Category: Bad Retro Food

Chicken Salad Pie – Pieathalon 7

Hello friends and pie eaters!!!  Welcome to Pieathalon 7 – that very special time of year when bloggers from all over the world get together and celebrate the weird and wonderful world of vintage pies.  And oh boy did it get weird this year!  Surly over from at Vintage Recipe Cards sent me a hybrid concoction which much like my detested chocolate cheesecake takes two things that separately are wonderful and combines them into a Franken-monster Chicken Salad Pie!

Are you ready, are you ready for this?  Are you hanging on the edge of your seat?

Chicken Salad Pie1

Glorious is it not?

Before we even get to the eating of it, let me tell you that Chicken Salad Pie was an absolute BASTARD of a thing to make!  Even before that though, let’s start with possibly the only positive to come out of this which is the perfect late ’60’s styling of the original recipe!  Perfection! I want that leaf plate so, so much.  And those gold glasses!

Easy as Pie Chicken Salad

So, you’ll notice that my pies are a lot more round that those in the recipe.  Let me tell you why.

Chicken Salad Pie: Hours 1-3

I finished work at around 6 and started cooking.  Given that I now mostly work from the dining table, I probably started making the Chicken Salad Pie at around…6:01.  Put the chicken on to poach.  Start cutting the pastry into the right size of rounds.  Oh, yeah, did I mention I was doing this on the Tuesday night before we posted today?

6:30: Everything on track.  The chicken was poached and was cooling. The pastry had been blind-baked and was also cooling.

6:45 The broth, salad dressing, onion, lemon juice and salt were in the bowl waiting for the pimentos.  Oh.  That’s right.  We don’t have pimentos here.  So, in order to get pimentos, I bought a jar of stuffed olives and picked them out of the olives using a kitchen skewer.

How long does it take to pick out a peck of pickled pimentos?

Too damn long.

Especially if you eat half the olives you are meant to be picking.

Chicken Salad Pie3

7:15:  Pimentos were picked.  Gelatine was added.  Mixture was beaten and left to chill.

8:15: Has the mixture thickened?  I don’t think it’s thickened.  Better give it another half hour.

8:45:  The mixture has definitely not thickened.

8:50: Research what do to if gelatine does not set.

Chicken Salad Pie5

Chicken Salad Pie: Hours 3-6

9:00.  Tip the mixture into a saucepan and heat it.  Add more gelatin.

9:20: Place mixture back into the fridge.  Wonder why you chose this week of all weeks to be alcohol-free.

9:45: Mixture shows no sign of thickening.  But it was warm so it will probably take longer right?

10:15 Still not thickening.  Realise you have not had dinner.  Eat some olives.

10:45 It’s like water.  Pour runny gelatine back into the saucepan.

11:15 Add more gelatine to the rewarmed mixture.  Have a glass of wine.  This is not the week to quit drinking.

Chicken Salad Pie6

11:30 Put the mixture back into the fridge.  Curse the non-specificity of vintage recipes.  How much gelatine was in an envelope of gelatine in 1968?  And how does that translate to spoonfuls which is how I am measuring mine.  Wonder why you leave everything to the last minute.  Vow to change. Eat more olives.

Midnight:  The mixture is thickening!!!!  REEEEE-SULT!  Add the chicken and celery

12:15:  Still thickening but still too runny to pour into the pie shells.  Because as they keep telling you on The Great British Bake-off, no one likes a soggy bottom!  Decide to pour the mixture into teacups, allow it to set inside them and turn them out the following day….later that same day.

Chicken Salad Pie 9

 

CHICKEN SALAD PIE – THE VERDICT

Cutting into the chicken salad pie was reminiscent of cutting into that jellied loaf style of dog food which was a real hurdle to overcome when tasting it.  I did have a tiny bit and it wasn’t….awful.  It tasted and smelled mostly of the dressing.  But the association with dogfood was enough to prevent me from eating any more.

So in summary, no sleep, no dinner and a pie that looked like Pedigree Chum.   It was certainly no winner, winner chicken dinner.  I can’t even feed it to the dogs, who would love it due to the onions!  This one, sadly, is going straight into the trash.

Chicken Salad Pie

Pieathalon 7

Thanks as ever to Yinzerella for organising Pieathalon 7! You’re the best!

Thanks  / Curses to Surly for the recipe.  It was very fun to make despite it taking forever and being the closest thing to dogfood I have ever eaten.

I really hope Wendy from A Day In The Life on The Farm fared better with my recipe for Cherry Blossom Pie!

To see how Wendy went and to check out all the other pies, please click on the links below.  If they are not all up at the time of posting, I will update during the course of the day.

Okay friends, stay safe and most importantly…eat pie!

pieathalon7 logo (1)

 

MFCB 13 – Missing from the Modern Part 3

It seems fitting that for the 13th (and last) part of this series that we hit what has to be the weirdest photo in The Margaret Fulton Cookbook. I’m not even sure where to start with this one….

  • This lady’s incredibly hairy arms?
  • The weird tan line across the back of her wrist?
  • Why would you put your thermometer in the meat and then rub the salt over it.  Surely it’s just going to get in the way?
  • What is that even doing there? Don’t you take the temperature during cooking not before?
  • Why would you even want a photo of someone rubbing raw meat?

So many questions.  So few answers…it boggles my mind!

It seems so right…and yet so wrong to leave you with this image but I’m back from holidays and normal (or what passes for it ’round here) transmission will resume shortly!

Missing From The Modern 3
Missing From The Modern 3

Have a great week!

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Margaret Fulton Cookbook 6 – Missing from the Modern

This is worse than the trout of nightmares.

I’m voting that this has to rank pretty high in the list of three words that should never be put together. 

JELLIED. TURTLE. SOUP.

W.T. F. People of 1977?

You had a lovely Olive and Onion Tart and some fabulous canapés to eat.  Why on earth would you choose to eat soup made from turtles? First that’s just gross and second, they don’t even look like they’d taste good. 

Image (22)Don’t even try to make it better by adding some totally delicious avocado. I’m calling shenanigans on you on this one!

 Even worse.  I was alive then.  My mother better never have fed me turtle soup jellied or otherwise. Or we’ll be having words when I get back.

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New (Old) Book – The A-Z of Cooking (1976)

As much as I have loved Salad’s For All Seasons and there are many, many recipes still to cook from there I felt I was due for a change.  There are only so many salads a girl can take.

A little dig through my pile of vintage cook books revealed this gem – The A-Z of Cooking from Octopus Books, 1976. 

Image (50)Just the cover sent my retro food antenna twitching that this was going to be gold.  Because right from the get-go, there were some mad quirks.  It’s called the A-Z of cooking.  And yet….only Appetizers to Wine are listed.   What, no zucchini, zabaglione or…wait for it, my new favourite food name….zuurkoolstamppot. ( I don’t care what’s in Z…trust me, we’re eating zuurkoolstampot that week!).

The inside cover of The A-Z of cooking tells me:

This is the compulsive “look up and learn’ book, where every cook, because of the original approach of the book, will find something new.  More helpful than a standard cookery book, more enjoyable than a cookery encyclopedia, the book is packed with 190 recipes which have been specially grouped  to give the ideas and situations when you are needing them”

Does anyone else think English may not have been that writer’s first language? 

I’m not going to go into the special groupings yet.  We’ll get to them in due course.

I did however just want to spend this post pointing out a few of the maddest bits of The  A-Z of Cooking right from the get go. 

Let’s start with page 13.  I have never actually screamed with fright when viewing a retro food photo before. 

Until this. 

Welcome To My Nightmare

Oh. My. God.  This thing looks like it wants to kill you.  Don’t be fooled by its supposedly fun little parsley toupé.  This nasty little fucker has got a backbone of prawns and it wants you, and your family, dead.  In the most painful way possible. 

 Image (2)Mango Mousse…Or Is It?

Moving very swiftly away from the psycho-killer trout, we come to page 30 of The A-Z of cooking and a Mango Mousse. 

Maybe.

Anyone care to address the elephant in the room?

 Mango Mousse

Who knew that back in 1976 mangoes and passionfruit were actually the same thing?

Little known fact* for you all.  It was only in 1977, as his first piece of business as newly elected President, that Jimmy Carter deemed that henceforth they would be distinct pieces of tropical fruit. 

*I swear on a stack of wikipedias that this  so-called fact is not something I just made up. 

Good Health…Good Grief!!!

Who remembers the great cucumber shortage of 1976?   No, me either but it is surely the only explanation for this picture of Burghul Salad on p 31. Even worse when you read the recipe and it says it feeds 8. I’m sure everyone enjoyed their half a piece of cucumber. I just hope that fisticuffs didn’t break out over which half of the family got a black olive.

Burghul SaladAnd also….I hate to bring things down to the level of the toilet.  But are little black ovoid shapes really the best garnish for a salad that already looks like kitty litter?

 Expecting The Unexpected

I’ll  leave you with possibly the worse recipe in the book. Filed under U for  “Unexpected Guest” this Chilled Ten Minute Potato Soup sounds utterly revolting.  Although, maybe there is a method to this madness.  Maybe it’s actually a warning. Do not turn up unexpected to the anonymous writer’s house and want a meal.  Because you’ll be given some disgusting concoction made from instant mash and dehydrated onions.  And it will be cold to boot.

Kind of makes the kitty litter salad seem not so bad. 

Chilled Potato Soup

 I think the A-Z of Cooking is going to be a hoot!  Coming soon…Adventurous Appetizers!

Have a great week!

 

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