Bacon Cornettes

Look at this wonderful thing! A friend liberated it from his grandmother’s bookshelves for me and I appreciate it so very much. If I had unlimited shelf space and an extra few hours in the week, I’d probably collect and blog about etiquette and entertaining manuals as well, but there’s only so much time a person should devote to horrified chuckling at kaleidoscopic interiors, conformist gender roles and devilled ham.

 

Herman the German Friendship Cake

Initially I had no plans to blog this as it’s not from a book, but after live-tweeting its assembly I thought I might as well. I remember my mother being given some of this starter about 25 years ago and I (who didn’t have to stir it daily or move it when doing other things in the kitchen), loved the resulting cake. The internet seems a little conflicted as to the origins – certainly Amish Friendship Bread is very similar.

Anyway, I was very pleased when a friend gave me some Herman starter in a yoghurt pot, in a Liberty’s bag, along with the strict advice that it was Day 3, and a piece of paper stating:

Eggs Florentine

Today a guest-post from a loyal reader – thanks, Cluedo!

Oh, the beauty of Eggs Florentine! What’s not to like – the luscious combination of nourishing spinach with the rehabilitative healthiness of eggs, topped of by a vast blob of saturated fat in the form of a rich hollandaise, served on a (buttered) muffin. I’m sure we’ve all seen pictures of this most agreeable of hangover foods, even if it’s only in our mind while we still work up the energy to get out of bed post-alcoholic excess.

Basic Fried Rice

Here’s another dish from Kenneth Lo’s Cheap Chow. I went for the Chinese classic of fried rice, which I’ve attempted before without reference to a recipe, with limited success. I figured starting at the very beginning when it came to fried rice might be a good idea, so Basic Fried Rice it is.

Jansson’s Frestelse

Aka Jansson’s Temptation. This dish was mentioned on the comments to this post and although I was not overly enthusiastic about it then, when I found a recipe for it in the Time Life Scandanavian cookbook (1969)  I felt obliged to give it a go.

 

 

Rårakor med Gråslök

This recipe is from a 1969 Time Life series of books ‘Foods of the World’, of which I have The Cooking of Scandinavia. It’s a sophisticated work, and doesn’t shrink from challenging recipes and obscure ingredients. I like this approach, rather than the approach sometimes  encountered with books on foreign cuisine where the author excludes recipes when they think that the ingredients will be hard to find. In English the dish is translated to ‘Lacy Potato Pancakes with Chives’.

 

Stir-Fried Minced Meat with Soya Sauce, Mushrooms & Green Peas with Onion Cakes

Here’s two from Kenneth Lo’s 1978 book on Chinese cooking – Cheap Chow. I’ve been meaning to cook more from this book, and now my budget is somewhat tight I hope to get on with some of the more adventurous recipes. There’s one for Broad Bean, Potato and Belly of Pork Soup, which sounds amazing, but would require me to tackle pig’s trotters and I’m just not sure I’m ready for that kind of commitment. Today’s recipe features the much more familar mince, because, as Kenneth points out ‘In facing up to the problems of budget cookery, sooner or later one has to resort to the use of minced meat‘. So here goes!

Macaroni burgers

I don’t know what possessed me to look in Beverly Pepper’s Potluck Cookery (Faber and Faber, 1955) for a secondary use for pasta and cheese sauce, but I’m glad I did.

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: