Some of my friends regularly post pictures of food on LiberFaciorum which I rather scorn to do, but I am breaking my rule here to show you a Dorset apple cake. It isn't made with Dorset apples, I fear, but Surrey ones from my garden. I'd unexpectedly found myself hosting some of my colleagues from other denominations, Fr Jeffery of the Catholic parish, Revd Alan of the URC, and Paul, the new Baptist minister, for our regular ministers' lunch. We were supposed to be at Revd Marlene's up in Tophill, but she was away at a funeral. She and her husband invariably provide us with cake when we visit and I felt somewhat shamed into furnishing my colleagues with something a little bit nicer than just chocolate biscuits from the Co-Op. Perhaps this might rouse me from my catering torpor: if Fr Jeffery can cook a huge meal for four of us at the start of Lent, can't I be at least minimally hospitable and bake a cake? It's not as though this version of Dorset Apple Cake is hard to do - just flour, butter, some defrosted cooked apple, and a dash of sugar.
Among my Anglo-Catholic researches I have been writing about Revd John Chandler of Witley today, one of the very first priests who took Tractarian ideals in the parishes, and almost definitely the first in Surrey. In 1870 as Rural Dean he hosted his colleagues for a Christmas dinner provided with nothing less than a haunch of venison sent by the then-recently-retired Bishop Sumner of Winchester, to whose gratitude he replied in verse:
Thanks, my Lord, for your venison, for finer or fatter
Ne'er ranged in a forest or smoked in a platter.
I at once ascertained from the basket and label
That 'twas none but your Lordship who furnished my table.
His eighty hymns were in quite a different mode!
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