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blamebrampton) wrote2010-10-10 12:10 am
blamebrampton) wrote2010-10-10 12:10 am
Austerity Cooking
I recently pulled an old cook book off the shelf, to have a flick through and giggle. It's called Fine English Cookery, and was printed in 1973, so is filled with the meals of my childhood.
Until I read it, and indulged on my massive Agatha Christie binge of the last six weeks (twenty novels and counting!), I had managed to completely remove the memory of tongue from my conscious mind. Happily, due to a few massive thwacks to the noggin over the years, I can still only recall that I have eaten it, and the vaguest distaste when it comes to trying to recall either actual taste or texture. I feel this is for the best.
However, thanks to the aforementioned reading (and I was then obliged to pull out my WI and CWA (Australian WI near-analogue) cookbooks), I have been cooking retro food for the last few weeks. With the credit crunch still biting bums in most of the world, and a lot of students out there, I want to share my two fave recipes, both of which are considerably adapted from their source material, due to the source being a bit mingy in the flavour department. The first is vegan, the second thoroughly not, but still vegetarian! Both cheap to make! (Admittedly a little less so if you use everything organic.)
Italianesque beans
Serves 2 really really hungry people as a meal, 3 normally hungry people as a meal, or 4-6 people as a side
Ingredients
A bucketload of garlic: half a head of Russian or Italian garlic, more if it's older, a little less than half a head of normal garlic, or else at least a teaspoon of bottled garlic. You can adjust this if you are fussy about garlic or going out on the pull later in the night.
A splash of olive oil
2 tins cannellini beans (white Italian kidney beans)
2 tins tomatoes (whole or crushed) or a similar amount of sugo or passata
(All tins should be roughly 400-450g, the standard size, but weights vary according to brand)
Salt and pepper
A small amount of caster sugar if the tomatoes are bitter
Basil or other Italian herbs (optional)
Method
1. In a large non-stick frypan, heat the oil over a medium-hot hob.
2. Chop garlic roughly. When oil is just beginning to spatter, but well before it starts to smoke, toss garlic in and cook, stirring occasionally, until it starts to soften and turn translucent/golden.
3. While garlic is cooking, open the tins of beans and tip into a large sieve. Rinse under a cold running tap until the water runs clear without foaming. Drain and tip beans in with soft garlic.
4. Cook, stirring, until beans heat through.
5. Add tomato (drain some of the liquid off first if using whole tomatoes that have been packed with a lot of water). Break up large tomato pieces as necessary -- it's easiest to do this with your spoon after they have heated through. Cook over a medium-hot heat until the sauce has thickened and reduced. Season as desired (it often does not need salt as many tinned products have a little salt added), taste, and if the tomatoes are bitter, add a quarter-teaspoon at a time of caster sugar and stir in well before tasting again. Add herbs just after tomatoes if using rosemary, oregano or marjoram.
6. Turn off heat and stir in torn basil, if using. Serve with crusty bread, if desired, or just eat from a big bowl. You can also cook the beans to this point and then pour them into ramekins, cracking a raw egg into the middle and putting the ramekin in a moderate oven until the egg is cooked (about 8 minutes in my oven) for a delicious non-vegan breakfast. And I have added a sliced onion to the garlic in step 2 for a more allium-centric version of this dish.
Baked custard
Serves six as a dish, or four hungry people as dish, or eight as an accompaniment to steamed pudding, stewed fruit or similar)
Ingredients
450mL milk (preferably organic)
300mL single cream (preferably organic)
Vanilla bean, or a good splash of vanilla extract
6 medium-large free-range eggs
100-110g caster sugar (the organic golden is delicious! Use the upper level if you like it sweeter.)
Nutmeg, if desired.
Method
1. Preheat oven to 200 degrees C conventional, 180 fan-forced. Prepare a 1.5L ovenproof dish or ring mould: the original recipe suggests buttering it, but I never bother. Instead, stand it inside a larger ovenproof dish, on an oven tray. Fill the outer dish with water to halfway up the sides of the inner dish. Old Pyrex dishes are perfect.
2. In a 2L pan, heat the milk and cream together. Split the vanilla bean (if using) with a sharp knife and scrape out the seeds: drop seeds and bean into milk. Stir occasionally to prevent milk sticking to pan.
3. Crack all the eggs, whole, into a medium bowl. Add sugar. Beat together with fork, whisk or hand-held beaters until the sugar is dissolved and egg mix well incoporated.
4. When the milk is starting to simmer, use a ladle or cup to scoop about 100mL into the egg mixture. Beat in well. Repeat twice more, until the egg mixture is starting to warm. Stirring as you do, pour the egg mixture into the milk still on the hob. Turn off the heat, but continue to stir until thoroughly incorporated. The custard will start to thicken a little as you stir.
5. Pour the custard mixture into the inner dish.Grate nutmeg over the top if using. Lift the tray carefully, so the water does not slosh, and place in middle of oven. Bake for about 50 mins. Test by giving the tray a jiggle: the custard should just be set: it will wobble in the middle, but not be liquid. Remove from oven and remove from water bath soon after: if left in it will continue to cook and the outside can become over tough. Can be served straight away hot, or left to cool to near room temperature and then refrigerated, covered, for a minimum of an hour to serve cool.
Until I read it, and indulged on my massive Agatha Christie binge of the last six weeks (twenty novels and counting!), I had managed to completely remove the memory of tongue from my conscious mind. Happily, due to a few massive thwacks to the noggin over the years, I can still only recall that I have eaten it, and the vaguest distaste when it comes to trying to recall either actual taste or texture. I feel this is for the best.
However, thanks to the aforementioned reading (and I was then obliged to pull out my WI and CWA (Australian WI near-analogue) cookbooks), I have been cooking retro food for the last few weeks. With the credit crunch still biting bums in most of the world, and a lot of students out there, I want to share my two fave recipes, both of which are considerably adapted from their source material, due to the source being a bit mingy in the flavour department. The first is vegan, the second thoroughly not, but still vegetarian! Both cheap to make! (Admittedly a little less so if you use everything organic.)
Italianesque beans
Serves 2 really really hungry people as a meal, 3 normally hungry people as a meal, or 4-6 people as a side
Ingredients
A bucketload of garlic: half a head of Russian or Italian garlic, more if it's older, a little less than half a head of normal garlic, or else at least a teaspoon of bottled garlic. You can adjust this if you are fussy about garlic or going out on the pull later in the night.
A splash of olive oil
2 tins cannellini beans (white Italian kidney beans)
2 tins tomatoes (whole or crushed) or a similar amount of sugo or passata
(All tins should be roughly 400-450g, the standard size, but weights vary according to brand)
Salt and pepper
A small amount of caster sugar if the tomatoes are bitter
Basil or other Italian herbs (optional)
Method
1. In a large non-stick frypan, heat the oil over a medium-hot hob.
2. Chop garlic roughly. When oil is just beginning to spatter, but well before it starts to smoke, toss garlic in and cook, stirring occasionally, until it starts to soften and turn translucent/golden.
3. While garlic is cooking, open the tins of beans and tip into a large sieve. Rinse under a cold running tap until the water runs clear without foaming. Drain and tip beans in with soft garlic.
4. Cook, stirring, until beans heat through.
5. Add tomato (drain some of the liquid off first if using whole tomatoes that have been packed with a lot of water). Break up large tomato pieces as necessary -- it's easiest to do this with your spoon after they have heated through. Cook over a medium-hot heat until the sauce has thickened and reduced. Season as desired (it often does not need salt as many tinned products have a little salt added), taste, and if the tomatoes are bitter, add a quarter-teaspoon at a time of caster sugar and stir in well before tasting again. Add herbs just after tomatoes if using rosemary, oregano or marjoram.
6. Turn off heat and stir in torn basil, if using. Serve with crusty bread, if desired, or just eat from a big bowl. You can also cook the beans to this point and then pour them into ramekins, cracking a raw egg into the middle and putting the ramekin in a moderate oven until the egg is cooked (about 8 minutes in my oven) for a delicious non-vegan breakfast. And I have added a sliced onion to the garlic in step 2 for a more allium-centric version of this dish.
Baked custard
Serves six as a dish, or four hungry people as dish, or eight as an accompaniment to steamed pudding, stewed fruit or similar)
Ingredients
450mL milk (preferably organic)
300mL single cream (preferably organic)
Vanilla bean, or a good splash of vanilla extract
6 medium-large free-range eggs
100-110g caster sugar (the organic golden is delicious! Use the upper level if you like it sweeter.)
Nutmeg, if desired.
Method
1. Preheat oven to 200 degrees C conventional, 180 fan-forced. Prepare a 1.5L ovenproof dish or ring mould: the original recipe suggests buttering it, but I never bother. Instead, stand it inside a larger ovenproof dish, on an oven tray. Fill the outer dish with water to halfway up the sides of the inner dish. Old Pyrex dishes are perfect.
2. In a 2L pan, heat the milk and cream together. Split the vanilla bean (if using) with a sharp knife and scrape out the seeds: drop seeds and bean into milk. Stir occasionally to prevent milk sticking to pan.
3. Crack all the eggs, whole, into a medium bowl. Add sugar. Beat together with fork, whisk or hand-held beaters until the sugar is dissolved and egg mix well incoporated.
4. When the milk is starting to simmer, use a ladle or cup to scoop about 100mL into the egg mixture. Beat in well. Repeat twice more, until the egg mixture is starting to warm. Stirring as you do, pour the egg mixture into the milk still on the hob. Turn off the heat, but continue to stir until thoroughly incorporated. The custard will start to thicken a little as you stir.
5. Pour the custard mixture into the inner dish.Grate nutmeg over the top if using. Lift the tray carefully, so the water does not slosh, and place in middle of oven. Bake for about 50 mins. Test by giving the tray a jiggle: the custard should just be set: it will wobble in the middle, but not be liquid. Remove from oven and remove from water bath soon after: if left in it will continue to cook and the outside can become over tough. Can be served straight away hot, or left to cool to near room temperature and then refrigerated, covered, for a minimum of an hour to serve cool.
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I vividly remember my mother preparing pressed tongue for Christmas - curled into my grandmother's aluminium cooking pot, covered with an old enamel army plate and weighted down with the granddad's cast iron shoe last...
I'd make it myself, but you can't get the equipment these days ;)
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Tuppence Beresford, on the other hand loves it, and she is a wonderful fictional creation!
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The baked custard came out of a memory. My grandparents had one cook who did an amazing one, and I fiddled with the original recipe until it matched my memory of the taste.
You call this cuisine you're rediscovering 'retro'...
There's a reason I am forever adverting friends to
http://www.greatbritishkitchen.co.uk/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1
and
http://thefoody.com/mrsbeeton.html
Re: You call this cuisine you're rediscovering 'retro'...
I am liking the experimenting, though! The majority of my pudding repertoire is steamed puddings and cakes, with the occasional ice-cream and sorbet. I do make a good pouring custard (and a good ice-cream base custard), but it had been years since I tried a baked one.
The original recipe called for just milk and about half the sugar, and was quite disappointing, I had to stew some fruit to perk it up. But going wild with my 21st century fats and sugars led to a very satisfactory conclusion!
My old bean dish was far more down the baked beans path and needed quite the dollop of vinegar, which made it all too acidic for me as a main meal. This one I can guzzle cheerfully!
Thank you very much for the links, I can see myself losing a great deal of time there.
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It's also good if you sprinkle a little caster sugar over it after it's been in the oven for a while: gives it a little caramel crust. (Yes, I did discover this through clumsiness rather than design.)
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*ponders*
My world for a blow torch. :D
(I buy organic raw sugar, which is readily available now in both Woolies and Coles generic brands, and stick it in the blender for a few seconds if I need caster sugar - I find it saves money and I prefer the taste of raw these days)
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Custards are very easy, the only thing to worry about is curdling if you add the eggs wrongly or heat too quickly. You can get around this in several ways depending on the recipe. If it's one where you heat the milk and cream, then add the eggs, add some of the milk mix into the egg mix first to bring it up to temperature, beating all the time, then pour the egg mix into the rest of the milk.
If you do everything over the hob, either have some cold water in the sink and take the pan off the hob and put it into the cold water and beat briskly at the first sign of curdling, or take it off the hob and add a good big dollop of cream (double cream is better) and beat thoroughly to reincorporate.
The sugar tip is a great one! And I agree, the extra molasses in the golden sugar really adds an extra dimension of taste. And QF's tip below is excellent. If you have a gas griller, you can turn it up to high and flash the tops underneath it, too, but it is hard to time.
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But I also found the MOST BASIC recipe for duck egg sponge cake, so I may try that first, because simple is my first, last and middle names. :D
*smooch*
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I need to work n a good rice pud. Should probably learn at the feet of feryl next time I am up the mountain. And shepherd's pie! I haven't made one in ages! What a good idea!
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A note from Sorrel
(Anonymous) 2010-10-10 01:06 am (UTC)(link)Re: A note from Sorrel
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Also, what is caster sugar? I'm a fair hand at cooking these days, but I've never heard of it.
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And yes, polenta would be a great addition! I'll give it a go!
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And Mmmmmmmm, Alliums ...
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(Anonymous) 2010-10-11 07:24 am (UTC)(link)Chop and add to COLD pan with the oil. This way it cooks more slowly, but thoroughly, and it's almost impossible to burn. I discovered this by accident and I now swear by it.
Burnt garlic is nasty, but can happen easily if you toss it in oil that's too hot.
Cheers, Charlotte
PS: And offal is awful!