Retro Food nostalgia - essays and recipes. A wonderful book just to curl up with on the sofa.

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Product Description

While Lindsey Bareham was helping Simon Hopkinson put together his best-selling book, Roast Chicken and Other Stories, the two of them began to reminisce about hotel and restaurant dishes they had grown up with and always loved; those Cinderellas of the kitchen that we abandoned in our quest for the wilder shores of gastronomy. Classics such as Duck a l’Orange, Weiner Schnitzel, Moussaka, Garlic Mushrooms and, of course, Prawn Cocktail, have all been slung out like old lovers but when made with fine, fresh ingredients and prepared with care and a genuine love of good eating, these former favourites should grace the most discerning of tables. The Prawn Cocktail Years sets out to rehabilitate the food we once loved and found exciting. In so doing, the authors take us on a cook’s tour of the legendary post-war hotels and gentlemen’s clubs with their Mulligatawny and Shepherd’s Pie, to the bistros of Swinging London where Paté Maison and sizzling Escargots excited the braver palate. Then there were the first Italian trattorias where Saltimbocca and Oranges in Caramel were the order of the day and the ‘Continental’ restaurants with their exotic offerings of Beef Stroganoff, Chicken Kiev and Rhum Baba. Recipes for all these old favourites have been brought back to life as well as those classics that were once described as the Great British Meal - Prawn Cocktail, Steak Garni with Chips and Black Forest Gateau. Cooked as they should be, this much derided and often ridiculed dinner is still something very special indeed. The prawn cocktail years are staging a comeback . . .

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19558 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Here they all are, fresh as paint, as if they'd never been away. Why did we let them go? Neglected, derided, dismissed as hopelessly naff, in what dismal Midlands eateries have they been waiting out the years of shame? No matter, they're back. Prawn Cocktail, Steak and Chips and Black Forest Gateau are the signature dishes of The Prawn Cocktail Years, a bravura collection of favourite restaurant dishes from the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies--years when Britain was learning to eat out. How evocative the recipe titles are (the authors describe a Proustian moment when the memories came pouring out): Coquilles St-Jacques, Sole Veronique, Beef Stroganoff, Mixed Grill, Swedish Meatballs, Wiener Schnitzel, Chicken Maryland, Crepes Suzette, Peach Melba and Profiteroles. Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham remind us firmly that although these may not chime with present food fashions (or prejudices), they were loved in their time and should be again, because when well made they are very good dishes indeed. They need no apology or special pleading.

The time machine of The Prawn Cocktail Years visits a number of favourite establishments over the years: the Fifties Hotel Dining Room, the Gentleman's Club, the Continental Restaurant. It looks into the coffee-bar madness that was Expresso Bongo (unexpectedly, perhaps, offering Cornish Pasty and Sausage Rolls for refreshment here), the Sixties Bistro, the Tratt-Era and Chez Gourmet; and returns us to the present burning to throw out our sun-dried tomatoes and lemon-grass and get down to making a good Fish Pie and Brown Bread Ice-Cream. Readers of a certain age, as they say, will be thrilled to see these old friends again; younger readers may care to discover what we ate before cooking became the new rock 'n' roll. --Robin Davidson

About the Author
Simon Hopkinson was born in Bury in Lancashire where his love of good eating was established at the kitchen table. He left school at seventeen to begin a career as a chef and by the age of 21, he had started his own restaurant. In 1987, he opened Bibendum in London with Sir Terence Conran where he worked for 8 years before retiring to concentrate on writing. He has since written columns for the Independent, The Sunday Times and Sainsbury’s Magazine and is the author of four books, including the bestselling Roast Chicken and Other Stories. Lindsey Bareham is best known for her daily after-after work recipe column in the Evening Standard, which she wrote for eight years. Currently she writes the weekly ‘Cheat’s Dinner Party’ column in the Sunday Telegraph Stella magazine and contributes a monthly recipe column to Saga magazine. She has written ten cookery books, including In Praise of the Potato, A Celebration of Soup, The Big Red Book of Tomatoes and Just One Pot. Her most recent book, The Fish Store, is a collection of recipes and stories, inspired by her holiday home in a Cornish fishing village.

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Customer Reviews

The signature dishes of the 50s, 60s and 70s, `Prawn Cocktail`, `Steak and Chips' & `Black Forest Gateau' ....back on the menu.
Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham have written several individual books between them, but this one has that.....well.....`je ne sais quoi'!
It just beckons one to open the seductive looking black cover and reveal the collection of favourite restaurant dishes from the 50s, 60s and 70s, revisited with nostalgia and a fair bit of pride.

For me the book arrived at a time when I was desperately seeking, dare I say a new `shop-bought', `Marie Rose Sauce', as my favourite had been given an up-to-date `tweak' with red peppercorns! Yuk!
As I sampled the vast array, most were too lemony, too mayonnaisey or simply too bland.......so the answer....well.... good old DIY!

And with the help of the `Prawn Cocktail Years', it is actually incredibly easy to achieve just the right balance for your own sauce.
Quite simply with...........well, actually, on second thoughts, I don't think I could possibly spoil the surprise!
The mouth-watering `Prawn Cocktail' photograph on page 15, and in the images above, is enticing enough in its own right to encourage the purchase of this gem of a book, which opens up to a wealth of forgotten or `not culinary correct' recipes.

272 shiny, incredibly high quality pages, split over 8 chapters:-

The Great British Meal Out
The 50s Hotel Dining Room
The Gentleman's Club
The Continental Restaurant
Expresso Bongo
The 60s Bistro
The Tart-era
Chez Gourmet

with introductions for the September 2006 edition as well as the original in February 1997, plus a recipe index and a general index.
Each chapter opens with text, often humorous, as do the recipes, e.g.:-

`Black Forest Gateau'
`Along with rather sad oranges in caramel, wilting profiteroles, gaudy sherry trifle and too-much-apple-in-it fruit salad,
`BFG' remains the bully of the sweet trolley.
It's always there isn't it, in the most prominent position, shoved in your face almost. `And will Madam be having cream with that?' Yes, of course she will, we all do, poured from that silver-plated jug and drowning the already creamy black wedge into submission............'

Recipes are well laid out with a clear list of ingredients and method, and include:-

Steak Garni and Chips
Scampi with Tartare Sauce
Chicken Maryland
Tournedos Rossini
Peach Melba
Toad-in-the-hole
Spotted Dick and Custard
Jam Roly-Poly
Chicken Kiev
Rhum Baba
Cornish Pasty
Treacle Tart
Steak au Poivre
Lobster Bisque
Quiche Lorraine
Beef Stroganoff
Duck a l'Orange
Sirloin steak with Red Wine Sauce
Syllabub

Sumptuous full colour photography throughout, sometimes double page spreads - not of every recipe but one can forgive that for a book of this calibre .....and the book stays open at the required place, which isn't achieved by all publications!

Quite simply, this book has become my new `Number One', with five star+ status - and it takes an awful lot to do that!

The Greatest Cookery Book Ever?
Quite possibly in my view. I have an elderly dog-eared copy of this. It's covered in food stains because the recipes are so good, and it's so well written that you can read it for pleasure.

The Ultimate British Cookbook
This is the only cookery book I have worn out through repeated use (the first edition). I looked for a replacement a while ago and a second hand one was going for £50 - that's how unwilling people who own this book are to part with it!

Every recipe merits it's own 10 page rave - from the unashamedly posh Savoy Hotel's Omlette Arnold Bennet, the Tournedos Rossini with it's foie gras and black truffle fit for royalty, the Victorian breakfast kedgeree right out of the last days days of the Raj, Jam Roly Poly 'Dead man's leg' pudding beloved of public schoolboys (and lords) everywhere, real cornwall cornish paasty, and the rather eccentric sounding brown bread ice cream.

The real icing on the cake (pardon the pun) though is the writers' style - this is a book to read even when you are nowhere near the kitchen, even when you're eating a big mac. Each recipe has as its introduction a brief but fascinating history of where it originated, how it became 'British', and how it won its place in the canon of culinary history.

The recipes are listed by the establishments that made them famous - The fifties hotel dining room, the Gentleman's club, the Italianate 'Espresso Bongo' coffee bars the cropped up in Soho in the 60's and many others - giving you the choice to dine like a lord, a cornish miner, or a mod or rocker.

This is the cookbook of Britain - if you're not a native Brit it's time to treat your tastebuds in a way you never thought possible coming from these isles. If you are a Brit - it's time for a journey through your culinary birthright.