"French Home Cooking: Some Cryptic Suggestions"

The same evening as we made the ginger cookies, we made a dish from the book 'French Home Cooking', which is a very special book.  It was given by my grandmother to my mother, I think when she got married (the book was published in 1962 which was the year when Mum and Dad got married).  It might even have been a wedding present?  Anyway, it is inscribed as follows:

Now, my grandmother was no fool (she was one of the first women to attend Oxford University, reading PPE at St Hugh's in the 30s).  'Inspiration' is a good word to describe what this book has to offer.  Take the following 'recipe' for Saumon Grillé (Grilled Salmon): "Grill salmon and serve, hot, with a cucumber sauce".  That's it.  No instructions as to how to grill salmon or how to make a cucumber sauce.  No indication of how long the dish takes to prepare.  No pictures, no anecdotes.  No funny stories about that time the author had to prepare a cucumber sauce but there were no cucumbers in all of Paris, or that time when she accidentally served the dish cold instead of hot, with hilarious results.

Anyway, we finally settled on the 'recipe' for Escalopes de Veau à la Viennoise (Schnitzel, to you and me):

It's the one in the middle on the left.  The instructions read: 'Prepare escalopes in the Viennese way.  Serve hot.'

First up, prepare breadcrumbs.  Line up alongside flour and egg:

 Then unwrap the veal:

 Dunk scallops in the order flour, egg, breadcrumbs:

 Then fry:

"Fry until ready"

Here they are in all their glory:

 We served them with roast potatoes and stir-fried red cabbage, with a lemon quarter:

My theory is that in the 60s, the household cooks (invariably women, then, I suppose) actually knew how to cook.  There were no ready-meals in the supermarkets and no microwaves.  So you could write a recipe book with the barest of instructions; people bought the book for tips on whether the dish was served hot or cold, or whether it had a cucumber sauce or not.  If this is right, then since I managed to fry these escalopes OK, that means that I am currently at the level of the average 60s housewife in terms of cooking ability.  I'm quite proud of that!

"Deserts from Canyon Ranch" [Geddit?]

OK, so this happened a long time ago, so I am not entirely sure what happened.  But basically, we had to make something from the Canyon Ranch dessert cookbook.  Here we faced two obvious problems: one, we hate desserts, and two, everything from Canyon Ranch is supposed to be healthy.  "Healthy Desserts"?  That sounds suspiciously like an oxymoron.  But we pressed ahead, and chose to do 'Triple Ginger Cookies':

First, I prepared one of the ginger ingredients, the minced fresh ginger:

Then I minced some crystallized ginger too:

There might be some powdered ginger too in the lefthand receptacle but it's hard to tell

Meanwhile, Katherine was measuring out some cream cheese:

This was being added to butter, cream cheese, brown sugar, egg yolk, and molasses:

Cream everything together:

 Then roast potatoes:

This was a long time ago.  I'm still trying to fit all the pieces together.

 The cookie mixture eventually becomes nice and sticky:

Add flour and baking soda:

 Finally, add the three gingers:

Mix together to arrive at the final cookie mixture:

Next, spoon the mixture out into attractive lumps on the baking tray:

We had no idea how they were going to look when they came out.  To our surprise, they came out perfect:

They were delicious: very soft, very chewy, and very tangy.  And very healthy, with only a cup and a half of brown sugar and 1/3 cup of molasses, and 1/3 cup of butter, and...

In an amazing culinary feat, at the very same time as we were making the cookies, we were making a recipe from 'French Home Cooking'... See the next entry!

I can't even remember what dish this was

Well, it's been so long since we cooked the dish this entry is about, that I can't even remember which dish it was, or which book it came from!  Maybe if I look at the photos?

WTF?

Hmmm.  Better start from the beginning.  It's another instalment of 'Everyday Food'.  This time, it was the much-needed 'Timesaving Tricks' edition:

The dish: sausage and bean casserole.  The concept behind the dish is one of my favourite dishes: cassoulet.  Of course it's one of my favourite dishes: it's a stew that cooks for hours and contains confit of duck (fatty duck braised in duck fat, refrigerated in duck fat, then sautéed in duck fat).  But what about this timesaving American version?

The key to this dish is that you can make it ahead of time and then freeze it - hence why it belongs in the 'timesaving' issue.  I'm going to try to recreate the genesis of the dish from the pictures.  First you chop some onion and cut up a couple of kielbasa:

Then your dish is ready!

OK, these might be out of order.  Ah yes, this photo looks like an interim stage, probably the onions cooking with the sausage: 

Cooking oil on the right, in case there's not enough fat.

Then you cook something in another pan (tomatoes?):

Then you add that to the sausage and onion mix:

It's looking very liquidy.  That must have been stock above, not oil.  And to my trained eye, there is red wine in there too.  Anyway, then you add beans, I'm guessing, although there's no picture to prove that actually happened.  And, I'm also guessing, you top it with breadcrumbs, and put it in the oven, and then take it out:

I do remember that it tasted very good; perhaps a little too smoky: I think we thought that next time we would use half smoked sausage and half unsmoked.

We did freeze another whole casserole dish of it and ate that later (a couple of weeks later, I mean, not later that same evening), and yes, that did save a lot of time.  Or rather, since we had to heat it in the dish from frozen, it took a long time, but time during which we could play scrabble and drink wine, rather than having to tend the stove.

Next up, 'Christmas appetizers'.  Don't think for a moment that we are going to skip it just because it is not Christmas!  That would not be in the spirit of the recipe book challenge.  Instead, we're just going to wait 9 months before doing anything out of it!  Seriously, I'm sure that the book's inappropriateness for this time of year is part of the explanation why our project has abruptly slowed down.  We had a great opportunity to make something out of it today, to take to Lydia's first birthday party (birthday, Christmas, what's the difference?), but the party was cancelled because of the bug that's hitting Princeton babies and their parents.  In fact, I am writing this as both Katherine and Evelyn are taking an afternoon nap; one of them recovering, and the other one still suffering badly.  At this rate, Evelyn will be able to help us when we get to the end of the books.  She is nearly standing on her own now, and so it won't be long before she is cooking us dinner!

Chicken Pot Pie (with a guest appearance)

So this time we moved on to another issue of 'Everyday Food', the 'Warm up to Fall' issue:

It wasn't hard to choose the recipe we wanted, because we had talked for a while about making a chicken pot pie, and there was a rather nice recipe which even included extra vegetables (green beans and yellow squash) to make you think that you are eating healthily.  The recipe spread over four pages:

That should have been a clue that it was going to be a little complicated, but we are good at ignoring such clues, and started the whole process at 7.00 pm after putting Evelyn to bed.  But we had a helper!  Ronald was visiting from England, and he was in charge of reading the recipe out when called upon:

First of all, the filling.  Chop the carrots: 

Note champagne bowl to my right.  Ronald demonstrated he is the  ideal guest by bringing Veuve Cliquot with him.

 Melt a considerable amount of butter:

 Then cook onion and carrot in the butter until soft, and add flour:

Add quite a lot of flour, actually:

Naturally, it was only after adding all six tablespoons of flour that we realised the flour I had added was completely the wrong sort.  I had added self-raising ('self-rising', as it's called here) flour.  Luckily, because this dish doesn't involve baking, it didn't matter.  Then a generous amount of wine is added, along with stock and tarragon.  Stir and simmer.  Then for the extra vegetables.  Yellow squash:

and green beans (not pictured here).  After they had been added, I thought the pot needed a little more stock so they could simmer properly:

 Looking good:

After a bit more simmering (it took rather longer than the recipe suggested for the beans to cook), we added the chicken pieces and some cream:

The topping was Katherine's domain.  First of all, she rolled out some (store-bought, frozen) puff pastry with flour (the right kind - in fact, it was because she was using the right flour that I had taken the wrong flour from the cupboard).  Then it was scored and brushed with cream, and put into the oven.  It came out looking pretty good:

Assemble the two components together, and you get something looking suspiciously like the picture in the book:

Now, to accompany it we had mashed potatoes, cooked in my beautiful new copper pot and then riced with my new ricer:

For some reason, the mashed potatoes, served on the side in a ramequin, didn't make it into the final shot.

But this is the unmistakable sight of friends eating a good dinner, with good wine.  At 10.00 p.m. at night.

Next up: "Everyday Food" again, this time, "Timesaving Tricks".  Maybe we'll get to eat at 9.00 p.m. this time?