Comfort food

The angry Spanish farmers are out again, so I wasn't going to try to go shopping. Plus it's a miserable day, cold and raining. A poke around in the vegetable rack produced a bag of very tired potatoes and a couple of onions. I don't know why but I suddenly thought of The Pauper's Cookbook,  which I haven't referred to for years. It was my bible when I was a poverty-stricken student in London.

One of my standards was onion, bacon, and potato hotpot -- cheap, filling stodge augmented with scraps of bacon begged from the butcher. It was quite nostalgic getting the tatty, food-stained paperback off the shelf. It cost me 60p in 1976, and is very much of its time. It contains all manner of unspeakable things that don't get mentioned nowadays: liver, brains, pig's trotters. It contains a recipe for brawn, which resulted in my flatmate Jane and I sawing half a pig's head in half again in the sink because it wouldn't fit in our biggest pan. It was quite a messy project and the resulting dish contained a number of bone splinters. We were quite adventurous cooks.

Anyway. This dish is much simpler and more palatable. I sliced potatoes and an onion, layered them in an ancient stained Le Creuset dish of the same vintage as the book, with bacon lardons sprinkled in. Poured over bechamel seasoned with nutmeg, and extravagantly sprinkled it with cheese before putting it in the oven for an hour. A nice comfort food lunch, served with frozen peas, and plenty left for tomorrow.

This also works for LBB14. Of course hardly any cookbooks those days had pictures of the finished dishes, especially not one that cost 60p. But this one did have some line drawings -- which probably aren't worth a thousand words (extra) but hey :) Note the number of mentions of scum and gristle on the left hand page -- that's the brawn recipe.

And finally a cheery soundtrack -- Tomatito and Michel Camilo with Mambo influenciado.