If you will insist on drinking acid lemonade when you’re thirsty and farting yourself silly, why not try the “safe” drink Glucolem instead? It’s safe because it’s mainly made of glucose, not lemon juice like the “unsafe” lemonades you like. Your friends are probably already drinking it and scorning your flatulent ways.
Macaroni cheese is probably my ultimate in comfort food (well, second to my mum’s world-beating mashed potato). It sounds to me like a fairly modern, American invention – after all, I thought the British were introduced to proper pasta in about 1975. At least, I’ve got a promotional pasta cookery pamphlet from 1978 that talks about its chosen foodstuff as a new and original thing. (It also has a strange lasagne recipe too – no meat sauce at all, just béchamel on every layer with chopped ham. I need to try it one day.)
But no! I was as wrong in this assumption as I could be. It turns out a version of mac ‘n’ cheese is in what might be the world’s oldest cookery book, Forme of Cury, from the late fourteenth century. There, it consists of fresh dough boiled in sheets and sandwiched in layers of cheese and butter. A bit like that lasagne from 1978. Elizabeth Raffald provides the first macaroni cheese recipe we’d properly recognise, in her The Experienced English Housekeeper of 1769, and Mrs Beeton included two recipes for it in her 1861 Book of Household Management.
And my excellent copy of Mrs Rea’s Cookery Book from 1910 has its own version too, below.
Ruth Goodman’s Victorian Farm tells me that the word macaroni in 19th Century recipes was used to describe all shaped pasta and that the macaroni usually available in Victorian shops was very thick and required a long cooking time to soften. This explains the timing of an hour’s boiling in my Edwardian recipe, I expect, rather than a preference for boiling it to a mush, like their carrots. The macaroni also came in long tubes, which you had to cut into smaller lengths yourself. And apparently it also needed washing.
I gave it a go, changing a few things for the modern world.
No boiling of the macaroni for a hour, and no browning it in front of a fire, sadly. Also, I’m not sure how many people the recipe is intended for, as the book doesn’t mention this for any of the recipes. But 3oz of pasta was not enough for two greedy 21st century portions so I upped the amount to 5oz. It’s unusual that there is more cheese by weight than macaroni in the recipe – despite adding more pasta, I kept the sauce amounts exactly the same, and it worked fine. Although the recipe seems to guide you to throw all the sauce ingredients together without cooking but maybe white sauces were too obvious to give much direction for. I like that soft cheese curds were also an option instead of the grated hard cheese.
Here it is.
Macaroni and Cheese.
3oz macaroni (I used 5oz)
4oz cheese
1oz flour
1 1/2oz butter
1/2 pint milk
Pepper, salt, cayenne, 1/2 tsp mustard powder
Wash the macaroni, drop it in short lengths into 1 pint boiling water. Add a little salt and 1/2 oz butter. Cook gently about 1 hour, then drain.
Grate the cheese or, if soft, press with a wooden spoon through a wire sieve. Put 1 oz of butter into a saucepan with the flour. Mix and add the milk and seasonings. Stir in 3oz of the cheese, add the macaroni, and mix.
Turn into a hot, greased pie dish. Sprinkle remaining cheese over. Brown in front of fire. Serve very hot.
It was definitely of the old, plain school of macaroni cheese, which would be too non-jazzed-up to be included in a recipe book these days. But that what I like about Mrs Rea – good, solid, day to day recipes that work, rather than a recipes dreamed up by a celebrity chef purely in order to have an original theme for their new cook book. Plain it might be, but lovely, smooth and tasty nonetheless. I will be making it again. In fact, writing this post now, I wish there was some left that I could eat Nigella-style in front of the fridge, but it’s all gone.
Right, so this is the new Keep Calm and Carry On, as far as I’m concerned.
For the good of your health, have a biscuit! Well, so said the “Cake and Biscuits Manufacturers War Time Alliance Ltd” in 1948. I love the way the fact that a pound of sweet biscuits is proudly presented as containing (a strangely specific) 2,204 calories, which would be cause for shame now.
This also happened to be the first day the National Health Service came into being.
I don’t know about you, but this is an extremely apt motto for my office at around 3pm. In fact, I’m off to print a copy of this to place over the special “biscuit desk” we have (and which is just one reason I love my new job).
The 1930s and 40s with their stiff upper lips, blitz spirit and derring-do remind me a bit of the quote from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, doctored a bit by me:
“In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. And Cadbury’s chocolate wasn’t buggered up by Kraft Foods.”
Cadbury’s Dairy Milk – eat it, just like some of the “wisest people you ever saw” do.
“Atora puddings solve the difficult problem of children who dislike fat.”
Not a sentence I can imagine would be used in today’s advertising. These adverts are from The Children’s Newspaper, and it is true that children do need fat – apart from other things, fat helps in the development of brain cells. Did you know that the brain can contain up to 60% fat? (More in some people’s cases….) Fat is of course one of those food groups that was celebrated, then demonised, and recently started to be rehabilitated as a useful part of your diet. My grandma could eat a mound of fat – she preferred the fat to the meat – and she was slim all her life and lived to a good old age too.
“Medical testimony proves that the children – and adults – with weakly and “chesty” tendencies, who most need nourishing fat, are the ones who don’t like it.”
Oh, I do like the idea of eating suet puddings for the good of your health. I’m sure the 1930s style diet is worth a try. I’m quite tempted to try something along the lines of this blog, The 1940s Experiment, where a woman lost weight by following Second World War rationing recipes. I could try the 1920s-30s version, the typical diet from just before rationing came in (well, it sounds more fun anyway – apart from the Mice in Honey). Nourishing Rowntree’s Chocolate Crisps all round!
Some vegetable-based advice from 1929 here, but it’s a bit harsh on the poor old radish, which is declared to have no food value.
It’s also really wrong. The radish is a good source of vitamins and minerals, particularly vitamin C and antioxidants, especially one called sulforaphane which might help fight cancer cells. In your face, 1929!
I’m fascinated by nutrition knowledge and advice though, the way it changes, and how we’re still finding out things all the time about how the body works. Doing Weight Watchers some years ago, I saw a slimming tip from an old issue of Jackie magazine promoting cheese as a dieting snack. On the Weight Watchers points system, cheese was one of the first things to be, very sadly, ditched, as you can probably use up a days worth of points on one small block. So this seemed absolutely ridiculous to me. But then the Atkins diet came in, advocating avoiding starchy foods and promoting protein and fats, and it suddenly didn’t seem so crazy after all.
And it will all change again, I expect. Maybe like Woody Allen predicted in Sleeper:
I enjoy the bold use of space and sense of minimalism in this advert for Spratt’s “Meat Fibrine” Dog Cakes. Founder James Spratt invented the idea of dog biscuits, inspired by seeing dogs on Liverpool docks scoffing down hardtack – the sailors weevil-busting biscuit. (Well, that’s if the “Dicky Sams” weren’t using the hardtack to make scouse.)
The name lives on in the Spratt’s Complex of Tower Hamlets, London, which was one of the first warehouse conversions in the 1980s. It used to be the old Victorian dog food factory, which at one point was the biggest in the world. They also had a dog show department, which must have had something to do with the fact that James Spratt’s assistant, a 14 year old Charles Cruft, later founded Crufts Dog Show.
Spratt’s produced over a billion dog biscuits for the army dogs of the First World War, and food for the dogs of the polar expeditions too. Here’s Ernest Shackleton’s snow dogs promoting Spratt’s dog cakes with a bit of frolicking in front of their posters:
Here’s an advert from a Liverpool greengrocer publicising his recent present to Queen Victoria.
“Her Majesty the Queen has been graciously pleased to order the acknowledgement of the box of FORBIDDEN FRUIT, &e., forwarded by MR MIDDLEWOOD, of this town, which arrived in the most perfect state, and was very much approved of at the Royal table.”
Well, if it’s good enough for the Queen it’s good enough for you, Mr Middlewood is telling Liverpool here. But what was forbidden fruit?
The advert says they are “selected the best in Nassau”, and forbidden fruit was actually the first name given to the natural hybrid fruit of the Bahamas, the grapefruit, first discovered in the mid-18th century. Later on it was termed “grapefruit” after the way the fruits grew in clusters on the tree, a bit like grapes. Bit of a name downgrade though.
Mr Middlewood also sells “shaddocks”, which are the citrus fruits now more commonly termed pomelos – although confusingly, both “pomelo” and “shaddock” also used to be names for the grapefruit, and pomelos are one of the ingredients of the cocktail “Forbidden Fruit”.
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ddock really doesn’t sound like the right thing to call a fruit. It just reminds me of that strange creature, the “Shadmock”, in the horror film “The Monster Club”, but then again he’s a hybrid too….
An advert from 1892 for Mellin’s Food Biscuits, biscuits that could be used for weaning babies, or given to the infirm. They were marketed as a replacement for mother’s milk, and were made from cows milk, malt flour and and wheat.
I was intrigued by this testimonial, by an Alice Liddell. Surely not “Alice in Wonderland” Alice? But no, that was her maiden name, she was Alice Hargreaves by marriage, after marrying the cricketer Reginald Hargreaves.
Incidentally, I love these two pictures of “the” Alice Liddell, at the ages of 20 and 80. She looks like she was a fascinating lady.
I was reading the “10 things we didn’t know last week” on the BBC website yesterday. I was intrigued by point two – the earliest mention of pizza in the New York Times was in 1944. It seemed quite late for something that took off so fast a short while later.
I thought I’d check The British Newspaper Archive to try and find the first mention of pizza in a British Newspaper. I’ve found this, which might be it, from 1860. A correspondent from Naples describes the frankly delicious-sounding pizza to be had in that city and how it was a classless food, enjoyed by every section of society. “The pizza cake is your only social leveller”. Apparently, the pizza was “only made and eaten between sunset and two or three in the morning…” 3am? Sounds like it was made to go with a bit of booze then, and I can’t argue there.
This bit is less appealing though – “the pizza shops are about the filthiest in Naples, and whoever knows Naples will admit that is saying a good deal.” I’ve gone off the idea now.
