Blancmange Coop

[Darth Sanderson]

dserves 10? does it buggery. We rationed ourselves to a single scoop eaten slowly, rather than troughling our way through the whole pot at once. I think you could get 6 scoops tops out of that barely-a-pint recipe.

I will be hosting a history-themed #BloggerationChat soon, so keep an eye on @Bloggeration_ for details of my forthcoming slot. If you have ever wanted to start writing a history blog, then check-out my first article for Bloggeration on how to do it. There are lots of tips and hints, as well as plenty of resources and sources to inspire you to begin your blogging journey.

Over on my history blog, Come Step Back In Time, there are also lots of new articles which may be of interest (see below), many different topics, particularly if you are looking for something to read in a lunch hour, at bedtime, on a lazy Sunday afternoon or indeed all three:

One of the many recent media opportunities I am particularly thrilled to share with you here, is a feature article about my adventures in retro food, I hope you find it a fun read! The article appeared in the February 2016 issue of recently re-launched Good Living magazine for Asda, now published by Hearst Magazines UK .

This article also tells the story of my late grandfather who served during the war with the Royal Engineers and was involved in the liberation of the Netherlands, specifically Hengelo, in 1945. The article features a wonderful twist of fate, thanks to some detective work by a Dutch historian based near Hengelo, who has traced the family my grandfather befriended during his 6 month stay there.

The two Schuit brothers (pictured above standing), now aged 79 and 85, are still alive, one resides in Hengelo. They remembered my grandfather and we are now in correspondence with them. Hope you enjoy reading this article, it has been a wonderful labour of love obtaining oral histories, curating family photographs and researching relevant historical content.

One of the most poignant of these V.E. Day 70th events will be the lighting of a hundred beacons at various locations around Britain from Newcastle to Cornwall. In the skies above London, there will be an aerial display of Spitfire and Lancaster bomber planes, and cathedral bells will also ring-out across the country.

Method: Boil your potatoes; when cool peel and reduce to a pulp. To 5lb of this pulp, which ought to be as equal as possible, is added 1lb of sour milk, and the necessary quantity of salt. The whole is kneaded together and the mixture covered up, and allowed to lie for three or four days, according to the season. At the end of this time it is kneaded anew, and the cheeses are placed in litter baskets, when the superfluous moisture is allowed to escape. They are then allowed to dry in the shade and placed in a large vessel where they must remain for fifteen days. The older these cheeses are the better.

I have also had enquiries from around the world about blancmange and retro foods in general. Some of these enquiries will hopefully lead to exciting and unusual creative collaborations. I am remaining tight-lipped about these opportunities for the moment but rest assured you will be the first to know when a project is ready for launch. My blancmange cookbook is shaping-up rather nicely too, it will be a mix of vintage recipes as well as modern reinventions. I just need to find a publisher willing take a leap of faith and bring the humble blancmange to a wider audience!

I have been trying-out some of my blancmange recipes on friends and family which has been terrific fun. Following transmission of the tv series, a number of viewers contacted me with their experiences of making blancmanges. Here is a round-up of some of the best pictures and feedback that I have received so far.

This recipe for cold cabinet pudding is from Practical Cookery for All, the 1950 edition. It is compiled and written by Nella Whitfield, Jessie Lindsay, Gweneth Chappel, Lydia Chatterton, Blanche Anding, Andr Simon and Josephine Terry and is one of my favourite cookery books. Packed full of retro recipes (640 pages of them) as well as colour and black and white photographs. I was drawn to this particular recipe for cold cabinet pudding because it is a moulded dessert which I love recreating.

Method: Coat a mould inside with jelly or curd. Decorate with fruit or Turkish delight. Dissolve the gelatine in hot water. Soak the sponge cake in the custard. Add the cream or top of milk, beaten lightly, the sugar, flavouring and the dissolved gelatine. When it begins to thicken, pour into the mould. When set, turn out. Decorate with piped mock cream, chopped jelly and cherries if liked. (For 4 persons).

"We should look at Trove," mused RPS's Dark Gods. "Hundreds of thousands of people are playing it, so there must be something interesting about it. You, Thrall Meer, go investigate." I gazed at Trove's key art, sneered at how it looked like someone tried to remake Minecraft out of fossilised blancmange and then stuck 1980s sweets all over it, and despaired. Then I went in, and I found out why it's so popular.

I won't keep you waiting: the answer is "free, massively-multiplayer Minecraft in which you get to hit a lot more stuff and are constantly showered with rewards." Trove is very obviously designed to be catnip to kids: all that oh-so-simple collaborative freeform building, paired with near-instant spider-bashing whenever you fancy it, a simplified WoW-like quest structure and classes, and a constantly expanded range of ridiculous hats to find and wear.

It's monstrous, but it's ingenious. In the games industry's ongoing determination to flood the market with Minecraftbuts, Trove is the most logical: building + loot. Sadly this means that the creative side of the game is being overwhelmed by the greed side: there are some marvellous co-operative constructions to be found in the 'Clubs', a sort of Guild/private shard hybrid, but mostly everyone's running very similar dungeons over and over in search of experience, coin and gear. Want want want, gimme gimme gimme, never get off that hamster wheel. It's everything people who hate World of Warcraft think World of Warcraft is, but without any of the world-building, roleplaying or even much sense of community.

Trove is an assault of visual noise, this explosion of colours and mismatched shapes, like being trapped inside Pat Sharpe's worst nightmares. In fairness, kids' birthday parties are like that, so the messiness and garishness is probably giving its intended audience what it wants. Underneath the chaos are the spectacular cuboid landscapes of Minecraft, some spun into newer forms with fancier graphical effects, and sometimes these are striking, but entirely absent is the purity and strangeness of Minecraft. This is like all the world's theme parks mashed together, and I pray that never gets quoted out of context to sound like a recommendation.

I looked back in on Mojang's era-defining game for the first time in years the other week, and I was struck by how sombre and odd it was, how entirely anti-populist it is even though it has come to be the very avatar of populism. Clearly, shared servers, especially the ones loaded with mods and texture packs, are a different affair entirely, but played solo it's so wonderfully lonely. Those dim and misty mountains, the skeletal C418 soundtrack which sounds like a slow-motion existential crisis, the brutality of the night-time monster invasions before you're anything like ready for them...

Minecraft has, in its vanilla form, atmosphere coming out of its square ears. Trove, by contrast, is a cacophony, an out-of-tune orchestra on a perpetual sugar rush. Of course kids love it. If Minecraft is presenting us with a bottomless box of classic Lego bricks, Trove offers a similarly endless tub of minifig legs and hats and rayguns and dragon wings. Of course kids love it. Combat is easy to control, combat is big, rewards rain down.

Probably because of this, I couldn't see any signs of real community: chat is just filled with people asking for numbers to join harder dungeon runs, to help them scratch their itch for more, more, more. No-one seeks information because no information is needed, no mysteries await: everything's right there, you just need to obtain enough components to build it, or you buy it.

All that said, initial loathing gave way to a very gentle fixation on progression. I could level up by hitting things, I could gain new wands and masks by hitting things, I could spend my winnings on building machines with which to build other machines or convert blocks to other colours, I could slowly expand my 'Cornerstone' persistent base in order that it could contain all these devices, I could hit things and hit things and hit things, and AND not too far in I could press the number 2 and turn into a bloody great dragon for about 10 seconds.

Even now, even as I write about how cynical and hollow it is, something at the back of my skull itches: "go back, get a better weapon, run another dungeon, find a faster mount." Self-loathing stops me, but if I wasn't a grown man who thinks himself above such things even though he plays games for a bloody living, I probably would go back. Trove offers a hell of a lot for free, and if it wasn't for the start-of-game menu so laden with screamy promotional messages and store links that it's almost painful to look at, you might never know that it's got baked-in monetisation everywhere.

It really, really has, of course. Almost everything - from costumes to classes, from mounts to treasure chests, from potions to in-game currency, can be bought, bar the basic and fundamental systems of progression and construction. It's this latter which is most key to Trove's success: if you want to have the foundations of the Minecraft experience without paying, here you go. You can either do it in public, in the quest zones through which both players and monsters pass, or you can setup a Club of your own and invite friends, or be the only member.

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