Spied Out: The Best Scones

The Spy's most recent, summery attempt at scones (strawberry); recipe here.

Rejoice good people of the fens and beyond, for summer is a-coming in (although if you think The Spy is going to celebrate with a rousing chorus of ‘sing cuckoo’ or a quick burst of ‘folderiddle rahs’, quite frankly you’ve been in the sun too long). The days are long, the swifts and swallows are wheeling and squealing high above us, and the flat fields stretch out green and glowing under the sun, capped by the blue-bowl sky as it unrolls itself towards the horizon.

Poppy-trail on the fields up at Barton, by Burwash Manor.

Cambridge summertime in the botanic gardens.

The Spy can only apologise for his recent lack of posts, for he has been sneaking out and about again, sniffing out dastardly enemies and edible delicacies further afield in Oxford and Berlin. Only one incident of note to report: a visit to the farm-shop P.E. Mead and Sons, located on the route between Cambridge and Oxford, and purveyor of the oak-smoked rapeseed oil first tasted by the Spy a few months ago at the Feast East food show. At that point, the oil was still in development (smoked on trays in the smokery), but the Spy was contacted once it reached the shelves and duly hared over to pick some up (as well as some black pudding slices for his Sunday barbecue, which turned out to be a cooking revelation: try it). 

Oils aplenty in the farm shop (oak-smoked third from left).

However, to the point of this post: scones. He will dispense with the preamble, and point you only to the excellent recent 'search for the perfect scone' in The Guardian, while there are a variety of other articles dealing with crucial issues such as jam-or-cream-first (the Spy considers himself a heathen; the natural order is cream-then-jam, as in butter-then-jam, but personally adheres to the jam-then-cream school of thought), buttery-versus-bready (bready every time, if the Spy wants buttery then let him eat cake), delicate-versus-substantial (need you ask? if it’s not the size of his fist, the Spy wants two). Yet for a fully paid-up fen monkey, it’s surprisingly difficult to get a good scone. Here are the top of the crop: if anyone has any additional favourites they are happy to share, the Spy loves you and wants your babies.

The Spy seduces a buxom beauty over scones in Cafe Coucou. Who could resist...

1. The Orchard. What can be said about this most perfect of places? A walk over the fields and by the river, a tree-filled orchard to sit in if the weather is fine, and scones the size of a baby’s head, baked throughout the day and often still warm, picked out of wicker baskets and with a choice of plain, fruit or cheese (the last is good with honey). Get there at 9.30am on a Sunday morning for warm breakfast scones and the papers. Except don’t, because the Spy will be there, and he doesn’t want some other greedy bastard eating all the scones.

Sunbathing scones tremulously awaiting scoffage in The Orchard.

2. Café Coucou. A little outside Cambridge (but readily accessible by train and car), Saffron Walden is stunning, with 16^th century wooden-beamed houses painted in reds, blues and yellows and pargeting patterns covering the walls. Café Coucou is the gem in its crown; an independent café filled with wooden tables and creaky old floorboards, where their enormous scones are piled in the window to entice passers by (their sweet ones are second to the Orchard’s only because they could do with a little more salt, but their cheese ones probably have the edge). If you don’t fancy scones, there are sandwiches with homemade bread, stacks of beautiful biscuits and cakes, and hot drinks with little nubbly shortbread buttons on the side. The only downside is they are closed on a Sunday: the Spy suggests a petition to rectify this grievous situation.

Scones galore piled up in the window.

The inside counter of Cafe Coucou and its other delicious products...

3. When you want a scone to buy and take-away, those made by Tom’s Cakes in the market (only on Sunday) are big, robust and delicious; it is probably a good thing they are only there one day a week or the Spy would no longer fit into his James-Bond- -tuxedo. Elsewhere, the Farmers’ Outlet sells both Bury Lane Farm scones and others made by a little old lady in all kinds of flavours (mixed spice, raisin and almond, sweet chestnut), but you have to be lucky as they are not always there. Get a thermos-flask of tea, a pot of jam, and take those bad boys down to the river for a-guzzling.

The Spy's scone about to be picked from the pile on Tom's Cakes market stall.

 

A crate full of Farmers' Outlet lil-ol-lady scones (chestnut variety bottom right corner).

4. Michaelhouse Café in the centre of town is a great place for grub of any kind, located in the old church with the middle still cordoned off for services and concerts. The scones are good, particularly the cheese ones which rise to great heights like little golden-flecked pillars, but in general the scones can be a little hard and buttery for the Spy’s taste. Best warmed up.

Sweet scones with their sugary topping.

Towering cheese scones...

5. Wimpole Hall. The food is fabulous with roast dinners and sausage rolls straight from the farm’s own piggies and a changing selection of baked goods (on the Spy’s last trip there was a honey cakes to celebrate ‘The Year of Honey’). The scones are good and of a decent size, although better to go for the ones on the table by the baked goods rather than the ones kept in the chiller (the sight of which nearly gave the Spy a heart attack before he had even got his chops around a mouthful). For more on the best scones to be found in National Trust properties, see here.

The Spy's Wimpole Hall scone picture was pretty bad even by his standards (shaking from the excitement perhaps?) so instead, another scone picture from Cafe Coucou, and a close-up of the Spy's strawberry scones for the finale...

Spied Out: Pizza (L’Authentique)

Pizza doesn't get much better than this...

In a homage to Toad, Mole and Ratty in their canary-coloured cart, this week found The Cambridge Spy traversing the hedgerow-lined lanes and leafy byways of his fenland home, hot on the scent of a hidden culinary treasure in the most unorthodox of locations. No stranger to good pizza (he cut his baby teeth on pizza crusts in his uncle’s pizzeria down in southern Italy) he has long bemoaned the lack of good pizza in Cambridge and the surrounding area. So, bombing along past rolling fields of shining golden rapeseed, on roads transformed into mysterious emerald tunnels by trees bowed and bending to touch each other from either side of the verge, little did he expect to came upon his prey so suddenly. And yet, before him lay Pizza L'Authentique: a pizza van with a wood-burning oven in the back, incongruously perched at the side of the busy road leaving Harwick. (On Thursdays, the van can be found in an equally unexpected side-street in Caldecote; both are about 8 miles outside Cambridge. The rest of the week, there is no sign of it, and the Spy suspects that this mysterious travelling purveyor of pizzas enters some strange parallel universe or fairy realm where it sells pizza to the Fenland goblins, elves and other ghoulish beasties…)

The glory of Pizza L'Authentique at dusk, complete with field backdrop.

Based on the mobile pizzerias from the owner’s home city of Marseilles, France, the scent of the wood-fired brick oven hit the Spy like a smoky wall of deliciousness as he approached the van, and he was suddenly, devastatingly in love. With tremulous step he approached the glorious Frenchman who stood, elevated above him like a Gallic pizza god, an elfin, apple-cheeked goddess at his side with floury hands clutching a sturdy rolling pin. The deity spake thusly unto the Spy: “No Emmental today, my supplier screwed up.”

A sneak-preview of the menu as the next order is taken: word is spreading fast.

How can perfection be described in mere words? The pizza was rolled out before the Spy’s greedy little eyes, sprinkled in bacon and a confit of onions and shunted onto a pizza paddle, as the French God waxed lyrical about the crucial addition of Emmental and the difficulty incorporating his home-cooked gammon into a cooked pizza. As it sizzled in the oven, the God mused on how he planned to introduce a sourdough pizza base with his own ‘mother’ starter from Jack Lang of Midsummer House (who also owns a wood-burning oven of this kind). And as it was folded into the pizza box, so big that its crusts had to be folded over so they rose up the side, he talked of his French supplier down in Kent, whom he trundles down to every week to pick up goodies purloined from the other side of the channel. 

Rolling out the dough...

What more is there to be said? Reader, I gobbled him. Wordlessly. In a grassy airfield up the road. A groan or two may have issued forth from the Spy’s pizza-stained lips. He cannot be sure. A blissful calm had entered his heart, and all was well with the world.

The folded crust of gluttony...

In Cambridge itself, your best pizza bets would be The Cow near the market/Corn Exchange and The Red Bull on Barton Road (the Spy senses a bovine theme developing). For the best of the chains, Italians reliably inform the Spy that La Strada is where it's at. However, quite honestly, nothing even comes close to Pizza L’Authentique. For the sake of keeping this wonderful enterprise in business, the Spy suggests a car-share system for those without vehicles who live outside Caldecote/Hardwick: he is personally willing to ferry out crowds of pizza tourists in his own, rather growth-stunted automobile. At a conservative estimate he could fit seven hungry people in the back if they are all happy to lie stacked on top of each other, but on the return journey their pizza-filled, distended bellies must be factored into the equation, so one member of every party must be nominated to be the sacrificial lamb, left at the side of the road and forced to adopt a feral existence, scraping cheese out of empty pizza boxes and howling wildly at the moon. However, the hungry wolf hunts best, and when the magical pizza van returns, he will be first in the queue for smoky, wood-fired manna from heaven... 

The wood-burning stove, pre-pizza.