Charmingly Retro Shrimp Cocktail

This blast from the past tastes wonderful and is a real treat. My Mom told me the recipe - she never wrote it down. It’s shrimp cocktail as it was served in the 1950’s - cold shrimp a sharp contrast to the bright spicy sauce they were topped with, laying on a super crisp bed of shredded iceberg lettuce. Not that I was born in the 1950’s - my experience of that decade is all from stories I was told and things I have read - but I do love the sound of them!

In England, shrimp are called ‘prawns’ and they are usually served with a Marie Rose dressing - a blend of ketchup or tomato sauce and mayonnaise, or sometimes even with thousand island dressing. Prawn cocktail was the fashionable starter of the 1980‘s here. By the end of that decade most folks were fed up with it and it experienced a huge fall from grace, along with that staple 1980’s dessert Black Forest Gateau. It’s certainly more fashionable now, but I think if folks could taste this sauce instead of the traditional mild Marie Rose version, even more people would be embracing this charming retro dish.

This makes a wonderful starter, or a real treat for lunch - if you are making lunch for one you can keep any extra sauce in the fridge for a couple of days. Thawing a handful of frozen shrimp or treating yourself to some fresh cooked shrimp from the grocery store can take an ordinary lunch and elevate it to the extraordinary.

The sauce also makes a great dip, and I have been known to serve a plate of large shrimp round a dish of it at parties. It always generates ‘ooh’s’ and ‘aah’s’ and it is usually empty in minutes.

Shrimp Cocktail

1 handful of shredded iceberg lettuce per person

1 handful of small frozen shrimp per person, thawed

For each serving, place the shredded lettuce in a pretty dish or on a nice plate. Top with the shrimp.

To make the sauce:

½ cup ketchup

1 to 2 tablespoons mild creamy horseradish (You may need a bit less than this depending on how hot your horseradish is.)

½ teaspoon lemon juice (fresh if possible)

Place the ketchup in a bowl and add about 1 tablespoon of the horseradish along with the lemon juice. Stir to mix. Taste, adding a bit more horseradish if you feel the mixture needs it.

Top the shrimp with the sauce and serve very cold.

Grandma's Garlic Bread

This is one of those wonderful 1950’s and 60’s recipes that not only tastes good, it’s frugal too. Back before everyone could pronounce baguette, when garlic was still an exotic ingredient, this was the way my Mom made garlic bread. And sitting at her table one day in Canada thirty years later, my son, who loves it, christened it Grandma’s Garlic Bread.

Of course, he was used to the kind of garlic bread you get in Italy and France, beautiful thick loaves smothered in a thick medley of garlic and unsalted butter. But my Mom’s garlic bread has a cachet all its own, and when it comes down to comfort food, this is the garlic bread I prefer.

The bread part is hamburger buns. They can be white or whole wheat, and if they are a little bit stale it really doesn’t matter. I do recall a couple of occasions when Mom used hotdog buns as well. Originally she made this recipe with garlic salt and margarine, so I have made it healthier to reflect the times, but the spirit and taste of the recipe is very much the same as Mom’s. It’s quick and easy and let’s face it, there are not many dishes garlic bread doesn’t go with.

For about 8 to 10 pieces of Grandma’s Garlic Bread, you need:-

4 or 5 hamburger buns, cut in half

4 to 5 tablespoons butter

1 or 2 cloves of garlic, peeled

(You can use garlic salt here instead, but don’t salt the bread at the end!)

1 to 2 teaspoons dried parsley (you can use fresh if you prefer)

salt and pepper to taste (I like to use ground rock salt and peppercorns)

Preheat the broiler/grill  to about 375℉ (180 to 190℃).

Place the buns, cut side up, on a baking sheet. Melt the butter in the microwave or in a saucepan on the stove. Grate in the garlic and add the parsley.

Brush the cut side of the buns generously with the buttery garlic mixture. Grind some salt and pepper over the top.

Chuck Wagon Chow

You can tell from the title of this recipe that it has to be just a little bit vintage. I found it in my Mom’s recipe box when I was about seven years old and to my mind, it sounded very cool. I begged her to make it, but she never did, and over the years I forgot about it. But recently I found it in my Mom’s old recipe box, which she gave to me a couple years before she passed away. I’d actually re-written it as kid, so keen was I to bring it to her attention. Sadly I don’t remember what the original was written on, whether it was a newspaper clipping or where it came from. If I could, I’d have words with that seven year old me, but hey, she didn’t know that the grown up her would be so into food history and where recipes came from!

When I reviewed the recipe, I think I may have found the reason for Mom’s hesitation to make it. It was one very spicy meal, and my Dad was a meat and potatoes man back then. Spice really wasn’t his bag at all. Even though my family does like a bit of heat in their food, I did change the spicing quite a bit as otherwise I don’t think even I would have been able to eat it. Either that or the seven year old me made some boo boos when she was copying the recipe out! Anyway, the end result is this, and it really is delicious and very good for you. A bit meatier than normal chilli, with a bit of a southwestern feel, it makes a lovely meal on a cold or blustery night. You can serve it with toast on the side, or tortilla chips, or even some rice (brown or basmati would be best). That’s how British people eat their chilli, served over rice, and I’ve almost gotten used to it after all these years. It is great way to serve it if you need to stretch the recipe a bit to serve a few more people - but I’m going to be honest here and say I like whole grain toast best - or tortilla chips if they had no calories! 

This recipe will serve four adults, and is easily doubled.

1 large onion, finely chopped

1 to 2 cloves of garlic

1 pound of beef chuck, stewing beef or braising steak, cut in chunks

(pastured, free range or organic if possible)

1 to 2 teaspoons chilli powder

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon pepper

1 red or green pepper, de-seeded and cut in chunks

1 - 14 ounce (about 400 grams) can of kidney beans, rinsed and drained

(If you want to used dried beans you have cooked yourself that is absolutely fine.)

2 - 14 ounce can of chopped tomatoes

1 - 14 ounce can of niblet or whole kernel corn

Heat the oil on the stovetop in a large oven safe casserole with a lid. Add the onion and sauté over medium heat. Grate in the garlic. Continue to sauté until the onion begins to go translucent.

Put the chilli powder, salt and pepper in a food safe paper or plastic bag. Quickly toss the chunks of beef in this mixture.

Tumble the beef into the onions and garlic and cook for a few minutes to brown the meat, stirring frequently.

Add the tomatoes, red pepper, kidney beans and corn.

Stir through.

Place the casserole in the oven and cook for an hour and a half to two hours, stirring every half hour or so. Serve with toast, rice or tortilla chips as you wish!

My Grandma's Butterscotch Sauce

This is a great recipe to have at your fingertips. It tastes delicious poured over ice cream and makes amazing sundaes. I am told my Grandma served it with her carrot pudding, which is the stuff of legend amongst those who have eaten it, but as she sadly passed away before I was born I never got to taste it. I do however have the recipe, and I am looking forward to making and sharing it as part of my Family Food History and Recipe Project. For the moment though, I will just share this fantastic, easy to make sauce in the hopes that you will love it as much as I do!

2½ cups brown sugar
½ cup butter
¾ cup corn syrup
¾ cup light (single) cream or half and half

Put the brown sugar and butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat and bring to the boil slowly, stirring constantly. Let it boil for a couple of minutes, stirring constantly, until the mixture reaches the soft ball stage. This is 235 - 240℉ or about 112 - 115℃ on a candy thermometer. If you don’t have a candy thermometer, just do as my Grandma did and just drop a tiny amount of syrup in cold water. The mixture is ready if a small soft ball forms in the water.

Remove from the heat (this recipe is truly vintage - if you look at the photograph of the recipe you can see my Grandma actually wrote “remove from fire” here!) and slowly stir in the cream. Allow to cool slightly, stir and serve.

My Grandma's Special White Cake

My Grandma’s name was Ruby Sybil Wilde, and she was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, which is very close to the Welsh border. Her mother brought her to Canada when she was a little girl where she grew up and eventually met and married my Grandpa. They had two daughters, one of whom was my Mom. Grandpa was the Reeve (Mayor) of the town they lived in for over thirty years, so Grandma used to do lots of entertaining and people always talked about what an amazing cook she was. Sadly I never got to meet her as she died in her early sixties, four years before I was born. (If you want to read a bit more about her slightly mysterious story, you can click here.)

I don’t know why Grandma called this ‘Special’ White Cake but it may have been because it tastes amazing. It’s a lovely light cake that you can eat frosted or unfrosted, and as the original recipe calls for ‘2 teaspoons vanilla or other’ you can flavour it pretty much how you like. Next time I might try using almond flavouring. As Grandma wrote on the recipe card (you can just see it at the bottom of the photo), this is “a good size cake with some body to it”. You could use just about any flavour frosting, from something seriously chocolatey to something light and lemony. I think it would be nice served with fruit too. On this, my first attempt with it, I‘m going to just sprinkle confectioner’s sugar over the top to make it look pretty and to emphasise the vanilla flavour.

I did fiddle about with the method a bit because I was using an electric mixer so I didn’t feel I needed to separate the eggs and add the whites separately as they used to do back in the days before electric mixers were common. I also misread the recipe and added a cup of milk instead of the ½ cup Grandma called for but I didn’t realise until after it was in the oven. It all turned out beautifully anyway. Plus it uses store cupboard ingredients and takes about ten minutes to throw together. I baked this in a 9 inch square pan, but I’m sure you could use the mixture for cupcakes if you preferred - just don’t bake them as long. I can’t wait to experiment with this recipe; it’s got so much potential! Thanks Grandma!

Ruby Sybil Wilde’s “Special” White Cake

½ cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla (or another flavouring of your choice)
2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 cup milk (recipe originally called for ½ cup but 1 cup worked nicely)

Cream the butter and sugar together using an electric mixer. Beat in the eggs. Add the vanilla.

Sift the flour and baking powder together, and add alternately with the milk, beating after each addition.

Bake in a greased and floured (or lined) nine inch square pan at 350℉ or 160 to 170℃. Be careful, the cake tends to brown very quickly and ideally you want it to be fairly pale. Mine took about thirty minutes to cook, but I did lower the heat to 150℃ (about 325℉) for the last five minutes. I would suggest setting the timer for fifteen to twenty minutes and then keeping an eye on it after that, depending on how fierce your oven is.

Frost if you like, or sprinkle with some confectioner’s sugar. As you can see, it does want some sort of adornment as it really isn’t all that pretty, but it smells and tastes so good I’m struggling not to just eat it plain, straight from the tin!



In the end, I served this cake sprinkled with icing sugar with a bit of good vanilla ice cream on the side, and it tasted amazing.

The 21st Century Housewife's© Scalloped Potatoes

My Mom really wasn’t one of those people who love cooking, but she was a very good cook nonetheless. One of the dishes she was famous for was her scalloped potatoes. They were voluptuous comfort food at its best. Thinly sliced potatoes and onion nestled in amongst a rich, creamy sauce that seemed to make itself. Mom never wrote her recipe down, because she maintained it was “hardly a recipe” but she talked me through it many, many times. Despite this, I never really quite got the hang of it, and my scalloped potatoes were always either too runny or not creamy enough. They certainly never tasted remotely like hers, so I kind of gave up.

It was not until about a week ago that I tried her recipe again as part of my Family Food History and Recipe Project. Perhaps it is because I am a more experienced cook than I was all those years ago, but suddenly, this time I got much closer to the wonderful dish I remember after only a couple attempts. I’m not sure it’s Mom’s exact recipe, but it sure does taste very similar.

Scalloped potatoes are a wonderfully easy dish (I honestly don’t know why I struggled so with them before) and they are a great one to make ahead. I use my oval Le Creuset casserole for this. Preheat your oven to about 200℃ or 400℉ and then all you need is:-

3 to 4 large potatoes, peeled and very thinly sliced
1 large mild onion, peeled and thinly sliced
2 generous tablespoons flour
1 tablespoon of cold butter, cut in small pieces
2 cups of milk
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon pepper

Put a layer of potato slices on the bottom of the casserole, overlapping slightly. Follow with a layer of onion slices. Sprinkle evenly with one generous tablespoon of flour.

Make another layer of potato slices on top of the flour, again overlapping slightly. Follow with another layer of onion slices. Sprinkle evenly with one generous tablespoon of flour.

Top the flour with a final layer of potato slices, being sure to overlap them slightly. Evenly distribute the pieces of cold butter over top of the potato. At this point, it should look like this:-



Heat the 2 cups of milk in the microwave or on the stovetop until warm. (I usually microwave on high for two minutes.) Stir in the salt and pepper. Carefully pour the hot milk over the potato and onion layers.

Cover the casserole with foil and put in the oven for half an hour. Remove the casserole from the oven, and remove the foil. Using a fork, carefully push the potato slices so that they are mostly under the milk. Return the casserole to the oven and cook for another thirty to forty minutes, until the potatoes are tender and the top is turning golden brown.

Family Food History and Recipe Project

Like most people, I have a lot of family recipes scattered throughout my home in recipe books and files. I’ve also got my Mom’s own recipe box, which I “helped” her to organise when I was a little girl. It’s funny, she never changed the green plastic file box she had her recipes in. I made her one of those labels for it using a Dymo embosser, painstakingly punching out “Barbara’s Recipe Box” with my tongue firmly clenched between my front teeth. When I brought the box home after she died, I had to carefully extract the recipes which due to their sheer number had become quite literally stuck in the box. I moved them to a bigger file box (above left), but aside from referring to ones I knew were there, I have not really touched it since her death. I got thinking about it the other day and realised I was probably emotionally ready to go back through Mom’s files and find some of the dishes I have forgotten about - and also the ones that are lost in a fog of delicious memory - the ones I can just about taste, but really can’t name.



I also inherited my Dad’s recipe collection, a large number of clippings and notes encased in a copy of ‘The Microwave Guide and Cookbook’ and secured with an elastic band. Both my parents were very good cooks, and my Dad did a lot more than just barbecue, although that was definitely one of his specialities. Wholeheartedly embracing the trend towards microwave cooking in the late 1970’s, our first microwave oven even had a spit for cooking meat in it, and my Dad had an incredible knack for making it taste like it had been slow roasting for hours.

And then there is my stuff. More notebooks than I’d care to count and more than one bookshelf full of cookbooks are just the beginning. I love to cook, and in the past few years have become really adept at developing my own recipes, but I still read cookbooks like they were novels and love to make other people’s recipes too.


These are just a few of my notebooks. The two on the right I have had since I was in my late teens, and the blue book on the top left is one made by my husband and his sister when they were little, containing lots of recipes from his side of the family. In addition, most of my notes for recipes I have developed myself are on my MacBook. So if I seem a little daunted, it’s probably partially because of the sheer volume of the task I am taking on, but mainly because of how important I believe this task is. Nowhere is our family history evidenced more thoroughly than in our attitudes towards and experience of food, and our traditions round it.

It’s a task I have wanted to undertake for a while now and I’m going to blog about it from time to time over the next few months. As I find some of my old family favourites I will share them with you, along with anecdotes about the people who developed them. I’ll also test and experiment with some of the recipes I don’t remember in the hopes of reviving some old favourites.



There’s a lot of newspaper clippings both in my Mom’s recipe box and in Dad’s makeshift recipe file. I’m really intrigued by these and look forward to testing some of the recipes. This one is from the Hamilton Spectator dated Friday June 22, 1956. I was not born yet; in fact it was before my parents got married. The recipe is for Sweet-Sour Spareribs, but the whole thing is a real piece of the past, with a snippet of an article ‘Report Three Polio Cases During Week‘ just visible at the bottom. I can just read the words “Weekly telegraphic reports from the provinces showed only one paralytic case...” It was such a terrifying disease then. The recipe sounds good though, and I will definitely be giving it a try. It’s more basic than the ones we see in the amazing Chinese cookbooks available today, but it sounds yummy (and pretty easy too).

I'm posting about this on my The 21st Century Housewife website as well so you’ll be able to follow my family food history project over there too if you like. I hope it will encourage you to delve into your own family food history. It can be a great conversation starter between generations and you could even involve your kids. After all, most everyone likes to talk about food and to eat!

Please drop me an email or comment if you decide to research your own family food history; I’d love to hear about your progress!