Announcement: Do you watch Mad Men?

We at A Book of Cookrye have something really delicious ready to share with you for the Virtual Mad Men Finale Party! We made something perfect for making ahead, so extravagant we had to stalk the store specials for weeks to get everything!

 

It's coming April 5!

Second-Stab Saturday: Zucchini Bread- Now with cucumbers!

We at A Book of Cookrye can't tell zucchinis from cucumbers unless they're labeled. They all look like green tubes until cut open.
With that in mind, I found some iffy looking zucchinis in the discount produce bin and figured I'd make another batch of zucchini bread because once peeled and pulverized, you'd never guess they looked like this.

Yes, a lot of those spots have fur. These were a quarter each.

Cucumber-Lemon Bread ½ c butter 1 c sugar 2 eggs 2 or 3 good-sized cucumbers 2 c flour 1 tsp baking powder Dash of salt Generous amount of lemon extract. Heat oven to 350°. Grease a loaf or 9x13 pan. Grate the cucumbers, shove them through a grinder, or put them in a food processor (don't thoroughly liquefy them). It should be about one cup of pulp. Mix butter and sugar. Stir in the salt and baking soda. Beat in the eggs and lemon extract, then add the cucumbers with any juice that came out of them and mix well. Lastly, mix in the flour. Pour into the pan and bake. A loaf pan will take about 40-50 minutes, a 9x13 pan will be done in 20 or so.

Getting your produce in a questionable state makes all the instructions in old recipes to pare and boil everything more sensible. I used to think it was just the style of the time and excessive tedium. At any rate, the zucchinis smelled suspiciously like cucumbers once peeled and cut open.

Once pulverized, there was no visible difference.

We at A Book of Cookrye briefly considered what to do now that our zucchinis turned out to be cukes. On the one hand, we actually like cucumbers. On the other, did you see how they looked when we bought them?

Also, who in the school paper thought showing the women's basketball team looking utterly terrified would sell school sports?

Since I'd already gotten the things for zucchini bread downstairs anyway, I forged daftly forward. The cucumber-lemon ice cream wasn't too bad (aside from the insufficiently liquefied cucumbers that turned into ice grit), so I had hope that this might, in its own weird way, work.
You know how some recipes have a step that doesn't look gross but still looks wrong?

Unlike when I made the zucchini bread, no one could reassure me they'd had this and liked it. But since I've had barbecue sauce brownies in the name of culinary experimentation (though admittedly most ended up in the trash), why does salad bread still frighten me? I tried to tell myself that I may be making an exciting discovery instead of running toward regret. At least it smelled good.

That's a surprisingly nice shade of yellow.

To my own surprise, I'm calling this a success. The cucumbers added a really satisfying kick which complemented the lemon really well. It's just different enough to have novelty, but not so much that people stare at the slice in their hands in confusion and fear. People described this with terms like "refreshing" and "surprising" (in a positive way). It's just weird enough to be a intriguing, but not so weird that it's bad. However, if your cucumbers are fit for it, you might want to leave the peels on so there's a visual cue that there's vegetables in this.
So, hooray for my inability to buy produce! I'd never have discovered cucumber-lemon bread without it!

Invigorating Hump-Day Quickie: Bananacafé!

We at A Book of Cookrye are not morning people. It takes drastic measures to make us get up when the sun is still out. While we have at long last accepted that as long as we live, we will forever be night owls, the rest of the world does not reschedule itself for our convenience.

We need a bigger cup.

However, now that we are in college, we, like the rest of the adult world we are pretending to pass for members of, turn to coffee. Unfortunately, no matter how hard we try, black coffee tastes like bitterness and sadness had a baby and liquefied it.

Bananacafé  4-6 tbsp instant coffee (or twice/thrice what the label says will make one cup)* 1 c water 4-6 tbsp powdered milk† Sugar to taste 1 ripe banana Ice Mix coffee, sugar, water, and milk powder, put over medium heat, and stir until dissolved (it'll probably be ready around when the water gets lukewarm). If persistent lumps of undissolved milk powder remain, the blender will deal with them. Put in blender with the banana and ice. *You could properly brew coffee instead, but were you really going to get up earlier just to wait for the coffeemaker to finish? †We went with powdered because, after it kept expiring on us, we no longer buy milk. Besides, you won't know the difference once it's blenderized with everything else.

Don't stint the ingredients. No one ever woke up on watered-down coffee.

This is what the sweet feeling of about-to-be-awake looks like.

Tada! It's a good source of potassium and calcium! Also, in a short time, you'll be able to put up with morning people even if you're not. If you're like me, you'll imagine the Popeye the Sailor Man theme playing as you drink it.

As I said to someone stupid enough to do so in person, do you really think it's wise to call me out for drinking coffee on training wheels when I just woke up?

Have a good rest of the week!

Meat Loaf with Yorkshire Pudding, or Let the drippings rain down!

Today on A Book of Cookrye, we're going seriously British by way of one of the earliest popular American cookbook writers! Or, at least, as British as someone can get operating on instructions with no illustrations and having little idea how a recipe is supposed to come out. Today, we present... this!

We're writing about the spotty bread, not the meat.

What is this, you ask? Here's the original recipe:

Instead of potatoes, you may put into the bottom of the pan what is called a Yorkshire pudding, to be baked under the meat.
To make this pudding,—stir gradually five table-spoonfuls of flour into a pint of milk, adding a salt-spoon of salt. Beat four eggs very light, and mix them gradually with the milk and flour. See that the batter is not lumpy. Do not put the pudding under the meat at first, as if baked too long it will be hard and solid. After the meat has baked till the pan is quite hot and well-greased with the drippings, you may put in the batter; having continued stirring till the last moment.
If the pudding is so spread over the pan as to be but an inch thick, it will require about two hours baking, and need not be turned. If it is thicker than an inch, you must (after it is brown on the top) loosen it in the pan, by inserting a knife beneath it, and having cut it across into four pieces, turn them all nicely that the other side may be equally done.
But this pudding is lighter and better if laid so thin as not to require turning.
When you serve up the beef lay the pieces of pudding round it, to be eaten with the meat.

Directions for Cookery in its Various Branches, Miss Leslie, 1837

This is an excerpt from the Baked Beef recipe (these days we'd call it Roast Beef) which is a lot like a modern-day one. You're supposed to salt the meat, bake it on a rack over a roasting pan with a little water in it, and baste it every now and then as it bakes. Miss Leslie also says to put potatoes in the roasting pan under the meat. Her second suggestion to put under the beef, mashed potatoes which you've scored all over with a knife so there's more crispy surface, sounds delicious.
At first it's odd that an American cookbook should have such obviously British recipes (and there a lot of them) as Yorkshire pudding in it. However, one need only look at the date to realize a lot of people using Directions for Cookery remembered being British citizens.
The recipe begins by saying this is "a plain, family dish" which you would never make for company, which is interesting because these days people put a massive beef slab in the oven as a special treat for company. Magazines these days also regularly make photo spreads of a huge piece of beef just out of the oven with potatoes spread around it when telling you how to impress your guests. Then again, in Miss Leslie's day, if you said you were making roast beef, you were roasting it on a spit, so I can see how beef cooked in an oven wouldn't impress anyone.

Yorkshire Pudding to be baked under roast beef or meatloaf 5 tbsp flour ½ tsp salt 2 c milk 4 eggs (3 if bigger than medium) Do your future self a massive favor and line the roasting pan with foil. Having seasoned and otherwise prepared the meat as you like, bake it on a rack that holds it a fairly good height over the pan. Put a little water under it- enough to keep the drippings that land in the pan from burning permanently onto it. Bake the meat very slowly so the drippings have plenty of time to fall out as it cooks. Start making the pudding when the meat is about 2½ hours away from being done. Thoroughly mix the flour, a spoonful or so at a time, into the milk, mixing until it's completely smooth. You'll find a whisk much better than a spoon for getting out lumps (or just grab one of the beaters from the mixer you were about to use for the eggs anyway- you needn't worry about rinsing it after). Add the salt. Make sure there are no lumps. Thoroughly whip the eggs- they should be a creamy color, smooth, and very light. Gently stir them into the milk in 3 or 4 additions, and keep stirring the batter right up to when you pour it out.. By now there should be a fair amount of drippings in the roasting pan. Pour the batter in- it'll be runny enough that if you can only pour it in one corner it should spread out just fine. Leave the meat to finish baking with the pudding under it. If the pudding is more than an inch thick, let it get browned on top, then cut it into four strips along the short side of the pan, carefully loosen them, and turn them over. (This will prove a dicey operation. If you have that much pudding batter to put in such a small pan, you will be glad you stopped pouring while it was still thin, and anyway Miss Leslie says it's better that way.) Directions for Cookery in its Various Branches, Miss Leslie, 1837

The occasion for today's culinary perpetration: I received a wonderful present: a massive package of ground beef! A friend works at a grocery store and took home more than she was going to use. Meatloaf being one of my favorite things ever, I was excited to make such a large one.

Onions, garlic, salt, paprika, eggs. Now all it needs is meat.

Because the meat was 20% fat, I added no breadcrumbs. Theoretically, the fat would drip out as the meat baked instead of soaking into said crumbs. However, what good is it if the fat stays right in the pan and soaks back in during baking? Like a lot of people who lack a proper roaster, I settled on baking it on the oven rack (DO NOT DO THIS UNLESS YOU HAVE A SELF CLEANING OVEN).

Beat the eggs very light, eh?

It takes a special brand of daft to, after carefully setting up meat in the oven so as much fat drips out as you could possibly get to drip out, collect all the fat that dripped out onto bread and eat it anyway. Fortunately, we at A Book of Cookrye are that daft!

Check out the dripping stalactites.

Furthermore, we were daft enough to rotate the pan mid-baking to make sure all of the Yorkshire pudding got dripped on, which led to this.

Someone else had to thaw his chicken out anyway.

It turns out that apparently even the British don't do Yorkshire pudding like this any more. If you do a recipe search, you'll find that for the most part, they're making a batter and putting it into muffin pans with a little beef drippings poured under each-- and without a slab of beef cooking above them. So, are we really stupid to make this the really old-fashioned way, or are we going to find that the modern way, while tidier, is just not the same?

Looks delightful.

You may think it's an oversaturated picture, but I assure you it is not. This was almost unnaturally golden and crispy on top. Like, if I hadn't made this myself and seen what went in it, I'd have suspected some creepy industrial practices and unpronounceable chemicals were involved in making it as crackly on top as it end up being. The rest of the pudding underneath the top tastes very heavily of eggs (unsurprising since it's baked egg foam) and happiness.
Also, I've noticed that it always seems meat loaf made from fatty ground beef ends up tasting underseasoned no matter what I put in it. Today I found out why because all of the dripping splots tasted like really concentrated garlic and paprika.

And yes, we had our Yorkshire pudding with tea.

This is amazing, delicious, and incredibly rich. You could portion it out for a dozen people and I doubt anyone would feel underfed- and that's before they have any of the meat. Although I would recommend stirring a shake of pepper into the pudding just to give it a little kick. If you've decided to hell with dieting, I doubt you'd regret making this.

Banana Mousse Fails Into Ice Cream

We at A Book of Cookrye, as mentioned before, have a lot of bananas in the freezer. Always up for new things, we looked up recipes online which were surprisingly normal. Most of them were variations on banana bread (muffins, pancakes, &c), though some daring person put sliced bananas into store-bought crêpes. However, this turned up in our 1934 cookbook:

A Book of Selected Recipes, Mrs George O Thurn, 1934

Looks easy enough, doesn't it? Incidentally, this is the only banana recipe in the whole book. Granted, said book has only 38 pages of recipes, but since each page has around six recipes on it, that's a lot of recipes to only mention bananas once.

Banana Mousse 2 c milk 2 eggs 1 c sugar ½ tsp salt 5 bananas ½ pint cream Beat sugar, salt, and eggs in the top of a double boiler until thoroughly mixed (a whisk may be needed to get rid of those last persistent unmixed bits of egg). Stir in the milk. Put over hot water and cook, stirring constantly, until thick. Remove from heat and put plastic wrap over it, pressing it down so it makes contact with the surface (this prevents a skin forming). Set aside until cooled. Mash the bananas and mix them in. For very smooth mousse, after you have mashed the bananas enough for a liquid to form, put them in a blender and pulse until thoroughly smooth. You may need to blenderize them in 2 or 3 batches. But this extra step is optional, and the banana mousse will be very lovely either way. Whip the cream* until stiff peaks form. Fold it in, taking care to stir up from the very bottom of the pot. Gently stir the whole thing at the end to make sure the cream is thoroughly mixed in. Freeze until firm. *To save dishes, you can mash the bananas with a mixer, then use the same bowl without rinsing it or the beaters to whip the cream. A Book of Selected Recipes, Mrs. George O. Thurn, 1934

I find it interesting that bananas are one of the few things in the produce section people will routinely cook long after they're overripe. Even I used to carefully cut out the brown parts of apples before making pies. But bananas? A lot of people have them in the freezer and see nothing wrong with making food out of them when they look like this.

Also those who decide to just dump the first ingredients in the pot should know that after a long time flogging them with a wooden spoon, you'll still have a pot full of this:

Kind of looks like terrazzo.

We at A Book of Cookrye, after fuming at our own absent-mindedness, managed to fix it in under 30 seconds.

We already had to get the mixer out for this recipe anyway.

Patient people would have left it sitting out to cool. Intelligent patient people would have refrigerated it. However, we do not believe in such unjustified long waits.

Ten minutes, baby!

The custard had smelled utterly divine as it cooked. A lot of people came into the kitchen to dip a spoon into the pot, and I seriously considered stopping right there and putting it into bowls. However, I'd already gotten out the bananas. Besides, what good is making a dessert without at least one step that looks like someone had the dire rear on your food?

A good source of potassium!

At any rate, a quick check of the label revealed the cream was adulterated.

If I wanted half-and-half I'd have bought it.

This may explain why the cream whipped but didn't expand all that much. Well, Mrs. George O Thurn never specified the cream be whipped to stiff peaks, much less how big said peaks should be.

However, the anticlimactically whipped cream did make this finally look decent instead of a sickly shade of brown. Seeing what color this ended up led to wondering why banana-flavored things are always dyed yellow. The part of the banana you actually eat isn't yellow, nor is anything you actually make with bananas.

We at A Book of Cookrye would like to heartily recommend banana recipes to people with lots of furry pets. Given how many fibers come off the bananas when you cook with them, a few stray pet hairs that float into your food will blend right in.

Five hours (and even a whole night) of refrigeration didn't do this much good. Perhaps I only cooked the custard until thickened when I should have cooked it to really thickened.

I think it's meant to not be banana glop.

However, always willing to salvage near-failures, we shoved the pot in the freezer and declared it banana ice cream.

It was amazing. True, it was slightly grainy, but this is one of the first times I've been asked what went in it so we could get the stuff and make another batch.
 Also, while Googling Mrs. George O Thurn whose cookbook this recipe came from, I found this.

Hump-Day Quickie: Rose Snow

Some of you may have picked up on how excited we at A Book of Cookrye get about snow. Yes, it makes driving a frightening experience (incredibly, people still didn't put their phones down!). And yes, it shuts things down a lot. But still- it's snow!
We had scooped some up and frozen it. As much as we'd like to save it for when it's really hot out, the freezer has little reliability. Therefore, let us enjoy it before it becomes a sad pan of melted water!

This has just a smidge of a capful of rose water (which is surprisingly concentrated) and enough sugar to make it sweet. It also is astonishingly delicious. When a friend of mine tried some, her eyes lit up and she said "This is the best stuff on Earth!"

Happy springtime, everyone!

Jelly Cake, or We're getting really classy now

We at A Book of Cookrye haven't dug out any really old recipes in a long time.
With that in mind, a friend got this from the nearby overpriced pizza place:

Throwing in cookware brings their prices to almost reasonable.

This put us in mind of a recipe we'd been looking at for a while now.

Aside from the fact that the ingredients look like they'll make a lot of jelly cake (hence cutting it in half), it looked like a really amazing idea. It's rose water - nutmeg crêpes stacked with jelly and iced like a cake! Furthermore, it says right there "It will not require turning," so my inability to flip a pancake will not get in the way.

Jelly Cake ½ c butter 1 c minus 1 tbsp powdered sugar 6 eggs 2 c flour 1½ tsp nutmeg 1 tbsp rose water Jelly or marmalade of your choice Icing to cover Heat oven to 400°. Grease a round oven-safe plate (they sell metal plates at camping stores).* Cream the butter and sugar until light. Beat the eggs in a large bowl with a mixer on on high speed for 10-15 minutes, or until really thoroughly whipped. Add them alternately with the flour. Stir in the nutmeg and rose water. Put about a third of the batter onto the plate. Spray your hands with cooking spray, then pat it carefully to the inner rim of the plate. If there are any thin spots, pinch a little more out of the bowl and fill them in. Bake until nice and golden at the edges, and firm on top. It'll be about 10 minutes. You can slide it off of the pan immediately out of the oven. Re-grease the plate and bake the remaining two layers the same way. Spread two of the layers with jelly, then stack them. Stack on the remaining layer upside-down. Trim all around the cake with a good, sharp knife, then ice it. *While I see no reason a round cake pan wouldn't work, it may be a little tricky to get the baked cookie out since you can't slide a spatula underneath or slide the layer around to loosen a bit. Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats, Miss Leslie, 1832

Let's look at the beginning of the second sentence of the original recipe: "Beat twelve eggs very light." Those five words meant that a lady of 1832 had over an hour of work for her. Miss Leslie had plenty to say about beating eggs in one of her later books. Keep in mind that at the time, the best you could come up with was a whisk; even the hand-cranked egg beaters hadn't been invented yet.

In making cakes it is of the utmost importance that the eggs should be properly and sufficiently beaten; otherwise the cakes will most certainly be deficient in the peculiar lightness characterizing those that are made by good confectioners.... Cakes cannot be crisp and light without a due proportion of the articles that are to make them so; and even then, the ingredients must be thoroughly stirred or beaten; and of course thoroughly baked afterwards.

This had better be good.

Persons who do not know the right way, complain much of the fatigue of beating eggs, and therefore leave off too soon. There will be no fatigue, if they are beaten with the proper stroke, and with wooden rods, and in a shallow, flat-bottomed earthen pan. The coldness of a tin pan retards the lightness of the eggs. For the same reason do not use a metal egg-beater. 

Miss Leslie disapproves.

In beating them do not move your elbow, but keep it close to your side. Move only your hand at the wrist, and let the stroke be quick, short, and horizontal; putting the egg-beater always down to the bottom of the pan, which should therefore be shallow. Do not leave off as soon as you have got the eggs into a foam; they are then only beginning to be light. 

Miss Leslie says we don't get off that easily.

But persist till after the foaming has ceased, and the bubbles have all disappeared. Continue till the surface is smooth as a mirror, and the beaten egg as thick as a rich boiled custard; for till then it will not be really light. 

Miss Leslie still can see bubbles.

It is seldom necessary to beat the whites and yolks separately, if they are afterwards to be put together. The article will be quite as light, when cooked, if the whites and yolks are beaten together, and there will then be no danger of their going in streaks when baked. The justly-celebrated Mrs. Goodfellow, of Philadelphia,^note always taught her pupils to beat the whites and yolks together, even for sponge-cake; and lighter than hers no sponge-cake could possibly be.

Can you hear the sound of women dropping their wooden rods and cradling their wrists while swearing? Also, how does someone who ended a page of instruction by telling her readers they will never be good enough end up being one of the most prolific cookbook writers of her century?
At any rate, had I spent over an hour beating eggs until they filled the bowl, I'd have smashed the earthenware pan to the floor and cried upon seeing how much the eggs deflated on contact with the rest of the ingredients.

THIS IS ALL THE BATTER THERE WAS.

Such distress might explain why I accidentally grabbed the wrong shaker and peppered the- and I use these next two words loosely- cake batter.

Someone who had hand beaten the eggs would have given up by now.

After carefully scooping it off and adding the nutmeg  (which hopefully would cover the taste of any pepper granules I missed) and rose water, we finally get to crêpe making! Or so we thought. The recipe makes it look like you ladle this onto the pan, but that did not work.

Figuring these were already mixed and therefore I may as well bake them, I patted and coaxed the dough into flatness and baked it. Maybe all this time beating the eggs actually did something. The crêpe rose off the pan so fast you could see it floating up.

Note the gap where it has risen right off the pan.

Once the first batch of dough was done, I realized this wasn't going to be spiffy crêpe stack. They were very firm cookie-patty things. You could carry an order of shots to a table on one of these.

All the work in this recipe- the separate plates (which you later get to wash) for each cake-cookie thing, the egg beating(!), and everything else- makes more sense when you realize that more people had servants than just the very rich- even if it was only a cook or maid who came in every few days. Besides beating the eggs, they would have washed all the separate plates for laying each of these out on.

Keep in mind this is half the recipe so you'd have needed six plates.

This appeared to be shaping up as intended. Having cut the recipe in half, we had half as many cookie-patties. Had we made six, they would stacked up to about the height of a cake. Also, did you know that for some reason, the reduced sugar jelly at the store is made with sugar rather than corn syrup?

After butchering it attempting to trim it nicely, there was only a cake stump bleeding all over the pan.

It looked even more sad and short when iced. It then occurred to me that I could have cut each in half and done an impressively tall semicircular cake instead.

Sorry, Miss Leslie, I didn't feel like marking out the slices with nonpareils.

Also, as one might have guessed by how stiff the layers ended up, this thing needed a lot of knife pressure to slice. The layers slid around a bit.

Honestly, the jelly did this no favors. The cookies had a really nice, surprisingly subtle flavor to them and the jelly overwhelmed that. Homemade jelly would have been better, but I didn't think of going to a farmer's market.
 A friend from the Philippines said if I gave her the recipe, she could Asian-ify it. When asked what that meant, she thought about it and said "Fresh fruit." Which.... you know, stacking these with fruit instead of jelly would be absolutely delicious. These cookies were made to stack with fruit. And since no one need spend forever hand-beating eggs, they're surprisingly easy to make.













----------------------
Note:  
Elizabeth Goodfellow was the owner and operator of the first cooking school in the United States.
American cooks were the first to use baking powder (well, things that would later evolve into baking powder) instead of whipping eggs until your arm gave in. In fact, the first cookbook written by an American is also the first published cookbook in the world where you could use a spoonful of powder to save yourself over an hour of work. However, Mrs. Goodfellow had views on such practices and passed them emphatically on to anyone in her school. Miss Leslie was one of her students and if she had to spend all this time with a pan and stick, you have no excuses. ↪

It's Pi Day! Lemon Chiffon Pie

We at A Book of Cookrye are really excited because it's Pi Day! This is a great leadup to Tau Day when we get to make 2π. However, this year also has...

It only happens one day every hundred years!

We dug out our favorite cookpamphlet to make...

Yes, I scanned and reprinted this. Judge someone else.

Lemon Chiffon Pie 3 eggs, separated 1 c sugar, divided ¼ c lemon juice Grated rind from however many lemons you used ⅛ tsp salt 1 baked pie crust Heat oven to 325°. Beat egg yolks and ½ c sugar in the top of a double boiler until uniform. Stir in the lemon juice and rind. Put over hot water and cook until thick, stirring constantly (this took about 5 minutes). Remove from heat and set aside until cooled. Beat the egg whites and salt 2 minutes with a mixer on high speed. Add the remaining sugar in small additions (a tablespoon or two each time), scattering it over the surface rather than dropping it all in one place. Beating each addition in thoroughly before adding the next. Gently but thoroughly stir a spoonful of meringue into the custard. Then fold in the remaining meringue in two or three additions. Pour and spread into the pie crust. Bake until nicely browned on top, 15-20 minutes. Let cool, then chill (yes, it will fall- don't worry about it). -All Electric-Mix Recipes prepared specially for your Dormeyer Mixer, 1946

Chiffon pies turn up in a lot of older cookbooks going back to the Depression, yet for some reason have more or less disappeared in the past 15-20 years. Today we're going to find out if there's a good reason for that or if people just don't know what they're missing. Really, it looks like little more than a lemon meringue pie if you just decided to mix it all together.
But getting to the recipe: we would like to thank those nice people at Dormeyer for failing to mention that this recipe has two parts. It took us a couple of minutes to realize the meringue recipe is actually the second half of the pie. In our defense, it made sense to us that a cookbook from when electric mixers were still a novelty would have a separate meringue recipe just to say "Look what you can do with this modern device! It's so easy and impressive!"
We never figured out why we're supposed to beat the yolks. Perhaps the thirty seconds of beating whips them up which is crucial to the recipe working?

...Maybe not.

It turns out there is a point to beating yolks the modern electric way- pausing the recipe so we could do this:

For those of you who think of washing dishes as a soothing activity, our friends at Dormeyer were thinking of you. Those who don't will have to anyway before getting to the meringue unless you have spare beaters. On the bright side, we had a measuring cup lined with tasty lemon sugar.

But getting back to today's perpetration. Previous experience made us wary of attempting to cook this until thick- there's no flour, cornstarch, or anything else in it. Nevertheless, we attempted it, setting a timer for 10 minutes, whereupon we would take it off the stove whether it worked or not. However, much to our surprise, it actually thickened! We were both delighted that it worked and unnerved at how gelatinous it ended up.

The people at Dormeyer probably had you beat the yolks with a mixer rather than a spoon to show how you really can use the mixer from beginning to end of making the pie. If this was their intent, it was defeated because you had to get out a spoon anyway once it was on the stove. Besides, the mixer's marvelous modern powers were perfectly demonstrated when you stuck it into egg whites and beat them into shape.

This bounced back when tapped.

It's recipes like this that really sell mixers to people who lived when you had to do without. Turning egg whites into Styrofoam in less time than it takes to play a record demonstrated the electric mixer so well that I really don't understand why they bothered beating the egg yolks with it. Thirty seconds didn't beat them, it barely broke them up. Maybe someone in editing ordered the writers to go through all the recipes and eliminate as much hand-stirring as possible whether it made things easier or not.

Looks like shaving cream, doesn't it?

We had barely a puddle of lemon sludge at the bottom of one pot and a lot of egg foam to get into it. As you can see, there's barely any color difference between the last spoon of egg whites and what's been mixed up already.

Given how little lemon there was in all the foam, it tasted surprisingly lemony. Also, I'm terrible at spreading things prettily in pans.

Yes, the pie is in a saucepan.

However, we at A Book of Cookrye wanted this to be pretty and like drawing swirls on things anyway.

If this were Pinterest, I'd claim I got it into the pan like that on the first attempt and that it is so easy.

And tada! It came out absolutely lovely to behold if not surprisingly flat on top. The pie felt odd and spongy, but it smelled really good.

However, it sank back to where it started by the time it cooled- maybe a little lower than before baking.

It's not sunken, it's a vessel for whipped cream.

It tastes just about exactly what the recipe looked like: lemon meringue pie if you just mixed it all together. Despite sinking a lot, it was still very fluffy. I was lazy and did it in a graham cracker crust, but it would have been better in a plain crust like the recipe called for. However, this is a really good whipped lemon pie. And if it sinks on you too, just fill it with whipped cream (or ice cream!).

There's no need to comment on my poor pie slice lifting technique.