Monday 20 February 2012

Plain Cake

Plain Cake, it sounds a bit boring, but I'm determined to put in all the recipes in the book, no matter how uninspiring or odd sounding!

Plain Cake
Put 1/4lb butter into 1lb flour and 1lb sultanas or raisins, 1/4lb moist sugar, 1/4lb candied peel sliced finely, 1 teaspoon baking soda, 1/2 pint new milk, 1 egg.  Beat well together and pour into a greased tin and bake.  Thrust a wire into it, when it comes out clean, it is done.

I love this recipe, no do it in this order, or add a bit at a time, just fling it all in and there your cake shall be!  Oh and I'm not telling you the temperature or how long!  I don't know if I would dare to try this recipe, I'm not really a cake baker, muffins are more my thing and I'd be a bit scared it would all go wrong.  If anyone tries this one let me know how it goes! ;-)

Thursday 16 February 2012

Cheese Pudding

I know soup is good for a winter day but I thought I would delve into the Puddings section of the cook book next.  The first page contains four recipes, each as stodgy as the last!  I will try and post the recipes in photo form too, but my camera is currently out of action.  So if it's cold and horrible where you are (as it is here) then dive in, forget the calories and enjoy!

Cheese Pudding
4oz best rice stewed gently in a pint of water for 1/2 hour.  At the end of that time pour in two pints of milk, add 3oz grated cheesea and season with salt and pepper.  Let all boil gently for another 1/2 hour and serve very hot.

I feel warmer all ready.  I have transcribed all the recipes as they are written, so any grammatical errors are not mine, Elizabeth would have written this book for her own use so would have used notation, or skipped words as she saw fit!

Wednesday 15 February 2012

Great gran's cook book - Onion Soup

This cook book was written by my Grandfather's grandmother, Elizabeth Lowe Stewart (nee Watt) and then passed onto my Gran.  It is full of recipes, many of which I have probably tasted and my Dad would definitely have grown up eating.  As we go through the book I'll tell you a little bit more about the author and her family.

The book is written in 16 original sections with others added at later dates.  The ink and handwriting are fairly consistent throughout although some recipes have been altered later or commented on.  At the back of the book snippets from magazines have been pasted in, unfortunately there are no dates included.

Here is the first one from the book, taken from Soups.

Onion Soup
Peel 6 good sized Spanish onions - cut them into slices and fry a pale brown.  Drain off the fat, put them into a saucepan with a quart of water and stew till quite tender, then pass them through a seive and return them to the pan.  Add a cup of sifted breadcrumbs previously soaked in as much sweet milk as they will absorb, season with pepper and salt, boil up at once and serve very hot.  An improvement is to sprinkle a little grated cheese - Parmesan for choice, over the soup just before serving.

As you can see amounts are largely ignored as is a list of ingredients, and I like the fact that no mention is given of adding anything to the pan to fry the onions in but you need to pour off the fat after frying.  If  she was anything like my gran, cooking was second nature, I used to watch my gran make cakes and she didn't weigh anything, she would know by looking whether it was right!

So I hope you come back to see some more recipes from the archive as well as a diary of Canadian travels and some contracts of apprenticeship.