United Kingdon Archives - Retro Food For Modern Times

Category: United Kingdon

01
Sep
2024

Welsh Rarebit Crumpets

categories: Bread, Cheese, Grilled Cheese, United Kingdon

Hello, friends! Tuesday, September 3rd, is Welsh Rarebit Day. Welsh Rarebit is one of my favourite foods—breakfast, brunch, lunch, supper. You name it – I’ll happily eat a Welsh Rarebit at that time. And over here at Maison de la Retro Food, we will be celebrating with a Welsh Rarebit Crumpet.

I have previously written about the dubious origins of the name so I won’t repeat myself. But, for anyone not familiar with the dish, it is a fancy version of cheese on toast. My recipe comes from British chef Mark Hix from the book Midnight Feasts: An Anthology of Late Night Munchies by Charmain Ponnuthurai. He calls it a “Rabbit,” a term used in the 18th century. I’m using “rarebit” to be kind to vegetarians. And no bunnies were harmed in the making of this dish!

I chose this recipe because, whilst having eaten Welsh Rarebit many times, I have never combined it with the joy that is a crumpet before! And it really was a joy! I had these for a working at home lunch and not only did they hit the spot taste-wise, they are also quick to make and the ingredients are usually on hand in most kitchens. Well, you might have to buy crumpets. And if you are the type of person who always has crumpets on hand, well done! You are truly living your best life! You could also use toast for these but you would miss out on one of the delights of the Welsh Rarebit Crumpet.

Crumpets, as I am sure I don’t need to tell you are full of holes. Here is one of my crumpets pre Rarebit

Now, when you add Welsh Rarebit to your crumpets and heat them, something wonderful happens. Those holes fill up with lovely, lovely melted cheese! So, not only do you have cheese on top of your crumpet, you also have it in your crumpet as shown in the photo below.

Bloody brilliant!!!!! I take my hat off to you Mark Hix, you are a genius!

Welsh Rarebit Crumpets – Recipe

Here is the recipe including the adorable drawing that accompanies it:

And just cos that looks tiny, here is a close up of the actual recipe:

Variations on Welsh Rarebit

If crumpets or bread are not your bag, here are some other variations on Welsh Rarebit so you can still celebrate on Tuesday!

Welsh Lamb Rarebit Hotpot: This is going onto my list of things to cook!

Welsh Rarebit Potato Skins: Cheese and Potato is never wrong!

Here’s one with chicken: Yes please!

This Welsh Rarebit Tart is right up my alley

As is this Welsh Rarebit version of cauliflower cheese

Have a wonderful day however you decide to spend Welsh Rarebit Day!

18
Aug
2024

Cheddar Scotch Eggs

categories: 1970's food, 1970's recipes, 500 Recipes for Quick Meals, Eggs, England

Hey friends! Today, I’m diving into a classic recipe: Cheddar Scotch Eggs. This little gem hails from 500 Recipes for Quick and Easy Meals by Marguerite Patten (1972).

I’ve got a confession: Scotch Eggs are one of those foods I adore eating but dread making. Remember the Pakistani version, the Nargisi Kofta, I made back in 2019? It was a culinary delight, but let’s face it, Scotch Eggs are a lot of work! Who wants to deal with the mess of a deep fryer just for one meal? It’s like running a marathon for a single slice of pizza!

Scotch eggs are however, quite lovely eaten cold, which makes making a big batch worthwhile as you can enjoy meals for a few days! They are also amazing picnic food so if you are contemplating an al fresco meal in the near future, these could be your go-to dish!

Ahem, I hear you say. That looks exactly like a regular Scotch Egg. Where’s the extra cheese you promised? Scotch Eggs are already laborious enough to make, but this version takes things to a new level. You cut the eggs in half, remove the yolks, and mix them with cheese. Then, you reassemble the eggs and proceed with the normal Scotch Egg process.. You can see the split in the eggs where they where cut through in the close up photo below.

What Are Scotch Eggs?

But maybe I should pause here in case some of my readers are unfamiliar with the concept of a Scotch Egg.

First thing. They are not from Scotland. They were invented by Fortnum and Mason the very posh department store in Picadilly in London in 1738. The term scotch comes from adding anchovies to the meat to cut through the fattiness of the meat and to give it a stronger flavour.

Second, they are an egg, wrapped in a meat casing and then crumbed and fried.

Cheddar Scotch Eggs – The Recipe

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!

10
Apr
2023

Devonshire Splits: And Then There Were Buns

categories: Baking, Dining With The Dame, England, Stand Alone

Hello crime readers and food lovers! When I first thought about writing about the food featured in Agatha Christie novels I spent quite a bit of time thinking about what to call my new venture. “And Then There Were Buns” was my first idea. It seemed equally Christiesque, food-related and appealed to my love of puns. In the end, I settled on Dining with the Dame as being a more simple title. However, the inital idea never really left my mind, and has, resurfaced, here as we begin to talk about the Christie classic And Then There Were None. In what has become a bit of a theme around here And Then There Were None features very little actual food. Plenty of tinned tongue (🤮) but little real food. Given it is Easter, I decided to make Devonshire splits over a more traditional hot cross bun for two reasons. First, the novel is set on a small island off the Devon Coast and second, I don’t really like a hot cross bun.

Oh, and I know I previously said that April’s read would be Sad Cypress but you can blame a work trip to Sydney for the mix-up. I accidentally popped the wrong book into my bag and didn’t realise until I was on the plane. I blame the 4:00am wake up for that error! Sad Cypress will be May’s read.

And Then There Were None -The Plot

This one is such as classic that I feel that it needs little explanation by me. It is Christie’s best-selling title with over 100 million sales! But here goes nothing – Eight people are invited to spend time on Soldier Island, off the Devon Coast. When they arrive, they are greeted by a butler and his wife, the cook but their hosts are absent. Each person finds a framed copy of a nursery rhyme called Ten Little Soldiers in their room and the dining table contains a tableau of ten soldiers.

As our guests are having dinner a terrifying voice booms out of nowhere that they have been gathered together as each of them has previously gotten away with murder and lists their crimes. Panic and pandemonium ensues.

And then they start dying in ways paralleling the Indians from the rhyme.

And with each death, one of the little figurines on the tables disappears.

We have:

No way off the island
A dawning realisation that one of them is a killer
A baffling puzzle for the police when they finally arrive on the Island. The last death was Vera Stanhope who hanged herself. So, given no one could get on or off the island, who moved the chair she stepped on to reach the noose away from her body and put it against the wall?
A confession in a bottle. If Smashmouth was the theme for Murder is Easy, then The Police’s Message in a Bottle might be this month’s song!

And Then There Were None is so creepy and the growing fear and paranoia of the guests as the death toll rises is so well done! It is no wonder that this is the best-selling mystery novel of all time! Speaking of which, let’s look at the covers of some of the 100 million!

And Then There Were None – The Covers

There are some wonderful covers here! Not sure about the significance of the fish (top right) but I really like all of the rest of them – the remoteness of the island, the way the noose forms the O in bottom left, the broken Indian, the skull shadow cast by the house are all greatly evocative of the book. You will also notice there are also a few covers with the title Ten Little Indians which is one of the former titles of this novel.

And I guess about now would be the right time to talk about the original title of this novel which was Ten Little N-words. I made the decision not to include any of the covers with that particular title. I don’t even know what to say about the original title. Except to say I’m very glad it was changed and I think Änd Then There Were None”is a much better title than either of the others!

The Recipe – Devonshire Splits

I used the recipe for Devonshire splits from the Waitrose website. I’ve also included it below in case the website ever takes it down. These are also called Cornish splits in other places on the internet so don’t come at me, people of Cornwall if you feel slighted, head straight to the source. The Devonshire Splits were delicious. BUT I found them quite big. Personally, I would use the amount of mixture suggested in the recipe to make 18 buns instead of the 12 suggested. If you do this make sure that you reduce the cooking time accordingly.

Links to The Christieverse

I could not find any links in this one.

Other Food & Drinks Mentioned in And Then There Were None

Gin and Ginger Beer
Coffee (multiple times)
Port
Brandy (multiple times)
Bread
Milk
Bacon and eggs (Bacon mentioned twice)
Tea (multiple times)
Cold Ham (twice)
Cold Tongue (tinned) (mentioned multiple times)
Boiled Potatoes
Cheese
Biscuits (twice)
Tinned Fruit (mentioned twice)
Honey
Whiskey

May’s read will absolutely positively definitely be Sad Cypress!

Have a great week!

Devonshire Splits

22
Nov
2022

Rhubarb and Rosé Syllabub

categories: Desserts, England, Rhubarb

I was doing some reading the other day and, no, not an Agatha Christie, even though I am about half way through Hercule Poirot’s Christmas for the next Dining with The Dame. I was reading some poetry (because in my head I am the cool intellectual girl who reads untranslated French poetry whilst drinking black coffee at a cool café in the hippest arrondissement in Paris).

In reality I was likely lying on my couch in dirty sweatpants, shoving salt and vinegar chips into my face. Regardless of the setting though, whilst I was reading came I across a poem by Edith Sitwell called “When Sir Beelzebub” The opening lines of which are

When
Sir
Beelzebub called for his syllabub
in the hotel in Hell
Where Proserpine first fell,
Blue as the gendarmerie were the
waves of the sea,

Which got me thinking…why aren’t there more poems about dessert? And why have I never made a syllabub? I’m still waiting for an answer on the first question. But as for the second?

No trip to hell required!

What is Syllabub?

Syllabub is a gorgeous British dessert which originated in the 16th century. It is a whipped cream dessert, originally flavoured with sweet wine or cider. My version uses rosé as the wine and pairs the rosé flavoured cream with a rhubarb and rosewater compote.

I really like the word syllabub. It sounds so slinky and smooth. But with a hint of bite with that last b. Which pretty much describes the syllabub. The silky smooth cream has a little kick of rosé and the rhubarb compote is tangy with hints of orange and rose. Layer it into your prettiest vintage glasses so you can see the contrast of the cream against deep crimson rhubarb.

It also looks very pretty when you put your spoon in and the layers get all mixed up and marbled. Maybe I have been reading too many Agatha Christie’s but my first thought was a rather macabre “like blood in the snow”! 😂 I could totally imagine Miss Marple eatiing syllabub too!

Rhubarb and Rosé Syllabub

Print Recipe

A delightful English dessert of poached rhubarb with a rosé flavoured cream.

Author: Taryn Nicole

Ingredients

Scale

For the Rhubarb Compote:

500g of rhubarb, cut into bit sized pieces
100g caster sugar
Juice and Zest of 1 orange
1/2–1 tsp rosewater

For The Cream:

175g rosé wine
80g caster sugar
200ml whipping cream

Garmish:

Strawberries (optional)
Flaked Almonds (optional)

Cook Mode Prevent your screen from going dark

Instructions

For the Compote:

Place rhubarb, sugar, orange juice and zest into a saucepan.
Add rosewater to taste (please see note below).
Cook over medium heat until the rhubarb is soft but is keeping it’s shape. If the mixture starts to stick you can add a tablespoon or so of water but you don’t want the rhubarb mixture to be too wet.
Allow to cool

For the Cream

Add the rosé and sugar to a small saucepan and bring to the boil, over a high heat stirring occasionally. Reduce the heat and allow the mix to reduce by a third.
Allow to cool.
Whip the cream to stiff peaks.
Fold in the rose mixture.
Layer the rhubarb and cream mixtures into a glass.
Top with a strawberry and some flaked almonds for crunch!

Notes

Rosewater can be overpowering. Start with half a teaspoon before cooking the rhubarb and add more after cooking if you want to boost the flavour.

A Very Brief Side Note on Edith Sitwell

Edith Sitwell, the writer of “When Sir Beelzebub” was a fascinating woman. Six foot tall, she had a distinctive dress style – turbans and the most amazing jewellery. She was also an innovative poet. One of her poems, Gold Coast Customs was written in jazz rhythms and she wrote a wrote poems to music in a show called Facade which was performed behind a curtain pained with a face. The words were read through a megaphone via a hole in the mouth. (This to me sounds very Mighty Booshy…I wonder if they might have been inspired by her.

She was also not one to mince words and had some scathing things to say about people including the critic F.R Leavis (For those fans of Bridget Jones out there Yes, “the F.R. Leavis who died in 1978.”) whom she called a “a tiresome, whining, pettyfogging little pipsqueak”. She also called D.H. Lawrence a “a plaster gnome on a stone toadstool in some suburban garden”. So in 1953, some bright spark had the idea for Dame Sitwell to interview Marilyn Monroe, assuming, oif course that they would hate each other and the Sitwell’s scathing critique of Monroe would create a commotion and of course increase circulation!

I’m sure, much to the chagrin of a features editor, the two liked each other!

The meeting between the two occurred in the Sunset Tower in Hollywood which is certainly not a hotel in hell! I wonder if they might have eaten some syllabub!

Have a great week!