Dear Laura
I’m glad you liked my hors d’oeuvres suggestion. As you so rightly point out, you don’t have enough matching cutlery for more that two courses and it’s embarrassing to have to wash up in the middle of a meal.
My grandmother always used to say: “Fingers were made before forks.” I don’t know whether she always had that attitude – definitely not correct etiquette for a Victorian lady – or whether living through two world wars and their accompanying food shortages, had made her realise that you cannot get your money’s worth out of a lamb chop or chicken leg without picking it up and gnawing at the bone!
To be perfectly correct, you should provide a finger bowl – preferably slightly scented and with rose petals or slices of lemon floating in it. I don’t suppose anyone will do a Paul Kruger and drink the stuff!
I agree with you about not wanting to put everything on biscuits. Lots of things do just as well on cocktail sticks. How about a strip of ham, rolled up and
speared onto a bite-sized piece of melon? It should really be Parma ham, but that’s a bit expensive and perhaps it’s not a good idea to serve uncooked pig
to people you don’t know very well!”
Cubes of ham or cheese can be impaled with a cocktail onion, a bit of gherkin or pineapple, or a stuffed olive and stuck into a cabbage to make a porcupine and save washing-up! Or you can go the whole hog and make mini-kebabs, filling the stick with a little bit of everything. By the way, don’t try to spear the cocktail tomatoes – unless you want to spend the next hour cleaning your contact lenses!
As for a fishy thing which won’t send the biscuits soggy, how about a kipper pâté? Cook a boil-in-the-bag kipper and mash it with some soft butter. Put it in a little dish and let people pile it on the biscuits as they want it. It’s very tasty, and a whole lot cheaper than smoked salmon.
I promised to tell you about the mousse and thereby hangs a tale. In fact, not just a tail but most of a cocker spaniel!
It was your grandmother’s birthday and your grandfather came home from work with the most enormous box. My mother and I attacked the packaging from both sides, one with the carving knife and the other with the bread saw. Eventually we stood knee-deep in cardboard and the monster stood there in all her glory. A Sunbeam Mixmaster! So state-of-the-art in the early sixties that neither of us had ever even seen one before!
We put a plug on it and assembled everything – without looking at the instructions – and decided to make a strawberry mousse. The quick-and-easy recipe was one we had used many times before (except that it hadn’t been very ‘quick-and-easy’ using a hand beater!) All you did was to melt a packet of jelly in as little water as possible and then whisk it into a tin of ice-cold evaporated milk. So we chucked everything in the Mixmaster and switched it on!
Up to that moment the ceiling had been white, my mother’s sweater dark green, my school uniform navy blue and the dog, well, dog-coloured. Within seconds, everything was strawberry pink!
Instead of pushing air into the mousse, the machine was pushing mousse into the air!
The dog was in his element. He discovered very quickly that he liked mousse, but he couldn’t decide where to lick first – himself, us or the floor. Then he found that the stuff was also dripping from the ceiling!
Anyway, it is a cheap and simple recipe (provided you don’t assemble your mixer back-to-front) and, at this time of year, you can decorate it with fresh
strawberries and cream without going into overdraft.
Love Mom
