Leftover Gingersnaps.
I have no idea where I got the following recipe from, but it has intrigued me for a long time. Sweet sour sauce for boiled tongue.5 gingersnaps½ cup brown sugar4 tab vinegar1 cup hot water1 lemon, sliced¼ cup raisinsCrush the gingersnaps, and mix with the sugar, vinegar, and hot water. Cook until well blended and smooth. Add the lemon and raisins.Serve over sliced tongue.Gingersnaps? In sauce? Interesting. If anyone has any ideas of its history, I would be most grateful. In the meantime, it is probably eligible for the

Stirring up the Pudding.
Yesterday was ‘Stir Up Sunday’, the traditional day to make your Christmas pudding. Did you mix yours? For some of you, in the other half of the world, it may still be Sunday when you read this, so you still have time.The ‘tradition’ is a nice example of the association of ideas. According to the Anglican Church calendar, yesterday was the last Sunday

Posh Toast.
Toast has many guises in the English-speaking culinary world, as we have seen this week. It is a staple at breakfast, very desirable at afternoon tea, and is happy to appear at lunch or supper alongside a bowl of soup. It can be cold and austere, or hot and buttery, it can be embellished with any number of delicious spreads, and is very supportive of eggs, or melted cheese (have we remembered Welsh Rabbit this week?) or leftover stew, or pretty well anything else - including, as we saw earlier in the week, a saucy pile of stewed fruit. As if to prove its versatility, slightly burnt toast also became an ingredient in some of the ersatz coffee recipes of the nineteenth century.You

Leftover Toast.
If one of the raisons d’être for the toasting of bread is domestic economy - by virtue of its making stale, leftover bread more palatable - then what does one do, if one is a very virtuous housewife, if some of that toast is itself, leftover?Rest assured, dear readers, that generations of frugal housewives and cooks have come up with quite a large number of ideas over the last couple of hundred years. One could, for example, make toast pudding. Toast can also be used in the following variation on the theme of bread pudding (not bread and butter pudding) is from the insp

Toast as Medicine.
There are those who love toast for the simple pleasure of it – for its inherent toastiness and its butter-absorbing, marmalade (or honey, or Vegemite)-carrying, and soup-accompanying capacity. Then there are those who eat it or inflict it because it is (when correctly prepared of course) - good for you. In the latter group were many medical and nursing and dietetic persons of the nineteenth century, amongst whom