Posts by dyan campbell
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) you can add the salt – at least 1/2 tsp. – more can be added later to taste.
Arrgh, I left it too late to edit... you probably want to start at only 1/4 tsp and start tasting from there - 1/2 tsp is looking like a lot at the moment.
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Dyan, all that cake-baking (and eating) must have sharpened your faculties. Alas I fear in my case the reverse is true. I only remember the terrified blancmange, classic tunnel vision.
There are some stories I have read so many times I can recite passages - and The Daughters of the Late Colonel is one of them! I love Katherine Mansfield for her slightly demented sense of humour. That story is so sad and so funny at the same time.
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Quoi? Have I missed a link? Wha?
Ah, I get it! Invisible writing!
Eeeek, well the failed link was fortunate, because on close inspection it's not quite exactly what I make - the linked recipe didn't use fresh tomatoes. Here goes the real one:
Fasolatha (ancient Greek recipe)
4 cups dried haricot beans (also known as "navy beans").
Put beans in a dish with water and cover, overnight. Drain and rinse well in colander. Add beans to cold fresh water (enough water to well submerge, about 6 cups) and bring to rolling boil.
Once boiling, reduce to fairly active simmer, until beans are tender - about 1 hour. Do not add salt, at this stage, as this makes the skins of the beans tough if added while cooking. Do not add baking soda (as some suggest) to the beans soaking overnight - this does speed up the softening, but can destroy some of the nice B vitamins contained in the beans).
So, starting with your cooked beans:
4 C. (they were 4C dried anyway!) haricot beans, cooked, boiled, drained and rinsed
1 spanish onion (plain brown) diced
4 - 5 cloves garlic, chopped
3 stalks celery (and a few leaves) diced
3 carrots, diced
4 -8 (depending on size) very ripe tomatoes - chopped or just processed smooth, skins and all.
2 - 3 Tbsp tomato paste
1/4 to 1/2 C. good quality extra virgin olive oil (as you are not going to fry/heat this directly, you can use the very dark green well flavoured type you'd use for salad - not the lighter coloured stuff meant for roasting & frying
3 - 4 C fresh water
1/4 tsp or ground pepper to tasteYou can top up with a little water during cooking - to make whatever texture you prefer. Traditionally it is not quite as thick as chili, but almost. Some people prefer it as a more soupy texture.
Bring all these ingredients to a boil. Reduce to a simmer & cook at least 1 & 1/2 hours. During cooking (at least an hour in or so) you can add the salt - at least 1/2 tsp. - more can be added later to taste.
That's it! You can remove a small amount of the soup (20% or so) and process till smooth, and add back to soup, giving it that nice, rich opaque sauce to the beans and vegetable chunks.
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Would so love to have that recipe. We’re mostly vego here, so pork is out. Care to share?
This is exactly what I make exceopt I would never put a whole cup of olive oil in this amount - I use 1/4 cup. Other than that, it's the same - it's an extremely y simple recipe. It sure goes well with fried haloumi cheese, you can make up for the missing olive oil there.
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I MAKE MY OWN VANILLA.
I should share the recipe here - and I was driven to this because good vanilla is sooo expensive - you take a bottle of vodka (or bourbon or other spirits if you wish) and put split vanilla pods in it. That's it - (I put about 6 or 8 - split up the sides). Replace cap. Wait.
Six or eight weeks will go by and the vodka will only be pale amber, and you'll think you've wasted both vodka and vanilla pods. Wait another 3 months, voila, it finally starts to turn dark (it never goes quite as dark as the store-bought stuff) but it makes the best vanilla you've ever tasted. You can decant it by the small bottle full, and top it up with more vodka. I usually get 2 bottles of spirits worth of vanilla out of 6 - 8 pods.
The vanilla pods, after spending a year or more in vodka can either be used as if they had never been used or just chucked into granulated sugar and sealed for a few weeks to make vanilla sugar.
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Real glass ones!
How those rabbit moulds brightened my golden childhood, even if they were only cheap aluminium knock-offs. Even blancmange* was a treat when it was rabbit-shaped. Our guinea pigs were taught to cease their clamor and “assume the position”, crouching expectantly in the pose inspired by the rabbit moulds, before they were fed.I had wanted them for years, having seen the jellies they make in The Innocents the wonderful 1961 adaptation of The Turn of the Screw. I’d been searching for literally years, and then I found first one at an antique shop (and paid I forget what, but more than I wanted to) and promptly found the matching one only days later in a junk shop for $3.00.
But kids’ reaction to the jellies they make are rapturous, and the heads are always eaten last and with many expressions of regret. Remorse even.
How did you train your guinea pigs to do anything? The guinea pig I knew didn’t do much except go into hysterics of joy if given Romaine (Cos) lettuce. She would sit and chew stolidly through all sorts of things, but only Romaine lettuce sent her into “whoop whoop” hysterics. Joe, your menagerie sounds like my house when I was a kid. My Mum always used to tell us we couldn’t bring home every animal we found, but she turned out to be wrong.
Blancmange – Cold Shape – everyone likes it better when they call it Panna Cotta.
Islander – I’ve never made Simmel Cake, but sure enough, the Colonial Cookery book has a recipe – it sounds delicious a pale fruitcake with a thin layer of jam under the marzipan topping. Lovely. If we ever meet and I have enough notice, I will try my hand at one for you.
My friend Aja’s Mum, who was Latvian but grew up in Germany (and saw Adolph Hitler speak, when she was 8) made the very best Black Forest Gateau I have ever… she even made her own preserved cherries, which had to be of a specific subspecies of some variety…. Aja’s Mum’s cake was the stuff of legendI have the recipe somewhere but have never attempted it.
The slightly strange textured almond cake someone described may be either a crepe cake or a choux pastry cake – you can combine either of those with layers of sponge cake and and/or combination of: custard/mousse/ganache/creme fraiche/cream cheese/fresh marzipan (wonderful just made) to great effect.
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Although now that I think of it there is that famous literary blancmange in KM’s Daughters of the Late Colonel. It gets a terrible state of the jitters in the presence of the two daughters arguing with the maid
Yes, I remember that blancmange, quivering. But the sisters weren't arguing with Kate, they were old tabbies terrified of Kate the bad tempered young maid, afraid to ask for jam. Or tea. Or hot water. Fear of Kate looms large in the story, considering she is help, and their father just died.
There are very famous literary meringues in that story as well. My sister Shirl & I used to sit and read it to each other howling with laughter. Poor Cyril, desperate to escape a conversation with his grandfather, Colonel Pinner always used to reduce us to hysterics.
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No class at all, I was practically feral as a child – didn’t come out of the trees until I was fourteen – but plenty of Alice in Wonderland, now that you mention it. I have a pair of antique glass jelly moulds – rabbits – and make fresh fruit jelly – wonderful jelly and Cold Shape recipes in the NZ Colonial Cookery book.
I find 1950s NZ baking recipes pretty dreadful to be quite honest – there was still a lot of rationing (as NZ was still “England’s Pantry”) so most baked things are gritty, over-sweet, full of dessicated coconut. There were so many things I find essential for cooking that seemed non-existent. I first moved here 22 years ago, and it was hard to find things like cardamom, rose water, good quality cinnamon, cloves, mace or ginger. If you bought any spices, whole grains, seeds or nuts, they were invariably stale beyond use.
Of course all that’s changed now – but it’s easy to forget how unvaried and stale the food was in NZ not long ago – and this extended to the supermarket shelves. It could be a struggle to find fresh garlic or any kind of lettuce other than iceberg back then.
Conversely, the NZ cookbook from 1903 has much more complex and varied recipes, and uses a wider range of ingredients. There are ice cream recipes (frozen custard actually, as you make a creme Anglais with your egg yolks) that use 1 quart of sieved berries to 1 pint of cream. That’s my kind of ice cream.
Jackie – there are so many trifle recipes in the 1903 book you would not believe it – one that uses macaroons on the bottom, 3 egg sponge in the middle and meringues on top (custard, brandy, berries and cream in varying layers). And that is only one of so many different variations on trifle.
My trifle (the Christmas one anyway) has a vanilla sponge, brandy, ny fresh raspberries as well as sieved, slightly thickened raspberry coulis, a whole egg & skim milk vanilla custard (as opposed to an egg yolk and cream custard) and a yoghurt cream of my own invention. It’s much less rich. I do a banana cream pie that is also much less rich than the original version.
Interesting about the sweetness and North American cookery. I’ve googled up a few recipes, such as boston baked beans, and included molasses, as required, but found it too sweet. I suspect that I’m one of those people who much prefer savoury.
I prefer savory food too, come to think of it – but I do love to bake. Cooking and baking are entirely different things. And North American baking has a tradition of using far more fruit, buttermilk, yoghurt, grains and just calling on a far more varied history than English baking, which NZ baking seemed to be – and a ration-induced state of that, too, when I first got here. . It was sad. Bread was a horrible, squashy white thing. Pizza was scone dough with Watties spagetti spinkled with white sugar. Salad was iceberg lettuce with condensed milk. Shudder.
The Boston Baked Beans you describe are more or less the homemade version of pork and beans Watties sells in a can – and a serving of that has about 30gm of sugar, I believe – very high in sugar – but the real dish is actually French – and is an old standard Haricot Bean and Pork Cassolet. As the French writer Colette once said to Proust when they were both in their teens: “my soul is full of haricot beans and little strips of bacon." The French recipe uses very little sugar, and is at least 400 years old. With haricot beans I prefer a Greek recipe, Fasolatha, which is vegetarian and the recipe is thousands of years old. But if I am making a French cassolet, I invariably make a beef version (which used 1/2 tsp sugar and a good shot of brandy) and takes just hours. We are hardly ever hungry enough for that kind of food these days – that is food for skiiers.
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I’m reminded of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, which perhaps expresses how one might feel too. To this day, you do not make jokes about the tragedy in the Great Lakes region, as many a would-be comedian has found. Another parallel is the destruction of the submarine Kursk.
Comedians have tried to do that? I'm amazed anyone would try to make jokes about either the Edmund Fitzgerald or the Kursk.
The song Gordon Lightfoot is a pretty close description of the Edmund Fitzgerald's fate - and shortly after the disaster, the wreckage was located, and is shown here in the tribute that was put up with the song.
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The prune brownies (?) are a winner. Love the idea of the kids downing prune and thinking it’s chocolate. Cool :)
I like doing up a table for kids - they will devour raw vegetables by the truckload, served with a mild curry/strained yoghurt dip. It always amazes their parents how much fresh produce their kids will actually pack away without prompting. Ditto bowls of raspberries and blueberries (served in silver bowls) and strawberries & cherries (served in crystal).. Presentation is all, with kids, As is culling the very, very best bits for the kids' table, and having b-grade berries for the adults, c-grade berries for smoothies etc.
What Jamie Oliver is doing is quite amazing - and his rant about how children are being malnourished by processed food is absolutely correct. Paediatricians have reported treating children with bowel obstructions, at 8, 9 years old. That's an unnecessary disorder in an elderly patient, but and ailment like that requiring surgery is nothing short of child abuse.