Monday 11 April 2011

In 1983...

...I was 8 years old. And according to a cookbook I borrowed from my ma, the height of sophistication for entertaining was Cinzano Chicken. Or maybe a mince cobbler with Angusturos Bitters, eeeeh this book is amazing! This weekend alone I've tried my hand at Jugged Pheasant and Lamb Lasagne, both of which were really rather tasty, yum yum yum. I love old recipes, I truly do. So weird though, in none of these recipes do they mention garlic. Did they not know about garlic in 1983? I'm betting that my ma never cooked us anything with garlic then, but I wonder when it took off as being a vital ingredient? In my Nigella cookbook from last year she makes chicken with 40 garlic cloves (!) I wonder what she would have used instead back in 1983? Oh and there are absolutely no vegetarian recipes in this book either. Were there no veggies in 1983? There has to have been, I mean Linda McCartney was like a veggie from being born and she was really ancient! It truly is like stepping back in time.

There must be a lot of that about at the moment. My work friend was telling me today how she had found this amazing extract from a book about women in Hitler's Germany all about how women were really born to be housewives and that working in an office was really bad for them. Hmmmm....

Anyhoo that's really all I had to say. Where were you in 1983? And had you ever had garlic...?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wow! I was 17 and about to embark on university. I certainly knew about garlic because the only dish I could cook was chile con carne. There was no internet, no mobile phones, very few people had computers (I was lucky enough to have a ZX81 but it only had 1K of memory so all I could do with it was print 'hello world' over and over). I can't remember how many TV channels there were, but certainly less than five. Everyone played their music on vinyl or tapes, CDs didn't really take off for another 3 or 4 years. No ipods: Sony Walkmans (Walkmen?) were the big thing. No Nintendo DS, Xbox, Wii, in fact no computer games, well duh, no computers...

But garlic, yes, definitely.

Fizz