Vintage Recipe Thursday: More From Bettina

The Joy of Desserts blog has a weekly round-up of vintage recipes and I thought that it would be a good way to help me blog on a regular basis!  (Along with the contest, of course--the 2nd contest recipe will arrive Saturday.)  I love all things vintage and cook from old recipes all the time, so a once-a-week posting shouldn't be too difficult!

This easy meal comes from one of my favorite old cookbooks: A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband.  The cranberry relish is my parents' recipe, though.  You'll have to ask my mom about it!  Oh, and the original menu called for a Baked Potato, but I had sweet potatoes from my CSA, so I used those instead.  Just pierce them a few times with a fork, wrap with tin foil and bake at 350 for about an hour.  This is super-convenient because both the cornbread and the ham bake at the same temperature.

Clockwise from top left: Corn Bread, Baked Sweet Potato, Baked Ham, Cranberry Relish

Bettina’s Baked Ham and Corn Bread

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Film recommendation:

A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946)

I'll admit it--the reason I rented this film from Netflix was that I was browsing David Niven movies and hadn't seen this one.  If I had known it also starred Kim Hunter ("Stella" from A Streetcar Named Desire, which is another must-see film) and Roger Livesey (I've talked about him before), I would have rented it earlier.  The premise sounds really lame--a pilot cheats death and then has to prove to heaven that he deserves to remain on Earth because he's fallen in love.  Don't let that (or the not-great special effects) stop you from watching this film.  It's charming and Roger Livesey is magnificent as the doctor in an English village who looks after David Niven's character.  Powell and Pressburger's script gracefully straddles the line between romantic, yet still realistic, war-wound-recovery story and romantic fantasy.  Is the action fueled by an accounting error in heaven or is the accounting error in heaven simply a manifestation of neurological trauma?

If you're looking for a sweet but not saccharine classic film, this one's for you.

It also makes me want to move to an English village where Roger Livesey is the village doctor, but honestly, it doesn't take encouragement from a film to make me want to move to an English village!