Grapefruit Pie

Grapefruit pie isn’t something I ever thought about before finding the recipe in American Cookery, but I have to admit the idea doesn’t sound too bad. Maybe something to make for Easter Dinner?

The Christmas Pudding

If you've taken a little time to browse this blog, you'll know I have a fascination with the past. Whether it's old cars, advertising from the 30's, the music of the 20's, or the comics of the early 1900's, I'm fond of all things forgotten. So, it probably isn't surprising that I found a somewhat forgotten Christmas day tradition to write about today. What is that tradition, you ask? It's the dinner table cannon ball, the desert bowling ball, the Christmas pudding.

Many believe the recipe for the Christmas (plum) pudding can be traced back to medieval England, but the first recipes appear in 17th century publications. The ancestors of the plum pudding may be older, going back to savory puddings such as those found in the Harleian Collection  of manuscripts found in the British Library. In the 1400's a method for preserving meat in a pastry casing with dried fruits in the form of pies became popular and these mince pies became popular dishes for the festive season.  The chief ancestor of the modern pudding, though, goes all the way back to the pottage of Roman times. Pottage was slow cooked in a large pot and by the 15th century plum pottage, a stew of vegetables and fruit, had become a common first course. While this is all well and good, what about the holiday treat Dickens' Tiny Tim heard singing in the copper? Well, it wouldn't come into being until the Victorian era.

Over time the savory elements of mince pies and pottage were scaled back and an emphasis was placed on sweet fruits and though mince pies still exist to this day, pottage eventually became largely known as plum pudding. In 1747 East Sussex cook Eliza Acton recorded the first recipe for Christmas Pudding in a cookbook and by the 1830's the holly-topped ball of flour, fruits, suet, and spices appeared on holiday tables. I did some digging and came up with the following 1837 recipe for Christmas Pudding from a book with the catchy title of A Housekeeper's Book: Comprising Advice on the Conduct of Household Affairs in General by Frances Harriet Green. Enjoy!

Halloween Egg Nog

I stumbled across this recipe while browsing a 1921 issue of American Cookery and thought it might make a nice addition to a fall outing. I'll be giving it a try at some point, though I won't be able to tell Kelly it's egg nog until she's tasted and formed an opinion. Then again, it's in keeping with the season to be sneaky, isn't it?

Hoosier Cookbook...

Reminds me of a certain Twilight Zone episode!

Spudnuts!

In these days of cronuts, I wanted to introduce you to the first alternative dough - the potato. Spudnuts are exactly what they sound like – spud-based doughnuts. As usual once I stopped laughing, I started researching and found that the doughnut made from potatoes has more than a little history. 

In typical American fashion, Al and Bob Pelton built a business on reinventing something that already existed. They had encountered potato-based doughnuts while in Germany and came home to America with the idea of making the odd little cakes marketable (and themselves rich).  They ran through several formulations before finally coming up with a dry potato mix that let them franchise the Spudnut concept and they went into business in 1940. By 1946 Spudnuts had gone nationwide and by 1952 the Peltons were featured on the cover of the now defunct Mechanix Illustrated.

The Pelton brothers eventually retired, selling Spudnut Industries Inc. and it was eventually bought by Dakota Bake-N-Serv. Within a year of the purchase even the potato mascot of the old Spudnut days had retired but the company seemed to have a bright future – that is until the new ownership wasted the company's funds on shaky land deals and drove it into the ground.

Unlike so many brands of the past, though, Spudnuts persist. According to Google Maps you can satisfy your spud craving at the Spudnut Shop in Richland, WA. If you happen to stop in, please let me know about the experience. I'm intrigued, but about two thousand miles too far away to make the trip!

By the way, if you're interested in making your own Spudnuts, the three recipes below come from The Book of a Thousand Recipes (1912). Supposedly the Peltons revised the recipe quite a bit in their quest for a marketable Spudnut, but they were after a dry mix that could be used to easily and quickly supply a doughnut shop. These more traditional versions lack the detail we've come to expect from our modern cookbooks, but they should put you on the path to glazed bliss.

Unusual isn't Always Good

$25000 worth of unusual recipes. That was Heinz's pitch line for their 1957 cookbook 57 Prize Winning Recipes. I probably shouldn't judge the book by its proverbial cover, though. I mean ad executives sometimes make poor word choices when putting their copy together and there's over fifty years of cultural change to think of too. Okay, so the ad does feature a recipe that involves ketchup and pear halves, but classy restaurants all over serve pears on dinner salads, so that's not that unusual when you really think about it. The rest of the book probably doesn't contain anything more unusual than meatloaf and stuffed bell peppers, right? Let's take a look inside...

Okay, I take it back...this is one messed up cookbook.

Vive la Margarine!

As you probably know, I like to pour over old cookbooks. It gives me a chance to find forgotten recipes that might be worth trying along with a few that definitely are worth avoiding. Well, during today’s trawling I came across this recipe for Victory Meat Dish from Mrs. Scott’s North American Seasonal Cookbook: Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter.  

The name was the first thing to catch my attention. It reminded me of the infamous Freedom Fries served at the House of Representatives Cafeteria during 2003. America’s good for redefining and food-isolationism during times of military upheaval and, since the cookbook was written by Anna B. Storck Scott in 1921 (not long after the end of World War I), the name isn’t surprising. The recipe contains another little nugget of arcane culinary practice though, the use of Oleomargarine which, by chance, is why I decided to write this blog post on Bastille Day weekend.

 

Oleomargarine was one of a new class of food products in the twenties: processed food products. Oleomargarine, even without the E-Z Color dye-pack, has a colorful history. Its origins can be traced back to Emperor Napoleon III. Napoleon was faced with the problem of feeding his navy and the poor subjects who’d overthrown the French monarchy over that whole “let them eat cake” thing so he offered a prize to anyone could create a cheap and palatable butter substitute. The winner was French chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès. In 1869, Mège-Mouriès patented a process for churning beef tallow with milk to create a butter substitute he dubbed Oleomargarine.

The prospects for this new product of science weren’t exactly sunny yellow, though. The product failed to gain widespread acceptance and Mège-Mouriès sought the help of a Dutch company (Jurgens) to build an international market. It was at this time that dyes began being added to the product to give it a more butter-like appearance.

It’s probably obvious that dairy farmers and butter manufacturers didn’t take well to the introduction of a cheap butter substitute. Lobbying by the dairy industry resulted in a tax of two cents a pound being levied against margarine (no small sum in the 1800s). Artificially colored butter became contraband in thirty US states by 1900. Between 1886 and 1948 Canada enforced a total ban on margarine with only a short exception during World War I and in Quebec bans on dying margarine remained in place until 2008. Margarine producers didn’t take these restrictions lying down, instead they sold dye-paks along with their product so that consumers could make their own artificially-yellow butter substitute at home.

The growth of the Pure Foods Movement of the 1920s eventually helped margarine’s case, preventing dairy producers from including additives in natural butter that would make it more spreadable. Smooth-spreading margarines became the toast-topper of choice during the depression and the rationing of dairy products during World War II convinced many consumers to switch.

In 1950, the U.S. government finally repealed its margarine tax, and the market continued to grow as individual states reversed their bans. Even the medical industry seemed to be on the side of margarine for a while, declaring that the high levels of saturated fats in butter put diners at a higher risk of heart disease. As we all know, though, the healthcare pendulum always tends to swing back and forth and eventually margarine got the doctor’s thumbs down for the use of trans fats which not only increased risk of heart disease but raised levels of LDL cholesterol (that’s the bad stuff).

The truth? Actually there never was good evidence replacing butter with margarine cut the chances of having a heart attack or developing heart disease. So, if I were to include this recipe in my Bastille Day feast I’d have to leave out the margarine in spite of its French connections. Still, vive la France!

Soup of the Evening

The middle of March is here and that means it’s time for another dive into the gastro-catastrophe known as the Gourmet Cookbook Volume II…or what I’ve come to call The Crazy Stuff People will Eat. Yes, that’s right, a look at all that’s unfit to serve – or at least strange to our modern eyes from the venerable 1957 cookbook that catered to the crustiest of the uppers. Today we’re dishing out a tureen of soup. Soup, the innocuous meal starter, soup the partner of nuts in describing all that could possibly be contained in a hardware store, soup the cheap mealtime companion of sandwiches across the continent and (so far as I know) beyond.

I’m actually a little excited about the soup section of the cookbook. I enjoy cooking and lately Kelly and I have been on a bit of a soup tear, working our way through another cookbook that goes by the unassuming title of The Ultimate Soup Bible (I’m actively seeking The Penultimate Soup Bible, but so far no luck). Most of the heathen soups that are found in Gourmet’s cookbook don’t appear in the soup bible. It’s as if the Gourmet chapter is mostly composed of soup Canaanites, prone to worshiping the golden soup calf or something. Then again, if you look at some of the recopies it’s pretty obvious why they’ve fallen out of favor. The modern palate isn’t ready for an Easter soup of lamb heart and lung, okra chowder, or jellied wine consume. Take the following example…

  

I have to admit that I can’t look at the name of this soup without thinking of Rose Marie who played Sally on the Dick Van Dyke Show. Definitely not an image that piques the appetite. If you can get past the name, though, the idea of sorrel combined with cream of tomato soup isn’t unappealing. We just finished a cream of tomato soup that had a nice, spicy flavor and adding the sharpness of something like common sorrel wouldn’t be bad. Maybe I’ll have to rename this one and try it this summer when tomatoes are in season. 

The second soup that caught my attention was Senate Bean Soup, described in Gourmet as follows…

 

I checked the US Senate website and it contains the same recipe along with a little bit of history. Not surprising that the Senate would have its own soup – they can make soup out of just about anything. I guess it’s even less surprising that their soup would be filled with beans…

All in all, organ meats and poor period photography aside, this wasn't a bad chapter. I've made a few of the soups featured in Gourmet from other recipe books and had good luck and they provide an extensive stock and soup starter section that is missing from many modern cookbooks. I'll keep you up to date on any of the Gourmet recipes we decide to try.

Hors d'Oeuvres

 

I grew up in a very blue collar household, a meat and potatoes household where a term like hors d’oeuvres would have been as out of place as a soufflé. In fact, I think learning the world hors d’oeuvres was part of my introduction to the idea that a larger world lay somewhere beyond the confines of my small suburban home. It sounded exotic, mysterious, and propelled me into what has become one of my many hobbies.

The literal translation of hors d’oeuvres is “outside of the work”, a term that doesn’t sound like it has much to do with cooking until you consider it references the small dishes served before or “outside of” (hors) a meal (the oeuvres).  The French claim hors d’oeuvres but they borrowed the concept from the early Greeks and Romans. In ancient times, wealthy Athenians would offer their guests an array of small dishes to begin a meal. These most usually contained containing garlic, fish and other morsels meant to enhance the meal to come. Similarly, the Romans began their extravagant banquets with sausages, eggs, shellfish, vegetables, herbs and olives.

Volume 2 of the Gourmet Cookbook elects to discard all this history and background, sticking to the remark that “even the most modestly situated French family will begin luncheon with hors d’oeuvre…” Perhaps the Greeks and Romans were too swarthy for the waspy 1957 sensibilities of the time. After all, only a dozen years before the US had been embroiled in a war in which Italy was an enemy. The omission seems odd when the authors decided to go back to biblical times in their search for wine quotes.

When I think back on my childhood (mind you, that was in the late 60’s and early 70’s), I can’t remember a single person who served hors d’oeuvres. I remember a lot of chips, bean dip, and eventually salsa, but no trays of savory meats and vegetables brought to me on a tray.

Enough dwelling on the times, the Gourmet Cookbook lavishes the subject of hors d’oeuvres with 45 pages and the recipes range from mundane to bizarre. Consider the following:

As much as I'm enjoying making fun of this cookbook, I don’t want to give the impression all it contains are disgusting recepies that I would steer clear of unless threatened. Gourmet offers a lot of staples, recipes I would try such as:

Wine

 

“One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...but with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.”

~ Charles Baudelaire

 “I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food.”

~ W.C. Fields

 “As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”

~ Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

 One would expect Gourmet to have a lot to say on the subject of wine.  You could be forgiven for thinking that since the authors decided to go positively biblical from the onset. They pulled a a quote from St. Paul as encouragement to the embiber.

“Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake...”

1 Timothy 5:23

Of course, the author cites this as an endorsement of enjoying wine while it appears from the biblical text that St. Paul meant it to be used as a remedy for polluted water. After bungling the quote, though, the Gourmet struck very modern stance in terms of wine pairings. They stated that the right wine for a meal is the one the drinker enjoys. Of course the next 17 pages are devoted to instructions on how you should choose the right wine for any particular meal!

Seventeen pages seems skimpy though. Twenty eight pages were devoted to mixed drinks and nearly fifty to Hors d'Ovres. Baffling that they'd spend so little time with wine when you think about it, but maybe that owes to the fact most people don't make wine. Then again they included recipes for smoked woodcock, potted bison, and woodchuck pie, I'd think a nice chardonnay wouldn't be too much to ask! Heck, if you're serving me woodchuck pie I'm going to need as much wine as I can get my hands on.

Cocktail Time

According to Merriam-Webster a cocktail is defined as "an iced drink of wine or distilled liquor mixed with flavoring ingredients." This seems pretty accurate, it describes our modern sense of the cocktail as any combination of alcohol and a number of juices, flavorings, or other mixers, but a cocktail hasn’t always had such a broad definition.


The first published definition of the cocktail showed up in an editorial in The Balance and Columbian Repository in 1806. This defined the cocktail as "…a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters."

In 1957 Gourmet Magazine put out the second volume of its beefy, hardbound cookbook. The book was an update to its existing tenth anniversary edition, meant to stand on its own as well as to update the previous edition.

Gourmet doesn’t bother defining cocktails, instead offering it’s officious instructions on the “proper purpose and presentation” of “drinks”, a category into which it piles cocktails, long drinks, punches, and coffee drinks into one chapter. They’re more concerned with the fact that “only foods of the nature of dry biscuits, cheese crackers, or olives should accompany the aperitif…” than giving the cocktail it’s due.

Still, I don’t mean to give Gourmet’s book. It hasn’t stood the test of time. It’s stiff, stuffy, concerted, and full of itself and that was what was expected of a 50’s era gourmet cookbook. It wasn’t about bringing culture to the people; it was about separating the upper crust from the ravel.

As an example I offer three champagne cocktail recipes, albeit not the common man’s drink.

Champagne Cocktail Recipes

A champagne coupe is a champagne glass. Not that the recipe says so. If the reader doesn’t understand what a coupe is, well why are they even trying? They probably ought to go back to eating beans from a can and drinking their cocktails from a paper bag! Contrast the Gourmet recipe with this modern recipe:

2 dashes bitters
1 tsp sugar
Chilled champagne
1 twist lemon peel

Place one lump of sugar with bitters in a chilled champagne flute. Fill with chilled champagne. Add the twist of lemon peel and serve.

The coupe has been replaced with a flute and therein is the answer to the strange choice of word in Gourmet, coupe is French for “cup”. French has long been the language of condescension, the verbal equivalent of a glove slap and turned up nose. In fact, in the Victorian era a gentleman was expected to speak French as well as their native language. French was a mark of culture and breeding, and a way of setting oneself apart from the commoners. It’s possible that the choice of a French term was equivalent to paying homage to a time perceived as more refined. A backward looking definition of refinement, therefore refining oneself would mean learning the underpinnings (French) of a cultured life.

I don’t know if there’s any validity to my assertions, I just know that I can look forward to a lot of common terms expressed in a foreign language.

An Honest Loaf

Dear Reader,


Of all things cooking, the baking of bread has come to stand in for the home. Actually, more than the home, it has come to represent a certain kind of home. Some would say it stands for the kind of home most of us either don't feel like we have time for or have forgotten the value of in our busy lives. These people see bread as a symbol of a time gone by; a gentler, simpler time when the day provided time for kneading and proofing, for punching down and rising, and for baking. Others see the baking of the daily loaf as something just about as anachronistic as the horse and buggy. Possibly worse, it can be interpreted as the ball at the end of the domestic chain women wore (and some still wear) around their collective ankle, a chore that required long hours of work and tending and forbid the pursuit of happiness endowed all our citizens. Personally, I can see both sides of the argument, though I grew up in a Wonder Bread world and never knew an unsliced loaf before I started buying my own groceries.

It might have been during those first solo excursions to the grocery store that I got the bread bug. Walking through the bakery section after working a split shift, just as the baker started taking loaves out of the oven and the warm smell permeated the entire store. I started out with "basic loaves", that is to say white bread. At first they came out like bricks - dense, hard, and tasteless - but something kept me from giving up. Now I'm known for brioche, focaccia, and gingerbread. Until now, however, I hadn't found a certain recipe that I'd always wanted to make.

Salt rising bread holds a special place in my heart and those who know me well might be able to guess why. To clue you in further, you should know that salt rising bread is especially popular in the south and Appalachia (the Carolina's, Virginia, and Kentucky). No clue? The answer goes back to an episode of The Andy Griffith Show titled Dogs, Dogs, Dogs and a scene in which Barney mentions salt rising bread. I tried to find a video snippet for the blog entry but couldn't. Regardless, since I saw the episode I've been looking for a copy of the recipe and during my perusal of The Gourmet Cookbook I stumbled upon the very recipe. Of course afterward I managed to find the recipe on the net in just a few seconds. Regardless, here it is.

I strolled through the bread section and it contained most of the usual suspects - rye breads, baguettes, brioche, and the sort. There are the bad 50's pictures and unholy combinations such as pate en brioche or duck liver pate baked inside of a brioche crust. Modern bread baking has turned more toward the "country" or "peasant" loaf, recipes like focaccia and other rustic loaves that focus on herbal notes, unbleached and specialty flours, and rustic textures. What I found most interesting about the bread section was the preface shown below:

The idea of a baker being pilloried for a "bad loaf" seems pretty harsh considering the lax laws regarding the quality of foods in the past. I did a search on the web but the only thing I came up with was an unsighted article stating that in medieval times there were laws regarding bakers cheating customers and that the term "baker's dozen" emanates from this period when exceptional bakers gave their customers thirteen of an item instead of twelve to separate themselves from the rest of their profession. I hate to think what would have become of me for all the bad loaves I baked while learning! My sourdough still comes out plain and dull, doubtless a crime worth of the stocks! It also worries me that the authors seem to be lamenting that they can't nail their baker's ears to a post when they feel their whole wheat isn't up to snuff. It seems to go beyond quality control to institute corporal punishment for sub-standard bread. Then again, maybe I'm just soft.

Old Cookbooks

Dear Reader,

Over the weekend we took a little one-tank-trip to the lovely berg of Berne, Indiana with a couple very good friends. While we were preparing for a nice stroll in the 35 degree pouring rain, my friend presented me with a tattered and yellow book.

"It's a gift." He said, handing the tome over. "You don't have to keep it if you don't want it."

Yeah, giving me a book is a commitment thing. I could start my own hoarding show, just me sitting in my hole of an office surrounded by teetering piles of print, muttering "I don't have a problem…" What's doubly bad is this particular book is titled A Taste of Texas, a 1949 Neiman Marcus giveaway containing recipes "culled from over 2000 submitted by N-M customers…" as the flyleaf says. I really can't fathom sending a recipe to a department store. Neiman Marcus probably had a contest or something of the sort with thousands of post-war home makers vying for a brand new fry-o-lator or something equally gadgety. Needless to say the book hasn't gone anywhere but into the "do something with me" pile.

Staring at that pile today I thought, "Hey, why not post a few snippets from these unwieldy books that nobody but me would even consider keeping? It's not a good or original idea, but what else are you going to do on a gloomy, Indiana Monday in March when the finals aren't on TV?

So, though I started out talking about A Taste of Texas I hope you will pardon the curve I'm throwing when I start with a totally different cookbook. The biblical the Gourmet Cookbook volume I came out in 1950. After a decade of circulation, the editors at Gourmet Magazine decided they'd better secure their spot in the cooking pantheon with a hardback cookbook for the epicure. The result is a weighty 781 page book bound and printed in Italy to ensure its panache. Like a good Italian roadster, the Gourmet Cookbook is impractical - hardcover and as thick as an unabridged dictionary, hardly the sort of thing you want nestling between the flour and butter while baking cookies. My copy came from my wife's favorite aunt and it looks nearly unused. Since she was an excellent cook I imagine she found it just as unwieldy in the kitchen and opted for something a little more counter friendly.

Regardless, paging through the book gives an overview of the rarified mind of the late 40's gourmet. There are the aspic-molded horrors you'd expect along with some truly odd stuff. Aspic referres to a jelly, usually formed from stock rendered from some sort of meat and then clarified. If you've ever taken a piece of roasted chicken out of the fridge to find a gelatanious goo pooled in the bottom of the container, essentially that is an aspic. The use of aspic in American cookiery rose to its pinnacle in the 50's before plummeting from the dinner table and into kitsch ridicule. The following two examples show how Gourmet Magazine suggested plying the edible shalack that was aspic:

For those who don't possess a culinary dictionary, this dish is a jelly-mold made with goose liver pate, aspic from chicken or some other fowl, and mayonnaise. It's difficult to imagine this falling in the appetizer section of the book. I can't fathom the thought of jellied liver and mayonnaise as appetizing! I'm also left wondering how this recipe ever came to be. I mean who thought, "You know what this chicken and liver jelly needs? Mayonnaise."

If jellied goose liver isn't to your taste we have an alternative. Jellied cheese! Actually it's jellied cheese and mustard. I'm struck by the difference in terms here. Notice that the cook is advised to add a few 'grains' of cayenne and salt? You'd never see that language in a modern cookbook, probably because the concept is utterly ridiculous. As someone who dabbles in cooking, I can't ever imagine picking out three grains of salt and adding them to a dish. What would be the point?

Well, I thought I'd conclude the first batch of appetizers with a dish that doesn't involve meat jelly. The Lorraine Custard is akin to the popular in kitchen and song, Quiche Lorraine. The Lorraine in question refers to the Lorraine region of France where the German-influenced locals concocted an open pie consisting of an egg custard with smoked bacon or lardons. Later cheese was added to the mixture to create the quiche that is popular today. The custard version shown in this section of the Gourmet Cookbook is, essentially, the filling of a quiche Lorraine without the pie crust. It seems like an odd selection, one that might be interpreted as the author padding this section of the book with a partial recipe given a new name.

I think a lot of the focus on cooking from the fourties and fifties is on the oddities of aspic. Maybe it's the freak show aspect of jellied foods or the fact they're so uncommon on the modern table. Regardless, the number of aspic recipes in the cookbook is very limited. The next portion of the cookbook's hors d'oeuvre section deals with vegetables. When I say vegetables, don't think vegetarian. The cheff of the fifties seems as incapable of imagining vegetarianism as the cheff of the middle ages would be of imagining the microwave oven. Nearly every dish involves meat and those which don't rely on salad dressing. An example would be cucumbers dressed with french dressing, salt, and pepper. Not all are as bland, there is a recipe for Eggplant Caviar that I plan to try.

Maybe the most interesting things in the Gourmet Cookbook are the few photographs of the food described by the recipes. I'm not sure if the way we think of food has changed since the fifties or if the technology and techniques of photographing food has evolved sufficiently to make the old photos look absolutely hidious but I've yet to find a 'classic' cookbook that makes a single dish look remotely appetizing. Anyone who is familliar with The Gallery of Regrettable Food by the genious James Lileks will be fully aware of the mayhem that can be wrought by a recipe and a camera. The odd pairings of props with dishes, the off colors, the bizzarre geological formations are all apparently part and parcel of the 50's gastronomic landscape. I imagine in sixty years someone will be looking at Paula Dean's creations and thinking "What must she have been smoking..." so I'm reluctant to be too hard on the food of the fifties. Of course, that doesn't mean I'd want to see it served to me!