The Non-Pareil

On the exquisite perfection of Lorraine’s Date Tart and I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.”

On Palings Lane, amid the alley of curiosity shops that weave their way into Ash St, Sydney lies a bakery of inestimable deliciousness known as Lorraine’s Patisserie. Named after its owner, Lorraine Godsmark, Lorraine’s Patisserie’s chief charm (among many) is its combination of exemplary technique accompanied by extreme restraint.This is never better exemplified than in Godsmark’s most indelible, most unforgettable dessert: the Date Tart. The Date Tart is an exercise in simplicity—but what simplicity: a crisp shortcrust base, of papery thiness, lined by Californian dates that have been coddled to creamy perfection. Baked to a chestnut brown, the tart, when served, gives the impression that the transformation from eggy emulsion to comestible custard has occurred a mere moment—as opposed to days or hours—ago.

The Date Tart first debuted at Neil Perry’s (sadly closed) Rockpool in 1984 and was perfected when Godsmark joined the restaurant as head pastry chef in 1990. While Godsmark left Rockpool for greener pastures in 1999, for more than 15 years Rockpool served a tiny portion of the date tart at the end of every meal served. This is how I discovered the tart. Though I had just consumed an unconscionable amount of food—the most brilliantly cooked food of my life—it is the Date Tart that I really remember, that I have spent many a pilgrimage to Lorraine’s Patisserie in the hope that I will see a slice on sale in the window. To date, I have never been successful.

Try as I might, the Date Tart has been frustratingly elusive. It is said that Lorraine only makes three of the tarts a week—for what seems effortless in fact takes hours of work to create. In my (pretty lengthy) repository of memorable desserts, the Lorraine’s Date Tart reigns supreme. It is incomparable; it is a non-pareil.

I can think of no better literary analogue to Lorraine’s Date Tart than I Capture the Castle by Dodi Smith. First published in 1948, I Capture the Castle is about nothing really, in the way that Jane Austen’s novels are about nothing and everything all at once. The plot itself very Austen-ish: two sisters seeking their fortune and navigating through the hazardous world of eligible (and ineligible) young men. But Cassandra is so delightful a voice that she feels as fresh today as she must have been more than 70 years ago. When she writes in her diary: “Perhaps if I make myself write I shall find out what is wrong with me”, I thoroughly understand what she means. Who could help but fall in love with a book that muses: “Which would be nicest -Jane (Austen) with a touch of Charlotte (Bronte), or Charlotte with a touch of Jane?”

Unlike the hundreds of books that it shares a superficial resemblance to I Capture the Castle is always truthful, and never sentimental. It resists a happy ending, when so many do. Instead of a declaration, the person that Cassandra loves leaves her, perhaps forever. All that Cassandra can do is fill in the small margin that is leftover in her journal with: I love you, I love you, I love you. These are the words by which the novel ends: not with a golden sunset, but with an autumnal chill.

Like Lorraine’s Date Tart,I Capture the Castle combines the most familiar and banal of ingredients: the aspiring writer, the English eccentric, the marriage plot, the sister-rival, and creates something thoroughly irresistible, almost entirely through Cassandra’s beguiling, endlessly compelling voice.

Yet like the tart, I Capture the Castle remains an inimitable result, even for its author. While Dodi Smith wrote many a novel—most famously, One Hundred and One Dalmatians—she would never create another I Capture the Castle. Her other books, which chart similar territory, feel leaden, whilst I Capture the Castle seems, in comparison, impossibly buoyant. And so I roam the bookshelves—much as I do the bakeries of Sydney—in search for another I Capture the Castle, for another date tart, that evinces even a modicum of similar affection. I’ve yet to find either.

Excerpt from Literary Crumbs (A Critical Cakeography), June 2016.