If Nanna Henderson can remember the sugar...

a Thrifty Kitchen update by Rebecca Law

Journalist Ian Gilbert’s maternal grandmother, Josephine Henderson (“Nanna”), raised a family through wartime rationing and post-war austerity, and the thought of buying preserves would have been anathema to her. And so it was that Ian came to inherit her wonderful – and wonderfully simple – recipe for lemon curd. “It’s dead easy,” explains Ian in his intro to the recipe for this lemon curd, which he contributed to our Independent Age cookbook, The Thrifty Kitchen.

And so, armed with confidence in abundance, the two of us headed off to this weekend’s Food and Wine Festival at Oxford Castle ready for our next foray into the international world of cookery demonstrations.

While Ian busied himself making Peter Gordon’s hot-smoked salmon fishcakes, I, as his faithful assistant, was left with the simple task of stirring the lemon curd - the ingredients of which were neatly perched on top of a gently bubbling bain marie. But something was afoot and what should have been metamorphosing into a velvety smooth lemony mixture was more akin to cottage cheese. Alas, as it dawned on us that the pre-measured 300g of sugar required for this recipe were still neatly sitting in their glass bowl on the work bench, we realised that we had just taught our audience how to make that traditional favourite: lemon scrambled eggs. Yum.

We may not have been Fanny and Johnny, but the performance was still enough to encourage a number of the audience to buy our book and to pledge to hold a Big Tea. And just for the record, the lemon curd is great, just so long as you listen to “Nanna”.

Thanks, too, to Harriet Steele who did a great job of manning our stall for the day...and juggling lemons.