Tag: vintage recipe

1900-1949 Food & Drink

Lobscouse and Witches, 1936

Post author By Estelle
Post date January 7, 2017

Today is the day for “Lobscouse and Witches” as I discovered from this magical-sounding 1936 article. The 11th January 1936 being a Saturday, it’s talking about Tuesday 7th January, the day after Twelfth Night. The day when an old-fashioned Northern tradition apparently meant that people ate lobscouse, drank lamb’s wool and set fire to their wheat to scare witches away.

Living in Liverpool, I am well acquainted with lobscouse. These days it’s simply called scouse, a beef or lamb (or both) stew for which every family had their own recipe. Being an adopted Liverpudlian, I had to create my own, and after a few attempts, this is now my family recipe. I prefer the old-fashioned taste of an oxo cube here.

Scouse
350g each of cubed beef and lamb
2 onions
Squirt of brown sauce
Squirt of tomato ketchup
5 large carrots, chopped
1.5-2 kg King Edward potatoes, in small and larger chunks
Dash of Worcestershire sauce
4 oxo cubes
Water to cover

Brown the meat in oil, add the onions and soften slightly.
Stir in a good squirt of both ketchup and brown sauce.
Add the rest of the vegetables, a dash of Worcestershire sauce, crumble the Oxo cubes on top and add enough water to cover.
Simmer for two hours, adding more water if needed. The smaller pieces of potato will have disintegrated to thicken the stew.
Serve with pickled red cabbage and bread and butter.

Lamb’s Wool is something I’ve never tried before – it’s spiced apple pulp mulled with sugar and ale. I used the recipe from the Oakden recipe archive. The origin of its name is a matter of debate. In the article above, it comes from “Lamb of God”. But other explanations suggest it comes from either the wooly-looking froth on top of the ale, or as a derivative of the ancient Celtic pagan festival of La mas ubal, meaning ‘Day of the Apple Fruit’.

I used Ghost Ship ale for this, the name appeals to me ever since my investigations into the Ourang Medan. I also made a non-alcoholic version using ginger ale, but you don’t need the extra sugar for that. Together the scouse and the lamb’s wool are quite a combination to keep the winter chill out.

Lamb’s Wool
1.5 Litres of real ale or cider
6 small cooking apples, cored
1 nutmeg freshly grated
1 tsp ground ginger
150g brown sugar

Preheat the oven to 120C, core the apples and bake for about an hour on a lightly greased baking tray, until pulpy and the skins come easily away.
In a large saucepan add the sugar, cover in a small amount of the ale or cider and heat gently. Stir continuously until the sugar has dissolved. Then add in the ground ginger and grate in the whole of the nutmeg. Stir, and keeping the pan on a gentle simmer, slowly add in all the rest of the ale. Leave for 10 minutes on a gentle heat.
Take the baked apples out of the oven to cool slightly for 10 minutes – they should now be soft and pulpy. Scoop out the baked flesh into a bowl, discarding the skin. Then take a fork and mash this apple pulp up, while it is still warm, into a smooth purée with no lumps. Add the apple purée into the ale, mixing it in with a whisk.
Let the saucepan continue to warm everything through for thirty minutes, on a very gentle heat, until ready to drink. When warmed through use the whisk again for a couple of minutes (or use a stick blender) to briskly and vigorously froth the drink up and mix everything together. The apple and light froth will float to the surface, and depending on how much you have whisked it, the more it looks like lamb’s wool. Note: to traditionally froth drinks up they were normally poured continuously between two large serving jugs to get air into the drink.
Ladle the hot Lambswool into heat-proof mugs or glasses and grate over some nutmeg, or pour the drink into a communal bowl (with several thick pieces of toast in the bottom) to pass around if wassailing.

Tags ale, lamb's wool, lobscouse, Scouse, vintage recipe

2000 onwards

Pork Pie and porky pies.

It’s coming up for two weeks since the EU referendum and I’ve only just started to calm down. Not because there’s any more reason to calm down. If anything, things have escalated and it feels like events are just sweeping everyone along like rapid water now. But you can’t sustain the national hysteria we’ve just experienced. “A week is a long time in politics,” said Harold Wilson. Or rather, as he supposedly said. Sometimes I wonder if anyone ever really said any of those famous quotes, and where they came from, if they didn’t.

I was a Remainer, reluctantly laying out the British champagne for the Leavers. But even though the polls showed the creeping popularity of the Leave campaign, I never thought, really, they would win. It seemed that too big a proportion of the population was undecided, and surely they’d vote for the safe option, when it came down to it? But no, the country narrowly voted for the white knuckle ride instead. The plunging markets, the endless resignations, the still unbelievable news that there was no plan. The dawning media realisation that they really should have pressed the issue of that plan. The petitions, the talk of breaking up this disunited kingdom, the fractures that have riven this country in a way never experienced before. Fractures not only between the cities, who largely voted to remain, and the smaller towns and villages, which largely didn’t, but cracks between the generations, affecting family relations in an entirely new way. I know lots of people who either aren’t talking to their parents right now, or else are not talking to them about this, because the generation gap has never felt so wide.

I saw history being invoked time and time again as to why leaving the EU was a good idea – “we were alright before,” “we won two world wars,” – by people who are normally uninterested in history, and seemed to think this was a magic vote to bring back “the good old days”. Never mind lessons of real history, that we deal with conflict stronger together, and that this retreat into selfish, fearful behaviour is the exact opposite to Britain’s Finest Hour in the Second World War, where we were selflessly fighting to save Europe, and we did certainly not win it alone.

On Friday 24th June, still disbelieving that they’d done it, they’d really done it, I went to Aldi where a lovely, twinkly, elderly lady cooed over my toddler daughter. My immediate reaction was “Ugh. I bet you voted Leave, didn’t you?” And that’s here, in Liverpool, which voted Remain by a 58% majority, so the odds were against it. It was an ugly, black thought which I hated thinking.

On Saturday, as the lies of the Leave campaign lay trampled in the dust, and we appeared to be sailing adrift into uncharted waters as British politics descended into turmoil, I took the kids to the park. There was a lovely food fair on, stalls full of artisan pizzas, cheese and chutneys, and I thought I’d buy something for dinner. The pie stall looked appealing, especially one pie which was called “Old English Pork Pie”. The name put me off though, I’d gone off the English. My first thought was “Fuck everything old and English right now.” And for someone obsessed by the history of England, this thought was rather a departure from the norm.

The pie man won me over though, in a way guaranteed to work. He told me the pie was made to Mrs Beeton’s pork pie recipe and it was quite peppery too. A vintage recipe – well, for all my fury, I can’t resist those. And he was right, it was slightly spicy with cayenne pepper and it was easily the most delicious pork pie I’ve ever had.

I’ve never considered “Mrs Beeton” to be market of quality, necessarily. She was no cook herself, mostly compiling her recipes from other sources. But this is a good one.

We’re still adrift in uncertain waters. The lead rats have jumped ship so they can shout safety at a distance, telling us what should happen now and inevitably to criticise those who are doing the actual hard work that lies ahead of us now. The brass neck of Boris Johnson, laying into Number 10 for not having a plan (yes, they should have had – but so bloody well should he). The gall of Farage to take the European money to line his inactive MEP pockets while making a complete ass of himself (and us) in front of the EU Parliament, putting his ego before the good of his country, yet again. The discomforting danger of Gove, a man who clearly thinks everyone else is his intellectual inferior, and would lead us into some very dark alleys by thinking he knows everything better than anyone.

There’s the hope (getting fainter with every step of the Tory leadership manoeuvres) that maybe, just maybe, the whole thing won’t come off at all. And the hope that Labour will get a grip soon and give the Tories a long overdue bloody nose for what they’ve done.

I’m reading everything, but I don’t know what to do for the best. So I’ve had a necklace made, as a kind of thought bubble I can wear.

And I’ve made a meme, with the help of my husband’s ace design skills. This sums everything up for me right now.

But I just can’t see how things will get better from a Brexit. I can’t see one positive thing right now. There’s what appears to be the likelihood of an imminent recession and then the gradual eroding of workers rights, which the Tories will of course attempt to get away with, without that pesky EU legislation holding them back. I suppose we have to wait and see. And there’s going be to no end of fighting back needed.

Tags Boris Johnson, Brexit, EU referendum, Michael Gove, Mrs Beeton, Nigel Farage, pork pies, vintage recipe

Food & Drink Victorian

Vintage Recipe – British Champagne, 1855

Post author By Estelle
Post date June 15, 2016
1 Comment on Vintage Recipe – British Champagne, 1855

Huddersfield Chronicle, 11th August 1855

The EU referendum campaign is hotting up ahead of the vote next week. I am a Remainer, very definitely, with a side order of “Oh crap….I think we’re actually going to leave.”

So here’s my generous offering to the Brexiteers – some appropriate booze for Farage, Gove and our new gurning overlord, Boris Johnson, to get their gruesome mugs around, should the country vote leave next Thursday. British Champagne from 1855, the days of the Empire, and made from gooseberries – appropriately enough for a country that wants to turn itself into an international gooseberry.

British Champagne

Take gooseberries before they are ripe, crush them in a wooden bowl with a mallet, and to every gallon of fruit put a gallon of water; let it stand two days, stirring it well; squeeze the mixture well with the hands through a hop-sieve, then measure the liquor, and to every gallon put three pounds of load sugar; mix it well in the tub, and let it stand one day; put bottle of the best brandy into the cask, which leave open five or six weeks, taking off the scum as it rises; then close it up, and let it stand one year in the barrel before it is bottled.

Tags 1855, Brexit, British champagne, EU, vintage recipe

1900-1949 Food & Drink

Vintage recipe – Mock Turtle Soup, 1910

Post author By Estelle
Post date June 10, 2016
2 Comments on Vintage recipe – Mock Turtle Soup, 1910

It was a stroke of glorious silliness from Lewis Carroll to invent the character of the Mock Turtle in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It was a play on the fact that mock turtle soup was a popular soup in the Victorian period, for those who couldn’t afford the expensive delicacy of Green Turtle Soup itself. The “mock” version generally included heads, brains and offal from various creatures to recreate the turtle experience, a mash-up that’s demonstrated in John Tenniel’s illustration of the Mock Turtle, which is a kind of turtle-cow-pig.

Maybe a bit like this.

Anyway, here’s Mrs Dora Rea’s take on Mock Turtle soup from 1910, with the turtle being substituted with calf’s cheek and ham, which sounds a bit more palatable than brain soup. The forcemeat balls mentioned were stuffing balls of bread, herbs and meat, similar to stuffing today. I presume they’re meant to be floating in the soup, as they aren’t mentioned in the instructions.

MOCK TURTLE SOUP

3 pints brown stock

3/4 pound calf’s cheek

1 small onion

1 carrot

1 turnip

1 bunch of celery

Parsley and sweet herbs

1/4 pound ham

Juice of half a lemon

1 glass sherry

1/2 tsp peppercorns

2 oz butter

2 oz flour

Forcemeat balls

Heat the butter, fry the vegetables in it, cut up.

Add and brown the flour, pour in the stock, stirring.

Add herbs, seasonings, calf’s cheek, and simmer 2 1/2 hours, lift out meat.

Strain soup, rubbing vegetables through the sieve with a wooden spoon.

Reheat the soup, add lemon juice, sherry, and some of the meat cut into neat pieces and serve.

Tags 1910, Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, mock turtle soup, Mrs Dora Rea's Cookery Book, vintage recipe

1900-1949 Food & Drink

Vintage recipe – Meat and Potato Turnovers

Post author By Estelle
Post date May 4, 2016

More from my Great-Grandma’s 1930s recipe book today. It’s Meat and Potato Turnovers, a pastie in other words.

Ingredients

1 lb flour

6 oz lard

1 tsp salt

A pinch cream of tartar

Filling for turnovers:

1 1/2 lb potatoes

2 oz meat minced

A little onion

Season with pepper and salt

Scatter a little flour in and boil until done.

Method

Rub lard into flour and [add] all other dry ingredients. Mix to a nice paste with cold water. Weigh 2 1/2 oz paste for each turnover. Roll out, out in the filling, fold up, egg wash, bake 25 minutes good hot oven top shelf.

As this is a 1930s recipe, the meat saving element is very much to be seen with 1 1/2 pounds of potatoes to only 2oz of meat. I upped the meat to about 300g and reduced the potatoes to about 500g, browned with a fried onion, flour stirred in, just enough water to cover everything, and cooked until the potatoes were tender. There was too much filling for the amount of pastry I ended up with, but that’s fine – meat and potato leftovers are easy enough to use in other dishes, or just to eat by themselves, Nigella-style in front of the fridge.

I wasn’t sure what shape there were supposed to be, so made them in traditional half-moon pastie-style, and cooked them at 200 degrees for 25 minutes. As my daughter has an egg allergy, I brushed them with milk instead of egg.

As you’d expect they tasted comforting and old-fashioned, the lardy pastry feeling very traditional. Best eaten warm, and on an old plate – I got out my 1950s Ridgway Homemakers Woolworths plate for the occasion.

Tags 1930s, Meat and potato turnover, old family recipe book, recipe, vintage recipe

1900-1949 Food & Drink

Vintage Recipe – Samuel Johnson’s Puffs of Affection, 1928

Post author By Estelle
Post date February 14, 2016

For something a little different this Valentine’s Day, why not make a little “Puff of Affection”, as apparently loved by the eminent eighteenth-century dictionary-compiler, Samuel Johnson. Or Robbie Coltrane, as he is forever in my mind’s eye.

I’d give one to Hugh Laurie, especially in the Prince Regent get-up. A puff of affection, that is.

As Johnson has it – it’s a little cake (“A kind of delicate bread”) for a Valentine (“a sweetheart, chosen on Valentine’s day”) to have for pudding (“1. a kind of food very variously compounded, but generally made of meal, milk, and eggs. 2. The gut of an animal. 3. A bowel stuffed with certain mixtures of meal and other ingredients.”)

“Puffs of Affection”

It is recorded that Samuel Johnson was very fond of these puffs. He refers to them as having been first made in honour of St Valentine, but that in his calendar the saint’s day came often.
Make a batter with 1 tablespoon flour and 1/2 pint milk, then add a beaten egg, 1 teaspoon sugar, the same of grated lemon rind, and a tiny pinch of salt. Butter some small moulds, pour a little of the mixture into each, just half filling them, and bake in a slow oven for 30 minutes. Turn out, sprinkle liberally with sugar, and serve hot.
Similar puffs are often served with syrup, and make quite a good stand-by pudding.

There’s a couple of odd things about the recipe. Firstly – flour, milk and eggs, flavoured with lemon, sugar and syrup. It’s pretty much a low-flour pancake, which seems a bit strange to have as a tradition merely a week after Shrove Tuesday. Secondly – one tablespoon of flour? I was interested to see how this would hold together with so little flour, and…well, it didn’t.

Not so much a Puff of Affection as a floppy slop. And no-one wants that on Valentine’s Day.

I tried again, upping the flour to that of my normal pancake recipe, 125g of flour with all the other ingredients kept the same.

These were much better in that they at least kept their shape, and they tasted, unsurprisingly, of fat pancake. But one of the charms of a pancake is its delicate thinness, and the fresh memory of a stack of them a week ago means this pales a bit in comparison. To be honest, I’d recommend a Valentine’s breakfast of a savoury bacon and cheese pancake instead.

Tags 1928, Blackadder, Hugh Laurie, pancake, puff of affection, samuel johnson, vintage recipe

1900-1949 Food & Drink

Vintage Recipe – Sarah’s Ginger Bread Biscuits

Post author By Estelle
Post date January 26, 2016

Last year my mum revealed that she had what I’d always wished my family had – an old family recipe book belonging to my great-grandma, who I called “Nan”.

I’m an avid recipe scrapbooker, pasting cuttings and print-outs of interesting-looking recipes into a succession of notebooks. The best of those recipes, the ones that work and I will make for my family over and over, I write down in my ultimate notebook, which is a copy of River Song’s Diary from Doctor Who. I started doing this years ago in order to start my own family recipe book for my children. With my daughter’s allergies, the focus has changed a bit, and now I’m trying to find vegan baking recipes that we all can enjoy, seeing as it’s strangely very hard to find shop-bought baked goods that are both dairy and egg-free. Especially as those are two of the most common allergies for children.

I’m slightly baffled as to why me and my brothers, all of us interested in food and cooking, were never aware of the recipe book before, but that fact that this thin green exercise book exists at all is a cause for joy. There are no dates in it, but I think it’s from when my grandma was a teenager, as some of what looks like her school-era writing is in it, which would make it from the 1920s-30s.

I’m planning to work my way through making a selection of the recipes, and I started here, with “Sarah’s Ginger Bread Biscuits”. I don’t know who Sarah was, but she evidently made biscuits which were good enough for my Nan to seek out the recipe. Also, as a bonus, there’s no dairy in them, the fat being made up of lard. In order to make them suitable for my daughter I included egg replacer instead of the egg, and soya milk to mix with the bicarbonate of soda. And I ended up using Trex vegetable fat instead of the lard too, but it’s a similar thing.

This is the recipe:

Sarah’s Ginger Bread Biscuits

Ingredients:

14 1/2oz flour
4oz lard
5oz syrup
8oz sugar
2 tspns ginger
1/2 tspn bicarbonate of soda
1 egg

Method:

Rub lard into dry ingredients, with a little salt.
Add warmed syrup warmed and the soda dissolved in a little milk.
Add egg, well beaten.
Mix all well together, roll out.
Next day cut with an egg cup and bake in a hot oven.

When I mixed the dough I didn’t roll it out, instead I kept it in a lump and put it in the fridge overnight. The next day I divided it into walnut-sized balls and flattened them with a fork rather than cut them with an eggcup. The biscuits spread and won’t keep their shape in any case. When you take them out of the oven they are soft, so wait a minute before moving them onto a wire tray to cool.

The verdict – they do indeed taste like gingerbread, and when freshly made are a delicious combination of crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. After a day they will have hardened a lot, and develop the classic crunchy texture of the gingernut biscuit. Which is nice, but not quite so delectable as the fresh version. They didn’t last long in my house, so thank you Nan!

Tags food, ginger bread biscuit, vintage recipe

1900-1949 Food & Drink

Vintage recipes – Poor Man’s Goose, 1930

Post author By Estelle
Post date December 22, 2015

Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat. Unless you’re having mock goose instead.

Mock versions of various meat dishes used to be fairly common in recipe books of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but you don’t tend to see recipes that seriously do this anymore. Thanks to Lewis Carroll, Mock Turtle Soup is probably the best-known example now.

I think the most recent recipe book I have that includes a mock creation was a 1970s Linda McCartney, which had a mock turkey for Christmas, mainly made of textured vegetable protein if I remember rightly. But there weren’t too many options for veggies in those days, you had to make your own fake meat if you wanted it. I was a vegetarian for seven years, during which time Linda McCartney first brought out her food range and it’s fair to say she was almost entirely responsible for bringing ready-made, specialised vegetarian food into the mainstream. I’m a big fan.

On that subject, in my vegetarian days, I remember eating something I bought from an international supermarket which was called “Mock Duck”. You can still get it, if you really want it. On the tin it says it’s made from “abalone”, but as I didn’t know what that was, I thought it must be something like tofu. Because why would you bother mocking meat unless it was to make it meat-free? Now I know that abalone is actually a kind of sea snail and so it was not only non-veggie, it was massively more hideous to boot. It did taste pretty bad, I have to say.

Oh, and to round up my knowledge of mocked food, there was also “mockolate” in Friends, as sold by the divine Michael McKean. That was disgusting too.

Anyway, it turns out then that the duck wasn’t being mocked for veggie reasons, but possibly for cost reasons instead (unless it was for “vegetarians” who still ate seafood, I suppose. That’s something I’ve never understood the reasoning for.) And cost used to be the reason these types of recipes existed at all. Which is why the mock goose below, from the 1930 Essex Cookery Book, is designated “Poor Man’s..”

I’m not too sure how much like goose it would actually have been as it’s mainly made from liver and potatoes. In fact, it’s not just liver, the recipe specifies a strangely non-specific “pig’s liver, etc”. There’s a lot of room for manoeuvre in that “etc” – it could contain pretty much anything. Apart from sea snails, hopefully.

Poor Man’s Goose

1/2 lb. pig’s liver, etc
1 lb. potatoes
2 small onions
Pepper and salt
1/2 tsp chopped sage
Water

Prepare potatoes and onions, cut into slices.
Wash liver and cut into slices.
Put all ingredients in layers in a pie-dish.
Cover with potato, add sufficient water to half fill the dish.
Put layer of caul or greased paper on the top.
Cook for 2 hours.

If covered with paper, remove 1/2 hour before serving and brown the potato.

Tags 1930, poor man's goose, The Essex Cookery Book, vintage recipe

1900-1949 Food & Drink

Vintage Recipe – The Savoy’s Christmas Pudding, 1925

Post author By Estelle
Post date December 20, 2015

If you fancy making a Christmas Pudding with a real vintage pedigree, here it is, a recipe from the Savoy in 1925. It might be too late to make a proper Christmas Cake, but it’s never too late to make a pudding – as long as you have 10 hours boiling time to spare.

Good luck finding both the specified large and small raisins.

A Christmas Pudding Recipe

The Chef of the Savoy Restaurant has been persuaded to reveal another of his famous recipes.

Although not quite so elaborate as that of the puddings he makes himself, it is of a fine, rich flavour, and simple to make.

He was kind enough to write it out for me, and here it is. It is a recipe for a seven-pound pudding.

Twelve ounces of large raisins, twelve ounces of small raisins, twelve ounces of currants, twelve ounces of crystalized peel, four ounces of chopped apple, one ounce of orange peel, one ounce of citron peel, two ounces of crystalized ginger, twelve ounces of suet, nine ounces of flour, ten ounces of bread crumbs, eight ounces of brown sugar, one teaspoonful of salt, six eggs, half a pint of milk, quarter of a pint of brandy or sherry.

All the dry ingredients should be mixed together. A little extra mixing well repays the trouble, he says. Beat the eggs and add them to the milk and brandy, then pour over the dry ingredients and again thoroughly mix. Pack into greased moulds and boil for six hours at the time of making. The puddings should be boiled for a further four hours when wanted for use. The best sauce is white, custard or brandy sauce.

Tags 1925, Christmas Pudding, vintage recipe