May, 2020 - Retro Food For Modern Times

Month: May 2020

15
May
2020

Not Quite Seeni Sambol

categories: 1970's recipes, Good Housekeeping World Cookery, Onions, Sri Lanka, Vegetables

Seeni Sambol is a Sri Lankan side dish, served as an accompaniment to rice, curries and hoppers as per the photo below. It is an integral component of lampries, which despite Covid-19, mum and I made this year at Easter, as per our normal habit. I made the seeni sambol this year, something we never really do as it takes so many onions! I used 8 onions to make mine and in the end, there was not enough for all our lampries and we ended up having to use a shop-bought version as well!

Please don’t judge my hoppers, I am playing with a recipe which I will post on here as soon as I have it right! The main ingredient of Seeni Sambol is onions. Put very simply you caramelise them down add some spices and voila – there you have it.

Our 2020 lampries. This is a SriLankan meal consisting of ghee rice, lampries curry, eggplant pickle,seeni sambol, prawn blachan and frikadeller which mum and I cook annually. We make enough to last the year, packing individual servings into foil packets and putting them into the freezer to reheat and eat whenever the mood takes us!

What I am trying to say is, that I know a bit about Seeni Sambol. So, when I saw that there was a recipe for it in the Good Housekeeping World Cookery Book, 1972 I was intrigued. My gut feel is that books this old do not do justice to “ethnic” recipes. But for the sake of the blog, I was willing to give this one a go.

But, because WordPress loves a subheading, let’s break it down a little.

The Title

The actual title is fine. In that, all words are spelt correctly.

It’s the subtitle that made me pause.

And call my mum.

“Are you meant to just eat Seeni Sambol with prawns?”

“No. Why?”

“No reason”.

So fail on the title. Seeni Sambol actually means sugar sambol and relates to the sweetness of the caramelised onions and the sugar you add towards the end of cooking to balance out the flavours. No prawns at all. Whatsoever.

The Ingredients

There are two very non-traditional additions in these ingredients. Tomatoes play no part in seeni sambol and neither does milk.

You probably could not have got fresh milk in Sri Lanka in 1972 – it would have either been evaporated or coconut milk. Either way, I inadvertently left the milk out of my version. I added the tomatoes though.

There is also an ingredient that is used in a traditional Seeni sambol called a Maldive Fish which is a cured dried fish which adds protein and umami flavours to the Seeni Sambol If you want to make this, and you cannot find Maldive fish, you can substitute Asian fish sauce. Or you can leave it out altogether which is what they do in vegetarian versions.

Overall though, the ingredients are pretty close to home. Just forget the tomatoes and the milk if you want to keep it real!

Oh, and btw? No prawns.

The Method

So, it all seems legit until…WTF why are they talking about Prawns? There were no prawns in the ingredients so why are there prawns in the GD recipe???

There are no prawns in Seeni Sambol. And that’s not just me saying that. That comes direct from my mum. And I may be an idiot who knows nothing but she knows Sri Lankan cooking!

So, this is kind of a shambolic recipe. However, if you ignore the magical prawns that do a disappearing act in the ingredients and reappear in the method and the milk which has no place here what so ever. this is not a bad recipe. I didn’t even mind the tomatoes in the final dish!

Here is the full recipe:

And here is a better one from chef Manu Fieldel. This is a vegetarian version so does not contain the possibly hard to find Maldive Fish.

Hope you are having a good week! Stay safe friends…the light at the end of this tunnel seems to be appearing!

11
May
2020

Quince Blancmange

categories: Desserts, Fruit

I’m fairly sure that Quince Blancmange was invented when someone put the names of the most old fashioned fruit and the most vintage of desserts through a random generator to see what came up. It could have been worse. We could have been eating Medlar Junkets. or Whortleberry Possets. BTW…just in case you are writing an academic history of quince blancmange don’t quote me on that origin story! For everyone else? That’s how it happened. Other people will tell you that blancmange originated in the Middle Ages and used to contain chicken and other meaty treats. That it moved from savoury to sweet in around 1600 and that the name is a portmanteau of the French words for white (blanc) and to eat (manger). And I’m not saying that they are wrong. “Quince” blancmange however? Random name generator. For sure. 100%.

Quince are one of the weirdest fruit around! If you are not familiar with them, they are those bright yellow fruit that look like large misshapen pears that you might see in your greengrocer in autumn. When you cut them open the flesh is white and so, so sour and a little bit bitter. But when you cook them that flesh becomes a glorious deep pink to dark red and sweet.

And blancmange? Is pretty much jelly / jello with cream or milk mixed through it. Who knew!

So, I bought a quince because I didn’t really read the recipe first and made the assumption that quince blancmange would contain quince. I mean stands to reason right?

Hmmm….wrong. The quince blancmange recipe uses the quince jelly you buy to eat with cheese. Now, for some reason we had a shit ton of this in our fridge. Well, one of them was Fig paste but for the purpose of the blancmange, it was all the same. I have no idea why we had so much of this. I suspect they came in hampers or were freebies with something because the only other time I have ever cooked quince was to make my own membrillo which is the proper name of Spanish Quince paste and we have been eating that. Delicious too I might add! If you do make it, a little splash of vanilla essence in the quince mix does not go astray. Trust me on that one.

Quince blancmange is so easy to make.

First, tip your paste into a sauce pan, add water and melt that jelly down. Taste. Add sugar if needed, or if already very sweet a dash of lemon juice. Add a splash of vanilla too. Then, turn off the heat, allow to cool slightly and stir through the cream. This looked so pretty as it made a beautiful marbled pattern. It was very soothing moving the spoon through the swirls of colour…

Then add some gelatine pour into the mould and you are done!

Quince Blancmange

Print Recipe

A fruity dessert that tastes better than it looks!

Yield: 6 1x
Category: Dessert

Ingredients

Scale

200 grams Quince Jelly
100 grams water (Plus moe for gelatime)
1 tsp Vanilla extract
4 Gelatine leaves
Sugar, to taste
Lemon juice, to taste
250 ml Cream
Berries to serve (Optionaal)

Cook Mode Prevent your screen from going dark

Instructions

Add the quince jelly to the water in a small saucepan and simmer over medium heat until the jelly melts.
Add the vanilla.
Taste and add sugar and / or lemon juice to taste.
Remove from heat. Stir through the cream.
Soften the gelatine leaves in a little cool water, then removeand squeeze out the excess water. Stir the gelatine into the warm cream andquince mixture.
Pour into a mould and chill until set.
To serve, invert the mould and garnish with the berries.

If I did not now know this was quince flavoured I would not have guessed that was it was. And I don’t think that was because of the figs because it did not taste overly figgy either. It tasted generically fruity sweet. The Quince Blancmange was much nicer to eat than it was to look at. Because it looked revolting. Really bad. It reminded me of being back in school and seeing a picture of some lungs with all the arteries and veins running through it.

Spot the Difference

So, not fail but not a total win. I probably will not make this exact recipe again but I am definitely going to experiment with blancmange a bit more to try to bring out the actual flavour of the fruit. I wonder if it would have been different if I had used fresh quince instead of the jelly?

Have a great week friends and stay safe!

06
May
2020

Tijuana Sunset and Buenos Noches – Two Evening Themed Cocktails

categories: Cocktail, Mexico, Tequila

Ola people of the internet! Today we are celebrating all things Mexican with a couple of cocktails, the Tijuana Sunset and the Buenos Noches both from Cantina. Regular readers would know what I have set myself a task to cook through this book by the end of the year. Readers from the way back would know that this book and I have a troubled past. Too cheffy, too complicated, too many hard to find ingredients have been my complaints of this book in the past.

Let’s kick things off early in the evening with..wait for it…we need some sort of fanfare…ah…here he is…

Da da dadada…TEQUILA!

The Tijuana Sunset

This is billed as “A sophisticated take on the tequila sunrise”.

Okay fine. But IMHO, the only thing that makes a tequila sunrise any good is that gorgeous ombre effect of the grenadine and the orange juice. And if you are going to call that drink a sunset then that ombre effect needs to run the opposite way to the sunrise right?

Well, it is totally missing from the Tijuana Sunset so I guess the way the gradient goes is immaterial right?

Now, bear in mind I made both of these drinks in iso at a time when even generally easy to come by ingredients were scarce on the ground. Blood orange juice was an impossibility. I decided to sub in Blood Orange Soda instead of Blood Orange Juice and Soda. Did this affect the colouring? Possibly. However, as there is no picture in the book I suspect that they also did not get that beautiful colour array.

Looks may be one thing but taste is another. And when it came to taste the Tijuana Sunset was OMG….100% delicious!!! 😍😍😍. Tangy from the lime, a little sweet from the soda, a nice kick from the tequila and the touch of salt was GENIUS. I loved this so much I immediately made another which I garnished with a little slice of jalapeno. This made it even better!

I loved the Tijuana Sunset. I just wish it had a different name so there weren’t those expectations of what it was going to look like!

Wait up. Hold on. Do you think that by making the claim that it is a “sophisticated” take on the Tequila Sunrise that the authors are trying to say that the beautiful orange to deep red shading is somehow unsophisticated? Are they making fun of my love for a drink that looks pretty as well as tasting delish?

OMG…see what this book does? It makes me crazy! Or maybe that’s life after what now…seven weeks in iso?

Buenos Noches

Now this one looked the biz! It is a Mexican take on an Irish Coffee which is a drink I hold dear. And on paper it sounds delicious. Chilli infused tequila, cinnamon infused coffee…sign me up!

Okay, so truth be told. This was one of the worst things I have ever put in my mouth. Particularly because I had to wait 3 days for the tequila to infuse with the chipotle.

I actually cried after tasting this. Which I admit is an extreme reaction. But, at the moment, when our lives are so restricted, something that I was looking forward to for THREE days and which turned out to be a bitter disappointment might actually be worth a tear or two.

I felt this was bitter and flat. It lacked any sweetness to counteract the bitterness of the coffee and the heat of the chilli and had no zestiness to bring the bitter and hot flavours together.

I’m calling Goodnight Irene on the Buenos Noches.

But here’s that recipe. Just in case you have really repressed emotions and need to cry over something dumb instead of the horror that is the world as we know it.

Have a great week! Stay safe!

02
May
2020

10-Minute Autumn Salad

categories: Chestnuts, Salad, Vegetables

Autumn is truly here. Most days are bright and sunny days but with a little chill in the air to let you know that winter is on its way. The nights are getting cold and darkness is falling a little bit earlier each day. It is very pretty when I am out on my daily walk with the dogs. And it is perfect weather for an Autumnal Salad.

Autumn salad not only makes the use of one of my favourite autumn ingredients, chestnuts but the colours of the dish are meant to resemble the colours of autumn.

One of the paradoxes of living in iso is that, just when I have more time to cook, half the time I can’t be bothered. I feel like I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel anxious or scared. And whilst I am trying to enjoy the pleasures of the little things such as the turning of the leaves, TBH, a lot of the time I just want to sleep and/or play mindless games on my phone. Another weird thing is that I am sleeping more than ever but constantly feel tired.

Anyway, for the days when I am feeling blah, this salad is a lifesaver. Not only does it only take around ten minutes to prepare but Autumn Salad looks so colourful and pretty, is healthy and can be varied to fit what you have in the fridge or what you feel like eating on the day!

Back in the days before the ‘rona I used to regularly stock up on little vacuum packets of roasted chestnuts from the Japanese department store Daiso. I usually have a few of these in my pantry to make this salad and other things requiring chestnuts. I used my last pack to make this one so, for future rounds, it looks like I will be roasting my own chestnuts! Good thing they are in season! This will take this recipe out of the 10-minute realm but it will be worth it!

The Recipe

The original recipe for the Autumn Salad comes from the May 2003 Delicious magazine. The basic recipe is this:

However, the joy of this salad lies in the variations.

Make it vegetarian

Substitute the Proscuitto for Blue Cheese (This is my favourite).
Throw in some chopped up pears if you like. Fresh or dried, both a great!

Make it vegan

Substitute the Proscuitto for Roast Pumpkin or Sweet Potato

You can serve this Autumn Salad on its own or for a larger meal, it is fabulous with a baked potato, loaded with butter and chives,

That’s me done for today. Stay safe!