My Mom's Rolls

As far as I know, my great grandmother brought this recipe from England when she immigrated. She was a young WWI bride, leaving her family to go to the wilds of Canada to be with the young soldier she'd nursed back to health. She got to Canada before her letter saying she was en route did, consequently, my great grandfather was not there to meet her. Standing on the dock, with everything she owned and no where to go, knowing no one, she could have been prime meat for all sorts of disreputable people. Fortunately, a generous man took her home for the night, much to his wife's suspicious dismay, and then took her out by horse cart to go from farm to farm searching the countryside looking for my grandfather's family farm.

I grew up on this recipe. My mother uses it for everything from pizza dough to cinnamon rolls. Everyone who has my mother's rolls, never forgets them. I've spent many years trying to get them exactly like hers and while I've gotten close, I have come to believe that there must be some element of my mom's sweat itself that I am missing, gross as that may sound.

At any rate, since Thanksgiving is coming up and there is no gathering without these rolls, here you go, as she dictated to me many years ago. Having made at least one batch a week for the last 40 years, she doesn't use a recipe.

Hot Rolls
Dissolve one package yeast in 1/2 cup warm water. Add 1 1/2 cups warm water, 1 egg, 1 t salt, 1/2 cup oil, 1/3-1/2 cup sugar (depending on the final salt/sweet balance wanted). Add flour until the mixture is the consistency of cake batter. Set aside for one hour in a warm place until it doubles in size and gets all bubbly. At this stage it can be fried like pancake batter if wanted. Add more flour. Knead until the dough isn't sticky. Place it in a large bowl and smear shortening over the top. Place in the fridge, preferably overnight to let the flavor develop. One and a half hours before you want to serve them, make into rolls and let rise in a warm place. Bake approximately 15 minutes at 350.


Here's another Thanksgiving tradition at our house, one of my absolute favorites.

Three-Layer Chocolate Dessert
1 cup nuts, chopped
1 cup flour
1 cup butter
Press the above into a 9x13 pan. Bake at 350 for 20 minutes.

8 oz. cream cheese
1 cup powdered sugar
1 cup cool whip
Mix and spread over cooled crust.

1 small box instant vanilla pudding
1 small box instant chocolate pudding
3 cups milk.
Mix and spread over the above. Spread more cool whip on top and sprinkle with nuts and shaved chocolate.


Just writing this is giving me cravings.

Potluck treasures

With Thanksgiving coming up, I’m looking back on various recipes collected from people at large gatherings and written into the margins of my main cookbook. Sometimes when you ask for a recipe at a potluck, you really mean it.

Penney brought this first one over for a holiday gathering for my spiritual group, it was so long ago I don’t remember which holiday, but let’s say sometime in fall or winter because its gooey and filling and would go well with a harvest theme.

Corn Casserole

1 17 oz can creamed corn

1 17 oz can whole corn with liquid

1 cup uncooked macaroni

½ cup melted butter

2 T chopped onion

2 T chopped green pepper

1 cup cubed processed cheese

Mix all the above and put in 2 quart casserole dish. Bake covered for 30 min and uncovered for 30 min at 350.

I don’t remember but I think the next one is Afghani. At least I have other Afghani soup recipes that use yogurt so it’s a safe bet. It’s also very healthy and tasty.

Yogurt Soup

1 med onion, chopped

½ stick butter

2 cup chicken broth

¼ cup pearl barley soaked overnight

¼ cup parsley

¼ cup dried mint

1 egg

2 cups yogurt

Lemon juice

Saute onion in butter. Add broth, simmer til just below boiling. Add drained barley and cook til tender, about 20 minutes. Add salt, pepper, parsley. Beat the egg and add it to the yogurt. Pour yogurt slowly into the broth, don’t boil or it will curdle. Simmer 10-15 minutes. Garnish with mint and a little lemon juice.

This next one took major arm twisting to get ahold of. I’ve never understood the idea of keeping a recipe a secret unless you’re like Colonel Sanders or something. So here I go, blowing all opportunities of becoming a franchise billionaire by posting the recipe for simply the best homemade ice cream EVER.

Liz’s Ice Cream

3 cups sugar

3 T cocoa

8 beaten eggs

As much milk as there is eggs

Mix the above and make into a custard on the stove over med heat, stirring constantly. Make sure you beat the eggs into it well or you will end up with scrambled eggs in your ice cream. It may curdle, and that’s okay.

Pour into ice cream freezer while still warm and add:

4 cups half and half

4 cups heavy cream

1 T vanilla

Freeze as directed.

I’ve also left out the cocoa and doubled the vanilla to make a vanilla version that was deadly good. Mexican vanilla. There’s nothing like Mexican vanilla in the world. And yet it’s illegal to sell it here, so get someone to sneak some across the border for you. It’s heavenly.

Tradition

I'm unimpressed. I pulled out the Better Homes and Gardens Holiday Cook Book from 1959 to see what ideas they might have for Thanksgiving. They have instructions for cooking a turkey, of course, nothing particularly riveting there, and roasting a chicken or cornish game hens. There's a recipe for giblet gravy, mushroom  wild rice, browned rice, apple-pineapple slaw, a jellied cranberry ring, and shrimp cocktail. Still not inspired. A recipe for tomato soup that involves combining canned tomato soup and beef broth. Whee. Orange-glazed sweet potatoes, butternut squash, pickled beets, and corn bread.

The page of "pretty trimmings" ideas doesn't wow me either. There's the idea of sticking chrysanthemums on the naked bone of the turkey legs, or poking spiced crab apples over them. There's the avant garde notion of blopping whipped cream on your pumpkin pie, or if you'd prefer, cut a slice of American cheese in half on the diagonal, and roll the resulting triangle into a cornucopia anchored with whole cloves. Arrange six of these in a pinwheel shape on top of your pumpkin pie. Cheese on apple pie: okay. Cheese on pumpkin pie: I don't think so.

I am neither comforted by old favorites or intrigued by new twists...and then I come to this:

"For tradition's sake, serve time-honored Creamed Onions. To lots of folks, it's not Thanksgiving unless this specialty is on the table. Our version has two Southern accents--cheese to enrich the sauce, peanuts for crunch and their own good flavor."

Creamed Onions
18-20 medium onions
1/3 cup salad oil
3 T flour
1 1/2 cups milk
1 cup shredded process American cheese
peanuts, chopped

Peel onions and cook in a large amount of boiling, salted water until tender; drain. Blend oil and flour, stir in milk and cook slowly until thick, stirring constantly. Add the cheese and stir until melted. Add the onions and heat through. Place in vegetable bowl and sprinkle with peanuts.

Did I miss something? When did Creamed Onions become such a hallowed part of Thanksgiving traditions? I have never heard of this. My friends have never waxed nostalgically about their gramma's creamed onions. I don't remember Mr. Food telling us, "oooh, it's so good." Peppermint Patty didn't yell at Charlie Brown for not providing Creamed Onions as they sat around the ping pong table. There has to be some kind of editorial bias here: maybe it was traditional at HER family Thanksgivings but putting it in a book doesn't normalize it for the rest of us.

I'm going to write my own Thanksgiving chapter, it will include that great American favorite: hummus,  and that little pastel marshmallow overnight fruit salad my mom makes. What? That's what's on our table.

Bottom of the barrel

I'm not obsessed with baking powder, I'm really not. It's just that, in my every day cooking, the only thing I actually use recipes for is baking, otherwise cookbooks and recipes merely serve to inspire and obsess over my favorite addiction: food.  Baking however, is a more precise art, probably having more in common with chemistry than anything else. That means paying attention to an actual recipe. So in reading old cookbooks, I run into discussions of baking powder a lot. Of course, it helps that many of them are actually produced by the food companies as a way of promoting their product, like Royal, as in Royal Baking Powder.

This one is from 1930, click on the following picture and get a larger version so you can read the origin of cream of tartar.

Sometimes I ask myself, who decided to try that for the first time? Who said, "Hey, this cheese is completely overrun with some kind of green mold, I think I'll try some! Wow, it didn't kill me and it tastes great!" Who said, "Hey, that cat just pooped out a bunch of undigested coffee beans, I think I'll grind them up and drink 'em!" (If you think I'm kidding, look up Kopi Luwak coffee.) Who said, "What's this white crusty scum in our wine barrel? Let's throw some in our bread to see what happens." I mean, I don't get out of the shower and look at the soap film left behind and wonder if it's edible. Maybe I should, maybe it is. Truly, who discovered cream of tartar?

In case you want to know what the experts say, I won't leave you in suspense, here's the next page:

So if you also have a 'particular household', like myself, though I suspect many would say 'peculiar' instead, get yourself some cream of tartar baking soda. It's better than eating aluminum.

One food I can't live without

Ode to Cheese

God of the country, bless today Thy cheese, For which we give Thee thanks on bended knees. Let them be fat or light, with onions blent, Shallots, brine, pepper, honey; whether scent Of sheep or fields is in them, in the yard Let them, good Lord, at dawn be beaten hard. And let their edges take on silvery shades Under the moist red hands of dairymaids; And, round and greenish, let them go to town Weighing the shepherd's folding mantle down; Whether from Parma or from Jura heights, Kneaded by august hands of Carmelites, Stamped with the mitre of a proud abbess. Flowered with the perfumes of the grass of Bresse, From hollow Holland, from the Vosges, from Brie, From Roquefort, Gorgonzola, Italy! Bless them, good Lord! Bless Stilton's royal fare, Red Cheshire, and the tearful cream Gruyère.

FROM JETHRO BITHELL'S TRANSLATION OF A POEM BY M. Thomas Braun

“I cannot think why this cheese was not thrown from the aeroplanes during the war to spread panic amongst enemy troops. It would have proved far more efficacious than those nasty deadly gases that kill people permanently.” Eric Weir

“In early days a large cheese sufficed for a year or two of family feeding, according to this old note: "A big Cheddar can be kept for two years in excellent condition if kept in a cool room and turned over every other day." But in old England some were harder to preserve: "In Bath... I asked one lady of the larder how she kept Cheddar cheese. Her eyes twinkled: 'We don't keep cheese; we eats it.'"

“Roquefort: Homage to this fromage! Long hailed as le roi Roquefort, it has filled books and booklets beyond count. By the miracle of Penicillium Roqueforti a new cheese was made. It is placed historically back around the eighth century when Charlemagne was found picking out the green spots of Persillé with the point of his knife, thinking them decay. But the monks of Saint-Gall, who were his hosts, recorded in their annals that when they regaled him with Roquefort (because it was Friday and they had no fish) they also made bold to tell him he was wasting the best part of the cheese. So he tasted again, found the advice excellent and liked it so well he ordered two caisses of it sent every year to his palace at Aix-la-Chapelle. He also suggested that it be cut in half first, to make sure it was well veined with blue, and then bound up with a wooden fastening. Perhaps he hoped the wood would protect the cheeses from mice and rats, for the good monks of Saint-Gall couldn't be expected to send an escort of cats from their chalky caves to guard them--even for Charlemagne. There is no telling how many cats were mustered out in the caves, in those early days, but a recent census put the number at five hundred. We can readily imagine the head handler in the caves leading a night inspection with a candle, followed by his chief taster and a regiment of cats. While the Dutch and other makers of cheese also employ cats to patrol their storage caves, Roquefort holds the record for number. An interesting point in this connection is that as rats and mice pick only the prime cheeses, a gnawed one is not thrown away but greatly prized.”

The Stieff Recipe Basic Milk Rabbit (completely surrounded by a lake of malt beverages)

2 cups grated sharp cheese

3 heaping tablespoons butter

1-1/2 cups milk

4 eggs

1 heaping tablespoon mustard

2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce

Pepper, salt and paprika to taste--then add more of each.

Grease well with butter the interior of your double boiler so that no hard particles of cheese will form in the mixture later and contribute undesirable lumps. Put cheese, well-grated, into the double boiler and add butter and milk. From this point vigorous stirring should be indulged in until Rabbit is ready for serving. Prepare a mixture of Worcestershire sauce, mustard, pepper, salt and paprika. These should be beaten until light and then slowly poured into the double boiler. Nothing now remains to be done except to stir and cook down to proper consistency over a fairly slow flame. The finale has not arrived until you can drip the rabbit from the spoon and spell the word finis on the surface. Pour over two pieces of toast per plate and send anyone home who does not attack it at once.

This is sufficient for six gourmets or four gourmands.

Nota bene: A Welsh Rabbit, to be a success, should never be of the consistency whereby it may be used to tie up bundles, nor yet should it bounce if inadvertently dropped on the kitchen floor.

After-Dinner Rabbit

Remove all crusts from bread slices, toast on both sides and soak to saturation in hot beer. Melt thin slices of sharp old cheese in butter in an iron skillet, with an added spot of beer and dry English mustard. Stir steadily with a wooden spoon and, when velvety, serve a-sizzle on piping hot beer-soaked toast.

All of the above found in the Complete Book of Cheese by Robert Carlton Brown, 1955.

Soup

I'll be making some beef stew today, to serve later on in the week. Today I have time and besides, it's one of those dishes that taste better the next day. I don't need a recipe, but for curiosity's sake, since it was sitting next to the computer from yesterday. I thought I'd see what the Household Searchlight Recipe Book, 1936, had to offer in the way of soups.

Cream of Corn
1 cup corn
2 cups milk, scalded
3 T melted butter
salt and pepper
1 cup boiling water
3 T flour
1/2 T minced onion
1 T chopped celery leaves
Brown onion and celery leaves in butter. Add flour. Mix until smooth. Add milk slowly, stirring constantly. Add water. Cook over hot water until thick and smooth. Add corn. Season to taste. Heat thoroughly. If desired, celery salt may be used for chopped celery leaves.

While I do enjoy corn soup, it was this variation that caught my eye:

Pea and Peanut Soup
Substitute one cup pea puree or sieved peas for corn, prepare as cream of corn soup. Add 1/2 t finely ground peanuts to each serving.

That seems worth a try, especially when I can find fresh peas. Growing my own is difficult, given that rabbits have eaten the plants that last few years I tried. I will leave the next one up to other people. My kids love salmon but I can't stand it. I cook it anyway, even though it stinks up the house. I have a special pan reserved just for salmon after the incident in which I cooked pastry on a pan that had previously had salmon on it, not knowing that the oils would so stubbornly penetrate the pan, and served up fishy puff pastry to my guests. Salmon is so oily I can't imagine it needs the extra butter in this soup--or that it would not benefit from some kind of thickening.

Salmon Soup
4 cups milk
2 cups shredded salmon
2 T butter
salt and pepper
Combine salmon, butter, and milk. Season to taste. Heat thoroughly. Stir until well-blended. Serve at once.


Here's two more that are unusual for inclusion in the 'soup' category:

Jellied Fruit Soup
1 cup orange juie
1 cup pineapple juice
1 package sweetened lemon flavored gelatin
Heat juices to boiling. Add gelatin. Stir until dissolved. Pour into a shallow oblong mold. Chill until firm. Cut into cubes. Serve in bouillon cups with crisp crackers.

Chow Mein
1 lb diced lean pork, veal, or chicken
2 cups diced celery
1 t salt
2 T corn starch
2 cups chow mein noodles
2 cups water or meat stock
1/2 cup diced onions
2 cups canned bean sprouts
2 T soy sauce
Fry meat 5 minutes in fat. Add water or stock. Cover. Simmer until tender. Add celery and onion. Simmer ten minutes. Moisten corn starch in a little water. Add to first mixture. Add bean sprouts and soy sauce. Season to taste. Heat thoroughly. Serve over noodles.

Dinner for Dickens

Today's food experiment was steel cut oats. I'm a big fan of oats, and have an occasional hankering for oatmeal. I'd heard that steel cut oats were much better than the rolled oats most commonly available in the U.S., so why not? Got myself some from Bob's Red Mill and followed the recipe on the package which is essentially just adding it to boiling water and simmering for 20 minutes or so, with a little salt. It's almost like the recipe for Oatmeal Gruel in the Household Searchlight Recipe Book, 1936. How much easier could it be?

Oatmeal Gruel
1/4 cup oats
4 cups boiling water
salt
Slowly sprinkle cereal into rapidly boiling water. Boil rapidly, stirring occasionally, for 30 minutes. Strain. Add salt to taste.

(Strain??? I thought gruel was just runny oatmeal. Are you straining out the excess water? Or straining out the oatmeal and eating the oatmeal juice. Ack.)

Well, Bob's recipe needed a lot more water and kept sticking to the bottom of the pan. And while it was cooking I did a little internet browsing and found versions where you brown the oats in butter first, and use various combos of milk, half and half, or buttermilk added in near the end of the cooking, all of which made me wish I'd waited and tried for something a little more elaborate.

However, when all was said and done, including vanilla, cinnamon, sugar, and a slosh of creamer...I am definitely a convert. The texture was different, creamy but more chewy, like risotto. I understand a savory version is made in Scotland and served on the side very much like risotto. I'm thinking there are tons of experimental possibilities here, both in the this-really-doesn't-count-as-breakfast-anymore-it's-really-dessert direction, and in the stuffing/pilaf/quinoa direction. I've definitely gotten my fiber for the day too.

In the same book, below the Gruel recipe, there's a recipe for Graham Mush. I'd say that the word 'mush' actually sounds more appetizing than anything called 'gruel', which I always associate with Ebenezer Scrooge, but once you scan the recipe you'll see that names, not unlike looks, can be deceiving.

Graham Mush
1 cup graham flour
2 cups boiling water
1 t salt
Sprinkle flour, stirring constantly, into rapidly boiling water. Add salt. Stir frequently to prevent lumping. Cook 30 minutes over direct heat or over hot water in the double boiler 1 hour.

I can't imagine this keeps from clumping. It sounds like a tasteless white sauce. Mmmm, please, sir, can I have some more?

As long as I'm on this page of the book, at the bottom is the recipe for rice. I've noticed that in these older books, rice is quite frequently cooked like pasta, as follows:

Boiled Rice
1 cup rice
8 cups boiling water
1 t salt
Wash rice thoroughly. Sprinkle gradually into boiling water. Add salt. Boil rapidly until rice grains are plump and tender. Pour into a sieve. Pour boiling water over rice until each grain is distinct. Reheat in a double boiler before serving.

Shortnin' Bread Redux

I don’t know why I didn’t realize when I was typing the recipe up, that the shortnin’ bread recipe in the Lincoln Heritage Trail Cookbook, by Marian French, 1971, was a shortbread recipe. Have I really been so dense my whole life, wondering what shortnin’ bread was and never equating it to my favorite kind of cookie? *Whacks self in head so hard birds twitter around it* I didn’t make the connection until I was actually making it.

Here’s my favorite regular shortbread recipe, my own combination of several others for the ratio of sweetness to crispness that I like best.

Scottish Shortbread

2 ½ sticks of butter (for best results, use European style)

¾ cup powdered sugar

2 ½ cups flour (for best results, use pastry flour)

½ t vanilla (optional)

Mix, press into two 9” round pans, score, cook at 325 for 30 minutes. Let cool ten minutes, turn out of pan, cut. Alternatively, can be spread thin on a cookie sheet to bake.

To add insult to injury in my not recognizing shortnin’ bread as shortbread, here’s a favorite brown sugar shortbread recipe given to me by a friend and coworker over a decade ago. These are scrumptious, hence too dangerous to my diet to make outside of the holidays.

Brown Sugar Shortbread

Cookie:

1 cup butter

¾ cup light brown sugar

2 t vanilla

2 cups flour

Topping:

1 T butter

1 c chocolate chips

1 cup chopped pecans

Cream butter and sugar, and vanilla, beat, then flour. Shape into 1 inch balls, then form into logs. Place on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 17 minutes at 325. Cool.

Dip one end of the logs in the chocolate and butter which have been melted together, then dip into chopped pecans. Refrigerate until set.

This is the Lincoln recipe again. I don’t keep brown sugar around. It just gets hard. All brown sugar is, is white sugar that has been sprayed with the molasses removed in processing. So that’s what I do, just add a healthy blob of molasses when I add white sugar. It’s rich in minerals. In making this Lincoln version, I also replaced a third of the flour with whole wheat pastry flour. It was fabulous. And quickly gone.

Shortnin’ Bread

1 stick butter

¼ cup brown sugar

1 ½ cup flour

Mix butter with sugar. Add flour and mix well. Roll about ½ inch thick on a floured board and shape with a biscuit cutter. Bake on lightly greased and floured pan at 350 for about 20 minutes.

I doubled the next batch and tried replacing 3 T of butter with 9 T of ground toasted flax seed, but it was too crumbly, so I ended up adding the butter back in. I replaced a third of the white flour with wheat pastry flour again, and tossed in a handful of wheat germ on top of it. No rolling this out, I had to mold it into shape like wet sand, but the end result is quite tasty, kind of like a Hob Nob. (I would increase the wheat germ and decrease the flax next time, to create a better texture.) Healthy short bread? Who would have guessed? 

Moby Mouse

I paid no attention when my cat, Lace, suddenly darted off my lap. Cats have a habit of realizing they are late for an appointment and darting away. But when I saw her staring intently under the oven, I realized she had a mouse in her sights. My hopes soared as I dropped to my knees beside her to peer under, maybe it was that little albino bastard.

Last April I bought a mouse to feed my daughter’s snake, only he went on hunger strike. I quickly tired of dropping this mouse into the tank every few days and then getting bitten—by the mouse, not the snake—taking it back out to the food ‘holding tank’. It was quick, clever, aggressive, wild—the mouse, not the snake—and while I don’t usually take any pleasure in feeding the snake, I was making a definite exception in this case. Only the snake still wasn’t eating, and I was getting worried; two months passed. Thinking the snake may have developed a similar aversion to this particular rodent, I reluctantly got him a young rat. Gone like a shot.

Okay, now he was eating again. I waited, continuing to feed him rats, while caring for the nasty white mouse, hoping to slip him in between rats, hoping the snake would strike before noticing. It never worked. I had had the mouse for at least 4 months now. And then he escaped. Quick as a wink when I was changing his cage. The next night my daughter caught him, but he escaped again.

No problem. My back porch, and quite often my living room, is littered with the remains of Lace’s favorite pastime. I’ve never had a cat that hunts as assiduously. Rabbits, mice, birds, shrews, you name it. Hear a squirrel cussing a blue streak? You can bet that Lace is on the roof with evil intent. My daughter reported frequent sightings of the white mouse in her room; Lace spent her nights prowling in there. But the mouse survived. Over the next few months, I could hear it at night, gnawing, taunting me. Every time I thought Lace must have got it at last, it made a foray into someone’s bedroom.

Then a few weeks ago, it strolled across the living room floor while we were watching a movie. I pulled a muscle jumping up, yelling incoherently. It went behind the computer desk. We played hide and seek the rest of the evening until I was a foot away from it, ready to slam an empty cottage cheese container over it, just an inch closer…just an inch closer…then Lace came up to me and did the figure 8 thing around my leg, oblivious, as the mouse disappeared from sight.  Damn! The thing that irritated me the most was that I could see it was starting to suffer from old age.

So here I was sprawled on my kitchen floor, next to my cat, mumbling about “that little white fucker”. I pulled the drawer out there it was, sitting among my baking pans. Then it was gone, I pulled the pans out. The drawer was empty. I pulled the drawer completely out. Lace was quivering with hunting fever. I stuffed her under the oven, screeching, “get it, get it, get it” like a mad woman. Nobody tells Lace what to do, but in this case, she was willing to overlook it, close as we both knew she was to the kill.

The clock ticked. Lace stuck her head out, confused. I shoved her back under. She stuck her head out. And then she locked on target. Behind me. I turned and saw a white nose and whiskers between the cups of a muffin tin that was sitting on a cookie sheet. The mouse was sandwiched between. Not squished between but running freely along the underside of the muffin tin, in and out of the spaces between the cups. Lace was quickly on one side and I was on the other as the nose peeked out here, then there, in a homemade whack-a-mole game I was simply NOT going to lose this time.

I called my daughter to get a plastic grocery bag and scooped the whole thing into the bag, shook the tins and caught my great white nemesis. Its hair was thinning, and it even seemed to have a little palsy. I ran with it up the stairs and bunged it into the snake cage, cackling and doing a victory dance. The snake was hungry.

Lace hasn't spoken to me since.

If I need to legitimize telling this story in a food blog: it is about food and it does take place in a kitchen. If you want more, consider it introduction to this recipe for rodents in the Lincoln Heritage Trail Cookbook by Marian French, 1971.

Rabbit and Squirrel

Soak overnight in salted water or 1 part vinegar to 1 part water. Stew or fry in the same manner as chicken.

That's it, that's all it says.It's followed by a recipe for Chicken and Dumplings that I assume you could use with your squirrel.

Stewed Chicken and Dumplings

Use a 5 or 6 pound chicken (or big ass squirrel) (whole or cut into parts), cover with water and boil slowly in covered pot until tender. Add salt, pepper, butter as seasoning. Remove chicken to platter, drop dumpling dough (or baked biscuits) into liquid, cover and cook ten minutes, serve hot.

Yeah, all kinds of wrong with that recipe. No where in the book does it give a recipe for dumplings. Now I know in the south a dumpling is a wide egg noodle and in the north its a biscuit, and there is a recipe for noodles but it isn't tagged as a 'dumpling'. There's no recipe for biscuits in here. Not to mention that biscuit dumplings aren't baked first and then dropped in the water, they are dropped in raw and steamed to cook them. Nor does this recipe mention thickening the liquid in any way, or that the chicken be returned to the pot. Or maybe the dumplings and liquid are supposed to be poured over the chicken afterwards? Meh, I doubt this author ever made chicken and dumplings. Or squirrel.

Log cabin cooking

I’ve been out of town for work and took along a history book to read on the plane. It had some interesting stuff about Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus and use of military tribunals to prosecute civilians during the civil war. Stuff they don’t tell you about in school. It doesn’t make me feel one bit better about the Patriot Act but it does make me drag The Lincoln Heritage Trail Cook Book, by Marian French, 1971, out of the basement to see if there’s anything worth trying. I have no idea if any of the information in this book about Lincoln’s culinary proclivities is accurate, but it’s at least not as disturbing as rummaging thru de-Bowdlerized history.

“Abe Lincoln’s stepmother was one of the best sausage makers. On a solid block of hard wood she would pound the best cuts of meats available with a wooden mallet. Then she would add seasoning and herbs and mix it thoroughly. The sausage was packed into crocks and covered with freshly rendered lard and set away to ripen. Abe Lincoln said he could smell that good sausage cooking while he was still a mile away. Abe loved fried apples and salt pork for breakfast—or biscuits with ham and cream gravy.”

After talking about the simple plain food of the struggling settlers of Kentucky, there’s this soup recipe. Guess the Indians taught them how to grow cans of Campbell’s.

Cream of Green Pepper Soup

1 medium green pepper, chopped

½ small onion chopped

2 T butter

1 can (10.5 oz. ) condensed cream of celery soup

1 soup can of milk

Heat pepper and onion in butter. Cook 5 minutes. Place in electric blender and blend well. Add cream of celery soup and milk, blend a few minutes until smooth. Heat gently.

Can't have soup without bread, so here's 3 options:

Bean Bread (Indian)

Pot of boiling water

½ cup cooked beans

1 cup cornmeal

Mix beans and meals together, add enough water to moisten until it holds together. Drop in boiling water and cook (as dumplings). (No salt to prevent crumbling.) This mixture was also wrapped in corn husks or large tree leaves, tied with a stout reed, then dropped into boiling water.

I know everyone has been keeping all their pork fat since I posted about that, so you could probably use a recipe to use up all the browned bits of meat leftover (cracklings) once you strain the rendered fat.

Crackling Bread

2 cups cornmeal

½ t salt

½ t soda

1 cup buttermilk

1 cup cracklings

Mix cornmeal with salt and soda, add buttermilk and cracklings. Form into cakes and place in greased baking pans. Bake at 450 for 30 minutes.

I can remember my mother singing:

“Mammy’s little baby loves shortnin’ shortnin’,

Mammy’s little baby loves shortnin’ bread (2X)

Put on the skillet, put on the lid

Mammy’s gonna make a little shortin’ bread,

That ain’t all she gonna do

Mammy’s gonna make a little coffee too.”

I’ve seen various versions of just what exactly shortnin bread is, but no actual recipe and I’ve never tried to make any. I thought it was like a batter bread, like indian fry bread, but here’s the one printed in this book. This is like a basic biscuit but without leavening. We’re having mussels and shrimp tonight, with a crusty baguette to soak up the broth, so no trying it out with dinner.

Shortnin’ Bread

1 stick butter

¼ cup brown sugar

1 ½ cup flour

Mix butter with sugar. Add flour and mix well. Roll about ½ inch thick on a floured board and shape with a biscuit cutter. Bake on lightly greased and floured pan at 350 for about 20 minutes.

More recipes coming!

Scary Candy

Halloween is busy and the whole weekend raced by. I was planning on posting some Halloween recipes but that will have to wait til next year. However, I have made a discovery that I could still say was Halloween-ish: Candy Making Revolutionized, Confectionary from Vegetables by Mary Elizabeth Hall, 1912. I don’t actually have the book, but I ran across the website Manybooks.net during my internet surfing. It’s full of free downloadable public domain ebooks, including a wealth of interesting old cookbooks. Thank you Project Gutenberg!

Now the first question on perusing this book is: are these actually edible? Are they even worse than receiving actual apples when trick-or-treating? Or is it possible that they could be a so-horrid-they-are-cool Halloween option? I’ll let you decide. But first, the advantages of these recipes:

“Mothers who formerly were all too often required to gratify their children's longing for candies that told a story--candies modeled or otherwise decorative--by giving them boughten confectionery that contained plaster of Paris, aniline dyes and other ingredients equally harmful, can now in

their own kitchen from nourishing and harmless vegetables fashion sweets that are just as beguiling to childish eyes.

Nor is this all. Children invariably have a craving for sweets that if allowed to run its course is almost sure to lead to indigestion and worse. On the other hand, if this craving is not satisfied, the children will be deprived of a food of the utmost value--a food element, indeed, that it is indispensable. Vegetable candy offers an ideal solution of this difficulty. Sugar it of course contains, but the vegetable base supplies no small part of the bulk; consequently children may eat their fill of it and satisfy their natural longing for candy without having gorged themselves with sugar.  Moreover, the vegetable base has virtues that are positive as well as negative; it itself supplies valuable food elements and equally valuable vegetable salts.”

Acquiring some of the equipment might prove challenging to modern cooks.

“A molasses-candy or taffy pull without a hook may be good fun, but it is hard on the candy as well as on the hands. A blacksmith can easily make the hook of round iron, about a half-inch in diameter and eighteen or twenty inches long. The rod should be bent until it forms roughly a letter J, with the tip about seven inches from the horizontal line. The top--the upper part of the horizontal line of the J--should be pounded flat, and two holes bored for screws. Be sure to attach the hook to the wall firmly, and about level with the shoulders. Hooks may be purchased for about fifty cents apiece, but those made by the blacksmith will do as well. Even with the hook, it is well to wear canvas gloves, so that the mass can be handled hotter, and in a more hygienic fashion than with bare hands. Canvas gloves are easily laundered--something which cannot be said of the expensive buckskin gloves recommended for this purpose.”

Time for some actual recipes!

"As the foundation for one sort of decorative confectionery, potato paste must be made. Steam or boil Irish potatoes, drain them, and force them through a fine sieve,--the finer the better. With one-half cupful of Irish potato, so prepared, mix one tablespoonful of corn starch. Gradually and carefully work in enough confectioner's sugar so that the mixture can be rolled. The "fine sieve," be it noted, plays a conspicuous and important part in the making of candy from vegetables. Moreover, it should be borne in mind that no vegetable particle will either soften in or cook up into syrup. While cooking, the vegetable particles are just as individual as though they were in separate vessels; consequently they must be kept circulating as uniformly as is possible through the syrup in order to prevent the accumulation of masses of vegetable matter of sufficient bulk and weight to sink to the bottom of the sauce pan and cause the mixture to burn. Moreover, should the mixture escape burning, it would develop gluey spots that would make the finished product lacking in the smoothness that is the ideal of the candy-cook. Flavor and color this paste to suit, place it on a surface well dusted with confectioner's sugar and roll it to the desired thinness. Cut it in shapes to suit. Cooky cutters or any other tin cutters may be used. More often, however, the amateur confectioner will prefer her own design.”

“Potato Caramel No. 1.

Stir well one pound of sugar, one cupful of milk, one cupful of Irish potato--boiled and sifted as directed before--two tablespoonfuls of butter and one-half teaspoonful of salt. Boil until thick, and thin with one-half cupful of milk, and again cook until thick; again thin with one-half cupful of milk and cook until the mass is of caramel consistency, tested in cold water. Stir as little as possible, but be careful that the mass does not stick to the bottom of the kettle. Pour on a well oiled marble between candy bars. Dry two days, cut in strips and dry again before finally cutting in squares. Place them in a cold place for several hours and then wrap them in parchment paper. They keep well. This is the kind of potato caramel that is especially good for chocolate coating, although all of the potato caramels can be chocolate coated. Make the caramels as above and allow them to dry in the open air for several hours and then cover with chocolate. The process is fully as laborious as it sounds, but the results are more than worth the trouble. The repeated cookings give the characteristic caramel taste and color.”

“=Carrot Rings.=--To make them, peel medium sized carrots and let them stand several hours in cold water. Cut cross-wise into slices about one-quarter of an inch thick and with a small round cutter or sharp knife remove the center pith. Drop the rings into boiling water and cook until tender. After they have thoroughly drained, drop them into a syrup made by boiling one part of water and three parts of sugar to two hundred and twenty degrees. Boil until the rings become translucent--probably about ten minutes. Dry on a wire rack, taking care that the rings do not touch. The next day, heat the syrup to two hundred and twenty-five degrees and again dip the rings and dry as before. If desired, when they are dry, fill the centers with bon-bon cream or marzipan. When this center has become firm, dip the candy into a syrup cooked to two hundred and twenty-eight degrees. Even if the centers are not filled, it is well to make this third dipping; the thermometer should, however, register two hundred and thirty degrees instead of merely two hundred and twenty-eight.”

“=Bean Taffy.=--Bean taffy easily takes first rank among all taffies--vegetable or otherwise. The taste is good beyond words, and the consistency is pleasingly "chewy" without being tenacious to the point of teeth pulling! Lima beans are the best to use as the basis because the skins can easily be removed, but ordinary dried beans may be substituted if care is taken. Cover the beans with cold water, let them stand over night, and the next morning boil them until soft, and force through a fine sieve to remove all the skins. Boil together two cupsful of granulated sugar, one-half cupful of water, a tablespoonful of butter, and one-half cupful of the beans, prepared as above. After the mixture has boiled thoroughly, add one cupful of milk. Add the cupful of milk, one-third at a time. Stir the mixture and let it boil a few minutes after each addition of milk. When the thermometer registers two hundred and forty-two degrees, pour the mass onto an oiled marble between oiled candy bars so that it will set about one-quarter inch thick. As with ordinary taffy, cut into pieces

of the desired size.”

Okay, definitely the trick not the treat.