Retro Food For Modern Times

01
Mar
2013

Retro Food For Modern Times – Scotch Woodcock and Sunday Television

“We’re having a little soirée after the theatre tomorrow darling, nothing fancy, maybe some scotch woodcock and a nightcap or two. Do come”

No one’s ever said that to me. Because I don’t live at Brideshead. Or Downton Abbey.

The recipe for Scotch Woodcock appears in the After-Theatre Party Section of The Party Cookbook by Anne Marshall and Elizabeth Sewell (1971). I can’t help it, that combination of the After-Theatre Party and the Scotch Woodcock immediately had me imagining something English and posh and from a bygone, more glamorous era. In my mind, Scotch Woodcock consisted of a game bird shot on the estate by the endearingly eccentric squire and then marinated in gallons of whiskey.

Wrong and wrong. This is Scotch Woodcock.

If you happen to be thinking “But that looks nothing like pheasant drowned in single malt…In fact it looks remarkably like scrambled eggs on toast topped with anchovies”, congratulations! You get this weeks Elephant Stamp!

elephant_stamp

I’m not sure why this is called Scotch Woodcock when it contains neither whiskey nor woodcock. Then again, those cheeky Brits do like to bamboozle the foreigners with their nomenclature. (We’ll be getting on to Welsh Rarebit in a future post. Toad in the Hole will never be mentioned again. Except to say, that the best thing about it is that it doesn’t actually contain toads).

I wish I lived in world where I gave after theatre parties (or was invited to them). Unfortunately I don’t and I suspect not many of us do. I do however, have a penchant for a meal I can whip up as a quick and easy light supper during my Sunday night television marathon.

Scotch Woodcock fits the bill exactly. Here’s how it’s done.

The evening starts at 6:30 with The Super-Sizers Go… If you have never seen this show and have any interest in food history done in the most hilarious way, stop right now. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Watch The Super-Sizers Go… then come back. That last bit’s important. Make sure you come back.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQlanfOun64]

Anyway, during the breaks in The Super-Sizers you can do the following:

Gather your ingredients. If you are thinking that the milk in the photo below looks a little thick, you’re absolutely right. We had run out of milk. (So much for recipe preparation!) I used cream for the photo and mixed it with a splash of water for the cooking. And, no I couldn’t have gone and bought milk. I had FOUR hours of television to watch.

Scotch Woodcock - Ingredients — Scotch Woodcock – Ingredients

Make and Butter Your toast. Make an extra piece of toast. Hot buttered toast is one of the best things in the world. Munch on this whilst you watch the end of Super Sizers.

7:30. Masterchef: The Professionals. I can’t help it. I am an unashamed Masterchef addict. And I am loving the professionals. It’s as contrived and the situations are as silly as the normal Masterchef but Marco Pierre White is amazing. He’s like a wise owl, dispensing advice to the hapless. I want him to be my Dad.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV11bTbK9m4]

During breaks in ‘Masterchef, Scramble your eggs. I chose not to add salt as I thought the anchovy and olive topping would be salty enough. They were.

You might also want to open a bottle at this stage. Sparkling wine is lovely with this…and hey, don’t we all need a little sparkle to help us face Monday?

Next break, heat your grill, load the scrambled eggs, anchovies (I added some olives) onto the toast and warm through.

Serve with another glass of bubbles.

(Just a quick note about the serving sizes. This may feed 4 people as stipulated in the recipe if it is part of a larger “after-theatre party” spread. We had it as a light meal and the quantities listed in the recipe were perfect. We had eaten a large, late lunch though. Adjust your quantities as required).

Creamy scrambled eggs, crispy toast, and the salty hit of the anchovies. Delicious!

8:30 Elementary. I know it’s not as good as the Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman Sherlock which is brilliant, but it’s absolutely watchable.

During the breaks, do your dishes and tidy the kitchen. Better still get your significant other to do the dishes and tidy the kitchen. And send him out for some milk.

9:30 You can both settle back down on the couch and finish that bottle whilst watching The Graham Norton Show.

I admit, it’s hardly high glamour but I can think of many worse ways of spending a Sunday night!

Enjoy your week!

Signature 1

19
Feb
2013

Singers and Swingers in The Kitchen – Roberta Ashley (1967): Lemon Cake, Orange Jello and Confusion

categories: Cake, Jelly, Lemon

Hello and welcome to the new look Retro Food For Modern Times. I’m still tweaking the design so feedback would be greatly appreciated!

I also know I have gone overboard on this book. I promise this will be my last post from it. ~~For the moment.~~

Finally, if anyone has come to this page by Googling “swingers” and “jello”, this probably isn’t what you’re looking for. It’s about cake. Seriously, stop reading now. You’ll only be disappointed. It wasn’t even a particularly nice cake!

Ok, so now that the perverts are gone, lets talk cake. Although, maybe I should have let them stay. It worked for that “Fifty Shades of Grey” lady. Maybe I should become the E L James of smutty cooking. I could go all breathy and talk about “Beating the eggs and whipping the cream” whilst heaving my bosom about. Or would that just make me Nigella? (Who I absolutely adore. Please don’t sue me. I love you).

Anyway, back to the cake. The recipe comes from Chad Stuart. And before you even start to think “Who the f…” let me interrupt you right there. Chad Stuart is one half of the British folk duo Chad And Jeremy.

Same question huh? I thought so. Click the link if you really want to find out. It doesn’t really matter but just for the hell of it, Chad Stuart is the speccy one in the photo below, not the one who looks a little bit like a young Ryan Gosling if you squint and look at the screen on the correct angle.

So, the cake.

I had never heard of a cake that used Jelly / Jello as an ingredient but was not averse to trying it. There were only a few ingredients and I have an incredible fondness for a lemon syrup cake!

Orange-Lemon Cake Ingredients — Lemon Orange Cake Ingredients

The batter turned a bright orange and went quite bubbly. It tasted slightly chemical and overwhelmingly of oil. The oil was my fault. The recipe states vegetable oil. I should have used a more neutral oil like canola instead of a fruity olive oil. There was still too much of it though, you can see it pooling around the edges of the bowl in the picture below.

I think the slight chemical taste probably came from the cake mix. It could also have been some sort of weird mental effect – my mind thinking that it wasn’t “real” cake so should not taste like one. I’m someone who often likes the raw batter better than the cooked cake so the initial taste was disappointing.

Lemon Orange Cake BatterThe first weird thing happened when I took the cake out of the oven. There was a white….(I want to say bloom but that reminds me a little too much of mould or algae)….froth?…on the surface of the cake, about an inch in from the border of the tin. This was probably caused by all those bubbles in the mixture, although these had not been as prevalent when I’d spooned it into the pan.

The froth didn’t impact the taste but it was unsightly and as the cake wasn’t iced, it meant I had to keep looking at it.

There was also some sort of Jedi mind trick going on with the taste of the cake. It was an orange cake in colour so in my mind, it should have also tasted of orange. It didn’t. It tasted pretty much of nothing. I’m not sure why, maybe the excess of oil neutralised the other flavours.

Adding the syrup, if anything, made it even weirder. Not the least of which because I have no idea what a poultry nail is. I poked my holes with a skewer like a normal person. What I ended up with was an orange cake that tasted of lemon.

This cake caused my brain to melt. Seriously. It messed with my head. The oily batter, the weird froth, the colour not matching the flavour, it was not a pleasant experience or one that I am likely to repeat without significantly changing the recipe.

If I was going to make it again I would use a more neutral oil and cut down on the amount. I would have the colour of the cake match the colour of the syrup – if using orange jelly/o, I would use orange syrup. How awesome would this look with a blood orange syrup?

I’m off to hunt for a new book for next time. Enjoy your week!
Signature 1

07
Feb
2013

Retro Food For Modern Times – Singers and Swingers – Roberta Ashley (1967): Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Spaghetti Bolognese

categories: 1960's recipes, Bolognese, Chicken Liver, Pasta

What do my latest kitchen rule and the American military have in common?

Hint – the answer is in the title.

Prompted by my latest foray into Roberta Ashley’s Singers and Swingers, the events of this week have led me to adopt a strict “need to know policy” in terms of the produce issuing from said kitchen.

The recipe in question was Noel Harrison’s Spaghetti Bolognese, inspired by a recipe by none other than Elizabeth David!

It obviously wasn’t all franks and beans for the celebrities of 1967, some of them were slightly more highbrow.

I dithered over making this recipe for about a week before deciding to go for it. The reason?

I don’t care if the recipe is inspired by the Grand Dame of British Cookery, a Spaghetti Bolognese without garlic is not any Spaghetti Bolognese I care to make!

That’s not true, well it’s partially true but the real reason for the prevarication was the presence of chicken livers in the recipe.

Ingredients - Noel Harrison's Spaghetti Bolognese — Ingredients – Noel Harrison’s Spaghetti Bolognese with a sneaky garlic clove thrown in!

I have never cooked liver before, in fact I have never, outside of a paté even eaten liver before. I am actually a bit frightened by the thought of offal. Still, one of my reasons for wanting to do this was to expand my horizons as a cook, so whilst it took a bit of internal debate there really was only one decision that made sense.

The texture of the raw liver was…ooky. It was softer than I thought it would be, almost a little spongy and a little….stringy. It was kind of gross. I would certainly not discount using chicken liver in a recipe again but I’m not scouring recipe books either!

Still, I persevered, (yay, me!) and the end result was a super Spaghetti Bolognese, even if I do say so myself. It was rich and flavoursome. There was an undercurrent of liver but the flavour certainly wasn’t overpowering. Bravo Noel Harrison and Elizabeth David!

I made the Bolognese sauce in the afternoon as I wanted it to simmer for a few hours. I had a gym class that evening, so just before I left I put the spaghetti on to boil and left Mark to fend for himself. When I got home, he had eaten his.

“Did you like it?”

“I was the best spaghetti Bolognese I have ever had…it was delicious” Proof is in the eating. he wiped his plate clean.

Wow! That’s some praise from a notoriously picky eater!

So, I then sat down to eat mine and, he was right, it was pretty damn good!

I’m putting my next comments down to delirium caused by too much exercise. Too much jumping around is not good for my brain! Because the next words out of my mouth were “Yeah, I was really worried about putting the chicken livers in there but they work”.

That was it. I continued eating, he continued watching tv.

End of discussion.

Or possibly not.

The next night, we were having left over Bolognese with garlic bread, also from the book. Or I thought we were. I ‘d started to reheat the Bolognese sauce when I heard a small voice behind me.

“I don’t think I can eat it”.

“Why”

“You shouldn’t have told me about the chicken livers”

“But you eat liver, you eat calves livers when we go out and they’re huge…the chicken livers were tiny”

“I know”

“You had chicken liver paté on toast for breakfast”

“I know”

“You said it was the BEST Spaghetti Bolognese you’ve ever eaten”

“That was before I knew about the chicken livers…I’ll have the garlic bread though, that looks great”

This example of man logic floored me. On a scale of one to ten where one is cold hard calculated rationality and ten is utter gibberish, surely this rates a 9.5?

So, from now on….any, and all, feats of kitchen wizardry are going to be hidden behind a veil, cloaked in a cone of silence and locked in a vault. From now on, nothing coming from my kitchen is being divulged to anyone. Ever.

Except for you dear readers…just don’t tell anyone!

Signature x

03
Feb
2013

Retro Food For Modern Times – Singers and Swingers – Roberta Ashley (1967): Ladies Night

categories: 1960's recipes, Icecream, Salad, Salad Dressing

Last week I mentioned how much I loved the tv show Get Smart. Thinking back, the main attraction probably wasn’t the humour, the wacky contraptions, the escapades or the resolution where good always triumphed over evil. The main reason I loved this show was Agent 99, played by Barbara Feldon.

She was my first inspirational role model. She was smart, sassy, and gorgeous; she wore great clothes and had fabulous hair. More importantly, not only was she a woman forging a career in a male dominated arena, but she would often get the better of the boys (and look glamorous as she did so). Plus, she was a secret agent! What a woman! I so wanted to be her!

Who am I kidding – I still want to be her!

But, having been very disappointed in the recipe offerings from Don Adams, the worst of which is mentioned in the last post, I was a little wary about looking at the recipe from Barbara Feldon.

No fear needed, this is a super salad recipe. I have never understood why cauliflower isn’t used raw more often. I think it has a lovely, nutty flavour. I also love radishes and cucumber and the other ingredients in this salad. I happened to have some celery and some cherry tomatoes in the fridge so I threw them into my mix but this would be delightful as is! I also did not let the ingredients sit in the dressing for half an hour as suggested but dressed the salad and ate it immediately. The addition of the egg is a nice touch and makes this more of a “meal” than a “side”.

If you are looking for a salad dressing to have with this, Sybil Burton Christopher’s Salad Dressing from Singers and Swingers perfectly fits the bill.

She was also quite the female role model. Ms Ashley has this to say:

“When Richard Burton took up with Elizabeth Taylor, everyone felt sorry for Sybil. But not for long. She packed up and moved from England to Manhattan, where she was instantly one of the most popular girls in town. She opened Arthur, a fabulously successful discotheque, and married the lead singer of group she booked into the club”

Talk about living well being the best revenge!

I made a minor change to this recipe, as I am not a fan of raw garlic in a salad, so I smashed up a clove of garlic and let it sit in the other ingredients for about an hour so the flavour would infuse the mixture but I fished it out before I dressed the salad.

Sybil's Salad Dressing — Sybil’s Salad Dressing

Finally, after feeling very virtuous about eating the salad, you can splurge on dessert by making Barbra Streisand’s Instant Coffee Ice Cream. A word of warning though, the mix tastes overly sweet before freezing. This is lessened, once it is frozen but you might want to reduce the marshmallow content from the original recipe depending on your sensitivity to sweetness.

The pretzels work really well, adding some crunch, some toastiness and some saltiness which further reduces the impact of the sugar. Given the current predilection for salted everything, Babs may have been displaying some culinary prescience in this combination!
Not only is she a singer, actor, film producer and director, she’s got some cooking nous as well!!! If I didn’t admire her so much, she’d be kind of irritating!

Barbra Streisand's Instant Coffee Ice Cream — Barbra Streisand’s Instant Coffee Ice Cream

So let’s hear it for this trio of fabulous women of 1967, not only for their fabulous food offerings but for acting as role models to generations of young women who have been inspired to forge their own careers as hard-working, independent, successful and glamorous women!

I’ll leave you today with a little gem I found on the youttubes of Barbara Feldon singing a song called “99”. I have been listening to it obsessively all week. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an original video – everything I found was stills or clips from the show. This does have a good selection of great hair and clothes and also some goofy dancing from my favourite ever Get Smart Episode, the Groovy Guru.

Enjoy!

[youtube=http://youtu.be/NDhhdG-nslg]

30
Jan
2013

Retro Food For Modern Times: Singers and Swingers – Roberta Ashley (1967) – Sorry About That, Chief!

categories: Beans, Chicken & Poultry, Cream Cheese, Soup

Last week I mentioned that there was surprisingly little to mock in Roberta Ashley’s Singers and Swingers. Never fear though, little doesn’t mean nothing and today, I’m turning my unflinching gaze to a few of the less palatable gems contained therein.

I have a strange relationship with cold soup. Until 5 years ago, I can honestly say, had never eaten it, and had no intention of doing so. I started to come round after a trip to Barcelona in 2008 and a bowl of the most amazing gazpacho I have ever eaten. I have become a fan of this delicious Spanish concoction, to the point of whipping up a batch or two of my own...

Homemade Gazpacho...I can do cold Soup — Homemade Gazpacho…I can do cold soup

So, whilst reconciled to gazpacho, cold creamy soups and I aren’t even friends on Facebook. You know how sometimes, if you eat something creamy you get a film in your mouth from the fat in the cream? That’s the thought that puts me off. Well, it’s that thought that puts me off a cold soup made from the freshest cream and vegetables. I have seen what cold canned soup looks like and believe me, it’s not going anywhere near my mouth! Gross! So, this recipe from Leonard Nimoy is designed to push all the wrong buttons for me. As far as I’m concerned this one can go back to Vulcan, Spock!

Leonard Nimoy's Cold Soup..not for me! — Leonard Nimoy’s Cold Soup..is not for me!

The next recipe designed to have me gritting my teeth and muttering swear words under my breath is called Homemade Canned Beans. As mentioned in the last post, I am not averse to a can of beans. Beans on toast is one of my go to meals when I want something quick and healthy after a trip to the gym or a lazy breakfast. My issue with most of the popular brands of beans on the market is that the sauce can be overly sweet. So I was very excited to read the name of this recipe. Imagine if I could make my own beans that tasted like canned beans but with less sugar? Happy days….

Unfortunately, as I read on, it turned out that the universe had another fate in store for me

Remember in the wacky races when Muttley used to mutter under his breath? I did a lot of that whilst reading this recipe.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/gf_IH3rj0hY]

If you want a better recipe for beans, check out Erica over at Retro Recipe Attempts. If, like me, you have an aversion to an overly sweet sauce for your beans, I think the mustard and tabasco in Erica’s recipe would cut through that sweetness.

http://retrorecipe.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/zingy-baked-beans/

Next, on my hit list, we have Southern Fried Chicken À La Mrs Bobby Goldsboro. Personally, I would call this heart attack on a plate but Mr Bobby Goldsboro informs us that:

“I like it because I like Southern Cooking, but another reason is that fried foods are fattening and I am always trying to put on some weight”.

Mr Bobby Goldsboro needs a good hard slap if you ask me. The man must have had the metabolism of a hummingbird!* Just looking at a plate of something that contains bacon fat, oil and cream and is served with mashed potatoes or biscuits, butter and honey would be enough to derail my weight loss efforts for a year!

Southern Fried Chicken A La Mrs Bobby Goldsboro

As a child, one of my favourite tv shows was Get Smart. I would race home from school every day to see which episode was on, I swear I have seen every episode a dozen or more times and, if push came to shove, I could probably recite some of them almost verbatim.

The hero of the show was the bumbling, wise-cracking secret agent called Maxwell Smart, played by Don Adams. Given my love for the show, I was delighted to see that Singers and Swingers contained recipes by both Don Adams and Barbara Feldon who played Max’s colleague (and eventually his wife), Agent 99. More about Barbara Feldon next time but I desperately wanted their recipes to be good. Hers is great. However, in the words of Maxwell Smart, I believe this recipe “missed by that much”. If by “that much” you mean the distance from here to the moon. I can’t even think what this mix would begin to taste like…if anyone is brave enough to make it, please let me know!

I’ll leave you to ponder the utter weirdness of the Don Adams recipe. I’m off to search for episodes of Get Smart….

Enjoy your week!

Signature x

*Hummingbirds have an incredibly fast metabolism. At any given moment they are only hours away from starving to death.