1970's recipes - Retro Food For Modern Times

17
Sep
2020

Chinese Pancake Rolls

categories: 1970's recipes, China, Good Housekeeping World Cookery

Today I am sharing another recipe from the China chapter of Good Housekeeping’s World Cookery. Pancake Rolls (aka Chun Guin) are a version of a Spring roll. Originally a pancake filled with fresh spring vegetables, Spring Rolls were a welcome change from the preserved foods that people had to eat during the long Chinese winter. Well, it is spring in Australia now so I thought why not celebrate the change of season with some traditional fare?

In retrospect, I should have celebrated by ordering some proper Spring rolls from The Imperial Garden because, to be honest, these weren’t great!

These were a lot of work – make the pancakes, make the filling, wrap and roll and then deep fry. It all took a good few hours and for not much payoff. I considered using spring roll wrappers for these but the recipe said pancakes, so I made pancakes. The problem was, the pancakes did not really crisp up enough during the frying process. And surely one of the delights of the spring / egg roll is that great crunch you get when you bite into that crispy pastry – just before the boiling hot contents ooze out into your mouth!

The filling was also disappointing. Something containing chicken*, crabmeat, mushrooms and leeks should be bursting with flavour. These really didn’t taste of much at all. *You will note the recipe calls for pork. I do not like the taste of pork so I subbed in some chicken. Maybe this accounts for the blandness?

Pancake Rolls – The Recipe

It’s here if you want it… but seriously there are better ways to spend your time! And that’s coming from someone living under one of the strictest coronavirus lockdowns in the world. All I have is time and I wouldn’t spend it making these again.

All was not entirely lost though. Some members of the household really enjoyed the leftover Pancake Rolls!

One great recipe from this chapter and one meh….do I call it a draw or make one more as a decider?

Decisions, decisions!!!

Have a great week!

25
Aug
2020

Almond Cookies

categories: 1970's food, 1970's recipes, Good Housekeeping World Cookery

These almond cookies come from the China section of Good Housekeeping’s World Cookery (1972). Let me tell you right from the get-go, (and I could be totally wrong here) but to me, there is absolutely nothing Chinese about them. Not that I have a vast knowledge of Chinese cookies…the only ones I can think of are Fortune cookies which also have absolutely nothing authentically Chinese about them either!

Hmmm…I’m sensing a pattern here…

Having said that, can you imagine what fortune cookies for 2020 should have actually said?

It feels weird to be starting the recipes for a country with a sweet but it just so happened that I had all of the ingredients to make these cookies in the house already. I hate shopping (or doing anything really) while masked up so an excuse not to have to leave the house is a bonus! Another bonus is that these almond cookies are really easy to make. And delicious!

I used coconut oil as the oil for these because I thought it might make them taste more Asian. The slight coconut flavour alongside the more prominent almond was really nice. Using coconut oil made for a really crunchy cookie though, so if you like a chewy cookie, I recommend using a different oil.
Also, a pet hate of mine is recipes that use half an egg! I mean WTF!!!! What on earth are you meant to do with the other half? Luckily I have two sous chefs who are more than happy to solve those problems for me. But for everyone else, half an egg is a pain the neck! Happily, though, these are really good I think you can do no wrong by doubling the recipe!

Here’s the recipe!

I’ll flick through the book and find some more Chinese-y Chinese dishes over the next few days. Even if it means I have to brave the world out there to get some ingredients!

Stay safe friends and have a great week!

Almond Cookies4 — Having said that, can you imagine what fortune cookies for 2020 should have actually said?

It feels weird to be starting the recipes for a country with a sweet but it just so happened that I had all of the ingredients to make these cookies in the house already. I hate shopping (or doing anything really) while masked up so an excuse not to have to leave the house is a bonus! Another bonus is that these almond cookies are really easy to make. And delicious!

I used coconut oil as the oil for these because I thought it might make them taste more Asian. The slight coconut flavour alongside the more prominent almond was really nice. Using coconut oil made for a really crunchy cookie though, so if you like a chewy cookie, I recommend using a different oil.
Also, a pet hate of mine is recipes that use half an egg! I mean WTF!!!! What on earth are you meant to do with the other half? Luckily I have two sous chefs who are more than happy to solve those problems for me. But for everyone else, half an egg is a pain the neck! Happily, though, these are really good I think you can do no wrong by doubling the recipe!

Here’s the recipe!

I’ll flick through the book and find some more Chinese-y Chinese dishes over the next few days. Even if it means I have to brave the world out there to get some ingredients!

Stay safe friends and have a great week!

28
Jul
2020

Name Plates: Pizza a la Garibaldi

categories: 1970's recipes, Italy, Name Plates, Pizza

What do an Italian revolutionary, a biscuit, a beard and this post have in common? They are all named Garibaldi! This Pizza a la Garibaldi comes from The Italian Cuisine I Love (1977) by Jules J Bond. I have a particular fondess for Jules J so I was eager to pick this book back up again. And who doesn’t love pizza?

What is Pizza a la Garibaldi?

Ok. So, I’m not going to explain pizza. Because it’s pizza!

Pizza a La Garibaldi though? Has cheese, green and black olives, oregano / marjoram, and anchovies. I also added some strips of roasted red pepper for reasons which will become clear right about now! This is the picture of the Pizza a la Garibaldi from The Italian Cusine I Love.

And this is me trying to recreate it. I think Jules J piped lines of tomato sauce on his pizza. There was no way in hell I was going to do that so strips of piquillo pepper it was! I wish I’d had some of those cute rolled anchovies with capers to get the same look as Jules. Mine looked like blobs.

The Recipe And Variations

I was interested to see that Jules uses bread dough as a base for his pizza. I have not been able to find yeast for love or money since the start of the first lockdown when everyone went sourdough mad so I was unable to test that part of the recipe out. Also, my preference is for a thin and crispy base rather than a thicker base so I used one of those souvlaki pitas for my pizza.

The Pizza a la Garibaldi was very tasty but for me the big disappointment was the cheese. Part of the joy of pizza, for me anyway is that beautiful streeeetch of the mozzarella.

Parmesan may be tastier but does not give the same joy! I will definitely use mozzarella next time I make this.

Who Was Garibaldi?

Well, we don’t have all day so here are a collection of fun facts about Giussepe Garibaldi

Unifier of Italy

Garibaldi was almost single-handedly responsible for helping Italy move from a collection of city-states to the country we know today. He and his volunteer army of guerilla fighters, the Redshirts, conquered Lombardy and later Sicily and Naples.

Anti Slavery Advocate

Abraham Lincoln offered Garibaldi a job as a Commander in the American Civil War. Garibaldi refused the post partly because Lincoln did not condemn slavery strongly enough for his liking.

Pacifist

Even though he was a soldier for most of his life, in his later years Garibaldi became something of a pacifist beliving that war was generally neither righteous or an effective means of getting what one wants.

Champion of the Underdog

Garibaldi believed in worker’s rights, women’s emancipation, racial equality, and the abolition of capital punishment.

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Garibaldi spent some time in South American and for the rest of his life work the clothing of the gauchos. He is also the originator of the Garibaldi beard.

Keen Entolmologist*

A little known fact about Garibaldi is that he was an avid collector of flying insects, a love he developed in South America. In order to keep his collection with him on his travels, he had specimens of his collection baked into little clay tablets. He could then pop these into his pocket to look at between skirmishes.

These small clay tablets are believed to be the origin of the Garibaldi biscuit.

(Photo via Delicious Magazine UK)

Modern Day Garibladi

I wasn’t sure if I would be able to find one of these but come on down Navarone Garibaldi. In case you haven’t heard of him, he is the son of Priscilla Presley and Marco Garibaldi, stepbrother to Lisa-Marie Presley and a member of the band Them Guns. Hmmm…maybe he could have gone with The Guns of Navarone…or would that be too obvs? Anyway, here he is!

Have a great week. And eat some pizza! It’s scientifically proven to make you happy!

*This “fact” is little known because I wanted to have an interesting story for the origin of the Garibaldi biscuit. The actual truth is that the reason why they are named after Garibaldi is totally unknown.

18
Jul
2020

Ye Olde Crusty Cellar Cheesecake

categories: 1970's recipes, Australia, Cheesecake, Desserts

At the best of times, a cheesecake (or really any item of food) hailing from “Ye Olde Crusty cellar” would not sound tempting. However, these are not the best of times, (these may well be the worse of times) and desperate times call for cheesecake! Have I ever mentioned how much I love cheesecake? Next to ice cream, it is probably my favourite dessert. Also, Fridge, Freezer, Pantry week has come around again and I had half a tub of cream cheese icing I wanted to use up. I did not want to make another cake with cream cheese icing so I thought I could hide it in plain sight as it were by mixing it with more cream cheese, sugar and lemon.

(Don’t ask me what look I was going for with the fruit decoration!)

The recipe for Ye Old Crusty Cellar’s Cheesecake came from the book 100 Fabulous Cheesecakes by Ellen Sinclair of The Australian Woman’s Weekly (1971). It is a real shame about the name because the Ye Olde Crusty Cellar cheesecake itself is delicious!!!

Ye Olde Crusty Cheesecake – The Recipe

I did not copy the recipe for Ye Olde Crusty Cellar Cheesecake exactly though. I changed a few things to suit my personal taste. You can decide if you make this whether to follow the OG version or mine. Here is the original with my notes on the crumb crust.

Here are the instructions on what to do with those ingredients to turn them into a crumb crust:

The two changes I made to this were:

I did not add any additional sugar as I thought an entire can of condensed milk would be sweet enough
I did not add the egg yolks. Largely because I could not understand what they were doing there. I totally understand eggs in a baked cheesecake but not in an unbaked. The only thing I could think that they provided was maybe an additional richness to the mix. Again, for my taste, cream cheese and sour cream are rich enough.

I was a bit worried that leaving them out would somehow mean that the cheesecake would not set. But the mixture firmed up beautifully in the fridge overnight to cream a filling that was both light, luscious and not too sweet!

Ye Olde Crusty Cellar – History

The Ye Olde Crusty Cellar was a wine bar opened at 255 George Street brSydney in 1931 by winemaker Leo Buring.

It was described as having:

“the head of Bacchus…to guide guests in and out’ with ‘shaded lights’ and a feeling of ‘cloistered gloom’.

Hmm, not sure cloistered gloom would be the ambiance I would be seeking were I to open a wine bar. But it worked for Leo! The “Crusty” was a destination venue, attracting crowds of visitors, many of whom would have sampled the cheesecake!

Sadly the “Crusty” closed in 1974 but luckily the recipe for us, it’s signature cheesecake lives on!

Have a great week everyone!

28
Jun
2020

Cheese-Stuffed Chillies

categories: 1970's recipes, Cheese, Chilli, Good Housekeeping World Cookery

These cheese-stuffed chillies are based on a recipe from the Ceylon section of Good Housekeeping’s World Cookery Book. So…I know a little bit about Sri Lankan cooking and never have I ever heard of a cheese-stuffed chilli. Never. Not once. Just in case I am not being entirely clear – no one in my family, not my grandmothers, not my mother, not my aunts, cousins, no other writers of Sri Lankan cookbooks have ever made or even mentioned cheese stuffed chillies in the context of Sri Lankan cooking.

Until now.

I became a little obsessed with this recipe because I started wondering if this was the original Jalapeno popper. Turns out the term jalapeno popper came to prominence in Texas in around 1972 so the recipes are definitely contemporaneous in time if a continent or two apart in space.

The recipe was vague about the type of cheese to use. Mum said that in Sri Lanka when she was growing up the only types of cheese available were Kraft cheese in a tin and Edam. Neither of which I happened to have on hand.

I did have some goat’s cheese and I remembered that my friend Leesa once brought an amazing dish to cookbook club that was feta baked with thyme, honey and walnut. Which also accounted for the other thing that was bothering me which was the inclusion of sugar in the recipe.

Hmm…so goat’s cheese to sub for the cheese in a tin, honey to sub in for the sugar. Looks like a recipe is coming together!

These cheese-stuffed chillies were delicious!!!!

There was some heat from the chillis, creaminess and a little bit of salty tanginess from the cheeseand the mustard, sweetness from the honey, crunchy toastiness from the nuts and a hit of herbiness from the thyme.

Perfect drinking snack!!!

I could have eaten a dozen of these with an ice-cold beer on a sunny afternoon. And I would have been in total bliss! They were also nice with a glass of red wine on a cold winter’s night too!

A Digression in the World of Major League Eating

Which reminds me. I found this amazing factoid on Wikipedia when doing some research on the origin of the jalapeno popper.

“Joey “Jaws” Chestnut holds the Major League Eating record for jalapeño poppers, eating 118 in 10 minutes at the University of Arizona on 8 April 2006.”

This of course took me down a path of Major League Eating. Turns out our boy Jaws (known on the MLE site as “the greatest eater in history” and “the apex predator” does not restrict himself to the jalapeno. He also holds records for downing Chicken Wings (both long form and 12 minute), pulled pork sandwiches, hot dogs, meat pies, donuts, eggs, asparagus, corned beef sandwiches, pork ribs, Philly Cheesesteaks, funnel cakes, fish tacos, mutton sandwichs, traditional tacos, shrimp wontons, pulled pork, horseshoe sandwiches (???), pulled pork sliders, long form burritos, short form ramen, gyros, Twinkies, boysenberry pie, tamales, gyoza, gumbo, ice cream sandwiches, grilled cheese sandwiches, poutine, shrimp cocktail..there are more but I lost the will to live whilst typing that lot out.

Sadly, the prize for French cut green beans (2.71 pounds in six minutes) went to Joey Jaws arch-rival Crazy Legs Conti. Shine on you Crazy Legged Diamond!

Cheese Stuffed Chillies – The Recipe

I also put my stuffed chillies under the grill to melt the cheese, toast the nuts and get some nice roastiness on the chillies. But you could serve them as is per the recipe if you wanted.

The ultimate verdict on these cheese-stuffed chillies is that they are not at all Sri Lankan but are totally delish! Just don’t invite Joey Jaws Chestnut over if you plan on making them. Or make a LOT!

Next stop on the good Housekeeping World Cookery Tour is China! Let’s see what inauthentic food we can find from the land of dragons and emperors! I’m hoping for some dumplings!