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.

Brownie canadensis: or, Importing recipes from the back of a chocolate chip bag

Guess what happened in the clearance rack!

Happy days have truly returned to A Book of Cookrye, because that is literally two pounds of chocolate, all of which is covered in markdown stickers!
Had it been but a single bag of chocolate chips, one might have just made a batch of delicious cookies. But two pounds of chocolate deserve something special. Something divine. A recipe that I've had on file for a while now...

That's right, this recipe for brownies uses three different kinds of chocolate! Truly, a recipe like this deserves to be shared with friends, which is why we're making this with Marcus!
You may notice two subtle hints that this recipe does not originate in the United States. It uses metric measurements,whereas America only uses kilograms and milliliters for science labs and selling illegal drugs. Also, they relisted the recipe in French. In case you skipped the title, this does indeed come from the Canada! I flew there on some friends' frequent flyer points last year, and in the course of doing some baking, I saw this recipe and thought it looked insanely good. Why I didn't make it on the spot I don't know, but let us wait no longer.

Double Chocolate Brownies 1¾ c flour (425 mL) ½ c cocoa powder (125 mL) ¼ tsp baking powder (1 mL) 1 pinch salt 1 c semisweet chocolate chips (or 6 oz chopped baking chocolate) (250 mL) 1 c butter (250 mL) 1⅓ c dark (50%) chocolate chips (or 8 oz or 325 mL) 2¼ c sugar (560 mL) 5 eggs 1 tsp vanilla (5 mL) Heat oven to 350° (180°C). Grease an 8"x12" or 9"x13" (20x30cm or 23x33cm) pan. For brownies, a metal pan is better than a glass one because the glass will hold onto heat and keep baking them for a while after you take it out of the oven. Mix flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt. Melt together the butter and dark chocolate. Beat the eggs until foamy. Add the sugar and beat until thick and custard-like. Add the chocolate-butter, mixing with a rubber spatula. Stir in the flour mixture. When all is mixed, stir in half the chocolate chips. Spread in the pan. Sprinkle the remaining chocolate chips on top. Bake 25-30 minutes. Source: A bag of store-brand chocolate chips I bought in Ottawa

This recipe starts with chopping a lot of baking chocolate. I was prepared to get out the knife and delay further brownie production for at least 5 minutes, but Marcus had a better idea.

Never thought your broke friends on A Book of Cookrye would extravagantly put slabs of Ghirardelli in a food processor, did you?

I will say, this recipe involved a lot more bowls than I bargained for. But, for once that did not annoy me at all. You see, Marcus has a dishwasher! So you know what? Let's get out a plastic tub and shake the flour and cocoa until they're as mixed as they can be!

And we'll go ahead and measure out the sugar beforehand into another bowl that no one will wash by hand!

Then we'll get out not a bowl but a pot because the chocolate and butter have to melt in something. We were out of microwave-safe bowls, so we had to use the stove for this.
Finally, we get out yet another bowl (that's 4 bowls total that no one will handwash) in which all of this will eventually come together... and beat eggs into suds. I will admit that this part of the recipe is mere speculation on my part. The instructions just say "beaten eggs" which can mean anything from "just bash them around with a fork for 10-ish seconds" to "keep going until they look like beige whipped cream (as we have done in recipes like this)." A lot of the egg-heavy brownie recipes I've seen lean towards the latter, so that was the option we went with.

At this point, with all the many ingredients in their many bowls or tubs or pots, measured and ready to go, the brownies began to come gloriously together. First, we add the sugar and transform this bowl of eggs into what tasted like an unusually rich icing. You might not think a bowl of just eggs and sugar would be all that great, but this was oddly addictive.

Next, we dumped in the melted chocolate and butter, which if you can pour out a mixture like that and not taste at least a little, you have no soul. The chocolate promptly sank through the extremely whipped eggs and hid under them.

Here let me detour and sing the praises of Marcus' dishwasher. Speaking as someone who has not had a working dishwasher in the house since 2005, the dishwasher is truly a miraculous and glorious wonder. Were I making this at home, there would be a pile of dishes overtopping the sink, waiting for me to reluctantly scrub and rinse each of them, one at a time, until the all were clean. Instead, we did not have a single dish in the sink. It is so gloriously convenient to measure and prepare absolutely every ingredient you're going to use without having to hand-wash a small army of little bowls and spoons. I've rarely had the pleasure of making a recipe and having everything measured out and ready at hand. The reward for such advance planning and preparation, if you have no dishwasher, is at least half an hour of extra cleanup because having everything measured out in its own little vessel quickly builds up to a lot of dirty dishes.
We kept the dishwasher open as we proceeded through the recipe, and simply dropped every gloriously unrinsed bowl, pot, tub, spoon, fork, and knife right onto the racks. No growing heap of dirty dishes grimly awaited someone with a sponge. All we had to do is close the door on the dripping mess and press a button. If you've never experienced cooking in the presence of a dishwasher, take a bag of ingredients and go to the house of anyone you know with a who has one and try it at least once. Your entire outlook on cooking will change.

Since the chocolate sank to the bottom, it took a few seconds of stirring before the batter started to really change color. But once it did, it seemed like it would never stop darkening. With every circle  the spoon made, the batter got even browner. It seemed like stirring made the chocolate magically grow in the batter.

But, just in case the brownies did not have enough chocolate in them yet, we added even more chocolate with the flour!

Oh, all this chocolate is (not) too much. It really is. This almost made me happier than not having to hand-wash a single dish.

But maybe you're unimpressed with all the chocolate in this recipe so far. What would say if we stopped bothering with other ingredients and just dumped more chocolate right into the batter?

And so, having put an unprecedented amount of chocolate into one pan of brownies, it was time to actually bake these. And.... oh. I nearly died when I saw this gloriously thick and oozy chocolate pour into the pan.

You know what? Let's look at that just a little closer.

When your brownie batter looks like this before you smooth it over with a spoon, that is a sign of amazing things to come.

Because Marcus and I are not soulless robots, we did a deliberately terrible job of scraping the bowl. Want to know how the batter tasted?

He actually stayed like this long enough for my camera to crash, restart, and finally take the picture.

Anyone who knows how much I don't just like but believe in chocolate will be thoroughly unsurprised to know this is how much I liked it.

We were so overcome with chocolate that we forgot to do the last line of instruction in the recipe before leaving the brownies in the oven. That's right, the recipe says you're supposed to just dump even more chocolate over the brownies right before they bake.

As I took these out of the oven, I just had to wonder: if Canadians get recipes this good on their grocery labels, why is the United States the country with the obesity epidemic?

If you look past my poor spatula skills, you can see a tantalizingly dark brownie that looks utterly divine.

In a predictable twist for two friends in the kitchen at 3 in the morning waiting for a pan of brownies to cool off to the point where we don't burn ourselves trying to eat them, we passed the time by going to the nearest establishment that sold tacos 24 hours a day. One of the benefit of living in the south is the density of Mexican restaurants, many of which extend their hours all the way around the clock. The sublime joy of 3AM tacos almost makes up for the miserable traffic and awful heatwaves.
Why do I mention the late-night food jaunt? Because we ended up too full of tacos and cheese dip to eat any dessert when we got home!
But you can take my word for it that the next day, despite promising friends that they could share in the chocolate creation, all the brownies mysteriously disappeared before anyone else could eat any.

Delicious Strawberry Shakes!

We at A Book of Cookrye would like to extend a laurel and hearty handshake to Marcus, for he has arrived at a new apartment! Marcus and I kept meaning to convene at his new domicile, but (miserable realities of adulthood being what they are) never seemed to both have the time at the same time. And so, a full year after he has moved to his domicile, we were finally able to christen his kitchen! (Yes, it was already well broken-in and therefore beyond christening since he's been living there a year, but that is a minor point.)

Strawberry Shakes 8-12 strawberries ¼-⅓ can condensed milk 1 to 3 tsp vanilla Ice Wash and remove leaves from strawberries. Thoroughly liquefy in blender with milk and vanilla. Add ice to taste and blenderize.

Unfortunately, the one night that both of us had open with neither an engagement that evening nor a morning shift to wake up for, it was time for new groceries to be purchased. Whatever would we make in a kitchen that has so little? We found a handful of strawberries which looked remarkably edible for a week in the refrigerator. Usually they're mold-coated and oozy, these were just kind of shrivelled.

Also, we found lurking in the back of the refrigerator a mostly-used can of condensed milk. We didn't know what we would make of any of this, but it seemed a blender would be required for wherever this took us.

The condensed milk had dried out in the refrigerator. I admire the restraint of anyone who can have a can of such deliciousness in their refrigerator for so long without just eating it. This poured out so slowly you could make the drop falling out of the can wobble and shake.

Some things just take time.

We didn't know if this blender full of stuff would become part of a batter, turn into a pie, or turn into a highly-sweetened failure. But while we didn't know what end result we were going for, it seemed pretty obvious that the next step must be to turn the blender on.

Holy snizzbat! That is the fakest-looking pink I've ever seen come from anything that didn't involve half a bottle of food coloring! Marcus and I both tasted this and agreed it needed to be spiked. You ever taste something and just implicitly know it will taste better with alcohol in it? I don't mean those oversized slushee things with umbrellas in them that are used as training wheels for those who wish to get drunk but cannot tolerate the taste of alcohol. Those are used to cover up the taste. This creation, on the other hand, seemed like a little alcohol would complement the sweet strawberry mess in the blender and make it better.
However, neither one of us wanted to get drunk this particular evening. While discussing the merits of liquor as a flavoring vs whether anyone will be inebriated after drinking it, somehow the phrase "about the same alcoholic content as cake batter with vanilla extract in it" came out. Whereupon we took the idea literally and added a splash of vanilla. (Side note: does anyone else think that foofy vanilla vodka is just that clear vanilla extract in a bigger bottle? Both taste like vanilla and are about 40% ABV.) Having resolved this, we decided to just throw in a couple fistfuls of ice cubes and call this creation finished.

So... pretty...

I already knew how it tasted because I'd been testing it by the (daintily-dipped) fingerload the whole time. But what does Marcus think? After all, it's his refrigerator we're cleaning.

Considering that he knows how long all of this has lurked in his refrigerator, he was pretty blasé about this.

"IT TASTES LIKE A STRAWBERRY SHAKE!"

And indeed it does! The condensed milk and strawberries with nothing added had tasted like... well... condensed milk and strawberries. But adding about two capfuls of vanilla had not only made them stop tasting like two separate things, but added that extra... that extra something or other. It tasted exactly like what we have gotten many times from many a drive-thru.
Given how very little fruit or dairy goes into fast-food shakes, the resemblance astonished me. That said, as someone who really likes drive-thru shakes, these were fricken amazing. Also, the refrigerator is now cleaned (or closer to it).

Twice-Fried French Fries!: or, A Book of Cookrye salutes Fanny Cradock

Have I ever mentioned how much I like Fanny Cradock? In all her overdressed, drag-queen makeup, suspiciously deep smoker's voice splendor, Fanny Cradock and her ever-disapproving ways are a spectacle I am so glad is preserved for posterity and available on YouTube. I feel an odd connection with the drag queen who terrified everyone in the kitchen with her and then produced some very questionable food with excessive amounts of food coloring. I even send her likeness to friends without warning.

I don't hear from this person so much these days.

Today, we at A Book of Cookrye would like to delve into the recipes of Her Not-So-Serene Highness, Fanny Cradock! Also, we are going to prevent the waste of these potatoes.

Sure, they were kind of soft, sprouting new plants, and about a week from turning to mush, but no one who's near-perpetually broke would throw them out. When faced with throwing out food, we at A Book of Cookrye indignantly say...

It occurs to me that Coco is wearing less makeup than someone who was (allegedly) not a drag queen.

What might we be making of these potatoes, you ask? We could have mashed them, we could have made latkes, we could have just baked them. But we at A Book of Cookrye decided to FRY THAT SHIT! There's not a thing in the world that frying doesn't make edible.

The relevant part of the video's at 9:57, but you should watch the whole thing.

French Fries Potatoes Oil for frying Salt, pepper Cut potatoes into strips (you can leave the skins on unless you dislike it). Immerse the cut potato pieces in water as you go- it keeps them from going rancid when exposed to air (cut potatoes in water will keep a day or two in the refrigerator). Heat the oil until a few bubbles come out of a raw potato immersed in it. Fry the potatoes until tender, but don't let them brown. Let the oil reheat a minute or two between batches or else your potatoes will be soggier with each successive batch. At this point, you can refrigerate the potatoes for later. When you want fresh fries, heat the oil until it almost smokes and a piece of raw potato held in it sends out a lot of bubbles very fast. Fry the potatoes to a deep golden color. Take them up and toss in salt and pepper immediately. Source: Fanny Cradock for the UK Gas Council, "Kitchen Magic" (1963 film)

In this lovely piece of British history, Fanny Cradock appears in some beleaguered, inexperienced housewife's dream. Her husband's been nagging her for her terrible cooking (quick semantic question: if a man with a nagging wife is henpecked, is she cockpecked?). When she randomly faints in the living room, Fanny Cradock appears like the nagging kitchen fairy to make her feel guilty every time she doesn't know how to make anything. Look at Fanny's reaction to our heroine when she doesn't know how to fry potatoes the Fanny Cradock-approved way.

Incidentally, when I described the film as "some lady in fancy dresses appearing appearing in a dream to disapprove at some woman's terrible cooking," an acquaintance said "That sounds very British."

Jesus, Fanny! You don't just have her embarrassed for not knowing how to fry potatoes, she's bracing for when you grab that ornamental cactus in the background and perforate her face!
And just what does Fanny Cradock say we should do when frying potatoes? Fry them twice!

We're not having really thick-cut fries with the skins left on because we're too lazy, it's because we think they're better that way. That's our story and we're sticking to it.

It was easy to cut the potatoes up, especially since we decided to forget about peeling them or cutting them into tiny slivers. However, we had difficulty finding sufficient vessels to store the cut pieces in.

This is a lot more potato than anticipated.

An involved discussion occurred in Marcus' kitchen- did we really want to fry all of these? Like, all of them? The answer, of course, was a resounding yes!

Testing the oil just like Fanny would.

At this point, we must say that even though (based on the test we did with a raw potato) we had the oil just as hot as Fanny Cradock and her unfortunate housewife pupil did in the film, these potatoes were not nearly done in the four and a half minutes Fanny said it'd take. Granted, the film is set in a dream where everything works out better than our dismal reality, but these had to fry for about ten minutes.

Such a long frying time doesn't seem so bad at first, but check out the size of the pot we're frying them in. See how small it is? We had a lot of batches that needed to fry for ten minutes each.

Tender all through, not brown at all. Fanny Cradock might approve. Also, we really hope they're supposed to be this soggy.

All right, now it's time to do the second, crisping fry! Fanny Cradock may have had two oil vats side by side, but the most oil Marcus and I came up with was three quarters of a bottle and a small saucepan. Therefore, we and the fries had to wait while the oil heated up.

I now have tiny burns on my hand and the oil's ready to go.

Did Fanny Cradock have leather hands? We got grease spatters all over ours while holding that fricken potato piece in there! We then realized that while just dropping the potatoes into the oil and fishing them out with tongs may have worked just fine when the oil wasn't so hot, we would probably get grease burns all over our fingers from not having a frying basket with a very long handle. Did we really want fries that badly?

Yes we did.

In Fanny's kitchen dreams, the fries took a minute and a half to turn really brown. And indeed, the fries were nice and crisp on the outside in ninety seconds- you could hear them knocking into each other. But we at A Book of Cookrye wanted them really fricken brown, just like Fanny Cradock did on TV.

As a side note, we dubbed the salt and pepper we promiscuously put on these "fairy dust."

First, what does Marcus think? Did we successfully turn some near-rancid potatoes into a successful (if not heart-attack inducing) delicious avoidance of waste?

Both of us were considering the fact that we made these ourselves rather than getting drive-thru.

Considering...

Hoping that's a pepper granule he's looking at...

APPROVES!

REALLY approves!

On that enthusiastic note, I tried them for myself. Would all that time I spent waiting to put another handful of potato sticks into the frying pot be worth it?

Yes it would!

REALLY would! Do this yourself!

These were still good after they'd gone cold. When we asked ourselves if we'd learned anything, Marcus said "Creepy old British ladies are awesome!"
We at A Book of Cookrye would like to salute Fanny Cradock! May her disapproving gaze be ever upon us!