The Country Kitchen

The Country Kitchen by Jocasta Innes was published in the late 1970’s. It could have been written today. Of course instead of drawings of techniques, today there would be photographs including detailed designs of Innes’ farm kitchen. Like many English kitchens there is a large Aga stove, multiple cupboards and tables and one tiny refrigerator, roughly the size that one finds in most college dorm rooms.

Jocasta Innes wanted to revive the kind of kitchen arts that would have been very familiar in the late 1800’s. Make sausage, cheese, preserves, and bread. Drying meat and mushrooms, curing ham, smoking kippers and brewing beer. As you can see, this is the stuff of many current cookbooks.

Innes is a classic and straightforward writer. Her instruction is precise, without being didactic. She encourages, offers advice, and forgives mistakes. Innes makes her own crowdie or cottage cheese, but you can make it with a commercial cottage cheese.

Spiced Cheese Loaf

225 g (8oz) crowdie or cottage cheese
3 egg yolks
25 g (1 oz) butter
4 tablespoons sugar
tiny pinch each ground cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence
1 thick slice stale white bread


Sieve or blend the cheese until smooth, and mix with beaten egg yolks, softened butter, sugar, spices and vanilla. Grate or grind the bread (minus crust) in an electric grinder into fine crumbs, then mix well with the cheese mixture. Pour into a well buttered glass or pottery oven or soufflé dish. Grate a little nutmeg over the top and bake for 45 minutes at 190 C (375 F, Mark 5). Eat hot from the dish or turn out when warm.

As a child I hated cottage cheese, but I learned to love it as an adult. This is a great dish to “disguise” cottage cheese and turn it into something special.

Picnics

Picnics by Viola Johnstone is from a series of small, British cookbooks published in the late 50’s and early 60’s. I adore this series, but frankly, many of the recipes are so vague, you need to know how to cook in order to accomplish the recipe. Then some are really straightforward such as the section on sandwiches. It lists 23 types of sandwiches, including eggs mashed with mayonnaise, chicken mashed with mayonnaise, sardines mashed with Worcester, crab meat mashed with Worcester and on and on.

There are many recipes that include aspic, which has a short shelf life in the out of doors! Unless you are traveling with a refrigerator, or the picnic is right out the kitchen door, I can’t imagine making a lot of aspics for a picnic.

Here is a simple salad that even the most unaccomplished cook could pull off -- and be a hit.

French Dressing

1 part of wine vinegar or lemon juice, 3 parts of olive oil, dry mustard, salt and pepper.

A basic French dressing in composed of the above ingredients. Some people advocate the addition of a little sugar, but this is not included in a correct and traditional French dressing.
Put the mustard, salt and pepper into a bowl and stir in the vinegar or lemon juice. Add the olive oil and mix well. Transfer to a jar with a top which will screw on tightly.
Travel the dressing—which will prove invaluable at almost every picnic –in the jar, and shake it well before pouring on any salad.

Salad of Baby Broad Beans

This is a delicate salad when broad beans are young and just in season –but for salad purposes they must be fresh and neither frozen of tinned.
Shell the beans and cook for a few minutes—according to age and size—in boiling salted water. Drain, cool and transfer to a container. When required serve tossed in a little French dressing which has been traveled in a screw-top jar.

I love picnic cookbooks, but I have yet to find one that makes me all excited. Perhaps because I am more interested in how to package the food and not what to make. Most anything becomes “picnic” food when you walk it out the door.

Jams, Preserves & Pickles

My friend, Harry Lowe, made a meatloaf last week which spurred a conversation about ketchup. And for that matter, meatloaf. I am not that fond of meatloaf sauced with that bright red layer of ketchup.

We talked about whether the ketchup was spicy enough. Perhaps the next meatloaf should incorporate chili sauce instead of ketchup. Then we started talking about ketchup itself. I told him that a lot of canning books had recipes for ketchup that ran the gamut from bland to spicy. For every ketchup recipe, however, there always seemed to be a corollary recipe for Mushroom Ketchup.

Mushroom ketchup is not something you never see on the shelf, yet recipes for it abound. So, someone out there must have enjoyed it. I began to look at ketchup recipes, but found the directions for mushroom ketchup more interesting.


Rosemary Hume and Muriel Downes published a slim volume called Jams, Preserves & Pickles. It is a basic little book with rather British directions for cooking the fruits, then weighing the fruits and measuring them for the ratio to add sugar. It seems complicated, but it is an accurate way to control the ratio in canning. The book also features a recipe for Mushroom Ketchup. I have read it several times, but I couldn’t think of it slathered on French fries.

Mushroom Ketchup

Weigh some dry open mushrooms and allow 1 1/2 oz. salt to every pound. Break up the mushrooms and put in layers, sprinkled with salt in a stone jar and leave 3-4 days. Stir and press from time to time. At the end of this time press well, cover the jar and put in a cool oven for 2-3 hours. Strain through a fine nylon sieve. Gently press to extract all the juice. To each quart of liquid allow:
1/2 oz. allspice: 1/2 root ginger: 2 blades of mace: pinch of cayenne (optional): 1 shallot, chopped.
Put all into a muslin bag. Put the liquid and spice into a pan and simmer 2-3 hours until well reduced. Strain, put into proper sterilizing bottles and sterilize 15 minutes. This is a precautionary measure. Some red wine in the proportion of a quarter of the quantity of mushroom liquor May be added and boiled with the liquid, or a few drops of brandy may be added to each pint.

I am going to try this and see if anyone asked, "Do you want mushroom ketchup with those fries?"

The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food

Judith Jones is probably the most famous foodie who didn’t spend her life in a kitchen cooking. Well, actually, she spent a lot of time in a kitchen cooking, but her claim to fame in not cooking, but publishing people who did cook. Judith Jones is the editor who brought Madhur Jaffery, Marcella Hazen, Ed Giobbi, and Edna Lewis to the reading public, but there were more.

She brought Elizabeth David to America, a feat that proved to be quite difficult. It seems, Jones wanted the stuffing set to fill zucchini, to fill just the zucchini and not make triple the amount needed. She wanted them to be zucchini and not courgettes, after all, it was America. David didn't see the problem and she knew courgettes were much more pleasant sounding than zucchini. She wrote to Jones:

“Inconsistencies are inevitable in a cookery book and preferable, I think myself, to the absurdities brought about by overzealousness in the matter of liberal renderings.
I don’t think one does any harm in crediting one’s readers with a little imagination and knowledge of their own.”

Is it any wonder I love Elizabeth David! Knopf told Jones to reject the book if David refused her changes, but Jones realized what a wonder it was and she published it with all of Elizabeth David’s “inconsistencies.”

There was someone else she edited … let me think… oh, yes, Julia Child. If you went to the movies this month you know this story by heart.

James Beard, Judith Jones, and Julia Child

Jones was a bit of a cookbook writer on her own (and with her husband, Evan). So when Jones set out to write a biography, it was destined to be a winner. The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food is just that. Part biography, part love story, part cookbook and all totally fascinating.

As for the cookbook part, Judith Jones first tasted this sauce in a bistro on the Left Bank. It was spread on sliced cold meat. She loved it and searched around for a recipe. She never found one she truly liked, so she devised her own.

Sauce Gribiche for Cold Lamb or Other Meats

1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon wine vinegar
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon capers
2 cornichons, chopped in small pieces
1 hard-boiled egg, chopped fine
Freshly ground pepper
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley

Mix all the ingredients together. If you’re not using the sauce right away, hold back on the parsley, and mix that in at the last. This is a sauce you have to taste so you can adjust the seasoning to get the balance right. Adjust accordingly to what your palate tells you.

See the movie if you must (you must) and while you are out, pick up a copy of The Tenth Muse.

The Ethnomusicologists’Cookbook

There is no doubt that I love food. My other passion is music. Mix them both together and you get -- The Ethnomusicologists’Cookbook. Sean Williams contacted a series of ethnomusicologists and asked them to gather recipes for a meal from the country where they were doing research. He also asked, quite naturally, for a list of music to accompany the meal as well as some additional reading material.

I was surprised to see that collards are a popular dish in many areas around the world. It is also interesting that every culture really wants to eat something sweet at the end of the meal.

I chose to share a dish from Kenya. I really love beans and this was something I just never thought of. This recipe features plain old kidney beans. When we think of kidney beans in the U. S. we think of them as an ingredient in chili, but not in other preparations. This is a lovely way to take a very common, plain ingredient and make it unique.

Maharagwe Ya Nasi
(Kidney Beans in Coconut)

4 c. fresh or canned coconut milk
4 c. cooked kidney beans
1 t. salt
1/2 t. allspice

[The recipe explains the long process of making your own coconut milk, but we encourage you to buy it in cans.]

soak 1 1/3 lb. kidney beans for 24 hours or use 4 c. canned beans. Boil with water, 1 t. salt and 1/2 t. allspice until soft. When nearing desired softness, add 4 c. coconut milk. Stir in and simmer until a thick cream forms around the beans.

This is a great recipe to clean out the larder. There are several sites out there challenging people to eat only the food you have on hand for a week. This is a great one to try, even if you have to buy some kidney beans or coconut milk.

Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices

Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices was written by George and Berthe Herter. George was the heir to the Herter sporting goods chain. While many people remember the sporting goods, everyone who reads this cookbook remembers its unique take on just about everything. It is one of those truly individual cookbooks hearkening back to the turn of the century when you got recipes for food with recipes for cleaners and a few etiquette tips.

There are many weird and wonderful recipes with some long and elaborate stories. For instance, did you know Wyatt Earp was a great cook whose specialities included pickled buffalo tongue (alas there is no recipe for this), buffalo liver and morning doves. He claims that the best shot he ever made was taking out 9 doves with one shot.

We are told to make mayonnaise as it cannot be bought in a grocery store. “That concoction they sell labeled mayonnaise are not even remotely similar to real mayonnaise.”

There is no other cookbook that tells you how to make puff pastry and how to use tomatoes to alleviate skunk order.

We are not told why Blanche Dupont was in Belgium or if there really was a "Blanche Dupont", but the Herters think this is quite marvelous.

Glace Blanche Dupont

This is a recent invention and a great one made in 1942 by Blanche Dupont in Belgium. It is one of the greatest known cooking tricks.

Take one cup of corn syrup, mix with 1/2 cup of water. Put in a pot and bring to a boil. Leave cool until lukewarm.
Brush or pour over the top of fruit cakes. This mixture gives them a rich clear glass like glaze and brings out their color.
Brush or pour over doughnuts. It gives them a beautiful glaze and taste.
Mix 1/8 level teaspoon of ground cloves or a few drops of cherry flavoring and brush over fried or baked ham and fried or cold Spam or brush over similar canned meats. Mix in a few drops of orange flavoring and brush over pieces of tame or wild duck or geese it makes them really delicious. Put in a few drops of peppermint flavorings into the mixture and brush over the tops of brownie cookies. Males them into a great delicacy instead of just another cookie.
Brush over the tops of apple turnovers, horns or lady locks just as it is. Pour over squash and sweet potatoes just as it is.

I am not sure I would agree that a simple syrup is the greatest known cooking trick, but I’m willing to give it a try. Do you think the Krispy Kream people read this cookbook when they developed their glaze?

Finally, the cookbook ends with instruction on what to do in case of an atomic attack. The good news is we have been told that red pepper is good for radiation, in fact, “People that use considerable red pepper in their foods are almost immune to atomic radiation except in sever form.” So, if you are staying awake at night worrying about North Korea and the bomb, stock up on red pepper.

Fresh From the Farmers’ Market

Fresh From the Farmers’ Market by Janet Fletcher is a rather self-explanatory cookbook. Fletcher provides recipes from produce one finds at a farmers’ market. Fletcher has the perfect background for this. She once cooked at Chez Panisse. In her introduction to the book, Alice Waters quotes the classicist and farmer, Victor Davis Hanson a passionate farmer. As passionate as he is, Hanson equates farmer’s markets with petting zoo. While Waters concedes that farmers’ markets alone will not save the family farm, but patronizing farmers’ markets will surely increase the demand for fresher produce. It certainly can’t hurt!

Fletcher’s introduction speaks to the need for the farmers’ market. The average consumer hasn’t a clue when and where their food comes from. Where the supermarket shopper makes a list and checks it twice, at a farmers' market, the decision making process happens on site. The food is fresh and needs to be eaten within a few days, preferably “that” day.

Today in my garden, there are filet beans and some really small turnips. The cold and wet weather did not contribute to a great crop of turnips. They have been few and small. The beans have been really nice, but the bush beans have been so beaten into the ground that they need to be washed like 4 times. But once everything gets picked and washed here’s what we’re making…

green beans with turnips

1 1/2 tablespoons unsalted butter
3/4 pound baby turnips, thickly peeled and cut in half’s, quarters or sixths, depending on size
salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 shallots, minced
3/4 pounds green filet beans(haricots verts), ends trimmed
1 tablespoon, minced Italian parsley

Melt butter in a large skillet over moderately low heat. Add turnips, season with salt and pepper and toss to coat with butter. Cover and cook, shaking skillet occasionally, until turnips are just tender and lightly browned in spots, 10 to 12 minutes. Uncover, add shallots and sauté 2 minutes to soften shallots
While turnips are cooking, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat. Add beans and cook until crisp-tender, about 5 minutes. Drain well, pat dry, then transfer to a skillet with turnips and toss to coat with seasonings. Taste and add more salt and pepper, if necessary. (Green beans need lots of salt.) Add parsley, toss again and serve.

I can't wait to get out there and start picking!

60-Minute Gourmet

I know you’ve heard this before, but really, 60-Minute Gourmet is one of my favorite cookbooks. It was one of my first cookbooks. I have cooked numerous recipes and go back to it again and again. My first copy of the book was “cooked” to bits.

Technically, the cookbook is entitled: The New York Times 60-Minute Gourmet. The book began as a series in the New York Times. The esteemed food writer, Craig Claiborne, wrote in the Times that there was only one restaurant that lived up to the elegance taught at the Hotel School in Switzerland, Le Pavillion. It was shocking to all those New Yorkers who felt they were the cradle of culinary civilization. To accompany this article, Claiborne went to meet the chef, Pierre Franey.

As The New York Times expanded their “living” section, they hired Pierre Franey to develop a series of gourmet recipe that could be completed within an hour. The series was so popular, it spawned a book which, no big surprise, was a New York Times best-seller. After being out of print for many years, it was re-issued in 2000, 4 years after Franey died.

This recipe is a summer staple. I don’t just make this recipe, I multiply it four-fold.

Poulet aux Nouilles Froides Façon de Virginia Lee
(Virginia Lee’s chicken and cold noodles with spicy sauce)

1 large chicken breast
6 ounces egg noodles
1/4 cup sesame paste
3 tablespoons water
2 teaspoons hot chili oil, optional
3 tablespoons light soy sauce
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon plus 1 tablespoon sesame oil
1/4 cup peanut or corn oil
2 tablespoons chopped garlic

1. bring about 6 cups of water to the boil and add the breast. Do not add salt. When the water returns to the boil, simmer about 10 to 15 minutes. Remove the breast but save the broth.
2. Bring the broth to the boil and add the noodles. Cook, stirring occasionally, about 5 to 7 minutes. Drain and run under cold water until chilled. Drain thoroughly and add to a mixing bowl. Add the teaspoon of sesame oil and toss.
3. cutting with a knife or using fingers, cut or pull the chicken into fine shreds.
4. Add the sesame paste to a bowl, add the water, stirring. Add the chili oil, soy sauce, wine vinegar, the tablespoon sesame oil, peanut oil, and garlic.
5. Arrange the noodles on a serving dish. Cover with the chicken and spoon the sauce over.

First, let me just say the chili oil is NOT optional. Secondly, the dish is greatly improved with the addition of chopped scallions. Give this a try in the hot weather and you will be pleasantly surprised.

More Caviare & More Candy

Alice Martineau or Mrs. Philip Martineau as she was sometimes known, wrote many books, including several cookery books. More Caviare & More Candy as a title gives you really all you need to know about Alice Martineau's style. Who doesn’t love caviare and candy! The truly wonderful jacket features an illustration by J. Gower Parks. I’m not real sure I want to eat that fish, but it is quite darling.

Alice Martineau offers some general cooking hints that are as good today as they were 70 years ago.

If they will patiently read these ‘Hints’ they will learn not to slam the oven door on a sponge-cake, or the shock will so frighten the fellow that it will achieve ‘that sinking feeling’ and down it will fall, to emerge a heavy sodden mass!

Not to roll their dough backwards and forwards till it is like leather, but to roll it gently but firmly away from them once, twice, thrice in making pastry.

Always add a spoonful of seed tapioca into a clear soup. It gives it a glutinous velvety feeling.

Always add a little sugar to vegetable soup such as tomato.

Always mash potatoes with hot milk, not cold.

Words to live by in the kitchen and frankly so nice to read the word "thrice" used in a sentence. Here are two of Alice Martineau’s recipes featuring a tinned ingredient. Tinned food was all the rage in the 1930's.

One for tinned soup:

Tomato Hurry Soup

One tin of tomato soup heated, garlic, two cups of milk (or half cream), grated cheese half cup (Gruyere). Seasoning. Dissolve in double saucepan, add the tomato soup last, mixed with cream. Enough for six persons.

And one for tinned caviare:

Caviare en Chemise

Bake some good-sized potatoes (not too large for caviare is expensive), cut the tops so as to make a lid. Scoop out some of the inside and fill with caviare.
Simple but highly appreciated.

What more can one say!

Cooking with the Two Fat Ladies

If forced to pick my favorite cooking show of all time, it would be The Two Fat Ladies. There was something magical about the style and banter of Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright. They had a tremendous love of food, evident from their rather noticeable girth. They always had a good story. Their food was as rich and substantial as they were.

Alas, Jennifer Paterson died. As noted in an earlier post, she died as she lived, drinking champagne and indulging in caviar and fois gras. An unapologetic smoker, she resigned herself to the the fact that she had greatly contributed to her demise, but she wouldn’t have had it any other way.


The girls loved their food and weren’t afraid of dispatching the food themselves. Here is an exchange between the Two Fat Ladies over peacock.

JENNIFER: I ate peacock once. It’s rather like pheasant.

CLARISSA: It is a bit. I once shot one in my sprouting broccoli. It was an accident, of course. Rabbits were always getting into my garden, so I used to throw up the kitchen window and shoot them from there. But one day, what I thought was a rabbit turned out to be a peacock.

JENNIFER: Whose peacock was it?

CLARISSA: It belonged to the people next door.

JENNIFER: They must have been pleased!

CLARISSA: Well, I asked them to dinner and we had a rather good bottle of wine. Then they said, this is very interesting, what is it?” Well, I said, I didn’t buy it at Harrod’s.

There is a story about the woman who owned my house before me. Opal was well known in Shirley for hunting from the kitchen like Clarissa. In fact there is a small hole in the porch screen that is rumored to be the opening for Opal’s gun.


Here is an uncharacteristic vegetarian dish.

Wild Mushroom Pancakes

FOR THE BATTER:

1 1/4 cups self-rising flour
2 eggs
7/8 cup milk
salt and freshly ground pepper


3/4 pound fresh wild mushrooms
4 tablespoons butter
oil


Make the batter, adding seasoning to taste, and leave to stand for at least 1 hour.

Melt the butter in a frying pan and cook the mushrooms until they are wilted and all liquid has evaporated. Set aside to cool.

Mix together the batter and mushrooms. Heat a frying pan, put in a smidgen of oil, and fry pancakes about 2 inches in diameter. Eat.

So, make up a batch of these pancakes, cook up a big steak and pop the top on nice bottle of champagne and toast the memory of the TWO fat ladies.