Rock and Roll Cookery

Found - an uncommon cook book called Cool Cooking. Recipes of your Favorite Rock Stars by Roberta Ashley ( Scholastic Book Service USA 1972). As it was published 40 years some of the stars are now dead (John Lennon, George Harrison, Eddie Kendricks, Wilson Pickett, Joe Cocker) or sadly forgotten (The Honey Cones, The Grass Roots, The Bells, Andy Kim, Odetta, The Delfonics, Rose Colored Glass, Mandrill) and Paul McCartney was still eating meat. He provides a pizza recipe with sausage and anchovies etc.,

Some recipes are long and complicated and some short to the point of minimalist. From Elton John ('who doesn't cook at all') is a multi ingredient Shrimp Currry. Kris Kristofferson's Tacos looks slightly difficult but he advises (unlike Nigella) 'prepackaged taco shells'. George Harrison' s Banana Sandwich requires bread and a banana with peanut butter optional -'Slice  a ripe banana lengthwise and lay on a piece of bread. If you like, you can spread the bread with peanut butter.' That's it.

Another banana themed recipe comes from Carly ('You're so vain') Simon. Carly 'likes strange food combinations she creates spontaneously'. This concoction, she says, tastes great with yoghurt and mandarin oranges.

Carly's Concoction
Chopped Walnuts
1 container cottage cheese
1 banana
honey ( as much as you like)
Mix the walnuts into the cottage cheese and sliced the banana over the top of this mixture. Pour honey over the whole concoction and serve.

Lastly John Fogerty ( Creedence Clearwater Revival) has a good egg recipe for a rock and roll breakfast.

Fogerty Scrambled Eggs
4 eggs
1/2 cup sour cream
salt and pepper
1/2 stick butter
 Beat  the eggs well and stir in the sour cream ; add salt and pepper and blend. Melt the butter in a skillet and pour in the eggs. Fry over a medium heat, stirring frequently, until the eggs are  solid. Serves 2.

Good Things in England

Florence White ( 1863 - 1940),  recently lauded by TV chef Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and trendy cultural historian Alexandra Harris, author of Romantic Moderns, founded the English Folk Cookery Association in 1928 in order to promote regional cookery in the UK. In the book that emerged from her extensive research, Good Things in England (1932), a brilliant anthology of recipes from 1399 to 1932, White unashamedly name checks many of her friends, colleagues, and suppliers in the proud tradition of Dr Kitchiner, whose early nineteenth century Cooks’ Oracle did something similar, though on a much smaller scale.

Michael Cardew - Ramekin

For instance I don’t think Kitchiner would ever have said  'These mutton chops taste  twice as good on one of Mr Wedgwood’s beautifully decorated Queensware plates ', which is essentially what Smith is doing when in her own recipe for Savoury Baked Eggs she writes approvingly of what we would now call ramekins that were produced by pioneer studio potter Michael Cardew. 'For these use the delightful little slip-ware pipkins made by Michael Cardew at Winchcombe, Gloucestershire…'

In this early stage of his career, Cardew (1901 – 83), then a little known disciple of Bernard Leach, must have been delighted with this free publicity from such a trusted source, especially as White’s book quickly became a best-seller. Good Things in England  is now regarded as a key document in the renaissance of regional British cookery that was to have its zenith in the work of Jane Grigson and others. As for Cardew, now acknowledged as only second to Leach himself in originality, his pots can sell for four-figure sums, and recently his enormous influence has been the focus of a full-length  biography , The Last Sane Man in England, which discusses, among many other things, his 'obsession' with food. [RR]

Vegetarian Instructions

From the Vegetarian Handbook (London 1970). The last 8 pages consist of instructions to show to your hosts in hotels and restaurants so that they understand your diet requirements. The style of non meat food is possibly now slightly dated (nut rissoles, vol-au-vents) and even a little joyless, but the leaflet makes pretty sure that the food provider gets the picture. Serious Veggies could well use it, or modify it...We have added the Spanish version and tried to OCR (read digitally) the Esperanto - but it scrambled.

VEGETARIAN FOOD HINTS
FOR CONTINENTAL HOTELS

The following pages, in seven different languages, may be useful to visitors in hotels that do not normally cater for vegetarians. Translation has been kept as literal as possible so that the various items can easily be identified.

ENGLISH

  Lunches and dinners, consisting exclusively of produce of the vegetable kingdom, with or without the addition of dairy produce.

1. SOUPS and sauces made with vegetable (not meat) stock. Vegetable soups of all kinds.

2. ENTRÉES, such as:
  Souffles, various; cauliflower au gratin; spaghetti or macaroni, with tomato or cheese; vols-au-vent, with vegetable filling.
  Rissoles made with nuts or other vegetable ingredients.
  Omelettes and other egg dishes, various.

With these dishes, vegetables such as:
    Potatoes, peas, green vegetables, carrots, beans. (If fried, vegetable oil or butter should be used.)
  For making rissoles, use lentils, beans, chestnuts, or other nuts (such as almonds, etc.). The nuts should be well ground.

3. SALADS, such as:
    Green, mixed, Russian (without anchovy); hors d'œuvre, with lemon and olive-oil (or mayonnaise).

4. PUDDINGS, etc. (made always without animal fat, except butter or cream), such as:
    Baked, boiled or steamed puddings; pastries, cakes, ices, cômpotes of all kinds; rice and other cereals, with jam or honey.

5. FRUITS (either fresh or stewed).


SPECIAL NOTE. Never serve meat, fish, fowl, or jelly. Do not over-season any of the dishes. Serve only vegetable gravies. Use no animal fats, except butter and cream.

SPANISH

  Almuerzos y comidas, consistiendo exclusivamente de productos del reino vegetal con o sin la adición de productos de lecheria.

1. SOPAS y salsas hechas con ingredientes vegetales (sin came). Sopas vegetales

The correct British way to make tea

From The New Illustrated Universal Reference Book (Odhams, London 1933). It called itself 'the book of a million facts' and was a sort of Google of its day. It advertised itself as covering 'the main interests of humanity…no essential subject is left out.' To test this I checked if it had instructions for making tea, as few things are more essential. Sure enough a third of the way through at page 414 it has this:

TO MAKE GOOD TEA

It is the easiest thing in the world, yet nine people out of 10 do not manage to make a success of it. First of all the water must be freshly drawn from the tap. That left already in the kettle is flat and lifeless. It must be quickly boiled and poured over the tea just as it reaches boiling point. Give preference to a pot of either earthenware or aluminium ware, as the two kinds that make the best brew, and let the pot be thoroughly heated before the tea is put in. This is generally accomplished by pouring boiling water into the pot and then pouring it out again. A way that comes to us from China, and an excellent way too, is to put the tea into a perfectly dry pot, and let pot and leaves get hot together by leaving it on the rack or any other warm place.

That's it. They might have added the measurements - usually one heaped teaspoon for each person and 'one for the pot.' Once the water has been poured (during a 'rolling boil') 4 or 5 minutes is the brewing time and a tea cosy can be used - but they seem to have fallen from favour. The fresh water should be taken ('drawn') from the cold tap; the Queen Mother is said to have had her tea made with still Malvern water.
The pouring of the water while it is boiling is the quintessential bit. The writer Kyril Bonfiglioli, in one of his Jersey based thrillers, has a character say something along the lines of 'you can kill me or you can give me tea made with water that hasn't come to the boil…'

Iced Soda Water Soup

From the fearless British reporter Noel Barber the first Briton to reach the South Pole since Scott. Found in The Artists and Writers Cookbook (Contact Editions, Sausalito 1961.) His other recipe is not for the fainthearted - a meal in Malaya with Dyak head-hunters.

Contributors to this uncommon (but not valuable) anthology includes: Man Ray, Pearl Buck, Marcel Duchamp, Burl Ives, Marianne Moore, James Michener, Paul Bowles, Harper Lee, Kay Boyle, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wilbur, Lawrence Durrell, Robert Graves, Malcolm Bradbury (from whom this book came-- he gives a recipe for Yorkshire Pudding) William Allen White, Max Eastman, Katherine Anne Porter, Simenon, Lin Yutang, Sir Shane Leslie, S.I. Hayakawa, Sam Francis and many more. The recipe sounds abit bit like a very savoury Lassi. Barber's advice to use as much soda water as you like could be the making or breaking of this hearty soup. The tone of this Daily Mail reporter is very much of his time..

Iced Soda Water Soup 
I tasted this first in a village in Persia, the morning after an earthquake in which several thousand people were killed in a vast area between Teheran and the Caspian Sea. Since my knowledge of Persian is considerably less than my knowledge of arithmetic, the only thing I could do (after tasting the soup and finding it delightful) was to watch the villagers make it for me all over again and write down just what I saw.

I had raced there to beat my competitors. I flew from London to Teheran, drove 11 hours and as I could get no further because of landslides, slept in the car, then did another 5 hours on horseback.

It was hot, dusty and terrible. I breakfasted off some chocolate and processed cheese and reached the village - which was in the centre, the heart of the devastated area - at noon. Hardly a house was left undamaged, and in one of the few skeletons that stood, pointing up like a rotten old tooth, friendly peasants made me lunch – starting with this soup. It is an ideal super hot day – it should be eaten cold, because it is a peasant dish, you may vary the ingredients to suit yourself.

Three jars or 1 1/4 pints of yoghurt
Quarter pint of cream
One heaping tablespoon full of raisins
One heaping tablespoon full of dill or if unobtainable parsley
One heaping tablespoon of chopped onion
1 1/2 medium cucumbers
Three hard-boiled eggs
Soda water as desired.

Chop all the ingredients very fine and place in a bowl. Mix with the yoghurt and the cream and  add as much soda water as you like just before serving. For six.

I once met Jane Grigson

Sent in by faithful jotter R.M.Healey. My nearest thing to this was walking through Elizabeth David's hall past some serious antiquarian cookery  to get to the garret of her sister to buy some books. Belgravia?

I met the woman who has been called one of the greatest writers on food in the twentieth century in the early autumn of 1985. But I wasn’t so much interested in her own writings, but in her husband, the poet and critic Geoffrey Grigson, twenty three years her senior, who was slowly dying.

Earlier that year I had compiled a festschrift for Grigson’s 80th birthday and he had sent me a letter of thanks dictated by his daughter Sophie, who had not yet embarked on her own career as a TV chef and food journalist. At that time I hadn’t fully realised how ill he was (I think it was prostate cancer) because I plagued Jane with letters and phone calls begging to visit them both. Eventually, she relented and one weekday in October my girlfriend and I caught the coach from Victoria to Swindon. 

Jane met us and we all drove back to that legendary farm house in Broad Town, whose name on the letterhead was capable of striking dread into the hearts of literary editors and literary enemies alike. We were shown around the house and garden , beginning, I think with the garden, which Grigson had lovingly created almost from scratch, and which features most significantly in his wonderful series of essays, Gardenage (1952).