the good old days

One day Five-Year-Old Daughter declared she’d been in a knife fight. She told a long, long story about how when her day camp took a field trip to the “Bounce House” (a place with lots of those huge inflatable slides and bouncy castles and such), one of the counselors took them in a back room and gave them all knives with plastic handles and told them they had to be in a knife fight. She picked a knife with flowers on the handle. It was about fifteen minutes before she admitted it was all made up…

If you like the silliness we produce here — well-edited, and plenty of things vetoed — you might enjoy the silliness that otherwise ends up on the cutting room floor, such as Daughter’s apparent fascination with hand-to-hand combat. Buzz is starting another blog to chronicle some of it.

I’m going on a picnic, and I’m bringing

Apple pie with a dutch crumb topping (Miranda @ A Duck in Her Pond)

Buttermilk spice cake (Mary @ One Perfect Bite)

Chocolate cherry pie

Dilly Potato Salad (Gloria @ Cookbook Cuisine)

Election Day Cake

Fruit Cocktail Meringue Pie

I will update links to all the previous delicious entries as I get them.

For the letter “F” recipe, I had a dish in mind that I had bookmarked a while ago. (I could probably manage almost any letter of the alphabet, including Q — my “to cook” bookmark folder has something like a hundred retro recipes, with varying levels of ewww). So on Sunday, I cheerfully pulled up the bookmark for what I had labelled as “Fruit Cocktail Meringue Pie”, and realized the recipe name was actually “Christmas Meringue Pie.”Whatever. I’m BRINGING fruit cocktail meringue pie, that’s all I know.

This recipe comes from Flickr, from a vintage advertisement unsettlingly titled, “Look what you can do with fruit cocktail and dairy foods!”

Fruit Cocktail Meringue Pie: Combine 1 envelope Knox gelatine, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/4 tsp salt in top of double boiler. Stir in 3/4 cup syrup from fruit cocktail, 2 beaten egg yolks. Cook over boiling water, stirring often, 15 minutes, till slightly thickened. Remove from heat, stir in 1 cup commercial sour cream, 2 tbsps lemon juice. Cool till thickened. Fold in 1-1/2 cup drained canned fruit cocktail. Turn into baked 9-inch pie shell. Top with Marshmallow Meringue. Sprinkle with toasted coconut. Chill 2 hours or longer.

For meringue: melt 16 marshmallows with 1 tbsp lemon juice and 1 tbsp syrup from fruit cocktail, over low heat, stirring often. Cool. Beat 2 egg whites with 1/4 tsp salt till stiff. Gradually beat in 1/4 cup sugar. Fold in marshmallow mixture.

I didn’t expect this to be complicated by just glancing over the recipe, but it turns out to require double-boiling a custard, chilling for a couple hours, melting marshmallows, and beating egg whites. Rather like Election Day Cake, there’s a lot of effort required — the question was whether it would pay off in the end.

A zabaglione is a very fussy egg-yolk custard, requiring stirring in a bowl over steam (or using a double boiler, if your kitchen is so endowed) until your arm falls off or the mixture thickens. I was rather surprised to see it showing up in a fruit cocktail pie recipe, particularly including gelatin and then being added to sour cream; it seems with thickeners like that, you wouldn’t really need to cook your egg yolk until it solidified. I suppose they did that just to put the separated eggs to full use or something.

Note my ultra-fancy, incredibly upscale double boiler. (I don’t recommend trying this if you don’t have a Pyrex bowl, though.)

Putting a tasty zabaglione in with sour cream just feels wrong somehow, but for the moment I’ll trust the recipe…

Melting marshmallows is fun. We also have a recipe for grasshopper pie which requires marshmallow melting, and it’s great to see them slowly shrinking and turning to thick goo.

After assembly, chilling, and a sprinkling of coconut, it looks really impressive.

It’s a little on the sweet side, and definitely very firm (which means it will stand up well to being in summer heat for our picnic). Overall, it’s tasty and fun. Would I want to make it again… maybe for a special occasion. (The ice cream Jell-o pie is a lot less work, albeit also a lot meltier.)

I’m going on a picnic, and I’m bringing

Apple pie with a dutch crumb topping (Miranda @ A Duck in Her Pond)

Buttermilk spice cake (Mary @ One Perfect Bite)

Chocolate cherry pie

Dilly Potato Salad (Gloria @ Cookbook Cuisine)

Election Day Cake

I will update links to all the previous delicious entries as I get them.

For the letter “E” recipe, the only things I could thing of were eggs or eggplant; I looked through my archives and found three “E” dishes which could qualify. Egg nog was eliminated because we never took a picture of it (shame, because Grandpa’s Egg Nog is quite the party drink), and egg drop soup, while delicious, savory, and inexpensive for large groups, just doesn’t feel very picnic-like. Election Day Cake, however, is a recipe that’s designed for large groups.

Election Day was originally a huge party in the US, a day when people didn’t work, but instead hung out in the town square and had picnics and various patriotic activities. Like any good picnic, it meant cooking lots of food for lots of people. So big loaf-like cakes, yeast-based fruitcakes basically, were baked for the occasion and became known as Election Day Cake. (Credit where credit’s due, I originally got the recipe and idea to make it from Historiann.) I learned quite a lot of things, including “baking powder is a wonderful invention” (yeast is a hassle!), and “your puny kitchen mixer is no match for Election Day Cake” (but I did get a new mixer out of the deal).

Whenever I try a 100+ year old recipe, I am amazed by the cooking skills of our forebears, who managed to make a huge batch of cakes with no power tools and wood-fired stoves and all sorts of inconveniences. Of course, the picnic participants will only enjoy the delightful cake and its bits of candied citron, and won’t have to bake the thing themselves. It really is delicious, and if you’re ever going to an actual Election Day party, I highly recommend making it — it’s both tasty and an excellent conversation piece.

Louise of Months of Edible Celebrations has invited us to a picnic, and we are only too happy to attend. It’s not a particularly real picnic; instead, a bunch of bloggers are getting together and playing the Picnic game, and sharing recipes with a particular letter.

If you’re not familiar with the Picnic Game, it’s a great way to kill time on roadtrips. Somebody starts with, “I’m going on a picnic, and I’m going to bring [food starting with A]“. The next player has to bring “[A-food], and [B-food]“, the next person brings “[A-food], [B-food], and [C-food]” — remembering what the first player chose for the menu, and adding their own contribution at the end. You keep going through the alphabet until somebody can’t remember the previous dozen or so dishes… or, preferably, you arrive at your destination. (Months of Edible Celebrations has a more complete description, including detailed rules of how to play it online with a bunch of bloggers.)

I got the letters E and F, and I promised to NOT bring “frankfurters in gelatin with hardboiled eggs and celery” (or soup shakes, which luckily aren’t my letter anyway). Stay tuned for the dishes.

Buzz shares a birthday with Fannie Farmer, of cookbook fame; he’s a bit younger, though. Read an excellent biography about Fannie and her cookbooks on Months of Edible Celebrations!

Her adaptation for precise measurement was a result of much experimentation. No one before Fannie Farmer had explained accurate measurements in recipes. Measurement standards of the time were unspecified. Now, I find them charming:) a teacup full of sherry, enough water to float an egg, a nut of butter. It is often difficult to translate stirrings of the past. With these standardized measurements producing reliable results, even the inexperienced cook was able to create a masterpiece.

Hers is the first cookbook I ever owned; it’s still the one Buzz or I go to for recipes such as “how do you cook a cabbage” or “what goes into shepherds pie, I’m pretty sure it isn’t shepherds.” While we nowadays take precise ingredient lists for granted, it’s worth looking at extremely old cookbooks and realizing just how vague the instructions were.

This afternoon my daughter insisted she did not want to learn math. ANY math. At all. We asked what she wanted to be when she grows up; she replied doctor, and I explained doctors need to know math — for example, to figure out how much medicine to give somebody. She frowned and said she would “just be a mom, then.” I pointed out that moms need to know math so they know how much money to spend on clothes and food and toys. So she decided she would never grow up…

I frankly don’t know where the math-hatred is coming from, since she’s only turning 5 next month and hasn’t learned addition, let alone anything hard. She has had to watch me struggle with thermodynamics homework for the last few weeks, and I suppose that’s been scarier to watch than I thought.

But I want to keep her excited about kindergarten next fall, and I’ll be showing her this later today — then do some age-appropriate math lessons. (Right after she gets home from her super-girly ballet lessons.)

For Buzz, who is still sad that his Jabba The Hutt shampoo was used up by his brother after Buzz left home for college.

via Found in Mom’s Basement

Over a week ago I was kindly graced with the Inspiration Award by Historiann, and while I was grateful and honored I have not really yet had time to pass it on as required. So I’m going to finally do it now. (And, in honor of the Marie Antoinette portrait, I’ll also bake cake and let everyone eat that.)

I’m passing it on to five blogs from which I am always happy to see a new post:

• Edible Celebrations — combines historical curiosity with food we know and love. The blog has definitely inspired me to be (slightly) more rigorous when investigating the background of recipes I attempt, because it’s often quite interesting. (Plus the cupcake zodiac logo is adorable.) She’s giving away a vintage Jell-O cookbook this week, take a look!
• The Mad Vortex — See this post, for example. A mix of quirky vintage images with delightfully crazy, revealing the seedy undercurrent of sex and violence we always suspected was an integral part of the good old days.
• Hoosier Journal of Inanity — a blog mostly about the Green Lantern, but also anything else that catches the Indiana blogger’s interest, such as Harryhausen, Lego computer games, or sugar pie. It’s one of those blogs where I think the author is stalking me and just writing what she expects I’ll want to read, except I moved from Indiana over a year ago so that can’t be right….
• Order of the Stick — which is technically an internet comic, not a blog, but it has an RSS feed so I’ll put it in. I love the style and the D&D jokes; it never fails to entertain (well, the current strip is actually quite depressing, little elves might get eaten, but it’s still riveting), and my only complaint is that it doesn’t update often enough. (I need every few minutes, not every few days.)
• And back at Historiann — reading the perspective of professors is valuable for a student returning to school after far too long, and I also love a good blog about women’s history and feminism.

Apparently, it comes with responsibilities:

• Please put the logo of the award (right) on your blog if you can make it work with your format.
• Link to the person from whom you received the award.
• Nominate 5-7 other blogs.
• Put the links of those blogs on your blog.
• Leave a message on their blogs to tell them.

Now I just have to find time to dig into my CSS and put Marie in the sidebar (Oh yes, and bake a cake…)

I have to confess: yesterday’s post about bread pudding was rather rushed. And since bread pudding is one of Buzz’s favorite dessert-breakfast foods, I think he was rather hurt that it didn’t get more attention. So this is something of an apology to him as well as an addendum.

Firstly, the source of the recipe is important. For the holidays, Buzz got me an incredible cookbook: The Old-Time Brand-Name Cookbook, a collection of vintage recipes from pamphlets put out by food (or appliance) companies to advertise their goods. It is ideal for a hobbyist chef and retro enthusiast like me, and I’ll give a full review of it tomorrow. (Spoiler alert: I highly recommend it.)

I used the recipe for Bread Pudding yesterday; its original source, per the book, is “Be an Artist at the Gas Range” from 1935. Maybe it was a bit bland because I used an electric oven rather than a gas range…

Secondly, a discussion of bread pudding itself. As it’s a favorite of his, Buzz loves to make bread pudding, and therefore has some serious opinions about the best recipes. The “Gas Range” recipe has a standard amount of milk (2 cups), but fewer eggs and less butter and even less sugar. While it’s still rich and tasty, it’s not as good as it could be with additional fat.

This is how you can tell you’ve cooked too many bad retro recipes: when you look at the following image and think, “Hey, a recipe for fish cakes!”

I actually have a far better fish cake recipe which I’ll make sometime soon

Via Found in Mom’s Basement.