Spaghetti Bolognese

Potage Saint-Germaine – Pea Soup

Final soup for January. This time from Ma Cuisine by Auguste Escoffier, published by Paul Hamlyn in 1934. (I am becoming very proficient at locating the recipes in this long book which do not require meat jelly or double cream!)

This is the second version given, the first being just boiled, puree’d peas with a little stock added. I was attracted to the idea of eating something summer-y, as it’s been so effing cold over the last week.

Hungarian Onion Soup

Sorry this is being posted late! Events ran away from me towards the end of last week.

As promised, another soup, and one you could conjure from store cupboard ingredients, (if you own a store cupboard, I took these items from my spice shelf, carb-drawer and the fruit bowl).  I’m interested to see if it’s edible exactly as written or if these seven ingredients actually don’t magickallye combine into a tasty meal.(This recipe is from Florence Greenberg’s Jewish Cookery Book, 6th edition, 1958).

Potato and Cheese Soup

Is it cold outside? Are you feeling cross from the cumulative effect of at least seven small things and it’s making your brain itch? Do you have a few edible bits in your kitchen but are too hungry to bake them all for an hour and a half as per most winter comfort dishes? Your problems are my problems, friend.

This recipe is from the Good Housekeeping Cookery Compendium, volume 1 (Waverly, 1955). I felt I should attempt a savoury dish from this book as so far I have only used it to make biscuits.

Different Scalloped Potatoes

I made these to accompany this chicken dish, being a thrifty sort of person and wishing to make best use of the fact that the oven was on. (This dish is from the New Casserole Treasury was written by Lousene Rousseau Brunner and published in 1970 by the Cookery Book Club by arrangement with Harper & Row.)

Texas Hash

Another recipe from the publications dug from the family collection and delivered to my grubby hands. (I wash them before cooking – promise!) Words are superfluous regarding the design and tone of this leaflet, from February 1966, suffice to say it was issued by the Rice Council for Market Development, then based in Notting Hill, which appears to have been an arm of the US rice industry.

Shredded pork stir-fried with bean-sprouts and spring onions

Although I enjoy Chinese food I’ve very little experience making it – there’s an assumption on my part, rightly or wrongly, that it’s somehow difficult. I bought the following book partly to make me give it a go (and also it only cost 50p). The book is ‘Cheap Chow – Chinese Cooking on next to nothing‘ by Kenneth Lo, published by Pan in 1978. I have no idea how popular Chinese food was in the seventies, but I assume that it wasn’t a very frequently cooked cuisine in the average home (nb, I wasn’t around in the seventies, so please set me to rights if I’m assuming wrongly). This recipe book suffers no fools though, and gives a very decent run through of Chinese cooking techniques, including recipes for the standards Red Sauce and Master Sauce, which Lo explains are the basis of many a dish. I’ve certainly made a mental note to set an afternoon aside to slow cook some meat in the red sauce.  I decided to start with something easy though:

Chicken Mexicane

In Pot Luck Cookery (1955, Faber & Faber). Beverley Pepper furnishes the reader with seventeen recipes for using up leftover chicken specifically (and several others suitable for ’what have you meats’), unfortunately on this occasion, I picked a dud. The recipe looked temptingly highly seasoned but didn’t quite come together. (I assume the ‘e’ on the end of Mexicane denotes this recipe is ‘in the style of’ rather than the real thing.)

Cream of Spinach Soup

Jane Grigson (from Vegetable Book, Penguin, 1978) rhapsodises about spinach at the start of this chapter giving its history – first known descriptions are by the Chinese whose name for it still translates as ‘Persian vegetable’. Obviously we’d say Iranian now, but the influence of the name from that language, aspanakh, is clear. Its first recorded use in English food was in 1568 and apparently it became very popular very quickly, probably because it grows so well in the UK. I love spinach (and swiss chard) so much that as a child, I thought of it as a treat, especially when stirred through pasta with cheese.

Gougére with Chicken Livers and Courgettes with Herbs

Two recipes from Alison Burt’s Super Saving Recipe Cards (first seen here in a spectacular cake fail) which I made together on Good Friday for my dinner. A gougére is savoury French pastry with cheese, and can be small like these or larger with a filling. Alison Burt’s recipe is for a larger gougére with a mix of liver and veg in the centre. The picture shows the dish tastefully arranged against a bit of red cloth, which is quite restrained compared to the presentation on the other recipe cards. The food photographers must have got bored by the time they got to the Pastry and Pies section. The food itself looks like someone was (neatly, admittedly) sick into a baguette.