Retro Recipe: German onion tart

 By: Mrs Robot

In my adventures in vintage, I rarely make it as far as the 1980s. However, it's a jolly interesting decade food-wise, and the recent BBC documentary series The 80s With Dominic Sandbrook made me reach for one of our inherited cookbooks, Mary Berry's Complete Television Cookbook. Sandbrook went on and on about Delia Smith in the first programme in the series, but we're definitely on Team Berry here at Casa Mechanica.

You can tell Mary Berry's Complete Television Cookbook is from the 1980s. In the section on kitchen equipment, it states, 'Microwave ovens are a luxury, but if you can run to one you will find it marvellously useful.' Nowadays most people see them as pretty much essential, and look at us askance when Mr Robot and I say we don't have one. The recipes don't feel fantastically 80s - there's nothing particularly nouveau - though the Asian recipes are more adventurous and feel much more authentic than the ones I've got in British cookbooks from earlier decades.

The recipe I decided to make, German Onion Tart, is somewhere between a quiche and a pizza. Pizza, because of the yeast-leavened base, quiche for the filling of eggs and onion, topped off with bacon. The base actually seemed easier to make than pizza dough, as it didn't need anywhere near as much kneading. I was impressed by how quickly it came together, though I rolled it out too thinly when I assembled the tart and it cooked too fast, leaving me with a darker pastry-bread case than I'd expected.

The filling is very economical, with loads of onions but only three eggs and a sprinkling of bacon. Okay, there's half a tub of double cream in there too. But still. It's very substantial and mostly onions, which are cheap in autumn. The recipe also includes an optional teaspoon of caraway seeds, which I put in as if you're going to make something that's supposed to be German, it might as well taste properly German.

The end result? Highly edible. I probably had the oven too high as the filling wasn't completely set when the case was cooked, but because the onions are softened in advance it was all perfectly edible. 'Carbonara pie' was Mr Robot's verdict. I'll give this another go at some point, perhaps replacing the bacon with sliced frankfurters. Good for autumn evenings.

Retro recipe: Pork in Cider

By: Mrs Robot

Traditional cookery. It's rarely pretty, but it can be very tasty, and this pork in cider is no exception.

I've never seen any food bloggers refer to Susan Campbell's book English Cookery New and Old online. I love old cookery books, and this is from 1981, but looking back for traditional recipes. Campbell wrote several cookbooks in the 1970s but seems to have been largely forgotten as a cookery writer - though she's now the country's leading expert on walled kitchen gardens, so she hasn't lost her love of British food history. This book is divided into menus. Many recipes are preceded by a little paragraph explaining their origins or, if a recipe is 'new' rather than 'old', why it's being included in a book of English cookery.

The recipe that really caught my eye in this book was 'Grassy Corner', a pudding served at Cambridge May Weeks just after the Great War. It's a strange cross between a trifle and a charlotte, and as I love trifle and between-the-wars history, it appeals doubly to me. However as that serves 12 it'll have to wait until we've got plenty of guests coming. Instead, Pork in Cider was what I made. Layers of pork slices, separated by a mixture of onions and mushrooms, splashed with cider then topped with a layer of cooking applees and cooked for a couple of hours before being topped with a mix of Double Gloucester cheese and breadcrumbs and baked to crisp, it's far from the most attractiive thing I've ever made. Oh, but it is good. The juices from the meat, apples, onions and mushrooms combine with the cider to make a delicious sauce that will go perfectly with mash and green veg. I'll definitely make it again.

Retro recipe: hot cross buns

By: Mrs Robot

I love hot cross buns. Even though I'm not religious, they're part of the food culture I've grown up with, so I try to eat them only around Easter time. Things can become boring if you have them whenever you want. That's not to say you shouldn't have something if you really want it, just that it's a shame if everything becomes commonplace and there's nothing to look forward to.

Despite loving hot cross buns, I'd never actually made them until this weekend. I started trying yeast cookery in 2015, and this year felt brave enough to tackle the buns. Also, I have been extraordinarily annoyed by shops bringing out nonsense variations like 'double chocolate hot cross buns.'* The recipe I used was from Julie Duff's book Cakes Regional and Traditional. Oddly, the recipe she gave didn't include the piped-on cross, but the buns in the photo in the book had clearly had a flour/water mixture piped on to make the cross shape. Luckily I'd seen enough other people making them to know that the decoration needed piping on. (Kavey's Hot Multicultural Buns being the most recent example.**)

However, I'm getting ahead of myself. I first attempted the buns on Good Friday and misread the instructions on the yeast, so added a teaspoonful instead of a tablespoonful. Oh dear. After several hours waiting for it to rise, I realised my error and the dough went in the bin. On Easter Sunday I tried again with the correct amount of yeast and, appropriately, this time they rose.

The buns turned out denser than the sort you get in the shops, though that could be because our house lacks sufficiently warm places to get a really good rise. They were also sweeter than shop-bought ones, possibly because of the sugar in the recipe, possibly because I overdid the glazing. I didn't mind that; they tasted fab and I think I will try to make baking hot cross buns something I do every Easter from now on.




*STOP MESSING AROUND WITH OUR TRADITIONS, YOU GITS. 
** This I do not class as messing around with tradition as it is taking something traditional and sharing it with everyone, as opposed to taking something traditional and throwing that tradition out of the window for the sake of chocolate.

Retro recipe: Tonight we're going to party like it's 1959...

By: Mrs Robot

It's no secret that I love vintage - or, as I generally call it, Old Tat. Back at the start of January my lovely friends Naomi and Zoe sent me a 1959 cookbook called Fun With Food: Planned Menus For All Occasions. It struck me as a book that might help out a housewife from a relatively humble background (or one who grew up on wartime rations), whose lifestyle has gone somewhat upmarket and is suddenly faced with hubby's boss coming for dinner. What to do?! Call on this little book by Nella Whitfield.

Tonight we tried one of the menus. It was supposed to be three courses, starting with strawberry cocktail, but I forgot to buy any strawberries. As it was essentially strawberries macerated in kirsch, served in glasses tarted up with either strawberry or lettuce leaves, I considered serving neat kirsch with a lettuce-leaf garnish, but thought better of it.

So, straight onto the chicken pie. The book called it chicken pie, but it also contained ham and, unusually, hard boiled eggs. You start by boiling the skin and bones with stock veg and a bay leaf for a couple of hours to make a stock, then put sliced egg in the bottom of a pie dish, pop chopped chicken and ham on top with some seasonings (including mace and a tiny bit of  grated lemon peel), top it up with stock, whack on a puff pastry lid and bake it.

Let's rewind there. 'Top it up with stock'. The recipe states three-quarters of a cup. I had my misgivings. It said nothing about flouring the chicken a little, so a nice gravy would be made during the cooking. However, I was sticking to the recipe for this, so in the stock went.

I baked the pie and it looked lovely, but when I dished up it was as I'd feared: the stock was still basically stock. Very tasty stock, but not the sort of thing I'd be prepared to include on the plate. I left it in the pie dish. The pie (served with cabbage and sweetcorn) tasted fine but not brilliant, and I couldn't help wondering how much of the flavour had leaked out into the stock. I'd make the pie again, but I'd flour the chicken slightly and use far less stock, just enough to keep it moist.

Pudding was 'Daisy Cream'. No daisies were harmed in the making of this dish. It was a jelly (jello) based dish. The recipe called for pineapple jelly but that wasn't available, so I settled for lemon. It was mixed with evaporated milk and finely-chopped pineapple and glace cherries. It's the sort of thing people laugh at nowadays, but it was actually pretty nice and, as Mr Robot pointed out, essentially a 1950s equivalent of pannacotta. I'll definitely leave the glace cherries out if I make it in future; they didn't introduce anything much flavour-wise, and my attempt at making cherry daisies for the top was lamentable.

So, it was an interesting meal. Which isn't to say it was bad; it didn't wow us but certain flavours, such as the seasoning in the pie, were much more sophisticated than I'd expected, less than a decade after the end of rationing. For its day, this was pretty posh fare to be eating at home. I'll definitely be trying more from the book as some of the puddings look quite good.

Afternoon tea - what a slog!

By: Mrs Robot

I've tried making afternoon tea* a number of times over the years, and have reached this conclusion: if you're actually cooking the things yourself, the more frequently you do it, the easier it gets. This is because you need a decent variety of items, which means baking an awful lot of different things from scratch. If you make it regularly, you can stick some things like scones (frozen baked) and pastry cases for tarts (frozen before cooking) in the freezer for next time, which reduces the work considerably. If you don't make it regularly, it can feel like a lot of work and a bit wasteful, though if you're very greedy, like Mr Robot and myself, you'll settle for eating a whole cake, a whole batch of scones, or all of whatever other baked goods you make.

This afternoon tea came about because Great British Bake-Off is on telly again and in Cake Week everyone had to make madeira cake for the signature challenge. It struck me that I had never made madeira cake, so decided to give it a go. Cake making is an 'interesting' thing in the House of Robots because all the temperature indicators have rubbed off our oven dial, and our oven thermometer has broken, so I simply have to guess what the temperature is. Anyway, my lemon one worked well, and had a decent crack along the top, which the Bake-Off judges insisted was essential. Perhaps it's because I used a recipe from an old volume of Beeton; I doubt she could control her oven to within 10 degrees either.

At the same time, I had a yearning for something baked and cheesy. It could have been cheese scones, but I decided to make Dorchester biscuits, a recipe from Mary Berry's Ultimate Cake Book. Basically butter, flour, cheese and nuts, they're the very antithesis of the current 'clean eating' trend and for that reason alone are well worth your time making. Dirty, dirty biscuits! Best eaten with an expression of utter bliss while sitting opposite someone who's bored you rigid with tales of quinoa and kale salads, I reckon. They're incredibly simple, and very addictive. No type of nut is specified, though I like peanuts with cheddar. If I'd used stilton – Berry recommends cheddar, but experimentation is a good thing – I'd prefer walnuts.

In a piece of truly awful planning, I didn't realise we'd all but run out of bread until I'd started making sandwiches (ham and chutney), so filled in the gaps with tomatoes cut in a waterlily shape, then filled with coils of ham and mayonnaise rosettes piped on top, and savoury eggs. I hardboiled the eggs, chopped them in half, removed the yolks, mashed the yolks with more mayonnaise and a bit of curry powder, then piped it all back into the eggs. Quel faff, as Holly Golightly might've said. They did taste nice, though. I put the whole lot on vintage pressed glass cake stands**. Job done.

And after all that baking and work, we demolished the whole lot in about 20 minutes. Maybe I'll have another go in about six months...


*We all know the difference between afternoon tea and high tea, don't we? The latter is a rustic meal, usually with a substantial hot element – the sort of thing the Famous Five seemed able to drop in and enjoy at random farmhouses. If it's a dainty affair, it's afternoon tea. 'High' refers to the time it was eaten; afternoon tea is the earlier meal, enjoyed by fine ladies in drawing rooms, whereas high tea would be had later and was the early evening meal rural workers would have when they came in from the field. People seem to confuse the two nowadays and it sends me into a ranty rage, it really does. British people, know your culture! Non-British people, stop dicking around with my culture! 

 ** You can get these absurdly cheap in charity shops. My tall one cost £3.

Retro Recipe: God Save the Queen (of Puddings)!

By: Mrs Robot

I was once entertained to hear an American food critic say you could mess about with the savoury side of food as much as you liked and British people would eat it, but don't ever mess with their puddings. It's true: we do love a good pud, from venerable old Christmas Pudding to a steamed golden syrup one, to what has to be the UK's current favourite, sticky toffee pudding, which is a bit of a johnny-come-lately having been invented around the 1970s. Now, British puddings are not like American pudding, which seems to refer solely to custardy or blancmangey things. Being a guttersnipe, I'll label anything sweet served towards the end of a meal 'pudding', but when I talk of 'a pudding', I'll mean the spongy sort. Queen of Puddings is a bit of an oddity, then, as it's got a custardy (but firm) base. On top of that goes a thin layer of red jam, then a pile of meringue.

This was an unusual thing for me to make as there's an unstated division of labour here at Casa Mechanica; I do pastry, he does meringues. But as Mr Robot had crossed the line when he wrestled with the Moroccan snake, I decided to give this a whirl. The recipe was from Katie Stewart's Cookery Book, a reprint of The Times Cookery Book. I was worried about including this entry in our 'Retro Recipes' section, but that book was first published over 40 years ago! Despite that, the book isn't at all dated, just incredibly useful.

I don't know why it's taken me so long to give this a go. I'd feared it would be tricky, but it's incredibly simple. I suppose separating eggs might seem difficult to some people if they've never tried it, but it's really easy. You use the yolks in the custard mixture, which you then soak the bread in, beat smooth, and bake. Once the bread-custard base is firm, you smear it with jam - we used a jar of raspberry bought at the Bakelite Museum on a recent trip to Devon - and then top with meringue. Bake it again for about 10 minutes and hey presto! Pudding is ready to serve.

As for the meringue... I did it! I've always been terrified of over-beating it and ending up with a collapsed mess, and that's been leading me to under-beat. This time I got it really stiff and the whole experience was much more satisfying (ooh, matron).

One thing that struck me was how economical the whole thing was, enabling you to feed about six people (erm, or two greedy ones) using just a few eggs, a thick slice of bread, some sugar and some jam. If you've got other things going in the oven anyway, it would be easy to pop the base in on a lower shelf at the same time, making maximum use of the heat. She may be called a Queen, but she's a Pauper at heart!

Retro Recipe: corned beef fritters

By Mrs Robot

When you think about it, the only reason people ate a ration book diet during the second world war was because they didn't have any option. Nonetheless, it seems to be a period people have great curiosity about, and when we were in Devon at the start of May I picked up a little book called Favourite Ration Book Recipes. One simple recipe was these corned beef fritters, which mainly consist of mashed potato and corned beef, plus some onion. They were very tasty, but one of the least-appetising-looking things I've cooked in a very long time. Bless him, Mr Robot ate his too.

Making the fritters was a simple matter of mashing everything together, and it's there that I suspect I went wrong: I overworked the mixture so it was very well blended but also extremely soft. (That said, it tasted pretty good at this stage.) The recipe called for a bit of milk, but I didn't add any, and even so the mixture was very moist. Chunkier bits of potato and beef would have had more texture, and might have fried up better. Also, the recipe said nothing about coating the patties with flour, which is something that I think might have improved the frying process, and might have stopped them sticking in the pan. Flour was rationed during the second world war, but bread was not, and breadcrumbs would have made a good alternative coating for the patties. I often turn leftover cottage pie into little mashcakes and they work really well, but these were too soft and attached themselves firmly to the frying pan.

As I had plenty of leftover mash, I fried up another onion with some cumin seeds, and worked it into the mash along with a finely-chopped green chilli, chopped fresh coriander and a little garam masala. This mixture was made into balls, dipped into a batter made of gram (chickpea) flour and water and deep fried. Much more satisfactory - and here's a photo, just to prove I can cook with leftover mash!

Retro recipe: Scalopine de Veau Linda

How much brandy do you need for flambeeing anyway?

By: Mrs Robot

You know that feeling when you first make something and you think, "This tastes like something I'd buy in a restaurant"? That's how we felt the first time I made Scalopine de Veau Linda.

Our copy of The Complete Hostess by Quaglino is in pretty good shape for its age!

The recipe comes from The Complete Hostess by Quaglino. Yes, the actual Quaglino, whose restaurant was the place to be seen in 1930s London and is still pretty swanky today. I picked up the book in Oxfam in the late 1990s. It cost £6.99, which was a lot for a secondhand book then, especially as I wasn't much of a cook, but I loved the 1930s deco styling. When I looked at it properly for the first time I was shocked to find that in most of the recipes, there were no quantities!

Sometimes the recipes were unhelpful in the extreme: Sole Dieppoise, for example, is simply "Poached. Cover with white wine sauce mixed with its reduce stock, and garnish Dieppoise." WHAT IS A GARNISH DIEPPOISE? If you don't know, Quaglino isn't going to tell you. On the other hand, Quaglino is very good at specifying things like a 1926 Lanson champagne (anyone want a kidney?), and as he discusses ingredients it really opens your eyes to the seasonality of foods in the 1930s, and to how hard it was to get certain things, even for the class of person who'd be using the book. Vintage port? Easy. Green pepper? Ooooooh, exotic!

First, prepare your veggies...

At least all the ingredients for Scalopine de Veau Linda are all stated, and the method easy enough to follow. Because it's so quick to make, I prepared the veggies for tonight's tea first: green beans, asparagus, and little bubble-and-squeak cakes. The latter were made from leftover new potatoes and savoy cabbage and carrot from a previous meal; the carrots had been braised with star anise, butter and sugar so were packed with an unusual flavour. All very easy to assemble.

Cream and butter. This is not for dieters.

As soon as the veggies were cooking I got my cast-iron frying pan really hot. I fried off seasoned veal escalopes in butter with button mushrooms, flambeed them with brandy, and finished them with cream, a dash of Worcestershire sauce and some chopped parsley. It really is that simple, though as with all simple things you need to watch the details. Don't be tempted to swap the butter for oil or (shudder) margarine as you need the flavour. It's very important to use button mushrooms for this as older, open-capped ones turn the sauce an unappealing grey. Likewise I get the pan really hot before popping the meat in as I like it to colour a bit, as this gives a lovely golden-brown tone to the sauce. Finally, add more brandy than you think you'll need, as the cream does soften all the other flavours.

I like to fry the mushrooms thoroughly. They absorb the butter and meat flavours.

A note on the veal: we buy British rose veal from our local butcher; the calf has not been crated, and has been allowed to run around. If you really don't like the idea of veal, I've also tried this technique with pork medallions cooked in butter with apple and flambeed with calvados, and that is also delicious.

Don't overcook the cream - you don't want it to separate.

The photos of the finished meal don't look that great. My presentation skills definitely need work. However, it tasted brilliant. Certainly nothing to sniff at after a day in the office!

Trust me, it tastes amazing - my presentation doesn't do it justice.

All images (c) PP Gettins

Retro Recipe: Trench Cake

By: Mrs Robot

If you're in or near Britain right now, you can't have failed to notice the events, displays, services and other public commemorations of the First World War. Frances Quinn, winner of last year's Great British Bake Off, has been promoting a 1916 recipe for 'trench cake', rereleased by the government, which during the First World War would have been baked to send to soldiers at the front. She's been doing a good job of publicising it; Mr Robot and I both love Test Match Special (live cricket programme on the radio), and it's common for listeners to send in cakes to the presenters. Frances Quinn even popped up there to talk about the cake.

Anyway, the Trench Cake recipe is over at The Telegraph if you want it, though it irritates me beyond belief that they've written 'baking soda' instead of 'bicarbonate of soda'. AUGH! WHICH SIDE OF THE ATLANTIC ARE YOU ON, TORYGRAPH?

So, the recipe. This is an egg-free recipe. I'm not a free-from cook, but it looks to me like if you swapped the milk for nut milk or water and used soya margarine, you could make a vegan version of this cake. You start by rubbing the margarine into the flour, then add the other dry ingredients, then the liquid. Bicarbonate of soda mixed with vinegar acts as the raising agent. As with any rubbing-in recipe, I don't believe you can overdo the rubbing in. Rub, rub and rub, get the fat really well worked in and keep it all nice and airy.

I was a little surprised by the recipe's combination of currants, spices and cocoa. Currants and spices, yes, but with cocoa? Chocolate cakes are a relatively late development in British baking, with fruit, nut or seed cakes being more commonplace historically. However, there's not enough cocoa in the cake to make it taste massively chocolately, rather it adds a pleasing richness and colour, and the combination works.

When I got mine out of the oven, I was a little annoyed that it seemed to have pale speckles and blamed myself for not rubbing in enough, but looking at the photos of Frances Quinn's cake, hers has the same speckles. In fact, mine looks pretty much the same as hers. On cutting, the cake is very light in texture, which is more surprising as you can't imagine it being robust enough to survive a trip across the channel and down to the front lines. That said, there's no time stated for how long you should beat the mixture once the liquid has been added, so it's possible that a longer beating would have led to the gluten becoming stickier and my cake being less crumbly.

I don't know if I'll make this cake again. It's pleasant enough, but if I'm going to cook with cocoa I want a more chocolatey cake, and if I'm making a fruit cake I want more spice and a crumblier, denser texture. Still, it's an interesting curiosity, and makes me wonder how many men received one, and dreamed of being back at home...

All images (c) PP Gettins

Retro recipe: raspberry buns

By: Mrs Robot

The weather here was truly dreadful yesterday, so I decided to do some baking. I've had my eye on the recipe for raspberry buns in Julie Duff's book Cakes: Regional and Traditional for some time. Here at the House of Robots, things involving flour, pastry in particular, seem to be my thing. Another thing I love is old cookbooks and recipes.

Cakes: Regional and Traditional is a brilliant compilation of historic cake recipes from around the UK. Duff has done a massive amount of research for this book. The recipes are split into five sections - Small Regional Cakes, Large Regional Cakes, Small Country Cakes, Large Regional Cakes and Gingerbreads and Ginger Cakes. Yes, ginger was once so popular every region had its own variation so gingery bakes get a whole chapter to themselves. Where possible she tells you the region the recipe is from. There are six different apple cakes, for example, all with variations in their ingredients according to what was available and liked locally, from the Irish recipe involving mashed potato to the West Country one with spices (possibly a legacy of the area's major ports, including Bristol) to a Yorkshire one made with Wensleydale cheese. Raspberry buns are a 'country cake', assigned to no particular region, and Duff states the recipe she's reproduced comes from a cookbook handwritten in 1923 by a lady named Ivy Peatman.

The beauty of the recipes in this book is that they're so simple, possibly reflecting the sorts of ingredients that were widely available, and the limited amount of kitchen equipment most people would've owned. In this case all I had to do was rub fat with flour, add sugar, add liquids, make into balls, pop in jam and bake. Easy. Of course, it would have been easier if I had remembered to add the sugar before adding the liquid! As I worked in the sugar I was a little worried about overworking the dough. However, the resulting buns were light and looked as domed and golden as the ones in the book.

You might be looking at these photos and thinking, "They look a bit plain." If so, Cakes: Regional and Traditional probably isn't the book for you. Everything I've made from it has been absolutely delicious - Mr Robot is especially keen on the Irish lemon cake - but nothing has been especially fancy to look at. On the other hand, if you like cake but can't bear twee fripperies, get this book!

I think when I make this recipe again I'll make two variations. I'll add a drop of almond essence to the mixture, as I think it would be delicious with the raspberry jam. Also, instead of making a little ball and popping a lump of jam into the centre, I'll make two discs and spread the jam across one, leaving space at the edge to seal the discs together, because in my buns the jam tended to stay in a blob in the centre, and I'd prefer the jam to be more spread out across the cake.