Also have some homemade chicken stock in the freezer, so making a summer minestrone soup for four with young green beans, baby gem squash, fennel and some smallish courgettes, all from the garden, with tomato passata and cooked white cannellini beans. As well as the usual sautéed onions, carrots and celery and minced garlic, a scant handful of orzo. To be topped with fresh basil (not enough yet for pesto) and grated Pecorino.
Like Sandemaniac, I've reacted by being an adventurous cook who enjoys cooking - and I've taught my sons to cook (as a teenager I was expected to cook for my 4 older brothers if my parents were away).
My father, lifelong Scouter that he was, had little patience for boys or men who couldn’t fend for themselves, or for the rest of the family, in the kitchen. He was the one who generally cooked breakfast at our house on school days/work days. Supper as well from time to time, and he could do some pretty impressive things in a Dutch oven over a campfire.
The comments from Heavenlyannie and Gill about leek and potato soup prompted me to have a go, and I pretty much followed the same recipe as Gill's - mine came from the Delia Smith books from the 1970s, but I added garlic, which (strangely) she didn't. It was OK; it would have been rather bland without the garlic, and probably rather better if I'd used real chicken stock rather than a Knorr Stockpot. Is it just me, or are they salty enough to give you a raging thirst, but without adding much in the way of flavour?
It makes me all the keener to acquire a decent sized freezer: the one I have just isn't big enough to accommodate quantities of stock. I think I'll try and do a clear-out, followed by a defrost - there's a thick layer of ice on the "roof", which is occupying more space than enough.
I grew up eating various anglicised Indian recipes, including mulligatawny, that came from an old fashioned hard back book, I wonder if that was the book? It used more complicated spicing mixes than the curry I was supposed to cook at school in the 1970s, which just used curry powder.
I think I make mulligatawny and minestrone with equal infrequency, as good intentions are often not executed. But its my meal week starting Monday, so I will put one on the menu.
As a boy I was introduced to curries by returned missionaries from India. At university college did not provide Sunday lunches and I used to invite friends for lunch, often a curry. I tried out different ways to make a good curry but was mostly unsuccessful. It wasn't until later that I realised that whatever you did with Vencat curry powder - frying - making a paste, cooking from the start, adding at the end - it didn't make the grade. I now make up my own garam masala mix from whole spices, though it does not include turmeric or chilli as they are added separately along with other spices.
- mine came from the Delia Smith books from the 1970s, but I added garlic, which (strangely) she didn't. It was OK; it would have been rather bland without the garlic
Maybe it was just my meat-and-two-veg (boiled) childhood, but did garlic even exist in the 1970s?
I think it snuck into our house as garlic salt (which I used to like sprinkled on buttered toast). I don't think I used the actual beast until I was living away from home.
I remember the advent of peppers - invariably green - which were treated as a salad ingredient. But I don't think I ever recall an Irish aubergine - and when I did meet it, it was spongy and undercooked in badly-made ratatouille.
Vegetables of my childhood were potato, carrot, parsnip, turnip and cabbage. And if you wanted exotica, mushrooms.
We had garlic at home in the 1970s, and probably 60s. I remember my school friends really objecting to the smell of the pâté in my lunch box when I was about 11. But my mother grew up holidaying in France and cooking from Elizabeth David. I ate quiche Lorraine from a very young age and a huge range of vegetables.
I also introduced my mother to fresh root ginger in the late 70s/early 80s; I brought it home from university (and a whole lot of other things I could find in London that she couldn't find in the depths of the West Country. (And had a cookery book with a recipe I still use for lentil quiche dating from the late 70s.)
Certainly no garlic or ginger in my UK working class home of the 70s and 80s. No peppers or aubergine either. Like Firenze, we only had root vegetables and cabbage, with brussels at Christmas. Mushrooms were for a cooked breakfast, with tinned tomatoes.
My father discovered frozen stir fries in the late 1980s and that was the height of exotic food for my parents. I doubt if my mother ever tasted a curry, which is the staple diet in my house.
You've just reminded me of my mother's curries. These involved leftover roast lamb, which was mixed into a white sauce flavoured with curry powder and served over boiled white rice.
I think my first memories of garlic are probably from the late 70s or early 80s, about the time my mum decided I should learn how to cook, and taught me, with the help of the blessèd Delia.
Green peppers were used for chillies and Spag Bog. Aubergines, thanks be to God, were either unavailable or ignored.
There was plenty of fresh ginger, garlic, chillies etc in working-class households in the 70s - they just weren't *white* working-class households (and to be really pedantic, there was plenty of garlic in many standard bought products like worcester sauce and brown sauce). And plenty of people from white working-class families were discovering baltis in Birmingham or samosas in Bradford for example - my dad was a Irish Catholic working-class teenager in Coventry in the 70s, and was a huge reggae fan so would often find himself at Black friends' houses swapping records and eating curry mutton or Jamaican patties. Many UK cities had substantial South Asian and Caribbean communities by the 70s, and growing Chinese communities.
And Italian - we stocked up on all sorts, including olive oil and garlic, when we went into London, deliberately seeking out the Italian delis. That would be 1960s.
Wow, you all had such varied experiences and food! We mostly had what we grew and what was hunted or fished. No garlic. No ginger. Thank the Good Lord, no eggplant*. And Mom didn't typically make soup, except for heating her home canned tomato juice, which I didn't enjoy, but I was hungry, so I ate it!
To make up for it, I use a lot of garlic and ginger now. And make many varieties of soup. And get a lot of ideas from you all! Thanks!
* After we moved here, Mom grew eggplant and loved to eat it. I don't like the texture or the bitterness.
Maybe it was just my meat-and-two-veg (boiled) childhood, but did garlic even exist in the 1970s?
It did, although it was used rather sparingly in our household. Probably mostly in potatoes au gratin. I do, however, have one friend whose mother wouldn't even have an onion in the house.
@Amos My Dad's curries would generally feature leftover roast chicken, and would always feature sultanas and a boiled egg.
Wow, you all had such varied experiences and food! We mostly had what we grew and what was hunted or fished. No garlic. No ginger. Thank the Good Lord, no eggplant*. And Mom didn't typically make soup, except for heating her home canned tomato juice, which I didn't enjoy, but I was hungry, so I ate it!
To make up for it, I use a lot of garlic and ginger now. And make many varieties of soup. And get a lot of ideas from you all! Thanks!
* After we moved here, Mom grew eggplant and loved to eat it. I don't like the texture or the bitterness.
Did you ever use wild ramps or other wild garlic/alliums?
Aubergine/eggplant isn't something I'm likely to use in soups because it soaks up water and gets unpleasantly spongey - but I love it braised or roasted for a long time, or in a slow-cooked moussaka. Modern varieties aren't usually bitter unless they're Thai eggplants.
There was plenty of fresh ginger, garlic, chillies etc in working-class households in the 70s - they just weren't *white* working-class households (and to be really pedantic, there was plenty of garlic in many standard bought products like worcester sauce and brown sauce). And plenty of people from white working-class families were discovering baltis in Birmingham or samosas in Bradford for example - my dad was a Irish Catholic working-class teenager in Coventry in the 70s, and was a huge reggae fan so would often find himself at Black friends' houses swapping records and eating curry mutton or Jamaican patties. Many UK cities had substantial South Asian and Caribbean communities by the 70s, and growing Chinese communities.
I never specified anyone else's working class household but my own. And despite my living on a council estate in Luton, which has a substantial South Asian population, and all my friendship circle being of Indian descent (my best friend an Indian Muslim, the rest Ugandan Indian Hindus) my factory working parents showed not an inkling of interest in their diets.
(though they weren't racist, either. Dad taught himself some Urdu to greet his Pakistani colleagues in the dairy factory)
There was plenty of fresh ginger, garlic, chillies etc in working-class households in the 70s - they just weren't *white* working-class households (and to be really pedantic, there was plenty of garlic in many standard bought products like worcester sauce and brown sauce). And plenty of people from white working-class families were discovering baltis in Birmingham or samosas in Bradford for example - my dad was a Irish Catholic working-class teenager in Coventry in the 70s, and was a huge reggae fan so would often find himself at Black friends' houses swapping records and eating curry mutton or Jamaican patties. Many UK cities had substantial South Asian and Caribbean communities by the 70s, and growing Chinese communities.
I never specified anyone else's working class household but my own. And despite my living on a council estate in Luton, which has a substantial South Asian population, and all my friendship circle being of Indian descent (my best friend an Indian Muslim, the rest Ugandan Indian Hindus) my factory working parents showed not an inkling of interest in their diets.
(though they weren't racist, either. Dad taught himself some Urdu to greet his Pakistani colleagues in the dairy factory)
Oh sure, I just see it as a trope that others pull out elsewhere when talking about working-class culture and food culture in particular, that working-class equals white working-class. My parents wouldn't have tried to make Indian food at home but certainly by the early 80s going out for a curry was extremely normal across classes in Coventry and Birmingham. I don't know a lot about the Luton area but different immigrant food cultures happen in different places.
@Amos My Dad's curries would generally feature leftover roast chicken, and would always feature sultanas and a boiled egg.
And desiccated coconut?
No - although I remember that being presented alongside school curries. It wasn't something that ever featured in our house (I think we all thought it was more or less pointless).
@Amos My Dad's curries would generally feature leftover roast chicken, and would always feature sultanas and a boiled egg.
And desiccated coconut?
Unironically love a curry with sultanas and coconut, though no egg (or banana!). I prefer it with beef and cooked low and slow though, and fairly spicy.
Felicity Cloake has an interesting feature on the perfect Christmas leftover turkey curry.
I regularly make beef rendang with desiccated coconut (I had it earlier this week). I’m not so keen on sultanas in savoury dishes though.
I love eggs and often served soft boiled egg halves on top of my curries, or make an egg curry for meat free days.
This talk of curries.... Growing up in the 1960s and 70s in a small town in northern Ontario, I was fortunate in that there was a large Italian community (my nanny was from Friuli), and my mother was a very good and adventurous cook, so garlic, Italian parsley, lovely tomatoes in season, were de rigueur. Eggplant and zucchini were not in the shops, but many Italian families had large gardens, so they were occasionally available. When I started cooking seriously, I was able to get rabbits from the father of one of my Italian friends. Curries, though, were a completely new thing, brought to us by the branch of my family who immigrated from what was then Rhodesia when I was 13. It was the first time that I had tasted fresh ginger, and that was a life-altering epiphany.
Helpful household hint. I made a roasted carrot and ginger soup earlier this week. Roasting the carrots is dead simple - cut into large chunks, roasted about 45-60 minutes at 400F, dressed with salt, pepper, olive oil, and... Nigella/calonji! For about 2-3lbs carrots, 2-3tsp of lightly crushed nigella makes a huge difference.
I'm struggling to remember if I ever actually went to an Indian restaurant before leaving Belfast. Chinese was the one exotic cuisine. Though of course this was the early years of The Troubles, with bombs being planted in pubs and cafes so dining out not without risk.
I do remember my brother and I turning the family saucepans yellow in efforts to create curry at home. Also my uncle peering at some brown sludge I was stirring and remarking, in a slow Monaghan accent 'Ahve seen stuff like that before. But it wasn't in a saucepan'.
My parents only ever ate out for birthdays and anniversaries and that was at the Beefeater. Meals were free for under 12s on their birthdays and I never went to any restaurant as a child other than there for a free meal on my birthday. My first restaurant trip other than this must have been around 1988 when I was 18/19, and my vegan boyfriend took me to a Chinese restaurant in Bury Park, Luton.
My dad worked for Peugeot and their canteen was a real French style one so I think he got a bit spoilt by that!
His parents worked for the Camping & Caravanning Club in semi-retirement and had been keen caravanners for many years, plus my dad and his parents were always very into real ale so eating out tended to be in pubs rather than restaurants.
My parents were born pre-war and already had children in the late 50s so seemed to have missed the move to eating out. I suspect having 8 children probably didn’t help either 😀
No soup here today, but we have a venison haunch slow cooking in the oven. There may be leftovers for soup another day.
Did you ever use wild ramps or other wild garlic/alliums?
Aubergine/eggplant isn't something I'm likely to use in soups because it soaks up water and gets unpleasantly spongey - but I love it braised or roasted for a long time, or in a slow-cooked moussaka. Modern varieties aren't usually bitter unless they're Thai eggplants.
We never looked for wild alliums! That's pretty strange, since we were foragers and found lots to eat in and around the woods. We did grow yellow onions, and perhaps that might have been why we didn't look for wild ramps.
I think it's just my tastebuds or something that detects bitterness in eggplant. Mom and everyone else who eats it says they detect no bitterness at all. (And I've tried multiple times to eat it!!)
And there wasn't a tin of Campbell's condensed soup in there somewhere?
No, curiously enough, though Campbell's condensed cream of mushroom was the vital ingredient in her Tuna á la King, which appeared as often as three times a week sometimes.
I never specified anyone else's working class household but my own. And despite my living on a council estate in Luton, which has a substantial South Asian population, and all my friendship circle being of Indian descent (my best friend an Indian Muslim, the rest Ugandan Indian Hindus) my factory working parents showed not an inkling of interest in their diets.
(though they weren't racist, either. Dad taught himself some Urdu to greet his Pakistani colleagues in the dairy factory)
Growing up in rural Essex, were it not for the local US airbase sending some kids to the village school, I don't think I'd have seen anyone with different-coloured skin until I went away to boarding school at 10, never mind coming across their food! The villages in the area are still pretty exclusively pink-skinned now, though the towns are far more mixed than I recall.
I'm struggling to remember if I ever actually went to an Indian restaurant before leaving Belfast. Chinese was the one exotic cuisine ...
When we lived in Norn Iron, Holywood was the place for good Indian restaurants - presumably catering for the English squaddies at the barracks there.
Chinese was still very popular when we lived there*; I can't speak for the authenticity, but the quality of the Chinese eateries we frequented was mostly very good.
* so much so that adverts for public-service jobs had to be published in Cantonese (as well as English, Irish and Ulster Scots).
Back to the soup ... I think tomorrow's effort might be an adaptation of Delia's minestrone soup with rice, which I made a few times when we lived in Canada, but haven't made since.
This talk of curries.... Growing up in the 1960s and 70s in a small town in northern Ontario, I was fortunate in that there was a large Italian community (my nanny was from Friuli), and my mother was a very good and adventurous cook, so garlic, Italian parsley, lovely tomatoes in season, were de rigueur. Eggplant and zucchini were not in the shops, but many Italian families had large gardens, so they were occasionally available. When I started cooking seriously, I was able to get rabbits from the father of one of my Italian friends. Curries, though, were a completely new thing, brought to us by the branch of my family who immigrated from what was then Rhodesia when I was 13. It was the first time that I had tasted fresh ginger, and that was a life-altering epiphany.
Helpful household hint. I made a roasted carrot and ginger soup earlier this week. Roasting the carrots is dead simple - cut into large chunks, roasted about 45-60 minutes at 400F, dressed with salt, pepper, olive oil, and... Nigella/calonji! For about 2-3lbs carrots, 2-3tsp of lightly crushed nigella makes a huge difference.
@Pangolin Guerre curries were among the few colonial dishes cooked well in then-Rhodesia. It's widely acknowledged that some of the worst food in Africa comes out of the former British colonies like Bostwana (Bechuanaland), Zambia (Northern Rhodesia) and Malawi (Nyasaland)! But fiery curries came from Anglo-Indian families and via Kenyan coastal dishes, using birdseye peppers grown by the Portuguese for peri-peri. Cape Malay curries in South Africa are gentler than the Durban masalas, but we're lucky here to get plenty of fresh ginger, turmeric, curry leaves and chillies.
Today's soup is going to be the remains of last night's steak diced up in a Tom Yum stock cube and sprinkled with spring onion.
I'm saving my serious effort for this evening when I'm making Worteljiebredie, which you will all instantly recognise - well @MaryLouise at any rate - as a Cape Malay stew of lamb and carrots.
I'm struggling to remember if I ever actually went to an Indian restaurant before leaving Belfast. Chinese was the one exotic cuisine ...
When we lived in Norn Iron, Holywood was the place for good Indian restaurants - presumably catering for the English squaddies at the barracks there.
Chinese was still very popular when we lived there*; I can't speak for the authenticity, but the quality of the Chinese eateries we frequented was mostly very good.
* so much so that adverts for public-service jobs had to be published in Cantonese (as well as English, Irish and Ulster Scots).
Back to the soup ... I think tomorrow's effort might be an adaptation of Delia's minestrone soup with rice, which I made a few times when we lived in Canada, but haven't made since.
Chinese-Irish cuisine gave the world the spice bag, after all!
Re soup, cooked white rice blended into a soup makes it creamy without needing any added dairy. I don't usually add dairy to leek and potato soup but I think creamed soups involving carrot benefits from it, and I have carrots that need using up. I'm wondering if cooked brown rice would be too noticeable if blended up.
Today's soup is going to be the remains of last night's steak diced up in a Tom Yum stock cube and sprinkled with spring onion.
I'm saving my serious effort for this evening when I'm making Worteljiebredie, which you will all instantly recognise - well @MaryLouise at any rate - as a Cape Malay stew of lamb and carrots.
@Firenze. Nervously inquiring as to how the Worteljiebredie went?
Today's soup is going to be the remains of last night's steak diced up in a Tom Yum stock cube and sprinkled with spring onion.
I'm saving my serious effort for this evening when I'm making Worteljiebredie, which you will all instantly recognise - well @MaryLouise at any rate - as a Cape Malay stew of lamb and carrots.
@Firenze. Nervously inquiring as to how the Worteljiebredie went?
Cleared plates and happy faces.
I haven't entirely made up my mind about the Isaac book. There is a serious editing error where the text talks about delicious lamb marinaded in tamarind followed by the recipe which mentions neither tamarind nor marinading. Some of the recipes are entirely European - minestrone and 'potato bake' aka potato dauphinoise. Some of her timings seem odd - she gives the bredie about 30 minutes, whereas I think shoulder lamb needs at least an hour/hour and a half. Also I tweaked the spicing a bit.
But I haven't cooked any of the curries yet, so I'm prepared to stick with it.
@Sojourner the whole point of that minestrone recipe from Delia, from my point of view, is that it is made with rice. It means that it's gluten-free.
I confess I hadn't thought of that (I'm lucky that I don't need to). I tweaked the recipe a bit: I didn't want to buy a whole celery just for a couple of sticks, and I'm not wild about cabbage, so I left that out too, but I used rather more tomatoes than the recipe wanted, and it came out not badly at all. 7½/10.
Today's soup is going to be the remains of last night's steak diced up in a Tom Yum stock cube and sprinkled with spring onion.
I'm saving my serious effort for this evening when I'm making Worteljiebredie, which you will all instantly recognise - well @MaryLouise at any rate - as a Cape Malay stew of lamb and carrots.
@Firenze. Nervously inquiring as to how the Worteljiebredie went?
Cleared plates and happy faces.
I haven't entirely made up my mind about the Isaac book. There is a serious editing error where the text talks about delicious lamb marinaded in tamarind followed by the recipe which mentions neither tamarind nor marinading. Some of the recipes are entirely European - minestrone and 'potato bake' aka potato dauphinoise. Some of her timings seem odd - she gives the bredie about 30 minutes, whereas I think shoulder lamb needs at least an hour/hour and a half. Also I tweaked the spicing a bit.
But I haven't cooked any of the curries yet, so I'm prepared to stick with it.
Aargh. Sorry to hear about the Isaacs book on Cape Malay recipes @Firenze, it is quite popular here and I thought those recipes would be more up-to-date than older cookbooks. That kind of editing/content error is unacceptable as are the shortened times given, since Struik Lifestyle is quite experienced in producing cookbooks. And the inclusion of recipes that aren't Cape Malay doesn't make sense since there are so many different biryanis and sambals found in the Cape. Mortifying. At its best Cape Malay cooking is quite subtle and fragrant, ideal for slow cooking. I've always tweaked spicing and seasoning, but that is because I find traditional dishes too mild.
Comments
It makes me all the keener to acquire a decent sized freezer: the one I have just isn't big enough to accommodate quantities of stock. I think I'll try and do a clear-out, followed by a defrost - there's a thick layer of ice on the "roof", which is occupying more space than enough.
I think I make mulligatawny and minestrone with equal infrequency, as good intentions are often not executed. But its my meal week starting Monday, so I will put one on the menu.
As a boy I was introduced to curries by returned missionaries from India. At university college did not provide Sunday lunches and I used to invite friends for lunch, often a curry. I tried out different ways to make a good curry but was mostly unsuccessful. It wasn't until later that I realised that whatever you did with Vencat curry powder - frying - making a paste, cooking from the start, adding at the end - it didn't make the grade. I now make up my own garam masala mix from whole spices, though it does not include turmeric or chilli as they are added separately along with other spices.
Maybe it was just my meat-and-two-veg (boiled) childhood, but did garlic even exist in the 1970s?
I remember the advent of peppers - invariably green - which were treated as a salad ingredient. But I don't think I ever recall an Irish aubergine - and when I did meet it, it was spongy and undercooked in badly-made ratatouille.
Vegetables of my childhood were potato, carrot, parsnip, turnip and cabbage. And if you wanted exotica, mushrooms.
I also introduced my mother to fresh root ginger in the late 70s/early 80s; I brought it home from university (and a whole lot of other things I could find in London that she couldn't find in the depths of the West Country. (And had a cookery book with a recipe I still use for lentil quiche dating from the late 70s.)
My father discovered frozen stir fries in the late 1980s and that was the height of exotic food for my parents. I doubt if my mother ever tasted a curry, which is the staple diet in my house.
Green peppers were used for chillies and Spag Bog. Aubergines, thanks be to God, were either unavailable or ignored.
To make up for it, I use a lot of garlic and ginger now. And make many varieties of soup. And get a lot of ideas from you all! Thanks!
* After we moved here, Mom grew eggplant and loved to eat it. I don't like the texture or the bitterness.
It did, although it was used rather sparingly in our household. Probably mostly in potatoes au gratin. I do, however, have one friend whose mother wouldn't even have an onion in the house.
@Amos My Dad's curries would generally feature leftover roast chicken, and would always feature sultanas and a boiled egg.
Did you ever use wild ramps or other wild garlic/alliums?
Aubergine/eggplant isn't something I'm likely to use in soups because it soaks up water and gets unpleasantly spongey - but I love it braised or roasted for a long time, or in a slow-cooked moussaka. Modern varieties aren't usually bitter unless they're Thai eggplants.
I never specified anyone else's working class household but my own. And despite my living on a council estate in Luton, which has a substantial South Asian population, and all my friendship circle being of Indian descent (my best friend an Indian Muslim, the rest Ugandan Indian Hindus) my factory working parents showed not an inkling of interest in their diets.
(though they weren't racist, either. Dad taught himself some Urdu to greet his Pakistani colleagues in the dairy factory)
Oh sure, I just see it as a trope that others pull out elsewhere when talking about working-class culture and food culture in particular, that working-class equals white working-class. My parents wouldn't have tried to make Indian food at home but certainly by the early 80s going out for a curry was extremely normal across classes in Coventry and Birmingham. I don't know a lot about the Luton area but different immigrant food cultures happen in different places.
No - although I remember that being presented alongside school curries. It wasn't something that ever featured in our house (I think we all thought it was more or less pointless).
And then there was coronation chicken, of course.
Unironically love a curry with sultanas and coconut, though no egg (or banana!). I prefer it with beef and cooked low and slow though, and fairly spicy.
Felicity Cloake has an interesting feature on the perfect Christmas leftover turkey curry.
I love eggs and often served soft boiled egg halves on top of my curries, or make an egg curry for meat free days.
Our experience also. Not just Elizabeth David, but similar recipes were passed around morning tea at the tennis club.
Helpful household hint. I made a roasted carrot and ginger soup earlier this week. Roasting the carrots is dead simple - cut into large chunks, roasted about 45-60 minutes at 400F, dressed with salt, pepper, olive oil, and... Nigella/calonji! For about 2-3lbs carrots, 2-3tsp of lightly crushed nigella makes a huge difference.
I do remember my brother and I turning the family saucepans yellow in efforts to create curry at home. Also my uncle peering at some brown sludge I was stirring and remarking, in a slow Monaghan accent 'Ahve seen stuff like that before. But it wasn't in a saucepan'.
His parents worked for the Camping & Caravanning Club in semi-retirement and had been keen caravanners for many years, plus my dad and his parents were always very into real ale so eating out tended to be in pubs rather than restaurants.
No soup here today, but we have a venison haunch slow cooking in the oven. There may be leftovers for soup another day.
We never looked for wild alliums! That's pretty strange, since we were foragers and found lots to eat in and around the woods. We did grow yellow onions, and perhaps that might have been why we didn't look for wild ramps.
I think it's just my tastebuds or something that detects bitterness in eggplant. Mom and everyone else who eats it says they detect no bitterness at all. (And I've tried multiple times to eat it!!)
No, curiously enough, though Campbell's condensed cream of mushroom was the vital ingredient in her Tuna á la King, which appeared as often as three times a week sometimes.
Vesta boxed meals were an eye opener. I first ate chilli in York in 1978.
Growing up in rural Essex, were it not for the local US airbase sending some kids to the village school, I don't think I'd have seen anyone with different-coloured skin until I went away to boarding school at 10, never mind coming across their food! The villages in the area are still pretty exclusively pink-skinned now, though the towns are far more mixed than I recall.
Chinese was still very popular when we lived there*; I can't speak for the authenticity, but the quality of the Chinese eateries we frequented was mostly very good.
* so much so that adverts for public-service jobs had to be published in Cantonese (as well as English, Irish and Ulster Scots).
Back to the soup ... I think tomorrow's effort might be an adaptation of Delia's minestrone soup with rice, which I made a few times when we lived in Canada, but haven't made since.
@Pangolin Guerre curries were among the few colonial dishes cooked well in then-Rhodesia. It's widely acknowledged that some of the worst food in Africa comes out of the former British colonies like Bostwana (Bechuanaland), Zambia (Northern Rhodesia) and Malawi (Nyasaland)! But fiery curries came from Anglo-Indian families and via Kenyan coastal dishes, using birdseye peppers grown by the Portuguese for peri-peri. Cape Malay curries in South Africa are gentler than the Durban masalas, but we're lucky here to get plenty of fresh ginger, turmeric, curry leaves and chillies.
I'm saving my serious effort for this evening when I'm making Worteljiebredie, which you will all instantly recognise - well @MaryLouise at any rate - as a Cape Malay stew of lamb and carrots.
Chinese-Irish cuisine gave the world the spice bag, after all!
Re soup, cooked white rice blended into a soup makes it creamy without needing any added dairy. I don't usually add dairy to leek and potato soup but I think creamed soups involving carrot benefits from it, and I have carrots that need using up. I'm wondering if cooked brown rice would be too noticeable if blended up.
@Firenze. Nervously inquiring as to how the Worteljiebredie went?
Cleared plates and happy faces.
I haven't entirely made up my mind about the Isaac book. There is a serious editing error where the text talks about delicious lamb marinaded in tamarind followed by the recipe which mentions neither tamarind nor marinading. Some of the recipes are entirely European - minestrone and 'potato bake' aka potato dauphinoise. Some of her timings seem odd - she gives the bredie about 30 minutes, whereas I think shoulder lamb needs at least an hour/hour and a half. Also I tweaked the spicing a bit.
But I haven't cooked any of the curries yet, so I'm prepared to stick with it.
I confess I hadn't thought of that (I'm lucky that I don't need to). I tweaked the recipe a bit: I didn't want to buy a whole celery just for a couple of sticks, and I'm not wild about cabbage, so I left that out too, but I used rather more tomatoes than the recipe wanted, and it came out not badly at all. 7½/10.
Aargh. Sorry to hear about the Isaacs book on Cape Malay recipes @Firenze, it is quite popular here and I thought those recipes would be more up-to-date than older cookbooks. That kind of editing/content error is unacceptable as are the shortened times given, since Struik Lifestyle is quite experienced in producing cookbooks. And the inclusion of recipes that aren't Cape Malay doesn't make sense since there are so many different biryanis and sambals found in the Cape. Mortifying. At its best Cape Malay cooking is quite subtle and fragrant, ideal for slow cooking. I've always tweaked spicing and seasoning, but that is because I find traditional dishes too mild.