Sweet Potato Pudding

Today, we're trying one of my great-grandmother's recipe clippings! We have made a few handwritten recipes from her binder, but this is our first time making something that she pasted in from the newspaper.

Sweet Potato Pudding 1 tablespoon (or one ¼-oz envelope) powdered gelatin ½ cup water 1 large sweet potato (big enough to yield at least 1 cup when mashed) ½ cup brown sugar 2 tsp cinnamon ⅛ tsp nutmeg ½ tsp salt 1 cup heavy cream ½ cup coarsely ground hazelnuts* Sprinkle the gelatin over the water and set aside. While the gelatin is soaking, cook and peel the sweet potato.† Then firmly pack it into a measuring cup. You want one cup of potato. (Reserve the extra potato for another use, or season to taste for a quick snack.) In a large mixing bowl, lightly break up the hot potato with a fork. Add the gelatin and stir until it is melted. Then mix in the brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt. Insert an immersion blender and blenderize until completely smooth.‡ Let stand to cool and thicken. When the sweet potato mixture is about as thick as whipped cream, whip the cream and fold it in. Pour into gelatin molds or a large serving bowl. Refrigerate or freeze overnight. Serve chilled or frozen, with the nuts sprinkled on top. Store in an airtight container. This will keep in the refrigerator for at least a week, and in the freezer for about as long as any other ice cream. *Use black walnuts if you really want to stick to the original. †In the old days, you would have needed to boil or bake the sweet potato until it was done. We recommend using a microwave instead. Simply prick the potato a few times with a fork or knife, and microwave it until it's soft when you stick a fork in it, about 6 to 8 minutes. ‡You can probably do this in a normal blender or food processor, but I haven't tried it. Or, if things are dire, do it the old-fashioned way: force the sweet potato through a sieve. Then, while the potato is still hot, mix in the gelatin. Source: Undated newspaper clipping (Chicago area), probably 1930s or 1940s

 Whoever wrote this loved the word "pulp."

I really wanted this recipe to be good. For one thing, if you microwave the sweet potato, you can make this in the summer without heating the kitchen. Furthermore, it is egg-free, which is really nice as the price of eggs keeps rising. (And given the recent mass-firings of government scientists, bird flu is probably not going away.)  

The directions tell us to add "moistened gelatin" with no further explanation. I assumed this means to sprinkle it over water and let it sit, as one usually does. 

While our gelatin was moistening and our potato was microwaving, I measured out our brown sugar and spices. I had cynically assumed this recipe would be underspiced, but look at the massive mound of cinnamon on top of the sugar!

I soon discovered that one cup of sweet potato requires a bigger spud than the fist-sized one I bought. But I decided to just go with what we had. I'm sure that anyone else who clipped this recipe did the same.

My mistakes are period-correct.

At this point, we were supposed to mix the still-hot sweet potato and the moistened gelatin. The pulp smelled like steaming dog food.

It's been a long time since I got a hard whiff of hot hoof powder.

I thought this would be a long, laborious recipe, but at this foul-smelling moment I was already halfway done. And so, with strong hopes that the brown sugar and spices would obliterate the gelatin's stink, I dumped them in. I didn't realize how much cinnamon this recipe uses until the smell of it unclogged my nose. 

Because I don't hate myself, I used a potato masher instead of forcing the pulp through a sieve. I am not persnickety about presentation, so I figured that I didn't need perfectionism. But after mixing everything together, my pulp was unpleasantly lumpy. 

I got out an immersion blender and made our pulp smoother than anyone with a sieve could have done. Heck, it was velvety. Unfortunately, it was also the color of a well-splattered bathroom.

Questionable color aside, the blender also whipped the potato unexpectedly well. I wondered if I could have run it long enough to aerate the pulp and make the whipped cream unnecessary.

Before adding the cream, I paused to taste our pudding-in-progress. It wasn't bad, but the flavor lacked something. Also, the cinnamon was unexpectedly harsh. But, I thought, maybe the spices would meld and mellow in the refrigerator overnight. After all, my great-grandmother wouldn't have clipped and saved a bad recipe... right?

I may have let the pulp sit and cool off for too long. Because it had gotten so thick and heavy, I'm not sure if I carefully folded the whipped cream in, or if I did an unusually tedious job of deflating and stirring it. But even if the cream added no fluff at all, it changed our pudding from an ugly brown to a cute orange. And it made the pudding's flavor complete in a way I can't explain.

Some readers may notice that I didn't add any walnuts to the pudding. As we learned with the cranberry-celery salad, nuts turn soggy when they spend the night in gelatin. Also, walnuts are terrible. I've heard that walnuts are delicious when they're fresh off the tree, and I'm willing to keep an open mind. But no one in my area has a walnut tree, so I am restricted to the walnuts on the supermarket shelf. They always taste bitter and slightly rancid, regardless of how far in the future the expiration date is. 

I have a theory that people back then didn't mind the taste of bitter supermarket walnuts because everyone smoked. Even nonsmokers probably smoked a pack a week secondhand. Why else would people freely contaminate everything from gelatin to brownies with walnuts? In all seriousness, I think the more bizarre flavors of older recipes make more sense when pre-seasoned with nicotine.

Walnuts aside, the directions end by saying this is good both chilled and frozen. So, I put half in the refrigerator and froze the rest. We are also told to "place in molds and chill." Since I don't have any, I put a serving of pudding into a measuring cup. I wanted the complete recipe experience-- except the walnuts.

By the next day, the pudding had become astonishingly resilient. It's always strange when your dessert can bounce. When I finally got it to fall out (which involved a lot of spoon-thwacking and hot water), I saw that my gelatin molding skills are quite bad.

In order not to ruin this dessert's appearance with my own ineptitude, I put it in a cute bowl and sprinkled hazelnuts on top. Unlike walnuts, hazelnuts taste good. Also, hazelnuts are called "filberts" in some places, and walnuts don't have such a cute-sounding name (nor do they deserve one).

When you taste this, it is surprisingly hard to tell whether it has sweet potatoes or pumpkin. But I do like how using a sweet potato instead of pumpkin lets us drastically reduce the sugar (and therefore the grocery money) going into dessert.

When I made this again, I decided to heat the cream, add the spices to it, and let it infuse while it cooled. But it turns out that scalded and spiced cream refuses to whip. I don't know if heating the cream denatured something, or if the spices reacted with something in it. Either way, the cream looked like this after ten minutes with an electric mixer. It didn't turn to butter, it didn't whip, it just wasted my time.

There's a science lesson here, but I don't know what it is.

I felt terrible about the waste, but at least everyone reading this will know not to repeat my mistakes. So hopefully my cream didn't go down the drain in vain.

But I don't want to end a good recipe with a mistake. So I'll by close by saying this is really easy to make, and very sating after a light supper. Since you have to refrigerate it overnight anyway, it's perfect for making ahead. And just as the directions say, it freezes really well. If you refrigerate it, it's like a mousse. If you freeze it, it's like ice cream.

Sweet-Sour Cabbage: or, It's almost ready after you've cut the greens

Some of my friends in northern latitudes can't plant anything outside yet, but down here the heat is already setting in. We haven't gotten to the truly miserable temperatures yet, but winter is definitely over. 

With that in mind, we had half a cabbage in the refrigerator, and cooking it in milk doesn't seem as nice without the chilly weather.

Sweet-Sour Cabbage 2 tbsp butter, cooking oil, or fat of choice 4 cups shredded cabbage 2 tart apples, thinly sliced Salt and pepper to taste Boiling water 2 tbsp flour ¼ cup brown sugar 2 tbsp vinegar Melt the fat in a large skillet. Add the cabbage and apples. Season with salt and pepper. Pour in enough boiling water to almost cover everything. Bring to a brisk boil, then cook for about 6 minutes or until tender but slightly crisp, stirring and submerging everything with the spoon so that all is evenly cooked. As the cabbage and apples soften, they will shrink and stay under the water on their own. While the cabbage is cooking, mix the flour and brown sugar in a small bowl, breaking up any flour-lumps. Then stir the vinegar into them. When the cabbage is ready, pour the vinegar mixture into it and quickly stir to prevent it from clumping. Cook for another minute or two, until thickened. Note: If you slice the apples thinly, you don't need to worry about peeling them. The small strips of apple peel will blend right in with the cabbage. Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933

I love the bygone lyricality of a sentence like "Heat fat in spider."

Today's directions don't mention peeling the apples, so I didn't. When this book was printed, the Depression was on. Who in their right mind would pare away their grocery money and throw it in the trash?

When you start a recipe by melting butter in a skillet, you usually add your next ingredients and push them around the pan for a while. But today, we are told to skip the tedious pan-frying business and just boil everything. This recipe economizes on time as well as groceries. 

The directions don't tell us how much water to add, so I poured in enough to almost cover the cabbage. In theory, the cabbage would shrink enough to be immersed without swimming in a watery surplus. 

Of course, someone in Mrs. Mary Martensen's day would have needed to set a pot on the burner next to the skillet (or "spider" as they used to call it), but we at A Book of Cookrye took a leap of extravagance and bought... this!

It can boil a pint of water in like 90 seconds-- and even faster in the summer when the tap water isn't as cold. (For our metric friends, it boils about 5 deciliters in 9-ish decaseconds.) I never realized how much time I spend waiting for water to boil until I no longer had to. 

I theorize that our electric kettle is so overpowered because it comes from Canada. After all, their tap water is ice-cold during much of the year.

Kitchen toys aside, it was soon time to add the sweet and the sour to the cabbage. I like that Mrs. Mary Martensen waits until the end of the cooking time before adding the vinegar. Otherwise it would have boiled away, leaving the kitchen pungent and the cabbage bland.

We are directed to serve this with "potato dumplings," so I found room in the oven for some sweet potato boulettes next to the dessert.

This recipe delivers exactly what the title promises. It is sweet, it is sour, and it is cabbage.This recipe was just sweet enough to be nice without being candied. True, it wasn't a gastronomical thrill on its own. But I think that makes it a very versatile side dish. It's flavorful enough to be good, but also neutral enough to go with nearly anything. 

 You might think the apple skins were unpleasant, but they blended right in with the surrounding cabbage. If you cut your apples as thinly as shown below, you will barely notice the peels.

In a later batch, I used cider vinegar and also added a shake of nutmeg. (Some online friends from Germany taught me that nutmeg and cabbage go together like salt and pepper.) I should have heeded the warning in the book's introduction: "Experimental changes in a good recipe are rarely successful." The cider-vinegar-and-nutmeg version tasted like apple pie with cabbage in it. 

I tried to tell myself that it was like a pie from the time before developed a rigid savory-sweet divide between the main dish and dessert. I also reminded myself that cabbage is cheap but it isn't free. I didn't throw the cabbage/apple pie filling away, but I won't repeat it. 

But I don't want anyone to leave today thinking this is a dud recipe just because I made some ill-advised changes. It's pretty good if you stick to the ingredients that are written. It's especially nice in hot weather because it's not too rich or heavy. And the short cooking time means you barely heat up the kitchen. 

Cheese-Stuffed Mushrooms

To the apparent surprise of Americans who believe conservative podcasters, Canada is a sovereign nation.

Cheddar-Stuffed Mushrooms 6 large portobello mushrooms, or 1 to 1½ pounds baby mushrooms ¼ cup (60 mL) butter, divided ¼ cup (60 mL) chopped roasted salted cashews (or nuts of your choice) 5 or 6 green onions 1 clove garlic (or more if desired), minced 2 tbsp (30 mL) flour 1 cup (250 mL) milk 1 cup shredded cheddar, or cheese of your choice 2 tbsp (30 mL) soy sauce 2 tbsp (30 mL) cooking oil Salt and pepper to taste Heat oven to 425°F or 220°C. Line a baking sheet with foil.* Remove the stems from the mushroom caps and chop. Set aside. Melt half the butter, mix with the chopped nuts. Set aside. Thinly slice the green onions, keeping the white and green parts separated. Set aside the green parts. Melt the remaining butter in a large frying pan over medium heat. Add the whites of the green onions and cook for 4 minutes, or until wilted. Stir in the garlic and chopped mushroom stems. Add salt and pepper to taste. Continue cooking 8-10 minutes, or until mushrooms are cooked and most of their juice has dried. Sprinkle the flour over the pan (if you have one of those miniature sifters, it's perfect for this), stirring rapidly to prevent lumps. While still quickly stirring, add the milk one splash at a time. You can add it more freely as the mixture thins out. After all the milk is added, cook until smooth and thickened, about 2 minutes. Then remove from heat, and immediately stir in the cheese and the green parts of the green onions. Mix the oil and soy sauce. Brush them all over the mushroom caps. Then lay the caps concave side up on the baking sheet. Fill them with the cheese sauce, adding enough to almost come to their rims. Put some of the chopped nuts and butter on top of each. Bake 20-25 minutes, or until mushrooms are cooked and the cheese is golden at the edges. Serve warm. *You don't need to line the pan with foil. But come cleanup time, you'll be glad you did. Adapted from Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

Right after election night, I said that I hoped Trump's dumber policies would inconvenience enough people who have sufficient money to influence him, thus bringing at least a little sanity back into national politics. And already, we are seeing little ripples of dismay in various top-floor offices. I would be bitterly amused if I had a lot of money to throw away on rising prices.

Liquor store employees in Canada have been removing American alcohol from the shelves as shoppers carefully avoid it. It turns out that people get irked when threatened with annexation and whapped with tariffs. Canadians may not be able to vote in US elections, but they can definitely vote with their money.

A friend sent me this picture from a store in Montreal.

 

Sinking sales over the border haven't bred executive desperation yet, but there are already signs of consternation. After all, stores never let freshly-cleared shelf space stay vacant. The president of the Kentucky Distillers' Association took to Twitter and begged Canadians to keep buying bourbon. The distillers' plea came on the same day that the Liquor Control Board of Ontario yanked American alcohol from every single store in the province. Other Canadian provinces have followed suit. 

The Globe and Mail

All of this to say, today we are getting out that magazine I took home from Ottawa's airport, and making a recipe from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario.

Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

Or at least, we are trying to make a recipe from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. As we have learned, a lot of the recipes from their beautifully-photographed magazine seem like they were only tested in commercial kitchens. I suspect the LCBO's recipe developers didn't always think about the realities of cooking in a house that does not have a full complement of restaurant equipment.

On a minor cross-cultural cooking note, I'm surprised the recipe writers used volume instead of weight* when writing the metric measurements of ingredients like shredded cheese and flour. I thought that people in Canada (and everywhere else that isn't the US) had kitchen scales.

We begin the recipe by making puffed wild rice. It was surprisingly hard to find plain wild rice at the store. There were plenty of rice mixes that contained it, but only one store in town could sell us a bag of standalone wild rice.

My puffed wild rice tasted burnt. I threw it out and tried again, watching the pan a lot more carefully. But I got more burnt (yet puffy) wild rice. After two failures, I figured that I needed a better tutorial than a few recipe sentences. But when I looked online, everyone's Instagram-worthy pictures showed rice that was just as burnt as mine was. Maybe everyone has been burning their wild rice and trying to convince themselves that it has a "deliciously nutty flavor" as the recipe headnote claims.

Since my burnt rice looked just like everyone else's, I gamely put it into the spice grinder. After it was as pulverized as it would get, it had a lot of unnerving translucent crystals that looked like Plexiglas sawdust.

With a skeptical yet open mind, I tried some of our allegedly completed "wild rice crunch." It was like eating gravelly dirt. This stuff threatened to sand off my teeth. At this point, I went off-recipe and tried putting it in hot water to soften it-- you know, what people normally do with rice. I thought I could put a dab of the resulting paste into the bottom of each mushroom for that, um, earthy flavor. But the rice was just as gritty as ever. Since I don't like ending every meal with a visit to the dentist, I threw it out. 

Setting aside the failed wild rice, it was time to go nuts.

We're supposed to use pecans, but this isn't the most economical time of the year to purchase them. Instead, I helped myself to a quarter-cup of cashews from the household snack stash. I could have chopped them with a knife, but we already had the spice grinder out from our recent wild rice misadventures.

I mixed the nuts with the melted butter as directed. If the wild rice hadn't been so terrible after getting burnt and pulverized, it would have been here also. But even though the paste looks terrible, but it tasted really good. I could already tell it would be an amazing topping for what was to come.

The next part of the recipe involved the white parts of our green onions and a lot of butter. I don't usually cook green onions, so this felt a bit odd. But it smelled really good. We should have been using a leek, but those were very expensive and only sold in large bunches. I didn't want to commit to two pounds of leeks for the sake of one mushroom recipe.

We are next directed to add the chopped mushroom stems. I like that the recipe uses the whole mushroom instead of telling us to snap off the stems and then discard them.

I usually don't cook mushrooms until dry, but I followed the directions and kept stirring the frying pan until all of the juices had bubbled away. The mushroom reduction in the pan was fantastically good, but I don't know if it was worth it.

The next part of the recipe is easy if you can make a competent white sauce (which, admittedly, is tricky to get right on the first five attempts). After we have made gravy of the pan, it was time to add the cheese. The ingredients list calls for "old cheddar," but I chose to use up the various scraps of cheese lurking in the refrigerator. Besides, "five-cheese sauce" sounds so much better than "cheddar sauce."

 

One taste of the cheese sauce and I forgave the recipe writers for the burnt wild rice.

And so, it was finally time to assemble everything! The recipe calls for large portobello mushrooms, but full-sized ones were extremely costly compared to the little ones. I know nothing about fungiculture, but the price difference suggests that mushrooms are difficult to grow to a large size. So, I figured we would have dainty little stuffed mushrooms instead of big ones. And they looked so cute before we baked them.

I know that this magazine is meant for autumn recipes, but realistically we can only serve these on Halloween. They look like we should call them "zombie pustules."

Things didn't look any better after coming out of the oven.

Before I get too disappointed about their appearance, I should note that the magazine's army of photoshoot professionals couldn't make their mushrooms look any less oozy. Their picture is a lot prettier than what happened in our kitchen, but I think this is an inherently untidy recipe.

Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

Even though our mushrooms looked like I had dropped them onto the floor before serving, I figured there was no way mushrooms and cheese could possibly taste bad. On a related note, I wonder if there's a visual equivalent of an "acquired taste." You know, how you think something looks ugly until spend several years forcefully convincing yourself that you like it.

These were as delicious as they weren't pretty. I know the recipe calls for pecans on top, but I thought the cashews were a lot better. That salty hit on top of the cheese made the mushrooms taste like really good bar food, without having to pay $20 for a beer in some place where the music is as loud as a high school dance. 

And so, once again, a recipe from this magazine didn't go where the directions told us to, but took us somewhere delicious. These mushrooms don't make up for the horror show that currently passes for national politics. But on the (very small) bright side, our northern neighbors who gave us the recipe aren't pretending any of this is normal.

*In the purest, most pedantic sense, it is true that the kilogram is a unit of mass, not a unit of weight. However, unless someone has decided to whip up some stuffed mushrooms while in a vomit comet or somewhere far away from Earth's surface, mass and weight are functionally interchangeable in the kitchen. Anyone wishing to waggle their irate index finger at me is advised to direct their corrective urges at the manufacturers of kitchen scales that switch between pounds (a unit of weight) and kilograms (a unit of mass) at the press of a button.↪

Egg-Free Cake: or, The time is right

Who would have thought that eggs would disappear from grocery stores? 

Eggless Cake ½ c shortening* 1½ c sugar 1 tsp soda ½ tsp cinnamon ½ tsp nutmeg 3 c flour 1 c sour milk or buttermilk 1 c firmly packed raisins Heat oven to 350°. Grease and flour two 8" round cake pans. Chop the raisins, or put them in a cup and have at them with scissors, stirring them as you go so they all get snipped. Cream shortening and sugar. Stir in the cinnamon, nutmeg, and baking soda, mix well. Add the flour one cup at a time, alternating with the milk ½ cup at a time. Mix thoroughly after every addition. Stir in the raisins, being sure to break up any clumps. Bake for about 30 minutes, or until it springs back in the center when lightly pressed. *A lot of recipes from this time use the word shortening to refer to any solid fat. So if you prefer to use margarine or butter, go right ahead. Good Things to Eat, Rufus Estes, 1911

Only a few weeks ago, the very idea of an egg shortage seemed as preposterous as running out of toilet paper did before the pandemic. Eggs were always there, just like the flour and the canned corn. But these days, a movie scene like this hits a little different.

The Stepford Wives, 2004

As eggs get scarcer, we at A Book of Cookrye would like to share a cake recipe that doesn't use any. Of course, we can offer the War Cake, which also contains no dairy. We also have a one-egg cake, for those who want to make a single egg work for an entire birthday-sized layer cake. But today, we are making the eggless cake from Good Things To Eat As Suggested By Rufus. 

Because we already had sour cream in the refrigerator, we used it instead of buttermilk. It made the cake batter almost like cookie dough.  

Of course, having been here before, we know that this recipe will make a perfectly good cake if you put it in a cake pan and then bake it like a normal person would. If you look past the low-quality picture from when last we wrote about it, you can see that baking it as directed results in a very lovely cake.

But today, in order to give the oven a bit of rest, I'm putting the cake batter onto this Soviet waffle iron that landed in the kitchen.

Reminder: The cake batter is egg-free. There's nothing timely about this cookware at all.

I knew the cake would be good because it was the last time I made it. And it looks really cute coming out of a waffle iron. 

I'll admit it makes a better cake than waffles, but that's why the cookbook writer told us to bake it in the oven and not on a waffle iron. 

In closing, this is a great cake for saving eggs. It's old-fashioned and a lot firmer than what we're used to today. But it doesn't taste like you tried to bake with ingredients you didn't have. It is very good on its own.