1970's recipes Archives - Page 5 of 22 - Retro Food For Modern Times

13
Nov
2022

The One with The Flan

categories: 1970's food, Custard, Desserts, Good Housekeeping World Cookery, Mexico, North and South America

For most people of my age the word flan conjures up the episode of Friends where Monica makes a birthday flan.

Monica Geller : We’re not having cake. We’re having flan.

Chandler Bing : Excuse me?

Monica Geller : It’s a festive custard Mexican dessert.

Well, today we having Flan de Café which is a coffee flavoured Mexican custard dessert direct from the South American chapter of Good Housekeeping’s World Cookery. Now, I know Mexico is not in South America, and I know you know that Mexico is not in South America. Good Housekeeping? Maybe not so much!

To amp up the coffee-ness of my flan, I baked them some vintage tea cups.

What did not need to amped up was the coffee flavour. I used the lower level of coffee suggested by the recipe which was 6 tablespoons and thought my heart was going to pop out of my chest for about an hour after eating it! I was WIRED! Talk about a major flan high!

I would probably halve the amount of coffee for future makes. Outside of a power punch of caffeine, the flavour was lovely, the light touch of orange added a refreshing note and the custard was silky and smooth. The Brazil nuts added a nice crunch as well as some garnish. I added some extra orange zest to the top of the flans to brighten them up. I chose not to use the recipe’s serving suggestion because I have a bit of a yecchh factor with raw eggs and I could not find guava jelly anywhere.

Flan De Café – The Recipe

Festive Flan Fun

As I was making the flans, I remembered something I heard wayback one of those science shows for kids. They said that there was enough oil in a brazil nut to act as a candle. For some weird reason, that piece of trivia has stuck in my head! Well, I had Brazil nuts and I had a flan which, after all is a festive dessert!

I really didn’t expect this to work particularly as the nuts kept breaking when I tried to chop them into anything resembling a taper. However….

Success!!!! Now that’s a really festive custard dessert!

Have a great week!

09
Oct
2022

Ceviche & Eggs A La Mexicana

categories: 1970's recipes, Eggs, Fish, Good Housekeeping World Cookery, Mexico

Hola amigas y amantes de la comida! Did I ever mention that during that very first lockdown of 2020, I tried learning Spanish on Duolingo? That first sentence pretty much reflects the highest level of proficiency I attained. Despite my very limited ability to speak the language, we are leaving the snowbound land of Canada to head south to the sun and sea of Mexico via Good Housekeeping’s World Cookery. And our first meal is going to be an absolute favourite of mine – Ceviche!

Ceviche contains so many things I love – raw fish, avocado, lemon, tomato, chill and coriander! And it is also so vibrant! I used tuna in my ceviche so there was the gorgeous pink of the tuna, some red tomatoes, the bright green of the coriander, the more more mellow yellow green of the avocado some bright yellow pear tomatoes so it really was very colourful.

I then also made Eggs A La Mexicana from the same chapter and the colour palette was quite similar!

Of course I am not the first person to realise that a lot of Mexican food is yellow, red and green…there are several colour palettes to this effect on Pinterest and elsewhere:

Having said that, the part of my brain that probably spends too much time at work, or thinking about work, thought the colour palette of both dishes was very similar to that of an Excel conditional formatting colour scale! So I may well be the first person to link Mexican food and a spreadsheeting tool!

The Recipes – Ceviche and Eggs a La Mexicana

Both of these were delicious and easy to cook! Which as long-time readers will know was definitely not the case the last time I ventured into the realm of Mexican cooking! Mind you, I’m not saying that these recipes are absolutely authentico but they had me doing a little dance like this all the same!I hope your week has you also doing a little dance and not staring at too many spreadsheets!

28
Sep
2022

Lime Pie with Creme De Menthe – Pieathalon 9!

categories: 1970's food, 1970's recipes, Cook A Long, Desserts, Pastry Desserts, Pieathalon

Greetings Pie lovers! Welcome to a special midweek edition of Retro Food For Modern Foods. Today we are celebrating that best of best days of the year – Pieathalon Day. This is the day, where lead by the lovely Yinzerella, bloggers worldwide swap and cook vintage pie recipes.

This year I got a recipe for Lime Pie with Creme de Menthe sent to me by Dr Bobb. Now, call me biased but how pretty are these? I made lots of little pies because I could not find a large already baked pie crust and at the time I made these I was suffering from double ear infections and a bad back so I was not really up for shopping about. The one shop I went to had no large pie crusts so I bought two packs of medium. I’m kind of glad. I think the little pies look adorable.

Lime Pie with Creme de Menthe?

To be honest, though, I was not initially enamoured with the recipe. Lime yes! It was the Creme de Menthe I was struggling with. I have never really tasted Creme de Menthe, all I knew about it was that it was a mint-flavoured liqueur that Poirot sometimes sips. Hmm…I wonder if that is why Yinzerella sent it to me! I have a love/hate relationship with mint-flavoured things. I hate mint tea and mint choc chip ice cream but I love a mint slice biscuit and I love the combo of mint and lime in a mojito.

Looking at the bottle of Creme de Menthe though I couldn’t help feeling I was going to be flavouring my pies with something that looked suspiciously like the mouthwash I use!

I had to keep reminding myself Mojito, not Listerine!

Mojito! Mojito…And given that I always like to have a song to celebrate Pieathalon, I was singing that “Mojito, mojito” to the tune of the bit in Despacito that goes “Pasito a pasito, suave suavecito”.

(How many of you are not humming despacito now?

However the real sticking point was not the Creme de Menthe but came when I was half way through making the recipe. At the exact point when I realised that the original recipe contained egg yolks that were not going to be cooked.

Hard no for me on the raw yolks.

Not the least of which was that I now had 12 little pies. These were going to last us for days. And if the idea of fresh raw yolks was bad, the idea of 4 day old raw yolks was putrid. Plus the mixture was quite runny. I was sure if I left it uncooked, we would have soggy bottoms in no time. And as anyone who watches the Great British Bake Off will know, no one likes a soggy bottom!

So, I popped my little pies into the oven for about 15 minutes.

Despite my misgivings, these pies were delicious!

Lime Pie with Creme De Menthe – The Recipe

Doctor Bobb, I raise my glass to you and your recipe!

Why not check out what Dr Bobb and all the other pieathletes made per the links below:

(please note some of the links may not be live at the time of posting. I will update as they become live).

Yinzerella	Candy Apple Cheese Pie	www.dinnerisserved1972.com
Dr. Bobb	praline pumpkin pie	http://dbkitschen.blogspot.com/2022/09/pieathalon-9-praline-pumpkin-pie.html
Battenburgbelle	Zucchini Pie	https://www.kitchenconfidence.co.uk/all-recipes/pieathalon-2022/
S S	Yul Brenner’s Pie	http://abookofcookrye.blogspot.com/2022/09/pieathlon-ninth-walnut-pie-from-stars.html
Jenny	Sagittarius Hamburger Pie	www.silverscreensuppers.com
Surly	poohs summer pie	www.vintagerecipecards.com
Kari	Ham Tongue Pie	www.thenostalgiccook.com
Poppy Crocker	apricot mallow pie	https://granniepantries.blogspot.com/
Camilla	Chocolate Angel Pie	http://culinary-adventures-with-cam.blogspot.com/

If you are wondering who got the pie I submitted, it was Jenny from Silver Screen Suppers! Good luck Jenny, I hope you enjoyed your hamburger pie!

Thanks as always to Yinzerella for organising this brilliant event!

14
Aug
2022

Rum and Butter Tartlets

categories: 1970's food, 1970's recipes, Baking, Canada, World Cooking

This recipe for Rum and Butter Tartlets is inspired by the recipe in the Canada chapter of Good Housekeeping’s World Cookery (1972).

To Rum or Not To Rum?

The original recipe calls for Rum essence which I suppose makes these child-friendly. I remember hating rum balls, or anything else rum flavoured, as a child so I am not sure how friendly the essence version would be. We did not have any rum essence in the house so I soaked my currants in actual rum. I then added the currant soaking liquid into the pies. Did I say how delicious these were?

Rum and butter is a classic combination – seen in hot buttered rum and steak with rum butter.

But please make up your own mind on using real rum or rum essence. Just not red rum!

We are watching The Shining for my film club. I think it is a genius movie and one of Kubrick’s best ( Stephen King hated it with a passion) and I am keen to see what the other club members think of it.

Rum and Butter Tartlets – The Recipes

I changed the original recipe a LOT both because some things such as the amount of sugar were insane. Also…it’s Canada…why are they even using sugar when they could have had maple syrup which is a far superior sweetener IMHO!

Here is the original recipe from Good Housekeeping’s World Cookery

And here is my version:

Print

Rum and Butter Tartlets

Print Recipe

A delicious modern take on a vintage recipe.

Author: Taryn Nicole

Ingredients

Scale

70g currants
50g butter
60g cream
100g maple syrup
1 tbsp rum / rum essence
1 egg
12 sweet tart shells

Cook Mode Prevent your screen from going dark

Instructions

Soak the currants in the rum for at least 1 hour.
Melt the butter. Add the cream, maple syrup, rum and currants.
Whisk in the egg.
Fill the tart shells and bake in a moderate oven (180C) until the filling was set and the pastry is golden. This was 40 minutes for me.

I have also found a very similar recipe from Adam Liaw

There may be a short hiatus in my posting schedule, we are about to go on a little holiday to the beautiful beach resort of Noosa on the Sunshine Coast. I am hoping for six days of sunshine, sand and great food!

Have a great week!

04
Jul
2022

Blueberry Cake

categories: 1970's recipes, Baking, Blueberries, Cake, Good Housekeeping World Cookery

Last Friday was Canada day so it seemed like an appropriate time to leave the United States of America and head north in our journey through Good Housekeeping’s World Cookery. It may also be an excellent time to leave the United States of America for Supreme Court related decisions too but that is by the by. Anyhoo, to celebrate our move to Canada I made a blueberry cake!

Now, blueberry cake is not the first thing I think of when my thoughts turn to Canadian cuisine. BUT…this chapter was fairly disappointing. Notably, the first thing I do think of was totally missing. I mean – WHO ON EARTH HAS A CHAPTER ON CANADIAN COOKING AND DOES NOT INCLUDE A RECIPE FOR POUTINE????

Ok. Let me take a few moments to do some of the deep rhythmic breathing they taught me at the conference I attended recently. Just. Breathe. Do not feel disappointed that you will not be making poutine. When you go to the office on Thursday you can buy some poutine from the very excellently named Lord of The Fries. Which may be even better than making some yourself. And breathe…

Ok, calming mantra over, let’s get on with the blueberry cake.

Blueberry Cake – The Recipe

The recipe called for lemon flavouring. We currently have a tree laden with lemons so I used the zest of one lemon and the juice of half a lemon as my “flavouring”. This added a nice hit of lemon to the cake. I found this cake to be quite dry – it very much needed a bit of cream or ice cream on the side. I had some with some homemade Mango Kufli (from Adam Liaw’s recipe) and it was divine. Mango, lemon and blueberries are a match made in heaven! I am not sure if this is because I did not have enough blueberries to half fill the loaf pan. There was a LOT of cake batter to blueberries so for future baking I might halve the batter mixture. Another variation might be to put a layer of blueberries in the middle or through the cake as well as on the top.

I think the way the blueberries bleed into the cake is so pretty!

Have a great week everyone!

Category: 1970’s recipes

Flan De Café – The Recipe

Festive Flan Fun

The Recipes – Ceviche and Eggs a La Mexicana

Lime Pie with Creme de Menthe?

Lime Pie with Creme De Menthe – The Recipe

To Rum or Not To Rum?

Rum and Butter Tartlets – The Recipes

Rum and Butter Tartlets

Ingredients

Instructions

Blueberry Cake – The Recipe