clay and why was it found with granites of igneous origin? Further, why were some of the most famous of English porcelain producers to be found in the Potteries (the six towns now absorbed within the city of Stoke on Trent in the west Midlands) and a long way from Cornwall?

Embellished patchwork star : detail (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Well, it turns out that China clay is to be found IN granite as the result of the decomposition of feldspar it and is a major constituent of the rock. The Chinese had for centuries – even thousands of years – made porcelain from china clay, china stone and petuntse (all decomposition products of igneous rocks) and Europe, greedy importers of their wares, had long been desperate to possess the secret of porcelain manufacture. Meissen was the first European hard paste porcelain (1708) but I’m unclear as to the clay they used and where it came from (it is by no means certain that all porcelain clay is derived from the decomposition of feldspar).

But back in England, around the mid C18 Plymouth Apothecary, William Cookworthy (and where is such a wonderful surname today?) was also researching porcelain production and he came to the conclusion that the right ingredients might be present in Cornish rocks. He went from mine to mine until, at Tregonning Hill, near Helston, he found a rare type of decomposing granite, very fine and known locally as Moorstone, Growan or Growan Clay – but basically kaolin or china clay. Larger deposits were found near St Austell and Cookworthy developed a way of separating this from impurities by blasting the rock with water (basically the same method as used today). Over the next 20 years he perfected his porcelain, patenting his recipe in 1768 and setting up the Plymouth Porcelain Factory soon after. At this time he also began to sell kaolin to other British potteries, who had their own clays of different composition but nothing as fine or white and clear of impurities.

Fourth embellished patchwork star (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

The Potteries had access to a great variety of clays but none as pure or white, for all contain metallic – mainly iron – oxides which give a red colour. (A little diversion – in Burslem, [one of the 6 towns making up Stoke-on-Trent], any freeholder could exercise his right to take clay or coals from any public land. In practice this often meant taking clay from the roads – at the sides or even from the carriageway. Such holes were often filled up with rubbish but inevitably the filling didn’t keep pace with the making of them and the roads became pitted with myriad holes – or pot holes.)

Bone china developed in England in 1749 (probably in Bow, east London).  This was a soft paste porcelain (as opposed to Chinese – and Meissen – porcelain which is hard paste ). Soft paste results from combining bone ash with feldspathic materials including kaolin to produce a very strong material which can be made thinner than other porcelain; such porcelain is also less liable to being chipped. Until the late C20 bone china was exclusively an English product but then almost everything changed for the British porcelain industry. For example, after bankruptcies and buyouts, Spode took production of some of its range to China. This was not a success. British buyers found the quality poor and Chinese buyers wanted Spode made in England, not China.  Now owned by the Portmeirion Group production of Spode has returned to Stoke-on-Trent. Hooray!

Embellished patchwork star : detail (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

By 1910 Cornwall was producing about 50% of the world’s china clay, 75% of which it exported. The three main producers merged into one body in the early C20 which continued operation until bought out by the French company Imerys in 1999. Soon after this Imerys moved their operation to Brazil and now just 2,00 people work in the Cornish china clay industry with much of the china clay used in the paper industry.

I bemoan the loss of so much of a once thriving industry but rejoice in Tim Smit’s vision of restoring beauty to just one bit of Cornwall’s industrially  scarred landscape. Nick Grimshaw’s hexagon patchwork puffs are deeply pleasing to a quilt lover and strangely easy on the eye. The urge to pop a puffy hexagon is itchingly strong – high up in the Tropical Biome, daughter No 1 and I couldn’t resist a little pat of the plastic skin. Thank God I didn’t have a needle! I would also like to see more labels on plants … and for there to be fewer visitors  – perhaps a visit in Late January next time.