Coffee get-together

There’s a bewildering array of different ways of drinking coffee these days, every sort of combination of coffee and milk, and different coffees and different milks. My earliest coffee memories are of percolated coffee at breakfast time, coffee cut with chicory, and Camp Coffee, a coffee and chicory essence of which I still have a bottle and use to flavour cakes and icing. The label always intrigued me as a child, the tall handsome Sikh soldier, with a rather puffy faced Scot in a kilt sitting down in front of a tent. Over the years the label changed from the first ones of the Sikh ‘waiting’ on the Scot, to the Sikh just standing there, to now the Sikh and the scot are both sitting enjoying a cup of Camp. Instant coffee was developed and became available, and my mum bought the small two ounce tins. I think both Camp and instant coffee were made with warm milk, but as a child I didn’t drink it.

I came across a free leaflet from Maxwell House coffee with recipes by Ruth Morgan, who I believe wrote the Woman Cookery Book published in 1955. The leaflet describes the sort of refreshments which can be served at a coffee morning, ‘a popular new habit’. Coffee time cookies, coconut rockies, apricot macaroons, chocolate kisses and quickie biscuits, Ruth shares easy and quick to make biscuits. Coffee mornings in the 50’s sound a little more elaborate than now, she suggests a variety of different sandwiches:

Cold white or brown bread

• tinned tuna and salad cream with chopped parsley
• cooked, skinned, sliced sausages with apple sauce
• chopped walnuts with cream cheese
• chopped hard-boiled eggs with chopped capers
• chopped ham and chutney
• orange marmalade blended with cream cheese
• scrambled egg with a few shrimps or prawns

Toasted

• sardines mashed with vinegar and chopped parsley
• chopped fried bacon
• sliced liver sausage with a little chopped raw onion

Three tiered (two slices of white/brown bread, one slice brown/white bread)

• chopped hard-boiled egg and water cress/sliced tomato and chives
• cream cheese mixed with tomato sauce/lettuce leaves with salt

I cannot imagine many of these sandwiches would be popular today, but it might be fun to have a retro 50’s party! sausage sandwiches at a coffee morning? marmalade and cream cheese? Scrambled egg sandwiches? sardines and vinegar or liver and raw onion? I hope i don’t sound as if I’m mocking; 50’s Britain would have still been a place where people had to watch their budgets, would have been reliant on tinned goods; people would have wanted to be imaginative and creative with food, and would have tried their best with the resources they had to share tasty and economical dishes.

It makes me so cross when British food is criticised; the country had been at war for seven years (yes, the war in the east didn’t finish until 1946) rationing continued in the 50’s, people did the best they could with what they had and produced lots of tasty and delicious food, presented in what was then a current and modern way.

Look what else was in this little leaflet – all of which could be served today at a coffee morning, or found in the cake cabinet of the newest coffee-house:

• cheese and walnut biscuits
• iced almond and cherry ring
• old world gingerbread
• fudge cakes
• hazelnut round
• chocolate and almond cups
• doughnuts

Well done Ruth Morgan, and my mum and aunties who used these recipes!