The company ROKA was founded in 1949 in Delft (the Netherlands) by Jo Roodenrijs, as a side business to his patisserie shop in Delft, the Netherlands. The name ROKA comes from his family name ROodenrijs and KAastabletten (which means cheese crispies). The company specialized in the production of very high quality, crispy puff-pastry biscuits, abundantly flavoured with over 30% matured Gouda cheese. Mr Roodenrijs strived to deliver the best quality to his customers. So I will come into the office to bring Dominic his lunch and there will be box after box. Well you should have seen his eyes dart open when he realised that he had a box of cheese crispies behind him and he didn’t even know. Be prepared with a sheet of all butter puff pastry, carefully selected from the supermarket chilled shelf. Generally, they all hover around the 320g weight. It is a good product and, be assured, performs admirably for these pastries unless you are a purist and wish to home-make. I am particularly fond of a braised, small joint of meat cooked with whole endives. Pork is possibly my favourite choice, especially with sage and much garlic to infuse meagre, though intense, savoury cooking juices. But here we are at Eastertide, when it would seem perverse not to go down the Pascal route. Please don’t waste a cut of ruinously expensive tender spring lamb here, even if available, for this is a slow affair, with the meat close to falling away from the bone, once ready to eat; save spring cuts for a little later, say late May, when both its cost has somewhat diminished, a touch more flavour has further emerged and, whichever joint preferred, should be cooked pink.

So we dived in and argued over who would have each box and were quiet for ages as we argued over which one was the best one. The “crispies” used to come in a charming blue and yellow tin; now, sadly, they are presented in just a thin blue and yellow cardboard box, but which neatly slots into a tin that I sensibly kept long ago, advised so to do by the late Elizabeth David (she happily almost lived on them towards the end of her life). In 1965, she opened a shop, Elizabeth David Limited, in Pimlico, London, where she sold Le Creuset pans and other hard-to-get-hold-of kit. The store, with its marvellous window displays, was as influential as her books would eventually be, pioneering a new generation of shops devoted exclusively to kitchenware. But it was also a business disaster, and she severed her links with it in 1973. Thereafter, she devoted herself to a more scholarly kind of writing: English Bread and Yeast Cookery was published in 1977, and Harvest of the Cold Months: the Social History of Ice and Ices appeared posthumously, in 1994. She became a vociferous critic both of the supermarkets, and of the 80s "foodie" culture as satirised in The Official Foodie Handbook by Ann Barr and Paul Levy, a volume she loathed ("To be sure they are skilful enough in the arts of toadying to their public and providing it with a little giggle at itself, but the meaning of satire in the true sense eludes them," she wrote in her review for Tatler). The deliveries at our house always seem to come on a Friday. Dominic is normally in the office on that day so is usually dealing with lots of different delivery companies which he hates. Not that we hate reviewing things, it is the fact that you get the same courier companies each week and each week they can’t find our house, even though they eventually found it the week before and it is so easy to find. Towards the end of her life, she was famously irascible. She drank too much, too – frustrated by her inability to get around, and perhaps a little lonely: since her affair with Peter Higgins, the dedicatee of French Provincial Cooking, had ended in 1963, she had been single. The death in 1986 of her sister, Felicite, with whom she shared her house, was a terrible blow, plunging her into depression. But she was also able to see, by this point, that others would carry the torch she had passed to them: Jane Grigson, Jeremy Round (until his early death in 1989, David had hoped Round would write her biography), Simon Hopkinson. And others felt it, too, this passing of the baton. Her work would not be undone. Among the baskets of lilies, blue iris and violets at her funeral at St Peter ad Vincula in Folkington, East Sussex, on 28 May 1992, someone placed a loaf of bread, and a bunch of herbs tied up in brown paper.Many cooks who choose to make this most luxurious of purees will use maincrop potatoes. However, when I first came upon the recipe (from Fredy Girardet’s cookery book La Cuisine Spontanée) some 30 years ago, the potatoes asked for were new. Although it may seem an easier task to incorporate oil into a fondant fluff of mashed maincrops, I remain convinced that his original stands alone; a unique, gloriously glossed potato puree.

Having so very much wished – and for ages! – to gingerly attempt to home-make my most loved cheese biccies, Roka Cheese Crispies, here follows the result. ROKA Cheese Crispies have an excellent unique flavour and texture. The unique taste comes from the high percentage (30%) of real matured cheese which is used. The texture is really unique because every single biscuit is made from refined puff-pastry, consisting of 90 layers (45 layers of dough and 45 layers of cheese). Our Crispies are still baked according to the original recipe created in 1949. Ever since, ROKA has continued to focus on making the finest quality cheese biscuits, made from the best ingredients to create those special moments of indulgence. The company ROKA was founded in 1949 in Delft (the Netherlands) by Jo Roodenrijs. The name ROKA comes from his family name ROodenrijs and KAastabletten (which means cheese crispies). Mr Roodenrijs was the real creator of the unique Cheese Crispies. He always strived to deliver the best quality to his customers. KLM Airlines and the Holland America Line were some of his most famous customers. 1984 What does Hopkinson make of David's legacy now, in the month of the centenary of her birth on Boxing Day 1913? He can only speak personally. "The writing had a big impact on me; you have to really want to cook to use her, it's not just a case of following a recipe. You have to pay attention. I loved the short ramble around, and then the perfect recipe within. But someone once told me Jamie Oliver had sold more copies of just one of his books than have been sold of Elizabeth's entire oeuvre, and what can you say about that?" He sighs, theatrically. As to her wider influence, the powerful effect she famously had (or not) on British palates, he believes this was as much a question of timing as anything else. David, whose first book, A Book of Mediterranean Food, was published in 1950, arrived on the scene at just the right moment: the British middle classes, exhausted by austerity, were longing, even if they did not precisely know it, for the taste of sunshine. David was, moreover, able to forge her career in an environment more suited to her particular talents and personality: "She wouldn't have been able to do television, and she wouldn't have wanted to do it either." The life of the celebrity was not for the redoubtable Mrs David. Hopkinson could no more have imagined her posing for the cover of a glossy magazine, dripping spatula in hand, than he could dashing to the nearest McDonald's for a Big Mac and fries. I ask Norman, who looks after David's estate, how she sees the legacy of her "beautiful, elegant, reserved, witty" friend (we have this conversation, incidentally, at a table that once stood in David's house in Halsey Street: a pine affair bleached pale with years of use). "I remember Prue Leith telling me that at a catering college soon after Elizabeth's death, she asked students how many of them had read her, and not a single one raised a hand. Prue was quite shaken. But the books do sell – I see the royalty statements – and you see her influence in the cooking of Jeremy Lee, Shaun Hill and Rowley Leigh. I think she would have loved the food at restaurants such as Moro and Ottolenghi. Towards the end of her life, she did get a bit bitter and cross, but she had reason. Fiddling about with food, over-garnishing; she hated that. She felt there was too much bad food about – the way the English made pizzas, she was always complaining about that – and some of the things on television, she would have been scornful. Elizabeth never, ever promoted herself."

The sales of these supreme delicate Cheese Crispies was so popular that the factory in Delft became too small. In 1984 the Roodenrijs family decided to move 140 km north to Emmeloord, a new town in a polder, land reclaimed from the IJsselmeer which was part of the sea before this. Here in Emmeloord they built a completely new factory. 2002 Roughly slice up into the pot a small onion and 6-7 medium-sized white mushrooms, along with 3 crushed garlic cloves and 2 broken sprigs of rosemary. Pour in a glass of dry white wine and bring up to a simmer. Reintroduce the lamb, closely cover with a tight-fitting sheet of dampened greaseproof paper (or foil), reattach the lid and slide into the oven. Once 20 minutes has elapsed, remove and turn the meat over. Turn the oven down to 150C/gas mark 2 and continue to cook for a further 30 minutes. Meanwhile, take the endives, trim away any tired leaves and, using a small, sharp knife, remove the little core from the base (its most bitter part) using a tight circular cut; it will emerge as a tiny cone. Put the endives in a bowl and squeeze over the juice of a small lemon. Lay pieces of cling film on the work surface and divide the dough into 5 equal parts weighing approx 200g. Shape into sausages about 15cms long; wrap in the cling film. Press and shape the dough into a rectangle about 4-5cm wide and 3.5cm tall. Chill for at least 1-2 hours, until firm if you want to cook same day. Each log will produce 12-14 biscuits. We did get sent a fourth but we didn’t try it as I am allergic to nuts and it had nuts in it, so it wasn’t a wise idea to give them a go! Well let’s start with the Roka Onion Cheese Crispies and our son. As I write this it is a super hot day in Portugal and I have a shedload of work to get done. Monday is my busiest day of the week and it doesn’t feel like I have come up for air. He has spent all day asking if we are doing the review and I feel like I have had a flea in my ear. You see his favourite flavour is the onion one and he wants me to hurry up and review it before he can eat the rest. Well I can tell you to never come between a teenage boy and his cheese! The hubby then chips in that the only way to eat them is dipped into soft cheese which is heaven. OMG I can’t believe I have to share the rest of these onion crispies. It is like homemade scones in a crisp.