1970's recipe - Retro Food For Modern Times

Tag: 1970’s recipe

03
Sep
2023

Busy Bird Chicken

categories: 1970's recipes, Chicken, The Busy Woman's Cookbook

Memories, Iike the corners of my mind…misty water-coloured memories…Greetings Friends and welcome to a very nostalgic instance of Retro Food for Modern Times. Many of the vintage dishes I make here are not from my own childhood but from old cookbooks I own. This one is different. Apricot or Busy Bird Chicken was something we would eat on the reg when I was growing up.

Why Busy Bird Chicken? That’s what the recipe my mum used was called. However, it is almost exactly the same as the recipe I found in The Busy Woman’s Cookbook by The Australian Women’s Weekly (1972). The only difference is that our version had almonds sprinkled over the top. The busy woman of the 1970s had no time for such frivolities. Her Apricot Chicken is unadorned. I really liked then in this thought, so I would urge you to also include them.

The Busy Woman’s Cookbook

We last met the busy woman way back in 2016. Then, as now, we lusted after her floral serving dishes and her perfectly coiffed hair, admired her skill in floristry / fruit wrangling and worried about her proximity to a naked flame whilst wearing a gorgeous but most likely highly flammable 1970s caftan.

They say you can’t step in the same river twice and so revisiting this beloved dish from my childhood came with a fair amount of anxiety. What if it wasn’t the charming dish of my memories? It’s very simple – four ingredients (with the almonds). Would the sweet / salty / oniony flavour be as I remembered it? Or would it be sickly sweet and awful?

I served my chicken with Sabrina Ghayour’s Coriander, Garlic and Lime Rice. I thought the savouriness of this would act as a counter if the Busy Bird Chicken was overly sweet. Back in the day, we would have had plain boiled rice with it. And to be honest, that would have been fine!

I’m happy to say that the Busy Bird Chicken was EXACTLY as I remembered it. It was a delicious blast from the retro past and I will certainly not be waiting such a long time to make it again!

If you would like to have your own blast from the past here’s the recipe!

Have a great week! I will be popping into your inboxes mid-week this week too as it is PIEATHALON time. I made my pie today (Sunday) and I am so looking forward to sharing it with you!

24
Jul
2023

The Return of the Australian Vegetable Cookbook

categories: 1970's recipes, Australian Vegetable Cookbook, Blue Cheese, Cornwall, Leeks, Lettuce

Hello friends, today I am revisiting a book I first wrote about in 2012 – The Australian Vegetable Cookbook. I am taste-testing two recipes from that book – a Cornish Leek Pie and a Roquefort Wedge Salad. The book contains a lovely line drawing and a brief history of each vegetable. So, without further preamble let’s get to the recipes!

Cornish Leek Pie

I was dubious as to how authentic the Cornish Leek Pie would be. However, I found a few references to a Leeky / Likky Pie which dates from 1865 and is remarkably similar!

I layered boiled leeks and bacon into a pie dish and covered with pastry. Now, I made a mistake here as the recipe quite clearly says to season the layers with salt and pepper. I thought the bacon would be salty enough which turned out to be true so I didn’t add salt. But I totally forgot about the pepper. But by the time I remembered the pepper, the pie was already in the oven.

Then, the recipe itself got weird. After cooking for a while, I needed to make a hole in the pastry top and pour in a mixture of cream and parsley. I have never added ingredients to a pie in this way before! But it did allow me to add the missing pepper in with the cream and parsley. I thought it would be really hard to cut a hole in the pastry once it was baked so I did this before it went into the oven.

The recipe which I have linked above adds eggs and cream to the bacon and leek mix which I think would be a lot more sensible. This would have thickened up on cooking to form a quiche-like filling. As it was the cream did nothing except make everything a bit wet! It also kept bubbling up out of the hole in the pastry and made a bit of a mess.

There was nothing wrong with the cornish leek pie. It was just not something I would make, in the format given in the Australian Vegetable Cookbook. Full marks for the illustrations though! They are beautiful!

Cornish Leek Pie – The Recipe

Roquefort Lettuce Wedges

The night after I made the Cornish Leek Pie I made the Roquefort Lettuce Wedge from the same book.

The roquefort dressing was sooo good! But overall this dish lacked something. I served it on a gorgeous plate I bought when I was in Darwin earlier this year to try to fancy it up a bit. Plate 10/10. Dish…kind of meh…I would defintely make this again, However, I would add some bacon or croutons or some chives to the salad (or all three) just to make it a bit more interesting!

They say you can’t step in the same river twice and, to be honest I was disappointed with my revisiting of The Australian Vegetable Cookbook. There was nothing wrong with either recipe but they were also not amazing. One or two more ingredients to each one might have brought a bit more flavour or texture or just some va va voom to the dish.

Whether this was due to bad recipe choices on my behalf or a comment on the state of vegetable dishes in the 1970s remains to be determined. There are still a number of recipes I have flagged as “to be cooked”. so I may well have another crack at it in the future. Just not for a little while!

Roquefort Lettuce Wedge – The Recipe

I hope your cooking adventures this week fare a little better! Have a great week!

13
Nov
2022

The One with The Flan

categories: 1970's food, Custard, Desserts, Good Housekeeping World Cookery, Mexico, North and South America

For most people of my age the word flan conjures up the episode of Friends where Monica makes a birthday flan.

Monica Geller : We’re not having cake. We’re having flan.

Chandler Bing : Excuse me?

Monica Geller : It’s a festive custard Mexican dessert.

Well, today we having Flan de Café which is a coffee flavoured Mexican custard dessert direct from the South American chapter of Good Housekeeping’s World Cookery. Now, I know Mexico is not in South America, and I know you know that Mexico is not in South America. Good Housekeeping? Maybe not so much!

To amp up the coffee-ness of my flan, I baked them some vintage tea cups.

What did not need to amped up was the coffee flavour. I used the lower level of coffee suggested by the recipe which was 6 tablespoons and thought my heart was going to pop out of my chest for about an hour after eating it! I was WIRED! Talk about a major flan high!

I would probably halve the amount of coffee for future makes. Outside of a power punch of caffeine, the flavour was lovely, the light touch of orange added a refreshing note and the custard was silky and smooth. The Brazil nuts added a nice crunch as well as some garnish. I added some extra orange zest to the top of the flans to brighten them up. I chose not to use the recipe’s serving suggestion because I have a bit of a yecchh factor with raw eggs and I could not find guava jelly anywhere.

Flan De Café – The Recipe

Festive Flan Fun

As I was making the flans, I remembered something I heard wayback one of those science shows for kids. They said that there was enough oil in a brazil nut to act as a candle. For some weird reason, that piece of trivia has stuck in my head! Well, I had Brazil nuts and I had a flan which, after all is a festive dessert!

I really didn’t expect this to work particularly as the nuts kept breaking when I tried to chop them into anything resembling a taper. However….

Success!!!! Now that’s a really festive custard dessert!

Have a great week!

08
Nov
2021

Cheesy Egg Dunk

categories: 1970's food, 1970's recipes, Cheese, Cottage Cheese, Dip, Eggs, Good Housekeeping World Cookery

Howdy friends, today we are starting a new Chapter of Good Housekeeping’s World Cookery. We are leaving the shores of Africa and heading to the good ol’ U.S. of A! I’ll be choosing a few classics and a few lesser-known dishes from the land of the free and the home of the brave starting with this Cheesy Egg Dunk!

I find it hard to believe that there was a time when a dip was strange to anyone. However, Good Housekeeping felt the need to introduce the concept with this:

“Dunking” is an established American custom. For any informal buffet type party, savoury “dips” are very popular. Guests help themselves to the bite-sized pieces of toast, etc., and dip them into one of several soft piquant mixtures”

I’m not sure why, if it is such an established custom, why they felt the need to put quotation marks around the words dunking and dips. Maybe we just need to be glad that “dunks” did not become the preferred nomenclature!

The Cheesy Egg Dunk tastes like a smooth egg salad. Full disclosure I only had 60g of cream cheese and, as I am about to go away for a few days I did not want to buy any more so I subbed in some cottage cheese to make up the difference. My version might be a bit less creamy but it will also be lower in calories!. More importantly, it was delicious!

Cheesy Egg Dunk – The Recipe

One thing that did bamboozle me – the recipe calls for piquant table sauce. I had no idea what that is so I hoped for the best and added a 1/4 teaspoon of Worchestershire sauce combined with a few drops of Tabasco sauce. I was pretty pleased with the result but if any of my American readers can let me know what piquant table sauce is, I would love to know.

If like me you are trying to lose a few covid kilos you could have some Cheesy Egg Dunk on lettuce as a low carb substitute for an egg salad sandwich. Or, you could take it high-end and sprinkle some fancy salmon roe over the top. Ooh la la!!!!

Maybe because I used 2/3 cottage cheese instead of all cream cheese my mixture was quite soft so I did not add the milk.

Just remember, if you make it…no double dipping!!!

A Little Vacay

As mentioned I am heading off on a little holiday! I am so looking forward to getting out of Melbourne, having a break from work and relaxing for a new days! One of the delights of the Air BNB we have chosen is that it has very sketchy reception. On the upside, that means no work calls or emails! On the downside, I might not be able to post from there next week. I have however planned to cook another recipe from this chapter when I am there. Even if I can’t post I will be thinking of you all as I make it.

I have already packed my books – I am taking the next Agatha Christie on my list, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans, The Devil’s Picnic by Taras Grescoe and The Lost Man by Jane Harper which will satisfy my need to have a holiday read that is set somewhat in the place where I am going. We will be on the coast and not in the outback but It is the closest I have! For the 4 hour drive there I have Stanley Tucci’s Taste all set to go on Audible!

Have a wonderful week!

04
Apr
2021

Eggs Hamine

categories: 1970's recipes, Africa, Easter, Eggs, Good Housekeeping World Cookery, World Cooking

Happy Easter to those who celebrate it! At Maison de la retro foods, we are supplementing our chocolate eggs with some North African Hamine Eggs. These came to us via Good Housekeeping’s World Cookery. The book offers two versions of this recipe. There is the traditional way:

In Egypt there are special shops selling them; there, after the eggs have been cooked for 3 or 4 hours, they are put under the ashes of a fire and left for as long as 8 hours – this makes them as creamy as butter”

– Good Housekeeping World Cookery

Never mind the pyramids and the Sphinx. Get me over to Egypt pronto for some of those buttery eggs!!!

Eggs Hamine – The Recipe

The non-traditional version of these eggs is so easy!

Put the brown outside skins of some onions into a saucepan of ocld water with the eggs and boil for 2 hours or as long as possible. The onion skins turn the shells of the eggs and the whites brown. Shell and halve the eggs and serve hot or cold with lemon wedges, salt, pepper and mixed spices”

I cooked my eggs in the slow cooker for a full 8 hours.

Pre – Water

4 hours – One of the eggs cracked during the cooking but did not ooze out like they do when they crack during normal boiling.

Eight hours!

Note, if you decide to make these in your slow cooker, the onion skins will stain your slow cooker brown along with the eggs. Get ready to soak and scrub to remove it!

Eight hours and fifteen minutes!

I sprinkled my egg with some salt and some dukkah and dug in! It was delicious. There was a faint taste of something – not exactly onion but slightly savoury to the egg which was different to a normal boiled egg. I would not say that it was buttery but the white seemed more delicate than a normal boiled egg.

I was also very surprised to see that the onion skin dye had penetrated not only into the white which became a gorgeous soft caramel colour but also the yolk! This was startling because it is so strange to have a monochrome egg!

These were nice and an interesting experiment but for me, it was a long time to wait for a fancy boiled egg so I will probably not make them again. If I ever do get to Egypt though, I will be making a breakfast beeline for the Hamine Eggs shops!

Making these eggs might be a fun thing to do with kids for Easter or for a science project on osmosis.

Happy Easter everyone!