Peanut butter and apple sandwich

Third and final vintage sandwich. Yes, more grated apple (I like apples!). I used an own brand of pb which I shall avoid in future as it was insufficiently crunchy.

Sweet Fillings

Peanut butter mixed with an equal amount of jam, honey, syrup or grated apple.

Results

This is as a hearty a sandwich as it looks, although the moisture of the apple means the peanut butter is lighter and less sticky. Would make a decent lunch for refueling during an outdoor pursuit.

Sandwiched by Elly

Haricot Bean Sandwich

Second sandwich of the week. Although aware of the popularity of ‘white bean dip‘ in the US, I was unsure how to how this recipe would turn out, mostly because I was using tinned beans which can sometimes have a tinny taste which requires a ton of garlic to get rid of it.

Bean Filling

Mash some cooked haricot beans to a paste with a little butter or margarine, season with salt and pepper and flavour with any kind of savoury sauce or vegetable extract. Add a little chopped parsley, chopped watercress or powdered sage.

Notes

• I chose wholemeal baguette to have with this to minimise the risk of a heavy, damp sandwich.  (I only actually used half the baguette, but the whole thing makes a better photo.)
• Fairly sure ‘vegetable extract’ means  Marmite and used a quarter of a teaspoon of that. Perhaps a reader could shed some light on this product?
• I considered Worcerstershire Sauce but was feeling sensitive in the morning and didn’t fancy opening the bottle.
• I used parsley as recommended and about 200g beans.

Results

Delicious. Crunchy bread is definitely the way to go here – I finished it for dinner the following day, using it as pitta bread stuffing.  The seasoning blended perfectly (and no, it did not taste like Marmite).

Sandwiched by Elly

Apple and Raisin Sandwich

I set myself the tiny challenge of, instead of having nuked leftovers for work lunches, crafting a sandwich as per the specifications of one of my recipe books for 1 working week. All three sandwich recipes are from Florence Greenberg’s Jewish Cookery Book (Jewish Chronicle Publications, 1947) (For various reasons, this project was abandoned after 3 days. I really am an almighty flake.)

Sweet Fillings

Raisins finely chopped and mixed with an equal quantity of grated apple. Flavour with cinnamon.

Results

This tasted exactly like fruit bread.  Now, I love fruit bread, but I almost never make it because I almost never want to spend a week eating no bread but fruit bread (although I guess one could make it, slice it up and freeze it). Now this problem is utterly solved, along with adding some extra fresh stuff to the diet. Recommended whole-heartedly.

Sandwiched by Elly

Cheese and Tomato Savouries

These were my contribution to our Canape party’s ‘Guess The Cheesy Decade’ competition, where 3 canapes were made, from various decades and guests were asked to, well, guess the decade. I can’t remember what the consensus was on when this recipe was from, but I don’t think anyone got it right. The recipe is from Modern Cookery Illustrated by Lydia Chatterton (Odham’s Press Ltd), and my edition is a 1947 reprint.

Notes

• I made 3 times this amount, yielding 12 savouries.
• Not being sure what patty tins are, never mind actually having any in my kitchen, I used fairycake papers instead.

Rather unfortunately I appear to not have a photo of these. However, if you can imagine irregularly formed splodges of cheese and tomato on rounds of toast you’re pretty much there. They tasted a little like vomit – the parmesan didn’t work well here, and the overall effect was not great. I wouldn’t make these again.

To make up for the lack of photos of these savouries, here’s some scans from the source book:

Savoury Éclairs

This was my entry in the ‘Guess the Decade of the Cheese-Based Canape’ contest, held at our party.

I am delighted to have an opportunity to make these, which I have fancied since my first browsing of Florence Greenberg’s Jewish Cookery Book. First published by the Jewish Chronicle Publications in published in 1947, I have the 6^th edition, from 1958, a family tome with a lovely range of recipes from  bloaters devilled to mock duck to nut frappe.

Despite having shrieked at countless episodes of Come Dine with Me, I didn’t manage to do a practise run of choux pastry earlier in the week, so at 1pm on Saturday, it was fail or fail time.

Savoury Éclairs

Make a choux paste (see page 297), omitting the vanilla essence. Put in a forcing bag with a half-inch plain tube and force into a greased baking tray – not too close together, and about 3 ½ inches long and bake in a moderately hot oven (400 degrees, Regulo 5) for 30 – 40 minutes.

Remove from the tin, slit down the sides with a sharp pointed and leave on a cake tray to cool; then fill with any savoury mixture.

Suggestions for fillings:

1. Remove skin and bone from some sardines, pound thoroughly with tomato ketchup, and season with salt and pepper.
2. Pounded hard-boiled egg and tomato, moistened with salad cream
3. Tiny roll of smoked salmon
4. Soft cream cheese, with chopped gherkin, olive, or chives.
5. Mix 2oz grated cheese with 4 pounded anchovies, a little mustard, and sufficient milk to make a soft paste.
6. Green peas or macedoine of vegetables mixed with cheese, in a thick white sauce.

So… I slightly re-interpreted suggestion 6, by making a filling of  very thick cheese sauce and adding some shredded spinach.

I also don’t own a ‘forcing’ bag and instead made buns. The amount of pastry made 12 buns.

Choux Paste

(for Cream Buns, Éclairs etc)

Flour 4oz
Butter or margarine 2oz
Water ¼ pint
Pinch of salt
Three eggs
Vanilla Essence

Use a saucepan  to make the paste, one large enough to allow the eggs to be beaten in. Put in the butter, pour over the boiling water, and when the butter has melted stir in the sieved flour, mixing very thoroughly with a wooden spoon, and stir over a gentle heat until the mixture-which is called a panada-thickens and leaves the sides of the pan quite clean. Cool slightly, then beat in the eggs one at a time. Beat very well and add the vanilla essence.

• I halved the recipe which made 12 profiterole-sized buns.
• Why doesn’t it say in the recipe that I’m supposed to boil the water?
• Please note this recipe has been copied out exactly. (I.e. Yes, it is punctuated exactly like this.)
• I actually beat the eggs together before adding them as I feared making a horrid mess if I misjudged the temperature of the ‘panada’.
• I wasn’t sure if it was thickening sufficiently so I cross-checked with the choux recipe from the Reader’s Digest Cookery Year, which has such excellent descriptions for the beginner. I was reassured by the instructions but that recipe had different proportions of ingredients. I found this very worrying.
• I baked the buns in the oven for about 20 minutes.
• I then left them to cool for about half an hour.
• Then I realised they were still a bit pale and gooey looking at the bottom so put them back in the oven on a low heat for another 15 minutes.
• Assembly at Alix’s involved slicing the buns open, forcing in some filling with a blunt knife and then sprinkling some more cheese on top and heating them in the oven.
• They may have ended up slightly over cooked.

Conclusion

Success! They were so tasty that I was glad a couple of our lovely guests had left to attend other events so I could eat two. Yes, I am a mean drunk. I was  interested (and pleased) to see that the consensus was strongly that they were from the 1970s. Probably if I had served them cold, they would have had a different effect. Anyway, they were worth the effort and I am no longer scared of choux pastry.

Chouxed by Elly

Haricot Bean Soup

This is from The English Cookery Book by Lucie G. Nicoll, published by Faber and Faber in 1936, though this is the 6th edition dating from 1947. The introduction explains that Ms Nicoll is a farmer’s wife and has written the book with the intention of providing a range of seasonal recipes, compiled in a ‘book that can be washed over after having been soiled with flour, and a book in which the recipe stands out in good bold type, so that time is not wasted in peering into small and difficult lettering’. It’s a compact, uncomplicated and indeed well laid-out book, and looks well kept, so the rough treatment Ms Nicoll prepared it for looks to have not come to it (yet).  The introduction also explains how farm wives have naturally developed a tradition of good cookery, and she emphasises that this is not haute cuisine, but good solid English food “They are not for the epicurean or frequenter of the Ritz or such-like places…but again if any of my tired epicurean friends with jaded palates should care to risk  say a slice of the cold spiced beef or the hotpot of pigeons I doubt they will regret it”.

Notably the book is divided into recipes for the four seasons. Ms Nicoll says in the introduction how it is odd this has not been done before (it seems to me to be the preserve of  most recipe books to consider themselves to be introducing new, improved  methods in their approach to cookery), seasonal cooking is something that has had something of a renaissance in recent years – when this book was penned it appears to be an approach so obvious it hasn’t been acknowledged (at least in the recipe books Ms Nicolls knows).

There is also a chapter entitled The Ramblers Harvest, (subchapter Hedgerow Cookery,) with recipes including numerous blackberry conserves, dandelion wine, medicinal elderflower concoctions, nettle beer and other tempting things that I will probably make at some point using the spoils of my forages on Walthamstow Marshes.

What I cooked was a very simple soup.  It’s from the section for the First Season, ie January-March. Here’s the recipe:

Haricot Bean Soup

1 pint of milk

1 pint of water

1/2 pint of haricot beans

1 onion

1/2 oz of dripping

salt and pepper and a pinch of bicarbonate of soda

Soak the beans in cold water overnight with a pinch of bicarbonate of soda. To make the soup, melt the dripping in a saucepan, add onion sliced and the drained beans, cover and cook for 5 minutes. Then add the water and simmer for three hours. Rub through a sieve and add the milk. Season to taste, serve very hot with fried croutons of bread. Sufficient for 4 people.

Results

Notes

• Firsly, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was something left out for the cat.
• I didn’t soak the beans as I bought them in a tin, in some brine or…something. This was a relief as I’d spent five minutes before reading the recipe beyond the ingredients list searching for the bicarb, which was either in the black hole section of my store cupboard or not there at all. Whichever it turns out to be (I gave up looking) it wasn’t looking good for its inclusion in the recipe.
• It occurs to me that I may have used too few beans. I measured them by putting them in a pint glass to the halfway mark, as I can’t see how else one would measure beans by the pint. Perhaps this was wrong?
• I almost didn’t bother because I didn’t think I would be able to get dripping. Dripping is so Victorian; it felt like being tasked to locate a Psammead. However, Morrison’s had some. Britannia Finest Beef Dripping, 67p for a hundredweight (or a half-kilo, I forget which) -

• Dripping is weird. More like wax than fat as I know it, it flaked off into the pan, but melted down beautifully.
• The 3 hour simmer of the fat, water, beans and onion produced a delicious smelling liquid. At this point I was very happy with the recipe.
• I don’t have a suitable sieve for rubbing things through, handy food processor to the rescue!
• Then I added the pint of milk. This is where I stopped wanting to consume what I had made.
• A whole pint of milk is a lot of milk! The soup is now a very pale, vaguely beany liquid. It’s mostly milk.
• I suspect it would have made a difference to use full fat instead of semi-skimmed milk. When was skimming cream from milk popularised?

Conclusion

A very cheap, simple and labour unintensive recipe for a very pale milky soup. Would not make again. I am going to blame post-war austerity for this recipe. I’m not going to eat more of it in it’s current state – am thinking add as many beans again, and perhaps some bacon.

Green Tomato and Ginger Jam

I’ve never made jam before, and I have it on good authority that it’s a tricky one to get right. I’d grown a small amount of green tomatoes in my windowbox over the summer, and wanted to use them up, so supplemented them with some shop-bought green tomatoes and bought plenty of sugar to make jam from them, intending to do it on a leisurely Sunday afternoon. So, last Friday night after a very adequate dinner of port, crackers and cheese, I decided to attempt making the jam around 10pm. I wouldn’t say I was drunk exactly, more just the tired you get if you’ve had some drinks early on then stopped drinking. Whatever the case I wasn’t really in the correct frame of mind to try jam making. The recipe I chose was from Modern Cookery Illustrated, published by Odhams Press Ltd (this edition is from 1949), a pleasantly worn book I got from a car boot sale the other weekend. The page edges are all soft with years of use, the spine is sellotaped together and the margins peppered with neat notes in old fashioned handwriting.

This excerpt is from the Foreword -

“The world may be made up of Nations – but nations are made up of individuals – and individuals are happiest and most peace-loving when they are well nourished and healthy, and so I hope this book will be a small link in the chain that in the hands of our women will help build a fitter, happier Empire”

And indeed, what Empire is complete without a recipe for Rhubarb Hedgehog?

Green Tomato and Ginger Jam

6lb green tomatoes

2oz root ginger

1/4lb preserved ginger

2 tablespoons ginger syrup

4.5lb sugar

1 large lemon

Cut the tomatoes in small pieces. Cut the lemon in very thin slices, remove the pips and cut the slices in small pieces. Bruise the root ginger and tie it in a piece of muslin. Put it in a preserving pan with the tomatoes, lemon and syrup. Stir over a gentle heat until the juice flows. Then bring to the boil and boil gently until the lemon rind is soft, then add the sugar and preserved ginger cut in small pieces and boil quickly until it sets when tested. Remove the root ginger. Turn into warm dry jars and cover at once.

The result

Notes etc

• I made a third of this amount as I only had 2lb of tomatoes.
• My crappy scales let me down and I think too much sugar was used.
• I panicked when it wouldn’t set and put a chopped apple in. This turns out to have been unneccessary as the ‘jam’ is now very set. Sort of ‘knife-handle-snapping-off-when-you-try-to-get-it-out-of-the-jar’ set.
• The lemon could have been chopped smaller.
• It’s rather tasty, though too sweet. The ginger does not come through as strongly as I would like, but I suspect it’s being drowned by the sugar.

Bottled by Alix