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.

Cabbage Cooked In Milk: or, Just like Great-Grandma used to make

Today, we are going back to my great-grandmother's binder of recipes and making cabbage.

Cabbage Cooked in Milk 2 cups milk 3 tbsp butter 3 tbsp flour 5 to 6 cups shredded cabbage (about half a cabbage-head) 1 cup cream or half-and-half Salt and pepper to taste Nutmeg to taste (if desired)* Heat the milk in a large saucepan. While you're waiting on the milk, melt the butter in a small frying pan. Add the flour and mix thoroughly. Reduce the burner to just enough heat to keep it warm. When the milk comes to a boil, add the cabbage to it. Cook for 2 minutes after it comes back to a simmer. You may have to press the cabbage into the milk until it softens, just like you usually have to gradually push spaghetti into boiling water as it starts to bend. After the cabbage has cooked for 2 minutes, stir in the half-and-half. Before the mixture has time to reheat, quickly mix in the butter and flour. Add salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a brisk boil and cook for 4 minutes, frequently stirring and scraping the bottom of the pot. *Nutmeg isn't in the original ingredients, but it's very good. Source: handwritten manuscript

Apparently she was a teacher. I think her cursive is just as incisive as the corrections she probably put under subpar homework.

Before proceeding, I should note that I only decided to make this recipe after seeing the relatively short cooking time. After all, very few vegetables are at their best after boiling for an hour. 

More so than the graham cracker cake or the brown sugar squares, this seemed like something she would have made. From what I've heard about her, and from seeing her perpetually stern face and rigorously serviceable clothes in photographs, she seems a lot more likely to serve cabbage than cake. 

I've never shredded a cabbage before, and honestly had no idea how. But Martha Stewart showed me how in exactly one minute. It's so rare to find cooking technique videos that aren't bloated out with theme songs or entreaties to "like and subscribe," so I was pleasantly surprised. Of course, I didn't manage to cut my cabbage as finely as the disembodied hands in the video, but I think I did pretty well for a first attempt. 

I didn't see how we could ever submerge this surfeit of cabbage in a pint of milk. But I figured it must have worked at some point, otherwise it wouldn't be written down. I thought that perhaps the cabbage would shrink a lot as it cooked, just like spinach does.

The cabbage barely fit into the pot, which took away a lot of my vegetable optimism. But as I often do when things look amiss on the stove, I followed the recipe exactly as written so I could blame someone else.

There's milk under there somewhere.

After two minutes, our recipe directs us to add the butter, flour, and second allotment of milk. Anyone who made it through the first six weeks of a home economics class would know that milk, butter, and flour are the starting ingredients of a standard-issue white sauce. With that in mind, I initially thought we're supposed to make a gravy which would in turn thicken the milky cabbage. But our recipe directs us, in formidably legible cursive, to "Combine the butter and flour and add with the top milk and seasoning to the cooking cabbage mixture." 

I was afraid that the butter and flour would harden into dumpling-clods as soon as it landed in the hot milk. But I can't argue with someone who (based on the recipe we're looking at) could competently use a fountain pen. And so, I dumped in the half-and-half (which today is filling in for the top milk). Before the pot of cabbage had a chance to reheat, I quickly added the butter and flour and stirred really hard to make them quickly mix into everything else. I didn't think it would work, but was happily surprised.

At this point, we had only one sentence left in the recipe: "Continue cooking the entire mixture rapidly for 4 minutes." When I turned off the burner, the cabbage was blessedly still green instead of a colorless overcooked slime. Unfortunately, it hung off the ladle like limp green tentacles.

Boy does this ever look like someone saying "Eat your vegetables."

The cabbage looked a lot better at the table than when I fished it out of the pot. Just for a bit of extra flair (and because we had the partial remains of a loaf on the countertop), I popped a slice of French bread into the toaster and then propped it up in the bowl.

 To my surprise, I liked this a lot. I had initially suspected that I was making a perfunctory recipe for joyless vegetables, but it was oddly satisfying on a cold night. It also was unexpectedly filling, which I imagine was ideal when my great-grandmother was feeding the kids. The short cooking time meant that the cabbage was still ever-so-slightly crisp. The cabbage became slightly sweet as it cooked, which I liked.

In full disclosure, I should note that some of the milk hardened onto the bottom of the pot (as often happens when putting milk on the stove). I had to soak it overnight in bleach-water before the cooked-on milk would lift away. Soaking a dirty pot overnight isn't laborious, but I do think it's worth keeping in mind. 

In closing, this was unexpectedly good and also really quick to make. If you are actually organized in the kitchen, you can have it ready in about half an hour. So, and I didn't think I would say this, I have already made this again.

Note: "Top milk" refers to how cream used to separate out of milk and rise to the top of the bottle. Because milk is now homogenized, that no longer happens. Back then, you had to shake the milk bottle to mix it before pouring, like you often do with salad dressings today. Many people would instead pour out the cream, then pour themselves a glass of milk, and then return the cream to the bottle afterward.↪

Onion Soup Gratinee: or, Every bit as good as I hoped

"Oh, go eat a boiled onion!"

Onion Soup Gratinee 3 white or yellow onions 3 tbsp butter or margarine (or cooking oil if desired) 6 cups beef stock 1 clove garlic, chopped (if desired) 2 tbsp chopped parsley (fresh or dried) Salt and pepper to taste 3 tbsp grated cheese (we recommend provolone) ¼ loaf French bread, sliced to desired thickness Have a large casserole dish ready. Quarter the onions lengthwise and slice thinly. Melt the butter in a soup pot. Add the onions and cook until slightly golden. This will take a while, so have patience. If using butter, be sure to stir it often or else it will burn onto the bottom of the pot. Add beef stock and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer 10 minutes. While the pot is simmering, put the bread slices onto the bare oven racks. Then heat oven to 400°. Remove the bread from the oven when it is dried. After the soup has simmered 10 minutes, remove from heat and add the garlic, parsley, salt, and pepper. Pour into the casserole dish, and lay the bread slices on top. Sprinkle with the cheese. Bake until the cheese is browned on top, about 10 minutes. Note: If you have single-serving baking dishes, that is even nicer than baking the soup in one large pan. 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, 1933

As the temperature dips in and out of freezing, heating up the oven for the express purpose of baking soup seems more justified than it did a week ago. And so, when no one was around to whine about the smell, I dared to bring forth an onion.

You can tell that this book comes from an era when we were economizing on time as much as money. Instead of chopping the entire onion into tiny pieces, we just had to cut it up like this. The onion didn't even have time to make me cry.

Less than two minutes after I got the onion out of the refrigerator, we were ready to heat up the saucepan. Now, because this cookbook came out in the middle of the Depression, our recipe calls for "butter or butter substitute." And so, with the recipe's blessing, I defied a century of cooking purism and put a big spoonful of cheap spreadable margarine into the pot.

 

This is period-correct economization.

And so, it was time to get our star ingredient off the cutting board and onto the stove!

I was kind of surprised that this soup contains onions and nothing else. I know it's called onion soup, but most soup recipes tell you to throw in a few other things besides the title ingredient. Truly, economizing was no joke in 1933.

We have learned that caramelizing onions takes a very long time. But you can also expect to spend quite a while at the frying pan if your recipe merely calls for "softened and lightly browned." For those who aren't using cooking oil like it's the 21st century, you should know that you need to keep stirring this the whole time because the butter (or butter substitute) will otherwise want to burn onto the bottom of the pan.

 

I had the audacity to leave the pot unattended and clean off the countertop. (After learning that onions require patience, I soon let myself get used to this sort of stovetop neglect.) Only a minute or so later, I returned to find that we had a few blackened spots on the onions. Because we are economizing, I didn't throw them out and start over.

You wouldn't have thrown this away if Old Man Depression was knocking on your door.

I've seen a lot of people say that recipes from this era are underseasoned, and I agree that a lot of them are. But I think the tiny seasoning amounts in most ingredient lists were meant to be starting points that you, the home cook, would expand on. With that said, I have to credit the recipe writers for using a truly huge amount of parsley in this recipe. This is exactly as much as the ingredients list calls for, and not a speck more. Perhaps fresh parsley would have been better, but we are economizing.

At this point, it was time to put our bread on top and get this into the oven. Our recipe calls for "one-fourth loaf of French bread," which I was only too happy to purchase. Even today, French bread is just one dollar per loaf at the grocery store near me. But then I started wondering: was French bread already a thing in grocery stores in the 1930s? I know that no grocery store today is complete without a rack of baguettes, but was that already the case in 1933? (Of course, supermarkets didn't really exist then, but that's another matter.) Or did most bakeries sell cheap French bread in those days?

Anyway, today's recipe taught me that bread shrinks when you toast it. I cut enough slices to cover this pan exactly. But after getting them out of the oven, I had to add two more to cover the empty space. 

In case you forgot that the Depression was on, this recipe calls for only three tablespoons of cheese to sprinkle over enough soup to serve a medium-sized family. Obviously, I let myself be a bit more extravagant than that. Provolone seemed like a great match, but I couldn't find any in brick form. I was mildly irked at having to pay the deli-counter markup for sliced cheese. But a good onion is worth it.

You can see the non-toasted last-minute bread already getting soggy, while the oven-dried bread is still perfectly fine.

After baking for ten minutes, the cheese was browned on top like every good casserole ought to be.

This soup tasted unexpectedly French in a way I couldn't explain. But it was also a lot better than a boiled onion has any right to be. The bread on top, despite being thoroughly dried out in the oven, got very soggy but kept a very thin layer of toasted crispness top. Some people might find that comforting, but I would rather make croutons and serve them on the side. However, I would definitely eat this again, and often.

The Last Chocolate Pizzelles I Want To Make

Today, we are asking Fante's to help us with our chocolate pizzelles.

Chocolate Pizzelles ½ cup butter ¼ cup cocoa powder 1¾ cups flour ½ tsp baking powder ⅛ tsp salt 3 eggs 1 tbsp vanilla Melt the butter, getting it really hot instead of merely warm enough to melt. Then stir in the cocoa powder, beating out all lumps. Set aside for three to five minutes to cool. If it has re-solidified after this time, re-melt it and allow it to cool until it is barely warm enough to stay liquid.* Meanwhile, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt, set aside. Beat together the eggs and vanilla. Once the cocoa and butter have cooled, add them and beat everything together. Then mix in the remaining dry ingredients. Cook on a hot pizzelle iron according to manufacturer's directions. These may take up to fifteen seconds longer to cook than other pizzelle recipes. *This is called "blooming" the cocoa powder. It draws out a lot more chocolate flavor than simply stirring the powder in. Source: Fante's Kitchen

Our previous chocolate pizzelles were a frustrating failure. Granted, I was not in a good mental state when I made them. But today, I decided to look elsewhere for chocolate pizzelles that might actually let go of the iron.

After I got the ingredients onto the counter, I thought "Is it really this easy?"

When I beat the egg into the chocolate, the batter turned an unexpectedly light color. I wasn't even trying to whip it.

This recipe was suspiciously easy to mix together. Things got a little tricky when I had to switch from whisk to spoon upon adding the flour. But that was the only non-problem I had. When our batter was ready, it looked and tasted like it could have become really good brownies.

I put our first dollop of delicious chocolate batter onto the iron. A few minutes later, I opened the iron and saw that this would be a very long process. We would have no free-falling pizzelles tonight.

After dislodging the first pizzelle with a spatula and a lot of force, I had to clean out all those little grooves with a wooden skewer. This has happened so often that I can now do it in less than a minute. I can't decide if I'm glad for the many opportunities I've had to practice.

I was so glad I used the flat iron and not the ridged snowflake one. No amount of generously-brushed shortening could persuade these to free-fall out of it. I had to jam the spatula under them like I was ruining a batch of hamburgers that had fused with the grill. But to my surprise, the spatula didn't rip the pizzelles to shreds. They actually managed to come off the iron intact(ish).

I tasted one and almost thought this recipe was worth it. The pizzelles had a really nice chocolate flavor. They had the same crisp fragile texture as the cinnamon wafers. For those who don't remember, the cinnamon wafers were my very first recipe on a stovetop iron (unless you count instant waffle mix). It's interesting to sort of come back to where we started, but this time with chocolate.

If you don't mind your pizzelles looking a little roughed-up after divorcing them from the iron, these are pretty good. But I absolutely DO NOT recommend these for your first pizzelle recipe.

After every single pizzelle resolutely glued itself to the iron, I wondered if I had lost my way. Or was the iron gummed up with something I didn't know I should clean off? Was the cocoa powder making these inherently sticky? Are chocolate pizzelles only suitable for nonstick irons?

As a sanity test, I made a batch of chocolate-free pizzelles. I went with Fante's recipe because they always come out so nice. I hadn't planned on making them, but we had all the ingredients anyway. The first pizzelle cooked to golden perfection and fell right off of the iron. After such a frustrating evening, I really needed that.

After a few near-perfect pizzelles made me feel better about life, I decided to be a bit daring and get out the snowflake iron. To repeat, you're screwed if your pizzelles stick to this thing. Or at least, you can't dislodge them intact. So I only use it if I am feeling really confident. Things got a little scary when I saw how wispy our first pizzelle was in the center, and I feared that I had ruined it by squeezing the iron too hard.

But to my delight, the pizzelle fluttered out completely intact-- even the dangerously thin center part. After this, I will forever swear by melted shortening, and never use cooking spray on a pizzelle iron ever again.

I'm tempted to say that a good batch of pizzelles fix a crappy mood. But I should also warn that a failed batch of them can add a special sort of misery to your night. So, I don't necessarily recommend making pizzelles for stress relief. If the recipe comes out right, you'll go through the rest of the day humming happy little tunes to yourself. But if things go awry at the iron, you'll feel rotten for quite some time.

As for the chocolate pizzelles that brought us here, I don't know if I recommend making them or not. They tasted so good that I very nearly want to say that everyone should try them at home. But at the same time, they were very irksome to get off of the iron. I'm not sure if these would be better on a nonstick iron since I don't have one laying around. Sorry to end this on such a mixed review, but these were exactly as delicious as they were frustrating. 

 

The Flavor: or, Here comes 2025!

We at A Book of Cookrye are giving 2024 the sendoff it deserves: with questionable cocktails from Tumblr!

The Flavor 1 can Cranberry Mike's Harder 1 bottle cucumber-lime Gatorade Pour the two into the same glass. Serve and contemplate how peculiar it tastes.

 

Did you know they make cucumber-lime Gatorade? I sure as heck didn't! I thought cucumber-lime would make a better lotion scent than Gatorade, but then again I never liked Gatorade. 

I could get into the measurements and all that, but that seems quite inappropriate for the recipe at hand. Instead, I just held one bottle in each hand and poured. I was surprised at how dominant the cranberry's color was. Like, the green Gatorade barely changed the color at all. 

I have to admit, I was super hyped for this bizarre flavor experience. I wanted to experience the strange. I wanted to taste the ineffable. But instead I was like "This tastes like church punch." 

If you've ever been to a Sunday children's social where they poured Hawaiian Punch and Sprite into a large bowl, you already have a good idea of what this tasted like. Except this also had undertones of cucumber. And I don't mean it tasted like artificial cucumber flavoring. I would have believed anyone who told me that the water had cranberry slices floating in it. 

I should note that when drunk on its own, the Gatorade merely tasted like Gatorade. You couldn't detect any cucumber until you mixed it with the cranberry. I also want to point out that it was a lot better with the alcohol in it. Maybe you have to be slightly schnockered to think Gatorade is any good.

I didn't finish my drink. But since I chose the wineglass, I filled it with Diet Coke and felt slightly classier for it. Well, we can't run away from the New Year, so may it be full of, um, flavor!

Spritz Cookies: or, The instruction manual is better than the thing it came with

I had to find out: Would I have a monogamous relationship with these cookies?

Spritz Cookies 1 cup shortening ¾ cup sugar ¼ tsp salt ½ tsp baking powder 1 egg 1 tsp lemon extract (or flavoring of choice) 2¼ cups sifted flour Heat oven to 400°. Have ungreased cookie sheets, a thin metal spatula, and cooling racks ready. Cream the shortening, sugar, salt, and baking powder. Beat in the egg and extract. Continue beating until very light. Then stir in the flour, mixing gently until all is combined. Put through the cookie press onto ungreased sheets. Bake for 10-12 minutes (mine were done in 6). Immediately upon removing from the oven, use the metal spatula to transfer the hot cookies to a cooling rack. Source: Mirro cookie press instruction sheet

Apparently whoever owned this recipe page made these cookies a lot. We have a note of what I think is the first year they made them. We also have two changes to the amount of flour, which appear to be in two different people's handwriting.

When I shared the cookie press instruction sheet/recipe handout that I nabbed and saved from someone's Ebay listing, a lot of people on the recipe swap group said things like "We only ever made the plain ones!" and "I didn't know there were so many kinds!" And so, I decided to temporarily set aside the thrills of spices and brown sugar to make the plain ones. I wanted to taste the recipe that apparently pops up every Christmas in countless homes. Would I think they were good enough to forsake all others?

And so, as often seems to be the case with spritz cookies, we begin with a mixing bowl full of ingredients and devoid of color. Given how many shortening-loaded spritz cookies, I've made of late, one might think I'm using up the entire can of shortening at an alarming rate. But I've halved all of these recipes for evaluation purposes.

Our ingredients whipped into a white fluff that looked unnervingly well-bleached. You can really appreciate how colorless it was after putting our half-egg on top. 

No matter how many shortening-loaded spritz cookies I make, I can't get over how much the starting mixture tastes like knockoff Oreo filling that has gotten just a tiny bit too old.

After adding the vanilla, egg, and everything else that has a bit of color in it, our mixture was precisely the same color as unbleached flour.

I added exactly as much flour as the recipe instructions told me to, and thought the dough was too sticky to put into the extruder. Like, you could press it into a square pan and call it bar cookies, but any attempt to make cute little cookies out of it would result in unfortunate-looking mounds. 

I was about to add more flour, but then I realized that I've had to add a lot of extra flour to every recipe on this handout. Had I been over-flouring every single batch I've made? Did I even know what this dough should look like? The instruction sheet didn't even have pictures to show me how firm the dough should be. Perhaps the Mirro press was so hard to use because my over-floured dough simply wasn't sticky enough to stay on the pan. 

I then reminded myself that ugly cookies were the absolute worst thing that could happen if I baked the dough as it was. No one would organize a Circle of Judgement for a cookie failure. I further reassured myself that kitchen misfires are not mortal sins. Thus emboldened, I loaded the sticky dough into the press.

The cookie press came with a full set of playing card suits- hearts, clubs, diamonds, and spades. I think it's so charming that people had canasta and bridge get-togethers so often that they needed thematic refreshments. (Heck, there's even a cookbook called Bridge Refreshments.) And so, I decided to pretend I was hosting a bridge party even though I do not like card games. This meant that I could start off my latest struggle with this this finicky press by making diamonds, the most fail-proof shape in the entire stencil set. 

Our first few cookies turned looked into blobs, but we soon figured out how much dough to extrude to make them look just right. After getting the pan halfway covered with successful cookies, I began to think that this press might not be a waste of money. I even imagined using it so often that I could just give the handle a quick twist without looking to see how much dough had come out.

After making a few diamonds, we did the clubs. These almost came out all right, but the little stem had an annoying habit of sticking to the press while the three lobes came out fine. For once I didn't mind when the cookies failed to press out. It meant I could put the defective ones back into the press and play with more shapes without running out of pan space.

All of the hearts came out nearly perfect. I immediately thought of Valentine's Day cookie bags. But after all this success, we were running out of room on the pan and still had to try out the spades. Impatience would not let me wait for the next batch. I was too excited about getting this blasted thing to work (most of the time). And so, I plucked some of the lesser-looking cookies away to make room.

Our spades came out of the press with very little trouble, leading me to think that I had solved all my cookie press problems with practice and reduced flour.

Our pan of bridge refreshments melted in the oven. They didn't turn into flat puddles, but they didn't look like playing cards either. I hate waste, but I told myself that no one would benefit from me eating lousy cookies, just like those starving children in far-off countries never benefit from anyone finishing their boiled peas at home. In other words, no one in the world would feel the happy effects of me doing a calorie penance for my baking misfires. And so, I thanked the cookies for helping me learn more about the recipe (which they did), and let them go to the municipal hereafter.

After I added more flour to the remaining cookie dough, it decided to stop staying on the pan. After scooping up the odd-shaped dough squirts and returning them to the mixing bowl, I gave up on my vintage cookie press. It was time to forget about vintage and get out the one that is more reliable. After transferring the dough from one press to another, I piped out a perfect batch of cookies in like fifteen seconds. I just had to go squirt, squirt, squirt across the pan. (Granted, the lever flexed unnervingly and felt like it would snap off at any minute.) 

So, without intending to, we did a near-perfect press-versus-press test and controlled for nearly every other factor that could ruin the results. We piped the same dough onto the same pan on the same night in the same weather, with the dough at the same temperature. Having eliminated all those other factors (and a few others which I didn't think of), we now know the problem is the Mirro press itself.

But those 8-pointed stars are easy. I have barely started using a cookie press, and I've already learned that the 8-pointed stars always come out fine. So I put in one of the more finicky, error-prone stencils that has a lot of little tiny holes that seem to love to get clogged whenever I use it. The cookies came out perfect.

I really wanted to like the Mirro press. For one thing, it comes with the prettiest little cookie stencils. Also, there was no point in returning it. I would probably lose the entire refund on return shipping. Aside from money matters, I felt like I had failed. After all, this thing was in production for decades. Surely a lot of people got theirs to work. Furthermore, a lot of people online saw mine and said "Oh, we had one of those!" and "We used ours every Christmas!" and "It's a real workhorse!" I doubt people would say such happy things if the Mirro press was a dud.

And so, just like when I made my first pizzelles, I went online and asked for help. One person suggested that I refrigerate the dough so it gets really firm before pushing it out. In addition to heeding others' advice, I decided to carefully read the instructions instead of skimming over it. It said to put the stencil into place with the number facing up. "What number?" I muttered to myself. I looked at a stencil closely, and finally saw it--- barely stamped into the metal, right next to the edge, and too tiny to notice without squinting. 

How could I ever miss that?

I didn't know why it mattered which side faced up, so I looked over the stencils very carefully to figure it out. The holes that make up the designs aren't cut at an angle that would change what happens when you lift the press off the pan or anything. Eventually, I noticed that the stencils aren't flat but slightly curved. This meant we had two things to test: whether I had been inserting the damn things the wrong way up the whole time, and also whether refrigeration helped at all.

Because I didn't want to wait several hours, I decided to test whether correctly assembling the press solved all my woes. Our results were still hit-or-miss, but slightly better than before. The cookies seemed more likely to succeed if I extruded enough dough to ever-so-slightly squish them. With the happy feeling that comes from a nearly 7 out of 10 success rate, I decided to try the stencil that had come out terribly every single time. After carefully installing it number-side up, and making sure to squish the dough under there (it is called a press after all), I got some surprisingly lovely cookies. Since the weather was too hot for the oven, I put all of the cookies back into the canister so I could wait until both the dough and the outside temperature had gotten a lot colder.

They're not great, but they're better than before.

A few hours later, when the sun had gone away and taken its excessive heat with it, I turned on the oven and got our fully-loaded cookie press out of the refrigerator. Our dough had turned to rock. I couldn't get the handle to turn at all. At first I thought it's supposed to be like that, and my dough had hitherto been too soft. But no amount of white-knuckling the handle would force anything to come out. After a few minutes of this, I decided that if the dough was supposed to be this hard, it wouldn't feel like I was about to snap the press apart. And so, I took off the cap and pushed out this perfectly cylindrical brick of raw cookies.

I nearly flung it into the garbage, but unfortunately I tasted it first and it was too delicious for the landfill. I then thought "Maybe I over-chilled it!" I also thought that my vintage Mirro cookie press is far too finicky if I have to temperature-control the dough with such precision.

To avoid waste, I hacked the dough into smaller lumps with a knife and kneaded it until it softened up again. After I reloaded the press, I discovered that refrigeration was futile.

To make sure it was the press' fault and not a bad batch of dough, I transferred it to our crappy yet reliable press. I could tell the dough was too hard from the way the handle bent and flexed. Nevertheless, we got a perfectly competent batch of cookies. And so, with great reluctance, I had to admit that I had been outwitted by a cookie press. As soon as we get a suitable-sized box, it's going back on Ebay to bother someone else.

That round one is the last of the dough that doesn't quite make it out of the press. I carefully peeled it off the piston and baked it.

So, the vintage Mirro press is a bust. I'm not going to frustrate myself by trying to use it again. But what about the reccipe?

These cookies reminded me a lot of the ones that come in those blue tins that infamously always contain sewing supplies-- except they were better because they were fresh. If you want a good, plain cookie, this recipe is a great choice. All the same, I can't help feeling bad for anyone who said "This is the only recipe we ever made!" There are so many other cookies out there, even if you look no farther than the instruction sheet!

 

I will definitely make these again, but I wouldn't take this recipe to have and to hold, forsaking all others. And I must give the Mirro people credit where it is due. Their recipe developing department did excellent work.