Cooking with Coronation Street - Manchester Tart

Greetings! Here we go with the fifth of our Cooking with Coronation Street blog posts in which we take recipes from this little gem of a book from 1992 and see what they turn out like when cooked at home by Corrie fans.  

Our friends from the Coronation Street podcast - Conversation Street, Gemma and Michael have taken up the cookery challenge again, this time to make Guinness casserole.

You can follow Conversation Street on Twitter @ConversationStr and Facebook

Michael and Gemma chose to cook Manchester Tart from the Corrie recipe book this time and now, it's over to them both... 

What do Elsie Tanner, Bet Lynch and Liz McDonald all have in common with our Cooking with Coronation Street recipe this week? Manchester tarts, the lot of ‘em – and very tasty too! 

For our third attempt at preparing a dish from The Coronation Street Cookbook, we’ve gone for a classic pudding that’s probably very familiar to the residents of Weatherfield, but truth be told, Manchester tart isn’t something we’d ever actually tried ourselves before. In fact, the only real knowledge we had of the dish came from the time Deirdre ended up with her face covered in the stuff after having a secret snog with Audrey’s fella, lothario Lewis Archer.

When we were ready to start, we got together the ingredients required for the recipe – pastry, jam, egg, milk, sugar and salt and nutmeg to taste – and set to following the steps. To be honest, the instructions couldn’t have been simpler. Like most of the dishes we’ve cooked from this book before, we got the impression that this was definitely a no-frills version of a pudding that could easily have been made more complex. Indeed, we’ve seen versions that use cream, whole raspberries, vanilla extract, banana, and even desiccated coconut, but this was a recipe that even a stranger to cooking like Carla Connor could handle. As proof of that, it was Michael who took the lead in preparing this pud, albeit under the watchful eye of house chef Gemma.

First off, the ready rolled shortcrust pastry was taken out of the pack and flattened out on our kitchen worktop. Don’t fall into the same trap we did and try this straight from the fridge, which can lead to the pastry cracking; instead, leave it 10-15 minutes at room temperature. Next up, we greased a 9-inch baking dish with butter, before lining it with the pastry. Be gentle with this part, as again, you don’t want the pastry to crack.

Once the dish was lined and excess pastry removed with a sharp knife, we dolloped and spread on a layer of jam (raspberry is traditional, though we preferred to use strawberry). On top of this, we poured on a mixture of milk (1/2 pint) and an egg, then grated a small amount of nutmeg over the surface.

The dish was then placed in the oven, preheated to 200 degrees, and cooked for just over half an hour. Be careful where you put it: the pastry can burn easily at such high temperatures, so keep the dish on a lower or central shelf. After thirty minutes, we checked the consistency of the mixture; it seemed a little liquidy still, so we kept it in the oven until it was a little more solid. Once it was ready, the tart was removed from the oven, sprinkled with caster sugar and left to cool.

So what were our first impressions of Manchester tart? Overall, pretty good! You can’t really go wrong with a bit of pastry, jam and egg custard – proper school dinner food. It’s certainly something we’d try again, and would love the opportunity to taste a more authentic version on our next trip up to Manchester.

May be served with cream, or for the full Coronation Street experience…

KEN! DO SOMETHING!!

Keep your eyes peeled for the next of our Cooking with Coronation Street blog posts coming very soon.

See also: 

• Cooking with Coronation Street, Betty's Hot Pot
• Cooking with Coronation Street, Angie Freeman's lentil soup
• Cooking with Coronation Street, Alec's Whiskey Chicken
• Cooking with Coronation Street, Curly's red wine chicken
• Cooking with Coronation Street, Bet and Alec's Guinness Casserole

Read more Corrie news, interviews, gossip and spoilers  

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Cooking with Coronation Street - Rita's Summer Pudding

Greetings! Here we go with the seventh of our Cooking with Coronation Street blog posts in which we take recipes from this little gem of a book from 1992 and see what they turn out like when cooked at home by Corrie fans. 

This time, our guest blogger Rob Coates has taken up the cookery challenge again, this time to make Rita’s Summer Pudding.

You can follow Rob on Twitter @abfabrobgeek

I was asked by the lovely folk at Coronation Street Blog to make and review one of the recipes in the 1990 Coronation Street Cookbook. I decided I wanted to do a Rita recipe first. Why? Because I love Rita. So I settled on making her Summer Pudding. 

I want Rita to have the perfect life. The perfect husband. To live on the new side of the street where she’d have a little garden to while away her twilight years, sipping Gin & Tonic and, presumably, eating her Summer Pudding.

But Rita wouldn’t be Rita with the perfect husband. Her track record isn’t great. The men sharing her bed over the last 40 years tend to either have an affair (Dennis) or die (Ted). And, in some cases, both (Alan; Len). 

So it’s quite difficult to imagine that she’s had much reason to perfect her Summer Pudding, given all the heartache she’s endured. 

Trams and Brain Tumours aside though, Rita has found the time after getting up at 5am every day to do the papers to create this little fruity treat.

Which brings us round to cooking the Summer Pudding. I say “cooking”... there isn’t much cooking actually involved in this recipe. Which, actually, sounds about right for Rita. I imagine she’s less of a Domestic Goddess and much more of a one-pot stew type person. Which leaves more time for sitting in the Rovers of an evening. And who’d argue with that?

The ingredients:
785g soft fruit
110g caster sugar 
8 slices of white bread

I opted for strawberries, raspberries and blueberries.

The recipe says to add the fruit and sugar to a pan and to heat gently. Without any liquid. Which I though was odd. But as the fruit softened, the natural juices of the fruits were more than adequate.

Meanwhile, cut the crusts off the bread and “butter” the inside of a 680ml bowl. 

Line the basin with the bread, overlapping the slices and pressing them together. 

Decant one cup of the juice from the pan of fruit and put to one side for later.

Pour the fruit into the breaded bowl.

Top the dish with a lid of bread. This was quite difficult to do as it is impossible to press the bread down without pushing the fruit out.

Place a saucer on top of the bowl and weigh it down. Refrigerate overnight.

The following day, tip the pudding out onto a plate then, using the decanted fruit juice, coat the bread so that it’s soaked in juice and the whole thing is bright red. 

Serve with fresh cream. 

And here it is; Rita’s Summer Pudding:

However, when I came to tip the pudding out of the bowl, it didn’t quite work...

So, the picture above of the perfect pudding is actually a mock-up I made of an up-turned bowl covered in bread and fruit juice!

So it didn’t quite work out as the recipe suggested! 

However, the flavour of the fruit filling was delicious. Even if the soggy bread wasn’t. 

My top tip: if, like me, you can’t get the pudding out of the bowl, throw it under the wheels of the nearest tram and head for a G&T at the Rovers! 


Thanks for the idea, Rita, but perhaps you should stick to selling toffees. 

See also: 

• Cooking with Coronation Street, Rita's Lemon Roast Chicken
• Cooking with Coronation Street, Manchester Tart
• Cooking with Coronation Street, Betty's Hot Pot
• Cooking with Coronation Street, Angie Freeman's lentil soup
• Cooking with Coronation Street, Alec's Whiskey Chicken
• Cooking with Coronation Street, Curly's red wine chicken
• Cooking with Coronation Street, Bet and Alec's Guinness Casserole

Read more Corrie news, interviews, gossip and spoilers  

Follow us on Twitter and Like us on Facebook 

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Cooking with Coronation Street - Rita's Lemon Roast Chicken

Greetings! Here we go with the seventh of our Cooking with Coronation Street blog posts in which we take recipes from this little gem of a book from 1992 and see what they turn out like when cooked at home by Corrie fans. 

Our friends from the Coronation Street podcast - Conversation Street, Gemma and Michael have taken up the cookery challenge again, this time to make Rita's lemon roast chicken.

You can follow Conversation Street on Twitter @ConversationStr and Facebook

Michael and Gemma chose to cook Rita's Lemon Roast Chicken from the Corrie recipe book this time and now, it's over to them both... 

Roast dinner is one of Britain’s most classic dishes. The meal we all eat on Christmas day, the quintessential Sunday lunch. At its most basic form it consists of sliced, roasted meat, roast potatoes (i.e. large chunks of boiled potatoes baked in the oven with vegetable oil, beef drippings or lard), gravy, and a couple of portions of boiled veg. 

If you’re getting fancy you can add in roast parsnips, stuffing, cauliflower cheese, mashed potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, pigs in blankets, and accompanying sauces – cranberry for chicken, mint or redcurrant sauce for lamb, horseradish for beef, apple sauce for pork and hollandaise for gammon. If you want to start arguments, mess with any of these elements for an important holiday, like Easter or Christmas. I have a friend whose family still don’t speak to other members after salmon was served on December 25th for lunch.

One in five Brits still have a Sunday roast regularly, and the rest are dirty heathens. Pretty much everyone follows their own guidelines for making a roast, passed down through the generations, so having a written recipe for a roast dinner is really unusual. That’s why we decided to try out Rita’s Lemon Roast Chicken, which together with her Summer Pudding recipe, makes Rita’s Sunday Dinner. Just so we can judge it like everyone judges every other family’s roast dinner recipes… they’re never as good as mum’s.

Rita’s introduction doesn’t do much for the faint-hearted. “I’ve chosen to do a roast dinner because I’ve always thought that if you can get through cooking and serving one without having a nervous breakdown, you can probably cope with everything,” she begins, before listing white wine and an extra lemon in the ingredients list so you can make yourself “a very large vodka and tonic just before you start the final stages of the meal.”

Never one to pass up sage cooking advice from a fellow lush, I got stuck right in.

First of all, arrange your bar area, because this is the most important part of the preparation. The sommelier’s choice for this meal is Blue Nun, perhaps Britain’s most famous bottle of cheap plonk, and super popular throughout the ‘80s, when Rita was enjoying her heyday.

Then, time to make a base for your gravy with giblets, onion, carrot, black pepper and bay leaf, to simmer while you roast the chicken. What’s that? You can’t find a chicken with giblets because everyone thinks they’re a little bit gross? Tough. Rita doesn’t care. She just wants you to move on. The chicken goes in the oven with a squeeze of lemon juice and the squeezed lemon inside the cavity, covered in olive oil and bacon.

Now you boil your peeled spuds, and shake them in the dry pan to fluff up the outsides. It’s more usual to roast your potatoes separately to get them really crispy, but Rita roasts hers inside the pan with the chicken for the last 25 minutes of the cooking time. She’s a renegade. This gives them a really gorgeous flavour and a hint of stickiness to their crunchy outside, but can result in a little bit of a soggy spud that’s prone to being a tiny bit anaemic unless you pay them a lot of attention. Rita has you drain your spuds after the chicken is cooked and return to the oven in a serving dish, but that’s not quite enough to really finish them off: you’ll need to pop them in a roasting dish with a bit of fat to do that… But you’re about to make yourself plenty of time to get that done in, so don’t you worry about it.

Now take your roasting pan which had the chicken and potatoes, spoon off the excess fat, and then heat over the hob, sprinkling over a tablespoon of flour and scraping up burnt bits as you go. Really you should chuck in the glass of white wine first, to deglaze, but Rita has you adding it after the flour is already incorporated because she’s very rebellious like that. Add in your giblet stock and the juice of half a lemon (you’ve already got the other lemon in a vodka tonic, don’t forget – you should probably have it into slices first, but it’s too late now). Stir until thickened, sieve into a jug (what lumps?!) and season as needed. With a Bisto cube, maybe, if you couldn’t find those giblets.

While this has been going on, Rita reminds you you should have already cooked your vegetables, which is very helpful and probably why you need a hefty vodka. She suggests you pre-boil your veggies so you can reheat them at this point to save stress, but it’s all well and good to start saying now, isn’t it, love? So anyway, let everything get a little bit cold while you boil up your choice of carrots, courgettes, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts or peas. Just don’t expect anyone to thank you for boiling up courgettes to go with a roast dinner. Rita suggests you pick veggies that contrast in colour – just do carrots and peas, then. Let’s not get too controversial at this late stage.

Now you carve the chicken using your bluntest knife otherwise you’ll probably drunkenly stab yourself to death in the kitchen like Michelle Connor nearly did the other week, and your family will only notice when they get really hungry. Shove everything on a plate or let your family serve themselves while you drink your vodka tonic and then get started on the rest of the Blue Nun.

Keep your eyes peeled for the next of our Cooking with Coronation Street blog posts coming very soon.

See also: 

• Cooking with Coronation Street, Manchester Tart
• Cooking with Coronation Street, Betty's Hot Pot
• Cooking with Coronation Street, Angie Freeman's lentil soup
• Cooking with Coronation Street, Alec's Whiskey Chicken
• Cooking with Coronation Street, Curly's red wine chicken
• Cooking with Coronation Street, Bet and Alec's Guinness Casserole

Read more Corrie news, interviews, gossip and spoilers  

Follow us on Twitter and Like us on Facebook 

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Please read our advice for leaving comments on the Coronation Street Blog
All original work on Coronation Street Blog is covered by a Creative Commons License