Mandrang or Mandram

After buying 2 cucumbers in order to make one into a Chinese salad for a party, I decided to make the other into salad as well (as opposed to tzatziki  and a tzatziki  delivery system).  After checking the index of Modern Cookery For Private Families (first published in 1845, reissued in 2011 by Quadrille), I decided to make the cucumber dish with the oddest name.

I canot find out much about the words ‘mandram’ or ‘mandrang’ or who went to to where in the Caribbean to bring the recipe back to Acton. Most descriptions of this ‘salad-like hash’ (William Woys Weaver, Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, edited by Harlan Walker, 1991), lead back to Acton’s recipe, although I enjoyed the idea of it as  an ‘unfailing stimulant to the appetite‘. Food in England by Dorothy White (1945) has completely different recipe for ‘cucumber mandram’, so perhaps I’ll have a go at that another time.

Cheese and walnut squares

In my neverending quest to find new ways to eat potatoes, I decided to try these potato scone-pancake hybrid from Florence Greenberg’s Jewish Cookery Book (6th Edition, 1958)

Recipe
Cooked potato 1lb
Grated cheese 3 oz
Salt and cayenne
Walnuts 2 oz
Milk ½ teacup
One egg

Salmon Croûtes

This recipe and sieved eggs were made by Rob for our Canapé Party. Rob sez:

“This recipe was taken from Practical Cookery For All, published in 1953 by Odhams Press Ltd. It’s an all-round cookery bible with chapters introducing new cooks to a range of ingredients and techniques, modern kitchenware and the new science of ‘nutrition’. There’s loads of emphasis on presentation. Full-page colour photos depict dishes like meat ragout or mock roast served on giant silver platters, decorated with vegetable crowns, surrounded by oceans of peas and finished with delicate sculptures of piped mashed potato. The recipe chapters dive straight in with a selection of rich hors d’œuvre for the Serious Business of impressing party guests.

Herbed Carrot Salad

a) apologies for the delay; b) ph34r the fusion of herbed carot salad, mashed potato, sook choo na mool and SAUSAGES! This is what happens when you cannot make salads for one, have urgent leftovers in need of eating and yet CANNOT refuse yourself sausage and mash after a tough day. Hurrah?!

Ingredients
450g carrots
peeled clove garlic
1/8 – 1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp paprika
pinch cayenne pepper
juice of one lemon
1/8 tsp granulated sugar
olive oil to taste
salt
freshly chopped parsley to garnish

Cheese Straws

Hello! This is my first post to vintagecookbook trials. The book I’ve chosen is The Beginner’s Cookery Book by Betty Falk. Before we engage in the debate about quite how a bloody souffle is ‘beginner’s cookery’, let’s just say that I knew nothing good could come out of this book – nothing good can come out of any book that has a quiche on the front cover. Ewwwww. But, oh well, give it a go, I thought. On a look through, I found a recipe for cheese straws.

Now, cheese straws have had a strange attraction for a while – every 70s cookbook anticipating a dinner party for 10+, or a Child’s Birthday Party contains a recipe for cheese straws – Children’s Party Cooking (to come!) indeed features a house made of cheese straws. But these days, they’re not even in the Sedexo catering catalogue. What of cheese straws? Would my experience in making cheese straws help me to find out why you never get them these days? Is it the post-Atkins mafia or… something worse? Let’s see.