Danish Cheese Loaf

This charming item was a gift from someone who knows my favourite kind of  vintage cookbook are those which contain both horrors for me to laugh at and things that might be OK to actually try and cook.

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

Sweet Corn Bread

Ah, sweetcorn. A controversial choice to some regular readers but a very popular one in my house, as those very readers know. This recipe is from Lousene Rousseau Brunner’s New Casserole Treasury (1970, The Cookery Book Club for Harper and Row). A book in which a great deal of care and attention has been paid to the layout of recipes  – a lovely, calm sans-serif font and  recipes arranged so that the pages need never be turned during cooking. Thanks, Ms R-B, you bring order to a troubled universe and your use of booze is epic. (Seriously, one of these days I will make Parisian Chicken and then you will see – but this will necessitate a serious trip to the offy. Until then, you’re stuck reading about ‘Things I have made with things I have found in my fridge’.)

Brown Flour Biscuits and Artichoke Paste

Summer is here or at least there have been some days which can unequivocally be categorised as ‘rather nice’ . Snacks to eat outside are needed.

The biscuits are from Agnes Jekyll’s Kitchen Essays, (first published in 1922,  reprinted by Persephone books in 2001) which Alix and I are currently enjoying. The book depicts a very gentle life (chapters include ‘In the Cook’s absence’, ‘Thoughts of Venice from Home’, ‘A little dinner before the play’ and ‘Tray Food’) and is  frequently, hilariously sexist.

This recipe is from ‘Tea-time and some Cakes‘ and is suitable for ‘the dyspeptic guest who never eats anything at tea’.