Brown Sugar Topped Squares: or, I would have written this down too

You never know what will turn up in boxes that no one has ever opened.

Brown Sugar Topped Squares         First layer: ½ cup butter (or ¼ cup each of butter and shortening) 1 cup dark brown sugar 1 egg 1 egg yolk (save white for topping) 1 tsp vanilla 1½ cups sifted flour ½ tsp baking powder ½ tsp salt         Topping: 1 egg white 1 cup dark brown sugar Heat oven to 325°. Grease a 10"x15" jelly roll pan. For extra insurance, cut a piece of baking paper to fit the bottom of the pan before greasing it. Afterward, press the paper firmly into place, eliminating as many bubbles as possible. Then coat the top of the paper with cooking spray. Cream the butter and sugar. Then beat in the egg, the yolk, and the vanilla. Beat well. Then sift in the flour, baking powder, and salt. Mix everything together. Place into the pan and spread to the edges. 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 sticks to your hands.) Set aside. 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. Bake about 30 minutes. Cut into squares or bars while warm. Source: handwritten note

I was recently dog-sitting for my parents. It's like getting to briefly enjoy the fun parts of dog ownership without the whole "lifetime commitment of responsibility" thing. A few days before I arrived, my mother said that when she was going through some boxes that have followed us through multiple moves, she found a whole binder of recipes in my great-grandmother's handwriting. She left it out for me to look through. The binder rings were long broken away, and the pages were so brittle that they shed little pieces of themselves no matter how carefully I turned them.

This comes from the same great-grandmother whose graham cracker cake literally fell into our hands on a paper scrap. At the time, I was surprised to get a single recipe from a relative I never met. An entire binder of them was more than I ever thought possible. She even put a table of contents at the front of it. Of course, by the time the book turned up, the pages were out of order and randomly stuffed in there. 

Her handwriting was this good. A few decades later, my teachers demanded typed drafts of my essays because they couldn't read them otherwise.

She had a mix of newspaper clippings, glued-down food labels, and handwritten recipes-- some of which are attributed to people I'm pretty sure are relatives. The handwritten ones are surprisingly detailed and easy to understand. You don't always find that in personal recipe books. (I only put in that kind of effort when I'm giving a recipe to someone else.) This binder looks less like someone's personal notes and more like it was meant to be found and used by somebody else. Then again, she was a teacher with terrifying stare, and also organized enough to put a table of contents at the front.

If we carefully flip through the pages, we find multiple recipes for prune whip. Maybe she liked prune whip the same way I like brownies, and had different ones for different occasions. Perhaps one prune whip is the fastest but not the best, another one uses better spices but is a bit fussy to put together, another one has the perfect texture but also takes a while to make... etc.

Not going to lie, a salad with hot dogs on top is probably amazing.

Looking elsewhere through the book, most of the recipes are for desserts. This kind of surprised me, because the surviving photographs of the lady herself show someone who looked too grim to ever permit frivolous sweets, much less make them. In pictures, she almost always looks ready to frighten the disobedience right out of you unless she's with her husband, in which case she just looks tired. 

But despite appearances, she may have liked sweets a lot. We found a lot of various personal effects organized in old chocolate boxes when we cleared out the house. There were a lot of chocolate boxes. Some of them were double-decker sized.

 Getting back to the book, the recipe for "pineapple dessert" involves mixing marshmallows into canned pineapple and letting them dissolve overnight. A decade or two later, the instructions would probably end with a note like "reduce marshmallows to serve as a salad." Now, I always thought of these people as the relatives from Chicago.  For some reason it never occurred to me that if they lived in Chicago, they were therefore midwestern--- marshmallow dessert/salads and all. I sent this page to a friend who lives in Michigan, who said "I've made that pineapple dessert!" I was further informed "It's pretty good!"

The instructions for the "lemon sponge" on the same page suggest that apparently she made it a lot. She wrote down the original ingredients, and then rewrote them in quantities to feed like fifty.

Other recipes of note include two recipes for "Irish moss blancmange." At first, I thought "Irish moss" was meant to be a poetic, evocative title. Like, no one today thinks "dirt cake" contains actual dirt. But both of the Irish moss blancmanges start by literally boiling Irish moss. I thought this seemed weird until I learned that "Irish moss" is what we now call carrageenan, which is still used the same way today. Anyway, I'm not sure if this recipe was some sort of Irish pride thing, or perhaps a vegetarian option for serving gelatin during Lent. (They were very Catholic.)

Naturally, I couldn't resist making something as soon as I finished looking through the book. What good is my parents' counterspace if I don't cover it in splatters while I'm here? I zeroed in on this recipe because I love brown sugar in all its exquisite forms. As I read the instructions, I wondered if this would be like a molasses-tinged variant of the Blitz Forte. After all, both of them are cookie dough baked under a meringue.

I love the change in handwriting halfway down the page, suggesting that she let one of her kids carefully copy a recipe off the back of the Quaker Oats can into "the big recipe book."

You may notice that I used light brown sugar even though the recipe specifies to use dark. As much as I like making recipes exactly as written, there was no dark brown sugar at hand. I could have gone out to the grocery store, but the weather was cold, wet, and miserable. I would have poured in a little bit of molasses to make up for what we lacked, but there wasn't any in the kitchen. (Really, I think every kitchen should have molasses in case of a brown sugar emergency.)

Our dough soon looked like we were making blondies. Even though our ingredients didn't quite match what was written, we could at least see that the recipe worked. Also, the dough tasted so good that I regretted preheating the oven.

After mixing, we are directed to spread the dough "thinly" onto a 10"x15" jelly roll pan. I don't have one of those, but a little bit of math told me that a pair of 9" square pans are about the same total size. As you can see, two 9" squares are only a smidge bigger than the pan we're supposed to use.

I have never used calculus in my life, but I have to admit that all of the math classes from 8th grade and earlier have been very useful in my daily life.

I didn't think an 8% pan size difference would matter until I saw how tiny the dough looked.

This is not a recipe where you can eat a lot of the dough. I had to completely clean the bowl with a rubber spatula. And when that wasn't enough, I had to scrape the very last spoonful of it from the beaters. Even then, I barely coaxed it to the edges.

After that the dough was pressed as thin as it would get, I cracked our single egg white into the bowl and thought "This is supposed to cover all of it?"

Things looked more promising after I whipped the egg white to a voluminous froth, but I still had my doubts. Even if I had my great-grandmother's correctly-sized pans, this lone egg white would have to cover 150 square inches of dough. (That's 968cm² for our metric friends.)

Although brown sugar meringues are pretty common, this is my first time making one. You'd think I would have made one sooner just because people call them "seafoams," which I think sounds charming. But even though I liked the idea of a brown sugar seafoam and was excited to make one, I didn't think the recipe we had written in front of us would end well. I've found that a cloud of whipped egg whites can only take so much sugar before collapsing into a goop. Which this did.

Granted, our topping was slightly more whipped than before I put the egg white into the mixer, but not by much. Also, it was easy to smear this runny mess on top of the rest of the recipe. I didn't manage to completely cover our cookie dough, but that didn't bother me. As we all know, whoever trims off the ugly edges after baking gets to eat them.

To my surprise, the cookie dough managed to puff up a lot. But since the dough had started out looking like either crackers or pie crust, it was still quite thin after baking. I wondered why my great-grandmother didn't use a smaller pan than this. Maybe she needed to stretch the kitchen budget as thin as the dough in the pans. Or she might not have wanted the cookies to be too indulgent. Or perhaps it was laziness: "There! That'll do the kids' lunches all week!"

I may have baked these slightly too long. Even though I followed the instruction to cut them while warm, I had to use a lot of force. Also, that top layer was unexpectedly fragile. It crumbled to powder wherever the metal spatula went. (It was easier to chisel straight down with a spatula than to use a knife.)

These were like brownies only a lot more so. The bottom layer was wonderfully dense and chewy. The top layer started off powdery and then melted in your mouth. It was like that crackly layer on top of brownies but a lot more so. I hesitate to say the top layer was like candy coating or frosting, but it definitely suggested both.

But as much as I liked these, they would have been better with dark brown sugar. I wish I had added cinnamon to the bottom layer to make up for the loss. However, I didn't tip these into the trash. Instead, I put them onto the pretty glass cake plate for when my parents returned. For one thing, my mother really likes it but doesn't use it very often. Also, this cake plate is relatively small, which meant we had to stack the cookies into a tall pile on it. This helped them look less thin.

I will definitely revisit this recipe with the dark brown sugar that is specified, but it was still good with what we had on hand. I'm also pretty sure that reducing the pan size to 9"x13" won't hurt a thing. Besides, I think more of us have 9"x13" pans in the house than jelly roll pans.