Oatmeal-Raisin Cookies: or, The things you let your kid write down

Ever let your kid write out a recipe?

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies 1 cup sifted flour 1 tsp baking powder ½ tsp salt 2 or 3 tsp cinnamon ½ tsp (heaping) nutmeg ¾ cup shortening - soft. 1 cup brown sugar 2 eggs ⅓ cup milk 1 cup raisins 3 cups oatmeal Heat oven to 375°. Have greased or paper-lined baking sheets ready. Sift flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg into a large bowl. Add the shortening, brown sugar, eggs, and about half of the milk. Beat until thoroughly mixed (about 1 or 2 minutes if you're mixing them by hand). Stir in the remaining milk, raisins, and oatmeal. Drop by large spoonfuls onto the baking sheets. Bake 12-15 minutes, or until browned at the edges. Depending on how much the first batch spreads while baking, you may want to pat the remaining cookies a little bit flat before baking them. Handwritten manuscript (probably copied from a Quaker Oats can), 1930s?

I'm pretty sure one of my great-grandmother's children copied this word-for-word off the back of a Quaker Oats can. It even looks like they used the kindergarten-aged method of spacing each sentence one finger-width apart. 

If we set aside the charmingly wobbly handwriting, I didn't see how a recipe copied off a food label could go wrong. Manufacturers usually test the heck out of those. (Or at least, the bigger companies do.) So instead of wondering if these would work, I was curious if these were good enough that I would have let my hypothetical child copy it into my recipe book. 

As I piled all the ingredients into the sifter, I had to credit the Quaker Oats people for not skimping on the spices. I didn't measure "with the heart" or by the heaping spoonful. These are level spoonfuls. 

Many cookies start with directions like "Cream the shortening and sugar until light, then beat in each egg one at a time..." but this recipe has us skip all that and just pile everything into the bowl. I'm going to guess that if I had the original oatmeal can in my hand, the recipe would have a headnote about making these cookies "the new, easy way."

I was going to use the electric mixer for this, but I got hit with a sudden hand-stirring mood. We had a few stubborn clumps at first, but this turned into a perfectly smooth batter in 90 seconds.

And now, we are directed to dump in the remaining ingredients. Like any good oatmeal cookie recipe, we have barely enough dough to contain the oats.

After making so many batches of runny cookies over the past few months, I baked a single cookie so that I could find out whether I needed to add more flour before committing an entire panload of dough. (Seriously, the ongoing trend of getting runny cookies unless I add extra flour has gone from frustrating to infuriating. But at least I know I'm not the only one.)

It may not be pretty, but I was thrilled that it didn't turn into a runny mess. (So many of my cookies have done that lately.) But it was so bland that I immediately stirred a lot more spices into the rest of the dough. 

Even after I got the spices right, these cookies were horribly dry. Like, they got crispy and then went too far. I didn't hate them enough to feed the trash can, but I also was muttering to myself that "If I had a child that wanted to copy out THIS recipe..." Then I thought that perhaps these would ripen overnight. It seems like a lot of older cookie recipes are better after they've sat out for a day.

While I was debating whether to let these cookies sit overnight or discreetly chuck them, someone grabbed one off the counter and was like "These are REALLY good." When someone says they like it, I never tell them they're wrong.

With that said, these were a lot better the next day. They had a much nicer, soft texture, and the flavor was a lot better too. But before you rush out to make these for yourself, I should note that overnight the raisin flavor seeped its way through these cookies. You would almost think I found a bottle of raisin extract and stirred a generous splash into them. It added a really interesting complex flavor that I really liked. But since not everyone likes raisins, I thought I'd forewarn.

I should also note that these had a fantastically long shelf life, even without carefully sealing them in an airtight container. They didn't go stale, or hard, or mushy. So if you need a cookie recipe to always have on hand in these increasingly trying times, this could be the one for you.

Soviet Waffle Cookies: or, Fun with new toys

I have no idea what current events could possibly put Russia on my mind.

Soviet Waffle Cookies

Recipe 1: (These are like waffle-iron pound cakes.) 3 eggs 1½ cups sugar 200 grams margarine or butter (1 cup minus about 1 tbsp) 250-300 grams sour cream (about 2-2¼ cups) 2 tsp bottled lemon juice, or juice of half a lemon Pinch salt About 3 cups flour ½ tsp baking soda Melt the margarine and set it aside cool off. Whisk eggs and sugar until very thoroughly beaten, about 1 or 2 minutes. Then beat in the sour cream and lemon juice. Mix in the flour and baking soda, adding enough flour to make it almost as thick as cookie dough. Cook on a hot, well-greased waffle iron. Клуб кулинаров (Cooking Club)

Recipe 2: (These are firm and not so sweet. They make good breakfast waffles.) 4 eggs 100 grams sugar (½ cup plus an extra spoonful) Pinch salt 2 tsp vanilla 1 tbsp vinegar 100 grams butter (a smidge less than ½ cup) 2 tbsp cooking oil 100 grams sour cream (1 tablespoon less than ½ cup) 1 tsp baking soda or baking powder (if using baking powder, omit vinegar) 250 grams flour (2 cups) Melt the butter and set aside to cool off. Thoroughly beat eggs, sugar, salt, vanilla, and vinegar. Slowly pour in the melted butter and the oil, beating the whole time. Add flour and baking soda. Mix well. It should be about the consistency of very thick sour cream. Let stand for 5 minutes. Cook on a hot, well-greased waffle iron. Olesya Real Life

Recipe 3: (These are very crisp on the outside and extra-fluffy in the middle, but are best when very fresh.) 3 eggs 180 grams sugar (1 cup plus a heaping tablespoon) 2 tsp vanilla pinch salt 100 grams butter (a smidge less than ½ cup) 70 grams cooking oil (scant ⅓ cup) 1 tsp baking powder 140 grams flour (about 1 cup plus 2 tbsp) Melt the butter and set aside to cool off. Thoroughly beat the eggs, sugar, vanilla, baking powder, and salt. Slowly pour in the butter and oil, beating as you go. Sift in the flour. It should be about the consistency of cake batter. Let stand for 5 minutes. Cook on a hot, well-greased waffle iron. Olesya Real Life

I don't know how I ended up watching Russian cooking videos when I can't even type Cyrillic letters to find them. But sometimes it's nice to watch people cook at home in a language you don't understand, so you don't even have to keep up with the words.

As I mentioned when we first bid goodbye to cheap eggs, a box with Ukrainian postage arrived on our doorstep earlier this year. Apparently in Ukraine, exporting Soviet bric-a-brac is a small-scale national fundraising effort. Ukrainians have discovered that a lot of people abroad will pay for old Soviet crap.

I opened our trans-Atlantic delivery box, carefully unwrapped a very well-done packing job (seriously, you could have thrown this off the balcony and the goods would have been safe), and found a new waffle iron. Well I say I "found" it, but to be honest I ordered it because we all have our splurges.

 

I love how Soviet waffle irons look like somebody described one to someone else without any pictures, and then commanded them to start a factory by next week or they'd end up in Siberia. A lot of them are more like stovetop 3D cookie molds than waffles. If you search online, you will find a lot of Soviet bunnies, walnuts, squirrels, mushrooms, and other whimsical shapes instead of boring grids. There is a certain grimness to all the designs that really speaks to me these days. (For those in the US, think cheaply-made 1970s kids' cartoons.) I didn't get one that makes little bears or oak leaves. I got one that looks like this.

I was really curious about what passed for a treat for well-behaved Soviet children. For my first attempt, I made this person's recipe because I always trust videos that are clearly someone cooking at home while their husband/wife/child/friend/whoever holds the camera. (A lot of the slicker-production videos are from content farms that use trick editing to hide recipes that cannot work.) I am not saying this is the definitive recipe, but it is definitely a recipe.

At this point, I have to give Google credit. They may be turning the entire internet into a network of spybots, ads, and AI trash, but YouTube's voice-processing and language translation is amazing. Even with the occasional misfires and gibberish, I could understand almost all of what these people were saying. And after enough videos (I watched a lot), I started to pick out the occasional word of Russian. First it was soundalike words like "margarine" and "soda" (baking, not drinking). Then I learned that "smetana" is sour cream, "masla" is probably butter, and I think "pichinya" is cookies. I may not be able to ask for directions in Saint Petersburg, but I can at least point at sour cream and name it.

On a brief cross-cultural note, I find it interesting how recipes always get adapted to local packaging sizes. In the US, we tend to use butter by the quarter-pound stick or a tidy fraction of it. Over in Russia, butter is apparently sold by the hectogram. As a result, all the recipes I saw called for either 100 grams of margarine or some easy portion of it. 

All right, enough preliminary remarks, it's time for waffles. Like making pizzelles, we started by beating eggs and sugar. In another bowl, we had already melted and cooled off our butter, which we then poured into the bowl in a thin stream. The butter sank to the bottom of the bowl, leaving only a few golden curlicues behind. 

I still sometimes forget that we have a dishwasher and therefore don't need to fret about washing the parts of an electric mixer.

And now, we add the sour cream! The Pan American Airways book of recipes from around the world has a chapter on Russia. The seven-pararagraph introduction (from which I learned all I know about Russian cooking) says that Russians use sour cream in nearly everything.

Apparently in eastern Europe, they use little packets of vanilla powder instead of bottles of extract. But I wasn't about to go out of my way to import ingredients for a recipe I had never made.

Meanwhile, the waffle iron was perched on a hot burner. I thought about trying to strip and clean the outside, but I have a certain respect for grease deposits that might be older than me. 

As the iron heated up, I could smell many years of dust burning off of it. But this wasn't just a smell, it was a presence. Imagine going into an abandoned house in the bleak midwinter, stepping over petrified breakfast cereal, broken ceramic knicknacks, and old magazines that had fallen to the floor as various shelves failed. Now, imagine that you turned on the central heating for the first time in at least twenty years. As the air blows through the vents, the smell of burning furnace dust mixes with moldering odor already in the room and the sharp scent of ice coming through the cracked windows. (You'll have to pretend that in all this time, no one ever cut off the utilities.) 

That is just about what was emanating from over the burner. This iron didn't just put out a musty smell, it put out an aura of faint yet heavy despair, the kind that you don't notice in the background of your life but you definitely feel when it hits you for the first time.

By the time most of the Soviet dreariness had burned off our iron, we had a thick batter that looked just like what we saw in the video. It's always nice when your cooking comes out the same as the guide you're following. When I tried a spoonful, it tasted like it could become a really good pound cake. (I think it was the sour cream.) 

As a recipe note, a lot of people in videos mixed the baking soda and the vinegar (or lemon juice) in a small spoon and then quickly stirred it in while it fizzed. I added them separately so they would fizz in the batter rather than over it. 

It's also worth noting that no one in any video I saw got out a nice, precise set of measuring spoons for their waffles. (Though some people had kitchen scales). Instead, people used spoons from the cutlery drawer without any thought to "level measurements." It reminded me of watching my aunt the night before Thanksgiving, measuring everything with random glasses and whatever spoon was at the top of the drawer.

With great excitement, I brushed shortening onto the iron and prepared to experience dessert behind the Iron Curtain. Now, everyone in the various videos kind of awkwardly smeared the batter onto the iron. I thought I might do a better job of batter distribution until I attempted it myself.

When I tried to open the iron a few minutes later, the top and bottom would not part. With a grim suspicion of what waited inside, I forced the iron open and saw... this.

I think we can say "Das vedanya" to this one.

I had suspected this would happen. The first waffle is always for the fairies. Always.

I made a few attempts to clean the mess off because I knew things would harden as the iron got cold. But I only got a few tiny shreds of batter and several burnt knuckles.

So now, my freshly-imported Soviet iron was out of commission and most of the batter was still in the bowl. If only I had a spare Soviet waffle iron in case of emergency...

People in Soviet days probably had to wait half a lifetime to get just one of these; I got two with combined shipping.

This one has a feature that I'm surprised doesn't turn up in a lot more stovetop waffle irons: little pegs and sockets that interlock and prevent any wiggling. I guess you just can't beat that communist build quality.

This time, I remembered the advice from Fante's website about seasoning the iron. I brushed both sides with shortening while it was still cold. Then I flipped it every minute or so as it heated up. As a result, the first waffles didn't stick quite as badly. With a bit of patience, I got these off almost completely intact.

For the second round of waffles (if you exclude the ones that ruined the first iron), I dared to put on a lot more batter, which filled the pan properly as it expanded and cooked. You can see where it overflowed the pan a bit, but it didn't ooze all over the stove.

 

These waffles didn't fall right out of the pan, but they didn't fight to stay in it either. They only needed a gentle suggestion from a spatula. 

I have learned by now that with stovetop waffles, you need to squeeze the iron shut until the batter is at least mostly set. But I didn't realize how much force a foaming waffle exerts. I could see our Soviet steel handles flexing and bending as the batter pushed them apart at one end and I white-knuckled them together at the other. I started to fear that I'd have have to take this to a welding shop after a few batches.

Worries about Soviet metallurgy aside, the waffles got better with each successive splot of batter. Our next batch dangled off the iron when we held it over the rack, then all the little hearts fell into a mound without any prodding.

After our initial stuck-on disaster (which was still waiting for me to clean up), I was so glad that we got this recipe to work. Look how many of these came out of the iron without ruining themselves! And that doesn't include the ones that got eaten while our wafflery was underway.

I am always surprised when I make a recipe and it comes out just like the pictures. Usually that can't happen without a lot of behind-the-scenes food stylists. But these looked just like the ones I watched people make online.

These were like a good pound cake, but with an extra-crispy golden crust all over. I'm not throwing out this recipe. Or the waffle iron.

Now, I hate to give a recipe that involves ordering utensils from a war zone. And so, I put the last of the batter into a normal waffle iron. You know, the kind you either have in your house or can find in any thrift store. Because this particular one does not clamp shut, the waffle puffed upward a lot instead of expanding across the entire iron. You can really see the difference if we put it next to one of the Soviet-cooked waffles.

So yes, you can make these on the sort of waffle irons that you can get from nearly any garage sale. (I mean, that should have been obvious. I just felt like getting out this waffle iron.) But if you're out shopping for a waffle iron just so you can try these Soviet delights, I suggest you get the kind where you lock the top and bottom together after you've poured in the batter (usually by twisting a handle).

Anyway, I decided to try another recipe very soon thereafter. After all, when you're culinarily venturing into an extinct country, you don't stop after one batch of waffles. And so, we landed on this video which has two recipes.

 

Even though I don't speak Russian, it was helpful to see how these should look as I'm making them. And she typed both ingredient lists in the video description, so I was able to run that through Google Translate and follow along. 

 As a lot of these Soviet waffle recipes seem to, we start by beating together sugar and eggs while our freshly-melted butter cools off on the countertop. The recipe used a lot of cooking oil, which makes it great for those weeks when you can only get margarine if you have personal connections in Moscow. We also added a bit of cinnamon because it just seemed right.

This time, we had more of a pourable batter than the first ones we made. 

 

We are told to let the batter stand for 5 minutes, after which I could pile it in a big mound instead of pouring it on.

The batter thickened a lot when we let it stand 5 minutes.

These waffles had a extra-crispy texture that almost made them seem like they were deep-fried. On the first day, they were almost-but-not-quite crunchy on the outside, delicately fluffy in the middle, and nearly impossible to stop eating.

But on day two, they were like hardened foam. So I would definitely recommend the recipe, but not making them ahead. With that said, I just know that they'd make an amazing trifle if I soaked enough sherry into them. They were the right kind of stale. 

Not long after that, I tried the other recipe in the same video. She said it was not as sweet as the first (which is why I let the recipe wait a bit), but that they had a much nicer consistency. I like how with every one of these I have made, you basically get everything into a bowl and start stirring. Time is money, and I'm pretty sure both were tightly rationed in the USSR.

Unlike the previous two recipes, the iron opened without any gentle cajoling or shaking it to loosen things up in there. They fell right out as soon as I opened the iron over the cooling rack.

I loved how the you could see visible mottling on the waffles. The batter got golden immediately on contact with the hot iron, then more of the batter burst out from inside it as it kept puffing up and spreading out. I should note that I sent a picture of these to a friend of mine who said "Oooooo, Dalek waffles!"

These weren't sweet cookies like all the others were. But they were really good breakfast waffles. They were just firm enough to hold their own against a deluge of syrup, and had just enough of a crispy, toasty flavor to be good on their own.

Naturally, you can make any of these recipes without having a waffle iron shipped in from over the sea. I'm going to recommend the first recipe at the top if you want a sweet dessert, and the second one if you wanted something for breakfast. The third recipe is really good, but only the day you make them.

Wilted Lettuce: or, When the old times come back, the old recipes come with them

Are your salads getting monotonous? Do you need a "pleasant variation from the day's usual tricks?" Are you concerned about budget cuts to food safety monitoring and therefore want to ensure that any stowaway microbes don't get past your stovetop?

Wilted Lettuce 3 hard cooked eggs, sliced 1 large head lettuce ½ teaspoon salt (or more to suit taste) 1 teaspoon sugar 6 slices bacon, cut into small (half-inch ish) pieces 2 tbsp vinegar Wash the lettuce thoroughly, drain it, and chop it into pieces slightly larger than bite size. In a very large frying pan, cook the bacon until it is crisp and the drippings have come out of it. Reduce heat to medium-low. Add the vinegar, then add the lettuce and eggs. Cook until the lettuce is tender but still bright green.  Serve at once. The leftovers aren't as good as when it's fresh, so make only as much as everyone will eat the first time. We recommend serving with a crusty bread to soak up the juices. Source: Chicago Tribune; April 17, 1936

Today, we are opening my great-grandmother's recipe binder and trying one of her newspaper clippings. I ran into problems at the first line of the ingredient list. An unfortunately-placed ink smudge made it impossible to read the amount of boiled eggs. I couldn't tell if it called for six or eight.

I emailed the Chicago Public Library, asking if they could track this recipe down and find a more legible copy. A reply arrived within a few hours: "Today is your lucky day, this recipe happened to be in the Chicago Tribune, whose database we can pretty easily search. The recipe is attached. It looks like 3 is the number of eggs."

Join or donate to your local Friends of the Public Library, everybody!

 

At first I wondered what kind of lettuce I should put in this. Today, we mostly default to iceberg, but how common was it in 1936? Before I let myself get caught up in period-correct salad greens, I checked the prices. Iceberg lettuce suddenly seemed perfect.

Back at the house, the lettuce had to wait until I had boiled the eggs. Since I never remember how to do that, I have to look up Delia Smith's guide every single time. I didn't think to look if she has a guide for neatly slicing them elsewhere on her site. But if you look past my inept knifework, you can see that these came out of the pot at the perfect time. Unfortunately, they also stank up the kitchen.

I have previously mentioned my theory that the weirder and wackier flavors of yesteryear made more sense when everyone smoked, whether they lit their own or inhaled a pack a week secondhand. In a similar vein, I would like to speculate that people didn't mind adding boiled eggs to everything because you couldn't smell them over the omnipresent stale smoke. Price of eggs notwithstanding, it seems like people these days don't "volumize" casseroles with chopped boiled eggs as often as we did when sofas were incomplete without an ashtray balanced on the armrest.

After getting the eggs ready, our recipe conveniently has us cover the faintly sulfurous smell with bacon. This is one of those recipes where cheap bacon (the kind that's mostly fat) might actually be the better choice. I don't think the recipe necessarily wanted to add bacon meat much as harvest the drippings for lettuce-wilting.

This salad can torture everyone in the next room of the house. First, they get the tantalizing scent of sizzling bacon. Then, all at once, they get the bitter smell of hot lettuce. I wonder if the people in a certain Chicago apartment were leery whenever they smelled bacon coming from my great-grandmother's stove. Sometimes you get bacon and waffles, other times you get wilted lettuce.

Speaking of title ingredients, we were ready to wilt our lettuce! We are told to "wash lettuce, drain, and chop." It is surprisingly hard to get all the water out of lettuce after you've washed it. I didn't want to go out and buy a salad spinner, but I definitely wanted to borrow one.

I cut the recipe to one-third, and the biggest skillet was barely up to it. Did everyone in Chicago have paella pans?

Just like fresh spinach, the lettuce shrank a lot. This may be why people don't cook lettuce very often. But on the other hand, it's a lot easier to eat your greens when you can compress them into a small bowl.

 

Things were going so well with this recipe until I added the egg after the lettuce was done. While I was stirring everything long enough to warm up the egg, the lettuce lost its bright green color and took on the dull gray look that says "You're not leaving this table until you finish your vegetables."

That bowl contains a third of a head of lettuce. That's, like, two or three wedge salads. Lettuce shrinks a lot on the stove.

Did you know iceberg lettuce has a flavor? Well, after shrinking it down to a seventh of its original size, its flavor is concentrated. The bitter lettuce (not overcooked, just its actual taste), salty bacon, vinegar, and boiled eggs went together better than I thought. But you have to be in the mood for pungency before you think this is "a pleasant variation from the day's usual tricks." As I said earlier, I can't help wondering if the flavor of this made more sense when life had a background of cigarettes and higher liquor sales.

Purely for the heck of it, I sent a picture of this to Marcus, longtime friend who definitely isn't traumatized from trying various recipes on the blog. He did not seem to regret being too far away to drop by and share the experience.

 

Because I still had two-thirds of a lettuce and another boiled egg in the refrigerator. I soon made a second wilted salad. This time, I cut up the bacon before cooking it instead of after. As we learned from the cream onion pie, the bacon gets crispier and the fat renders off better. I also didn't have to pause mid-recipe for a chopping break. (As a food safety note, chop your lettuce and get it off the cutting board BEFORE cutting up the bacon. That way, you don't get raw-meat germs in the greens.)

This time, I added the boiled eggs just as everything was heating up. The lettuce stayed green this time, but I don't think it made a dramatic visual difference. There's really no way to make iceberg lettuce look pretty after you've cooked it.

This recipe is neither disgusting, nor is it a classic waiting for rediscovery. You have to be in the mood for some well-placed bitter flavors before you can like it. But if you're like me and always keep a jar of sauerkraut on hand, you might not be disappointed. Some of my friends suggested I try this with kale instead of lettuce, so I'm going to keep an eye on the clearance produce. 

But I'm not going to cross out the wilted lettuce in my reprinted copy of the book. This recipe may have regained a place in our kitchens thanks to CDC budget cuts. It might be wise to start cooking all our vegetables again-- or at least briefly heating them to get rid of any microscopic stowaways. And of course, this salad a good way to salvage any salad greens that aren't quite as fresh as they were when you bought them.

Salt-And-Vinegar Hot Potato Salad: or, Better than I knew I could wish it to be

I can't think of a sound argument against potatoes and bacon.

Salt And Vinegar Hot Potato Salad 4 cups sliced new potatoes 6 strips bacon, chopped 1 tbsp flour ¼ cup vinegar 1½ tsp salt ½ tsp pepper ½ cup water 1 sliced green onion* Boil the potatoes in salted water until tender. Meanwhile, fry the bacon until crisp in a large pan. Stir in the flour and blend well. Add the vinegar, salt, pepper, water, and the (thinly sliced) white part of the green onion. Cook for 5 minutes over medium heat. Drain and add the potatoes. Gently mix. Stir in the rest of the green onion just before serving. If you cook the potatoes ahead of time, you can reheat them with the sauce in the top of a double boiler (or the microwave, of course!). *the original recipe calls for one tablespoon sliced green onions, but who wants to cram those into a tiny measuring spoon? Chicago Tribune, undated (1930s or 1940s?)

This recipe comes from my great-grandmother's binder. She pasted two hot potato salads onto the same page, but this one starts with bacon.

First off, I love that picture and want a copy of it to hang in the kitchen. It goes past strange and straight to art. I almost want to say it's "geometric" and "art-deco inspired," but maybe I'm just a bit bedazzled from seeing hot dogs and sandwich bread arranged with so much intentionality. This puts our modern-day party trays to shame. 

Getting down to the salad, I love how the writers let us economically dodge the cost of hot dog buns. Instead, we have a decorative, aesthetically pleasing arrangement of sandwich bread and sausage. (Well, if you consider hot dogs to be sausage...) I supposed you're supposed to take a piece of bread and then plonk a wiener on top of it?

If you add a few condiments, it looks like a very nice one-tray meal. But I have a hard time imagining following the newspaper's advice to serve this at a "picnic supper" unless I packed a chafing dish.

Getting down to spuds, I decided to do everything involving a cutting board before I turned on the stove. I don't always manage that kind of advance planning, so it's nice when I think of it. Aside from sliced potatoes, the recipe calls for "one tablespoon sliced green onions, including tops." I briefly tried measuring them out properly, but I can't reconcile green onions and level tablespoons.

Moving down the ingredient list, we're using a lot of bacon today. The newspaper may have named this "hot potato salad," but I think the bacon should have also gotten title billing.

I've never seen bacon look so bad. Like, we all know where meat comes from. But this mess looked more like a slimy heap of dead animal than most of the meat that passes through the kitchen, including the occasional recognizable organs.

As we learned from The Philadelphia Inquirer, chopping the bacon before cooking allows all the grease melts off better. 

I think that the recipe was more interested in harvesting the fat that melted off the bacon than the bacon itself. A lot of recipes call for bacon fat without using the bacon itself, but this one is perfect for those of us who no longer keep bacon grease jar next to the stove. 

In just a minute or two, the meat itself shrank to brown confetti, but the grease remained in abundance.

For some reason, the flour made the grease fizz.

We were now ready to add everything else to the pan except the potatoes, which were still boiling in the saucepan next door. As a recipe note, I omitted the tablespoon of sugar in the recipe. I don't know what it's supposed to do, but I don't like adding adding sugar to things that aren't sweet. Every time I make sloppy joes, I omit the brown sugar.

It kind of looks like cheese dip, doesn't it? After telling us to add the green onions at this point, the recipe suggests waiting until the end. If you're trying this at home (and if you like salt-and-vinegar chips you should), wait til you take the pan off the stove to add the green onions. They soon withered to nothing. But in this moment, everything looked really nice.

I thought the sauce was far too drippy at first, but after 5 minutes it became nice and creamy. Also, you'll notice that the green onions have all but vanished. Again, I should have taken the recipe writers' hint to ignore their own instructions. But at this point, only one thing remained: add the potatoes!

I didn't serve this with rye bread because do we really need carbs with a side of carbs? While we're on the subject, I like that they don't suggest serving it with toasted rye bread. For one thing, toasters were still expensive. Also, since (I'm guessing) the depression was on, you didn't have to worry about uneaten toast going stale. Instead, you could just put the extra bread back into the breadbox.

The newspaper suggests serving this with frankfurters. I didn't think that was necessary when I was getting groceries. But as I served this, I couldn't help thinking "This would be great with hot dogs..." 

 

I shouldn't have been surprised this was so good. This was salt and vinegar bliss. If you like salt and vinegar chips, you owe it to yourself. But in full disclosure, the salad didn't reheat very well. The leftovers weren't bad, but they lost their zest after a night in the refrigerator. 

As a postscript, I have to note a fun variation I made on this. You see, others in the house had bought a frozen pizza a while ago and never bothered to eat it. As I watched it slowly get freezer-burnt in its own box, I thought to myself "I wonder if this is any good with pepperoni grease instead of bacon drippings..."

Things soon looked like someone's first-ever shift in a diner kitchen. Everything in the pan thickened up exactly as it should have, but it didn't look very good.

I never thought pepperoni would be almost too hot to handle. Rendering off the pepperoni grease and then cooking the meat in its own fat released a capsaicin payload I didn't know pepperoni had. Until today, I never knew pepperoni contained actual peppers. I always thought it was salt and nitrates. 

Even though I omitted the salt, this was a lot saltier than I wanted it to be. The pepperoni-potato salad was fun in theory, but it just wasn't that great in practice. 

I want to say this is a nice recipe for hot weather since you don't turn on the oven. However, you do end up standing over two stove burners, one of which is steaming at you and the other is full of spattering grease. But even as I write this, I didn't regret purchasing enough spuds and bacon to make it again.