More on 1920s cookery

[sienamystic]

Sayers readers take note! An old friend of the ham family appears in the essay on breakfast:

Of course a really first-rate ham, such as the peach-fed Spanish variety, or those excellent but costly brands from Yorkshire, Bradenham, or Cumberland, deserve special treatment in their boiling, such as a bottle of madeira and the addition of vegetables, spices, and herbs. Thus enriched, they should make ceremonial debut at a luncheon or dinner-table, accompanied by Cumberland sauce and a skillfully composed salad before appearing at the breakfast sideboard.

Now I want to try Bradenham ham.

From the essay titled Cottage Hospitality:

Bread and Butter Pudding, for six persons.
Cut about six thin slices of bread and butter from a tin loaf, remove crust, cut into squares or rounds. Arrange in a nice white buttered dish or oven-proof glass oval. Add a few stoned raisins or well-soaked sultanas, sprinkle with castor sugar. Break 2 whole eggs and one extra yolk into a basin, whisk up, pour on 1/2 pint of hot milk flavored with vanilla, and pour this on to bread and butter; then embellish the top with some halved glace cherries and acorn-sized pieces of crushed loaf sugar. Cook to attractive brownness in a slow oven for 3/4 hour,a nd serve with fresh cream. Good both hot or cold.

I could definitely follow this recipe, and I think I will. Although I don't know what a "tin loaf" might be. And I'd have to look up castor sugar, too - I used to know what it was but can't recall.

This one from the Dance and supper essay, on the other hand, seems a waste of a good chicken to me:

For a good cold Cream of Chicken for the supper table, steam a large plump fowl till tender. When cold point the meat, and pass through a hair sieve mixed with enough cream to make it light, season to taste, add 3 or 4 leaves of gelatine dissolved. When nearly set, pour it into a plain round charlotte or brick-shaped mould previously lined with aspic of the chicken stock, turn out, and serve very cold with a garnish of shredded and creamed celery, or a fruid salad, or chopped aspic and cress. a similar treatment of lobster makes a good mousse,a nd the economist can use whiting for its basis.

I'm not sure why that's so off-putting...probably because I'm not a fan of aspics and savory mousses. The flavor is probably very good, but the mouthfeel just doesn't work for me.

Comments

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

I do have a very demanding sweet tooth! But I like the idea of a sauce instead of the cherries. I think I've seen a bourbon-vanilla sort of sauce for bread pudding somewhere, and that just sounds fabulous.