Maria Dernikos

I used to make this tea bread without thinking, well, maybe a little bit of thinking was involved but it was a really easy recipe to make, we had it so often it became ordinary and unexciting so I stopped making it and the recipe was forgotten in a drawer and left to gather dust.

When I was going through the kitchen drawer this week I found my little paperback notebook – it is scribbled on and worn but inside is a world of lost recipes carefully handwritten some twenty five years ago. Some of the recipes are just scraps of paper with recipes written on which have been glued in and others are tinted with stains of food long eaten. I can remember a time when I was lost without this little book, it held my culinary world in its grasp.  All the recipes in that little note-book were collected from friends and family, their mothers and grandmothers – some of them were not that easy to obtain and one or two of them I suspect are not complete, they are missing that little extra ingredient,  having the reputation of making the best lemon cake in the village was something to aspire to – you weren’t going to throw that away lightly. When I was a small child, I often overheard many times ‘she makes the most marvelous sausage rolls, but she won’t give the recipe away’ to a gaggle of disapproval and an intake of breaths. How times have changed; a computer and access to the internet reveals all.

Cheese & Walnut Tea Bread

Ingredients

225g/8 oz Wholemeal Flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp celery salt

1/2 tsp mustard powder

50g/2 oz butter diced

110g/4 oz cheddar cheese grated

25g/1 oz shelled walnuts chopped

142ml/1/4 pint milk

1 egg beaten

1 lb loaf tin – lined with greaseproof paper

Turn oven to gas mark 4/180C/350F.

Method

Mix flour, baking powder, salt and mustard in a large bowl.  Add butter and rub it in between your fingers until it resembles fine breadcrumbs (being lazy I put it in the food processor and whizzed for about a minute).

Stir in cheese and walnuts and then mix in milk and egg to make a soft dough.

Turn the dough into the loaf tin, level the surface and make a slight hollow in the centre.

Bake for 40-45 mins till golden brown. (I baked mine for 50 mins which I believe is down to my oven).

Take out and cool. When cool slice.  My preferred way of eating this is to spread a thick slice liberally with butter. This isn’t a moist tea bread.  It has a more wholemeal texture, but the smell and taste  is lovely and morish.