the good old days

I have a confession: I’m in love. With my mixer. Of course, it doesn’t do the dishes or mow the lawn, so I have to explore my polyandry options.

I know, I know. Man-woman-mixer relationships are ruining the foundation of our society. I just can’t help myself. I have never been so happy that I was unable to repair something as I was when I couldn’t get my old mixer apart to clean out the Election Cake batter, and was forced to buy an upgrade.

When it came home from the store with us, I started looking around for something to make. At RecipeCurio.com, I found Beatrice Cooke’s Gebackenes. Sugar cookies that had to be rolled and cut out (thus entertaining Daughter), with a strange and ridiculous name… win-win!

I thought Gebackenes would be some traditional German-ish cookie. However, a Google search for “gebackenes” turns up this recipe, and lots of recipes for Gebackenes Euter — Fried Cow’s Udder… rather disturbing, although Euter was clearly the Udder part of the name and so Gebackenes must mean something like fried. Or fried cow.

According to my good friend from Berlin, Gebäck means pastry, and Gebäckenes is nothing. At best, the name of Beatrice Cooke’s recipe is “Bakes”, or not actually a German word but from a different language. Considering Beatrice is as fictional a home economist as Betty Crocker, it’s not surprising she was rather bad at naming things.

GEBACKENES
1 cup Meadow Gold Butter
1-3/4 cups sugar
2 Meadow Gold Eggs, beaten
1/2 cup Meadow Gold Whipping Cream
1 teaspoon vanilla
4 cups sifted flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
2 Meadow Gold Egg Yolks, beaten
Colored sugar or chopped nuts

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Mix in eggs, cream and vanilla. Add sifted dry ingredients gradually, mixing well after each addition. Chill dough for several hours. Roll out on lightly floured surface to 1/8 inch thickness. Cut with various shaped cooky cutters. Place on ungreased cooky sheet; brush with egg yolks; sprinkle with colored sugar or chopped nuts. Bake at 400° or 8-10 minutes. Makes 12 dozen cookies.

My beloved new mixer made quick work of the dough. Mmmm, sticky!

They aren’t kidding about needing to “chill dough for several hours”. At room temperature, it simply sticks to the rolling pin and everything else in sight. When rolled to an eighth of an inch, it creates flimsy little shapes that will fall apart unless they’ve been on a heavily floured surface.

Daughter got to use her miniature rolling pin for the first time, then she got to pick which cookie cutters we used. (These were both also purchased from Linens ‘n’ Things closing sale. I am apparently a sucker for stupid little baking gadgets if they are 30% off.)

After a yolk wash and a sugar sprinkling, they baked. And, being incredibly thin, they got a little burned in places, but that’s to be expected.

As freakishly-named holiday cookies go, Gebäckenes aren’t half bad. But I really prefer cookies that you can simply drop onto a sheet and bake. The chilling, rolling, cutting out, and decorating is loads of fun for kids, and can have pretty results. But flavorwise, they’re never terribly exciting. The flour/sugar/butter ratio needed to get a good rolling dough detracts from the taste. It’s not even much fun eating the leftover scraps afterwards.

Do you know how to carve a turkey, or are you going to make a total fool of yourself on Thursday? Luckily, there’s a vintage educational film for almost every subject imaginable, including cutting up meat.

Martha Logan was a fictional creation (much like Betty Crocker) of Swift & Co, a meat processing company. Under her name, they published a number of cookbooks (presumably all encouraging meat consumption), and at least one educational short. Carving Magic is an exhaustive review of how to cut pretty much any piece of meat you could want. (They don’t cover calf head, though.)

This film ends up being an argument for providing both girls AND boys with home economics background. When Martha Logan, eminent Home Economist, is making a movie about carving instruction at Charlie’s studio, lots of the men at the studio are spellbound — apparently they’re all clueless about carving, and all eager to learn. When Charlie brags about his newfound turkey carving expertise, his friend Al begs for lessons as well. That’s how you know your education system is a little wonky… when somebody throws a dinner party specifically to celebrate Charlie learning how to cut up a turkey. I don’t doubt that high school kids would have a great time making jokes about cutting meat, but at least a bit of information might sink in about how to maximize edible portions after cooking something.

(And yes, that is Harvey Korman playing Al!)

If you really want to learn carving techniques, watch the full twenty-minute version (below); many of the repetitive and/or dull sections were removed for the YouTube clip above.

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Add an international flavor to your table this Thanksgiving…

Since the election cake fiasco, we had been without a functioning electric mixer.  While mixing batter and whipping egg whites by hand can give you a feel for how much harder people used to work in the kitchen, they get pretty dreary after a while.  So I took the opportunity to buy the proprietress of this site the stand mixer she had been wanting.  (If we were getting a stand mixer, I personally would have wanted a fifty-inch Hobart like we had when I worked at summer camp, but that wasn’t really practical.)  So here it is!

It’s marvelous, and I have never heard anybody say, “I’m going to whip cream!” with such joy.

How can you compete with the girls in the office? Folgers Coffee!

The wife is a pathetic — he didn’t even kiss me goodbye! sob! — domestically ignorant woman who’s saddled with an ignorant, coffee-obsessed jackass. But it’s the 50’s, so she can’t dump the coffee over his head as he so richly deserves; instead, she tricks him with Folgers instant. (Take that, hot-plate hussies.)

This was the worst thing I’ve made in a while. (Not as bad as Jellied Frankfurters, but then what could possibly be as bad as Jellied Frankfurters?) Today’s fable has many morals, and I’ll walk you through each one of them. Consider it a rough draft for the home economics book I could write someday.

1. When you want to cook, have a recipe.
Unless you’re Masahari Morimoto, it’s risky to just throw things together and expect them to taste good. It can work for stir fried vegetables, but not for baked goods.

2. Having a recipe in the house isn’t enough. Know where your recipe is and look at it before you start
Unsurprisingly, this is where my problems started. I knew I had a lemon meringue pie recipe on an old Jello advertisement I’d previously used for a retro recipe.

I also knew I had some lemon gelatin. So, I started making the lemon gelatin.

3. When you have found your recipe, and when you realize you haven’t been following it at all, and in fact it’s not a recipe but an instruction to look somewhere else that doesn’t exist, don’t start combining other recipes.
When I decided to actually look at the recipe, I panicked. There wasn’t a recipe there at all, just this annoying little note:

Directions on the box?!?

At this point, I realized (a) I should have been using Jello Pudding, not Jello Gelatin and (b) Jello Pudding does not print lemon meringue pie recipes on its Lemon Jello Pudding boxes any longer. Arrrrrgh.

So I had no recipe. Thanks to Google, I managed to find one that called for lemon Jello combined with Cool Whip, and then made another critical mistake…

4. “Whipped topping” and “cream cheese” are not the same thing.
While it’s possible to combine cream cheese and gelatin (I’ve seen it done and it’s quite tasty), it’s almost impossible to do so by hand with cold cream cheese.

Before:

After (in crust):

See the little white bits? That’s teeny chunks of cream cheese which weren’t properly blended. Whisking by hand just won’t work for this.

I tried to repair my mixer (which won’t turn off and smells of burnt wiring, ever since it sucked up Election Cake batter), and Buzz and I each wasted a good half hour trying to remove this one stupid two-inch-long bolt that was holding the damn thing together. All the others came out fine, but THAT one had to strip. And if you can’t get into a mixer, you can’t clean out the gunked-up motor, so you can’t keep it from wildly sparking and potentially electrocuting you while mixing.

5. You won’t get nice stiff peaks in your egg whites if you whisk by hand.
Same problem as with the lemon filling… not enough mixing power without my mixer, although I came close before my arm fell off. The peaks were present, but wimpy rather than stiff. My pie topping desperately needed Viagra. (Meringue lasting more than four hours… ?)

Without those spiky little peaks, you don’t get the same light browning and drying-out that makes for a really tasty meringue.

6. Meringue is not spelled with a “Q”
I don’t know why, but I have a constant compulsion to type MERINQUE. No wonder my blog only rates at a junior high school level.

It isn’t the worst pie I’ve ever had, but it’s down there. The filling was bland, the meringue was insipid, the overall experience was thoroughly pointless. It was a refresher course in culinary stupidity, though, as well as a compelling argument to buy a new mixer

The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book: Twelve Steps to a Happy Marriage, from 1938 (reprinted 1949) has an inauspicious title if I ever heard one. It’s definitely going to be all about giving in and being a good cook and sewing your children’s clothes from scratch, snarked my feminist side. Just goes to show I don’t know everything. It had a neat essay from Eleanor Roosevelt… which rather shows just how far we have left to go.

This is not a case of whether you prefer marriage or a career. It is a case of marriage and work together, or no marriage and work alone. Work must go on in either case. For most women there is something so satisfying in creating a home that they do it frequently by themselves….

I know one young couple who were married when the boy was getting twenty-five dollars a week and the girl was getting the same as a stenographer. Both of them went on working. Everything seemed to be going very well, and she managed her two jobs quite successfully. The most successful part of it was the fact that she induced her husband to feel an equal responsibility for the house. I remember that when I dined with them, he put on an apron after dinner and helped wash the dishes as naturally as if that were the normal occupation for a man. When a marriage works out this way, it is very successful, especially if the man has a knack for doing things about the house, because it keeps him busy when his wife is busy.

So often these days, the question of whether women should work outside the home is framed entirely from the viewpoint of married, middle class families, who have the luxury of choosing between one or two incomes.

Of course, when it comes to the mothers of families who work in mills, factories, and stores, we know quite well that there is no question of choice—poverty drives them, and they work because they have to, and only a few would hesitate if they were offered an opportunity to stay at home and look after their home and their children.

I remember visiting a mill town once, and as the women came off the night shift—for there were no laws at that time in that particular state against women’s working on night shifts—they met their husbands going to work on the day shift. We followed one woman home. Tired from the hours in the mill, she nevertheless had to set to work immediately to get the children fed and off to school. Then she had her house to set to rights, washing and ironing to do, and dinner to get for the children and supper to be left for the man when he came back from work as she went on. In the afternoon she snatched a few hours of sleep, and the children who were not in school played unwatched and uncared for. She knew that her home life was not satisfactory, and she did not work long hours in the mill because she wanted to, but simply because there was not enough food to go around unless her earnings supplemented those of her husband.

At least today we have day care available.

The guilt trips from the “should women work” debate are laughably old. There are advantages and disadvantages to each, and it’s tiresome to hear each side snark at the other.

The whole thing is worth reading if you’re interested. The rest of the book isn’t all that bad, either.

One out of every 10 people in America is employed in a service that is related to the U.S. auto industry.

That’s a statistic from the Center for Automotive Research, via GM Facts and Fiction. It’s actually plausible; there are factories around the nation, not just in Detroit, that are somehow related to putting a car together. (I will note, though, it’s not clear how many of those sub-suppliers also work for Honda, Toyota, BMW, or “foreign” companies with US operations.)

The “Big Three” will never simply vanish — they (and the extended support structure of dealerships, suppliers, mechanics, etc.) are simply too large and too integral to the country’s manufacturing landscape. The job loss, health care loss, and tax income loss would be spread over the course of a few years. And it’s also worth noting that, to a large extent, the American Auto Maker crisis is largely of its own making; the recession is simply pinching them harder and sooner than expected.

I’m not against bailing out the auto industry, because the ripple effect around the country would be incredibly bad. At the same time, I haven’t decided if I’m in favor enough to write to my elected officials about it. (Yes, Visteon, when you fire loyal employees, they’ll hold a grudge and not help YOU out when the time comes. Payback’s a bitch, ain’t it.) But I am in favor, just enough, to mention it here. The issue is worth awareness and discussion and thought. And perhaps a large dose of nervous worrying as well.

If it is decided that they deserve a second chance, then the automakers need to be held to a much higher standard than they currently are. It would be inspiring to see them remade into an industry that is a leader in sustainable design and manufacturing, rather than grudgingly hoping global warming is a passing fad. But given the firmly entrenched old-style industry and infrastructure they have, I’m not holding out much hope.

If you like food, explosions, and history, this is a great video to watch.

Food Fight is an abridged history of American-centric war, from World War II to present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict. Watch as traditional comestibles slug it out for world domination in this chronologically re-enacted smorgasbord of aggression.

I laughed most at the Cold War.

Via Improbable Research

This strikes me as quite an innovation in sustainable design. A car that you can eat at the end of your journey.

The “making of” video is almost cooler, because it proves they weren’t just pretending to build a car out of cake, they actually were building a car out of cake.

And they had an actual Home Economist on their team! How cool is that? In the few recruiting films I’ve seen, “edible car construction” was never listed as a possible occupation for home ec majors. I imagine the field might have gotten more students if they’d mentioned a job like this.

Found via Cake Wrecks.