Grannymar

Do you shake a blob of tomato sauce on you chips, or eggs & bacon?  I know people who cannot live without a bottle of Tomato sauce in the fridge.  Have you ever thought of making it?

On my journey down memory lane with this old cookery book, I found a recipe for tomato sauce.  I will reproduce it here.

Tomato Store Sauce

3 lbs red tomatoes
1 small onion
1 clove or more
10 peppercorns
1 bay leaf
1 blade of mace
1 dessertspoon salt
½ pint vinegar
3 ozs sugar
Cayenne

Cut the tomatoes in halves and chop the onions.  Place all the ingredients, except the sugar and the cayenne, in a pan and simmer for 1 hour.  Pass through a sieve, return to the saucepan and boil hard for a few minutes to reduce to a thin cream.  Add the sugar and cayenne.  Pour the sauce into bottles.  When cold, cork tightly and store.

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Now I challenge Not Junk Food to update it!

Melon and Kiwi Fruit Salad
Serves 6
100 g caster sugar
200 ml water
50 g fresh ginger – grated or thinly sliced
1 medium Galia melon in balls or bite-sized pieces
4 kiwi fruit – peeled and cut into wedges

This recipe can be prepared in advance and chilled overnight.
Place the caster sugar in a heavy based saucepan and put on a low heat until the sugar has melted and changed to a light golden colour, resembling runny honey.
Remove the pan from the heat; add the water, taking great care, as the mixture will spit and splutter. Add the ginger and return the syrup to the heat. Bring to the boil and simmer until all the caramel has melted.
Pour the syrup over the fruit, chill before serving.

Delicious served with a lemon sorbet.

Mammy’s bread making implements were a large baking bowl, a tablespoon, a teaspoon and a bone handled table knife for mixing the dough.  We had no scales back then so it was handfuls or spoonfuls.  It worked well.

Brown Wheaten Bread
Preheat oven to 190°C
4 ozs plain flour – (1 mammy’s handful)
12 ozs wheaten meal (3 Mammy’s handfuls)
1 level teaspoon bread soda (bicarbonate) that is what mammy called it!
Pinch of salt
Pinch of sugar
1 oz margarine
½ egg + buttermilk

Sift Plain flour, bicarbonate of soda & salt in a bowl. Rub in margarine. Add wheaten meal and sugar and mix with the white flour. Make well in centre add beaten egg and buttermilk and mix well. Flour 2lb loaf tin and pour in mixture. Even out and mark into quarters.
Bake for 45 minutes
Test – The bread is cooked when it sounds hollow to a tap on the base of the loaf. Remove from tin, wrap in clean tea towel and leave on cake rack to cool.

In the past I have given you my updated version of Wheaten bread.

No!  Daddy did not cook, bake or boil the kettle.  He did eat and this bread was a favourite.
You might know it as:

White Soda Bread

Preheat oven to 180°C - 190°C

1 lb self raising flour (4 Mammy’s handfuls)
Pinch salt
Pinch sugar
1½ ozs butter or margarine
½ egg + buttermilk

Mix the flour, salt and sugar in a bowl and rub in the butter or margarine.  Add the egg and buttermilk reserving a little for brushing the top.  Knead lightly on a floured surface and transfer to tin or baking sheet.  (Mammy always used sandwich tins for her bread to give a uniform shape.
Run a knife across the top of the dough at right angles to form a cross.  Brush with egg and milk.
Bake for 45 minutes.

Once baked (test by tapping on the base of the loaf, it should sound hollow) mammy always wrapped the bread in a clean teatowel and set it on a cooling rack.

* I often cut into the bread while it was still warm,  I was the only one to get away with it!
Warm Daddy’s bread fresh from the oven with home made raspberry jam…. heaven on a plate!

** This bread is best on the day of baking and it is NOT a candidate for freezing.  Perhaps this is why Mammy made one cake of white bread and two brown (wheaten) every day.

• Eggs
• Liquid Polish
• Honey
• Milton
• Rashers
• Rum
• Mince

Oops!  That is not the list of Ingredients :roll:  That was a shopping list on the back of a scrap of paper in Mammy’s handwriting, the recipe I want is on the other side!

German Slices

Preheat the oven to 180°C

For the base:
8 ozs self raising flour
4 ozs margarine
3 ozs caster sugar
2 egg yolks
¼ teaspoon vanilla essence

For the top layer
2 tablespoons yellow jam (apricot)**
2 egg whites
4ozs ground almonds
4 ozs caster sugar
Few flaked almonds to sprinkle on top

Now in true mammy style I should leave you there and let you figure it out for yourself.  Will I?  Nah, I will give you the modern method Elly style instead.

Place all the ingredients for the base in a food processor bowl.  Process until well mixed, then press into a Swiss roll tin.

Spread a layer of ‘Yellow jam’ over this base in the tin.

Whisk the egg whites and fold in the ground almonds and the sugar. Spread over the jam layer and sprinkle with flaked almonds.  Bake for 30 minutes.

** Mammy used red or yellow jam when baking.  The red was always Raspberry and the yellow Apricot.

Our Loose Blogging consortium includes:-  Anu, Ashok, Conrad,  Gaelikaa,  Ginger,  Grannymar, Helen,  Judy, Magpie 11,  Maria, & Ramana.

Our topic today was chosen by Magpie 11

Potatoes and beans…..

This topic takes me full circle.  Let me explain.  A few years ago I left a spontaneous comment on a fellow Irishman’s blog.  It was: “Just give them three jumps at the cupboard door!”** - You don’t need to know all the details as the story might lose the flavour in the retelling.

Some months, if not a year later a certain gentleman was searching for the origin of said phrase and landed up on my blog.  At times he may rue that day because he has never been allowed to leave.  Not alone has he stayed, but listened to my nagging, and started a blog of his own.  Today he is a very well respected member of the LBC and responsible for the choice of topic today.

Over the past couple of weeks I have had fun dipping back into some old cookery books that came from my childhood home.  One book in particular was a Thirty-Seventh Edition, printed in 1950.  The first was in 1927.  On several occasions there were revised and enlarged editions half way through a year.

On page 194 the heading for the chapter was Sauces, Dressings and Stuffings (Including Batters and some Miscellaneous Recipes).  Sauce recipes covered eight pages, I lost count of the actual number of individual recipes and intend returning to this at a later date.

The sauce ‘To serve with Butter Beans‘ nicely fulfils the criteria for our topic today and I will reprint it verbatim.

Ingredients:-

1 saltspoonful of French mustard*
¼-½ teaspoonful salt
⅛ teaspoonful pepper
1 dessertspoonful creamed potato
4 tablespoons salad oil
1 tablespoon white vinegar
A few drops of Worcester sauce
Milk

Mix the mustard, salt, pepper and potato and gradually add the oil, mixing well with a fork or small wooden spoon.  If the oil is added too quickly and not absorbed, add a little extra potato.  Stir in the vinegar and Worcester sauce.  Add sufficient milk to thin to the required consistency.

I assume you pour the sauce over the cooked butter beans.  There is no mention of cooking, heating either the sauce or the beans.

* Does anybody use a saltspoon these days?

Now had our canny Magpie 11 chosen Brains instead of the vegetables, I found a recipe in there for Brain sauce! :roll:  Anyone want to bequeath their brain so we can try it?

** The phrase ‘Three jumps at the cupboard door’ was the reply given by my late mother-in-law then a very young Jack asked “What’s for dinner?”  In translation it means if you don’t get out from under my feet there will be no dinner, and you will have to jump up to the cupboard and see what you can find!

My mammy’s version of the above phrase was ‘Potatoes and point‘, it translated as ‘You will be lucky if you get boiled potatoes and you can point at what ever you fancy and imaging you are eating it’!

Today I dip into the old recipe book that belonged to my sister.  The recipe that I have chosen is in her hand and near the back of the book so I think it might be quite recent.

Coconut Custard

Preheat the oven to 150°C

4 eggs
3 ozs light brown sugar
8 fluid ozs coconut milk
1 teaspoon vanilla essence

Fit the metal blade to a processor and add all the ingredients and process until smooth.  Transfer to individual Ramekin dishes and bake for 35-40 minutes.

*When mammy made baked custard she always stood it in a dish of water before setting it in the oven.

In Scraps of history I was sharing recipes written by mammy and other relations on scraps of paper.  Over the next few weeks I hope to dip into the collection and share a few well tried favourites.  Today I begin with a regular when I was a schoolgirl.

Toffee Crisps.

4ozs large Marshmallows
4ozs butter or margarine
4ozs toffee (when I was young we used a slab of Cleeve’s Toffee)
4ozs Rice Krispies

Melt the butter or margarine with the toffee and marshmallows in a saucepan over a low heat stirring frequently.  Mix in the Rice Krispies and then transfer to a Swiss roll tin - yes we did make Swiss rolls back then!  You may call it a tray bake tin! Spread the mixture with a fork to even it out.  Mark into squares and leave to cool and set.  Then cut into squares and store in an airtight tin.

I was asking my sister if she still had her old school cookery book.  In the school she attended, they wrote all their notes  for Domestic Science in a large copybook.  It was the later section of the book that interested me.  You see the copybook was less than half filled by the time she left school and she added recipes as she found or tried them.  Mammy would write in the book too.

Back in the days when Elly was small and we were going to see and stay with my parents for a weekend, I would spend a day baking and fill my tins with goodies to bring with me.  Regularly I was asked to write out a recipe before I went home.  So my hand wtiting was scattered among the pages too.

With time and plenty of use the book is like us… getting old and fragile!  Pieces of paper may fall out if you are not careful.

The open book with some of the loose pieces of paper.

The loose pieces of paper are recipes written by different hands.  They are living history, recalling for me members of my family, relations and friends - Not alone in the hand writing but also with a particular recipe that we associate them with!

A collection in mammy’s hand

Mammy was an avid recipe collector, it may have have been gleaned from a friend, or quickly scribbled as she listened to a cookery item on the radio.  She was not fussy:- she used whatever piece of paper she could find.  It might be the back of an envelope or part of one, a scrap of cereal packet, an instruction leaflet or a page torn from a jotter.  Most of the time it was only the ingredients and she would know from years of cooking what method to use.  There were a few scraps with no title just a list, you knew they were recipes because the quantities were included.  Of course the far corner might have a shopping list - the things she thought of as she was baking or cooking or the bags or boxes she emptied during the session. The recipes were all tested and tried!  One thing sure you never left your school copy books lying around when I was a school girl or you might end up with a recipe in the middle of an Irish essay!

Our dearly beloved mother also collected recipes from the newspapers:

They were anything from a full page broadsheet to a tiny scrap.  The names include Theodora Fitzgibbon, Monica Sheridan (do you remember her from early RTE- all her cakes flopped- something to do with studio heat and lights I am sure!), Brenda Costigan, Monica Nevin and Mary Frances Keating. The oldest printed date that I can see is the wedding Cake, dated Thursday September 25 1969.  I was all of 22 years old…. do you think she was planning my wedding in her head?

This cutting by Mary Frances Keating for Rich Mincemeat fascinates me.  It is roughly torn from the paper, possibly while mammy was on her knees cleaning out the fire, before scrunching up some ‘yesterdays news’ as a base for kindling and the turf or coal.  The cutting has no date but I think it is the oldest of the scraps of paper.  WHY?  Look at the back…

No complete article, but the torn advertisement is the clue.  In tiny print it tells me it is a Danus “Executive” 3 button single-breasted suit, from 24 to 30 gns!

When did they stop using Guineas?

Nana’s Baked Rhubarb

Spread 2 pounds of rhubarb, cut into ¾ to 1 inch pieces, on the bottom of a 9 x 13 inch baking dish.  The quickest way to cut rhubarb is to use a scissors.  Pour 1½ cups of sugar evenly over the rhubarb.  Cover baking dish with foil. Bake for 30 minutes at 180°C. Remove rhubarb from the oven and stir mixture. Put back in the oven and bake uncovered for an additional 10 minutes or until rhubarb is tender.
Nana never added water, mind you she never measured anything either.  She worked by the look, taste or feel method!   I loved to drain off the excess juice and drink it!

Variation 1: Add ¼ teaspoon of ground ginger and ¼ teaspoon of nutmeg to the sugar. Mix ginger and nutmeg into the sugar until evenly distributed.

Variation 2: Half the amount of sugar and cook the rhubarb in lemonade.

For a crumble topping I like Micko’s version best of all.

Cook the crumble separately at 200°C. This gives it a real crunchy texture instead of it being a soggy mush.  Rub 2 ozs butter into 3 ozs plain flour in a mixing bowl until “they resemble breadcrumbs”.  Then add 1½ ozs of brown sugar. Finely chop a handful of nuts and add them to the mixing bowl, with a pinch of ginger, stir together. Sprinkle onto a baking sheet - spreading it out and cook it in the oven for about 10 minutes.  Turn the mixture & return the tray to the oven for another five to 10 minutes, just until the mixture is golden but not burnt - and it’s incredibly crunchy.

Assemble the dish about 5 minutes before you serve it up. Put the fruit filling in a microwave safe baking dish, sprinkle the crumble mixture on top and reheat it in the microwave for about one or two minutes, depending on how hot you like it. I prefer warm rather than piping hot, so it’s just a quick 60 seconds.
To Serve: Vanilla ice cream, whipped cream or thick natural yoghurt.