Curry Salad

From Katharine Whitehorn's Kitchen in the Corner/Cooking in a Bedsitter.

Mix a little curry powder into some mayonnaise. Add chunks of celery and a little chopped onion and mix with cold boiled macaroni. Hard-boiled eggs optional.

Cooking a decent meal in a bedsitter is not just a matter of finding something that can be cooked over a single gas-ring. It is a problem of finding somewhere to put down the fork while you take the lid off the saucepan, and then finding somewhere else to put the lid. It is finding a place to keep the butter where it will not get mixed up with your razor or your hairpins. ... It is cooking at floor level, in a hurry, with nowhere to put the salad but the washing-up bowl, which in any case is full of socks. (Katharine Whitehorn)

Marguerite Patten's Norfolk Pudding

From wartime cookery guru Marguerite Patten's Post-war Kitchen.

4 oz plain flour
pinch salt
1 egg
1/2 pint milk

1/2 oz butter
1 lb cooking apples
2 tbsp dried fruit
2 oz sugar

For the batter, sift the flour with the salt. Beat the egg into the milk and add to the flour. Beat to a smooth batter.

Preheat the oven to 220C/425F. Put the butter into a large pie dish or casserole and melt gently. Peel, core and thinly slice the apples, add to the butter with the dried fruit and sugar. Mix well, cover the dish and return tot eh oven for 5 mins. Uncover, pour the batter over and bake for 25-30 mins, or until well-risen and brown. Sprinkle with sugar and serve at once.

Stuffed Tomatoes

From Katharine Whitehorn's original Kitchen in the Corner, that became Cooking in a Bedsitter. The early editions contain much fascinating social history about bedsitter life. This was the 50s and early 60s, before they invented flat-sharing. Yes, really, flat-sharing was radical - especially if the flat was "mixed". Whitehorn later wrote about the "gas-fire, brown-lino loneliness" of bedsitter life. There was also no takeaway food back in them days.

2 large tomatoes
2 dessertspoons sausage meat (2 oz)
1 onion
cooked rice

Fry onion for 5 mins. Meanwhile cut off tops of tomatoes and scoop out pulp. Add sausage meat and rice to onions, brown for a minute or two only; remove and add all this to the tomato pulp, with herbs and salt, but no pepper. Stuff the tomatoes with mixture; return to pan and cook 10-15 mins. in oil on medium flame.

For the sausage meat, buy some good sausages and take the skins off. I think I'd want to cook it for longer - maybe in a deep pan with a lid. Another book we loved in the early 70s was the Pauper's Cookbook by Jocasta Innes, who went on to become famous for persuading us all to rag-roll our walls in the 80s. She has a lot to answer for! (Sourcing Pauper's now...)

Sydney Smith's Salad Dressing

TO make this condiment, your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two hard-boiled eggs;
Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen sieve,
Smoothness and softness to the salad give.
Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, half suspected, animate the whole.
Of mordant mustard add a single spoon,
Distrust the condiment that bites so soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault,
To add a double quantity of salt.
Four times the spoon with oil from Lucca brown,
And twice with vinegar procured from town;
And, lastly, o'er the flavored compound toss
A magic soupcion of anchovy sauce.
O, green and glorious! O herbaceous treat!
'T would tempt the dying anchorite to eat:
Back to the world he'd turn his fleeting soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl!
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
"Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day."

2 hard-boiled egg yolks
Two boiled potatoes
1 tbsp finely chopped onion
1 tsp mustard
1/2 tsp salt
4 tbsps olive oil
2 tbsps vinegar

Mash the egg yolks and the potatoes, mix in the other ingredients, beat. Add to coarsely chopped romaine lettuce. (Who has anchovy sauce in their kitchen cupboard?)

Update: I've just made it, and it's delicious. You could eat it on its own. I left out the mustard, salt and pepper but it's just as nice without. I used new potatoes, Palestinian olive oil, Aspall balsamic vinegar and a sweet shallot.

Ethelind Fearon's Salad

Ethelind Fearon was writing soon after World War II. This salad is from The Reluctant Cook. The Reluctant Hostess is good too.

Possible inclusions are:

Spring onions
Hard-boiled eggs
Sliced dates
Sliced olives
Sultanas
Apples
Oranges
Bananas
Beetroot
Tomatoes
Celery
Cucumber
Cold vegetable marrow
Radishes
Cold French beans
Cold peas
Watercress
Small strawberries

The most unorthodox salad of my life had all of these and a bit of chopped cold ham as well. All the ingredients were chopped, for ease of handling, to about 1/2-inch lengths and bound with a good [salad] cream...

1 tbsp mustard
1 tbsp flour
1 tbsp olive oil
3 teasp sugar
1 teasp salt
1/2 teasp pepper
1 egg
1/2 pint milk
1/2 pint vinegar

Mix dry ingredients, then add well-beaten egg, oil, milk and vinegar in that order. Put in double saucepan and stir until it thickens. On no account let it boil.

You could probably make a decent salad out of three of those ingredients. But perhaps not cold marrow, radishes and dates...

The vicar and writer Sidney Smith once wrote a recipe for salad dressing in the form of a poem. I've always wanted to try making it. Coming up...

Wartime Coffee Mould

½ pint milk

½ pint strong coffee

2 oz cornflour

2 oz sugar

1 oz butter

Few drops vanilla essence

Heat together the coffee and half the milk. Mix the cornflour with the rest of the milk to a smooth paste, add to the hot milk and boil, stirring all the time, till cooked and thick. Add the butter, sugar and vanilla, mix well and pour into a wet mould to set.

It's a bit wartime: you could double the sugar at least. My aunt was still making it in the 90s. (Some recipes never got back their full quota of eggs, sugar and cream after the war.)

Coffee Mallow

Here's how the Boston Cookery School Cook Book does it.

16 marshmallows
1/2 cup hot coffee
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Cut marshmallows in quarters with wet scissors. Add coffee. Cook in double boiler until melted. Cool. When beginning to thicken, fold in cream, beaten stiff, and add vanilla. Mold in dessert glasses.

You find a lot of "double boilers" in vintage recipes. I think they date from the days when you couldn't adjust the heat on your hob, and in the 21st century you just need to turn the heat down very low. But I could be wrong.

Still can't find that cornflour version my aunt used to make...