Kimbell Banana Bread

The Kimbell flour company's attempt at cake may have been a bust, but maybe they can do better with banana bread!

Banana-Nut Bread 2 cups flour ½ tsp salt ½ teaspoon baking soda ¼ tsp baking powder 1 tsp cinnamon (or more if desired) ½ cup shortening* ⅔ cup sugar 2 eggs ¼ cup buttermilk or sour cream 2 ripe bananas, mashed 1 cup pecans Heat oven to 350°. Grease a loaf pan. Mix flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon. Set aside. Cream the sugar and shortening. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each. Then alternately add the milk and the dry ingredients. Mix in the bananas and nuts. Pour into the pan and bake until the center springs back when lightly pressed, about an hour. *Or butter, or oleo Source: Kimbell flour canister, probably 1940s or 1950s

I made this purely because we had two bananas slowly blackening on the countertop, and the recipe calls for exactly that. At first I was very happy to keep our grocery money out of the dump. Then I realized: am I really economizing if I throw a lot of flour and eggs after nearly-rotten fruit?

Because I didn't want to make bland banana bread, I used oleo instead of shortening. A lot of older recipes use the word "shortening" to mean "any solid fat," so it's probably period correct. But mostly, I distrust shortening unless I am brushing it onto a hot waffle iron. It does not seem like it came from this good earth. 

I also added some uncalled-for cinnamon and vanilla because I could tell we would need it.

We are told to use "well beaten" eggs. Instead of getting out a little bowl for this, I figured the eggs would be well beaten by the time our mixer was done with them. We may have a dishwasher, but that doesn't mean I need to fill it as often as possible.

Even though I didn't add nuts, I will give the Kimbell Flour people credit: they explicitly call for pecans instead of walnuts. Pecans are what walnuts wish they could be. And they are so versatile: if you wish you had walnuts, simply let your pecans go rancid! But even through the Kimbell people got their nuts right, I just do not like nuts in cake.

I was going to put the batter into a loaf pan as specified, but cupcakes suddenly seemed like a better idea. After baking, I chose not to ice them. You see, this recipe is called banana bread. It is not banana cake. Therefore, these are not cupcakes but muffins. Therefore they are a healthy breakfast.

They baked up nicely, but in full disclosure a lot of them had deep holes on top. I figured anyone who complained didn't want muffins. (There were no complaints.)

All in all, these weren't bad. I didn't have to discreetly drop them into the trash after a few days. But like so many muffins, these were not as good as I hoped. They were so bland that I could have convincingly lied and said they're good for you. 

But with that said, this recipe has a really nice pound cake texture. I don't think the Kimbell people can top Mrs. Kahn or the Slovak-American Ladies Association, but I didn't violently scribble out Kimbell's banana bread like I did their marble cake.

 

Est! Est!! Est!!! Pizzelles

Somebody really liked this recipe.

Est! Est!! Est!!! Pizzelles 6 eggs 1 tsp vanilla 1 tbsp anise extract, or ¼ tsp anise oil 1 tsp orange or lemon extract 1 cup sugar 1 cup butter or oil Pinch of salt 2¼-2½ cups flour 2 tsp baking powder If using butter, melt it and set it aside to cool. Combine flour and baking powder in a sifter, set aside. Beat eggs and flavorings with an electric mixer until very light. Gradually add the sugar, beating the whole time. Beat until very thick. Gradually pour in the butter or oil, beating on high speed the whole time. Then set aside the mixer. Sift in the flour and stir it in by hand. Cook on a hot pizzelle iron until crisp and golden. If desired, take out about a third of the batter. Mix in ¼ cup cocoa powder. Cut this into the rest of the batter for a marbled effect. (Note: Apparently lots of people can make chocolate pizzelles, but the cocoa powder makes them stick horribly to the iron every time I try. So beware!) Source: handwritten recipe on a pizzelle iron box

I've been rehoming unwanted clutter on Ebay, which is kind of fun if you're not in it for the money. It's amusing to see how far across the country your junk--- I mean, your under-cherished treasures--- can go. Every now and then while I'm waiting for my listing photos to upload, I'll look at the suggested merchandise. Because I've already gotten everything I want, I am now immune to ill-advised purchases. (However, I am not above helping myself to interesting things I find on the curb.) This pizzelle iron turned up, and I knew I wouldn't buy it because I already have the same one perched on top of the refrigerator. (Again, I already have everything I want.)

Whoever first owned this iron wrote today's recipe on the box in big enough letters to cover the entire side of it. That is even more commitment than permanently writing a recipe into the blank pages at the end of a cookbook. Maybe they were like "This is the recipe. There are other pizzelle recipes, but I choose this one for now and for always." Naturally, I had make it.

As with so many pizzelles, this recipe starts off with beating the eggs until Miss Leslie would have approved. This is why I really love having a stand mixer in my life. I simply had to turn it on and leave it alone, which freed me to clear off counterspace to make room for the impending cooling racks. Within a minute or two, the egg (just the one, we're cutting down the recipe) looked like this.

This is only one egg.

This really is the kind of recipe that electric mixers were made for. Whipping everything into a beige custard would be an arduous ordeal if we were doing it by hand. Even a handcranked eggbeater would have left our hands a bit sore. But today, our pre-flour mixture formed peaks in less than five minutes. It also tasted insanely good, in large part because I added a truly excessive splash of almond extract.

Our recipe box (literally a recipe box!) tells us to add anise. I've learned that apparently anise is the traditional pizzelle flavoring, but it's not my favorite extract to add to the batter. So I left it out. (However, I love adding powdered star anise to chocolate fudge. As a bonus, everyone else thinks it tastes weird, so I get to eat all of it!)

After adding the flour, I could tell this was supposed to be on the cake-batter end of pizzelles instead of a firm dough. However, it was a little bit curdled. So I added a smidge more flour than the recipe called for. 

Now, if I wanted to make these exactly like the original writer did, I would have made these on the stovetop iron that is identical to the one this recipe came with. But I wanted to get out the electric one and justify having bothered some unsuspecting electricians to fix its wiring. The batter looked unexpectedly pretty when it landed.

The lid put up some resistance when I tried to open it. I was already bracing myself for failure, because that usually means the batter has stuck to both sides of the iron and glued it shut. But after a few moments of gentle prising, the iron opened without tearing the pizzelless. However, they were were firmly attached to the lid of the iron.

I still haven't gotten the hang of putting the right amount of batter onto my electric iron. They're either runty or they ooze.

To my own surprise, I managed to lift them off in a single sheet. I fully expected to destroy them in my attempts to dislodge them from the iron. On a barely-related note, I love imagining generations of people saying that those fluffy bits of hot dough between the pizzelles are for the person working the iron.

These tasted like they wanted to be crisper than they ended up. I know I didn't undercook them because they had turned a lovely golden color. But even after these cooled completely, they were almost soft. On the one hand, I like pizzelles to be really crispy. But on the other hand, these didn't break into messy shards when you bit into them. And of course, I don't know enough about pizzelles to get away with being opinionated about them. These seem like they'd be really good with some sort of custard or cream spread onto them, or maybe clapped together with a filling like stroopwafels. Which I just might do in the near-ish future.

Cabbage au Gratin: or, Never has failure tasted so good

Mrs. Mary Martensen has let me down.

Cabbage au Gratin 3 cups chopped or shredded cabbage, boiled or steamed 1 egg 1½ cups milk ¾ tsp salt ⅛ tsp. pepper ¾ cup fine dry bread crumbs 1½ cups grated cheese (sharp) 1½ tbsp. butter Heat oven to 350°. Grease a casserole dish. Beat egg, milk, salt, and pepper together. Set aside. Place a layer of cabbage in the baking dish. Sprinkle lightly with the crumbs, then with the cheese. Repeat these layers until all the cabbage is used up. Pour the milk over the whole dish before adding the last layer of breadcrumbs and cheese. Bake until golden on top, about 35 minutes. Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

Lured by a 50% markdown, we at A Book of Cookrye have been cooking a lot of cabbage lately. I didn't realize how much I liked cabbage until I learned about haluski, so the discount has only encouraged me further. If prices hold steady at twenty cents above nothing, I might actually get enough practice to shred cabbage into fine confetti. 

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933

Before reading the recipe, I thought we would have to make a white sauce and then melt cheese into it. But Mrs. Mary Martensen's method allows us to economize on time as well as grocery money. We were more than halfway done after we had all our ingredients gathered together.  

Today's recipe involves a lot of cheese, which always makes vegetables good. It also avoids boiling the cabbage into slime. It's amazing how delicious vegetables can be when you don't boil them until quite dead. I am tempted to say that steaming the cabbage in the microwave (as we did) reduces heat in the kitchen and thus makes this recipe a lot more summer-friendly. But we still had a half-hour baking time ahead of us.

In case you forget this recipe came out in the middle of the Depression, have a look at how parsimonious Mrs. Martensen is with breadcrumbs. Even pulverized stale bread must be carefully rationed (if you even had enough bread for any of it to go stale).

After layering everything together, we only needed to dump in the eggy milk. Before I read the recipe directions, I had assumed we would be making cabbage in a cheese sauce. But this was shaping up more like a cheesy cabbage quiche.

Having reread the directions and confirmed that everything in the baking dish was as it should be, we only needed to put the final layer of crumbs and cheese on top. I even remembered to dot the top with butter.

I felt silly for putting a relatively small pan of cabbage into the oven for over half an hour. So, I decided to economize on oven heat by pushing dinner to the back corner of the oven and use the rest of the shelf space for cookies. Or at least, that was my excuse.

Our recipe says to bake for 35 minutes, and Mrs. Mary Martensen's time proved to be exactly correct. After I had baked it for precisely that long down to the last tick of the timer, it had a beautiful golden-brown cheesy top.

I couldn't wait to dig in, but some daft fool had decided that this was a good time to make cookies with dinner in the oven. This meant I had to let the cabbage au gratin wait for at least fifteen minutes while I finished baking. When I finally got a spatula into our dinner, I found that the beautifully-browned top layer concealed a watery mess.

I didn't know which was weeping harder: the casserole dish on the countertop, or me as I thought about how much sharp cheddar was lost in this failure. Tasting this only made me more irate because it was amazing and wrong at the same time.  It's hardly a revelation that vegetables and cheese are friends, but sharp cheddar and cabbage are an extraordinarily good match.

But this recipe did not work. The egg coagulated the milk into some horribly slimy semi-cheese curds. Meanwhile, the actual cheese had not melted. Instead, the shreds were half-softened and almost rubbery. And the soggy breadcrumbs interspersed throughout only made everything worse. It was edible, but I needed a lot of willpower not to throw it away. 

 

I shared this online, asking if I had missed a step that would have been obvious when the book was new. Everyone agreed that the recipe had nothing to prevent it from turning into a soggy mess. 

To Mrs. Mary Martensen's credit, this allowed you to get something shoved into the oven with minimal effort. It definitely is a vegetable. And maybe if you serve it with bread to sop up the juices, it's not bad after a long day. But mostly, I hate how good this wanted to taste. Everything in it went together so, so well. If it wasn't a soupy failure, it would be amazing. But it can't live up to its own ingredients.

Chili As Apparently Made In Chicago

Keep in mind the small amount of beef in this recipe the whole time we're making this.

Chili 1 pound ground beef 12 scallions or 1 large onion, chopped ½ of a (20-oz) can chopped tomatoes, or 2 chopped and peeled medium tomatoes 1 16-oz can beans, drained ¾ cup water Salt, chili powder, paprika, garlic powder, etc to taste Brown the beef in a large skillet with a lid. Drain the fat unless using very lean meat. Add the onions, tomatoes, beans, and water. Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat, and simmer for one hour. Add the seasonings about 5 or 10 minutes before you turn off the heat. (I've found that simmering dried spices for an hour cooks away all their flavor, which makes the house smell great but leaves the food bland.) Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933

Since I live in Texas, you'd think I wouldn't have to go up to Illinois and 90 years into the past for a chili recipe. But I was curious to see what might have appeared on tables where chili is a food and not a religion. Turns out that like every other pot of the stuff I've ever made, it starts with beef.

At the sight of the greasy pan, our household's local chapter of the Society for the Conservation of Beef Fat called an emergency meeting. The recipe never mentions draining the meat, but we all agreed that no one wants to greasy chili. I know that some chili purists will mechanically repeat the mantra "fat equals flavor", but this was a lot. Like, you could probably get a half-batch of pizzelles out of this.

Also, the recipe calls for "ground round steak" and we used 80% hamburger. Maybe period-correct meat wouldn't have turned our skillet into a grease pit. And so, we drained the meat and economically saved the drippings for another time.

History doesn't always repeat, but it often rhymes.

Speaking of economizing, Mrs. Mary Martensen's chili only uses a half-can of tomatoes, thus allowing us to save the rest for another day. Tomatoes are one of the cheapest vegetables on the canned food aisle, so you know times are tough when you're splitting them in half. 

Setting aside the can opener, our recipe economizes on time as well as grocery money. This is all the knife-work required for the entire recipe. I think I spent more time peeling the onion than cutting it.

And here is where you can really tell this recipe comes from hard times: this is everything we're using to stretch the beef. Keep in mind how puny the meat looked by itself in the pan. 

The onion slices were impossible to stir into the pan, so I laid them on top and hoped they'd mix in better after they softened in the steam.

Now in Texas, chili is a religion. Multi-generational feuds have been launched over a half-teaspoon of liquid smoke. People with pure hearts and true beliefs can argue for multiple days about whether garlic powder is a heretical shortcut (or if garlic should be permitted at all). But I think all of them would agree that noodles are sacrilege. And even those who permit noodles would agree that you don't boil them for an hour.

However, Mrs. Mary Martensen's chili isn't meant to win any cookoff prizes. It is for you, the housewife of 1933, whose grocery budget consists of a few pennies leftover from last week. Also, this recipe comes from Chicago in the 1930s. It was still an industrial town. No amount of noodle-free purism would hold up against a table full of people who just got home from a long shift. So, noodles it is.

Even after I decided to include the noodles, I thought I'd skip simmering them for an hour. But then I wondered if this would come out better than I thought. Perhaps the noodles absorb a lot of the chili flavors. Or, maybe they would dissolve and turn into an economical thickener. 

In the absence of a lid, we pressed foil on top of the pan as best we could. The chili barely fit in there, so we had to use a lot of pressure to keep it in place. Again, I have to give credit to Mrs. Mary Martensen and the home economics staff of The Chicago American. They made a single pound of beef nearly overflow the skillet.

As is customary with chili, I was going to make cornbread to go with it. Then I realized that the noodles made it redundant. Mrs. Mary Martensen really is looking out for her readers: she got meat, vegetables (if you count a half-can of tomatoes), and bread into a single, nearly-overflowing pot.

I did not stay in the house for the entire one-hour simmering time. When I returned from some errands, every room smelled like really, really good chili. Given the small amounts of seasonings, I was surprised. 

But when the time was close to over, I sampled a spoonful and immediately shook a lot of chili powder into the skillet. I'm going to charitably assume that this recipe's tiny doses of seasonings were meant as a starting point rather than the absolute final amount. Otherwise, anyone following this recipe would have eaten some very bland meat. 

On the positive side, I liked how the onion rings had turned into long noodles. It helped their flavor stand out more than if I'd chopped them. However, the actual noodles had turned to slime. As a result, our chili had become a slithery porridge that happened to have meat in it. You had to imagine your way past a lot of slippery, half-disintegrated noodles before you could like what you were eating.

But before I complain about the noodles too much, I have to note that I wasn't hungry again for hours. Like, some dinners have you drifting back to the kitchen before bed, but with this you're good until tomorrow. And that's worth a lot on a Depression-era grocery budget.

To give the recipe a better shake, I made it again without any noodles. I also tripled the seasonings and added some truly uncalled-for garlic. Omitting the pasta meant I economized on time since I didn't have to get out a strainer and a second pot. Also, the supermarket nearest me sells French bread for embarrassingly cheap, so we still economized on ingredients.

If you triple the seasonings and serve noodles on the side (if at all), this recipe is a pretty good way to make an easy meal-- even if it's not the most exciting. Even without the noodles, that single pound of beef went an astonishingly long way. And it was good enough that I was happy to have the leftovers. I wouldn't take this to a chili contest, but it's great for dinner at home.

Mock Cherry Pie: or, A Book of Cookrye makes a mockery of cherries

If you are looking for an adventurous way to delight and slightly bamboozle your relatives this Thanksgiving, this pie is perfect.

Mock Cherry Pie 1½ cups (5.5 oz) raw cranberries ½ cup (about 3 oz) raisins 1 cup water 1 cup sugar 1½ tbsp (or 4½ tsp) cornstarch 1 cup sugar 1 unbaked pie shell (plus enough dough for a top crust or lattice if desired) Heat oven to 350°. Cut the cranberries in half.* This is easier with scissors than a knife. Place raisins, cranberries, and water in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. While they are heating up, mix the cornstarch and sugar, breaking up all the cornstarch lumps. Stir the sugar into the boiling pot, and bring back to a boil. Cook, stirring constantly, until thickened and transparent. Then cool completely. (You can cool it faster by putting the pot in a larger pan of cold water— or ice water if you have an ice maker— and stirring it until it cools off.) While the filling cools off, make the pie crust if you're preparing one from scratch.  Pour the cooled filling into the pie shell. Make sure you leave room for it to bubble and boil up a bit in the oven. Finger-dab or brush water around the edge of the pie crust. Cover with a top crust, or a lattice. Or, if desired, leave the top open. Bake until the crust is golden on top, about 30-40 minutes. *If you don't want to cut all those cranberries in half, you can instead put them whole into the pot along with the water and raisins. Bring to a boil, cover with a lid, reduce heat to a simmer, and cook until you hear the cranberries stop popping. Then proceed with the rest of the recipe. The pie won't taste as convincingly of cherries, but it's still really good. Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

I never thought anyone would need to imitate cherries. Even when fresh cherries are out of season, stores always have canned cherry pie. Maybe cherries were impossibly expensive in the 1930s. Or perhaps Mrs. Mary Martensen created this recipe so for the busy home cook who didn't have time to waste with a cherry pitter. Even cutting cranberries in half one at a time is faster than pitting cherries. Or, maybe cranberries used to be so cheap that people needed to disguise them, like someone serving turkey sixteen nights in a row because it was on discount.

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933

The halved cranberries kind of look like miniature apples, don't they?

 

Our filling was done only a few minutes after turning on the stove. But as we learned with the honey fruit pie, things go very wrong when you pour steaming-hot filling into a raw pie crust. We're here to make a mockery of cherries, not find fifty new reasons for kitchen profanity. I therefore let the pie filling cool off, after which it slid right into the pie pan without ruining anything.

I was going to make a lattice top out of our excess pie dough, but I had a sudden attack of laziness. So, I just laid some strips across the top and declared it done.

While the pie baked, I decided to try the syrup that remained in the pot. (I may or may not have done a deliberately bad job with a rubber spatula.) And it tasted astonishingly like cherries. You had to carefully examine the flavors before you could tell that something was amiss.

Before the pie had finished baking, I had already filed this recipe away for next fall. When fresh cherries are in season and everyone the house starts buying them by the sack, I start craving cherry pie. But the cherries get eaten too quickly for me to bake them, and I cannot justify swatting everyone else away from fresh fruit.But I know that I won't need to defend cranberries and raisins against anybody.

I don't know if I'll ever be comfortable with an oven this large. Yes, I could put a whole turkey in there if I wanted. But even a full-sized pie looks puny in such a massive space, which makes me feel bad about the wasted heat.

After the pie was baked, it even looked like it was loaded with cherries. The cranberries and raisins had dyed each other as the filling bubbled in the oven, and their respective colors had averaged out to a reasonable approximation of cherry red. You can really see the near-perfect cherry color if we zoom in on the edge of the pie, where the filling bubbled up a little bit as it baked.

But really, I was just amazed at how pretty this pie is.

I would have never thought that cranberries and raisins add up to cherries. But when I brought this pie with me on a visit, none of my friends believed me when I said it is cherry-free. Everyone thought I was testing their gullibility.

The pie doesn't taste exactly like cherries, but it gets unnervingly close. If no one told you otherwise, you would think it was mostly cherries with a few other things stirred in. And even if you were told the truth, you might not believe it. (Again, my friends thought I was lying.)

Because I had enough cranberries to make this again, I tried it without snipping the cranberries in half. I wanted to know whether all that fruit bifurcation was really necessary, or if it was yet another instance of older recipes adding pointless extra steps (which happens surprisingly often). 

Borrowing methods from the cranberry-celery salad, I boiled the cranberries until they popped. Then I added the raisins and everything else. And... the pie still tasted cherry-ish, but it wasn't as convincing. Maybe cutting the cranberries allows all of the flavors to meld, rather than keeping the berries' interiors half-shielded by their own skins. It was still a really good pie, but it wasn't as good of a cherry pie.

I made this recipe because I thought a cranberry-raisin pie would be good on its own. I wasn't prepared for it to actually taste like cherries. If this cookbook tells me that I can mix corn and avocados and it will taste like bacon, I'm not going to argue without trying it first.

Escalloped Corn

Did you know that Chicago is by definition Midwestern?

Escalloped Corn 2 cups canned corn, drained* 1 tbsp butter 2 tbsp flour 1 cup milk 1¼ tsp salt Chili powder, black pepper, paprika, and other seasonings to taste 2 eggs, separated ¼ cup diced ham ½ cup shredded cheddar cheese (mild or sharp, whichever you like) Heat oven to 350°. Grease or spray a medium casserole dish. Melt butter, add flour and mix well. Slowly add the milk, stirring hard as you pour it in. Cook until it comes to a boil, stirring constantly. Reduce heat to medium and cook 2 minutes longer, scraping the pot the whole time. Pour into a large mixing bowl. Mix in corn, seasonings, ham, and egg yolks. Beat egg whites until stiff peaks form, then fold into corn mixture. Pour into the pan. Sprinkle .the cheese on top. Bake until the cheese is golden brown, about 30 minutes. *Use a 16-oz can, or whatever happens to be the closest size on the grocery shelf. All Electric-Mix Recipes Prepared Specially for your Dormeyer Mixer, 1946

All Electric-Mix Recipes Prepared Specially for you Dormeyer Mixer, 1946

 

Today, we are revisiting the Dormeyer mixer recipe book. Mom found it at an antique store for 80¢ when I was tiny. I didn't know at the time that old advertising handouts are so common that you can find racks of them for less than the cost of a candy bar. Therefore, I thought it was it was a special compilation of recipes that were all old enough to be heirlooms by now. So it felt like getting a lot of lovingly passed-down recipes without having to wait for multiple generations of relatives to pass them down. (Because I didn't know about low-quality paper, the book's brittle, browned state made it a rarer treasure.)

Getting to the recipe, today we are making something called "escalloped corn." I guess that tacking an extra "e" onto the word "scalloped" makes it extra fancy? 

This is one of the few recipes that doesn't have any brands in the ingredients. The writers credit "our own Dormeyer kitchens" for the few recipes that didn't come from any food companies. There were no Dormeyer kitchens. They just had their employees send in recipes to round out the book. Given that Illinois has a lot of corn fields once you drive out of Dormeyer's hometown of Chicago, I'm not surprised that we have a corn casserole.

As we soon found out, "escalloping" our corn starts with white sauce.

I'm not going to make any snipes at Midwestern recipes and their apparent aversion to spices. But I will note that I added a truly uncalled-for amount of chili powder.

I know that most casseroles look terrible in the mixing bowl, but this one looked particularly bad.

And now we get to the only reason our escalloped corn is in a mixer instruction book: whipped eggs. I wonder if the Dormeyer people included this recipe subtly promote the extra beaters (sold separately). You can't whip egg whites if you get a single errant drop of yolk in them. Therefore, you have to either pause the recipe to wash the beaters, or get out out a second mixer.

This is a lot of bowls for canned corn.

On a more general note, I really don't think this recipe would exist without mixers. I can't imagine anyone wearing out their wrists to beat egg whites for canned corn, escalloped or not. Even a hand-cranked eggbeater is too much work for canned corn.

Our casserole looked particularly vomitous in the pan. This is why we always cover our casseroles with cheese. (Also, I didn't see the direction to stir the cheese into everything else.)

After seeing how ugly this looked, I was ready to say a lot of mean things about it. Then I tasted a spoonful and instantly stopped regretting that I preheated the oven for this.

But even though I have a dishwasher and multiple electric mixers (they turn up cheap at thrift shops), I didn't like how many dirty dishes were involved in making a casserole. Aren't you supposed to just put everything into a big pan and bake it?

So, when I escalloped some corn again (yes, this was good enough to make again), I reduced our beater count by 50% and dumped the egg yolks into the with everything else. Then I buried the whole mess under seasonings that never made the Dormeyer print edition.

If the goal of this recipe was to achieve greater volume and height, skipping half the steps works better than following the directions. The corn mixture still looks like barf, but now it's extra-fluffy barf.

I liked everything about this recipe except its airiness. Even though it was fully baked, it had the texture of an uncooked mousse-- with canned corn in it. 

 

But with that said, this tasted really good. I don't think you can go wrong with ham, corn, and cheese. The leftovers were a lot better after firming up in the refrigerator overnight. So even though the Dormeyer people wanted to demonstrate the versatility of electric mixers with corn casserole ("It's not just for cakes!"), this is almost certainly better if you just stir it together and put cheese on top.