It began with trying to figure out how to make my own tomato sauce, and turned into one of my historical research adventures. After noticing a citation that the first recipe for tomato sauce was included in a 17th century Italian cookbook by Antonio Latini, I had to track it down. I finally located the correct passage, in translation:

“Salsa di pomodoro alla spagnola (tomato sauce, Spanish style). Take half a  dozen ripe tomatoes and roast them in embers, and when they are charred, carefully remove the skin, and mince them finely with a knife. Add as many onions, finely minced, as desired; chilies [peparolo, in Neapolitan dialect], also finely minced; and a small amount of thyme. After mixing everything together, add a little salt, oil, and vinegar as needed. It is a very tasty sauce, for boiled dishes or anything else.”

The full post at my blog is here. I observed pretty quickly that this sounded more like what we’d now designate as a salsa rather than a sauce (even though ‘salsa’ technically just means sauce, including in this recipe’s name — “Salsa di pomodoro.”) Only the tomatoes are specified to be cooked, the rest of the ingredients seem to go in raw, which is definitely going to produce something pretty chunky in texture and not at all like we’d expect of modern tomato sauces.

While at the grocery store, a couple weeks after the discovery, I found tomatoes and onions on the discount rack, and decided it was a sign to give the salsa/sauce a try.

Now, as mentioned in previous guest posts here, I’m American but hang around in the UK a lot. Tomatoes around here (Scotland) are usually smaller than we typically see in the states, and are conveniently sold in packs of 6; this was perfect for the recipe, supposedly, but since no one but me was going to be eating this stuff and really there are no other quantities given for anything in the original recipe, I didn’t particularly see why I should have to use all 6 of them for it. So I used three — including the one that was quickly going south and was probably the reason for the package’s markdown. I’m sure tomatoes weren’t always at their freshest in Latini’s day, either.

It’s of note, for anyone who isn’t brushed up on their food history, that tomatoes are a New World food, and were brought to Europe by the Spaniards sometime in the 16th or 17th century, where for quite a while they were the only people who would eat them because everyone else thought they were poisonous. No wonder this is considered a Spanish sauce! Given its similarity to modern pico de gallo salsa which is still used in Mexico, I speculate it might even be modeled after something the Indians were doing with the fruit.

Anyway… to make the sauce, I began with 3 tomatoes. I did not have any “embers” available for roasting them, so instead I pre-heated the oven as hot as it would go, then turned on the broiler, and put the tomatoes in the oven in a bread pan. I let them cook about 6 minutes, till they were starting to turn black. They were hot, but still had a touch of body to them — not total mush. Peeling them was easy, chopping them was a bit wetter than I’d have liked but was done in short order. I’d estimate I got 3/4 cup diced cooked tomato from it, to which I added…

1/2 onion diced (about 1/3 c)
1 medium jalapeno, diced (about 1 tbs)
1/4 tsp dried thyme
1/8 tsp salt
dash vinegar (a wine vinegar would be most appropriate, but I didn’t have any and figured the taste wasn’t going to be much changed if I used white vinegar instead)
1 tsp olive oil

Mixed it all together, tasting frequently, and…

…it’s salsa.

I mean really, it’s just salsa. It tastes exactly like every restaurant salsa in New Mexico, and I felt weird for not having any tortilla chips to dip into it.

Still, I needed to try it on some food, so I used it to top some eggs. And it tastes like eggs with salsa on them. I think I will be making nachos and tacos from the leftovers.

So here’s a question: did they ever use this sauce on pasta? I kind of doubt it, because firstly, older pasta recipes are usually cheese-and-spice dishes rather than meat-and-vegetable like now.  Also, I don’t think it would have stuck to noodles very well. This is certainly more of a thing to plop over chunks of meat, rather than to try to coat a piece of spaghetti with.

Antonio Latini’s cookbook The Modern Steward was published to showcase recipes he’d learned in Spain, and to describe the new style of upper-class food which was less heavily spiced than Medieval and Renaissance menus (which were a bit more like eating Indian curries in that almost all the food was very heavily seasoned with spices.) Mild dishes like cream sauces began to emerge around this same time — a real change from old fashioned spice-and-vinegar mixes. Yet when you take that into account, the inclusion of the newly discovered chile pepper also doesn’t seem so shocking, since strong tastes were already established in the cuisine of the day.

You can read The Modern Steward online in the original Italian from Google Books.

I’m not an expert in Danish dairy, but luckily that canyon has been bridged, by this handy-dandy guide to the cheeses of Denmark. What more could a girl want?

And I wasn’t joking about the range of recipes, either:

This is normal

This is not.

So what to choose?  When I realised ingredient list was basically a salad held together with dough (Walnuts! Blue cheese! Celery!), I knew I had to try it.

As I didn’t have any self-raising flour at home, I used plain and added some extra baking powder, but then fretted that I hadn’t added quite enough, also the dough felt rather heavy. I decided not to risk creating a flour-fat-seed brick and formed it into a round, flat loaf on a baking tray.

I also forgot about the celery – probably for the best.

Results
I enjoyed the amount of bits in this loaf greatly and would consider the proportions suitable for experimenting with any type of nut and crumble-able cheese. The black sesame seeds were overkill however, rendering the whole thing a bit fibrous and worthy.

If, like me, you have a mild fear of yeast, this is a fine recipe to keep in your arsenal.

Loafed by Elly

As readers of my last post may have already twigged, I’m not a big fan of domestic goddess style cooking, so the She Quickie Cookbook with its faux feminist agenda is a bit of a red rag to me. Be a career woman AND a fabulous cook, and do it all in 15 mins to make your man happy. Hand me the vomit bowl.

But maybe I should not be so unkind, after all, working married women in the 60s were a bit of a novelty*. On the other hand, taking the mickey out of the cookbook is fun, so I thought I’d do it again. This time, I chose the Corn Chowder (cost: 3/9, calories: about 550 each). I had most of the ingredients, so I didn’t check on the pricing, although 3/9 would be £2.85 in today’s prices – I somehow doubt you could get all the necessary stuff for that money nowadays

Now for the cooking:

The recipe is nice and easy as you can see from the images below. I did actually try and be more organised this time, i.e. put all the stuff that I needed near me rather than what I usually do, which is run around frantically, pulling stuff from the fridge and the pantry like I only just realised now that the onions should go in with the minced meat rather than sitting unchopped at the back of my food box while the mince is nearly done. So I was quietly confident that my timing would be not too far off this time, after it took me more than double the time to make the Tomato Rarebit – bad Cluedo.

But again, no such luck.

Of course, I blame the cookbook: despite their near-anal description of things to collect and plates to warm up before you start, they completely omit that you would need a chopping board and that you need to peel the potato**. Also, I defy anyone but Antony Bourdain on coke to peel and slice an onion, dice 4 rashers and cut up 2 potatoes and 2 tomatoes in 3 minutes, especially if you need to peel the potatoes first. Or did they have pre-peeled potatoes back then? It also doesn’t help that Sainsbury’s fancy bacon comes fanned out in the pack rather than just stacked as it does with their cheap “I-Can’t Believe-This-Has-Pork-In-It”-water bacon. So you lose valuable time stacking them up to dice them in one go. Time is money, honey, especially if you’re working against the She-Quickie-Cookbook-Clock! Also, in which universe do potatoes cook in 10 minutes in not very much water, even when sliced?

Anyway, trying not to be too panicked by the quarter hour deadline, I proceeded apace, and it was all very straight-forward. I did start frying the onions, bacon, potatoes and tomatoes in the frying pan rather than as indicated in the sauce pan, which I always find weird. But that’s probably just me. I transferred the mix over when it was time to put in the sweetcorn & water. The fritters scared me a little bit, as I have a similar success rate with nice-looking fritters as with fried eggs, but surprisingly, they turned out ok. And were very yummy. I altered very little of the recipe – no cooking fat but sunflower oil for the fritters as I was out of Stork and prefer oil over fat anyway. I also used quite a lot more cheese than indicated, but that was because I was trying out lacto-free cheese for the first time and pigged out. Note: lacto-free cheese is bland, but works quite well as glue-cheese required for this dish. I halved the ingredients, and ate the lot alone, when I realised that it’s meant for four – which will go some way to explaining why I felt quite so full afterwards *burp*. But who quarters a tin of corn, and one rasher is never enough, in any circumstance.

It is nice and yummy, so if you’re looking for something quick and easy and comforting, it’s your ticket. It took me 27 minutes to prepare it, which is slightly better than last time. And the potato was still undercooked, albeit edible.

Err, and I do have to apologise for the lack of a picture – I was so hungry by the time I was finished that I simply forgot. Trust me, it looked nice, like the picture in the cookbook, just in colour.

*(not really, women have always worked, but that’s a yarn to be unspun somewhere else at another time…)

**they give you 2 minutes to collect all the stuff together. Hah, I laugh in your face Quickie Cookbook, I live in a house with 7 other people, my tin opener cannot be found that quickly. And cleanly.

We are delighted to wake this blog from a few restorative weeks of hibernation with a guest post from Salada. Her other posts can be enjoyed here and here.

No muffin recipes appear in the VCBT list. Honestly, I checked.  Patricia H White is, assuming she’s still with us, an American who moved to England in the 1960’s.  This book was first published in 1975, and encourages the tradition of taking a bit of trouble with your gifts, or DIY as it’s known.  The recipes are divided into eight categories such as preserves, potted foods, sweetmeats and baked goods.  Ms White gives advice on packaging and storage, and how long the produce will last.

This recipe looks like a standard muffin mixture.  Commercial muffins nowadays have expanded to massive proportions, but these seem to come from a more frugal era.  Apple and cinnamon is a classic flavour match.

Recipe

Yield: a dozen muffins
Keep well
Oven: preheated to 200C, gas 6

1 egg, beaten
4fl oz (100g) milk
40g butter, melted
200g cooking apples, peeled, cored & chopped
150g self-raising flour
½ teasp salt
100g sugar
1 level teasp cinnamon
dash of ground cloves
sugar to dredge

Mix together egg, milk, melted butter and apples.  Sift together flour, salt, sugar and spices.  Combine with wet mix and blend completely.  Fill greased patty tins between half and three-quarters full and bake for 20 minutes until muffins are raised and he tops browned.  Turn out and dredge with sugar.  Allow to cool completely before storing.

Minor alterations:-

• I used 50g sugar because the apples were Cox’s dessert apples, and I don’t have a sweet tooth.  Sour cookers would need more.
• I didn’t have self-raising flour, so used plain with 2 level teaspoons baking powder.
• The ‘dash’ of ground cloves in my cupboard came as mixed spice.
• I used margarine not butter, melted in the microwave, 20 seconds at medium.
• I sifted the dry mix straight into the bowl of apple/egg/milk etc.
• I used fairy cake cases, quite small, old-fashioned, paper ones.  Here, again, is a product area that has evolved in recent years.  This amount of mixture actually produced 15.

As well as being a slightly off-putting dull beige hue, the raw mixture seemed like a lot of apple stuck together with thick batter.  However, when cooked the balance was redressed.  There was a strong cinnamon-y smell.  The apple had softened.  The beige colour remained, but the tops browned.  I dredged some with icing sugar and left some plain.  There are no instructions on oven-shelf level, so I guessed middle, but the three muffins that I put in lower, on the ‘overflow’ tray, actually expanded more than those above them.  Nonetheless, the muffin I tasted was both light and moist (still warm from baking) and only just sweet enough.  I have heard that muffin mixture must not be over-worked, and I followed this advice.  Ms White also suggests they are best served warm.

Results

A quick result – hard to go wrong; could be adapted for other fruit and flavourings; if eaten hot, would work as a pudding with honey, syrup, ice-cream.

While trawling through the archives at the Croydon Local Studies Library recently, I made a delightful discovery that immediately brought the Vintage Cookbook Trials to mind. I had actually been looking for information on Jay’s Furnishing Stores, a chain of hire-purchase furniture shops that operated in the UK during the 20^th century — but to my surprise, nestled among the cuttings of newspaper adverts offering “guaranteed delivery” and “the Best Terms in the World” was a small booklet entitled “20 Ways of Cooking Fish”.

Published by Jay’s at an unspecified date (though an anonymous hand has written “prob 1932” on the back), this booklet contains recipes written by a Monsieur X M Boulestin, billed as “The Worlds [sic] Greatest Cookery Expert”. [Editor's note: He definitely knew what to do with potatoes.] The rather tenuous connection between furniture sales and fish is supported by a short statement on the front cover: “Our object has always been a double one – to supply the Best Value in Fine Furniture and to ensure a Happy Home to each of our customers – by freedom from worry – Every housewife knows what part cooking plays in making a happy home.

Flipping through the recipes, I was briefly tempted by Cod Normande (featuring cider, parsley, shallots, and mushrooms) and Skate with Caper Sauce (which involves cooking the skate along with some of its liver plus cloves, parsley, thyme, bay leaves, and vinegar). However I thought the cod dish might be a bit boring, and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to get skate liver; indeed, I hadn’t previously known they even had livers. So I eventually settled on Eels Landaises, a lightly stewed dish of eels with red wine and prunes.

The author states that this recipe comes from “the Landes”, which Wikipedia tells me might refer to several places in France, but I suspect the most likely is the département of Landes itself, particularly as Wikipedia also tells me that M Boulestin had his own holiday home there. I found some interesting pages online while investigating further: Landais Folklore discusses the customs and geography of the area, and Landais Gastronomy discusses the food, mentioning eels among other things.

Take two or three moderate-sized eels

M Boulestin notes that some people consider eels “rather an alarming fish” (an observation borne out by my own experiences of telling people I was planning to cook this dish), but I quite like them. I get mine from the fishmonger on Church Street in Croydon, an excellent place where they have a very precise eye for cutting fish to order (I once asked for 300g of salmon and the piece they cut came out as exactly 300g on the scales; I nearly gave them a round of applause).

For this recipe I decided to use some eel pieces that I had a vague memory of stashing in the freezer after a change of dinner plans a few months ago. Upon defrosting it became clear that there was much less of it than I’d thought — a single thick slice weighing 350g (12oz). However, I suspected this wasn’t from the type of eel M Boulestin had in mind, as going by the diameter of my piece, two or three whole eels this large would have served at least twenty people. So I decided to press on anyway.

skin them, cut them in pieces about three inches long and roll them in flour. Cook them in olive oil; when they are nearly cooked, remove them

I just cooked my piece whole, and didn’t skin it either. I probably used about 1 Tbsp of plain flour to coat it, though it didn’t all stick. Aiming for a bit of a crust (this didn’t entirely work), I fried the eel for 10 minutes on each side, for a total of 20 minutes — obviously with smaller pieces you probably wouldn’t want to cook them for quite this long.

and fry in the same oil two or three onions and one clove of garlic, cut in slices;

I used half a small onion (around 75g/2½ oz) and two cloves of garlic, because I like garlic. Incidentally, if you’re wondering why the sliced garlic cloves look circular in the photo, that’s because I used garlic that I grew in my garden and pulled up before it had divided into cloves, because I was impatient and wanted to use the pot for something else.

when these are brown, add salt and pepper, one tumbler of red wine and a cup of stock, then about a dozen fine prunes, stoned and previously soaked in wine (you use the wine for the dish as directed above),

I used 125ml (4.5 fl oz) red wine, 125ml stock, and 6 prunes. The stock was proper home-made stock, made from an “old hen” and some pork bones, simmered over very low heat for 8 hours. I do this about twice a year, then freeze the stock in 60ml (4 Tbsp) portions for use in Chinese cooking. It’s very gelatinous, which I thought would be good in this dish because the sauce has no thickening agent.

bring to the boil, let it simmer about twenty minutes so that it is sufficiently reduced, and ten minutes before serving put in the pieces of eel which you have meanwhile kept hot. Serve with croûtons around the dish.

It wasn’t entirely clear whether M Boulestin wanted me to simmer this for 20 minutes total, or for 20 minutes without the eel and then another 10 minutes after adding it. In any case, I simmered it for about 15 minutes total, with the eel going in about halfway through when I judged the sauce was about halfway reduced enough. Only the bottom half-centimetre of my gigantic chunk of eel was actually in contact with the sauce anyway, so I got a dessertspoon and started basting.

I served it with boiled sweet potatoes rather than croûtons, because I had some in the fridge left over from a couple of nights previously, and they needed using up.

Would I make it again? Possibly. The sauce was very slightly too tart on its own, but made a good counterbalance to the sweetness of the prunes. The flavour of the sauce didn’t penetrate the eel at all, but that might have worked better if I’d skinned it and used smaller pieces. I also didn’t think there was really enough sauce — although I halved the sauce ingredients, I more-than-halved the eel, and the sauce-to-eel ratio still felt a little scant.

Suppliers:

• Eels from Fresh Fish of Croydon and Surrey, 25 Church Street, Croydon, CR0 1RH
• Wine from Good Taste, 28 Westow Hill, Crystal Palace, SE19 1RX
• Prunes from Authentic Roots, 96 High Street, Croydon, CR0 1ND
• Pork bones and hen (for stock) from Wing Yip, 544 Purley Way, Croydon, CR0 4NZ
• Garlic from my garden. I have no idea where the onion came from.

From The Baker’s ABC by John Kirkland, formerly Head Teacher of National School of Baking, published 1927 by Gresham

One of the great things about this blog are the books people give me – this gem, purchased somewhere in south London, is a stone-cold classic.  Spiral-bound  like a desktop calendar and part of the ‘Standeasy Cookbook’ series, Special Occasions was published in 1979 by Bay Books, edited by Vivian Allwood, with the home economist Ann Page-Wood. You can tell it’s a late 70s cookbook, because two out of the 48 recipes contain tragically misplaced grapes. As you can see – it’s still fully operational:

Nestled between the recipes for vermouth fish loaf and guinea fowl madelaine however, there are some tasty dishes – dinner party standards like devils on horseback and duck a l’orange and from this range, I chose the boeuf en daube after a craving for beef stew persisted after eating an excellent boeuf carbonnade (made by someone else).

I cooked a much smaller portion than listed in the recipe. used some excellent stewing steak from Marsh produce (currently selling through Harringay market) and instead of belly pork, I used a thick rasher of back bacon. I also added  larger quantities vegetables than listed and left the meat to marinate for longer (two days, in fact!). Also, as I added just a couple of dried mushrooms for flavour (and picked them

Results
It may not be lovely looking, but it was easily the best stew I’ve ever made. Whether it was the extra veg or the extra marinating time, the sauce was smooth and delicious with tender (somewhat irregular…) pieces of meat and vegetables. Highly recommended (as long as you add an extra leek).

Daube’d by Elly

From The Baker’s ABC by John Kirkland, formerly Head Teacher of National School of Baking, published 1927 by Gresham

This book is something of a mixed bag. It’s a guide to entertaining for people who already have a large encyclopedia-type cookbook and are now seeking to bless others with their efforts. I wonder how much it owes to the personal tastes of its author and her guests? Some dishes seem like a genuine treat, others are more along jelly, cream and bananas lines. (Actually, what am I talking about? If someone served me jelly, cream and bananas, I would probably kiss them.)

(The ‘more out-of-the-ordinary’ way of using them ‘a l’Indienne’ i.e with curry sauce. No.)

According to my (admittedly limp) grasp of food hygiene, eggs should either be hot or cold, so please don’t keep them in warm, salted water. Salmonella is a real downer, or so I’ve heard.

This dish may seem like something one might put together from bits found at the back of the fridge (a couple of eggs, a bit of bechamel, some greens where it doesn’t matter if they’re a bit old because they’re going to be wilted, chopped and covered in hot cheese) but it results in something filthily delicious and incredibly filling. I had it as was, but you might want a triangle or two of crisp toast on the side. Recommended now the nights are miserable.

Mollet’ed by Elly

ETA: I have just only just realised that I could see her in her prime – voila! A clip of What’s my Line from 1955. Enjoy!

From The Baker’s ABC by John Kirkland, formerly Head Teacher of National School of Baking, published 1927 by Gresham