Cooking! Old-school.

During my Exciting Weekend Away, which you didn't know about because I was totally incognito or something, I ended up briefly mentioning a cookbook my old flatmate used to have, entitled Be Bold With Bananas! I can't remember if it actually had the ! but if it didn't it totally should have, because the whole book was dedicated to making interesting, banana-related taste abominations.

So when my grandmother came around this afternoon with a whole bunch of old cookbooks I decided to have a quick look through them as weird culinary adventures were on my mind, and here is a bit of what I found:

'Upside Down Pineapple Mince Loaf' - Presumably a savoury take on the upside-down pineapple cake? Pineapple features a lot more than it should in all old cooking books: see also Pineapple Meat Rolls, Delicious Pineapple (appears to consist of pineapple, malt biscuits, and butter) and a dish which I did not catch the name of but appears to be pineapple rings with a sausage shoved through the middle. Yum.

"Select a large and beautiful pineapple" - This instruction makes sense once you realise that the basic thread of the recipe is "hollow out the fruit/vegetable, mix insides with cheese/fish paste/fruit/cheese, refill shell." Apparently back in the day when you couldn't quite decide how to cook something, you just hollowed it out then filled it back up. With itself. And cheese.

Grapefruit Fluff - Wow. How appealing.

Flippettey Flop - Appears to be made of eggs behaving in this manner. Submitted by M. Cunningham, who also contributed the recipe for Bobbity Bobs, a dish which stars balls of sausage meat. In broth. Bobbity bobbing.

Stuffed Cold Meat Casserole - Come on, dish. You can't be everything to everyone.

"The caramel will sizzle, harden, and look very odd." Oh! Well, in that case I won't be worried, I'll just make something else. Perhaps the Simple Meal for 25, although part of me worries that it's too good to be true.

"It is rarely a good idea to keep banana salads hanging about." - Is it often a good idea to make banana salads in the first place? I think not.

"This way of cooking bananas brings out their quality of aromatic richness that remains hidden and unsuspected in the huge bananas of modern commerce when eaten raw." - "Wilbur sighed in quiet desperation. Once more, his artistic dreams had been trampled by the huge bananas of modern commerce."

"Season the grouse inside [...] and cover the breasts with bacon." - I consider this to be a Nostradamus-esque premonition warning us of the advent of Lady Gaga.

"Fruit can be the duck's amiable companion.."

And that was where I stopped reading and reached for the bottle of fizzy wine.