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.

Soupe or zuppa?

I’m trying to remember how old I was when my Dad made his now infamous potato soup. I think my next two siblings were toddlers but the others hadn’t been born. That means it was just me alone with his cooking skills—which might have extended as far as Arabian cooking but certainly had not made the cultural leap yet—actually, based on the matazeez incident in which he tried to poison my grandparents while he was dating my mother, I don’t think they extended that far—when my mom left him in charge of making dinner. Surely she meant to simplify things by suggesting he make potato soup. Maybe she even gave him instructions. I don’t know.

What I do know is that he winged it. Potato soup has to have potatoes so he cut some up in small pieces and boiled them. And boiled them. And boiled them until they jelled. The starch in a potato is a funny thing. It can suck up a lot of water like a sponge and form long sticky ropey molecule chains. This is why it’s good to let your potatoes drain awhile, or even reheat them in the pan a little to dry them off when you are making mashed potatoes. The starch cells can also collapse if handled with any force, like mashing or whipping them really hard in hopes of creating some kind of “creamy” base for the soup. I don’t believe it crossed his mind to use milk, or if it did, it was too late. The casein in milk (and butter) interacts with the potato starch to keep the starch from swelling and forming those long chains. Just try making mashed potatoes without either and see what you get.

As my mother tells the story, when she walked in the door she found us all sitting in silence around the kitchen table. I looked up at her and said, “I hope you’re hungry!” with all the contempt for her neglectful parenting that my preadolescent body could conjure. “What’s for dinner?” she chirruped. I held out my bowl, picked up my spoon, plunged it into the center of the white shimmering mass, and let go. It stood straight upright.

But let’s go back to Italy and France for our cuisine comparison. I love soup, including potato, regardless of any past trauma. Thank goodness my mom didn't tell my dad he should make some little hat soup for dinner. 

.

Cappelletti in Brodo (Little Hat Soup)

Prepare and set aside 2 quarts chicken broth

Combine and set aside:

 ½ cup (about ¼ lb) ricotta or cottage cheese

½ cup finely chopped cooked chicken

2 T grated Parmesan cheese

1 egg, slightly beaten

1/8 t salt

Few grains nutmeg

Few grains pepper

Prepare half recipe of basic noodle dough. Roll about 1/16 inch thick. Cut into rounds with 2 ½ round cookie cutter. Place ½ t cheese-chicken mixture in center of each round of dough. Fold each round in half, covering the mounds of filling. Dampen edges of pasta with water and press together to seal. Bring two extreme ends together. Dampen and press together to seal.

Bring broth to a boil and add pasta. Cook about 20-25 minutes or until pasta is tender. Test by pressing a piece against side of pan with fork or spoon. Serve with broth.

Pasta (Basic Noodle Dough)

Sift into a large bowl:

4 cups flour

¼ t salt

Make a well in the center of flour.

Add 4 eggs, one at a time, mixing slightly after each addition. Gradually add 6 T cold water.

Mix well to make a stiff dough. Turn dough onto a lightly floured surface and knead (page 6). Proceed as directed in recipes.

Potage Saint-Germain (Green Pea Soup)

Put into a heavy saucepan:

1 small head lettuce, shredded

2 cups shelled fresh green peas

1 cup water

½ cup chopped green leeks (green part only)

2 T fat

2 t chopped chervil

1 t sugar

1 t salt

¼ t pepper

Bring quickly to boiling and cook until peas are tender. Reserve 3T peas for garnish. Put remaining mixture thru sieve. Return sieved mixture to the pan. Reheat with 2 cups bouillon. Just before serving, blend in 2 cups cream and heat thoroughly. Garnish with reserved peas.

Can't have soup without some great bread, I'll have to do that comparison next time.

Significantly less than 500 salads

[Less Than] 500 Delicious Salad Recipes from the Culinary Arts Institute, 1951, includes an interesting list of salad bowl combinations. My typical method is to open the fridge door and see what's lurking and needs to be used up, but if I actually checked this list before going to the grocery store, I might be inspired to something more than what comes prechopped in a bag.

Avocado, grapefruit, romaine
Avocado, orange, and watercress
Avocado, peeled white grapes, and chicory (seriously? I can't be bothered anymore to chop my lettuce but I'm going to stand around peeling a bowl of grapes?)
Avocado, tangerine, pecans and lettuce
Avocado, tart apple, and romaine
Chicory, escarole, and grapefruit
Chicory, shredded cabbage, lettuce
Escarole,chinese cabbage, watercress (Watercress has completely dropped out of fashion. It's hard to find here, which is a shame. Its short shelf life is probably the major factor; can't pick it before it's ripe, spray wax over it and ship it a thousand miles like everything else.)
Chinese cabbage, tomato, radish, olives
Endive, carrot sticks, grapefruit
Shredded carrot, chinese cabbage, and romaine
Orange, Bermuda onion, and romaine
Potato diced, celery, cucumber, green pepper, pimiento
Green peas, mint leaves, lettuce
Dandelion, escarole, pimiento, and onion (That's a rare appearance of dandelion as a green in something other than a survivalist/girl scout cook book.)
Lettuce, fresh spinach, watercress, radishes, carrot sticks
Cabbage, carrot sticks, diced apples, shredded green pepper

Things in this book that do not inspire me:
Tongue salad
Anything with canned peas
Pyramid salad (which consists of arranging celery and swiss cheese sticks in a teepee shape on your plate)
Jellied Salmon mold
Duck salad (which far from using duck, sticks a marshmallow on a peach half, with an almond stuck in it for a bill, sorry no pic included!)
Washington's Salad (which involves coating a banana with mayonnaise and rolling it in nuts to look like a log in which you place a small toy hatchet)
Tongue and cabbage salad
Black and white photos of salads, e.g.:

Here's one more recipe inspiration:
Peanut and Carrot Salad
2 cups grated carrot
1 cup ground peanuts
1 T grated onion
1/2 t salt
1/2 cup mayonnaise
lettuce or chicory
1 tomato cut into thin wedges
Combine carrots, peanuts, onion, salt, and mayonnaise. Mix lightly and serve on crisp lettuce, garnish with tomato wedges.

This would probably be surprisingly good. I tried my first african peanut soup about two months ago, and loved it, so peanuts are definitely worthy of a second look. I might have this salad for lunch, except I'm going to the World Food Festival, and eating beforehand is not on my agenda.

Salad No. 1

I have tons of apples and a new rule to use walnuts every day to make my menu magic. That means turning to this book from the Culinary Arts Institute, 1951, for a ham and apple salad for lunch.

Ham and Apple Salad
1 1/2 cups diced ham
1 1/2 cups diced apple
1/2 c chopped celery
1 head lettuce or romaine, shredded
mustard French dressing

Combine all ingredients, adding enough dressing to coat, toss together in salad bowl. Serves six.

What is mustard French dressing? It's this:

1 cup olive oil
1/2 cup vinegar
1/2 t salt
few grains cayenne (don't get carried away here, one extra grain and you might taste it)
1/4 t white pepper
2 T chopped parsley
2 t prepared mustard

Combine and beat or shake thoroughly before using. Makes 1 1/4 cups. Rub the bowl with a crushed clove of garlic before adding salad. (Then chew the clove so that you'll actually get some garlic flavor in your salad.)

Or in my case, it's something out of a bottle with a little mustard added--for the sake of speed--that probably bears as little resemblance to the real thing in taste as it does to any real food substance, given the list of ingredients on the label.

And it's not a bad combination at all, notice I threw in some walnuts. Mmmm, I can taste Tinkerbell dancing on my tongue. Apparently she hasn't taken a bath in awhile. Thank you Culinary Arts Institute for giving me 482 new salads. I won't say 500 because 18 of them are for molded salads. In my book, if you mold it, it isn't salad. It's either sweet and fruity which makes it dessert, or it's got vegetables and/or meat in it which makes it an abomination. And I'm highly suspicious of the frozen salads too.

Nuts to you

I spent the day at a vintage goods and new crafts flea market. I picked up two new cook books and I wish I could have brought home more. But I settled on Menu Magic in a Nutshell by the California Walnut Grower's Association, which is probably from the 1950s, based on the illustrations, and yet another Metropolitan Cook Book from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.

Let's start with some Menu Magic. "Many a fine cook's reputation is based on a trick of kitchen magic--the little flick of the wrist that empties a cup of walnut kernels into some simple recipe! What menu magic these golden kernels work! How they add eye appeal, flavor, and food value to even old favorites! How they transform ordinary dishes into extraordinary treats!"

I can get into adding them to chicken salad, and maybe even the potato salad would be interesting to try, but I wish they didn't ruin a Pear, Cheese & Walnut Salad with celery. I'll have to come up with a good substitute. I do have all these darn apples rolling around the kitchen table.

Pear, Cheese & Walnut Salad
1/4 c cream cheese
1/4 cup celery, chopped fine
1/4 cup walnuts, chopped fine
cream
salt, pepper, and paprika
6 halves canned pears
mayonnaise
lettuce

Mix cheese, celery, and walnuts. Moisten with cream and season to taste. Place pears on lettuce leaves, fill centers of pears with mixture and garnish with mayonnaise.

Walnut Potato Salad
2 cups cold cooked potatoes
1 cup coarsely chopped walnuts
1 small onion, minced
2 T parsley. minced
1/2 t salt
2 small sweet pickles, diced
mayonnaise
lettuce
walnuts
cheese wafers

Cut potatoes into small cubes. Mix potatoes and walnuts with onion, parsley, salt and pickles, using sufficient mayonnaise to moisten. Serve on crisp lettuce leave with small cheese wafers and garnish with walnut halves.

The recipes I really find interesting though, are the ones that use walnuts as a meat substitute: a vegetarian option for the Depression. If you had walnut trees and time and couldn't afford meat...

Walnut Loaf
2 cups cold baked beans
1 1/2 cups soft bread crumbs
3 T minced onion
1 t salt
1 egg, beaten
1 1/2 cups chopped walnuts
2 T melted fat
1/2 t paprika
1 1/2 cups canned tomato juice
2 cups tomato sauce

Mix all the ingredients except the tomato sauce and put into a greased loaf pan. Bake in a moderate oven (350) for 60 minutes. Serve with or without a well-seasoned tomato sauce.

Walnut Sausage
1 cup soft bread crumbs
1 T butter
1 cup cooked rice
2 t sage
1/2 t paprika
1 1/2 cups chopped walnuts
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 t salt
1/4 t celery seed
1 t minced onion
4 T fat
crisp bacon as garnish
1 1/2 cups white sauce
Blend all ingredients except fat, bacon and white sauce. Shape mixture like sausages and brown well in the hot fat in a skillet. garnish with bacon and serve with a white sauce. (Okay, I know the fat and bacon are hardly vegetarian, but you don't have to have garnish you know, and you can always use a vegetable based fat instead.) (Do you usually garnish you sausage with bacon??)

Vegetable Loaf
1 cup canned or cooked peas
1 cup cooked, mashed carrots
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
3 T minced onion
1 cup soft bread crumbs
1 cup milk
1 T melted fat
2 beaten eggs
1 t salt
1/8 t pepper
2 cups tomato sauce
Mix ingredients in order given, omitting tomato sauce, and put in a greased loaf pan. Bake in a moderate oven (350) for 60 minutes. Serve with a well-seasoned tomato sauce.

All in all, a fun little book to have picked from the tree. And remember: "[M]ake it a rule to "Just Add Walnuts" to at least one dish every day."

Homestyle Perfume

Apparently, onions are one of the top 5 foods that make up the Saudi diet. That may be why I regard onions as a vegetable rather than a seasoning, as I think many Americans see them. I see ingredient lists with 2T of onion or some such and I just laugh. My friend, Annie, told me her gramma’s tip: when you have a house full of people and are suddenly in the position of needing to whip up a meal at short notice, that the first thing you do is chop an onion and start it carmelizing. The scent relaxes people, it tells them you’re on top of things and they sit back in anticipation. Now you have some time to figure out what the hell you’re gonna do, and besides everything begins with onions. Wise woman.

When I was in college, I had a friend from Palestine, Samer, and one day, I was having a bunch of people over, so Samer came by early and we made kufta together for them. It was a lovely afternoon, chopping onion, and parsley and mushing it with our hands onto bamboo skewers. I can't help but think of the gentle rapport and pleasure of cooking togther when I think of him. He often used to greet me by burying his nose in the crook of my shoulder and hair and taking a deep breath. Even then I did a lot of cooking, and as he said, “A woman should smell like onions.” It was meant as a compliment and I took it as such, especially since I frequently did.

Making kufta from a recipe would be unusual for me, but for the novice middle-eastern cook, here’s a version from Good Eating the Arabic Way, a book complied by Laraine Kousaie Mahshie for the Anthiochian Women of St. Elias Orthodox Church and the ladies of the Arabic speaking community in Syracuse, NY.

Kefta
1 lb. lean ground lamb or ground beef
1/2 c parsley, finely chopped
1/4 t pepper
1/8 t cinnamon
1/4 c onion, minced
1 tsp salt
dash allspice

Mix above ingredients well. Form in individual cylindrical shapes around a skewer. Broil in oven or over charcoal. Serve in arabic bread with yogurt as a sauce.

Variations:
Add 2 T burghal (crushed wheat) softened in water for 10 minutes. Drain completely and squeeze before adding.
Mix all ingredients in a meat grinder.
Sprinkle with lemon juice and garnish with parsley.
Mold in round patties and fry in skillet in butter over medium high heat.

As You Like It

Love the opera glasses. Yes, dahling, nothing rounds out a night of Aida like tinned fish.

When I was seventeen, my family was in a car accident that left my mother with severe injuries and the rest of us with more than our share of bumps, stitches, and broken bones. In the aftermath, I did my best to take care of things. Given the chaos, that often meant making do with whatever was at hand to feed the family, since this was in Arabia and running to the store myself was not really an option. We did have a case of canned tuna in the pantry. I suddenly found more uses for tuna than I’d ever eaten in my life. It’s probably lucky we didn’t add mercury poisoning to the list of physical concerns. If only I’d had the help of the Tuna Research Foundation to guide me. After all:

“Open a can of tuna and you open a tale of adventure…of daring fishermen ready to travel far and wide for America’s favorite canned seafood…ready to use all their skill and courage to secure their prize catch.”

“The saga of tuna is a short but merry one. Appropriately, it unfolds in California, the center of the tuna-canning industry, for tuna’s spectacular rise to stardom as a menu of choice rivals a Hollywood success story.”

“In its initial decade, tuna played a modest part at table, slowly gathering a group of devoted admirers. But when World War I darkened the economic scene, tuna scored its major triumph. As many foods became scare, tuna performed valiant service on the home front, breaching the nutrition gap with its rich protein, valuable minerals and vitamins, and introducing many Americans to its pleasing flavor and versatility.”

Swept away by the heady proximity of this canned star of the silver screen and wartime hero, I surely would have tried these recipes.

Tuna Potato Puff

2 eggs

½ cup milk

2 cups soft bread crumbs

¼ cup minced onion

2 T minced parsley

½ t salt

½ t mustard

¼ t pepper

2 cans tuna in oil

1 envelope instant mashed potatoes

½ cup shredded American cheese

Combine eggs, milk, bread crumbs, onion,parsley and seasonings in a mixing bowl. Beat until blended. Mix in tuna. Turn into a 9 inch pie plate. Bake in a moderate oven (350) for 40 minutes. Remove from oven. Increase oven heat to very hot (550). Prepare mashed potatoes according to package directions; season to taste. Pile potatoes on top of tuna mixture; sprinkle with cheese. Place under broiler heat or in oven until cheese reaches melting point.

Tuna Corn Chowder

2 cans (6 ½ or 7 oz. each) tuna in oil

1 large onion, sliced

1 can (1 lb) whole kernel or cream style corn

2 cups diced potatoes

3 cups milk

1 t salt

2 T chopped parsley

¼ t Tabasco

Drain 2 T oil from tuna into large saucepan, add onion and cook until tender but not brown. If whole kernel corn is used, drain corn and add liquid to saucepan. If cream style corn is used, ass ½ cup water to saucepan. Bring to a boil and add potatoes; cover and cook 10 minutes. Add corn, milk, and tuna. Add salt. Heat thoroughly. Add parsley and Tabasco.

Revolutionary Recipes

It doesn’t seem to matter how far back your go, gramma always cooked better in the past. I’ve got recent cookbooks, 100 year old cookbooks and I’ve seen 200 year old cook books, and no matter what they always speak longingly of recapturing some mythical magic that our foremothers had in the kitchen that we are now too busy, too sophisticated, or too ignorant to possess. We’ve always lost something ephemeral that that particular book will help us recapture.

Here Stokely-Van Camp gives us a pastoral Colonial setting (Conner Prairie Pioneer Settlement, Noblesville, Indiana, 1977) to set us back on the wholesome path of our ancestors and make us buy more canned green beans. This is probably the tail end of the bicentennial craze too. Ohmygosh, my brain goes strange places sometimes, anyone remember the Saturday morning cartoon The Funky Phantom? The Spirit of 1776.

Back to my theme. The first recipe I read in this book was far from promising. Something about canned green beans entombed in lemon jello makes me think they'd be more likely to incite rebellion than feed a revolution.

Green Bean Crunchers

1 can [1 lb] French style green beans

1 pkg [3 oz.] lemon gelatin

1 envelope unflavored gelatin

½ cup finely chopped onion

½ cup chopped celery

½ cup coarsely chopped nuts

Drain beans, reserving liquid. Add enough water to bean liquid to make 2 cups. Bring liquid to a boil and add lemon gelatin, stirring until dissolved. Dissolve unflavored gelatin in ¼ cup cold water and add to lemon gelatin mixture. Cool until slightly thickened. Fold in remaining ingredients. Pour into a 6-cup mold or 8 individual molds and chill until firm. Unmold on crisp greens and serve with Tangy Dressing.

That means we have to take a look at the Tangy Dressing recipe too. This is a little more appealing, though definitely on some other substance.

½ c unpeeled cucumber, grated and drained

1 cup mayonnaise

½ cup finely chopped green pepper

2 t white vinegar

½ t salt

Dash pepper

Stir all ingredients together and chill before serving. Makes about 1 pint dressing.

The following recipes, while not noteworthy on their own, have a whole new spin when juxtaposed with the lovely colonial women posed serving up the family dinner.  

Beans and Franks

(“It’s a tradition.” We are reassured. I’m sure that Betsy Ross had a big bowl beside her rocking chair as she sewed the first flag. They rise to the level of haute cuisine by reason of sautéing.)

3 T chopped onion

2 T butter

1 can [1 lb. 15 oz.] pork and beans

6 wieners, sliced penny style

1/3 cup brown sugar

1 t prepared mustard

1 t celery salt

Saute onion in butter until tender. Combine onion with remaining ingredients in a 2 quart casserole. Bake, uncovered, at 350 for 40 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Polynesian Chicken

(May be served over rice. I have it on great authority that Paul Revere preferred his Polynesian chicken over mashed rutabagas.)

2 whole chicken breasts, halved

2 T shortening

1 can [15 oz.] tomato sauce

1 cup peach preserves

2 T chopped onion

1 ½ T soy sauce

¼ t ginger

½ cup toasted sliced almonds

In skillet, brown chicken in shortening, pour off fat. Combine next 5 ingredients and pour over chicken. Bring to simmer; cover and simmer 1 ½ hours, turning chicken after 30 minutes. Sauce should thicken. Garnish with toasted almonds.

I'll leave you with one more picture of the kind of spread so dear to the hearts of our founding fathers.

Grease! or butter...whatever

Yeast! 

You want your bread to be so soft and light

You got a growin' thing, you gotta feed it right
There ain't no danger it can rise too far
So add some sugar now, just a pinch from the jar

Yeast is the word

Learning to bake can be a royal pain
When your bread don't rise, It's just a crying shame
The top is burning, a disaster so real
So take it out right now, you just ruined your meal

Yeast is the word

(is the word that you heard)
It's alive, can't mistreat it
Yeast needs the time, a warm place, and devotion
Yeast is the microbe we're eating

Time to make some bread! And I’ve got a carton of buttermilk in the fridge that’s about to go bad, so…

Buttermilk Bread

6 cups buttermilk

1 cake dry yeast

½ c lukewarm water

Flour

1 ½ T salt

2 T sugar

2 T butter

Heat buttermilk, stirring constantly until scalded.(Scalding breaks up the proteins in the milk, that’s why you see it so frequently as a step in bread recipes; it’s all about the texture.) Remove from fire and let cool. Add yeast which has been softened in the water. Add sufficient flour to make a medium batter. Beat until smooth. Cover and set in a warm place and allow to stand overnight. (This creates a fermented batter, with a greater depth of yeasty flavor, called a ‘sponge’. I love that term and that’s what it looks like.)

Add sugar, salt, butter, and enough flour to make a dough just stiff enough to knead. Turn onto lightly floured board and knead until smooth and elastic. Allow to rise until double in bulk and work down. Let rise again until double in bulk. Form into loaves. Place in well-oiled pans. Cover and let rise until double in bulk. Bake in hot oven, 450°, about 45 minutes.

From Mrs. W.H. Juedeman, Bristow, OK, printed in The Household Searchlight Recipe Book, 1936.

My kitchen is not very warm so this process took most of the day. That’s fine; it gives more time for the flavor to develop. Here’s the end product, a soft dense texture with a hint of sourness from the buttermilk. I would absolutely make it again. It’s very similar to my mom’s famous dinner rolls.

A bowl of homemade tomato soup is perfect with the bread, slathered with Laughing Cow blue cheese spread. The soup is my last hurrah to the tomatoes of summer. Never any recipe there, just whatever is at hand to add to the tomatoes, in this case: zucchini, carrots, roasted Anaheim chilis, a little chicken stock, and tons of garlic. My daughter didn’t want the soup, or the Laughing Cow, but she did eat the bread…smothered in ketchup. Which proves the old adage: you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him eat the stinky cheese.

English Monkey

I've certainly heard of Welsh Rabbit before (or rarebit, yeah, whatever) but not English Monkey. I would like to think that this was invented in Wales in answer to the British making fun of them with their "rabbit." I guess Monkey would be the grossest thing they could think of to eat. In the U.S. maybe we'd call it Road Kill Possum. I guess if you used stinky enough cheese.

English Monkey

1 Cup bread crumbs
1 cup milk
1/2 cup mild cheese
1 egg
1T butter
salt and cayenne

Soak bread crumbs in milk 15 minutes. Melt butter in saucepan, add cheese cut in small pieces and let it melt; then add soaked crumbs, egg beaten a little, 1/2 t salt and a few grains cayenne. Cook 3 minutes. Serve on crackers.

Matthew Arnold, British poet.
An English monkey? Or the prototype for Wolverine.

This recipe is also from the undated 1890s(?) Perfection Stove Company Cook Book. A few other odds and ends that are noticeable:

• In older cookbooks they always talk about breaking macaroni in pieces so it must have originally been sold as long tubes.
• Either they had such sensitive taste buds they needed very little flavor, or the food tasted more flavorful, which is possible given the huge but styrofoam veggies the abound in the American marketplace, or we have completely jaded palates. If there's one thing I have to adjust with these old recipes it's to give them some flavor. ("A few grains cayenne." Sheesh)
• Bread crumbs abound in old cook books. Not a scrap was left unused. Consequently the next item:
• There's often a section for ways to reuse leftovers, especially in croquettes. I have not, to my knowledge, ever actually eaten a croquette. But in the past there was nothing that couldn't be smashed together, rolled in bread crumbs, and fried.
• There's an opposite dearth of vegetable recipes. Boil the crap out of them and put them on the table. Enough said.

Eggs and biscuits

Sometimes one acquires leftover odd ingredients from an experiment that isn’t likely to be repeated. In my case, it’s a box of sugar cubes leftover from building a replica of the Washington monument for a 5^th grade project. (Used a sander to shape the sides--powdered sugar flying everywhere. It was sure fun getting that tower glued to wobbly poster board into the building. Ever notice that when your kids have a project, YOU have a project? We got an A on that one.) 

So it’s been awhile, and I still haven’t had enough ladies over for afternoon tea to put a dent in it, and sugar doesn’t go bad, does it? So I think I’ll be trying this recipe from the Glenwood Cook Book, 1933. Maybe for an evening snack tonight with some caffeine-free tea. 

Orange biscuits

2 cups flour

4 t baking powder

1/2 t salt

2 T shortening

1 T grated orange rind

3/4 cups cold water

orange juice and cube sugar

Sift dry ingredients, work in shortening and add grated orange rind moistened with 3/4 c water. Roll to 1/4 inch thick. Cut into biscuits. On half the rounds place a cube of sugar which has been moistened with orange juice. Cover the sugar with another round of dough and press together gently. Spread the tops with powdered sugar slightly moistened with orange juice, sprinkle a fine grating of orange rind over them and bake at 450 degrees for 12 to 15 minutes.

Here’s another recipe from the same cook book I want to try. I do essentially the same thing with shrimp and feta cheese in place of the eggs and American. That with some nice crusty homemade rosemary bread to sop it up with. Hmmm, maybe that would be good tonight too. Could sneak some zucchini into it.

Spanish Eggs

2 T salad oil

1 onion

1 green pepper

2 c tomatoes

1 t sugar

1 T Worcestershire sauce

4 T dry bread crumbs

American cheese

1 t salt

Put oil into saucepan and in it sauté, until golden brown, the onion and pepper, finely chopped. Then add tomatoes and bring to boiling point. Add remaining ingredients and cook until onion is soft. Pour into an oiled shallow baking dish, and break into it as many eggs as desired. Season eggs. Cover with grated cheese and bake at 375 degrees for 15 minutes.

Here it is: with summer squash added to the vegetable saute, and feta instead of American cheese.

300 Ways to Serve Eggs

Culinary Arts Institute, 1940

"Eggs have always been popular as food but it is only in recent years, since biochemists and nutritionists have presented us with the results of their careful and thorough research, that we are fully awake to the fact that eggs are an indispensable food. We know now, that they carry in their golden hearts every food element the human body needs and especially vitamin D which occurs so rarely in our everyday foods. Our only problem is to eat enough of them.

For the mother of growing children as well as for the hostess there is the need of acquiring enough really toothsome [bring back that word toothsome!] and attractive ways to serve eggs so that the total quantity is a actually increased.

Many think of eggs entirely in terms of breakfast or possibly as a substitute for meat at luncheon. [Bring back luncheon as well. When did we get so busy that we couldn't even take a proper break to say the whole word, much less leave our desks to eat it.] The least thorough paging through this book will prove to the alert homemaker [but not those who've already had their morning martini] that she may use eggs as the theme of any course from appetizers to dessert and add to those the between-meal beverages. "

So how to get people to eat more eggs?

The direct approach:

Eggs with Black Butter
8 fried eggs
5 T butter
4 t sherry
Remove eggs from pan to hot platter. Place butter in pan and heat until browned but not burned. Add sherry and pour over eggs.

The frightening way:

Egg Noodle Ring
1/4 lb noodles
3/4 c cream
3 eggs, slightly beaten
fine dry bread crumbs

Cook noodles in boiling salted water. Drain; add cream and eggs. Butter a ring mold and dust with crumbs. Pour noodles mixture into a mold and set in pan of hot water. Bake in moderate oven (350) for 45 minutes. Unmold on hot platter and fill center with creamed eggs, creamed fish, or fowl. Serves 6.

The I-have-to-try-this-cuz-I-love-the-soft-creaminess-of-a-poached-egg way, and it gives me options, I like options:

Poached Eggs on Potato Cakes
4 large potatoes
2 T butter
2 T grated cheese
salt and pepper
fat for frying
2 onions, sliced
3 tomatoes, sliced
6 poached eggs

Pare and boil potatoes until tender. Mash, add butter, cheese, salt and pepper. Shape into flate cakes and fry in hot fat. Prepare a sauce by browning onions in fat and adding the tomatoes; simmer slowly for twenty minutes. Cover fried potato cakes with sauce and top each with a poached egg. Serves 6. Use 2 cups leftover mashed potatoes and 2 cups minced cooked ham. Omit tomato sauce and serve with horseradish sauce. Use corned beef hash for patties instead of potatoes.

The stealthy ninja way:

Chocolate Eggnog
1 egg, beaten
1 T sugar or honey
salt
3/4 cup milk
1/4 t vanilla
2 T chocolate syrup
Combine egg with sugar and salt. add milk and vanilla. Serve cold in tall glasses. Top with whipped cream and grated chocolate. For a fluffy eggnog, separate egg, beat white until stiff then fold into egg yolk mixture. May be served hot or cold. For one.

The only-a-ninja-would-be-brave-enough-to-drink-that way:

Egg Lemonade
1 egg, beaten
3 T lemon juice
3 T sugar
1 T crushed fruit (pineapples, peaches, or berries)
2/3 c plain or carbonated water

Combine chilled ingredients and shake or beat thoroughly. For one.

Bette Davis Pies

Road tripping tomorrow, so I'm putting up Saturday's post early.

I love old movies and Bette Davis is a particular favorite. I’ve always thought my grandmother bore a resemblance to her. Turns out, not only was Bette an incredible actress and Hollywood icon, she was also addicted to Bisquick as seen in this wonderful booklet from 1935.

Why, here’s Bette, having tea and ham bisquicks in her dressing room. And since we can only assume the quote on this page is from her, “Bisquick makes rich, flaky Hunt Club sandwiches”, let’s be sure to check that recipe out.

Hunt Club Sandwich

Roll Bisquick dough very thin. Dot surface with 4 T butter. Fold so as to make 3 layers. Turn half way round. Roll out half the dough 1/8 inch thick to cover bottom of oblong pan, about 12 x 9 inches. Spread thickly with chicken and ham filling. Cover with remaining dough rolled thin. Cut through in desired shapes, such as squares, diamonds, etc., but leave in place. Bake 15 minutes in hot oven. Filling: To 1 ½ cups cooked chicken, cut up and flaked, and ¾ cup cooked ham, cut in ½ inch pieces, add 4 T top milk, 3 beaten egg yolks, and 2 hard cooked eggs, chopped. Season with salt and pepper.

Here’s another recipe for good measure. I can see Bette now, hard at work in the kitchen, humming Four and Twenty Parakeets—err, Blackbirds—Baked in a Pie as she rolls out the dough.

Pie Crust

Cut 4 T of shortening into 1 cup of Bisquick. Leave this additional shortening in rather large pieces—about the size of peas. Add just enough ice water to make dough stay together—about 2 T. This will make pastry for 1 crust for an eight inch pie pan. For a two-crust pie, double the recipe.

Variations on Burgers and Nightmares

Barbecued Hamburgers

3 T shortening

3 lbs. ground beef

3 large onions, finely chopped

1 clove garlic, minced

1 T salt

1 1/2 T black pepper

1/2 t ground red pepper

2 t chili powder

2 t Worcestershire sauce

1/4 c flour

1 1/4 c canned tomatoes

3/4 c ketchup

Melt shortening in heavy skillet. Combine ground beef, onions, and garlic. Cook in skillet until lightly browned. Add seasonings. Stir in flour. Add tomatoes and ketchup, mixing well. Simmer 15 to 20 minutes until thickened. Spoon between split buns to make hot sandwiches. Makes 12 servings.

From Farm Journal's Country Cook Book, 1959.

The book notes: "These spicy sandwiches are great favorites with men at country sales." And the previous owner starred it, so she must agree.

Here's another burger variation, Pioneer Drumsticks, from Cooking Out of Doors by the Girl Scouts of America, 1960.

3 lbs. chopped beef

1 c. cornflakes, crumbled fine

2 eggs (optional)

12 rolls or 24 slices of bread

salt, pepper, onion if desired

Mix beef, seasonings, eggs, and cornflakes together thoroughly. Wrap a portion around the end of a stick, squeezing in place evenly. Make it long and thin, not a ball. Be sure there are no air spaces in it. (Watch out for big pieces of cornflakes.) Cook slowly over coals, turning frequently so all sides are evenly cooked. Twist slightly to take off stick. Serve in a roll. Some prefer to roll meat in crumbled cornflakes after placing it on the stick to make a crust. Try it both ways.

Didn’t the most recent Ken Burns special mention how cornflakes played a key role in the taming of the American West? I’m not sure I’d trust this cookbook anyway, it contains the following which is either a) an April Fool’s day dish or b) an illegal form of hazing. You decide.

Salmon Wiggle (off to a flying start with the name itself)

3 (1 lb.) cans of salmon

2 (1 lb. 4 oz.) cans of peas (mmmm, canned salmon and peas, I can smell it now)

1 T lemon juice (carefully measure that, wouldn’t want to get crazy with the lemon juice, more than that and you might actually be able to taste it)

¼ cup fat

¼ cup flour

3 cups milk (can you tell where this recipe is going by now?)

1 t salt

Pepper

Toast or crackers

Drain the salmon and peas but save the liquid to add to white sauce. (Would that be fish juice and pea pee?) Flake salmon with a fork and season with lemon juice. Prepare a white sauce with fat, flour, milk, and liquid from the salmon and peas. Season with salt and pepper. Add salmon and peas and heat thoroughly. (You’ll known it’s ready when you hear the girls weeping in anticipation.) Serve on hot buttered toast or crackers.

I'm surprised this didn't appear in my dream last night.