April, 2021 - Retro Food For Modern Times

The Red Signal Cocktail came about by a bit of an accident. I recently tried to make a cocktail called the Seamist. Except, I could not get some of the ingredients so I had to improvise. The finished version looked beautiful and tasted lovely. It is the exact sweet/sour fruity taste that I love in a cocktail plus a tinge of dryness from the cranberry and a touch of bitterness from the grapefruit.

But there was something about it that was not right. And it bugged me for days on end. It tasted great, it looked beautiful. So what was wrong with it?

She Comes in Colours Everywhere

Let’s digress for a moment. As a child, I was OBSESSED with paint charts. I have already mentioned that I was a weird only child. But I don’t think I have mentioned that my parents would quite often spend their weekends going to display homes and DIY stores and inevitably during these excursions, I would pick up a paint chart (or two). I would then try to memorise all the names and the matching colours. And then get them to test me on the way home. Or during the week. Yes. School wasn’t enough. I wanted to be tested on random things outside of school as well.

For a while there I wanted to be the person who named those colours. Actually, you know what? I still do want that job! So, believe me when I say that I know my Paris Creek (pale slate green grey) from my Camisole Quarter (pale pink) to my Shampoo (mid Blue).

I. Know. My. Colours.

And the colour of this cocktail is not a Seamist. No wonder I felt in my deepest soul that there was something wrong with it!

Seamist is a pale grey green with a tiny touch of blue.

And I think we can all agree that this cocktail is possibly the very opposite colour of a greeny-grey.

So, the name of Seamist had to go. Life is hard enough at the moment without having additional cognitive dissonance caused by the colour of a cocktail! And because I had played around with the ingredients, it wasn’t a true Seamist anyway.

So, then the dilemma became what to call it.

The Red Signal

Luckily, for all of us, I happen to be reading The Hounds of Death. This is a book of short stories by Agatha Christie where each story has a spooky or supernatural twist. I am still undecided on what to do with the volumes of Agatha Christie’s short stories. When I started the Dining With The Dame series, I only ever considered her novels. And believe me, it’s hard enough to find food references to blog in some of the novels, let alone something a tenth of the size!

But, lo and behold, in that collection, there is a story called The Red Signal.

Is a tale of

Premonitions and intuitions
Seances
Falling in love with the wrong person
Madness and murder
And a weird sixth sense called The Red Signal!

Now…you tell me Isn’t The Red Signal a much better name for this cocktail?

The Recipe

The Red Signal Cocktail

Print Recipe

A sweet sour cocktail inspired by the Agatha Christie short story – The Red Signal.

Author: Taryn Nicole
Prep Time: 3 minutes
Total Time: 3 minutes
Yield: 1 1x
Category: Cocktails
Method: Shake

Ingredients

Scale

3 parts cranberry juice

3 parts pink grapefruit juice

2 parts vodka

Lemon and lime quarters

Ice cubes

Mixed berries for garnish

Cook Mode Prevent your screen from going dark

Instructions

Shake the juices and vodka in a cocktail shaker over ice.

Gently muddle the lemon and lime quarters in a highball glass to release some of their citrus oils and some juice. Add ice cubes to the glass.

Strain the cocktail into the glass and give a light stir.

Garnish with mixed berries of your choice.

Other food mentioned in The Red Signal

Welsh Rarebit

Have a great week friends and remember if you feel “the red signal” pay it some heed!

Or make this cocktail!

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!

Month: April 2021