Cambridge University Orienteering Club Annual Dinner

CUOC is an orienteering club for members of Cambridge University. Membership usually varies around 40 members, ranging from complete beginners to British Champions.

 The club subsidises transport to events, so it can provide a very cheap escapade from Cambridge to see some of the more interesting parts of the English countryside. A three member team from Pembroke managed to win this year's intercollegiate Cuppers competition, which was  a close battle between Pembroke, Clare and St Catherine's.

Last night's dinner began with a gateau of melon and  fruit coulis, very fresh and seasonal!

The main course of beef fillet was cooked sous vide to 58C, and accompanied by Anna potatoes and caramelised red cabbage. Sous vide is a long established but relatively little known cooking process in which food (e.g. a cut of meat) is vacuum sealed in a pouch with/without an accompanying sauce or seasoning and then cooked at comparatively low temperatures (typically around 70°C) for relatively long periods of time. Meat in particular becomes very tender and succulent when cooked sous vide.

Pommes Anna or Anna potatoes, is a classic French dish of sliced, layered potatoes cooked in a very large amount of melted butter. For that reason (even though the butter is eventually discarded), and because the initial preparation is quite meticulous and labor intensive, they are seldom prepared today in their original fashion. There are numerous modern recipes that are somewhat easier to prepare and that use much less butter. The dish is generally credited with having been created during the time of Napoleon III by the chef Adolphe Dugléré, a pupil of Carême, when Dugléré was head chef at the Café Anglais, the leading Paris restaurant of the 19th century, where he reputedly named the dish for one of the grandes cocottes of the period. There is disagreement about which of three beauties the dish was named after: the actress Dame Judic (real name: Anna Damiens), Anna DesLions, or Anna Untel.

For the sweet we served creme brulee with raspberries. The exact origins of this dish are unknown, though the earliest known reference to it is in François Massialot's 1691 cookbook, and the French name was used in the English translation of this book, but the 1731 edition of Massialot's Cuisinier roial et bourgeois changed the name of the same recipe from "crème brûlée" to "crème anglaise". In the early eighteenth century, the dessert was called "burnt cream" in English.

In Britain, a version of crème brûlée (known locally as 'Trinity Cream' or 'Cambridge burnt cream') was introduced at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1879 with the college arms "impressed on top of the cream with a branding iron", although some cookbooks claim much earlier British origins for the dessert.

Bon appétit!