Mardi Gras Salad: or, Have you ever tried ginger-flavored pineapple?

With the heatwave firmly in place, we at A Book of Cookrye are trying to indulge ourselves without turning on the oven. Even if the power company ran buy-one-get-one-free special on kilowatt-hours, who wants to pull cookies out of the oven when it's 105 degrees out? (That's 41° for our Celsius friends.) So, instead of baking a heavy dessert, we are making a nice, refreshing salad.

Mardi Gras Salad 1 (3-oz) package lemon gelatin 1 cup boiling water 1 (20-oz) can diced pineapple or pineapple tidbits* ½ cup maraschino cherries (or one 10-oz jar) 1 cup ginger ale 4 oz mini marshmallows (or two heaping cups) Whipped cream, if desired Pour the pineapple into a strainer and let it sit for about 30 minutes. If desired, cut the pineapple into smaller pieces afterward. Meanwhile in a large mixing bowl, dissolve the gelatin in the boiling water. Set aside to cool. Cut half of the cherries into quarters. Save the remaining cherries for garnish. Mix the ginger ale, pineapple, and cherries into the gelatin. Refrigerate, stirring occasionally, until it is firm enough that the marshmallows don't float and the fruit don't sink. If you want to speed this up, you can put the bowl in a much larger bowl full of ice water (or pot of ice water, or whatever else is big enough) and stir it for a few minutes. When the salad is firm enough, pour it whatever container or mold you want it to serve it from. (I just let it firm up in the bowl.) Refrigerate overnight. Serve "piled gayly" (the original recipe's words) in small bowls. Garnish each one with whipped cream (if desired) and a cherry. *Be sure you get the correct type of canned pineapple. I accidentally used crushed pineapple the first time and it never set. Note: If you want to very strictly follow the original recipe, pour the salad into a square baking dish to firm up. Cut into squares when set. Serve each portion on lettuce, and top each one with mayonnaise mixed a little pineapple juice (which you saved from draining the pineapple). Garnish each one with a cherry. Or, spoon the salad into "slim stemmed sherbet glasses" and top with whipped cream and a cherry. Chicago newspaper clipping, 1930s-50s Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

...Did you think we would make a lettuce salad in these cyclosporic times? It seems like every week brings more produce recalls.* I know we are all glad to have eliminated all those tedious food regulations and made everything more efficient.

 

This salad comes from my great-grandmother's recipe binder. As a reminder, she was from Chicago and therefore from the Midwest. Therefore, this is not a dessert even though it contains marshmallows.

Before we did anything else, we set our pineapple aside to drain. Doesn't it look like a beautiful mound of blue Hawaii?

 

Next, the recipe calls for diced maraschino cherries. I quartered them because it seemed like the perfect size. Their flavor would probably disappear if we cut them too small.

As a recipe note, I also cut the pineapple into smaller pieces. 

And now, with all the advance preparation out of the way, we got to the foundation of our salad: Lemon Jello! (Or lemon store-brand gelatin because I'm not paying extra for a different logo on the same box.) It smelled like a bowl of knockoff Lucky Charms. Of all the gelatins, Lemon Jello is one of the most frightening ways to begin a salad. You never know whether you're going to get fruit, olives, or Spam in it. (Or, any combination of the three!) Since this recipe starts with pineapple instead of horseradish, I wasn't too worried.

So many salad disasters start with a bowl that looks just like this.

Next, we added our diced cherries and... an entire quarter-pound marshmallows. In the olden days, anyone making this salad would have needed to cut up every last one of the sticky things. But at some point after my great-grandmother clipped this from the newspaper, some blessed and ingenious person (who was probably tired of gummy scissors) invented mini marshmallows. Can you tell that a salad lies half-assembled beneath them?

I don't know if this recipe came out during WWII rationing. But in a ration-coupon sense, it is sugar free.

I tried a spoonful of our uncongealed salad and liked it more than I expected. I've seen a lot of unnerving congealed salads from the Midwest around my great-grandmother's time, but this one is pineapple, lemon, and ginger with a cherry on top. No olives lurk in the ingredients waiting to ruin everything. (We are at some point supposed to get out the mayonnaise, but we'll get there when we get there.)

The recipe next says to "let the mixture cool, stirring occasionally, til it starts to thicken." I first thought this would be like the applesauce-date mallow, where the marshmallows slowly dissolve and exude enough gelatin to firm it up. But after leaving it on the countertop for several hours, it hadn't changed at all. So I think you can just put it right into the refrigerator and stir it every now and then to redistribute everything as the gelatin activates. There's no point in waiting for a thickening that will never come at room temperature.

As the marshmallows half-dissolved and revealed the rest of the salad, it looked different than I expected. I had imagined a transparent, sparkling creation (fit for the daintiest of luncheons) with all the goodies floating in it like decorative beads in a bottle of shower gel. You know, something like this:

Source: The Gallery of Regrettable Food

Instead, we had white marshmallows and red cherries interspersed throughout an nearly-opaque quivering mass.

The pineapple hid surprisingly well. Can you see it in the picture?

As we approached serving time, the note above the recipe says it "may be served in green and gold blocks on crisp lettuce." Maybe the suggestion of "green and gold blocks" means if you were really feeding a crowd, you would have made a second batch with lime Jello. 

Regardless of what color my gelatin blocks may be, crisp lettuce is not happening in this presidential administration. Fortunately for those of us who are learning about cyclosporiasis just in time to avoid it, the directions go on to say that it may be "piled gayly into a slim stemmed sherbet glass and offered ["offered"!] with a cherry and a fluff of whipped cream for a luncheon finale." No biohazardous greens are required. Incidentally, a lot of recipes from that time (salad or otherwise) end with "serve in sherbet glasses." Did more people own sherbet glasses back then?

Moving on from the sherbet glasses I don't own and the lettuce I am not purchasing, I refused to buy mayonnaise for the sole purpose of defiling a salad. But in a happy coincidence, someone else in the house recently wanted cold sandwiches, which brought about a shopping trip. I discreetly encouraged a small jar of mayo to fall into the grocery cart. 

When salad time arrived, I found that mayonnaise flavored as directed with "a little of the drained off pineapple juice" tastes terrible. Nevertheless, I carefully dripped a little bit of our, um, salad dressing onto a spoonful of mardi gras salad (just a spoonful, we didn't want to contaminate a whole serving) to see if everything combined into something unexpectedly good. You never know when two apparently disparate ingredients will be the next mayonnaise and ketchup. The salad with mayonnaise tasted like very questionable thousand island dressing-- the kind that you throw out and then worry that you'll soon be at the doctor's office.

We couldn't even use the mayonnaise to make the salad look cute. Even the smallest half-spoonful of pineapple juice turned it into a dribbly mess. So not only did the mayonnaise ruin the salad, I couldn't even get a picture like the mayonnaise-topped cranberry salad.

That's not whipped cream on top.

If we serve our salad bare and free of mayonnaise, it was a summery delight. The flavor is perfect for this hot weather. The ginger gives it a really nice bite, the pineapple tastes unexpectedly fresh (you almost can't tell it was canned), and the marshmallows add lovely creamy interspersions throughout. Pineapple and ginger go shockingly well together. I don't just mean they don't clash-- they add up to something a lot better than either one by itself. I'm going to have try to find more ways to bring pineapple and ginger together.

___________________
*It is true that there are always new food recalls, every single day, no matter how well things are going in the world. However, you need to be very good at deluding yourself if you want to claim that there hasn't been a huge spike ever since our friendly friends in the White House cut all those annoying pesky regulations.  ↪

Fried Rosettes: or, Adventures in deep-fried collectibles

Sometimes it seems like I'm not unloading junk so much as trading it for junk I actually want.

Rosettes or Timbales 1 cup flour ½ cup whole or evaporated milk ½ cup water 1 teaspoon sugar ¼ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon vanilla 2 eggs Put all ingredients into a mixing bowl and stir gently with a spoon until batter is smooth and as firm as thick cream. If you have to get out a whisk and vigorously beat the lumps away, let the batter stand for an hour before frying. If you used a plastic bowl, transfer the batter to something heat-resistant so you don't accidentally touch the bowl with the hot iron and melt it. You may prefer to pour the batter into a shallow baking pan rather than a bowl- it might make dipping easier. Heat oil to 325°-350°F, or about 160°-190°C. If you don't have a frying thermometer, dip a knife in the oil long enough to heat it. Quickly wipe it dry, then dip the tip into the batter and fry it. The batter should become golden in about 40 seconds. Dip the rosette or timbale iron in the oil long enough to heat it up. Wipe the oil off the bottom of it (just the bottom, not the sides) and dip it in the batter. Be sure the batter doesn't go over the top of the iron. Fry until golden, which should take about 40 seconds. When you lift the rosette out of the frying pan, tip it upside-down to pour out the oil that got in it. Then gently loosen it from the iron onto a plate with paper towels on top. I'm not good enough at making these to give precise directions, but here are the hints from the instruction sheet: If the rosettes have blisters, your eggs or batter were overbeaten. Let it stand for an hour. If patty shells are not crisp, the batter is too thick. Dilute it with more milk. The bottom of patty shells can be made fried more crisp by putting them back into the oil and letting them free-float for a bit. Your oil is too hot if: Your rosettes drop from the iron before being removed from the oil. Your batter falls in a partially-cooked noodly mess, right back into the dipping-bowl as soon as you lift the iron out. Your rosette comes off the iron in the oil.  The rosettes are too soft when cooked. If your rosettes start coming out soggy, your oil has cooled too much. (Every fresh rosette sucks some heat out of it, and not all stove burners can keep up.) Just let the oil rest and reheat for a minute or two. You can reheat these in the oven or in a toaster oven. The temperature doesn't matter too much, so if you're already baking something else you can just put them on a small pan and slide them in the oven. If you're not already baking something else, just set the oven (or toaster oven, no need to heat up the big one) to 350°. US Utilities wafflet iron instruction sheet, 1933

Several years ago, we had to empty out a late relative's apartment in Chicago. (I think I've said this before, but this was how I found out that I had relatives in Chicago.) We have only just now gotten around to going through many of the boxes that we threw in the back of a U-Haul and then stuffed into various closets back home. A lot of things are only interesting because no one threw them out ninety years ago, like handwritten electric bills or toothbrushes from the Jazz Age. But every time we consider just flinging it all in the trash, we find things like my great-grandmother's recipe binder or some amusingly gossipy letters. (Her husband was a mortician. She had occasional opinions on how various decedents were dressed and how their houses looked for the wake.)

Anyway, Mom tacitly encouraged me to help her regain some space in the house by taking anything I either liked or thought might be worth selling. This included a lot of swag from the 1933/1934 Chicago World's Fair. Either they went to the fair repeatedly (it was in their town, after all), or they visited for one tightly-packed day and grabbed absolutely every free flyer they could carry. I don't think that mass-produced flyers count as "irreplaceable family treasures," so online they went (and didn't sell for very much).

Selling world's fair souvenirs involved looking through a lot of already-sold listings for price comparisons, which in turn made Ebay's algorithm think I was absolutely obsessed with the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. Even had I wanted to buy historical clutter, most of the collectibles were too collectibly priced. But it turns out that even the most devout world's fair collectors aren't very interested in old kitchen things. I got these for cheaper than buying on Wish and without the risk of lead poisoning. (Yes, Ebay's algorithm finally got me again.) I thought it'd be fun to try making them.

More of these await in the box.

 Like pizzelles, I had never been particularly interested in making timbales until I decided to buy the implements. But fortunately, this has no underlying post-breakup motivation. I just thought they'd be fun.

You can tell the Depression was on when these were made. They printed DELICIOUS --- INEXPENSIVE --- EASY TO MAKE (emphasis mine) right on the box.

Also, I love how they ended the address with "Chicago, U.S.A." like you're mailing international packages. They really wanted people to buy these and take them home around the world. I wonder if any of these would turn up if you peeped through kitchen cabinets on other continents?

These may look cute and dainty in pictures with no scale reference, but they were surprisingly big. Like, a single one nearly covered the plate. 

Of course, plates don't come in standard sizes. So here it is on a 3x5-inch index card.  

I put our new toys on the kitchen scale. We have a pound of metal.

Because my scale is bilingual, here it is in grams. I want everyone to appreciate the heft, whether you use customary or metric.

Some of the irons were, um, seasoned with cooked-on grease. I found this reassuring. If someone got these to work at some point, in theory I didn't buy commemorative duds.

These particular irons have an exciting feature: you can screw this little flat plate onto the bottom and make little tartlet-shell things instead of flowers or snowflakes. I've seen irons that make those cute little fried wagon-wheels and irons that make tartlet shells, but I've never seen ones that can do both. I wonder if they never worked as well as advertised, and therefore no one bought them?

And if you take the little plate off, it looks like a souvenir medallion.

The other one might look like a random cloud design, but it's actually a take on the logo from the world's fair where it was sold (ie, that planet-looking thing on the box). It even says 1933 if you flip it over. I find that absolutely delightful.

I've never fried rosettes before, but I didn't want to look up instructions online. I'm not as good as I'd like at spotting AI slop. Until the AI bubble pops, it is not safe to mix boiling-hot fat and inhuman garbage. Fortunately, someone selling another set of these irons uploaded pictures of the instruction sheet.

 

After skipping over the more brand-specific directions, cutting out the product placements, and undoing some of the more peculiar ad-agency capitalization, let's see what they have to say:

GENERAL INSTRUCTIONS

Heat mold in your favorite fat at a temperature from 325 to 375 degrees. (ed. note: about 160° - 190°C.)

("Your favorite fat"! I love it.)

If no thermometer is used, dip point of knife in batter, then hold it in hot fat. It should brown in about 40 seconds. Never let fat smoke.

I tried this, and you should know two things: First, heat the bare knife in the fat before dipping. Second, wipe it dry and quickly dip it in batter before it cools off. If you don't wipe off the hot oil, the batter will just slide right off.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, the damn batter did not come off the knife after frying. I had to soak each test-knife (I did this multiple times over the course of frying) overnight.

When molds are hot, remove and lightly wipe bottom on cloth. Dip hot mold into batter but never let batter go over top of mold. Then place back into hot cooking fat and fry until a delicate brown— about 25 to 35 seconds. Wafflets must be fully covered with cooking fat while being cooked.

When patty shell plate is not in use, always keep the small screw in the hole in the bottom of the mold.

Well, keeping the screw in place makes sense. First, you don't have to remember where you mislaid the darn thing. Second, you won't get batter stuck in the screw-hole.

TO MAKE PATTY SHELLS

First screw patty shell plate on THIN side of mold by using point of knife or coin.

First, I am NOT jabbing the end of my good kitchen knife into a flathead screw. Second, did people not have screwdrivers at home in those days? Even my friends who can't use tools have a cheap one lying around from the last time something broke.

Heat up mold and dip into batter about ¾ its depth. Then lower mold gently into hot cooking fat, keeping mold level so patty shell will swell evenly all around as it rises to top of mold. Let mold rest on bottom of pan to cook.

(Never heard of keeping things at the bottom of the pot while you're frying before. I'd have thought they would burn.)

To make "cream puff" cover for patty shell, remove the plate and make a very shallow rosette.

That actually sounds so cute! I wanted to try it as soon as I read it.

All right, now we're getting to the handy hints section:

POINTS TO REMEMBER

If wafflets drop from mold before being removed from utensil, your lard is too hot. If they are too soft when cooked they have been cooked too quickly. If they show blisters your eggs or batter have been beaten too much. If patty shells are not crisp the batter is too thick and must be diluted with milk. The bottom of patty shells can be made fried more crisp by putting them back into hot lard and cooking more while they float on top.

Rosettes or patty shells can reheated by placing in a warm oven.

Fancy colors are obtained by mixing pure vegetable colors into the batter. Rainbow colors are obtained by mixing various colors into different parts of the batter before putting the molds in.

All of that seemed good to know. But I'm not sure how well food coloring would work in these. It tends to look bad when things get cooked brown. Just look at the top of the pink cake I made once. The inside of the cake is as pretty as it was as a batter, but the browned top did not look right. (This is why we cover our festively colored cakes with icing.) If you really wanted to dye these, you would probably want to stick to reds, oranges, and yellows. Your purples or greens would look sickly and terrible when mixed with the golden-brown color of something fried crisp.

If we zoom in on the instruction sheet I didn't buy, we have a recipe. Some of the words are cut off in the picture (understandable since they were trying to sell merchandise rather than document random instruction sheets for posterity), but we can infer what's missing.

If this is the recipe they use for demonstrations, hopefully it's good enough to sell me on not trying to return these.

Well I feel like I am ready to fry some rosettes, don't you? 

The directions tell us to pile all our ingredients into a bowl and "stir gently" with a spoon. (Apparently if you overbeat the batter, these don't fry right.) However, my gentle spoon-nudging only yielded a lumpy mess.

I had to get out a whisk and defy the warnings about blisters on my patty shells. After beating this hard enough that Fanny Cradock would have approved, our batter resembled "thick cream" as specified. It was also thoroughly impregnated with little bubbles, which presumably is why our instruction sheet threatened blisters. Fortunately, the directions have a remedy:  let the batter stand for an hour should an unfortunate whipping occur. Patience would ward off ruination.

While our batter recovered from a severe overbeating, I got everything else ready. After screwing the rosette iron onto the handle, I thought to myself that it looked hopelessly cute. If you were in charge of coming up with props for a kiddie play, some spray paint and glitter would turn this into a really good fairy wand. (Though if children are the same as I remember from that age, you'd have to prevent whoever was playing the good fairy from bashing people with the wand as soon as they felt the heft.)

After getting our batter whipped and letting it recover, it was time to fry. As a safety note, choose a pot that gives your oil plenty of room to boil up. Don't settle for something that is technically deep enough to immerse your rosettes and patty shells. I ended up switching to a saucepan after this proved inadequate.

Just because you have a fire extinguisher in the kitchen doesn't mean you should use it.

I wanted to make the little "patty shells" as the direction sheet calls them. Dipping and frying seemed like a wonderfully fast way to crank out lots of tartlet shells without any pastry fuss. However, our first attempt looked sad and bulbous.

The leaflet says this will "add dignity and pleasure to your parties."

I think I know why no one makes interchangeable rosette/pastry case irons. We had some batter leak past the removable plate, firmly anchoring our patty shell. We couldn't get it off without ripping it. (I would later carefully bend the screw-on plate back into flatness, but that would wait until everything was cooled off and dried.)

I decided that my pastry case (or "patty shell" in company parlance) dreams would have to wait until further practice. Until then, I would try out every single one of the irons in our one-pound bag of goodies, starting with our special 1933 commemorative iron. This one was my favorite because it couldn't have come from anywhere but the world's fair. So it presumably was only available for a few short months of a single year, in one demonstration booth in a single city. (Well, I say that. There's a good chance they sold the surplus in the local office or gave them away as curiosities to customers and employees until they were finally gone.)

My first attempt at making special 1933 crispy things failed before we even made it to the oil. The batter flash-cooked on the iron and fell back into the bowl in hot, slimy noodles.

I referred back to the instruction sheet, which says "If wafflets drop from mold before being removed from utensil, your lard is too hot." So I turned off the burner, let the oil cool a little, and used the intermission to wipe the splats from the countertop.

Our next attempt at making a crispy fried 1933 went better until I tried to get it off the iron. But at least my lard wasn't too hot anymore.

After some more attempts, we actually got one to stay intact! See, it's an art-deco cloud swirl that says 1933, the year of the fair. It is also full of oil since I didn't know you're supposed to tip the iron upside down before getting your cooked creation off of it.

I wondered if they designed a 1934 iron when the fair was extended into the next year.

Dizzy with success and airborne grease, I decided next to try the little iron that makes two at once. If it worked, I thought I'd use it for making things like mini quiches and other things that you hand around on occasions when a fork is too inconvenient. The batter half-slipped off, which simultaneously gave me the sting of failure and the happy chance to read A CENTURY OF PROGRESS- U.S. UTILITIES on my limited-edition kitchen clutter. (Future patty-shell attempts would be more successful.)

At this point, I began to reconsider whether this as an economical way to make treats in the summertime. The box says they're inexpensive, and I had thought that perhaps frying would be cheaper than running the oven. But between sopping up the ongoing mess and wiping the irons before every dip, I think the massive outlay of paper towels offset any energy savings.

With that said, I decided next to try these very small irons. I don't know if they're part of this set or if they just got dumped into the same bag when someone's kitchen was being emptied out.

The starburst/flower one came out really cute, but I think the other two were amorphous fried blobs. If you didn't know these are supposed to be a fish and a butterfly, could you tell?

At this point, I decided that I had gotten marginally better at making these (though not good enough to promise anyone a tray of them), and dared to revisit our first iron. Our next stars came out so pretty I could imagine buying them off a cart in the park. As a side note, I love how you can see the flathead screw in the center.

Despite the massive pileup of failures in the trash can, the successful ones were really good. They were incredibly light and delicate, like fragile floating bits of crispiness. After tasting one, I was ready to brave the mess again (but not tonight!).

Naturally, I had to take one of our more successful mini-shells and fill it with something, just to see if I could. With that in mind, I had made a half-recipe of applesauce-date mallow. It involves nearly no heat (aside from microwaving the applesauce for a bit), which is perfect when we're trying to keep things easy for both the air conditioning and the electric bill. Also, I was right when I speculated that it is a lot better when lightly spiked. Unfortunately, it is the same color as our patty shell.

Just to complete things, I put the matching lid on top.

These make wonderfully crisp shells. It was almost like very thin layers of puff pastry, except fried. I don't know how long you can leave these pre-filled before they get soggy, but it was fantastic. It's like picking the breading off of fried foods, except in really cute shapes.

I'm not going to close with detailed instructions on how to use rosette irons because I wouldn't know. But I will list my first-time mistakes so that you can avoid them:

• Put your batter in a shallow bowl (or a baking pan, I saw some people do that in videos) before you try to dip the iron. It's a bit awkward trying to get in a deep bowl with a piece of metal on a stick.
• Don't use a plastic bowl. Otherwise, your hot iron might melt a hole in it when you dip.
• Have a metal slotted spoon ready in case they fall off the iron and back into the oil. (Obviously, a plastic spoon will melt!)
• Line your work surface for easier cleanup. There will be a big mess. In the old days I would have suggested a thick layer of newspapers. These days I might suggest the brown paper they use to pad out boxes for shipping. Whatever you use, it will be so much easier to just roll up your entire splattery mess and throw it out.

Graham-Coconut Cupcakes: or, Just use a full-size cake pan. They're better.

Now that most of our neighbors have burned off their fireworks stashes, how was everyone's Fourth of July?

Everyone in our neighborhood was slightly more restrained with their fireworks this year than last. We only had a slight haze in the air. Last year, we had an honest-to-God London fog. You could only see about two or three blocks ahead in the smoke. The fireworks were a constant earsplitting crackle well into the night, and the stink of burning metal seeped into the house even though I remembered to shut the door. I know it was a miracle the entire county didn't go up in flames (there's a lot of dry grass at this time of year), but I missed the exuberance this year.

For this fourth of July, I wanted to introduce everyone to the absolute delight that is graham cracker cake. Then I decided to eliminate the hassle of paper plates and plastic forks by making cupcakes instead. That is how I learned that not every cake recipe makes good cupcakes.

Because I grew up in the nineties, I had to dye the icing turquoise. (Turqouise was everywhere in the nineties, whether it was the color of your entire car or just the logo on your normal-colored T-shirt.) I didn't realize until too late that I had color-matched the mixing bowl.

So many of my friends' parents had bathrooms in this color.

 The icing came out exactly as I planned, but the cupcakes were not so great. You know how I wrote in the original recipe that it really likes to stick to the pan? Well in this case it stuck to the paper no matter how carefully you tried to peel it off. You couldn't remove the paper without ripping away huge chunks of cake.

Even if you extracted the cupcake intact(ish), the batter seems to need a large pan to bake right. These were a little gummy and just a smidge on the wrong side of underwhelming. But at least they looked cute!

Happy belated independence day, everyone!

Sauteed Lettuce Salad: A recipe repeat for our colon-cleansing times

We've run today's recipe before, but now that we have a cyclosporiasis outbreak I think wilted lettuce worth revisiting. After all, the surest way to kill germs is to cook them. Had you even heard of cyclosporiasis before the outbreak? Neither had most people outside of the CDC and the USDA. That's why (until Trump and his handlers took office) we fund government programs to keep these things out of our food. In theory, this means that we the laypeople can live happily unaware of things like "screwworms" and "explosive diarrhea parasites." But nowadays, you're better off assuming your salad is as germy as raw meat and thus getting it into a hot frying pan. 

Wilted lettuce (doesn't "sauteed lettuce" sound better?) and the latest outbreak also remind us that most weird-looking recipes evolved for a reason (with the exception of the mid-century burst of bizarre foods that came out of advertising companies spending more money on in-office alcohol than ad photographers). Now that every salad comes with an elevated risk of a surprise colon cleanse, it's easy to see why people used to cook it.

So, with that said, let's remember that 1) cutting government funds "for efficiency" without seeing what would break leads to nationwide disease, and 2) salad greens can be cooked, even if we're not used to it anymore. 

Anyway, in case it helps in these increasingly horrid times, here (again) is the wilted lettuce! 

~---------~ 

Are your salads getting monotonous? Do you need a "pleasant variation from the day's usual tricks?" Are you concerned about budget cuts to food safety monitoring and therefore want to ensure that any stowaway microbes don't get past your stovetop? (Didn't that last sentence age well?)

Wilted Lettuce 3 hard cooked eggs, sliced 1 large head lettuce ½ teaspoon salt (or more to suit taste) 1 teaspoon sugar 6 slices bacon, cut into small (half-inch ish) pieces 2 tbsp vinegar Wash the lettuce thoroughly, drain it, and chop it into pieces slightly larger than bite size. In a very large frying pan, cook the bacon until it is crisp and the drippings have come out of it. Reduce heat to medium-low. Add the vinegar, then add the lettuce and eggs. Cook until the lettuce is tender but still bright green.  Serve at once. The leftovers aren't as good as when it's fresh, so make only as much as everyone will eat the first time. We recommend serving with a crusty bread to soak up the juices. Source: Chicago Tribune; April 17, 1936

Today, we are opening my great-grandmother's recipe binder and trying one of her newspaper clippings. I ran into problems at the first line of the ingredient list. An unfortunately-placed ink smudge made it impossible to read the amount of boiled eggs. I couldn't tell if it called for six or eight.

I emailed the Chicago Public Library, asking if they could track this recipe down and find a more legible copy. A reply arrived within a few hours: "Today is your lucky day, this recipe happened to be in the Chicago Tribune, whose database we can pretty easily search. The recipe is attached. It looks like 3 is the number of eggs."

Join or donate to your local Friends of the Public Library, everybody!

 

At first I wondered what kind of lettuce I should put in this. Today, we mostly default to iceberg, but how common was it in 1936? Before I let myself get caught up in period-correct salad greens, I checked the prices. Iceberg lettuce suddenly seemed perfect.

Back at the house, the lettuce had to wait until I had boiled the eggs. Since I never remember how to do that, I have to look up Delia Smith's guide every single time. I didn't think to look if she has a guide for neatly slicing them elsewhere on her site. But if you look past my inept knifework, you can see that these came out of the pot at the perfect time. Unfortunately, they also stank up the kitchen.

I have previously mentioned my theory that the weirder and wackier flavors of yesteryear made more sense when everyone smoked, whether they lit their own or inhaled a pack a week secondhand. In a similar vein, I would like to speculate that people didn't mind adding boiled eggs to everything because you couldn't smell them over the omnipresent stale smoke. Price of eggs notwithstanding, it seems like people these days don't "volumize" casseroles with chopped boiled eggs as often as we did when every sofa had an ashtray balanced on the armrest.

After getting the eggs ready, our recipe conveniently has us cover the faintly sulfurous smell with bacon. This is one of those recipes where cheap bacon (the kind that's mostly fat) might actually be the better choice. I don't think the recipe necessarily wanted to add bacon meat much as harvest the drippings for lettuce-wilting.

This salad can torture everyone in the next room of the house. First, they get the tantalizing scent of sizzling bacon. Then, all at once, they get the bitter smell of hot lettuce. I wonder if the people in a certain Chicago apartment were leery whenever they smelled bacon coming from my great-grandmother's stove. Sometimes you get bacon and waffles, other times you get wilted lettuce.

Speaking of title ingredients, we were ready to wilt our lettuce! We are told to "wash lettuce, drain, and chop." It is surprisingly hard to get all the water out of lettuce after you've washed it. I didn't want to go out and buy a salad spinner, but I definitely wanted to borrow one.

I cut the recipe to one-third, and the biggest skillet was barely up to it. Did everyone in Chicago have paella pans?

Just like fresh spinach, the lettuce shrank a lot. This may be why people don't cook lettuce very often. But on the other hand, it's a lot easier to eat your daily quota of greens when you can compress them into a small bowl.

 

Things were going ever-so-well until I added the egg after the lettuce was done. While I was stirring everything long enough to warm up the egg, the lettuce lost its bright green color and took on that dull gray look that says "You're not leaving this table until you finish your vegetables."

That bowl contains a third of a head of lettuce. That's, like, two or three wedge salads. Lettuce shrinks a lot on the stove.

Did you know iceberg lettuce has a flavor? Well, after shrinking it down to a seventh of its original size, its flavor is concentrated. The bitter lettuce (not overcooked, just its actual taste), salty bacon, vinegar, and boiled eggs went together better than I thought. But you have to be in the mood for pungency before you think this is "a pleasant variation from the day's usual tricks." As I said earlier, I can't help wondering if the flavor of this made more sense when life had a background of cigarettes and higher liquor sales.

Purely for the heck of it, I sent a picture of this to Marcus, our longtime friend who definitely isn't traumatized from trying various recipes on the blog. He did not seem to regret being too far away to drop by.

 

Because I still had two-thirds of a lettuce and another boiled egg in the refrigerator. I soon made a second wilted salad. This time, I cut up the bacon before cooking it instead of after. As we learned from the cream onion pie, the bacon gets crispier and the fat renders off better. I also didn't have to pause mid-recipe for a chopping break. (As a food safety note, chop your lettuce and get it off the cutting board BEFORE cutting up the bacon. That way, you don't get raw-meat germs in the greens.)

Instead of waiting til the end, I added the boiled eggs just as everything was heating up. The lettuce stayed green, but I don't think it made a dramatic visual difference. There's really no way to make iceberg lettuce look pretty after you've cooked it.

This recipe is not disgusting, but it's also not a classic waiting for rediscovery. You have to be in the mood for some well-placed bitter flavors before you can like it. But if you're like me and always keep a jar of sauerkraut on hand, you might not be disappointed. Some of my friends suggested I try this with kale instead of lettuce, so I'm going to keep an eye on the clearance produce. 

Despite the lack of salad ecstasy, I'm not going to cross out the wilted lettuce in my reprinted copy of the book. This recipe may have regained a place in our kitchens thanks to CDC budget cuts. It might be wise to start cooking all our vegetables again-- or at least briefly heating them to get rid of any microscopic stowaways. And of course, this salad is a good way to salvage any salad greens that aren't quite as fresh as they were when you bought them.