Vintage Cookbooks Archives - Retro Food For Modern Times

Tag: Vintage Cookbooks

24
Apr
2014

Retro Easter Part 3: The Eggs-travaganza

categories: Avocado, Bacon, Breakfast, Brunch, Chocolate, Easter, Eggs, Peanut Butter, Potato, Vintage Cookbooks, Vintage Recipes

I solemnly promise that will be my only egg pun for this whole post.

But really, what is Easter about if it’s not about eggs?

What?

Well, yeah, ok sure it’s about Jesus….but eggs are important too.

This year I made my own chocolate eggs.

And ok, so Adriano Zumbo is not shaking in his shoes just yet but I get some points for trying right? Can’t this be like Little League and I get a medal just for turning up?

For those of you who don’t know Adriano Zumbo, he is a mad-scientist genius baker (kind of like an Australian Heston Blumenthal but with more macaroons and fewer snails). He makes things like this gorgeous V8 cake.

Think it looks simple?

Think again.

Because when you cut this baby open you get this:

Yeah…uh huh and OMG wow!!!

Maybe I’ll try to make that ~~next Easter~~ never.

For anyone brave enough to try, you can get the recipe by clicking the link below:

Zumbo’s V8 Cake

And send me photos. And a piece.

However, ’nuff about Zumbo, back to my eggs. They weren’t just any plain old chocolate eggs. Uh uh. No way.

They also had a peanut butter fudge filling:

And in true retro style the peanut butter fudge mix has a secret ingredient.

Mashed potato.

Yes, I did just say mashed potato.

And it works surprisingly well. You can’t taste it but it gives the peanut butter a firmer texture. Actually the texture is very similar to that of my one of my all time favourite decadent little treats – a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. And when I say “a” Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, I of course mean a ~~four~~ twin pack.

I even had to check that there wasn’t mashed potato in a Reese’s PBC. There isn’t but there are two things that don’t actually have names, just initials. And you have to love a list that contains non-fat milk and milk fat right next to each other. So, that would be milk right?

You can check the full list out here.

I’m not going to come over all Michael Pollan about this (guess who finally finished reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma?) but you know what? I’m really not sure about eating the stuff that is just initials. However, whilst we’re on the subject of Mr Pollan, here is what he has to say about TBHQ, one of the ingredients in my possibly formerly beloved peanut butter cups:

But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to “help preserve freshness.” According to A Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause “nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse.” Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill.

Hmm…compared to lighter fluid, the mashed potato suddenly seems a bit more attractive does it not? And yes ok, you would probably have to eat your own weight in them to get that gram of TBHQ but it was enough to make me walk away from the rack of peanut butter cups today. Damn you Pollan.

Peanut Butter Fudge Easter Eggs

Print Recipe

Easter Eggs with a “secret” ingredient

Prep Time: 5
Cook Time: 120
Total Time: 2 hours 5 minutes

Ingredients

Scale

1 small potato, peeled and cubed
1 cup peanut butter – I used super crunchy.
1/2 cup condensed milk
1 cup icing (confectioner’s) sugar
180 gram block of dark chocolate

Cook Mode Prevent your screen from going dark

Instructions

Melt 2/3 of the chocolate in a bowl over hot water and coat the moulds with the melted chocolate. You may need to do this more than once to get the desired thickness of chocolate shell.
Place the chopped potato into a saucepan and cover with water. Boil until tender.
Drain and mash.
Add your condensed milk, just as you would add regular milk to normal mashed potatoes.
Allow this mixture to cool.
Mix in your peanut butter and confectioner’s sugar. It should form a fairly thick paste.
Add more condensed milk or confectioner’s sugar if required.
Spoon this mixture into the chocolate lined moulds.
Melt the remaining 1/3 of the chocolate. Use this to seal the mixture into the moulds.
Chill until the chocolate hardens then press your eggs out of the moulds.

Notes

You will also need Easter Egg Moulds. I bought mine from a craft shop for around $4.

Ox Eye Eggs

In my last post I assumed that everyone would know what Egg in a Hole was. I then further confused the issue by using the name we call these things in my family which is an Ox-Eye egg.

I actually managed to trace back the source of why we call it that. It comes from this book which I inherited from my…hmmm…I’m not sure of our exact relationship…maybe my second cousin? A great cousin? My nana’s sister’s daughter.

This was possibly my first cook book and the ox-eye eggs have become a family favourite. I will return to this book in due course because the illustrations are awesome but here is the recipe for the original ox-eye eggs:

I prefer to do mine in a frying pan than in the oven as I think it gives you a little more control over your preferred degree of yolk runniness but the choice is yours!

And look at this for an amazing breakfast – seriously, if I’d thrown some cheese on this plate all my five favourite food groups would have been covered – eggs, bacon, avocado, and bread!

Loading up that toasted circle with a piece of bacon, some guac and some semi-runny yolk? Probably about as close to heaven as I’m going to get!!!

And that’s Easter 2014 done!

Next time, a double whammy, a retro treat from Salads from All Seasons and a Daring Kitchen Challenge. I’m 3 months behind on my Daring Kitchen stuff and I’m really nervous about all of them – for very different reasons – again which we will get to in due course.

February’s challenge was Salad Dressing – and if you’re thinking that should be fairly impossible to fuck up, well, you haven’t seen the recipe I’m planning on using.

Hint – it too has a secret ingredient, which incidentally has been mentioned in this post. And it’s not mashed potato. If only.

I’m loving my extended Easter break. Hope your week is fabulous whatever you are doing!

Signature 1

12
Oct
2012

Retro Food For Modern Times: The Busy Woman’s Pineapple Soufflé

categories: 1970's food, Desserts, Jelly, Pineapple

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!

16
Sep
2012

The Busy Woman’s Cookbook – Australian Woman’s Weekly (1972)

categories: Books

Strange things happened in the ‘70’s. And for my next revelation…water is wet. Yes, I know. My acuity today is on fire. I have a horrible headache. It came on whilst reading this book. Possibly due to the number of times I beat myself about the head with it exclaiming “WTF? For the love of God, why?”

However, I digress. One of the things that happened in the 1970’s was a glut of cookbooks aimed at the growing number of women entering the full-time workforce. They all touted their ability to save women time in the kitchen through the use of processed foods. The result, in many cases, was a book which sacrificed taste and nutrition for what was often a false expediency. The current wave of people wanting to do everything from scratch – bake their own bread, make their own preserves and pickles, cure their own olives etc, may well be a backlash from the children of these busy women of the ’70’s!

Before I continue, I would just like to take a moment to say how much I love the Australian Women’s Weekly. There is rarely a bad recipe in the modern-day magazine. Their test kitchen is amazing and, just in case you’re reading AWW, the kind of place I would really like to work one day. Disclaimer and hints for future employment over, sadly, this book mostly provides examples of the worst faults of this type of cooking. Before we launch into the horror though, lets start with a positive.

This book has an awesome cover.

Just look at it. The busy woman has a fabulous dress and great hair and makeup. She has some amazing ceramic casserole dishes in a glorious 1970’s pattern on the dresser in the background. Don’t look for too long though, or you may start to ask yourself some disturbing questions. Like what EXACTLY is the busy woman doing? Because it looks like she has made a tower of fruit and is now topping that tower with some flowers.

The message intended by the AWW in selecting this cover may have been something like :

“No longer a slave to the stove, the modern-day busy woman can spend time on creating a delightful ambience for her guests”

The messages I took away after reading the book were:

“If you have time to faff about making flower towers you have time to cook something decent”

And

“I would prefer to eat those flowers than some of the meals contained in here”

And

“Good thing that candle’s not lit. Material in the 1970’s was not known for its resistance to fire”

♦♦♦♦♦♦

The Busy Woman’s Cookbook repeatedly commits three crimes against food.

Crime Number One: Gilding A turd

I tried for a long time to think of a more delicate phrase for this. I failed. For those of you not familiar with this delightful expression, urban dictionary defines it as

“Wasting your time trying to turn something completely worthless into something that looks (or tastes) good”

This is exemplified by the recipe for :

Culprit: Gourmet Chicken Soup, page 4

To make gourmet chicken soup, you add tarragon vinegar, cream and a stock cube to a can of cream of chicken soup. So, not only is this recipe guilty of the crime of gilding, it is also guilty of the misdemeanor of redundancy. Using soup to make soup is…stupid. It’s even more stupid if you are time strapped. You already have soup. Why bother? Ah, I hear you cry but we want this to be gourmet chicken soup. Let me give you a clue. Adding vinegar, cream and a stock cube will not make your canned cream of chicken soup gourmet. It will make your canned cream of chicken soup taste like a more creamy (again with the redundancy), more vinegary and more salty canned cream of chicken soup.

There is not a single thing you can do to make canned soup taste like home-made. So, if you must have canned soup, ditch the accoutrements and revel in the tackiness of it. Whilst your soup is heating, practice your best death stare in the nearest reflective surface. If your guests are rude enough to comment on the cannedness of your soup, fix them with this death stare and say very coldly. “Yes, it is canned soup. You can eat it or wear it.” Alternatively, you could just not serve canned chicken soup to guests.

I’m not a complete food snob. There is a time and a place for canned soup. It is when you are sick and are too ill to make something decent. Canned soup should be only eaten when you are wearing pyjamas and have a runny nose / sore throat/ cough / headache / hangover etc.

See also: Creamy Tomato Soup (made with tomato soup), p5, Orange Sorbet (made with orange squash), p40

Crime Number Two: Hiding Your Love Away

Otherwise known as the anti-gilding a turd. This is when you have some great ingredients and do your best to fuck them up.

Culprit: Oyster Soup, also page 4

Ok, so here’s a little test for you. You have a dozen oysters. You have some bacon. You are a busy woman and your guests are sitting in the dining room waiting for their first course. What are your options?

1 The Romantic: Put the bacon in the fridge and have it for breakfast tomorrow. Serve the oysters as naked as God intended, maybe with a squeeze of lemon to tantalise the taste buds.

2 Spicy Salty Goodness: Whip up a quick Kilpatrick – chop the bacon, add a drop or two of Worcestershire sauce to the oysters (personally, I also like a drop of Tabasco) add the bacon, grill.

3. The WTF. Alternatively titled the AWW Option. Incidentally, in a book for the supposedly busy woman, the this option takes longer to cook than the either of the ones I’ve suggested. And is disgusting to boot.

Oysters and bacon are good. Don’t add them to instant mashed potato. Don’t add anything to instant mashed potato. It’s an abomination sprung from the deepest recesses of hell. And, if you weren’t already feeling ill, try imagining how this would look in a bowl – beige, lumpy and gluggy….ewwwwww.

See also: Cheese Wine Dip p6 – made by mixing wine with a jar of cheese spread. Wine is a delightful substance and has given me many hours of happiness. It should never be subjected to such horrendous treatment.

Crime Number Three: Sometimes A Rose isn’t a Rose

This is the crime of taking a perfectly decent concept and ruining it.

Culprit: Asparagus Mornay, page 7.

I’m not sure why I find the idea of heating the canned asparagus in its own liquid the most repulsive part of this dish. It’s not as if I wasn’t spoiled for choice.

See also: Easy Chocolate Mousse , p36; Pears Belle Helene, p41

♦♦♦♦♦♦

Despite its many faults, this book is not a complete waste of time. The salad section is perfectly fine, there are also some good standard beef and chicken dishes, including one of my favourite childhood meals – Apricot Chicken made with a packet of french onion soup and a can of apricot nectar. Delicious. This was the first meal I ever made for my family. I must have been about seven and found the recipe in one of my mum’s magazines – quite possibly a Women’s Weekly – and then badgered her to buy the ingredients so I could cook it. After this original outing it became a family favourite. We made a posher version than the one in this book where we sprinkled flaked almonds over the top. Now, that’s gourmet living! The only reason I am not making it as part of this experiment is that if it turned out to be horrible, I would feel like a my childhood had been stolen from me. And a fairy would die.

The food styling in “The Busy Woman’s Cookbook is also delightfully odd. How do you make your spaghetti and meatballs look authentically Italian? Serve it with a backdrop of a Renaissance painting!

So, how to present your Kidneys Bordelaise?

Bordelaise means from Bordeaux (I had to Google that)so maybe some a painting of some wine? Grapes? Rolling hills of French vineyards? No? What about a random backdrop of a river scene? I”m not saying it’s not Bordeaux. Just not obviously so.

We’ll end with my favourite photo from the book, a photo that, unlike the Kidneys Bordelaise above, is for a perfectly edible dish too. Over the next few weeks I”ll be trying out a few more of these. But for now, enjoy the psychedelic 1970’s delight of these funky mushroom glasses as the backdrop for a spinach and mushroom salad.

09
Jun
2012

Food For Lovers – Kelly Brodsky (1973)

categories: Books, Food For Lovers

Published in 1973, Food For Lovers is quite possibly the kookiest book I have ever read. The book is broken into 15 sections, each of which is based on a different type of man and the food an aspiring seductress should cook for him if she wants to win his affections.

The main problem of the book that the descriptions of each of these men are so horrible that I can’t think of why anyone in their right mind would want to be in the same room as them let alone seduce them.

Take this, from the introduction to Jack Snack:

Wow. One day my Prince will come. And he will be a dreary non-event couch potato. Although, in comparison to some of the other types mentioned, the boring (but benign) Jack Snack actually comes up sounding like a winner. He’s certainly preferable to Greek God Rod:

Dreary tv man is starting to look pretty good by comparison isn’t he?

Then there’s Professor Repressor:

At best, he sounds like a pervert. At worst, a sex offender.

If you find yourself attracted by such a specimen, I would suggest you you seek professional help.

Brodsky suggests you whip him up a bowl of borscht, followed by braised wine-steeped beef and an apple strudel.

As if these lesss than appealing descriptions aren’t bad enough, they are combined with some of the creepiest drawings I have ever seen.

This for example is the picture of Willy Wolfe. He looks like he’s just slipped a date rape drug into that glass of wine.

Then there’s Gadabout Guy.

Now, in my mind a gadabout guy is a handsome, debonair, cultured ladykiller, who spends his time flitting from cocktail party to sexy soiree to a jazz club in Paris in the 1950’s. He’s James Bond, he’s Cary Grant, he’s Alain Delon….

Brodsky’s version:

Uncannily similar aren’t they?

However, as we all know the proof of the cookbook is neither in the bizarre text or the even weirder drawings; it is in the eating. Stay tuned for The Food For Lovers Love Feast…