Baked Ham And Noodles: It's too good to care that it's not pretty

I didn't know I had leftover ham.

Baked Ham With Noodles 1 cup leftover ham, chopped into medium pieces 3 cups leftover cooked noodles 1 cup whole milk ½ cup breadcrumbs Salt and pepper to taste 1 tbsp butter Heat oven to 400°. Grease a medium-sized baking dish. Sprinkle the noodles in ham into the dish in alternate layers. Season with salt and pepper. Add less salt than you may think- the ham already contains plenty of it. Pour the milk over everything in the pan. Then sprinkle it with bread crumbs. Dot with the butter. Bake until browned, about 15-20 minutes. Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

Over the course of cleaning out the freezer, I found a gallon bag of leftover ham from Thanksgiving. When I put it away in November, I told myself that I'd make something truly special with it, since ham doesn't happen every day. Then, when no worthy recipe appeared, I forgot the ham was in the freezer until it landed on my foot. 

Yes, you can buy sliced ham with the other cold cuts, but it's not the same.

And so, instead of obsessing over the perfect way to elevate this rare treat into something truly grand, we're going to let Mrs. Mary Martensen help us do something more interesting than just microwaving it or putting it in rice. I think this recipe is supposed to let us quickly repurpose our leftovers. If I'd had leftover noodles on hand, I could have gotten this oven in three minutes. 

This was a lot better than it should have been.

I thought one cup of ham seemed awfully parsimonious, so I decided that this is one of those "measure with your heart" recipes. And my heart said we should add one heaping cup of ham. But when I got everything into the pan, I started to think that we might have a bit too much meat to too little noodles. (Who would have thought that a recipe writer would be more correct than someone following along at home?) This is what we had after returning to level measurements.

 

You usually make a white sauce in recipes like this, not pour in the milk to make a sloshy mess. I was a little worried that I'd end up with a pan of mush. But I am not Mrs. Mary Martensen, director of a newspaper's home economics department, who presumably made sure these recipes worked before they went to press. 

When we took the pan out of the oven, we found a surprisingly good baked macaroni. The milk had kept the noodles from drying without turning them soggy. But I should note that it left weird, proteinaceous, and occasionally stringy deposits as it slowly boiled away.

The noodles lifted out perfectly without sticking or leaving any sad goop in the pan. I'm not saying Mrs. Mary Martensen was like Mrs. Wilson of the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger who could put microbes on a tight schedule and make them obey. But she comes respectably close.

In full disclosure, you're not going to serve this in neat portions. The noodles fall apart as soon as you scoop them out. But the recipe works exactly as intended. As with many things in this book, you may not win a cookoff, but you will come back for seconds. 

 

Golden Crisp Waffles

I don't think anyone can throw away a jar of screws.

Golden Crisp Waffles 2 cups sifted flour 2 tsp baking powder ½ tsp salt 3 eggs, separated 1¼ cup milk ⅓ cup shortening, melted In a large mixing bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Beat together the egg yolks and milk. Then add them and the shortening to the dry ingredients. Whisk together until mixed. (You might not get all of the lumps out, but don't worry too much about it.) Beat the egg whites until soft peaks form. Quickly but thoroughly fold them into the batter. Cook on a hot, well-greased waffle iron. Serve hot, with butter and syrup. Source: old Calumet baking powder tin (probably 1950s)

This recipe sort of comes to us from nearly the same source as my great-grandmother's binder. When we were emptying out the apartment, we found a lot of screws carefully sorted into Calumet baking powder tins. Like, a lot of Calumet tins. Apparently, they had some serious brand loyalty to Calumet baking powder in that house. 

We had a lot more Calumet tins than this one box, but I gave them to trick-or-treaters when we ran out of candy.

 

Anyway, I was in the mood for waffles and decided it'd be fun to deviate from my usual recipe (which is "prepare the mix according to box directions"). I was pleasantly surprised to find that you're nearly ready for the waffle iron after getting all your ingredients in a line. Sure, you have to beat the egg whites, but that only takes a minute or two now that electric mixers aren't priced like a lifetime investment.

After stirring everything together, I began to suspect that the Calumet people had sent in a faulty recipe to whoever printed their can labels. The directions say to stir the whites "quickly but thoroughly into batter" and we didn't have a batter. We had a paste.

To my grim lack of surprise, the egg whites deflated completely. I could have just stirred them in and gotten exactly where we are now with fewer dirty dishes. Perhaps the people at Calumet added some pointless extra steps to help you, the home cook, feel like you're not lazy. Or maybe someone had some truly pedantic views about cooking and felt that unbeaten egg whites were as disgraceful as lumpy gravy.

Even though finishing the recipe seemed like disappointment with added effort, our "batter" and iron were both ready. So, I put a big sticky splot of it into place and got it onto the stove. 

Incidentally, I'm not turning into a stovetop waffle snob, even though I haven't used an electric waffle iron in a while. I won't pretend that anyone tell the difference between stovetop and electric waffles once they're on a plate. This is just my idea of a good time.

Although the first round of waffles was thoroughly cooked, I thought they looked rather pale. And the recipe promises us golden crisp waffles. With that in mind, I let the next batch of them cook until I thought they were golden enough.

If we break one open, we can see that they were surprisingly fluffy in the middle. I thought this could be why Calumet people used this recipe on their cans. That single spoonful of white powder worked a miracle on our waffle paste. They were a little dry, but we fixed that with extra syrup.

I glanced again at the recipe as I was cleaning up and discovered why my waffle batter had become a hard, sticky mess. I had cut the milk in half.

Because I love waffles as much as I love giving a recipe a fair chance, I made these again. It turns out that when you actually use the correct amount of each ingredient, a recipe goes a lot better. After stirring everything together, we had a batter just like the instructions say we should. But even though the recipe says to "mix only until smooth," that never happened. The lumps in the batter got smaller at first, but eventually they stopped shrinking. I figured that a lot of muffin recipes tell you that you're going to have some lumps left in the batter, and also managed a half-finished thought about "old-fashioned" and "homemade charm."

I kind of suspected that the batter would squish all the bubbles out of egg whites just like last time. They whites seemed so fragile when they landed on top. However, the batter was actually a bit puffier afterward. After our first mismeasured failure, I was so happy to see a recipe following its own directions.

And so, with a lot of optimism and delight, we poured our first correctly-made golden crisp waffles onto the iron. Unlike or previous sticky mess, this looked like the recipe was going right.

Four minutes later, we opened the iron and found these! I don't usually put butter onto waffles, but who am I to contravene the official written directions?

These were the best waffles I've had in a long time. Their crisp outer crust gives way to a wonderfully soft interior. And they're sturdy enough to take a lot of syrup on top. If I'm making a hot breakfast in the early morning (whether for myself or anyone else), I will use waffle mix. However, this is a great recipe for midnight waffles.

In closing, I have to credit the Calumet people for creating such a forgiving recipe. If your ingredient amounts are a long ways off, you will probably still get decent waffles. That's especially reassuring for those people who, for whatever reason, decided to make them for breakfast and therefore ended up measuring out ingredients at an unspeakable hour of the morning. 

I could be chipper and try to claim that if you measure all the ingredients out the night before, this recipe is a breeze to throw together in time for breakfast. However, neither I nor anyone I know has that kind of homemaking panache. But if you want waffles at an hour when you're already awake, this is a great recipe for them.

Domecon Chocolate Cake: or, The filling is the real winner

It's hard to argue with chocolate cake.

Domecon Chocolate Cake 1 cup sugar 1 cup flour ¾ tsp baking soda 2 ounces unsweetened chocolate ¼ cup shortening ½ cup cold water 1 egg ¼ cup sour cream or buttermilk Heat oven to 350°. Cut two paper circles to fit in the bottom of 8-inch round pans. Then grease the pans. Press the circles firmly into place, then coat the tops of them with cooking spray. (This cake really wants to stick to the pan, so you want some paper on the bottom.) Place chocolate, shortening, and water in a small saucepan or a microwave-safe bowl. Cook until everything is melted. If microwaving, stop and stir every 15 seconds. (Don't worry if it looks curdled and weird when the water and melted shortening refuse to mix.) Set aside to cool until lukewarm. Sift the flour, sugar, and baking soda in a large bowl. Or, mix them with a whisk or a fork to break up any little clumps. Whisk the egg and buttermilk into the dry ingredients. When thoroughly combined, add the chocolate mixture. Pour and spread into the pans. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes. When they're cooled, you may need to carefully cut around the edges to free the cake from the pans. When cold, put layers together with chocolate filling. Then frost with the icing of your choice. (I'm going to suggest you frost the top and then drizzle something down the sides instead of trying to spread icing over the whole thing. The cake sheds crumbs very well.). Chocolate filling: ¼ cup flour 1 cup sugar 1 egg yolk 1½ ounces unsweetened chocolate 1 cup cold milk ½ tsp vanilla Mix flour and sugar in a medium bowl, set aside. Have the egg yolk ready in another medium-sized bowl. Combine chocolate and milk in saucepan. Place over low heat, stirring occasionally, until chocolate is melted. Mix enough of this into the flour mixture to make a paste. Then return this to the pot. Cook, stirring constantly, until mixture thickens. Then reduce heat to a low simmer and cook until it is thick enough to hold a shape but still spreadable (about ten minutes). Scrape the bottom of the pot frequently. If it doesn't thicken, turn up the burner a little. Beat the egg yolk vigorously with a whisk. Continue beating hard while slowly spooning in about a third of the chocolate mixture, beating very hard the whole time. Then stir this back into the pot and cook for another two minutes. Remove from heat and cover with plastic wrap, pressing the wrap so it is in contact with the surface. (This prevents a skin from forming on top.) Let it cool, then add the vanilla. If the filling is too thick when it cools, stir in milk a spoonful at a time. This makes enough filling to spread between two 8 or 9-inch layers. Note: If you make the filling in a nonstick saucepan, you won't need to scrape it quite so much as you're cooking it. Unknown source (probably 1952-53)

To use cocoa powder instead of chocolate: For the cake: Add an additional 2 tablespoons of shortening to the amount already in the recipe. Heat the shortening and water together, getting them very hot instead of just warm enough to melt. Then thoroughly whisk in 6 tablespoons of cocoa powder. Let stand until lukewarm. (Adding the cocoa powder to very hot water and letting it steep for a few minutes brings out a lot more chocolate flavor than just stirring it in.) For the filling: Add 2 tablespoons of butter and 6 tablespoons of cocoa powder to the milk when you first get it into a saucepan. Stir over low or medium heat until the butter melts and the cocoa powder dissolves. Then finish the recipe as written.

I'm not going to say this was the only chocolate cake my great-grandmother ever made, but it is the only recipe she cut and pasted into her notebook. Or at least, it's the only cake in the surviving pages.

I don't know where this clipping comes from, but I'm guessing it was a magazine. The back of the paper has an advertisement for various books that came out in 1952. I only find the date noteworthy because all the kids were out of the house by then. Either she always got asked to bring the dessert (relatable), or she wanted to have chocolate cake regardless of whether anyone else was around (which is also relatable).

I had to ask: what makes this a "Domecon Cake"? At first, I thought it might have come from a region of France called "Domeçon" (with the little tail under the ç). However, this chocolate cake didn't seem particularly French. When I looked up the name, I found that "Domecon" is short for "Domestic Economy."

I didn't find any mentions of a "domecon cake" anywhere online, but I found a lot of articles about "domecon babies." During the early to mid-20^th century, the domestic science departments of various universities would apparently borrow babies from orphanages so the young women to practice parenting.

Oftentimes, the babies would be sick or underfed upon arrival. Restoring them to health became a class assignment. After a few months of scientific mothering, the babies would be returned to the orphanages and adopted out like nothing happened. No one kept records of who the babies were, where they came from, or what became of them afterward. So, it's almost certain that a fair number of grandparent-aged people today have gone their entire lives without knowing that they were once a class project.

The practice remains controversial to this day-- and I don't mean "controversial" in the lazy writer's sense of "makes everyone angry." Many people state the obvious: babies are not classroom supplies. However, others point out that the 1900s to the 1950s were a bad time to be an parentless infant, even if you were healthy enough not to threaten the orphanage's budget. And while no one would claim that college students raising babies in an artificial apartment is good parenting, it was difficult to find enough people with the will and funds to care for orphaned babies. Fortunately, we have a better social safety net today to help everyone in need-- right?

Obviously, I wasn't prepared to go from chocolate cake to lending babies. Let's get back to the cake.

We're supposed to melt the chocolate in the water. Later in the recipe, we are told to add it at the same time as the melted shortening. Naturally, this seemed a lot easier in one step. I could have done this in the microwave. But I've found that when you microwave fat and water together, they tend to pop, splatter, and make a mess that requires at least three dishrags. So even though the stove takes longer, it was the better option.

See? Easy peasy, even though it is curdled and oily for now.

I can't decide if this cake's method was faster than the usual "cream the butter and sugar, then beat in eggs one at a time" types of recipes. On one hand, we didn't have any long beating times. However, all of the bowls demanded a lot of counterspace (and later, dishwasher space).

But after everything was mixed and the pile of dishes had reached a respectable height in the sink, the batter tasted amazing.

As some domecon students may have said back in the day, "Oh baby!"

At this point, we ran into pan problems. We don't have any pan small enough for the recipe. I had to spread the batter realllllllly thin for this. I lowered the oven temperature to 300° so that the entire cake could rise before it firmed up. (For those who speak Celsius, we went from 180° to 150°.)

I got what I wanted from lowering the oven temperature, but I think my success came at the expense of a good cake. I can't tell what looked wrong about it, but it didn't look right. I told myself that the batter had tasted really good, so things couldn't go too badly.

Like the cake, the filling starts with a lot of bowls. Either 1950s domestic economy operated under the assumption that you had a dishwasher at hand, or you were supposed to really love getting up to your forearms in greasy suds.

A small stack of dirty bowls later, we were ready to cook this over what the recipe calls "a very low flame." It was barely different after the long cooking time. Given how much flour was in the cake filling, it should have turned into chocolate clay. 

It might have firmed up while cooling, but someone innocently wandered into the kitchen and asked "Whatcha making?" My dessert then realized there were witnesses and decided to embarrass me. It never got any better than runny gravy, not even when I put it in the refrigerator.

I didn't need to determinedly press on with the directions to know that most of this would drip right off the cake, and the rest would squeeze out as soon as I stacked the top layer on it. I put it back onto the stove to see if I could salvage it. This meant that I wasted a spoonful of the good vanilla because it cooked right out. But doesn't that look better?

I can only guess that my stove's "very low flame" was less than the recipe writers intended. Maybe gas stove valves have improved in the decades since this recipe was printed, allowing them to sustain a much smaller flame without sputtering out.

Having gotten this filling to act like it's meant to, it tasted exactly like a chocolate pudding cup. So even if the cake wasn't very good, I would definitely spread the filling in a different one.

Unfortunately we now had to set aside success and ice the cake. I wanted a thin coat of icing instead of burying the cake in a mound of sugar. But when I put the first smear of icing on top, I knew this would end badly.

Things went pretty well when we were doing the top. Sure, the cake showed through the icing, but we had successfully spread it without a single stray crumb. I almost felt confident before I got to the sides. Because I didn't yet have the new cake plate when I made this, the icing job ended horribly.

I think it's impossible (or at least really hard) to competently ice the sides of a cake if it's on a dinner plate. The raised rim gets in the way of your knife or spatula. You can even see that the cake looks slightly better where it was farther from the edge of the plate. 

After a minute or two, I realized that I was only making things worse. I dropped the knife into the spoon (after licking the icing off first) and decided the cake was done.

The filling stayed between the layers when we stacked them. However, it oozed out as soon as we cut a slice. I tried to tell myself I didn't mind, but it bothered me. 

But setting aside my first-time mistakes, this tastes like someone's birthday. It's just chocolatey enough to be really rich, but (dangerously) not so rich that you stop after just one sliver.

 

A few weeks later when some visitors dropped by, I decided to provide chocolate cake. This had absolutely nothing to do with wanting to test whether I could get the filling to stay in the darn thing.

This may a good time to mention that I splurged on a new set of 8" rounds. It felt very weird to buy brand-new cake pans. They usually just appear in my life. I've always used whatever happened to be in any given house I was in, gotten them as gifts, "borrowed" them from people (my cousin has long accepted that her round cake pan is on permanent loan), or --when all else failed-- bought them secondhand. But as of today, I own a matched set that no one has used before. It was so weird seeing shiny new pans in the oven.

I ordinarily wouldn't have bought something so thoroughly unnecessary. We have plenty of round pans in the house, even if none of them match. But these days, you never know what the tariffs will hit next. And dangit, I wanted to be able to stack a cake. The new pans sit very nicely next to the Soviet waffle irons and other kitchen frivolities.

Back to the cake. This time, I kept the filling at a simmer the entire time it cooked instead of lowering the burner much as it would go. By the end of ten minutes, this looked almost thick enough to serve as fudge.

After the filling was ready, it was time to stack our creation. You can see the the cake sagging in the middle. I think it just does that. I made sure it sprang back when lightly pressed, the toothpick came out clean, but the cake fell in the center anyway. I guess this recipe really wants to come out concave. If I were the sort of person who plans ahead, I would filled the shallow hole with fresh fruit.

It looks like I just plonked the cake on the counter, but it's actually sitting on a clear glass plate.

Getting icing onto the top of the cake went well enough. I could have piped a border around the rim and had a lovely (if incomplete) creation, but I decided I also wanted to ice the sides. 

Let's pause for a moment and look at the last few moments before things got irreparable.

If you're trying this at home, I suggest you ice the top and then drizzle some sort of thin, pourable glaze down the sides. If you don't, this will happen.

 

It doesn't look good, but I think it came out better without a dinner plate rim getting in the way. 

Setting aside the bad icing job, this is a pretty good chocolate cake. It's very tender, which is great when you're eating it-- and irksome when you're stacking and icing it. I think it'd be better as cupcakes, just because it doesn't have as much of a chance to fall apart on you. Making cupcakes would also let you avoid how badly this cake sagged in the middle. 

Even though the cake was good, but I think it got upstaged by its own filling. It tastes like really good chocolate pudding cups. But we only had few hours after cutting the cake before the filling slowly oozed out.

Soon thereafter, I decided to put the filling in a yellow cake. Because it was a little drippy last time, I let it get a lot firmer before taking it off the stove. This would prove a mistake. By the time the filling cooled, I could knead it like clay.

I worked it into a cake-size patty and flopped it into place. Then I thought that perhaps I should try a sample of it before letting myself get too happy. And I am glad I did. I thought it would be fudge, but instead it was gummy and sad (though the flavor was as good as ever). I quickly lifted it back off the cake, dropped it into the nearest bowl, and gradually added enough milk to make it right.

 

The cake crumbs make it look ugly and lumpy, but it tastes good anyway.

It was exactly as good as I hoped.

This is a really good chocolate cake, even though the recipe didn't seem to make enough batter for the pans it calls for. I think it'd be better as cupcakes anyway. But (as you likely have surmised by now) the filling is the really good part of the recipe. If you don't mind a small pileup of bowls in the sink, you should make it.

Spinach-Bacon Pie

I had all the ingredients in the freezer.

Spinach-Bacon Pie 1 unbaked 9-inch pie shell 6 strips bacon, cooked crisp, then crumbled or chopped* 1 (12-oz) package frozen chopped spinach, defrosted 3 eggs 2 tbsp flour 1 tsp salt 2 tsp onion powder (more if desired) 1 tsp black pepper ½ tsp cayenne pepper (if desired) 1 cup evaporated milk 1 cup (or 4 oz) shredded cheddar cheese (or any other type of cheese that melts well) Heat oven to 400°. Put the spinach in a strainer and press out as much juice as possible. Mix the juice with the evaporated milk. Then add enough water to make 2 cups. Heat it up on the stove or in the microwave. In a large bowl, whisk together eggs, flour, and seasonings. Pour in the milk while stirring constantly. Then mix in the bacon and spinach. Pour this into the pie shell. If needed, gently spread out the spinach if it landed in a sort of pile. Sprinkle the cheese onto the iron. Then bake 20-25 minutes, or until golden on top. *Naturally, you can just cut up 6 pieces of pre-cooked bacon if you have that on hand. Adapted from 9th Grand National Cookbook: 100 Prize-Winning Recipes from the Pillsbury's Best 9th Grand National Bakeoff, 1957--- via Mid-Century Menu. Recipe by Linda Lee Bauman (Whitehouse, Ohio), Junior Winner

I love the three bell pepper slices on top of the pie (which don't get mentioned in the recipe.) I imagine people fighting over who gets to eat the garnish because there isn't enough to go around.

When no one is around the house to bemoan the absence of meat, I often make vegetarian (or at least vegetarian-ish) food. Spinach-cheese-and-mushroom pasta is one of my default choices when I want to make dinner without thinking about it. This recipe (which is scanned from a Pillsbury Bakeoff handout) came across the Mid-Century Menu group, and I figured it was about the same meal with the ingredients rearranged a bit. Also, bacon is involved. 

When we made the gumdrop cookies, I mentioned that I had found a box of antique scissors and handed every pair to a friend who had made the mistake of saying he wanted to learn how to sharpen them. Well, I later found these cute things in a different box that probably hasn't been opened in years.

 

Getting back to the bacon, I am always a bit astonished at how much you lose when you cook it. By the time it was done, it was a shriveled husk of its former self. You'd never believe I had to cut it in half to fit it in the pan.

Moving to the other ingredients, we are supposed to drain and squeeze our spinach. (I also had a tiny bit of frozen bell peppers in a near-empty bag, so I added those too.) I think the recipe intends that we discard what we drained off, but hardly any spinach remained. 

Even if you don't fret about saving every last water-soluble vitamin, we had wrung out a lot of flavor. I didn't want to make an entire pie out of a blank-tasting wad of fiber, so I used the spinach juice to dilute the canned milk. The resulting gray-green stuff, which is full of delicious water-soluble vitamins, is theoretically the beginning of dinner. 

Incidentally, this is the first time I've used evaporated milk in something besides fudge.

Setting aside our filling ingredients, this pie came with its own crust recipe. It barely made enough dough to cover the pan. If you make it without increasing the amounts a bit, you will probably end up carefully patching every last scrap onto various holes and gaps before you're done. (It's a pretty basic pie crust recipe, so you won't lose anything special if you just get a frozen pie shell.)

Now, the first time I made this pie (yes, we liked it enough to make it again), water seeped out when I cut it. And I don't like weeping pies. So the next time, I added just a smidge of flour to the pie filling. After whisking the lumps away, we were ready to put all of this together.

Even if you just buy a frozen pie crust and pre-cooked bacon, you will spend a fair amount of time prepping your ingredients for this recipe, only to dump it all into one bowl at the end. 

All the ingredients landed in one big mound in the center of the pie crust. I had to do some spoon-nudging to even everything out.

 

This isn't at all pretty, but we hadn't yet crowned the pie with cheese. I was pleasantly surprised that the recipe calls for actual cheddar instead of American cheese. Maybe using real cheese set Linda Lee Bauman apart from all the other contenders and won her the prize.

This pie was absolutely fantastic. I can see why it won a bakeoff prize. It's rich without being overwhelming, and a good serving of vegetables without being punitive. Also, the spices seeped into the pie crust and turned it into a pretty good half-approximation of herbed breadsticks. And as an added bonus, the leftover pie slices were unexpectedly sturdy. I could just stack them in the storage container and none of them fell apart.