Charity shop meals-cooking from A New Style Of Cooking by Anton Mosimann

Hello once again super-galactic travellers, and welcome to a new series I'm going to call, charity shop meals, where I review recipes I try from vintage cookbooks!

A few years back I started collecting recipe books I thought were interesting. I have a few from regular shops, but most are from charity shops.

We've cooked from some of the shop bought books but we've not really done a lot with the charity shops ones, so last week my partner proposed we start cooking with them more, starting this week!

My partner was the first to choose a recipe, and decided to pick one from A New Style Of Cooking by Anton Mosimann.

I bought this cookbook a couple months back as I found it interesting to see recipes that were seen as fancy and modern at the time, but when you look back at them now they come across as pretty old fashioned.

The recipe he ended up picking at random was poached sole fillets with smoked salmon sauce (filets de sole a l'ecossaise.)

We love white fish, smoked salmon, and creamy sauces, so what's not to love eh! My partner wanted to try and plate it as closely as possible as the image example. He wanted to try and plate it as close to the image in the book as possible, and this was the result!

Not perfect, but it was pretty close! The only things it was missing is some dill as I'm not a fan of it, and some melon balled potatoes (which weren't actually a part of the recipe, just those or rice were a recommended side if you were having it as a main) and that’s only because we don't own a melon baller. Maybe if more recipes need one we'll buy one, but nowadays balls of melon aren't really seen as the height of fashion they once were, so I see it sitting in the back of out drawer collecting dust 99% of the time 😆

Overall I found it to be a really tasty and enjoyable dish. The only real downside was that it was a bit small portion wise, even with the potatoes, when presented like it is in the cookbook.

My partner's thoughts on it were that, it took longer to cook than he imagined, it could really do with some citrus and ground pepper on top, and he thought the saltiness of the smoked salmon within the dish would be enough seasoning but it wasn't, and so could have done with a sprinkling of salt on top as well.

He did enjoy it as well though, and was happy he learnt two new skills while cooking this (making a mousse and stuffing fish). I'm guessing it's missing some of these ingredients though due to his Cuisine Naturelle style of cooking, which I think is meant to be more about tasting the main ingredients rather than masking it with lots of other flavours.

I was planning to sharing lots of photos from the book and the recipe on here, but the laws around copyright when it comes to sharing stuff from vintage cookbooks are a little confusing, but if you're interested in this or other recipes from the book it seems readily available on eBay (make sure to look for the new edition!)

I think overall this was a tasty meal with a couple of issues, but with few tweaks it could be made into a more modern dish. It's also made me want to try some of of the other recipes in there in the future, but maybe for more of a lunch or a starter than a main meal.

Tune in next time where I got to pick the recipe, which ended up being a salad that couldn’t be any less of a salad if it tried...