Igenlode Wordsmith

NB Mordaunt (the son of Milady by her second husband) in Twenty Years After is played by the Count of Monte Cristo :-D
(a.k.a. Viktor Avilov, evidently making the most of his sinister looks)
I recognised him almost immediately, whereas I'm not sure I should necessarily have recognised d'Artagnan playing Fernand (a.k.a. Mikhail Boyarsky) if I hadn't been primed to await his appearance!

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I had yet another go at the 1920s rhubarb pie that I keep optimistically attempting, and this time I made a full-size one with three sticks of rhubarb and a whole egg, but only the juice of a tiny bargain lemon (about the size of a lime: they were on special offer, and since I mainly use them for salad dressing it seemed a good home for fruit that would otherwise be wasted due to being 'sub-standard'). But I really do think the baking instructions on this one must be wrong.

( Accidental success )

(It wasn't actually pure butter this time round, which might or might not have been significant; in my periodic check on the margarine shelves I discovered that there actually *was* a margarine product that was made of local vegetable oil instead of the ubiquitous cheap (and destructive) imported palm oil, just as they all used to be back before palm oil got pushed as the next big industry ingredient. Flora has rebranded itself as "now free from palm oil" and "made with natural ingredients" (the two are not in any way synonymous; palm oil *is* natural, just as organic food contains 'minerals'!) and I felt it deserved to be rewarded for the effort, so I bought some. ( Read more... )

It's the time of year for the first (very expensive) rhubarb, and I tried out another of the rhubarb recipes from the Cold Sweets section of the 1920s cookery leaflet: Rhubarb and Tapioca Mould. Since I haven't seen any tapioca for years I used semolina instead, on the grounds that "We'll Eat Again" contains a recipe for 'fruit semolina' which is very similar -- presumably in order to save on the [wartime rationed] milk one would normally require for a semolina pudding.

You simply cook up your rhubarb with half its weight in sugar, a quarter of its weight in tapioca (or semolina), a little knob of butter, a little ginger, fresh or grated, and sufficient water to produce a thick pudding. ( Read more... )

And... again my alarm failed to go off in time for me to get to market, after successfully ringing every time for a couple of weeks (but alas, the market was closed last week). I'd started to think that whatever-it-was had stopped happening :-(

My heating has been coming on all this week, and I was finally stung into completing the Great Changeover, having as usual been making do for several weeks with just the thermal underwear, by the sight of a hard white frost all over the roofs! So I am currently wearing my really warm dressing-gown instead of the summer one plus a rug round my shoulders...
I discovered from the manual that the flashing bar which had appeared on the left-hand side of my fancy wireless thermostat system was a low battery indicator( Read more... )


I improvised a 'chocolate beetroot upside-down pear pudding' by combining the recipes for wartime beetroot pudding and 1960s upside-down pineapple pudding (and adding an ounce of cocoa). The beetroot pudding is made with half an ounce of fat, an ounce of sugar, and '6oz wheatmeal flour' to 4oz grated beetroot, and tastes precisely as chewy and uninteresting as one might imagine :-p But I thought adding the chopped pear and 3 tablespoons of golden syrup (which took *forever* to extract from a squeezy bottle) might liven it up.

( Read more... )

My alarm clock has failed to go off for the last three days in a row, with assortedly unfortunate consequences. ( Read more... )
Edit: my alarm clock, re-set as a test for 10am, has just gone off again, precisely as happened yesterday when it was already too late... so I simply have no idea what is happening, other than that I evidently cannot rely on it :-(



I made a 'Bread meringue' from the "120 Ways of using Bread" leaflet; this is basically bread and milk simmered together and then sweetened and enriched with egg yolk and dried fruit, and I suspect it should have been cooked for longer (I note that the Chocolate Bread Pudding took a long time to set). Like many of these 1930s recipes it uses an *unsweetened* meringue topping, i.e. just beaten egg white piled on top of the filling. I was a bit sceptical about this, as I had always assumed that meringue was simply spun-sugar held in shape while it dried out, but in fact it did hold up without any sugar 'skeleton' to give it body. It does not, however, taste of anything to speak of!

I also used the Victory Sponge recipe from "We'll Eat Again" to improvise a raspberry pudding, using windfall apples and some very squishy supermarket raspberries. ( Read more... )

This month I was given a bag of real quinces (i.e. not japonica fruit).

I made Patchwork Orchard Pie (a bit dominated by the pear -- I scaled it down and possibly didn't get the proportions right), Lamb and Quince Tagine (first using the vegetarian version with roasted squash and then making it again with some actual mutton -- disappointingly, it tasted exactly the same as lamb so far as I could tell!), Apple and Quince Crumble, putting the slices of quince in the oven first to pre-soften them, Apple and Quince Cobbler, which is basically the same thing with scones on top instead of crumble, and Quince and Orange Compote and Lamb With Quince from It's Raining Plums.
( Read more... )
In terms of historical cookery I made a Norfolk Million Pie -- 'million', 'malin', 'meloun' etc. apparently being the older term for all hard-skinned fruits from the durian to the pumpkin ('pompion') before later horticulturalists decided that only what had previously been known as the 'musk-melon' should be counted as a true melon!

I also made a rhubarb tansey, using a combination of all sorts of 'tansey' recipes from various sources, most of which, like me, do not include the actual herb.... It is basically a custard, which may or may not be thickened with breadcrumbs to make it go further. The Million Pie is a recipe worth saving for the next time I have a marrow, or even a pumpkin -- the leftover mixture was a lot more successful in tiny pastry cases than my attempt at pumpkin pie, and it is more economical as well -- but I shan't bother with the tansey again.

I made a Sultana Pudding from the 1920s cookery book ("500 Cookery Hints and Recipes: This Book Will Save You Money"). Unfortunately the recipe wasn't too specific about how much liquid to add ("2 small cups of milk"), and I was a bit doubtful as to the results when it originally went into the bowl; I used an ordinary half-pint mug about three-quarters full, but this was clearly too much milk. After three and a half hours' steaming the pudding was still liquid in the middle, and microwaving it for a further three minutes didn't make a lot of difference, although the set bits around the outside were definitely tasty.

In the end I simply dished it out with a spoon and ate it liquid. It was extremely good with cold yoghurt, having a delicious caramel flavour which may have been due to the sultanas and/or to my having used evaporated milk (albeit diluted with two-thirds water). Using ground cornmeal instead of the recommended ground rice may also have had an effect — but polenta is supposed to set solid, after all!( Read more... )

( Recipe )

I had a sudden craving for sausages and baked beans after watching Sims help themselves to "franks 'n beans" :-D

And thanks to half a tin of tomatoes left over in the fridge and some crab eye beans I'd frozen in their cooking water, about five hours later I did in fact achieve a reasonable facsimile of the tinned article, although I had to add an extra teaspoon of treacle and half-teaspoon of salt at the end to get it to taste right (demonstrating all the claims about baked beans being high in sugar and salt!)( Read more... )

I also made an Apple Shape from my 1930s cookery leaflet (under the Cold Sweets heading). It is basically simply cooking apples boiled up with sugar and spices into what amounts in practice to a dish of apple marmalade; 2lb of sugar to 3lb of apples boiled for a measured 50 minutes, with a muslin bag of cinnamon, cloves and lemon rind.

( Read more... )

I went elderberry-picking on Friday, having noticed some on my way home the previous weekend. I got fairly thoroughly nettle-stung around the ankles despite the fact that the path had been recently strimmed back (if not for one bow-shot on either side, than at least for six feet), but the harvest was disappointing; a lot of the berries had already gone over, and were withered on the bough or else had been picked off/knocked off already by birds, and the remaining sprays had a significant proportion of unripe fruit.

The worse the quality of the berry sprays, the slower it is to strip them off, since you can't just draw a fork down the whole thing in order to scrape free the ripe fruit, but have to cherry-pick the good berries while avoiding the unripe ones (and in particular the over-ripe and shrivelled ones). I got two smallish bags full, and spent Friday evening cleaning the fruit from the first batch. I ended up with about enough elderberries to fill a pie-dish.


( It's ALIVE!!! )

( Read more... )

Another very successful recipe from the "120 ways of using Bread" vintage leaflet: 'Tomato Cheese Custard', which doesn't sound frightfully appealing but came out very tasty and sustaining, and quite attractive too :-)

It's effectively a sort of simplified soufflé which uses fresh breadcrumbs as thickening; I forgot to "well butter" my dish before putting in the tomatoes and didn't bother to skin them, but it still came out successfully. By halving all the quantitities I just about had enough bread left from my crumbled sourdough roll to create some very small fingers of hot buttered toast as accompaniment; one roll creates about a mugful of breadcrumbs, depending on size, which is more than one would think. ( Read more... )

I tried making the potato duff, and I'm afraid it tasted exactly as one would expect from a dish of Duchess potatoes with dried fruit stirred in :-(

You couldn't detect the nutmeg or strawberry jam, or even the three tablespoons of sugar and the lemon zest and juice; it just resembled unseasoned mashed potato.

I put the remainder back in the oven to cook some more, to see if it improved when dried out to something more resembling a potato pan scone...