Putting the mayo on the cranberries

We haven't committed any questionable acts of mayonnaise in a surprisingly long time.

This came out of my great-grandmother's notebook. We've made this recipe before, so let's just zoom in on that last line:

Maybe the mayo on top helps stretch this salad into the purported dozen servings. I know I'd be a bit more cautious with my portion size if I knew my cranberries were buried under mayonnaise.

Despite tossing the idea aside at first, I wondered if cranberry salad is better under mayonnaise-infused whipped cream. After all, I didn't think cranberries and celery were a good idea until I tried that. And mayonnaise and ketchup turn into thousand island dressing instead of a tragedy of condiments.

 But I didn't want to purchase an entire bottle of mayonnaise just for one silly salad. But while I was pocketing enough mayonnaise packets for a winter salad, I decided to grab an extra one to complete my great-grandmother's cranberry salad. (Sure, it's a recipe she clipped and not something she independently devised. But that's true for most American family recipes anyway).
 

It lurks in the cup, atop a single serving of whipped cream...

I had only one thought: "Well doesn't that just put the mayonnaise on my cranberry sundae?"

It's fruit with whipped cream on top, but with a special surprise...

There is no place for mayo on top of cranberries. Adding it to whipped cream makes it extra greasy (you are mixing fat into fat), and it tastes... like mayonnaise. We didn't get any magical unexpected flavor melding. I'm glad I tried this, but I am also glad I didn't sink any grocery money into it.

A lot of the recipes "of a certain age" make me think that smoking changed cooking. Like, I think the flavors in this would work if you had pre-tarred your taste buds. (The mayonnaised cream would probably feel less like straight cooking oil on the tongue.) But since we can repaint the ceilings in our house without five coats of post-nicotine primer, I was unimpressed.

Cranberry-Apple Pie: Candy in a pie crust

The merry parade of cranberries continues!

Cranberry-Apple Pie 1¾ cups sugar 2 tbsp cornstarch ¼ tsp salt 4 tart medium apples ½ cup water 2½ cups whole cranberries (10 oz by weight) 3 tbsp butter 2 tbsp grated orange rind 1 unbaked deep-dish 9" pie shell (or a 10-inch if your pan isn't deep) Additional pie dough for the top, if desired Mix about half the sugar with the cornstarch and salt, set aside. Then set aside the remaining sugar in a separate cup or bowl. Pare, core, and slice the apples. Place in a large saucepan with the water. Cook stirring constantly over medium or high heat until they are slightly softened, about 5 to 8 minutes. Stir in the sugar-cornstarch mixture, blending well. Then add the cranberries, butter, and orange rind. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to medium and cook until the cranberries pop, about five minutes. Taste the mixture and stir in the remaining sugar until it is as sweet as you like. (You may not use all of it.) Cool the filling completely. You can either put a lid on the pot and leave it for a few hours, or put it in a larger pot of cold water (iced water if you have an ice maker) and stir it for a few minutes. When ready to bake, heat oven to 425°. Just before adding the filling to the pie shell, brush it with cooking oil (or spritz it with cooking spray). This helps keep the crust from getting soggy. Put the filling into the pie shell. Then use the remaining dough to make a lattice top. (Or, simply lay parallel strips of crust across the pie.) Dab the end of each pastry strip with water just before pressing it onto the edge of the pie shell. Bake 20 minutes. Then reduce heat to 350° and bake until the top is a deep golden brown, about 25 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature. Source: Marion's Pie Shop (Chatham, Massachusetts), via Bon Appétit magazine, reprinted in an unknown newsletter from 1978

I was rummaging through some long-undisturbed drawers, and found this recipe clipping. The note at the bottom says it's credited to some place called "Marion's Pie Shop" in Chatham, Massachusetts. I looked them up out of curiosity, and they are still in business. However, we do know that this paper comes from 1978 (the date is on the back).

I love cranberries at this time of year because the stores can barely give them away. And even if the out-of-season peaches and strawberries weren't astronomically priced, they simply don't taste very good. But at this time of year, I can casually toss a pound or two of cranberries into the grocery cart and barely feel it when paying. Fresh, seasonal fruit is rarely so easy.

Aside from the cheap berries, I found some forgotten apples in the refrigerator. Someone else in the house had a short-lived resolve to keep fresh fruit on hand for snacking. These apples have been in the back of the fridge ever since. They're not the sort of sour apples you're supposed to bake with, but we do not waste food here at A Book of Cookrye.

I had to reread the recipe a few times before I could figure out what went into the pot in what order. Therefore it seemed wise to have all the ingredients measured and lined up beforehand. I don't usually bother with that, but sometimes you can tell that you really should. 

You'd never guess I had to cut so many bad parts off those apples!

 

The recipe says to use a 9-inch pie pan, but the ingredient amounts suggested that we would have a lot of pie on our hands. I got out the "correct" sized pan, glanced at all the ingredients that were supposed to fit in it, then put it away and got out the big one.

You can tell this recipe comes from a commercial kitchen because you completely cook the apples on the stove before putting them into the pie. Leaving a pie full of raw apples in an oven for over an hour is great at home, but it doesn't really work on a commercial scale. Though I think the ones where you load a pie with raw apples taste better. (The stovetop ones often come out like canned pie filling.)

As the apples cooked, the water became thick and gummy.

We are next directed to add a small mountain of sugar. The pot looked like when I was six years old and poured my own cornflakes.

 As we have previously learned, sugar is "hydroscopic." That means it pulls water out of whatever it sits on. This often happens so fast that it looks like water is spontaneously generating in the pot. And sure enough, the apples were swimming in their own juices after just a few seconds of stirring.

And here's why we added so much sugar: nearly a whole package of cranberries!

We were only a few ingredients away from a completed filling. I don't know what the butter is supposed to do in this recipe, but I did remember to add it.

After a few minutes over a hot burner, the pie filling had turned a beautiful cranberry red. Note also that the apples have shrunk to nearly nothing after having all their juice hygroscopically sucked out of them. This means that our fruit is swimming in extra-sweet apple juice, which made the test spoonful absolute ecstasy.

As we learned when making what some newspaper article called the perfect pie, your crusts will stay crisp if you brush them with butter or oil. Well, we at A Book of Cookrye decided to try a shortcut that whoever wrote that article in the 1930s probably never imagined: cooking spray! I highly doubt that brushing the crust with cooking oil (or "salad oil" as it was apparently called at the time) made any indispensable difference in flavor, and the spray was so much faster at making a perfect thorough coating.

No matter how many times I cook cranberries, I can never get over the absolutely beautiful color they make. This looks like it has a red velvet cake's worth of artificial dye.

I was going to make a lattice top for this, but we economized today and used beef fat in the pie crust. And even though it came out a lot better after following our ancient newspaper article's directions, it was too stiff to fold back on itself over and over again in an attempt to weave it. So I decided to take the easy way and just lay strips across the top. It was really pretty the last time we did it.

As I watched the pie bake, I was very glad I went up a pan size. It boiled a lot, and pie is always better when it stays in the pan instead of burning on the oven floor.

It bubbled a lot, but nothing dripped out.

If we look closely at our lazy lattice, we can really see the wonderful results of that pie article from my great-grandmother's binder. It tells us to stack your pastry scraps for rerolling instead of wadding and smushing them into a ball, which was new to me. But just look at all those lovely layers!

My happiness faltered on the first taste. I should have cut the sugar in this pie. No one left a half-finished slice on their plates, but no one rushed back for seconds either. I actually ended up carefully scooping out the filling and then stirring a lot of chopped raw cranberries into it. If you're going to make this pie (and I think you should!), set about half the sugar aside and then taste the filling right as you take it off the stove. Cranberries and apples are very good together, but you don't need this to be like sliceable candy. 

 

Winter Cabbage Salad

Today, we are making a winter salad! The recipe uses produce that's easy to find in the winter months. And thanks to climate change, a salad seems really good right now.

Winter Cabbage Salad The ingredients for this salad are easily available all winter. Refrigerate all the ingredients until thoroughly chilled. Mix: 2 cups shredded cabbage (This is not a lot of cabbage. Unless you get a very runty cabbage, you'll find that you barely use more than one or two slices of it. Cut it from the end opposite of the stem, where the leaves are thinner and less tough. Save the rest of the cabbage for another use.) 1 cup finely chopped celery (About half of the usual-sized bunch of celery) 1 diced apple (No need to peel it. Use a tart variety that tastes good when eaten uncooked.) 1 teaspoon finely chopped yellow or white onion (cut the tip off an onion, chop it, and put the rest of the onion back in the fridge for another use) 1 chopped fresh pimiento, or one (2-oz) undrained jar chopped pimientos (You can also chop in half of a bell pepper if you like) When ready to serve, toss with: About 2 tablespoons mayonnaise (more or less as desired) Salt and seasonings to taste (I added a generous shake of chili powder) Serve immediately, on lettuce leaves or in apple cups if desired. Mrs. T. O. Carr, 5116 Locke Street, Fort Worth, TX; Fort Worth Star-Telegram; January 25, 1930; page 8

Apparently the Fort Worth Star-Telegram had an ongoing reader recipe contest in the 1930s. Was that a newspaper trend in the Depression? We've seen recipe contests from Chicago, Philadelphia, and now Fort Worth. All three cities printed the submitters' names and home addresses under their prize-winning creations. (And those are just the newspapers I could flip through before my free newspapers.com trial ran out.)

At any rate, this salad won Mrs. T. O. Carr first prize in late January of 1930. She notes that "the ingredients of this salad are available all Winter." And a quick scan of the ingredient lists shows no out-of-season produce (except maybe the optional lettuce at the end). 

Fort Worth Star-Telegram; January 25, 1930; page 8

 

The recipe starts out with two cups of shredded cabbage. That is less cabbage than you probably think. We took a sliver off the top of a head of cabbage and that was more than enough.

Our future has a lot of colcannon.

You can tell this recipe comes from an era of sharp economizing. After taking a small section off a cabbage without using too much of it, we do the same with an onion. To emphasize, this recipe calls for one teaspoon of chopped onion. 

On the other hand, one cup of chopped celery required all but the tiniest inner sticks out of our celery bunch. Granted, we got one of the smaller celeries at the store. But apparently cabbage expands when you chop it, and celery compacts.

This can get dropped into a future pot of soup.

After all our chopping, we only had to unite our ingredients. Incidentally, I really like that this bowl came with a lid. It reduces mixing to a few vigorous shakes.

After our salad was perfectly tossed, it was time for the dressing. I was going to buy mayonnaise, but it has followed the price of eggs upward. I don't have any food-snob objections to mayonnaise, but I didn't want to pay a lot of money for something I would not use again. I let a few mayonnaise packets slip in my pocket the next time I was somewhere that had them next to the ketchup dispenser.

I tasted the salad and realized that it would benefit from a delicate smattering of chili powder. Well, our directions do tell us to "add enough mayonnaise to moisten and season." This is why one should always actually read the recipe instead of blaming it.

Mrs. T. O. Carr tells us to serve this in apple cups or on lettuce leaves. I didn't feel like hollowing out a lot of apples (though that would let us economically dice the inner fruit into the bowl and save its shell for serving). Nor did I want to pay for lettuce-- though it's interesting to see this anecdotal hint that iceberg lettuce was already cheap by 1930. A bowl sufficed.

This salad is a lot better than I expected, and just the perfect hit of fresh greens while all the other leafy things are out of season. For such a simple recipe, everything was perfectly balanced. It had just enough onion to give it a sharp kick without tasting like raw onions. The apple gave it just a bit of sweetness, but not enough to suggest we added any sugar. And the cabbage was sturdy enough to be the perfect complement to everything else. Lettuce would have been too delicate.

In closing, this is a really nice salad if you don't mind a fair bit of chopping. And it's a refreshing dose of greens while we wait for the summer fruits to come back for the season.

Sausage Rolls the Delia Way!

It's easy to see why Delia Smith superseded Fanny Cradock.

Sausage Rolls with Quick Flaky Pastry There's really no point in writing directions when Delia Smith can show us how faster than anyone could read it. Just watch her video and you'll see how easy this is. If you prefer to use nonmetric units instead of the quantities in the video, here are the amounts: 4 oz butter (ie, 1 stick or ½ cup) 6 oz flour (1½ cups) Pinch of salt A little cold water        Filling: 1 pound pork sausage meat 1 medium onion, finely minced (use a mini food processor if you have one) 2 rounded tablespoons chopped sage leaves (about ⅓ oz, chopped together with the onion) -- use dried sage if the fresh sage is either too expensive or looks ratty in the store Salt and pepper to taste 1 egg, beaten with 1 tablespoon milk, for the glaze Note: If you're economizing on eggs, you can use milk instead (both for sealing the rolls shut and for brushing on top). You won't get that super-shiny layer on top, but they'll still be really good. Source: Delia Smith Online

Sometimes I watch Delia Smith videos just to decompress my mind. Even if you're not looking for clear and precise recipe guides, Delia's videos are very relaxing to watch while your mind wanders to other places. You can't look away from Fanny Cradock, but Delia is so much easier to watch. I've been rewatching this particular video in a lot, and those sausage rolls look better every time.

Now, as an ignorant American, our version of "sausage rolls" involves wrapping pre-fabricated cocktail weenies in bread dough and then baking them. The British wrap raw sausage meat in pastry and then bake until the meat is cooked. And having made British-style sausage rolls once, our American version will never be the same.

And we found the perfect meat for this. With our crisis of refrigeration safely over, I've been semi-regularly going through the chest freezer to see what I forgot was in there. When we hastily flung everything into there, I didn't have time to bother examining what I was trying to save. So, a lot of fairly old frozen things got buried among half-empty sauce jars and chopped vegetables. This is why I recently dug out a batch of uncooked turkey burgers that are perhaps embarrassingly old. (The last time I made them, I doubled the recipe and froze half for some future night when I didn't want to cook.)  

I was going to simply bake them as they were, but then I decided they could become really good sausage rolls. It's tempting to say they'd be reduced-fat since they're turkey meat, but don't forget how much raw bacon got ground into them.

Since I made the sausage filling a year ago, I only needed to make the pastry. I found an earlier video of Delia doing the same recipe in the pre-metric days. The method is the same, but there were no mentions of grams or milliliters. The older recipe uses exactly one stick of butter. I'm not going anti-metric, but I went with the one that wouldn't leave me with odd-size butter partials in the refrigerator. 

Not long after putting the bowl on the countertop, we had a big pile of frozen butter curls just like in the video. I have to say, if you follow Delia Smith's directions, things almost always come out just like the video. This is why she has been popular for some fifty years.

Delia tells us to use a palette knife to mix everything, but I don't have one. A plain knife from the cutlery drawer did the trick.

Here is our butter, all coated with flour and ready to become something great!

We are directed to mix the dough by repeatedly cutting into it with a knife. This reminded me of our "perfect pie" article which says that we "can not hurt this dough if you will just mix it as a man does with mixing mortar with a hoe." (I'm still quite not sure what that means.) Seeing the same advice in different places shouldn't surprise me. After all, basic methods are the same no matter who is presenting them.

We had a lumpy dough after a minute or two. I checked the video, and Delia's looked a bit lumpy too. And since Delia never does any fake recipes or trick editing, this means that our dough was exactly right. 

Our pastry had some hairline cracks when I got it out of the (blessedly working!) refrigerator. They don't look bad, but I could tell they would expand into major fissures as I rolled the dough out.

Fortunately, the other side was nice and smooth. I flipped the dough over and hoped the cracks underneath would smush together instead of spreading.

Things looked really great from the beginning. Again, if you follow a Delia Smith recipe, you cannot go wrong unless you go off-book. Just look at how perfectly straight the sides are after giving them a good sideways thwack with the rolling pin!

Delia says to roll out the dough to 20 x 30 centimeters, but I didn't want to bring a ruler into the kitchen. For one thing, I'd have to find where at least one of them went. Second, I didn't want to accidentally strip off the markings when I gave it an alcohol rubdown after being so close to raw meat. So, we made our dough one rolling pin wide and one-and-a-half rolling pins long. 

Measurements aside, look at how perfect the dough came out! No cracks, no rips, just a beautiful rectangle of paste. (On a side note, I finally see why we all switched from saying "paste" to "pastry." Who wants to say things like "Working with paste is a skill" or "my paste cracked while rolling it"?)  

I didn't get my meat into a long, neat log like Delia did in the video. Instead, I ended up just laying short segments of meat on top of the dough and hoping they'd stick together after cooking. Also, I figured that wouldn't matter after the meat was encased in a tube of dough.

Delia's sausage rolls were so much easier to close than the ones we made for our British picnic. The person in the 1930s video had to pinch the dough together. But Delia simply rolls the crust around the sausage and then presses the whole thing closed.

These sausage rolls were a LOT bigger than I expected. Our previous British-style sausage rolls were sized like finger food, but two or three of these are a complete dinner if you remember to come up with a vegetable.

For reference, this is the big pan. It can hold 20 cookies.

Naturally, we lined the pan. I was going to anyway, but Delia warned us that "The liner is going to save you an awful lot of scrubbing and cleaning later on." She doesn't usually mention washing dishes in her videos, so I figured this pan would become a truly dire project without protection.

Next, we are told to use scissors to snip three vent-holes on each one. When we held the scissors at a slant instead of vertically, we got the same cute little V's that Delia did. I got to use my new favorite kitchen shears for this.

I really like these scissors ever since my friend sharpened them for me. In the short time since I got them out of the closet and back into use, they have been involved in a lot of things involving raw meat. The blades are slowly becoming shinier from getting repeatedly wiped with rubbing alcohol.

Just before getting these into the oven, I had to diverge from Delia's directions. She has us brushing the rolls with an egg wash, and I'm trying to cut back on our egg use for the next couple of weeks. A couple of nights ago, I really wanted an omelet and my attempts kept sticking to the pan. I would ordinarily decide that scrambled eggs are a perfectly good second choice, but this time I wanted an omelet and nothing else would do. I am not thrilled about how many greasy scrambled messes went into the trash can, but I figured I should probably cut back on gratuitous egg use until it averages out. So I brushed these with milk instead. (I also brushed milk on the insides of these to seal them together. It worked just fine.) I know that an egg wash would have given us a shiny, crackly top. But sometimes we have to economize and make up for yesterday's extravagance.

To make up for not brushing on an extra-crisp top layer, I sprinkled the rolls with cheese. I know that deviating from a Delia recipe means that you no longer have a 100% guarantee of success, but I figured this was a safe change.

After about a minute of baking, I heard a horrible CLANG! and feared that my future held some very expensive appliance repairs. But no, it was just our baking sheet, which had decided to suddenly warp. I might have tried to carefully slide the fully-loaded baking paper onto a different pan, but our homemade flaky pastry had already become half-melted. So, I had to simply hope that the lowest row of sausage rolls wouldn't mind all of the grease sliding down to them.

After baking these rolls, I saw why we were warned to line the pan to avoid "an awful lot of scrubbing and cleaning later on." Since I heeded Delia's instructions, I only had to roll up the paper and throw the would-have-been labor into the trash.

I had worried about encasing raw sausage meat in dough with nowhere for the grease to drain to, but I felt a lot better after lifting the liner away. Instead of staying inside the rolls, the sausage grease had seeped out and then hid under the paper.

I didn't mind handwashing the grease from the pan since the really charred-on mess was already in the trash. And anyway, cleaning the pan was a perfect way to avoid waste while I was running the hot water to the sink before starting the dishwasher.

But enough about cleanup- let's get back to the sausage rolls. I cut one in half and the crust crackled on contact with the knife. When Delia Smith promises something, she delivers. She said this was flaky pastry, and it flaked deliciously. I am so glad I didn't mistakenly cut the recipe in half. 

Brown Sugar Topped Squares Revisited: I bought the pan just for these

Today, we are revisiting the first recipe we made from my great-grandmother's book!

Brown Sugar Topped Squares ½ cup butter (or ¼ cup each of butter and shortening) 1 cup dark brown sugar 1 egg 1 egg yolk (save the white for the topping) ½ to 1 tsp cinnamon, if desired 1 tsp vanilla 1½ cups sifted flour ½ tsp baking powder ½ tsp salt         Topping: 1 egg white 1 cup dark brown sugar 1 cup chopped hazelnuts, pecans, or almonds (if desired) Heat oven to 325°. Line a 9"x13" pan with parchment paper. (You don't need to bother with cooking spray, just put the paper into the bare pan.) Cream the butter and sugar. Then beat in the egg, the yolk, the cinnamon (if using), and the vanilla. Beat well. Then sift in the flour, baking powder, and salt. Mix everything together. Place into the pan and spread as much as you can. This is easier if you coat the top of the dough with cooking spray and then pat it out. (You may need to re-spray it a few times if it starts sticking to your hands.) You may not coax it all the way to the edges of the pan-- that's fine, don't worry about it. In a clean bowl with clean beaters, beat the egg white until it forms stiff peaks. Gradually add the sugar, then beat well. Pour this onto the dough and spread it to cover. Sprinkle on the nuts if using, then gently pat them to press them into the topping. Bake about 30 minutes. Cut into squares or bars while warm. Source: handwritten note Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

One of my friends flips electronics for a side income, so we often go to thrift shops looking for stuff tagged with notes like UNTESTED or SOLD AS-IS. While he is examining the electronics, I often wander to the kitchen section because I can't be persuaded to care about vintage stereos. I usually leave empty handed, but I recently plonked this on the checkout counter next to a haul of 1990s computer keyboards and an alarm clock with woodgrain sides. (Did you know there are alarm clock collectors? I didn't.)

 

I got this pan because I wanted to bring out a certain special recipe again:

As some readers will recall, we didn't have the right-sized pan or enough brown sugar the last time we made this. (I was housesitting for my parents at the time. Mom doesn't keep as many ingredients on hand since she decided she was three-quarters done with baking.)

Just like before, the recipe yielded very little dough. It looks like a decent amount until you compare it to the vast acreage of pan that it's supposed to cover.

I tried to persuade our dough to get all the way to the edges of the pan, but it didn't quite make it. Fortunately, that ultimately didn't matter.

This is a really fast recipe--- aside from the tedious job of coaxing a small portion of dough across a big pan. We were ready to put on the topping before we knew it. The first time we made this, the topping was so runny that we only needed to tilt the pan a bit. But today, we needed to get out a spatula.

Since we had some pecans lying around from a previous recipe, I sprinkled them on as the recipe says. I mean, how can you go wrong with brown sugar and pecans?

I should have pressed the nuts into the cake before baking. I thought they would sink in, and they didn't. They didn't fall off as soon as you picked up a slice, but they didn't really stay on either.

If you love the taste of brown sugar, this recipe is absolutely meant for you. The now-toasted pecans on top were perfect with it. You might want to add a little bit of cinnamon to the cookie layer, but if you like brown sugar a lot you won't need to.