Another Reason I Love Old Cookbooks

Oh, I do love me some old cookbooks. As in used cookbooks. As in well-used cookbooks. You know the type. The ones that open naturally to certain pages, because those were the favorite recipes. The ones that have stains and spatters on them.

Often, old cookbooks have special gifts inside: extra recipes! Sometimes, clipped out of newspapers and magazines. Sometimes, they’re handwritten—either on the pages, or on a separate sheet and stuck within the leaves of the book. Sometimes, they’re even typed.

This cookbook came from an acquaintance of mine—an elderly friend and work associate who, after her husband passed away, gave up independent living and had to downsize. They loved books! She was closer friends with my dad, and she offered this cookbook to him, and he gave it to me.

Did you know I didn’t yet have a copy of The Joy of Cooking? Anyway, I have one now—it’s the 1962 edition. Full of good information.

Anyway, here’s the part I wanted to share with you: It seems that, at some point, my friend and her husband were planning a party—probably more, but at least one—and she tucked candidate recipes into a nice little envelope labeled, logically enough, “Party.” What a surprise! I thought, “Oh, boy, I wonder what’s in here!”

Inside, she kept a trove of snacky-type recipes: a shrimp-and-dressing preparation, a cheese log with California walnuts, cheese and mushroom canapés, ham and cheese roll-ups, drunken meatballs (they’re simmered in a mixture of ketchup and beer; I can just hear her chuckling; the idea must’ve tickled her), shrimp and crab Louis, seviche, and a special pastry crust, for use in quiches, that has Parmesan, cayenne, and dry mustard in it. She'd clipped that one out of the paper using pinking shears.

And finally, the best one of all: a recipe for paté: PATE.

She typed it out herself; but then, apparently after she’d made the recipe, she added the final note. Anyone who’s used an actual typewriter can appreciate how the type wavers drunkenly at the bottom of a slip of paper when you get too far down, as the paper slides around, no longer held by the roller. This adds to the hilarity.

Here it is. Read and enjoy.

Then, um, reread the first line.

Then, reread the comment at the bottom. And reread it again:

“This makes much more than anybody would ever want. I make half.”

Of course, you know what happened: she made the recipe as specified—once—and after the party, she and her husband were left with a pound and a half of liverwurst spread they felt they ought to eat, but probably ended up throwing out. (Ew, just the thought: spoiled liverwurst!) . . . Thus, the addendum at the bottom of the recipe. So deadpan: Much more than anybody would ever want.

No, I’m never going to make this recipe—I have better recipes for braunschweiger balls. (But Aunt Becky, where did you get this recipe, and why does it make so much?!)

But if I did make it, I would indeed halve the recipe!

The Personal Recipe Book of Leota Busch

I’ve recently been looking through the personal recipe book of one of Jefferson City’s (and Munichburg’s) notable residents. It belonged to Leota Busch. Leota was the wife of Arthur Busch, and the two ran Busch’s Florist from the early 1940s until his death in 1990. She continued to own and run the florist until 1996, when she sold the business. She kept working, though, doing flower arrangements for another eight years.

Busch’s Florist is just about two blocks away from my house, and it’s still gloriously in business, a true anchor for our neighborhood.



Busch’s is where my dad and his brothers used to buy my grandma flats of pansies for her birthday each March.

If you read Leota Busch’s obituary, you’ll see that she was a pretty neat lady, who lived a long and full life.

She and her husband didn’t have children, however, and when she passed away in 2011, she remembered the Old Munichburg Association in her will. When officers of the Old Munichburg Association met with Mrs. Busch’s bank, they were told that her survivors had declined to take some items that had belonged to Mrs. Busch, and her personal recipe book was one of these items.



I don’t suppose it has any real “value,” in any monetary sense. But then, I’m a collector of old church-ladies cookbooks, and I’m intrigued about anyone’s personal recipe collection.

As I’ve noted before, in prior generations, a lady’s ability to cook was a big part of her “job,” and her recipes reflected her and her family’s tastes. They reflected her triumphs, and they give insights into her creativity, her thought processes, and to some extent, her interactions with her family. It’s almost like a diary. I like reading “between the lines” in recipes. The things not said, because they are so well known, shows areas of special culinary prowess. The recipes splotched and stained with food spills were probably special favorites.



This little recipe book was meticulously prepared. Each recipe was typed (yes, on an old-fashioned manual typewriter!) with an admirable degree of stylistic consistency. She used asterisks as a stylistic way of denoting the ends and beginnings of sections.



It is neatly bound in a quarter-page-size, six-hole looseleaf notebook. There are thumb tabs for the different sections: meat, salad, vegetable, dessert, cake, candy, cookies, and “misc.”



(Yes, there are four entire sections for what amounts to desserts and sweets! Ha ha, take that, you ol’ “food pyramid”! Leota Busch lived to be ninety-nine!)

Anyway, there’s a lot in the recipe book that looks like a vintage church-ladies cookbook. Stuff we’d laugh at today, or cringe at, thinking about cholesterol and sodium and such. There’s a recipe for “Liver Cakes.”

Of course, times and tastes change. As expected, there are plenty of “ethnic” recipes done per mid-twentieth-century, midwestern style, and we’re all familiar with recipes like Leota’s “Spanish Steak,” which is “Spanish” by virtue of its having tomatoes, green and red pepper, onion, and optional “pimentos.”

Likewise, there is the de rigueur midcentury heartland recipe for “Chop-Suey” (from Clara Weber, Leota noted): “Have butcher cut meat into small pieces; put on stove to cook with just a little lard, salt & pepper.” In addition to onions, canned mushrooms, and celery, the recipe also calls for sorghum, a bottle of chop suey sauce, and “1 Can (Chinese) Chop Suey Vegetables.”

And the spellings—well, I shouldn’t talk. I’m an editor, and if it weren’t for the difficulties of writing in our language, I wouldn’t have a job. But I did almost snicker when I saw Leota’s big heading on one page: “Schrimp Salad.” She noted she got the recipe from a Mrs. Kimmel.



But no matter who decided to spell “shrimp” with a “c,” I have to bow to her and say, I can’t blame you, if you lived among German-types all your life!

And who wouldn’t spell it “Orange Sherbert” and “Pineapple Sherbert”? Isn’t that how you say it? (Well, against all reason, that’s how we say it around here!) And we’re not going to laugh at “Angle Food Cake,” because people still make that mistake nowadays, even people who “know better,” because we rely too much on our spell-checkers. And Mrs. Busch was a busy woman!

But I did finally laugh out loud when I saw the following recipe. I haven’t tried it yet, and I certainly wouldn’t serve it to any actual Arabs:




Arabian Stew

6 Pork chops placed in casserole after being seared.
1 slice onion on each chop
1 slice tomato on each,
1 ring green pepper on each,
1 tablespoon rice in pepper ring.
Salt and pepper.
3 cups hot water and bake.

Use raw rice.



Yes! Pork chops! It’s Arabian stew with pork chops! I hope you’re laughing, now, too!

Meanwhile, there are some awesome-looking recipes, too, no matter how they’re spelled or whose ethnicity they stumble over: “Carmel ice cream” must’ve been a favorite, as there are two versions of it.

. . . There was one recipe, though, that I had to try. According to the note at the end of the recipe, it had been given to her by Maryfrances Schwartz. Imagine my surprise, when it registered that that is the maiden name of a woman who was my closest friend my grandparents’ age.



Mrs. Ridgeway—Maryfrances Ridgeway—lived in my Columbia neighborhood when I grew up, and soon after her husband passed away, we became friends.

She owned a large tract of land. She rented the fields to others to grow soybeans, corn, and sorghum. (Or was it millet?) The forested areas were the magical green places of my childhood. The places I would go to think, to explore outside and in.

Her property was basically where the Columbia Menard’s is, and her lake—Lake Ridgeway—was bulldozed and remade into Bass Pro Shop’s “test drive your boat” lake.

Mrs. Ridgeway’s long gone, and I miss being able to ride my bike down the gravel lane to her house and talk to her. We used to talk for hours.

She’d grown up in Jefferson City, here in this Munichburg neighborhood, only a few blocks from where I’m typing this right now. She must’ve been friends with Leota Busch before marrying George Ridgeway and moving to Columbia.

. . . And so I had to make the recipe.

My next post will tell you how it turned out.

Sesame Crunch Bars

When I first started getting interested in cooking, I was mostly interested in health foods, not “retro” recipes, and one of my favorite books of that time is called Uprisings: The Whole Grain Bakers’ Book. I’ve got the “revised edition” of 1990, which was published by the Cooperative Whole Grain Educational Association. This fun book features recipes from eighteen cooperative bakeries across the nation—many, alas, which are now closed.




Some apparently are still in operation, such as Blue Heron Bakery in Olympia, Washington, and Open Harvest Bakery in Lincoln, Nebraska. Hooray for them! And one of my favorites, though not represented in the book, is Small Planet Bakery in Tucson, Arizona (their “vegie bread” is the best!) Most of these kinds of bakeries were started in the 1970s.

Although the book is out of print, a former member of the Uprisings collective in Berkeley has been digitizing portions of it and posting them online, at uprisingsbakersbook.org. For more information, click here.




I encourage you to get a print version of the book, because it’s very fun—all the recipes were written out by hand by members of the collectives and cooperatives supplying the recipes, with lots of cute drawings, too. There is also a lot of good introductory stuff about baking in general, and baking with a variety of whole grains, in particular. Plus, there’s a helpful index to recipes by major ingredients, and recipes separated by dietary characteristics (such as “no eggs or dairy,” “no wheat,” and “low- or no-fat”). This book is a treasure.

The recipes make delicious food you can feel good about eating, and if you have warm memories of eating or working at health food coops, you’ll particularly adore recipes such as Carob Chip Cookies (with tahini and tamari, yes, tamari); Carrot Celery Bread, “Peanut Minus” cookies (“eggless, dairyless, wheatless, but NOT peanut-less!”), 7-Grain Currant Muffins, Ozark Barley Bread, Banana Rice Cupcakes (wheat-free), and the best damn whole-wheat pizza crust you ever had (it’s spiffed up with oregano, cayenne, and basil—yum, yum!).

The recipe I’m sharing with you today is from the section contributed by Uprisings Baking Collective, formerly in Berkeley, California. You can read about that collective online here.

These sesame crunch bars are sweet, but not overly so. They keep well. They’re a terrific snack or light breakfast. They’re a perfect hiking snack! You can alter the flavorings a bit with other nuts, dried fruit, and so on.

Note that in the recipe below, transcribed from the book (page 224), I’m offering some comments and ideas for substitutions (which are in brackets).




Sesame Crunch Bars

Makes about 30 2-inch squares. Use an 8 x 14 inch pan, or similar.
[I use two 9 x 13 inch pans and spread dough to about 1/2 inch high, which yields 48 bars, each about 2 1/2 x 2 inches.]

• 5/8 cup peanut butter
• 1 1/4 cups honey
• 2 tsp. vanilla
• 1 1/4 cups oats [rolled is what I use, as in Quaker]
• 1 1/4 cups cashews [I don’t care much for cashews, so I use raisins or chopped dried apricots]
• 1 cup wheat germ [I was getting low, so I substituted some crushed breakfast cereal flakes]
• 6 1/4 cups sesame seeds [rather hard to find; I finally scored these at an international/ethnic grocery; by the way, sesames can get rancid quickly, so when buying, check for freshness, and refrigerate or freeze them when you get home]
• 5/8 cup sunflower seeds [raw]

Cream together peanut butter, honey, and vanilla [it helps if you heat the honey and peanut butter; heating softens it up and makes it easier to stir]. Add the rest of the ingredients [in a big bowl!] and mix well with your hands—it works best and saves on dishes [if you heated the goo part, you can stir it with a spoon]. With wet hands or rolling pin, flatten mixture to uniform thickness on oiled pan. Dough will be stiff—be patient. Bake at 350 degrees for about 25 minutes [my oven runs hot and my bars are thinner, so I go for about half this time; watch it; if it gets too toasty and tan, it will be hard; and if you use raisins, don’t let them scorch]. Let cool [then cut into bars and store in a closed container, separated with waxed paper].

The Hearthstone’s Pickled Grapes: “Especially Nice for the Tea-Table”

Today I’m returning to a very old book we picked up at a used bookstore: The Hearthstone; or, Life at Home: A Household Manual [etc., etc.], by Laura C. Holloway (Philadelphia: Bradley, Garretson, 1883, yes, 1883).




Among the “Cookery Recipes” in this volume are several formulas for various types of pickles. Obviously, in the 1880s, if you wanted to have anything remotely resembling a fruit or vegetable in the wintertime (not counting potatoes, cabbage, and apples), you needed to preserve it before it went “south.”

I try to imagine what winter dinners were like before refrigeration, advanced greenhouses, and rapid transcontinental shipping: Meat ’n potatoes ’n cabbage. Potatoes ’n cabbage ’n meat. Cabbage ’n meat ’n potatoes . . .

So when Mom would have you go to the basement and fetch up a jar of pickled peaches, zesty gherkins, or zippy tomato catsup, it would turn the mundane into something you could, well, relish.

I encourage you to check out the recipes in this book. You can find digital copies of it online. Some of its pickle recipes today seem a tad unusual—including pickled nasturtiums, pickled damsons, cucumber catsup, and walnut catsup!

But the one we’re talking about today is on page 511: “Pickled grapes.” With my glorious abundance of Concords, I have plenty to experiment with. So I tried it this week!

No, it’s not as bad as you think—it’s not like dill or sour pickles. It’s more along the lines of “pickled peaches”—flavored with cloves and cinnamon, and brightened with apple cider vinegar—except with grapes, it acquires the texture of a sauce or jelly. It makes a great relish for any kind of dry meat that harmonizes with sweet flavors. It would be great on turkey, I think, or with pork chops or white-meat chicken.

Hey, maybe you could make this for Thanksgiving! The deep purple hue and the silky texture would be an interesting alternative to the usual ol’ cranberry-stuff you usually serve.

And it would be good on biscuits, and all of that kind of stuff, too. —Oatmeal? Why not!

And it’s good on crackers!




Here’s the recipe. I quartered it (those quantities and my notes appear after the official, full recipe).

Be careful not to overcook it; this recipe relies on the natural pectin in the grapes. If your grapes don’t quite “jelly,” don’t sweat it. It’s just fine when it’s on the runny side.

Here we go, verbatim from the book:

Pickled Grapes.—Seven pounds of ripe grapes, picked from the stems, and boiled until the skins will pass through a colander; three and a-half pounds of sugar, one-half pint of vinegar, one ounce each of whole cloves, cinnamon and allspice; all boiled together until it jellies. Put in glasses, and turn out in form. These pickles are especially nice for the tea-table.

But now, here’s how I did it: I processed the grapes in my usual way: I measured the cupfuls of grapes first; slipped off and reserved the skins; boiled the insides until soft and passed them through a food mill to deseed them. To ensure a fairly smooth texture, I chopped up the skins before reuniting them with the grape “guts.” Then I proceeded as the recipe says, cooking all ingredients together. I didn’t can (preserve) it; I’m just keeping it in the fridge. Depending on how much you cook it down, the quartered version will make no more than a few pints. Mine made about a pint and a half.

Here are the quantities for my quartered version:

3 cups Concord grapes (about 1.75 lbs.), processed as above to remove seeds
2 cups sugar
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
1 tsp. cloves (I used powdered)
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. allspice




I wish I could give you some to try, because I think it's delicious. But maybe that's "just me." So when you try this recipe, make sure you write and tell me what you think!

Addendum: A few days after posting this, I found a similar recipe in another old cookbook, and it was recommended specifically as a relish for venison. Click here for my post on it.

Wild Cooking!

There’s a new blog for all my chow-lovin’ friends to look at! “Woods to Food” follows on the trail blazed by blogger Julie Powell in her famous “Julie/Julia Project,” and other cookbook-guided blogs like “Nose to Tail at Home,” “French Laundry at Home,” and the sadly disappeared “Georgia on My Thighs.” (That last one was going to be based on a Paula Deen cookbook; wonder what happened to it?)

But in “Woods to Food,” bloggers Fred and Ann Koenig aren’t grabbing headlines by challenging themselves to cook their way through some big TV-celebrity chef’s national best-selling cookbook—instead, they’re going native, going local, and that’s why their project is so very, very cool!

They’re not just going to talk about making the recipes; they will also tell the stories of hunting, fishing, and foraging the comestibles their dinner comprises!

The cookbook upon which this blog is based is a new (2011) publication by the Missouri Department of Conservation, Cooking Wild in Missouri: Savoring the Show-Me State’s Game, Fish, Nuts, Fruits, and Mushrooms, by Bernadette Dryden. Dryden recently retired from the publications branch of the MDC, and for years she’s been a leader of the local “Katy Trail” chapter of Slow Foods, not to mention a true Queen of the Kitchen.

(Look, I’m not putting in all these hyperlinks for my health: Check them out!)




Have you been holed up in a little cabin for several months, and the letter carrier’s not delivering your free copies of the Missouri Conservationist? Well, let me fill you in. Cooking Wild is a wild foods cookbook for twenty-first-century America. Yep, it uses foods that were hunted, hooked, or plucked from our own Missouri landscapes, but it approaches them with a global palate and an eclectic pantry. You might need to head to St. Louis for some of the ingredients, even if you only need to go as far as the back forty for the entrées themselves.

Here are some of the recipes, to give you an idea of the level of “foodiness” we’re talking about:

• Moroccan spice-braised venison
• Pawpaw frozen yogurt gelato
• Cioppino, made with bluegill and largemouth bass, shrimp and mussels, and, optional, crayfish (some of this seafood isn’t quite local!)
• Bass-and-crappie spring rolls
• Papassinos, made using pecans or hickory nuts (What are papassinos? Well, get the book and find out!)

There are plenty of less “exotic” dishes, such as “wild turkey dropped-biscuit pie,” but throughout, the emphasis is on an elevated, sophisticated cuisine—which of course is incredibly popular right now.

Now, when you go to buy yourself a copy of Cooking Wild in Missouri, you might find yourself confronted with a choice, because there’s an excellent chance that right there next to Dryden’s two-hundred-page, full-color volume will be a humble copy of Cy Littlebee’s Guide to Cooking Fish and Game. Written by Werner O. Nagel, who was also a longtime MDC employee, this cookbook, like Dryden’s, is published by the Missouri Department of Conservation. (Actually, it was the “Missouri Conservation Commission” back in 1960 when it first came out—it’s now in its seventeenth printing!)




Nagel’s book has certainly stood the test of time. “Cy Littlebee” isn’t exactly an “author”; he was a character Nagel invented to represent an ordinary, down-home, rural Missourian, and the Conservationist used to carry his entertaining columns as a regular feature. You don’t see much written these days in Ozark vernacular (as opposed to garden-variety “Suth’un”), so it’s a treat to bathe in the grammar and cadences of old-time Missouri dialect.

“Cy” apparently was well-known in his day, but I suppose Missourians have mostly forgotten him now. (Pity.)

Here is a sample of the writing style, from the section on cooking rabbit: “You take a state where from four to six million rabbits is eat in a year, not counting tame rabbits nor any shipped in, and all you can figger is that either a lot of folks likes some rabbit, or some folks like lots of rabbit” (p. 30). (I’ll bet Nagel and Vance Randolph knew a lot of the same people!)

The Littlebee cookbook represents a base camp for cooking wild foods; its recipes, hardly changed since settler days, were certainly passed down from farmwife to daughter to granddaughter, from hunter to son to grandson. This small volume presents many recipes by women (yeah, mostly women) who sent in their best wild-game dishes. These are “good- ol’” recipes, like “baked rabbit,” “fried groundhog,” and that venerable southern favorite, “opossum and sweet potatoes.” Naturally there are a lot of venison recipes, but there’s even a recipe for skunk!

So which book do you get? Do you get the one that represents a rich tradition, our true, elemental, cultural roots, the simple cuisine endemic to our nation and our region? Or do you get the exciting, fresh, globally inspired cookbook that “figgers” the sky’s the limit? Decisions, decisions!

Well, fortunately, the answer is simple: You buy both! Dryden’s volume sells for $15, and Nagel’s little chestnut is just $3.50 a copy. So you can get both for under twenty bucks.

And then, when you have the other kind of “bucks,” then you’ll know how to fix them!

Meanwhile, let’s stay tuned to the Koenigs’ cooking adventure!

Another Egg Recipe: From My Favorite “Cookbook”

Are you getting tired of egg recipes yet? I hope not, because I have one more for you. (Look, I’m trying to be timely, what with Easter coming up!) But this will be all for a while, since I ran out of eggs. (Hey, Rhoda . . . when can I pick up some more?)

The following is a very simple idea, but it illustrates one of my favorite cookbooks. I’ve raved about this book before, and I’ll probably rave to you about it again!

It’s not really a recipe book so much as it is an idea book—a gentle introduction for how to go about improvisational cooking—in a healthy and vegetarian way. If you’re not vegetarian, you can still get a lot out of this book, because it glorifies vegetables, grains, eggs, and dairy products. It’s fun; it gets your creative juices going. And it’s simple; it proves that awesome cooking doesn’t have to be complex.

It’s an excellent book for a young person just learning to do his or her own cooking. (Hmm: think graduation gift!)

The book is Tassajara Cooking, by Edward Espe Brown. When it was originally published in 1973, Brown was the cook at the Berkeley Zen Center in California. Now he’s an internationally renown chef and cookbook author.

Here’s a link for purchasing a copy. Seriously—I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It opened doors for me; it gave me permission to play around in the kitchen, to “visualize” flavor combinations. It gave me basic guidelines that I still use today.




Since I’ve been talking about eggs, and a few recipes I’ve shared have been rather, um, rich, here’s one that you can feel pretty doggone good about. It’s from the “greens” chapter, and it appears on pages 68–69 of the 1973 edition. It follows such unusual and fun-sounding creations as “Green, Orange & Mushroom,” “Spinach Goes Bananas with Sesame,” and “Spinach Could Also Go Apricot”!

Greens Get Egged On

The egg can appear or disappear, but in any case the greens are meaty.


greens – oil – salt, pepper – eggs

Sauté-steam the greens until they’re nearly done. Stir in some beaten egg or eggs. With a few eggs and lots of stirring, the eggs will blend in much like a seasoning. With more eggs and less stirring, the effect will be more omelette-like. A few teaspoons of soy sauce can go in with the eggs. If you like onions, start by sautéing the yellow kind, or sprinkle on some chopped green onion as garnish.

Pretty easy, huh? Go try it! With a handful of strawberries and a piece of bread, with or without Tabasco or salsa, it would make an awesome lunch!

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.

Hang On to Your Stomach—It’s Tomato Aspic!

I bet you’re thinking I’ve lost it now!

Well, I haven’t. I had to try it—yes, “it”—the one dish that has come to signify, more than any other, the culinary atrocities of the twentieth century—the ultimate in savory gelatin recipes: Tomato aspic.

Haven’t you been curious? I certainly was. I’d never had aspic before!

Of course there are a ton of recipes; this one looked pretty good.

The basic idea is something like “V-8 Jell-O.” Or you could say it’s like a Jell-O shot inspired by a bloody Mary, minus the vodka. In the case of this recipe, it’s not made with Jell-O, however—no fruit or sweet flavor. It’s made with plain powdered gelatin.




Some tomato aspic recipes don’t use any creamy ingredients in the gelatin construction itself, and these look something like solidified tomato juice. (If you can go by the pictures in old cookbooks, anyway.) Tomato aspic is considered a “salad,” just as potato salad is considered a “salad.”

The noncreamy recipes usually call for you to serve the tomato aspic with mayonnaise as an accompaniment, as the “dressing” to this “salad.” I tried this technique earlier, when I made that cucumber-lime-Jell-O salad, and I found it pretty hard to choke down. I’m not that big a fan of mayo!

But this recipe includes the “dressing” in the “salad.”

Have you ever stirred together your Pace picante sauce and some sour cream? Or if not sour cream, cottage cheese? I know, I know—it’s not exactly haute cuisine, but it is great with tortilla chips when you’re doing the couch potato/television thing. Or the graduate-school thing. Okay: the salsa/sour cream combo is a lot like this aspic—in a word, delicious.

So this is a vintage recipe from the thirties; I am quoting it from pp. 28–29 of Betty Crocker’s $25,000 Recipe Set: Featuring Recipes from World Famous Chefs for Foods That Enchant Men (Paris: Société des Cuisiniers Internationaux and the Gold Medal Home Service Department, 1933).

Without further ado . . .





Chilled Tomato Salad

3 cups canned tomatoes [I used a 28 oz. can of diced tomatoes]
3 tbsp. sugar [I used a tad less—the idea is to cut the acidity of the tomatoes]
2 tbsp. onion juice [I used grated onion]
2 tsp. salt
Dash of pepper
2 tbsp. gelatin [I used Knox]
1/3 cup cold water
1/2 cup chopped cucumber
1/2 cup chopped celery
1/2 cup chopped green pepper
1 tbsp. grated horseradish [I used Yoder’s prepared]
1 cup mayonnaise
1/2 cup whipping cream

Method—1. Cook tomatoes with the seasonings 10 minutes. 2. Soak gelatin in cold water and dissolve in hot tomato mixture. 3. Cool and add vegetables chopped rather finely. 4. Whip cream until stiff; blend with mayonnaise and then blend with tomato and vegetable mixture. 5. Pour into lightly oiled ring mold, or individual molds, and chill. 6. Unmold the salad onto crisp lettuce and garnish with pimiento. Amount—Serves 12. Note—The dressing is in the salad. For a Valentine Salad, it can be chilled in heart shape mold and garnished with pimiento hearts.




Here’s how I chopped the veggies: I peeled the cukes and quartered them lengthwise. Then I chopped them pretty thinly, so each piece was one quarter of a thin round. The celery was cut lengthwise, then sliced thinly against the grain, so that no piece was wider than about a half inch. I also sliced the green bell pepper into fairly thin pieces.

Sue’s mom gave us some wonderfully dainty old individual Jell-O molds, and the aspic unmolded well (be sure to use all the unmolding techniques that fifties housewives learned in their home ec classes: apply a thin coat of vegetable oil in the mold before filling; then to release the Jell-O, dip the metal part in hot water for a few seconds, then gently wiggle the edges free with your fingertips, and finally release the suction with a knife). (There are lots of places to learn the secrets of unmolding Jell-O perfectly.)

Date Nut Bars: A Christmas Classic from “Ann Pillsbury”

A few posts ago I told you about Sue’s mom’s Christmas cookies. Just a day after I posted it, the postman brought us a box containing . . . Sue’s mom’s Christmas cookies!

Oh, joy!

Here’s the first one we chomped: Date Nut Bars!

They’re cakey and chewy and a little crumbly. Not too sweet. And they look great, too.

They’re ex-cel-lent with coffee and tea!!! (Three exclamation points = Big emphasis!)

Mrs. F. says to double this for a 10×15 inch pan, or a 9×12. And yes, you’ll want to make plenty.

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Date Nut Bars

“Developed by Ann Pillsbury.”

“Easy and quick to make! Chewy and moist to eat!”

“Makes 2 dozen.”

Bake at 350 degrees for 25–30 minutes.

Sift together into a large bowl:

3/4 c. sifted Pillsbury’s Best Enriched Flour*
1/2 t. double-acting baking powder
1/2 t. salt

Add:

1 c. firmly packed brown sugar; mix well.

Blend in, and mix thoroughly:

2 well-beaten eggs
2 T melted butter

Stir in:

1 c. walnuts or pecans, chopped [Mrs. F. uses pecans!]
1 c. dates, cut in small pieces

Spread in well-greased 11×7 or 9×9 inch pan.

Bake in moderate oven (350 degrees) 25–30 minutes. While warm, cut into bars. If desired, roll in confectioners’ sugar before serving.


* “If you use Pillsbury’s Best Enriched Self-Rising Flour (sold in parts of the South), omit baking powder and salt.”

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A Few Notes

Mrs. Ferber got the recipe from a vintage Pillsbury cookie cookbook from the fifties: Pillsbury’s Best Butter Cookie Cookbook, volume 2. Hers is a well-loved and well-used cookbook! You can find copies of the publication for sale online.

Originally this cookbook was only 20 cents a copy, but now it and volume 3 of the same book are selling for $10–13 for a decent copy. (Hey, Pillsbury! Maybe it’s time to think about a special vintage-reprint edition, with all the same cool artwork, typesetting, and recipes, just modified slightly where your products have changed?) (I mean, look what Better Homes and Gardens recently did—they’re offering a glorious facsimile edition of their 1950 Picture Cookbook! What a cool thing, huh?)

Not thinking I was ever going to quote it for anything but my own use, I didn’t copy the recipe word-for-word. So Capital “T” means tablespoon; lowercase “t” means teaspoon. The original had that kinda stuff spelled out. I did copy the important points of the recipe. It’s from p. 36.

By the way, I’m pretty sure that “Ann Pillsbury” is a myth, like Betty Crocker, Aunt Jemima, and Mrs. Butterworth. (Duncan Hines, however, was indeed a real person!)

Finally, my blog-formatting skills don’t allow me to reproduce the unique and helpful two-column typesetting pioneered in the original publication. If you can find a copy, you’ll see it’s pretty neat.

Grape Crumble Cake

Here’s what I finally did with those grapes I processed. (Remember that earlier post?) I didn’t have enough grapes for a pie, so I decided to “wing it” and adapt a recipe from Dr. Oetker’s book of German baking. (See “Books . . .” at the bottom of this post.)




Dr. Oetker, the company, is the German equivalent of Betty Crocker or Duncan Hines—a manufacturer of packaged baking and pudding mixes, which you can easily find at international groceries. There was a real guy behind the name: Dr. August Oetker developed and sold baking powder in the late 1800s, and it kinda grew from there. His descendants still run the now-international company.

So there’s this cookbook, too—Dr. Oetker’s German Baking Today—whose recipes are all from scratch, with good descriptions and photos of technique. Which I for one need.

The following is adapted from Dr. Oetker’s “Cherry Crumble Cake,” on pages 88–90 of the book. Don’t be put off by all my text—it’s not a difficult recipe. I don’t know how much of a professional baker you are, but I’m intimidated by “pastry” and always appreciate such explanation.





Grape Crumble Cake

You will need a springform pan for this.

First, process about 2 cups of Concord grapes (see my earlier post for pictures): Pluck and measure grapes, slip skin from each grape, reserving skins and putting grape-innards into a small saucepan. Simmer the innards until the tissues start breaking down and seeds start coming loose. The use a food mill or sieve to strain seeds out of the pulp. Recombine the innards with the skins in the saucepan; throw away the seeds.

Next, make the dough for the crust; it will need to chill in the fridge for half an hour, giving you more time to mess with your grapes and the crumble topping.

To make the dough for crust, start with:

1 1/3 c. flour
1 pinch baking powder

Sift together the above into a mixing bowl; then add the following:

1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tsp. vanilla dissolved in a tablespoon of sugar
1 pinch salt
1 egg
3/4 stick butter, somewhat softened

Combine with a pastry cutter until a dough is formed; shape into a ball, wrap in plastic wrap, and put into the fridge for half an hour.

While the crust dough chills, preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Finish preparing the grapes. To the processed grapes in the saucepan, add the following:

2/3 c. sugar
3 tablespoons cornstarch (dissolved in a little grape juice or water first)
dash salt
dash nutmeg
1 tablespoon of lemon juice

Heat slowly to boiling, then simmer a few minutes until thickened. Turn off heat; set aside.

Prepare crumb crust from the following:

1 1/3 c. flour (sifted as above)
1/2 c. sugar
1 tsp. vanilla dissolved in 1 tablespoon of sugar
3/4 stick of butter, slightly softened.

Mix together with a pastry cutter until desired crumb texture is achieved. Set aside or better yet in the fridge.

Assembly:

Grease the springform pan and take it apart. Take the dough-for-the-crust out of the fridge and roll out like a pie crust. Then, using the bottom platform of the springform pan as a stencil, cut out a circle of dough to fit it. Place that dough circle onto the bottom of the greased springform pan, and then put the springform pan back together. Press the edge of the dough so that it lightly seals around the edge. Lightly prick all over with a fork.

Bake just this bottom part for about 10 minutes or until it’s just cooked; remove from the oven, place on a wire rack, and let it cool down some.

Once it’s cooled a bit, roll/shape the rest of the crust dough into a “snake” (or snake segments), and press it lightly against the sides of the springform pan to form an edge, sealing it against the bottom crust. It should go about 3/4 inch up the sides of the pan.

Pour/scrape the grape mixture onto the pastry base and spread evenly. Top with the crumble topping, and place the whole shebang into the oven. Bake for about 20–30 minutes or until done and attractively golden on top.

Let the cake sit in its pan on a wire rack for about 15 minutes. Then run a knife or thin spatula carefully along the edge to unstick it, and carefully remove the ring. Next, run the knife or thin spatula carefully underneath the cake to free it from the springform base, but don’t take it off the base. Finish cooling on a wire rack.

Then, you have to think of something special to have for dinner, to go with this awesome dessert. I leave that part to you—but make it light, fish or salad or something—because this cake is full of buttery goodness!

(If “grape pie” sounds familiar, you might recall another recipe for grape pie I gave you last year; here’s a link to it!)


Books Admired in This Post

Dr. Oetker, German Baking Today (English edition) (Bielefeld, Germany: Dr. Oetker Verlag, 2003).

Cantaloupe Sorbet

Melons—Sweet juiciness in frosty pulp. The high water content of melons makes them the most refreshing of hot-weather fruits, but for the same reason they are not suitable for cooking into sauces or pies. Chill them in the refrigerator, in the creek, or in the shade. Cut out a thick crescent and bite in. Don’t you wish your mouth was bigger?

—Edward Espe Brown, Tassajara Cooking (Boulder: Shambhala, 1973), 115.

Yesterday, my friends, I had occasion to drive out Highway 50 to Sedalia, and as I returned I stopped for provisions at the Dutch Bakery, a Mennonite-owned market in Tipton. My prime objective was to visit the bulk-grains aisle and replenish my stock of oat bran for my famous muffins.

Then I got sidetracked by the carts and carts of ripe local watermelons and cantaloupes. I leaned over and poked my nose down into the cantaloupes—inhaled—ahh, there we go! I had to buy one!

It was large, and there’s only two of us, so I decided to cut up half to eat “plain,” and then to “do something else” with the other half. . . . But what to do?

When I’m looking for interesting things to do with vegetables and fruits, I tend to consult two books: Tassajara Cooking, by Edward Espe Brown, and the much more recent Farmer’s John’s Cookbook, which I also love. (Remember the chilled cucumber-mint soup? What an awesome recipe!)

Both books offer fresh ideas for flavor combinations. Brown, in Tassajara Cooking, suggests the interesting combination of fresh cantaloupe drizzled with lemon juice and topped with a mound of cashew butter (“Cantaloupe Fancies,” p. 115).

I would have never thought of that, but although cashews aren’t my thing, I’ll bet this combination would send some people over the moon.

Farmer John offers recipes for a cantaloupe-and-tomato salad, for instance, and for “Cantaloupe and Cardamom,” which is fresh-cut cantaloupe jazzed up by ground cardamom, some fresh lime juice, a bit of black pepper, and chopped fresh cilantro (p. 214).

Again, I wouldn’t have come up with that combination on my own—but it is indeed very interesting; adding those flavors makes you “interpret” cantaloupe in a whole new way.

I landed on this cantaloupe sorbet recipe from Farmer John’s Cookbook. (I’ve been using the ice cream maker a lot recently!)




Below is essentially the same exact recipe as provided in—note the official, complete bibliographic citation—Farmer John Peterson and Angelic Organics, with Lesley Littlefield Freeman, Farmer John’s Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2006), 214. I have made slight amendments, but quantities and ingredients are the same.

This sorbet is incredibly refreshing, and it lacks the strong, puckery-sweet quality that other sorbets usually have. The cantaloupe (not sugar) is unmistakably the star ingredient, and the ginger adds an addictive je ne sais quoi.

Farmer John’s Cookbook says this recipe serves 4—and it’s light enough you could eat a lot of it at a sitting—but I think it serves a lot more than four people, considering sorbet is usually served in little dabs.

Ginger Melon Sorbet

—approx. 4 cups cantaloupe, cut into cubes (about half of a large cantaloupe)
—1/2 cup sugar
—1 1/2 tbsp. lemon juice
—2 tbsp. grated ginger (see neat trick below!)
—garnish: mint leaves

Add all ingredients into food processor or blender and purée until smooth. Depending on capacity of food processor, you might have to work in batches.

Transfer the mixture to an ice cream maker and freeze according to the manufacturer’s directions.

Now, for your bonus cooking tip, check this out!

Convenient Grated Ginger

When I’m in a rush (which is most of the time), I have tended to avoid recipes calling for fresh-grated ginger because of the preparation ginger requires. And no matter what grater-gadget I used, I always scuffed my knuckles at the end, or else it seemed that I always had a nubbin of ginger in the fridge that I never used up.

But here’s a neat trick to make fresh ginger be more convenient. I learned this from the St. Louis mother-and-daughter “Punjabi Home Cooking” team of Aman and Gurcharan Aulakh. They use ginger a lot!

Peel a large bunch of ginger and chop it up (I recommend slicing it very thinly against the fibers), then pulse in a food processor to grind it up. Add some water if you need to. Transfer it to a zip bag (don't make it very thick), squeeze all the air out, and seal. Freeze. Then, when you need “fresh grated ginger,” it’s always on hand; just break off what you need (that's why it needs to be a rather thin layer, so you can break it). It’s not technically “fresh,” but it’s incredibly close, and the convenience rocks!

(You can also process and freeze fresh garlic, too; this comes in handy when you’re cooking Indian food and must start off nearly every dish with some garlic in the skillet!)