Puds and Psychoanalysts

Having attempted a Apricot Roulade a while ago, with fairly disastrous results (albeit very tasty ones) yesterday I returned to the Afternoon Teas recipe book. My friend Lou had half a carton of double cream which didn't have long left to live, and thought we might be able to use it... and I knew there was a recipe that I wanted to use involving double cream. Not only that, but 'double (heavy) cream' - do they intentionally include the inevitable result upon the consumer?

That recipe was for Chocolate Torte. Mmmmm. As you can see from the picture, it turned out pretty well - and tastes amazing. But when the main ingredients are cream and chocolate, you can't go far wrong. We didn't have any liqueur, so that couldn't go in. Being this recipe book, though, everything was slightly over-complicated. They kept wanting me to leave the pastry to rest for an hour, and thought I should use an electric mixer to make flour and fat into breadcrumbs... tsk. But it was worth all the labour, and I can feel myself getting larger just looking at it.

What else has happened lately... Today I read my first Freud! 'Femininity' (1933). I'm really interested in the reception to Freud, especially in middlebrow literature of the 1920s and '30s - it's amazing how pervasive his theories, or vague outlines of them, were - but I hadn't ever got around to reading anything he'd actually written. Somehow it *felt* like I'd read it before... and that must be more or less how these interwar novelists dealt with Freud. I'd go so far as to say most of the novels I've read from the period make glancing mentions of him - for example, EM Delafield's The Way Things Are, as quoted in Nicola Beauman's A Very Great Profession:

'Well,' said Christine kindly, 'I can't say that I believe you. And any decent analyst would tell you that you're doing yourself a great deal of harm by this constant pretence. It's bound to create the most frightful repressions. What sort of dreams do you have?'

But Laura, even though she did live in the country, knew all about Herr Freud and his theories, and declined to commit herself in any way upon the subject of dreams.'

In fact, I've proposed a section of my doctorate on the influence of, and response to, Freud - so if ever you find a comment about Freud in an interwar novel, do let me know!