I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street. - W.H. Auden

Salmon is a popular food. Classified as an "oily fish", salmon is considered to be healthy due to the fish's high protein, high Omega-3 fatty acids, and high vitamin D content.

It also happens to be delicious. I would totally be one of those bears who fish for salmon in some remote mountain stream. Mmmm, mmm.





SALMON, BAKED

INGREDIENTS. - 2 slices of salmon
about 2. oz of butter or good dripping
1/2 a teaspoonful of chopped parsley
1 shallot
salt and pepper
grated nutmeg

METHOD. - Lay the salmon in a baking-dish, place the pieces of butter or dripping over it, and add the other ingreients, rubbing a little of the seasoning into the dish.
Baste frequently, and when done place the salmon on a dish, and serve.

TIME. - About 3/4 of an hour. SUFFICIENT for 6 persons.

"...there are times when only mashed potato will do." - Nigella Lawson

Sometimes I agree with Nigella. Sometimes I think she's just a little too excited by food. But Nigella hits the nail on the head with mashed potato. Mashed potato is essential... and as if they read my mind - an article in the Times describes all different varieties of ways to produce the perfect mashed potato.

So here's how Mrs Beeton suggests you make them. How do you make yours?





POTATOES, MASHED.

INGREDIENTS. - 1 lb. of potatoes
1 oz. of butter
1 or 2 tablespoonfuls of milk
salt

METHOD. - Peel and steam the potatoes over a saucepan of boiling water, or boil them in their skins, and afterwards peel them.
In either case, pass the potatoes through a wire sieve, or mash them well with a fork.
Heat the butter in a stewpan, add the milk, stir in the potato, and season to tastes with salt.
Beat well with a wooden spoon, pile lightly in a hot dish, then serve.

TIME. - To steam, 30 to 40 minutes. SUFFICIENT for 3 persons

Fishing for coffee

Sometimes you just make things for fun. Like this fish - it is a coffee fish - actually it is COFFEE CREAM but for some unknown reason I decided to put my cream in my fish mould et volia - COFFEE FISH - swimming in a mint leaf sea.



COFFEE FISH

INGREDIENTS.- 1/2 a pint of cream
1/2 a pint of milk
coffee essence
2 1/2 oz. of castor sugar
3/4 of an oz. of gelatine
the yolks of 2 eggs.

METHOD. - Beat the yolks of the eggs, ass them to the milk when nearly boiling, stir until they thicken, then put in the sugar and cool slightly.
Now dissolve the gelatine in 1 tablespoonful of water, and add it to the custard.
Whip the cream stiffly, stir it into the custard when nearly cold, add the coffee essence, and pur into the prepared mould.
Let the mould remain in a cold place until firm.

TIME. - About 1/2 an hour.

Artists reflect the course of obesity with expanding portions in the Last Supper

From The Times
March 24, 2010

Chris Smyth


Jesus Christ and Ronald McDonald may seem to have little in common. But both are presiding over the supersizing of their followers’ eating habits, according to researchers who found that the portion sizes in paintings of the Last Supper have piled up over the past 1,000 years.

American academics analysed 52 of the most famous depictions of the Last Supper and found that the appetites of the Apostles have become increasingly prodigious. The size of the main dish grew 69.2 per cent and bread portions by 23.1 per cent over the millennium, while the plates grew by 65.6 per cent, they found.

The findings suggest that today’s obesity crisis may have deep historical roots, according to the researchers. “I think people assume that increased serving sizes, or ‘portion distortion’, is a recent phenomenon,” said Brian Wansink, director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, New York, who led the study. “But this research indicates that it’s a general trend for at least the last millennium.”

From the austere repast laid on by the early 14th-century Tuscan artist Duccio, through Leonardo’s lively party of 1495, the supper became a feast in Titian’s depiction of 1544. When Tintoretto painted the Last Supper in 1592-94 the table was groaning with dishes.

Professor Wansink, with his brother Craig, a Presbyterian minister and Professor of Religious Studies at Virginia Wesleyan College, examined dozens of artworks including modern depictions by Stanley Spencer and Salvador Dalí.

Using computer design software, they scanned the meals and calculated the portion size relative to the head size of the average apostle. They found a big upwards trend, in research published in the International Journal of Obesity.

The Bible, being more concerned with its religious import, does not dwell on the amount of food consumed at the Last Supper, and it was a “tertiary matter” for most artists, Professor Wansink said. “The ampleness of the food is coming from the mind of the artist, showing what he thought was reasonable and appropriate in the time and place he was living,” he told The Times.

Professor Wansink, whose book Mindless Eating studies how social and environmental forces affect how much we eat, argues that the increasingly meaty Christianity on display is an indication of improvements in agriculture.

“The last thousand years have witnessed dramatic increases in the production, availability, safety, abundance and affordability of food,” he said. “We think that as art imitates life, these changes have been reflected in paintings of history’s most famous dinner.”

The New Testament mentions only bread and wine, but Professor Wansink discovered that fish was the most commonly depicted main course, featuring in 18 per cent of canvases. Considering the symbolism of the fish and Jesus’s injunction to his disciples to become “fishers of men”, this is perhaps unsurprising. Lamb was the main course in 14 per cent of the pictures and, more puzzling for a gathering of Jews on the eve of Passover, 7 per cent of the paintings featured pork.

Jeff Brunstrom, Reader in Behavioural Nutrition at the University of Bristol, described the research as “very interesting”. But he said: “The obesity epidemic is a relatively modern phenomenon and it’s really only in the past 40 to 50 years that you’ve seen big changes in body mass index (BMI).”

The researchers needed to show whether the larger portions had been making people fatter, he said. “If people were really eating 70 per cent more calories than they used to we would be rolling around,” said Dr Brunstrom. “Whether we have seen an increase in BMI historically is unclear.”

That will have to remain among the divine mysteries: the Wansink brothers did not assess whether Christ and his disciples themselves were getting bigger.

Yes, Virginia - there is meatloaf in Britain

Except it's called 'Beef Cake'. (Beef Cake, BEEF CAKE) Sounds delicious, doesn't it?

I misread the recipe and added only half the required breadcrumbs, so I resulted in more of a Savoury Mince, than cake, as my cake didn't hold together. However, my husband said it was delicious and even better because it wasn't dry like some meatloaves are. So, win for me.

Here is it beforehand.



BEEF CAKE.

INGREDIENTS. - 1 lb. of cold roast beef
4 oz. of breadcrumbs
1 small onion chopped finely
2 oz. of cooked ham or bacon
1 teaspoonful of chopped parsley
pepper and salt
1 egg
1 gill of stock
2 oz of bread raspings
1 oz of dripping

METHOD. - Grease a plain mould or shallow cake tin, put in the raspings, and turn the mould round until quite covered with raspings.
Melt the dripping, fry the onion until slightly brown, mince the beef and bacon finely, and then mix all the ingredients together, using more stock if the mixture is very dry.
Then turn into the prepared mould, press carefully into shape, cover with a greased paper, and bake in a moderate oven for about 45 minutes.
Turn out carefully, and pour a little brown sauce round.

TIME. - To bake, 45 minutes. SUFFICIENT for 4 persons.


With apologies to Virginia, who was only inquiring if there was a Santa

The only thing that will make a souffle fall is if it knows you're afraid of it — James Beard

I showed my fear... but I didn't back off. I didn't let my fear rule me. But my souffle still didn't rise. Well, it did a bit but not as much as I was hoping.

However, it was still delicious. So you can't really complain.



RASPBERRY SOUFFLÉ.

INGREDIENTS. - 1/2 a lb. of ripe raspberries
2 oz. of cake-crumbs or bread-crumbs
2 oz. of castor sugar
2 oz. of rice-flour or cornflour
1/2 an oz. of butter
1/2 a gill of cream
3 eggs

METHOD.-
Put the raspberries, cream, rice-flour and sugar into a basin and reduce them to a pulp by means of a wooden spoon.
Beat in the yolks of the eggs, add the cake-crumbs, stir in lightly the stiffly-whisked whites of eggs, and turn the mixture into a well-greased mould.
Bake in a hot oven from 25 to 30 minutes, and serve.


TIME. - From about 25 to 30 minutes. SUFFICIENT for 5 or 6 persons.

I don't usually have cake crumbs just lying around - so I used sponge fingers and crubled them up... and ate the left overs ;) ... definitely calls for another go around... stay tuned

Mothers lose art of cooking

From the Herald Sun yesterday...

Mothers lose art of cooking

Traditional cooking skills such as poaching an egg and making short-crust pastry are almost obsolete, according to a new survey.

More than two thirds of today's mothers (my question is where are the fathers?) do not know how to make gravy from scratch, compared with a third of their mothers. Only 15 per cent know how to make custard, compared with almost half of mothers 35 years ago.

Teh study of 2500 British women aged 18 to 70 finds traditional cooking skills have deteriorated, with 65 per cent of the women admitting their mothers cooked more family meals from scratch than they do.

One in four knows how to poach and egg without gadgets, compared with 75 per cent of the older generation. Only 16 per cent can make short-crust pastry.

Clearly there is room for a little blogger like me in the big bad world out there. Not know how to make short-crust pastry.... Fuggedaboutit!