1950's recipes - Retro Food For Modern Times

Category: 1950’s recipes

07
Jan
2024

Huli Huli Chicken Wings

categories: 1950's recipes, Chicken, United States of America

Aloha friends and welcome to 2024! Whilst most of us are looking ahead, I am reflecting on the last “20 Years Ago Today” post I wrote. In that post, I said, “couscous is the only food I can think of where the same letters are repeated”. The very next day, I was searching through my file of blog-worthy recipes. And, found a recipe for Huli Huli Chicken Wings. So, we are taking a little trip back to 1950’s Hawaii for a taste test! Never let it be said that I am not happy to prove myself wrong in the search for delicious food.

If someone else hadn’t already come up with the catchphrase of “finger licking good” I’d be using it right now to describe these wings. The Huli Huli sauce is so good! It’s sweet and sour and full of umami and sticky and just plain delicious. I made these a little while ago and as I am writing this now my mouth is watering thinking about them! Guess what’s going back on the menu for next week!

Huli Huli Huh?

Ernest Morgado, the founder of the Pacific Poultry Co served his mum’s teriyaki-style chicken to a group of farmers back in 1955. They loved it and he decided to market it as Huli Huli Chicken. Huli means “turn” in Hawaiian. The original way of cooking this was to place the chicken between two racks and to grill it, preferably over charcoal. It was turned during cooking hence, huli huli!

Schools and other charities often sold Huli Huli chicken as a fundraising item. In Australia, outside every Bunnings (large hardware store) we also have fundraising food stalls. We get the cheapest sausages imaginable, slapped into usually dry and equally cheap white bread, some BBQ’ed onions if you want them, and some sauce. It is usually revolting but there is something about that BBQ aroma that draws you in, even though you know it you will regret it as soon as you take that first bite.

I think Australian fundraisers could learn a lot from the Hawaiian way of doing things. I mean, why have this?

When you could have this?

Huli Huli Chicken Recipe

My recipe comes directly from the Australian Women’s Weekly website. You can find it here but I have noticed that many websites are now blocking links from blogs. So I have also copied it out below:

I can also heartily recommend the pineapple salad that accompanies the Huli Huli chicken wings in the above recipe. To me, it was the perfect fresh and zesty offset to the sweetness of the chicken. And that hit of chilli in the salad somehow brought everything together!

Well, if this is the standard of cooking I get when I prove myself wrong, I am willing to be proved wrong again and again! Please let me know if you can think of any others! Otherwise, have a great week!

08
May
2023

Passionfruit Flummery

categories: 1950's recipes, Australia, Desserts, Jelly, Passionfruit

Hello friends and welcome. Today I am featuring another recipe with a wonderfully evocative name – Passionfruit Flummery. The name flummery makes me think of something that is light and fluttery, like a gorgeous butterfly. And also something summery and maybe even a little bit shimmery! Now, I can’t promise fluttery or shimmery but this is a delicious summery dessert! This recipe for Passionfruit Flummery comes from 250 Quick and Easy Recipes which also contained the recipe for the wonderful Savoury Upside Down Pie.

So what exactly is a flummery. Very simply it is a whipped jelly confection. The whipping makes it feather-light and it almost melts in your mouth! The one odd, I thought ingredient was that you needed to add some flour to the jelly mix. I am not sure why – it did turn the jelly mix opaque rather than the normal clear colour but I can’t figure out if it serves another purpose as well. If we have any flummery experts out there, please let me know!

The other nice thing about this dessert is…you know those people who don’t like desserts that are too sweet? I personally am not one of them. I love a sweet dessert, however my flavour profile also runs to sweet / sour as being right in my wheelhouse. This is definitely a dessert for those people who do not like desserts that are overly sweet. The passionfruit and the citrus juices keep it fresh, zesty and light!

Passionfruit Flummery – The Recipe

The flummery will keep in the fridge for about a week – if you can make it last that long! It is very more-ish! I went in for a spoonful and ended up making a dent this big! I really could not stop!

Flummery Fun “Facts”

I found some facts about flummeries when I was researching this post. Now some of these seem to be more “ïnternet” facts than factual facts but let’s see how we go…

Flummerries started out as a sour porridge-like dish in 17th Century England
The name comes from the Welsh word “llymru” meaning sour oatmeal jelly boiled with the husks
The name was also spelt thlummery and flamery
In Australia and New Zealand, the name flummery was given to a mousse like dessert that used gelatine instead of cream which was more expensive

So far so good. However, I’m less convinced about this:

Flummery was a fall-back dessert in the New South Wales Town of Forbes in the 1950s.

Huh…weirdly specific. When I was in school we had to learn a song called The Streets of Forbes which is about the death of the bushranger Ben Hall. And that is pretty much all I know about Forbes. So maybe, there and nowhere else, people were scoffing down flummery like there was no tomorrow in the 1950’s. But I’m dubious.

I’m even more dubious about this one:

In the Queensland town of Longreach, it was staple food in the 1970s

Yep, right up there with flour, rice and corn…flummery!

Longreach

Of course then, I had to Google Longreach to see if there was any reason why it might be the whipped jelly capital of Australia. And I swear this is true…the very first question that pops up is:

Which is intriguing…what is the smell in Longreach? Is it something to do with the overconsumption of flummery?

According to this article the lanes of Longreach “were always foul with the rank and unpleasant smell of goats’ faeces and urine”.

.And based on that we can whip through the rest of the questions pretty quickly:

2) Zero is the number of days you need in Longreach. Unless you have no sense of smell. Then, stay as long as you like.

3) Longreach is famous for the stench of goats.

4) Whenever the wind is blowing those goaty fumes away.

Well, this post took a turn…we started with pretty butterflies and ended with dead bushrangers and stinky goats!

Have a great week, I hope it doesn’t end up with stinky goats!

03
Jul
2021

Ratafias

categories: 1950's recipes, Almond

One of the frequent debates we have at our Tasty ReadsCookbook Club is whether cookbooks should have a photo for each recipe. Most people like something to judge their efforts against. I prefer a photo but I am content to fly blind if required. Which is a good thing because when making these Ratafias from The Daily News Cookery Book (1953) I had no idea what I was going to end up with!

Thankfully, it was these:

But as both Julie Andrews and I are wont to say…let’s start at the very beginning. Ratafiaa are almond flavoured cookies. If you can imagine an amaretti and a macaron had a love child? It would be a ratafia. Not as chewy as a macaron, not as crunchy as an amaretti.

The Ratafias Recipe

A few notes about this recipe.

It calls for soft sugar. I used normal caster sugar in my recipe but in retrospect, I wonder if they meant icing/confectioner’s sugar.
It also calls for Ratafia flavouring which I could not find for love or money The closest thing I could come to was a Ratafia flavoured liqueur but they were 1) a bit spendy and 2) not readily available locally so I used almond essence.
Finally, you can roast your rice flour for around 10 minutes in the oven, until you just see the colour start to turn. Alternatively, if you have an Indian / Sri Lankan grocery near you, they may sell it as roasted rice flour is used to make hoppers.

The ratafias were really yummy and very easy to make. They will defintely be on high rotation here. Also, they are a great way to use up left over eggwhites!

Have a great week friends, sorry I have been so absent from here. It’s been a busy few months. Hopefully I will start to be able to post more regularly now as things, particualry workwise are starting to calm down!

30
Dec
2019

Coronation Chicken “Brexit” Rolls

categories: 1950's recipes, A Moveable Feast, Brioche, Cantina, Chicken, Leftovers, Tasty Reads

For me, closing out a recipe book is almost as satisfying as marking up the pages of a new one! The very last recipe I had to cook out of A Moveable Feast by Katy Holder was Coronation Chicken Baguettes with Apple Slaw. It took ages to make because leftover roast chicken seems to disappear from my fridge before I ever find the time to mix it with mayo, curry powder and chutney to make up some Coronation Chicken.

I did not have baguettes. I had these gorgeous Bretzel Rolls which are, I assume a cross between a Pretzel roll and a Brioche. These made me laugh because I made them on the day after the British election. Whilst I knew that technically they were Bretzel rolls, in my head, they were only ever Brexit rolls!

For those of you not familiar with the bright orange concoction that is Coronation Chicken, it is the best of British combined with a little bit o’ spice from the days of the Raj. Martin Lampen quite cruelly describes it as follows:

“A combination of chicken breasts, curry powder and mayonnaise, Coronation Chicken was created by flower-decorator and author Constance Spry ( the Nigella Lawson of powdered egg, nylon chaffing, sexual repression, back street abortions and locking women in the attic for thyroid problems and ‘hysterics’) in 1953 to celebrate the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II….Cheap chicken in a sickly yellow curry gunk with six sultanas. God save the Queen”

It is actually quite delicious – a little bit spicy, a little bit sweet. And the slaw on the side suggested by Katy Holder is a great accompaniment to cut through some of the richness.

You could also make these with turkey if you still have any leftover from Christmas! The homemade is also a whole lot nicer than the “sickly yellow curry gunk” that comes in those plastic tubs in British supermarkets. So why not make your own. With, a Brexit roll if you can get one!

For a vegetarian version, Yotam Ottolenghi suggests his curried egg and cauliflower salad. It lacks the sweetness of a regular Coronation chicken – which could be resolved, if you wish, by adding a little dollop of mango chutney or those sultanas reviled by Martin Lampen.

So this will be my last post for 2019. Apologies for being absent recently. I had a mad 6 weeks at work before the break, then got sick, and since then have been busy trying to socialise the new addition to the family!

Holly joined us about a week ago. She has had a terrible life, first on a puppy farm who then sold her to medical research. So even though she is nearly 11 years old, she has never been a house dog. She is very timid but is learning very quickly how to dog! We already love her to bits. She will need ongoing training but has already come a very long way in a short time. And every second is worth it as she is an absolute joy!

Anyway, all that has meant that the blog has been on a back burner for a while but for 2020…

Now that I have cooked through A Moveable Feast, another aim for 2020 is to cook through Cantina. I did not entirely enjoy this book when we tackled it in Tasty Reads back in 2015. I found the recipes were too long and complicated and many of the ingredients were hard to come. Alhough the results were generally delish. I still have 30 recipes left to cook from it which equates to around 1.5 per week during 2020.

It might be a long year!

The upside is delicious Mexican food 30 times in the year which can’t be a bad thing!!!

Thanks for reading and being a part of this in 2019. Wishing you all a wonderful 2020!!!!