Corn Griddlecakes an’ Sorghum Molasses

Another cool morning here in Central Missouri! This spring, we’ve had remarkably warm weather remarkably early, so these brief “cool-downs” have been especially welcome. And it makes one hungry for a warm, hearty breakfast!

I’ve been dipping into some small-time, down-home Ozark-cookin’ cookbooks, and Sue and I have given our Jane Austen reading a rest, in favor of reading more of the colorful folk tales Vance Randolph collected from southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. Plus, last weekend was the Big Muddy Folk Festival in Boonville . . . so I had a hankerin’ for something, well, “indigenous.”

You can’t get more indigenous to the Ozarks than corn (and ham, and greens), and old-fashioned sorghum molasses is a regional treat that those poor, deprived people in big cities rarely get to have. But it was our breakfast today, and you can’t ask for anything more delicious at the breakfast table.

Recently, my favorite recipes have been coming from the sixty-year-old Good Housekeeping Cook Book, edited by Dorothy B. Marsh (New York: Rinehart, 1949). I love it because it provides tons of basic, foolproof recipes without much reliance on premade, frozen, boxed, canned or “glassed” foods. The following formulation is a golden example.

I’m completely paraphrasing this; the original appears on pages 443–44 of the book and is a variation of the basic “step-by-step” Griddlecakes recipe.

Corn Griddlecakes

3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup corn meal [not too coarsely ground; also, I prefer yellow because it’s so pretty!]
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 tablespoon sugar
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 egg
3/4 cup milk
3 tablespoons melted butter, margarine, vegetable oil, or other fat

Instructions: I’m not going to retype the book’s method, because I’ll bet you know what to do to heat the griddle or skillet to the right temperature, to know when to flip the cakes, etc. And you know how to mix the batter, too: Combine the dry ingredients and set aside; beat the eggs and beat in the rest of the liquid ingredients; then combine all together with as little stirring as possible.

The cakes will be about 4 inches in diameter; this recipe makes about 12 cakes.

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The jug of sorghum we’re currently enjoying is from a Mennonite producer, Daniel Hoover, in Bates County, Missouri. You can order it here!

Notes on the Cakes

I recommend making a double recipe of these corn cakes, so you have plenty of leftovers!

You can also make up your own convenient “corn cakes mix” by combining all the dry ingredients and putting them in a jar; all you have to measure out in the morning is about 1 1/4 cup of the mix plus the liquid ingredients.

Corn, in all its forms, is the official grain of the Americas, and leftover corn cakes are more versatile than regular pancakes when it comes to having with a dinner:

—They can go with anything down-home, like with greens and ham, say, or with a bowl of bean soup. Use them like cornbread.

—They can also go Mexican—topped with salsa and sour cream or guacamole, next to some huevos or refried beans; treat them like pudgy corn tortillas.

—Eat them with a bowl of chili!

—Or travel vicariously to South America, serving them beside grilled steak, roasted bell peppers, and a chimichurri sauce.

—They also make good breakfast sandwiches, filled with a fried egg and a couple pieces of bacon, and topped with some maple syrup. (Mmm! Maybe if we have a couple more of these cold mornings—!

Prune Bread (Retro Recipe)

Here’s one of the two great recipes for prune bread that appear in my esteemed 1949 Good Housekeeping Cook Book. I share it with you because prunes are opulently opossumable, and this bread is delicious!

It uses the proven combination of orange and prunes. As an example of how well the two flavors go together, I see that at least one company sells prunes (“dried plums”) that come pre-infused with orange essence.

A few notes on the recipe below:

1. This time, I didn’t chop up the prunes very much. But I think the idea is to chop them much more finely, so the fruit is incorporated more evenly throughout the bread (sort of like zucchini bread, or banana bread). But I wanted the chunks to be more visible, so I only cut them coarsely with a knife. (The down side to big chunks? It makes your knife sticky when you slice it!)

2. I suggest using less baking powder/soda/salt. It really doesn’t need that much. I think you can halve all three ingredients and come out fine. But here, I’m presenting the recipe just as it appears in the book.

3. In the same book (same page, even) is another gem: Oatmeal Prune Bread! And if you Google “prune bread” you can find lots more fun chocolaty, banana-y, citrusy, appley, nutty variations!

Hooray for prunes!




Prune Bread

1 cup dried, uncooked prunes
3 cups sifted all-purpose flour
4 teasp. baking powder
1/2 teasp. baking soda
1 1/2 teasp. salt
2 tablesp. granulated sugar
1/4 cup shortening
2 tablesp. grated orange rind
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup bottled milk or 1/2 cup evaporated milk and 1/2 cup water

Heat oven to 350˚ F. Rinse prunes, drain, dry. If very dry, boil 5 min. in water to cover; drain. Put pitted prunes through food chopper, using medium blade. Sift flour with next 4 ingredients. Cut in shortening with pastry blender until like coarse corn meal. Stir in prunes and rind. Combine eggs and milk; add to dry ingredients; mix well. Pour into greased 10˝ × 3˝ loaf pan. Bake in moderate oven of 350 F. 1 hr., or until done. Makes 1 loaf.

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From The Good Housekeeping Cook Book, with a preface by Katharine Fisher (New York: Rinehart, 1949), p. 446.

Eggs Goldenrod

Look, it’s another version of “à la mode sunshine”!

Yep, I’m still groovin’ on those awesome free-range eggs from my friend!

I found this in my beloved copy of The Good Housekeeping Cook Book (ed. Dorothy B. Marsh, New York: Rinehart, 1949). As with my friend’s mother’s recipe, this rich, warm dish with a white sauce and hard-cooked eggs takes advantage of the bright yellow yolks to make for a festive presentation.

Sure, you could just crumble the yolks with your fingers or smash them with a fork, as in my friend’s mom’s recipe. But in this case, pressing the yolks through a wire sieve makes them particularly fluffy. It gives them tons of volume. Definitely a unique presentation!




It takes a bit of effort to make this, especially if you don’t have the hard-cooked eggs ready-made. But I made it recently for dinner, with a bit of kiszka and a light, fresh green salad. A Stone Hill Chardonel paired well with it. Pretty darn good!




I more-or-less copy it from page 133, where it’s given as one of six variations of “Creamed Eggs.”


Eggs Goldenrod

6 hot, shelled, hard-cooked eggs
3 tablesp. butter or margarine
1 tablesp. minced onion (optional)
3 tablsep. flour
1/4 teasp. salt
Speck pepper
1 teasp. Worcestershire sauce (optional)
2 cups milk
1 tablesp. minced parsley
Toast

1. Hard-cook eggs, then peel off shells.
2. Partially fill base of double boiler with water; cover; bring to a boil.
3. Melt butter in top of double boiler over direct heat. Add onion and simmer until tender. Remove from heat. Add flour, salt, and pepper, mixing well. Add Worcestershire sauce, if desired.
4. Set top in place over boiling water. Slowly stir in milk. Cook, stirring, until smooth and thickened.
5. Cut hard-cooked eggs in halves, remove yolks. Cut whites in slivers; add to sauce. Heat; pour over toast. Sprinkle with yolks, pressed through sieve, and minced parsley.

Peet-za, United States, 1949

Another treasure from my beloved copy of the Good Housekeeping Cook Book of 1949!

I’ve told you about this book before; the more I cook out of it, the more impressed I am with its recipes. It must have been one of the last thorough, general-use, make-it-from-scratch cookbooks to be published before “instant” this and that, and all kinds of needless shortcuts, came into vogue.




I was reading it recently and discovered a recipe for pizza! Curiously enough, it was in the “Vegetables” section, under “Tomatoes”! Huh?

Well, what was the American version of pizza in 1949? I mean, what constituted the basic, no-frills pizza that a generalized cookbook would offer for the standard American cook? Pizza! It has garlic in it! That’s ethnic! That’s Eye-talian!




Another thing that caught my eye was the subheading under “PIZZA,” informing the reader that it’s “pronounced peet-za.” Yes, pizza was that novel in the 1940s. (Anyone remember when Taco Bell, and thus Mexican food, first came to the Midwest, and the menu boards coached us in pronunciations like “buh-REE-toe” and “TAH-co”?)

Well, guess what: This pizza recipe is dang close to the real thing, the traditional pizza napoletana. And the one variation for toppings that is provided—for Anchovy Pizza—is very close to pizza marinara, which has no cheese, plus the added anchovies (which is a very traditional topping). I was surprised to find such authenticity, when I was expecting something frightfully, embarrassingly Americanized.




I guess what happened was this: The Good Housekeeping Cook Book (“copyright 1942, 1944, 1949”) completely preceded the births of Pizza Hut (1958) and Shakey’s Pizza (1954), whose presence would play a huge part in establishing the “norms” for the American idea of pizza. And before the arrival of chain pizza joints (and not counting various regional versions of pizza that emerged in big cities like Chicago), the only kind of pizza most Americans knew was the authentic kind—made by immigrants, or tasted in Europe.

And yeah, a lot of Americans had been introduced to authentic Italian pizza during and after World War II!

So I suspect that there was a window of time, post–World War II and pre–Pizza Hut, where the only pizzas available were ones made by ethnic Italians and available to other Americans only in big cities, and those made to be as close as possible to the traditional Italian pizzas.




So this recipe must be one of the latter. Yes, there are clearly adaptations for the limitations of the typical midcentury American pantry (note the use of “shortening” in the dough), but even then, the recipe is strikingly authentic. It doesn’t say to use a rolling pin, and it calls for olive oil. (Just Google “authentic pizza recipe,” and see the Wikipedia article on “pizza,” to see tons of examples of what I’m talking about: rolling pins are verboten, and olive oil is a requirement.)

I was so curious! I had to give it a try. I’ve retyped the recipe below. My changes and comments are noted at the end.


PIZZA
(Pronounced peet-za)

It’s like a huge pancake, topped with a tomato-cheese mixture, and baked until crust is crisp and golden brown. Hot out of oven, it’s cut into wedges. You fold a wedge; eat it with your fingers. Use as appetizer, bread with dinner, main course for lunch, or evening snack.

Pizza Dough:

1 pkg. dry or compressed yeast
2 tablesp. lukewarm water
1 cup boiling water
2 tablesp. shortening
1 1/2 teasp. salt
3 cups sifted all-purpose flour

Sprinkle yeast in lukewarm water; let stand 5–10 min. to completely dissolve. Pour boiling water over shortening and salt in a large bowl. Cool to lukewarm; stir up yeast, then add. Add half of flour; beat until smooth with spoon. Then add remaining flour; beat smooth. Divide dough in half for 2 thin pizzas such as are served in restaurants. Or use all of dough for 1 thicker pizza. Place dough on floured board; pat gently with hand into 2 11” rounds or 1 13” round; have edges slightly thicker (this keeps filling from running over during baking). Place on greased cookie sheets. Let rise in warm place (85° F.) until double in height. Then proceed as directed in Tomato Topping.

Tomato Topping:

Pizza Dough
1 tablesp. olive oil
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
3/4 lb. sliced Italian mozzarella cheese or process American Cheddar cheese
2 cups diced, peeled ripe tomatoes, drained
1 minced, peeled clove garlic
1/2 teasp. salt
1/8 teasp. pepper
1/2 teasp. dried oregano or thyme
1 tablesp. olive oil

Heat oven to 450° F. After the round or rounds of Pizza Dough doubles in height, brush with 1 tablesp. olive oil. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese; then arrange 1/3 of mozzarella cheese on top; sprinkle with diced tomatoes combined with garlic, salt, and pepper. Arrange rest of mozzarella on top. Sprinkle with oregano; then drizzle on 2 tablesp. oil. Bake in hot oven of 450° F. for 25–30 min., or until crust is golden brown.

Anchovy Pizza: Make Pizza with Tomato Topping, omitting all oil and all cheese in Tomato Topping. Dot tomatoes with 2 oz. can fillet anchovies, finely minced; drizzle on oil from anchovies. Garnish with a few slivers of green pepper. Bake as directed.





My Changes and Comments

The recipe gives you the option of making one large or two smaller pizzas; I chose the latter. However, I made one pizza be the standard type, and one the anchovy version (halving various components as necessary). Why? Because variety is the spice of life!

Another thing I changed is that I used diced, drained canned tomatoes instead of fresh. Why? Because it’s February, and even the tomatoes that look ripe taste pretty lame (especially given the price). (But see my note about salt, below.)

Also, as you can see in the pictures, I didn’t have any green bell peppers, so I used the yellow one I had on hand.




Finally—and I think I wasn’t giving enough credit to the writers of the cookbook—I used a plain old bouncy-bouncy rubbery brick of grocery-store mozzarella instead of the fresh kind I know is authentic (and much better). Why? Because I assumed that’s what people had access to in 1949. Now, however, I’m not sure about that.

Indeed, the recipe calls for “3/4 lb. sliced Italian mozzarella cheese”—and I’m betting that in 1949, anyone with access to any mozzarella at all probably knew where to get the good stuff. In fact, Kraft might not have even been making the rubbery kind back then. I’ll bet that’s why the recipe calls for “sliced” mozzarella, and names the alternative (for the truly limited grocery shopper) as “process American Cheddar cheese.” (Yuck!) Next time I make this, I’ll go for a ball of genuine, fresh mozzarella. (Or else, if I use the rubbery kind, I’ll be sure to shred it, so it melts better.)

Hopefully I don’t need to tell you this, but use real Parmesan cheese, and not the dusty stuff from the green can.




Finally, if you try this recipe, I recommend cutting the salt way back for the tomato mixture, especially if you’re making the anchovy version and using canned tomatoes (which are already salted)—heck, even the cheese is salty enough. In fact, you probably don’t need to put salt with the tomatoes at all.

I kept a close eye on the pizzas, and I found that they only needed about a third of the cooking time recommended—ten or twelve minutes was plenty! Trust your instincts, check the pies, and the crust will turn out fine.




And yes, these were really good! I was kind of worried about whether I would like the anchovy pizza, since there was no cheese (whine, whine!), but I didn’t miss it at all. The saltiness and richness of the anchovies and their oil completely made up for the lack of cheese.




As an added bonus, the Good Housekeeping Cook Book includes the following variation, as well:

Kitchenette Pizza: For 2 people, or a few guests, use 4 English muffins, split in halves, instead of Pizza Dough. Top with 1/2 recipe for Tomato Topping. Bake at 450° F. 20 min.

How about that! I thought the kid-friendly English-muffin pizza was a relatively recent invention/bastardization, but here it is alongside fairly authentic recipes, made for an American audience that had never even sampled Jeno’s! I’ll be darned.

The recipes on this post were published in The Good Housekeeping Cook Book, ed. Dorothy B. Marsh (New York: Rinehart and Co., 1949), 418–19. It’s long out of print, but it’s truly worth hunting for! See this blog post for more on this book.

Righteous German Soul-Food Christmas Cookies

Amen, you all, Ayyyyyyy-men. We baked our springerles this evening! A truly worthy use for the venerable, vintage Maytag Dutch Oven range in our kitchen!




For those of you who don’t know about them, springerles (pronounced springer-leez or shpringer-leez, I’m not sure which) are a pale, light, crispy cookie almost always flavored with anise. Though they can be cut into shapes, they’re usually squares or rectangles and have pretty little patterns imprinted on the top surface.

Some people around here call them “anise cookies.”

You can use special springerle rolling pins to make them, or you can use springerle presses.

Or you can do like I did the first year I made them, and use a butter knife to make little “star” patterns on the top. A blunted toothpick added extra pizzazz. That got kinda tedious, though, with so many cookies.




If you overcook them, they can become incredibly tough. In fact, it is not a big problem if this happens, because they get better as they age: You’re supposed to bake them, let them cool, then pack them in airtight containers for at least a couple of weeks before serving.

This is one of those Christmas cookies—like lepkuchen—that you can store with an apple to enhance the flavor while protecting and perfecting their texture.

Alas, I don’t have either of my grandmas’ recipes for springerles. My recipe comes from that groovy 1949 edition of The Good Housekeeping Cook Book that I got from Cousin Marguerite’s kitchen. (I raved about this incredible book earlier this year.) The springerle recipe is printed on pages 709–10.

I’ll pass it along to you, but this time I’m not copying it word-for-word. I’m changing the wording slightly. The original has instructions written in one long paragraph—I’ve made it easier by adding hard returns and such between the steps. (Yeah! You’re welcome!) My own comments, where I differ with the recipe, appear in square brackets.

I usually double this recipe—for me, this year, doubling it yielded 120 cookies, some smaller than others.





Springerle

4 1/2 cups sifted cake flour [like Swans Down—and measure it correctly, you!]
1 teaspoon baking powder
4 eggs
1 pound powdered sugar
1 tablespoon grated lemon rind [I use a microplane grater]
anise seeds [or anise extract] [you can use both]

On the First Day, Make and Roll Out the Dough:

1. Sift together the flour and baking powder; set aside.

2. Beat eggs until light [I use a hand mixer].

3. Stir the sugar into the eggs; beat with a spoon until thoroughly combined.

4. Add lemon rind to eggs mixture; add anise extract if using it instead of seeds. Then add the flour mixture. Mix thoroughly. Dough will be stiff.

5. [Cover it so it doesn’t dry out], and chill until firm enough to handle easily.

6. Roll to 1/2 inch thickness on a floured board.

7. Cut into fancy shapes with cookie cutters, or use a springerle rolling pin to impress the surface with patterns, then cut cookies into individual pieces [I use a pizza cutter!]

8. Grease cookie sheets; sprinkle them with anise seed [if using anise seed]. [Using parchment paper on the cookie sheets instead of greasing them is an excellent alternative.]

9. Arrange cookies, 1/2 inch apart, on sheets, and leave them exposed to the air, overnight or for 12 hours. [I’ve found this is a great use for an unheated sunporch. The idea here is to let the surfaces dry a bit so that when the cookies bake and rise, the surface pattern stays intact. And I’ve found you can let them sit longer than 12 hours, depending on humidity and such.]

10. A note about anise oil versus anise extract: Anise oil is much, much stronger; you'll only need a few drops, or a small dribble for a doubled recipe. If you use more, it will end up tasting like black jelly beans, or Nyquil. Anise extract is more easily available, and you'll need to use a lot more of it. At least half a teaspoon, I'd say, or more.



On the Next Day, Bake the Cookies:

1. Bake in a moderate (350 degree) oven for 30 minutes. [Whoa! Mine usually only take about 7 or maybe 10 minutes, depending on thickness! The take-home point here is, Keep an eye on them. They’re done when they just start to turn slightly pinkish on the edges and the bottoms are cooked.]

2. When they’re cool, store them in a covered jar for 2 or 3 weeks before serving.

Makes about 30 cookies. [Though it depends on the cookie size! Most of my springerles are about 2 x 1.5 inches, and I get about 50 or 60 cookies from this recipe, not doubled.]

Beatrice Stephens and Her Mint Recipes

Recently I purchased a copy of an old, used cookbook. Remember how I was crowing on and on about the Good Housekeeping Cook Book of 1949? Well, soon after writing that earlier post, I found a copy of the first edition of that book, copyright 1933, and the nice people at Eureka! Books in Mount Vernon, Maine (selling via Alibris), sent it to me without delay. (And yes, they were indeed nice!)

As soon as the package arrived, I grabbed it and an O’Doull’s, carried them out to the backyard, and plopped down in one of our big Adirondack chairs to give my lovely new/old book a nice once-over.

And if you’ve had much experience looking at used cookbooks, you know that they often include bonus treasuries of handwritten recipes and notes by the previous owner. And my copy of the 1933 Good Housekeeping Cook Book is no exception! What a treat!

First off, in the front endpapers is the name of the cookbook’s first owner:

Beatrice E. P. Stephens
21 Academy St.
Auburn, Maine

February 12, 1934
2 years to G.H.

Yeah . . . I Google-mapped the street address, and according to the “street view,” it looks like Beatrice’s house is no longer standing (unless they’ve renumbered the addresses on that block). There is a convenience store on the corner, and next to that is a large patch of big trees, including some Norway spruces among some deciduous species, and a place in the sidewalk curb where a walkway to a house must have been. The “academy” is apparently still there, down the street, but I guess her home is gone.

Shoot. Sometimes, a little Internet sleuthing yields some intriguing information, but no, I wasn’t able to find anything on Beatrice herself. And I have no idea if “Stephens” would have been a maiden or married name, of course, either. So who knows.

I did find one possibly interesting link, where a guy named David Stephens claimed to be abducted by aliens in 1975 near Oxford, Maine. His hypnosis sessions wherein he described the incident were witnessed by his father and mother, Gene and Beatrice. How about that! Wonder if it’s the same people. Oxford isn’t very far away from Auburn—ten miles, maybe.

However, David was twenty-two at the time of his abduction, meaning that Beatrice would have given birth to him ca. 1953, and if our Beatrice was starting to get Good Housekeeping in about 1932, that’s a long time between young adulthood and having a kid. Oh well. Probably different people.

Anyway, the Beatrice Stephens who owned this cookbook left several Depression-era recipes of her own in her clean, cursive fountain pen and in pencil, including: French Dressing; Sour Cream Dressing (“on a cucumber & scallion salad!”); Fish Chowder; outlines for four different salads; a list of spices to use when boiling smoked shoulder or ham; a list of sandwich fillings; and a recipe for donuts.

But she must have loved mint the best, because she wrote down several recipes for mint sauce, mint vinegar, mint punch, etc. I transcribe these for you now.

(I wonder: If you were to go to the location of 21 Academy Street in Auburn, Maine, and look around in that overgrown, foresty patch of land, do you suppose you would find a nice patch of spearmint persisting after all these years? I wonder.)

Mint Punch
Crush 12 sprigs fresh mint
add: 1 c. sugar
---- 6 oranges
---- 3 lemons, & stir well
Set 2 hours, pour over ice in bowl. Add 2 qts. ginger ale.

Mint Punch #2
4 Tbspn. fresh mint, chopped
2 " sugar syrup
2 " lemon juice
1 " orange juice, and set 2 hrs.
Strain; add 1 qt. ginger ale.

Mint Punch #3
Boil together for 8 min.
1/2 c. water, 1/2 c. sugar. Cool.
Mix 1 c. fresh mint, cho.—
juice of 2 lemons
-------- 3 oranges
1 pt. pineapple juice
1 qt. weak tea
1/2 t. to 1 c. bo. water (add water to make 1 qt.)
Stand cold place 4 hours or overnight.
Strain—add 2 qts. ginger ale
Makes about 1 gallon.

Mint Sauce #1
Chop 1/4 c. mint leaves & add to 1/2 c. hot vinegar with a little (1 T) sugar.

Mint Sauce #2
1 c. currant jelly, 2 t. mint, finely chopped, 1 t. grated orange rind. Break jelly with fork. Lamb.

Green Mint Vinegar
Bring to boil 1 qt. pure cider vinegar.
Add 1 c. gran. sugar &
1 pt. of spearmint leaves & young tips
Stir & crush
boil a few minutes.
Strain & bottle hot in glass jars.
For Iced Tea & Fruit Punches, basis for Mint Sauce, sparingly in lettuce & cress salads.

Minted Iced Tea
1 1/2 t. tea for ea. c. freshly boiling water.
Steep 5 min.—add a few crushed mint leaves.
Strain cool & chill in ref.
Cracked ice—lemon slice & mint sprig.

So this seemed a fitting post for today, since they’re predicting our weather will soon become more seasonal (which is to say, roastingly, braisingly hot), and mint has the marvelous property of making your mouth feel cool.

Also, mint has long been used as a mild remedy for digestive upsets, and since my dad is recovering from an acute and completely uncalled-for compulsory gastroenterology seminar this week, I’m prescribing mint tea for his tummy.

(One final note, an interesting connection: Beatrice Stephens acquired her cookbook in 1934, the year my dad was born. That summer was one of the hottest on record in North America. No wonder Beatrice was scribbling down recipes for mint tea and mint punch!)

Grape Cream Pie

Here it is; I’d been wanting to try this recipe for a while, and yeah, it was pretty darn good. It was perfect on Memorial Day, when we didn’t want to have the oven on for long, and the chill of this dessert was especially welcome.

It’s a lot like lemon meringue pie, only topped with whipped cream instead of meringue, and made with grape juice instead of being flavored entirely with lemon. And there are no eggs.

An old friend of mine got me hooked on grape pies—the traditional kind, double-crust, made with concords that have been skinned and deseeded, and then you add the skins back to the deseeded pulp—which is a whole lot of labor. This following grape pie is much simpler but is just as gloriously purple.

It’s so simple, it could easily be one of those “first recipes” a young person learns.

As I mentioned in the previous post, this recipe comes from the 1949 edition of The Good Housekeeping Cook Book, ed. Dorothy B. Marsh (New York: Rinehart, 1949), page 730.

The comments in brackets are mine; sorry, I can’t resist it.

Grape Cream Pie

1/2 cup granulated sugar
6 tablesp. cornstarch
1/4 teasp. salt
1 tablesp. grated lemon rind
1/2 teasp. cinnamon
2 1/2 cups grape juice
1 tablesp. lemon juice
1 baked 9˝ pie shell [the book gives that recipe on p. 727]
1/2 cup heavy cream, whipped [the basic deal; freeze/chill the bowl and the beaters, and just before serving, whip it with a tablespoon of sugar and a few drops of vanilla]

Combine first 5 ingredients in saucepan [which is to say, blend together the dry ingredients first; the cornstarch will mix in better with the grape juice if you do]. Stir in grape juice and cook, stirring, over low heat until a small amount mounds slightly when dropped from a spoon [this cornstarch transformation is way cool, if you’ve never done this before; it’s, like, “Wow, man”]. Add lemon juice. Cool; chill until very thick. Meanwhile, make and bake pie shell; cool. Spoon chilled grape mixture into pie shell; chill. Top with cream. Makes 1 9˝ pie.

Now, I don’t know why you couldn’t make the pie, chill it thoroughly, and then slather a meringue on it and toast the meringue peaks quickly in the oven, then rechill, thus making “Grape Meringue Pie.” But the whipped cream was good, too. (It always is, isn’t it?)

You’ll have to try this recipe and let me know what you think.

Next, I plan to use this same technique using some other juice or beverage. Apricot juice, perhaps? Or fresh carrot juice, plus spices? That would be neat. Or do you think elderberry wine would work? . . . Ooh la la.

Treasury of Retro Recipes

Last night I went delving through my oh-so-intriguing copy of the Good Housekeeping Cook Book (note the antique letterspacing) of 1949, one of the genuine treasures I selected from Cousin Marguerite’s kitchen when she moved into an assisted-living place some years ago and invited the family to come and take things we’d like to have.

The cookbook (well-worn, stained, lacking the front cover) is full of what we would certainly call “retro” recipes. Fortunately, it’s not like nineteenth-century cooking (which flat-out scares me) with recipes for calf’s head soup and so on.

Yet it antedates the worst culinary atrocities of the fifties (documented so well in James Lileks’s hilarious publications, such as his newest, Gastroanomalies). Still, much of what we take for granted today wasn’t available to most cooks then, and the limitations of people’s tastes and of 1940s food distribution are obvious—and yet there are a surprising number of sophisticated and elevated recipes in here. The book is over a thousand pages long.

An added bonus, for sentimental reasons, is that apparently the book was a gift to Marguerite from her Aunt Esther (my grandma’s sister), because the Christmas card that accompanied it is still tucked within the pages. Signed “Uncle Emil and Aunt Esther”: “Hope you learn a lot from this book!” Bless them all, those dear people who are gone.

This is the cookbook where I found my awesome (and simple) springerle recipe. (More on that when Christmas rolls around.)

You could just laugh at it, because it’s old and seemingly naive compared to the big fat sophistication we bring to our kitchens today (sure, uh-huh), but the book is truly enlightening to me. In fact, it’s a trove.

It’s pretty cool to take a peek through the book—ingredients and flavors that are nearly foreign to us today, certainly out of vogue. Anchovies and sardines. Chopped pickles. Liverwurst. Prunes. Pimiento. Tongue. And chop suey! The recipes distinguish between “canned” and “glassed” ingredients. The “Home Canning” section tells you how to home-can in your leftover coffee and mayonnaise jars, if you want.

There’s also instructions on how to care for “Oil Ranges” and “Ice Refrigerators.” There’s advice to the home cook to “always buy eggs from merchants who keep eggs under refrigeration, not on the counter.” Hmmm. I guess I’ll take that one under advisement!

The section on “Electrical Kitchen Appliances” mentions the wide array of contraptions that can be plugged into your kitchen outlets (though be sure to “ask your local utility office to tell you the kind of current furnished your home”)—“toaster, coffeemaker, beater or mixer, fruit juice extractor, waffle iron [etc.]”—and it ends with this glorious reminder: “There is also the electric kitchen clock.” . . . Imagine.

In the chapter entitled “Sandwiches of All Kinds,” the first statement, under the heading “Sandwiches, an Important Food,” is “Many bakers enrich white bread today. (Look for this information on bread label.) Sandwiches made with this bread . . . take on a new importance.” Later, the cook is instructed to wrap sandwiches in waxed paper for a picnic. It was the days before Saran Wrap, before aluminum foil.

In the section about frogs’ legs, the first helpful tip is: “Only hind legs of frog are eaten.” They needed to say this? Oh, I can just picture the I Love Lucy episode where she spends hours trying to pick the skin from a thousand teeny-tiny frog arms, elbows, and fingers in order to make a dinner for her and Ricky!

The book gives instructions on how to “Disjoint and Cut Up a Drawn Carcass” (of a chicken) as well as how to “Draw Poultry” (which begins: “Cut Off Head—if not already done” and proceeds next to “Remove Pinfeathers”). I had no idea that a nut pick was routinely used for yanking the toe tendons from the drumsticks! And here we’ve been using Grandma’s old nut utensils for . . . nuts! She probably used them for butchering chickens.

There are wonderful pie recipes in this book—from savory types (“Beef Steak and Kidney Pie”) to sweet (“Grape Creme Pie”; “Orange Apple Pie”). The quick breads are pretty cool, too. One of my favorites is “Prune Bread” (which has grated orange peel in it)—very delicious. There’s also an “Oatmeal Prune Bread,” a “Butterscotch Walnut Bread,” and something called “Dark Walnut Bread” made with whole-wheat flour. They used whole-wheat flour in 1949? Apparently so!

Many recipes end in “De Luxe” (as in “Turnips De Luxe”) or “Surprise” (“Broiled Fish Fillets Surprise”) (okay, because now you’re curious, I have to tell you: The “surprise” is that the fish!—are covered with cooked broccoli!—and a cheese sauce!).

The phrase “à la” is used a lot, too (“Salmon à la Newburg”). These kind of dishes remind me of the suggestion in Phyllis Diller’s Housekeeping Hints to make one’s mediocre cooking seem tastier by adding the word supreme “to everything you serve—hamburgers supreme, turkey necks supreme, toast supreme, etc.”

So . . . on Memorial Day, I made “Grape Cream Pie” from the Good Housekeeping Cook Book of 1949. It was very easy and turned out fabulously well. And that’s going to be my next post. Stay tuned.


Books Adored in This Post

The Good Housekeeping Cook Book. Edited by Dorothy B. Marsh. New York: Rinehart, 1949.

Phyllis Diller’s Housekeeping Hints. Introduction by Bob Hope; drawings by Susan Perl. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966.

I keep using this cookbook. To see my related blog posts, click on the "Good Housekeeping Cook Book" tag at the bottom.