Switchel, Stichel, Switzel, Swizzle: Ginger Water for Hot Days

Six years ago, in a post I’d almost forgotten about, I talked about our sweltery summertime heat. And that’s where we’re at again: heat and humidity. Well? It makes the corn and the tomatoes grow!

But it makes me wilt. And it, with all the rain we’ve had, makes the watergrass, crabgrass, or whatever-it-is grow like crazy. So I’ve gotta mow the lawn it again. I’m going to wait until the sun starts to set tonight. Ugh! I’m dreading it. (Compared to this heat, my hot flashes seem cool!)

Revisiting that older post I did about “Heat,” I recalled John Madson’s description of an old-timey lemonade-like beverage that farmers used to gulp when they had to thresh wheat in the hottest part of summer. It must have been hell on earth. That’s how Madson describes it, anyway.



Madson called this beverage “stichel,” but from what I can see online, it’s more commonly called switchel, switzel, swizzle, ginger-water, haymaker’s punch, or switchy. It’s an incredibly old concoction, a centuries-old thirst-quencher, an antique equivalent to today’s “energy drinks” or “electrolyte beverages.”

Wikipedia’s entry on “Switchel” notes that the beverage is also mentioned by Laura Ingalls Wilder in her book The Long Winter. In it, Laura’s mom tells her to make up a bunch of the stuff to take to the laboring men, explaining that cold well water, alone, would make the overheated men feel sick, while the ginger-beverage would quench their thirst better.

Today it’s a super-trendy hipster beverage! Who knew? All the cool kids are drinking it!

You can find plenty of different recipes online, but here’s the one I tried. It seemed simple, basic, and it seemed to fit what Madson described Iowa farmers drinking “by the gallon.” (Sorry, but I can’t remember where I got this particular recipe.)

Use this recipe as an idea starter, and mess around with it until you get it just right: try pure maple syrup instead of brown sugar, as they do in Vermont, here and here. Molasses and honey were probably popular in some areas, too. Or try using the juice from fresh ginger instead of powdered.

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Stichel

3/4 cup brown sugar
1 tsp. ginger (powdered)
1/2 cup cider vinegar
1 quart cold water

Dissolve together the first three ingredients, then shake with the cold water. Serve chilled.

The recipe, wherever I got it from, also suggested you could mix it with equal quantities of ginger ale. Or, I would suggest, mix in some club soda or seltzer, if you wanted it bubbly and less strong.



How does it taste? Well—Sue and I think it’s actually pretty darned tasty! The hardest part is the first sip, because you can smell the vinegar, and the immediate thought is: This is going to taste like something you’d dip Easter eggs into. Or: “Ugh! pickle juice!”

But despite that initial panicked thought, it really does taste very good, and it goes down easy, and I’ll probably be making it again. The vinegar does the same thing that lemons do in lemonade. (Hey, remember the Greek lemonade recipe I shared with you a while back?)

I hope you’ll give switchel a try! When you do, let me know what you think of the flavor. Bonus points if you report on its efficacy as a thirst-quencher during these beastly hot days!

Mississippel

This post builds on the previous one, about the women of the Greatest Generation.

I’ve learned that someone connected to me, a member of this generation, passed away recently: Mildred Sippel. She was born in 1916, got married in 1954 (yes!), and was the organist for her church for many years. This information is from her obituary, here.

I copied this picture from the newspaper’s obituary, and ten bucks says that it, in turn, was copied from her church’s directory.

Here’s how she’s connected to me: My mom’s aunt’s husband was Mildred’s brother. Which is to say, she was the sister of my Great Uncle Adolf. No, I didn’t know her, but my mom did. And I’m sure we’ve attended some of the same weddings and funerals.

So. Mildred Sippel passed away, and I had to go look in my copy of Cooking with Faith, 1950 to 1975, also known as “Favorite Recipes of Faith Lutheran Church Women, Jefferson City, Missouri, 1970.” Because she was a longtime member of Faith Lutheran.

(No, it’s not very clear what the official cookbook title is—the thing on the cover, or the thing on the first page. And you can’t tell what the publication year is, either. Church ladies’ cookbooks can’t be bothered with such details—it’s more important to copy all those precious recipes accurately.)

And behold! I found one of Mildred’s recipes—in fact, I remember looking at this recipe before, because when I was first teaching myself how to cook red cabbage, I studied her instructions with curiosity. (How much red cabbage to use, then? Apparently this must not make very much. Maybe she was just thinking about cooking for two, huh. And do you think the spelling should have been “Bierich,” or what? Hmm. I’ll bet she was one of those gifted “cook by feel” people. . . . Or maybe that’s the pun in the book’s title—you have to have “faith” that it will turn out!)

Anyway, here ya go, verbatim from the bottom of p. 46 of Cooking with Faith. Read my note right after it, however. Very important.

Beirich Kraut

Place finely cut red cabbage in pan with slightly salted boiling water. (Water should barely cover the cabbage.) Add 1 teaspoon vinegar to water, cover pan and cook cabbage until tender, adding water if needed. When finished, add a little sugar or sweetener to taste.
Mrs. William Sippel (Mildred)

Note: I don’t know how long Mildred had to cook this after she’d added her vinegar, in order for it to get tender, but my advice is to cook the cabbage in water alone, first, until it’s completely done, before adding any vinegar. It can only be a small amount of water, too; it basically steams. As a general rule, if you add vinegar before the vegetable is soft, it will stay crunchy. . . . Hmm. Well, maybe Mrs. Sippel liked it crunchy.

Oh, and of course: Use apple cider vinegar. Of course.

Someday I’ll post my own recipe for red cabbage. Which is better; everyone loves it. But this is Mildred Sippel’s memorial post, and I don’t want to brag . . .

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And now here’s a bonus recipe for you! From my mom’s handwritten collection! This recipe is known as “Mrs. Sippel’s Meatloaf,” but my Mom pointed out to me that it’s not from Mildred Sippel . . . and it’s not from Mildred’s mother-in-law, either. Nope. It’s from Mildred’s predecessor, the first Mrs. Sippel, who passed away—hence William Sippel’s remarriage in 1954, to Mildred, who was the second Mrs. Sippel.

So yeah . . . I’m feeling warm about this dish. This is the exact same meatloaf recipe my mom used all while I was growing up. This here is real home cookin’, I’ll tell you what!

Note: Making these kinds of connections are one of the best things about living in your extended family’s home turf.

Mrs. Sippel’s Meatloaf

1 1/2 lb. hamburger
1 egg
2 tbsp. chopped onion
1 cup cracker crumbs
1 cup milk
salt and pepper (to taste)

For Topping:

bacon (2 strips)
catsup

Mix together meatloaf ingredients and place in baking dish. Put 2 strips of bacon on top and dot with catsup. Bake 1 hour at 350°.

(For more on these recipes, with pictures, click here!)

Walnut Catsup

Building on the subject of the last post, I wanted to talk again about the old tome The Hearthstone; or, Life at Home: A Household Manual, by Laura C. Holloway, published in 1883. Google has the entire book available online, here.

You might remember me making fun of this book’s “Toast and Water” recipe some weeks ago. Turns out some retro recipes deserve to recede into dim history!

But we were talking about ketchup, or catsup, as some would spell it. (Editor’s note: Webster’s 11th Collegiate has ketchup as the first spelling, followed by catchup and catsup in that order, so among U.S. editors, ketchup would almost always be the preferred spelling. Unless you have a good reason to prefer one of the alternate spellings . . . such as when you’re quoting from an 1880s cookbook that spells it catsup throughout and don’t want to annoy your reader by switching back and forth a lot . . .)

So, there are a lot of catsup recipes in Holloway’s book, beginning on page 508, in a section called “Pickles and Catsups.” Here’s a list of the recipes in that section:

--To Pickle Lemons with the Peel on.
--To Pickle Lemons without the Peel.
--Knickerbocker Pickle [“for beef, mutton and pork”; recipe makes one hundred pounds of pickled meat].
--To Pickle Green Tomatoes.
--To Pickle Red Tomatoes.
--Indian or Yellow Pickle (Mrs. Reynolds’ recipe).
--Mangoes. [Not what you think! It is muskmelons stuffed “with mustard-seed, allspice, horseradish, small onions, etc., and sewed up” and pickled.]
--Mushrooms.
--Onion and Cucumber Pickles.
--To Pickle Gherkins.
--Nasturtiums.
--Pickled Grapes.
--To Pickle Peaches [3 different recipes for these].
--Pickled Peppers.
--Pickled Onions.
--Spanish Onions—Pickled.
--Pickled Plums [2 versions].
--East India Pickle [What the hey? It’s cabbage, onions, horseradish, green peppers, vinegar, mace, cloves, allspice, cinnamon, alum, and salt.]
--English Pickles.
--To Pickle Eggs.
--Universal Pickle.
--A Tennessee Recipe for Tomato Catsup (1) [I think Holloway was from Tennessee; no wonder she lists it first].
--Tomato Catsup (2).
--Tomato Catsup (3) (Mrs. Reynolds’ recipe).
--Tomato Catsup (4) [Yes! Four different recipes for tomato catsup! Glory!].
--Cucumber Catsup.
--Walnut Catsup.
--To Make Curry Powder.

. . . So, are we scared yet, or intrigued? My home-canning skills are pretty minimal, so if I attempted to put up any of these, you should be very afraid. But I think it would nifty if a skilled home-canner explored some of these recipes and used modern (trustworthy) canning materials and techniques to produce some recipes from history.

For fun, and because I’ll be talking more along these lines shortly, here is Holloway’s recipe for Walnut Catsup, found on pages 515–14 of her book. No, there are no paragraph breaks. (Her book was going to be long enough as it was, huh?)

Walnut Catsup.—One hundred walnuts, one handful of salt, one quart of vinegar, one-quarter of an ounce of mace, one-quarter of an ounce of cloves, one-quarter of an ounce of ginger, one-quarter of an ounce of whole black pepper, a small piece of horseradish, twenty shallots, one-quarter of a pound of anchovies, one pint of port wine; procure the walnuts at a time when you can run a pin through them; slightly bruise, and put them into a jar with the salt and vinegar; let them stand eight days, stirring every day; then drain the liquor from them and boil it, with the above ingredients, for about half an hour; it may be strained or not, as preferred, and, if required, a little more vinegar or wine can be added, according to taste. When bottled well, seal the corks.

Poking a pin through the walnut is the way to tell if the nut inside is still soft enough to be pickled and eaten; if the pin can’t penetrate, then the shells have formed too hard inside. Which, truth be told, would be sometime in June for around these parts, if I gauge correctly.

Interesting how she says you can either strain it or leave them whole. Wild, huh?

Well, more on this subject later . . .

FOR MORE INFO, LOOK AT MY POST ON PICKLED WALNUTS.

Ketchup and Vinegar

Sue buys me a subscription to Gourmet Magazine every year. I think it’s an example of how truly good she is to me, but she is always quick to remind me that her own self-interests are at play, too.

And sure, I do get a lot of great recipes and ideas from the magazine (like this keeper: Finnan Haddie Gratin), but I have to admit that the writing and feature articles almost always appeal to me as well as the photography and design. I find myself thinking about the stories and topics long after I’ve read them. I think that’s the first sign of excellence in essay writing—you keep thinking about it long after you’ve read it.

Sure, I can find good things to read all over the place, and I can find all the recipes in the world (-wide-Web) on the Internet. But Gourmet serves it all up to me each month in one sweet package. The way a great chef creates a menu that is nutritious, visually beautiful, with harmonized flavors and balanced textures, Ruth Reichl and her staff really do a wonderful job in putting together a satisfying publication.

So with that little introduction—now that you know I’m an avid Gourmet reader—I want to talk to you about ketchup, in part because Gourmet itself brought it up this month (June 2009, page 11). There’s also a Web page about it.

Now, ketchup is an Opulent Opossum topic for sure, because it’s utterly common, it’s undersung, it’s great (come on, it is—read the online article above) . . . and it’s made with vinegar.

Yes, I keep running into vinegar in my recipes—the old-timey ones, the German-heritage ones. Vinegar used to be a necessary cooking ingredient because of its preservative values as well as its ability to add what people used to call “zip.”

Zip! Remember that term? If you’re old enough, you can remember the days in the Midwest before Taco Bell came to town and people started using chili peppers to add pizzazz to their foods. We used to add vinegar and pickles to things to give them a culinary thrill. Ketchup is a member of that tribe—one member that has endured, along with cucumber pickles of various types. (Look at your fast-food hamburger.)

I mean, think about it: the same company makes America’s number-one ketchup as well as the most popular vinegars. When I go to buy ketchup or my apple cider vinegar, I always get Heinz. Chances are, you do, too.

Ketchups were a way of preserving the bounty of the summer garden during the drab winter months. We still laugh at Ronald Reagan’s declaring ketchup a “vegetable,” but when you think about it, despite the added sugars in processed ketchups, at heart ketchup is cooked, strained, pickled, canned tomatoes—the richness of a summer garden preserved in glass bottles. Can’t blame ol’ Reagan for thinking in nineteenth-century terms, as he was such a relic himself. (Sorry, I couldn’t stand him. His head-in-the-sand AIDS policy was the kicker for me. But I digress.)

Sue made an interesting observation once: French fries are good by themselves, but once you’ve started dipping them in ketchup, you can’t go back to eating them just plain. You have to keep dipping them in ketchup until they’re gone.

So it was with interest that I read Adam Brent Houghtaling’s Web post on the Gourmet site, introduced in the magazine thus: “Could the future of ketchup be in its past? Our archives are filled with apple, grape, and mushroom versions. Get the recipes and find out how the country’s best chefs are using this ubiquitous sauce at gourmet.com/go/ketchup.”

What I find most intriguing is how one type of ketchup—tomato; Heinz—has come to be ubiquitous, while there were so many different types of ketchup adding zip to the nation’s dishes in the 1800s: Grape ketchup? Mushroom ketchup? . . . Walnut ketchup? How fascinating.

I’ll stop for now with this post, but I encourage you to look at Houghtaling’s essay and reflect a bit on how our forebears in the kitchen relied on vinegar as a necessary cooking item (and not just for salad dressings), and how their families grooved on the zippiness of so many pickled and ketchupped concoctions.

Schnittled Carrots

There are certain words that apparently only our family uses. I grew up with these words, thinking they were part of the American lexicon. I learned words like “schmutzy,” “shittle” (schüttel), and Knisperhexie. And “schnittle.”

In German, schnitt means “cut,” so in the pidgin German used by my family, we have brought the word into our English, attaching English plural and conjugational endings like -s and -ed and -ing. It can be a verb and it be can a noun. Here are some examples.

“After the second graders had created their paper snowflakes, the floor was covered with schnittles of paper.”

“I’m busy schnittling up the potatoes to fry them; I’ll schnittle the veggies for the salad in a minute.”

You can see how schnittle comes in handy if you’re cooking. It implies cutting up into little pieces, and not just something you can sever with one whack. Schnittle is kind of like “whittle” or “snip.” Julienning comes close, too; matchsticks, chips, slivers . . . schnittles.

So here is another recipe for you. It’s taken me a ridiculously long time to understand how to make it, but I’m so pleased now that I have it (mostly) figured out. I think I heard my dad say it was one of the first recipes my Grandma S learned to make, taught to her by her German-born mother, Wilhelmine Thomas. And yeah, I’m still working on it, but here it is.

Schnittled Carrots

Peel carrots and cut into matchsticks; splinters. I don’t think grating will work, unless you have an exceptionally coarse grater. Do up about three cups.

Put these in a saucepan with a little water. Bring to a boil, cover, and let simmer until almost done. Cook off most of the water if you can. (I’m still figuring this out. Maybe steaming would be better. At any rate, you don’t want a lot of cooking water, but neither do you want to overcook the carrots.) (I think Grandma often used an electric skillet, with a lid, for this.)

Gently stir in the following, and serve.

• 2 tbsp. butter or margarine
• 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar. (Remember what I told you about apple cider vinegar: there is no substitute when we’re talking about “Grandma recipes”)
• 1 1/2 tsp. flour
• 1/4 c. packed brown sugar (or maybe a little less)
• salt and pepper to taste

The carrots should turn out kind of sweet-and-sour glazed.

Another note: This recipe is remarkably similar to what we do with red cabbage around here (grate cabbage, cook or steam in a small amount of water, add sliced apples if you want, then add a dressing that’s almost identical to this).

On the face of it, this would seem a very ho-hum kind of dish, but like I said yesterday, it’s one of those dishes that acts like a time machine for me. It’s “comfort food” of the first order.

Wilted Lettuce Salad

Y’all, I’ve been too busy today finishing up the flower bed cleanup to think of anything substantial to write. So here is our first recipe. I think it’s fitting, because in early springtime, I start thinking about planting lettuce, which is always the first thing to harvest (along with radishes of course). This is the perfect dressing for your first harvest of leaf lettuce.

This is the standard salad we used to have at my Grandma Renner’s back when I was a goofy kid in the seventies. This is what she made for her family during the Depression. This is how people dressed their salads before you could just go to the store and buy ranch or thousand island or Catalina or green goddess.

When I was a kid, thousand island dressing was what we had at home. But we always had this at Grandma’s. It always tasted weird to me, but you know what? I liked it okay then, and I love it today.

The biggest requirement is: Use fresh, leafy salad greens, such as green leaf lettuce that you picked this morning. Please don’t use iceberg; it won’t wilt right, and its flavor is all wrong. So: green or red leaf lettuce, or possibly buttercrunch or Bibb.

This is so simple. Step one is to rinse and dry the leaf lettuce and tear it into pieces. Put it in a serving bowl. Then make the dressing by heating together the following:

• 1/3 c. vinegar (by this we mean apple cider vinegar—all “Grandma recipes” use apple cider vinegar: you think she was goin’ out and buyin’ balsamic or red wine vinegar in Jeff City in 1936?)
• 1/3 c. sugar
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• couple dashes of pepper
• 1/2 tbsp. bacon grease

That’s right, bacon grease. Grandma kept a jar of it on her kitchen counter. She had bacon every morning (and struggled with high cholesterol and yet lived to be nearly 101), and she saved her drippings. I’m only now beginning to appreciate that. (I keep my little vial of drippings in the fridge.) In this recipe, you must use bacon grease. Don’t bother with it if you’re thinking about using something else. Don’t invite me over to have any, if you’re making it with olive oil. I got nothing against olive oil, but in this recipe, it’s gotta be bacon grease.

So you have your dressing all warmed up in a little saucepan, and then you drizzle that right over the lettuce. Then, serve it immediately (before it gets too wilted). I think you’ll agree this is really good. (And you won’t need any bacon bits, either.)