Yesterdays Recipes, Cooked Today
So Retro Food is the new trend for 2013….I always knew I was ahead of the curve 😉
http://uk.lifestyle.yahoo.com/retro-food-comeback-ocado-artic-roll-prawn-cocktail-heston-173344802.html
What a perfect retro meal this would make:
All washed down with some delicious Sodastream:
You know, they can bring back as much food as they like…but those hairstyles? They need to stayed buried in the past!
“The Knickerbocker Glory Years” is Martin Lampen’s hilarious homage to all that is awful in British food. From A – All You Can Eat £5.99 to Z – Zest, the book lays out the dark side of British cooking.
I really liked this book. Lampen’s humour is of the very dry British style. If you do not like my excerpts you will probably not like the rest of the book. If you do like them, try to hunt down this book as you will thoroughly enjoy the rest of it. Also, the same book is called “Sausage in A Basket” in some parts of the world.
Many of the entries are short. For instance, the entry for Wood Fired Pizza is:
“Big Fucking Deal”
The longest entry is 13 pages and documents Lampen’s first dinner party in all it’s excruciating awkwardness. This is the type of book you can dip in and dip out of as you require, it doesn’t have to be read from cover to cover.
Given that I touched on the 1970’s fondness for Ham Steak and Pineapple in the last post, Lampen’s take on Gammon is:
“The pig is slaughtered, its hind legs are removed, cured, glazed in honey and sliced into steaks. If this isn’t indignity enough, the steaks are then topped with a single wet pineapple ring from a dented tin and a waxy maraschino cherry.
Yes, gammon steak when topped with egg or pineapple is a peculiarly British dish: a bloated pink slab of fatty meat, topped with a garish fruit hat. Rather like a ‘Nikita’-era Elton John”
On the subject of pineapple, the entry for Tropical is:
“In Britain, any food or drink – be it a concentrated juice, cordial or sugary carbonated fizz – containing lemon, lime, pineapple or mango is tagged as ‘tropical’.
It’s important to note that other items included in the taxonomy ‘tropical’ are tuberculosis, typhoid, tularemia, (and) tropical storm Arlene”
Or, this for Guacamole:
“A filthy Soylent Green-style dip, guacamole is usually served with stale Doritos, a mountain of melted Cheddar cheese and mayonnaise on chain-pub’s nacho platter . It’s made from dead people.”
As for the eponymous Knickerbocker Glory Lampen has this to say:
“The knickerbocker glory, a layered dessert served in a tall glass and made with ice cream, tinned peaches, chocolate or fruit sauce and strawberry puree was the first post war dessert to be made in Britain that did not contain suet.
For a young male aged between eight and fourteen in the 1980’s, the knickerbocker glory was the greatest sensual experience one could imagine. Greater even than being interfered with by Bananarama”
For those of you who have no idea what Bananarama is, firstly it was a they and they were an immensely popular girl band of the 1980’s.
In homage to this book I made my own Knickerbocker Glory and it was about the funnest thing I have eaten all year!!! And I know full well funnest isn’t a word, but it was so much fun I lost all thoughts about grammar.
My version of Knickerbocker Glory differs from Lampen’s in that I always thought Knickerbocker Glory should contain jelly. My version contained the following layers:
For something that is largely put together from bits and pieces, this looks spectacular! And tastes even better!!!
Enjoy!
This makes 6 cups, you can obviously adjust quantities down if you do not want this much. This is so easy to make and absolutely delicious!
1 litre cream
250g dark chocolate
200g marshmallows
Frangelico to taste
These are a little troublesome to make but are worth it in the end!
50g caster sugar
30g unsalted butter at room temperature, plus extra for greasing
1 egg-white
1/4 tsp rosewater
Finely grated rind of 1/2 an orange
35g plain flower
30g flaked almonds
pinch of salt
All eras have their food fads – remember when everything was daubed in pesto? And/ or sun-dried tomatoes? What about Tandoori chicken served ad nauseam outside of its natural habitat of an Indian restaurant? Tandoori Chicken Caesar Salad, Tandoori Chicken Pizza, Tandoori Chicken Pie, Tandoori Chicken Pasta with Sun Dried Tomatoes and Pesto…for the love of God, stop. Just because something tastes good doesn’t mean it has to be used in every known recipe in the world.
Back in the 1970’s pineapple was the weapon of choice. It was everywhere! It was stabbed on toothpicks with a cube of generic cheese and possibly a brightly coloured cocktail onion to form the signature hors d’oeuvre of the decade, it was grilled with ham steaks to provide the first course of the generation and, combined with the glacé cherry, formed the classic upside down cake.
It was also:
Made into Salads:
Used as a receptable for prawns:
In increasingly odd ways (also note the ubiquitous curly parsley):
For main course, there was the exotic appeal of a sweet and sour:
Or a pineapple and pork casserole:
For dessert, apart from the classic upside down cake, pineapple was also a favourite topping for cheesecakes:
Or, as in the case of this post, made into a pineapple soufflé. The recipe for pineapple soufflé appears in a number of cookbooks of this vintage so must have been a popular dish of the time. Also, just to be really confusing, this is not a soufflé as in the French baked dessert but is more a mousse type concoction. I have no idea why this is also called a soufflé. Maybe in the ’70’s “foreign” terms were interchangeable. I guess we should consider ourselves lucky it’s not called Pineapple Bourguignon…
This recipe is so easy to cook and goes a mad, almost flourescent yellow when you first mix the jelly and cream together:
The end result is lovely. The tanginess of the lemon and the pineapple cut through the heaviness of the cream so you don’t get that horrible creamy coating on your tongue. It is a lovely light and refreshing dessert. I’ll definitely be making this again and am already thinking about how I could use the same techniques with different fruit and jelly combinations – strawberries with strawberry jelly? Maybe my favourite rhubarb with raspberry and rosewater jelly… In the meantime though, just enjoy this as is!
Who doesn’t love a chicken salad? Shut up vegans and vegetarians. I heard you. Ok…what normal person doesn’t love a chicken salad?
Busy women of the 1970’s loved a chicken salad. They also loved curly parsley. I have never seen so much curly parsley in my life as in these old cookbooks. They also loved scales. Scales feature heavily in vintage cookbooks. I have no idea why. Some sneaky physics lesson maybe. Which weighs more – parsley or a lead weight? Garlic or clams? Maybe these pictures were the precursor to the BrainTraining games of today where you are shown a kitten and an elephant sitting on some scales and you have to say which one weighs the most (it’s usually the kitten).
The Busy Woman’s Curried Chicken Salad is a a pretty good recipe, all it needs is a few little tweaks to adapt it to modern taste. I suggest the following:
Enjoy!
Most of the time, I can make a snap judgement as to how awful something will be just by reading the recipe. Take, for instance, the Oyster Soup mentioned in the previous post. I don’t actually have to taste it to know it will be repulsive. I can mock a lot of things without having to hand over cash for the privilege. Sometimes though, the line between good and evil is not so easily drawn. So it was with the Busy Woman’s Cookbook recipe for Fish Fingers in Sauce Verte.
I have a soft spot for fish fingers. They were a staple of my childhood and even now, particularly if I come home a bit boozy, fish fingers are a guilty pleasure of mine. So, I wasn’t entirely averse to giving this recipe a try.
The result:
I had a dilemma with how exactly to eat this though. The recipe is not particularly helpful. Serve sauce with fish fingers it says. How? I’d made two fish fingers so I tried it two ways.
Of the two, the dip was preferable as the slather made the crispy crumb coating on the fish fingers go soggy. In all honesty though, selecting one of these as being better than the other was a little bit like choosing between being punched or kicked in the face. Given the choice, you may prefer one over the other but neither would always be a better option.
As mentioned, I was unsure about how the Fish Finger dish might turn out. And the idea of the challenge was born – put a borderline recipe up against one with similar ingredients that sounds ok. Compare the two.
A search of my cookbooks lead me to a different fish with spinach sauce recipe – Fish with Spinach Hollandaise – from another AWW cookbook – The Best Seafood Recipes.
Incidentally, the Fish Finger with Sauce Verte recipe did not make it into The Best Seafood Recipes. Quelle surprise. Also, I used salmon in my version of the Fish with Spinach Hollandaise sauce recipe, because I had some in my freezer.
The result:
I compared the two recipes on 5 parameters: Taste, Ease of Cooking, Overall Look, Cost and Nutrition.
The retro food did not compare well. The fault was in the Sauce Verte. The next sentence is something I have never actually uttered before. Here goes.
It would have been better without the wine.
Wow. I’m still here. I thought for sure a bolt from the blue would have struck me down for so flagrantly defying my prevailing ethos. The combination of wine and lemon made the sauce too sour, a little bit bitter and combined with the spinach made my teeth go a little furry. It was not pleasant. The wine would have been much better just being drunk, preferably in copious amounts prior to eating the Fish Fingers in Sauce Verte.
The other surprise was that the sugar in the Fish with Spinach Hollandaise really worked! It somehow brightened the sauce up and I think also worked well with the toasted macadamias. The nuts were great and added some crunchy texture into the modern dish.
Fish with Spinach Hollandaise won this round easily!
One of the problems with cooking fish is that it can be hard to get it just right – ie not overcooked. For that reason alone, the Fish Finger dish won this challenge.
They were both very quick, with the sauce being able to made whilst the fish was cooking. One note though – the Fish Finger with Sauce Verte recipe states to cook the fish fingers for 20 minutes. I cooked mine for under ten and they were fine.
Let’s start with the sauce. Only one of these can really be called a sauce Verte. The other is more of a Sauce Not So Verte.
Aesthetically, the Fish with Spinach Hollandaise was far more pleasing to my eye. I loved the combination of the bright green sauce and the pink salmon. I thought this was a really pretty looking dish and it won this round hands down.
Fish Fingers and frozen spinach are cheap. Salmon and macadamias are not. Lets move on.
I’m not a nutritionist but I’m probably not wrong in suggesting that fresh salmon and spinach are better for you than frozen spinach and fish fingers. I’d also hazard a guess that macadamias are more healthy than whatever the hell they crumb fish fingers with. Even with the butter and sugar I think the modern version wins out.
The Busy Woman’s Fish Finger recipe did not fare as badly as I thought it would. Personally if I had to rank the parameters, I would probably place taste and nutritional value towards the top of the list but I also recognise that sometimes cheap and cheerful is exactly what you need. Even under these circumstances I would not make the Sauce Verte again. It was not good. The remainder of the box of fish fingers is in my freezer and when the time is right will be eaten with this busy woman’s preferred combination of mayonnaise and tabasco!