Thursday 29 July 2010

Coffee Pudding


From Peg Bracken's The Compleat I Hate to Cook Book.

Melt 12 marshmallows in two cups of strong black coffee. Then add enough unwhipped whipping cream to make it a pretty café au lait colour, and pour it into a freezing tray. Leave it for eight hours. Serve it in sundae glasses with whipped cream on top, and some chopped nuts if you have them.


Peg Bracken was a 50s writer whose I Hate to Housekeep Book is also brilliant (and even funnier). One of her best pieces of advices: If you have a lot of jobs to do that you've been putting off, start them all. Lay out the material and pin on the pattern pieces. Get out the bank statements. Throw the laundry on the floor in front of the washer. Rake the leaves into a heap. Then you can potter between the jobs and somehow they all get done.

In her recipes, she has the disconcerting habit of writing STOP NOW. She doesn't mean "throw it all out and order a pizza", she means you can leave it now and go and do other stuff, and come back half an hour before dinner to do the actual cooking part.

Her cookbook is rather full of the tuna noodle casserole style of cookery. Nothing wrong with that, but I don't think I'll post any containing chipped beef. I've gone through two copies of this book – just about to order a third as this one's lost its front cover.




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