1970's recipes Archives - Page 3 of 22 - Retro Food For Modern Times

Category: 1970’s recipes

22
Oct
2023

Sunday Night Ham Slaw Supper

categories: 1970's recipes, Salad, Salads For All Season

Hello retro food lovers! Today we are taking a step back into one of my favourite vintage cookbooks, Salads for All Seasons by Rosemary Mayne Wilson. I last cooked from this book way back in 2014. I chose a Sunday Night Ham Slaw Supper as I will be posting this on a Sunday. Also, because I love the word supper. It seems much cozier than the word dinner.

The Sunday night ham slaw is such a good idea! You know that feeling after a big Sunday roast when you feel you might never need to eat again? Except a good few hours later you start to think that maybe a little something-something might be nice? Well this is that something. A little salad, some cold meat, a bread roll and butter. Enough to stave off the pangs, not enough to fill you up too much.

I used ham as my meat of choice but this would be equally nice with leftover roast chicken or beef. It would also be perfect with leftover grilled salmon, or for the vegetarians amongst us, some slices of avocado or as a filling for a baked potato. I also did not mix my ham into the slaw as per the recipe but had it on the side. I thought the ham mixed in with the slaw might not look great. It tasted great though and, with the bread on the plate was just crying out to be made into a sandwich!

Sunday Night Ham Slaw Supper – The Recipe

This is a quick, easy and very tasty meal and a nice way to round off the weekend!

Have a great week!

25
Sep
2023

Beauty Bean Salad and a Herb S(w)izzle

categories: 1970's recipes, Beans, Drinks, Eat Your Way To Love and Beauty, Non - Alcoholic, Salad, Vegetables

Hello Yogis and retro food lovers. Today we are revisiting “Eat Your Way To Love and Beauty” by Swami Saravati. Today we are focussing on the beauty side with a Beauty Bean Salad. There is no indication as to what the Herb S(w)izzle is good for. Let’s say hydration and move on. As with last time, before we get to the recipes, let’s take a moment to marvel at the cover of this book.

This is probably one of my all favourite covers of any book I own. The swami looks young and gorgeous, she has perfect skin, is lithe and limber and is rocking an itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow flowered bikini. Seeing that cover and how great she looks, who wouldn’t want to get her recipes? I will add that nowadays doing the camel pose over over glass containers probably breaks all sorts of OHS laws but back in the freewheeling days of 1971…you could do what you wanted! Just on that, and how good she looks? There was no photoshop back in 1971. She actually looked like that!

Hmm…maybe I need to cook a few more recipes from this book

Beauty Bean Salad

This was really tasty! And it also looked very pretty with the different shades of green and then pops of purple from the red onion. I ate this for dinner one night and made enough to have for lunch the following day. One of the great things about this salad is that the ingredients are all fairly robust so will not wilt overnight. Good thing really because after I had taken the photos from the night, I realised I had left out a key ingredient.

I used green beans, edamame and sugar snap beans for my fresh ingredients. However, the recipe also calls for some dried beans. I had a can of chickpeas in the cupboard so when I had these for lunch, I threw in some chickpeas.

The chickpeas changed this from a side salad to a more filling meal. I’m not sure if the Swami would entirely agree with this but if you wanted to bulk this out even more, some feta or goat’s cheese or a can of tuna or some grilled salmon would be great with this!

Beauty Bean Salad – The Recipe

I used lemon juice and olive oil as my dressing and dill as my herb.

I find it really interesting to see the differences between night light and daylight and the passage of time on the color of this salad.

The Herb S(w)izzle

This drink is actually called a Herb Sizzle. There is nothing sizzled in it so in my head it is the Herb Swizzle as you have to stir the ingredients together! Whatever you call it, it is a fancy and very tasty apple juice! I used Rosemary as my herb but you could use your favourite herb instead.

The Herb S(w)izzle Recipe

This was really refreshing and went very nicely with the salad!

It was really fun revisiting Eat Your Way To Love and Beauty. I also still want to go to the Swami’s Yoga Retreat! Sadly Swami herself passed away in 2009. I have a candleholder very much like the one by her left knee on the book cover. So let’s light a candle and raise a Herb Swizzle toast to the Swami and her legacy of eating our way to love and beauty!

Candle Have a great week!

03
Sep
2023

Busy Bird Chicken

categories: 1970's recipes, Chicken, The Busy Woman's Cookbook

Memories, Iike the corners of my mind…misty water-coloured memories…Greetings Friends and welcome to a very nostalgic instance of Retro Food for Modern Times. Many of the vintage dishes I make here are not from my own childhood but from old cookbooks I own. This one is different. Apricot or Busy Bird Chicken was something we would eat on the reg when I was growing up.

Why Busy Bird Chicken? That’s what the recipe my mum used was called. However, it is almost exactly the same as the recipe I found in The Busy Woman’s Cookbook by The Australian Women’s Weekly (1972). The only difference is that our version had almonds sprinkled over the top. The busy woman of the 1970s had no time for such frivolities. Her Apricot Chicken is unadorned. I really liked then in this thought, so I would urge you to also include them.

The Busy Woman’s Cookbook

We last met the busy woman way back in 2016. Then, as now, we lusted after her floral serving dishes and her perfectly coiffed hair, admired her skill in floristry / fruit wrangling and worried about her proximity to a naked flame whilst wearing a gorgeous but most likely highly flammable 1970s caftan.

They say you can’t step in the same river twice and so revisiting this beloved dish from my childhood came with a fair amount of anxiety. What if it wasn’t the charming dish of my memories? It’s very simple – four ingredients (with the almonds). Would the sweet / salty / oniony flavour be as I remembered it? Or would it be sickly sweet and awful?

I served my chicken with Sabrina Ghayour’s Coriander, Garlic and Lime Rice. I thought the savouriness of this would act as a counter if the Busy Bird Chicken was overly sweet. Back in the day, we would have had plain boiled rice with it. And to be honest, that would have been fine!

I’m happy to say that the Busy Bird Chicken was EXACTLY as I remembered it. It was a delicious blast from the retro past and I will certainly not be waiting such a long time to make it again!

If you would like to have your own blast from the past here’s the recipe!

Have a great week! I will be popping into your inboxes mid-week this week too as it is PIEATHALON time. I made my pie today (Sunday) and I am so looking forward to sharing it with you!

26
Aug
2023

Riceycoco

categories: 1970's recipes, Good Housekeeping World Cookery, The Caribbean, World Cooking

Greetings friends and welcome to Jamaica! Today, on the back of my trip to tropical FNQ (Far North Queensland), I am featuring a recipe from the Caribbean. Riceycoco comes to us via the pages of Good Housekeeping’s World Cookery (1972). It also comes very high on the list of words I find pleasant to say! And that is all the justification I needed to make it!

Riceycoco, is as the name suggests, rice cooked in coconut milk. It is traditionally eaten for breakfast which reminded me of a Sri Lankan dish called Kiribath (milk rice). There the difference ends. Kiribath is eaten with chutneys and sambols as a savoury dish whereas Riceycoco is sweet. I am not fond of a sweet breakfast so I ate mine as a dessert, similar to a rice pudding. To amp up the tropical vibes, I added some mango to the mix.

Rice and coconut milk is a classic in many Asian countries and I enjoyed the twist of having a sweet version of something I am more familiar with as a savoury dish. It was also a nice reminder of the tropics now we are back in cold, grey Melbourne! Its also a very soothing comfort food – a little bit like being cocooned in a warm cuddlepillar!

Riceycoco – The Recipe & Notes

I used coconut milk from a can instead of fresh coconut milk.
I also swapped out the brown sugar for maple syrup.
I served some additional coconut milk on the side.
This would also be spectacular with a dollop of coconut yoghurt.

If you want to be reminded of the tropics, like a sweet breakfast or want the nursery comfort of a rice pudding why not give Riceycocoa try Even just so you get to say the name a few times!

Have a great week!

24
Jul
2023

The Return of the Australian Vegetable Cookbook

categories: 1970's recipes, Australian Vegetable Cookbook, Blue Cheese, Cornwall, Leeks, Lettuce

Hello friends, today I am revisiting a book I first wrote about in 2012 – The Australian Vegetable Cookbook. I am taste-testing two recipes from that book – a Cornish Leek Pie and a Roquefort Wedge Salad. The book contains a lovely line drawing and a brief history of each vegetable. So, without further preamble let’s get to the recipes!

Cornish Leek Pie

I was dubious as to how authentic the Cornish Leek Pie would be. However, I found a few references to a Leeky / Likky Pie which dates from 1865 and is remarkably similar!

I layered boiled leeks and bacon into a pie dish and covered with pastry. Now, I made a mistake here as the recipe quite clearly says to season the layers with salt and pepper. I thought the bacon would be salty enough which turned out to be true so I didn’t add salt. But I totally forgot about the pepper. But by the time I remembered the pepper, the pie was already in the oven.

Then, the recipe itself got weird. After cooking for a while, I needed to make a hole in the pastry top and pour in a mixture of cream and parsley. I have never added ingredients to a pie in this way before! But it did allow me to add the missing pepper in with the cream and parsley. I thought it would be really hard to cut a hole in the pastry once it was baked so I did this before it went into the oven.

The recipe which I have linked above adds eggs and cream to the bacon and leek mix which I think would be a lot more sensible. This would have thickened up on cooking to form a quiche-like filling. As it was the cream did nothing except make everything a bit wet! It also kept bubbling up out of the hole in the pastry and made a bit of a mess.

There was nothing wrong with the cornish leek pie. It was just not something I would make, in the format given in the Australian Vegetable Cookbook. Full marks for the illustrations though! They are beautiful!

Cornish Leek Pie – The Recipe

Roquefort Lettuce Wedges

The night after I made the Cornish Leek Pie I made the Roquefort Lettuce Wedge from the same book.

The roquefort dressing was sooo good! But overall this dish lacked something. I served it on a gorgeous plate I bought when I was in Darwin earlier this year to try to fancy it up a bit. Plate 10/10. Dish…kind of meh…I would defintely make this again, However, I would add some bacon or croutons or some chives to the salad (or all three) just to make it a bit more interesting!

They say you can’t step in the same river twice and, to be honest I was disappointed with my revisiting of The Australian Vegetable Cookbook. There was nothing wrong with either recipe but they were also not amazing. One or two more ingredients to each one might have brought a bit more flavour or texture or just some va va voom to the dish.

Whether this was due to bad recipe choices on my behalf or a comment on the state of vegetable dishes in the 1970s remains to be determined. There are still a number of recipes I have flagged as “to be cooked”. so I may well have another crack at it in the future. Just not for a little while!

Roquefort Lettuce Wedge – The Recipe

I hope your cooking adventures this week fare a little better! Have a great week!