Strawberry Whip: or, Spring is turning into summer

We overestimated how much we wanted strawberries.

Strawberry Whip 2 tbsp gelatin, or 1 (¼-oz) envelope 1 tbsp water About 8 oz fresh strawberries A little lemon juice, if desired 1 tsp vanilla Red food coloring, if desired 1 cup cream ½ cup sugar Mix the gelatin and water in a small microwave-safe bowl. Set aside to soak about 5 minutes. Puree the strawberries, then pour through a strainer to remove the seeds and stringy bits. Microwave the gelatin until melted and watery, about 5 seconds or so. Add the gelatin, lemon juice, and vanilla to the strawberries. If desired, add a few drops of red food coloring. Whip the cream and sugar in a large bowl. Then fold in the strawberries. Transfer to the container of your choice, and place in the coldest part of your refrigerator. Chill and serve. Adapted from a handwritten manuscript, 1930s-1940s Notebook of Hannah Dannehy O'Neil

Strawberries have been astonishingly cheap these past few weeks. I don't know if it's a bizarre confluence of economic coincidences, if we live near a lot of strawberry farms and didn't know it, or if it's some combination of the two. Furthermore, the berries are actually in season (ish), so they taste like strawberries instead of like nothing. We got one small box last week, and they were so good that we bought a lot of them the next time we went grocery shopping. They soon started to get pruny and squishy, and I didn't want to lose them.

I could have suspended the berries in red Jello. As many have noted before me, gelatin is surprisingly good at extending the lifespan of fresh produce. But today, I wanted to adopt my great-grandmother's apricot whip. Instead of stewing apricots, we're blenderizing strawberries.

After a good pulverization, I ran the strawberries through a sieve. This was the only tedious(ish) part of this whole recipe, but would you want all these seeds and stringy bits in your pink fluff?

As soon as I realized I was making "pink fluff," I had horrible visions of the ballistic-grade pink pie we made a while ago. 

And also, pink fluff is one of the more infamous midcentury desserts. It's almost a symbol of the insipid "cooking" that involved creatively dumping three cans into one bowl. But then I figured this is literally strawberries and cream (with some gelatin to keep it from deflating, of course).

Speaking of strawberries, I decided they needed a bit of artificial assistance to look their best after getting blenderized. Fruit is rarely fruit-colored enough.

This reminds me a lot of the cream of strawberry pie we made a while ago. Both of them are basically strawberries and whipped cream. And both of them looked so pretty at this stage.

This recipe was agreeably fast since we didn't have to wait on a pot of simmering dried fruit. Only ten minutes after sprinkling the gelatin over the water, we were ready to, as the recipe says, "Chill and serve." And then, of course, we discovered that the bowl-scrapings were delicious.

 

This wasn't as magical as I fantasized it would be, but it was still very good indeed. It did get a bit bland in the refrigerator, though- which surprised me. I know strawberry is perhaps the most inoffensive of artificial flavors, but the actual fruits tend to actually have a taste. So while this isn't necesessarily the best way to appreciate fresh strawberries, it's pretty good if they've slipped just a bit past it. 

 

Lemon Pie no. 2: It's always time for lemon pie

I can't imagine needing two lemon pie recipes.

Lemon Pie #2 3 egg yolks Juice and rind of 1 lemon 3 tablespoons flour 1 cup sugar ½ teaspoon salt 1 cup boiling water 1 tablespoon butter 1 9-inch pie shell Heat oven to 350°. Bake the pie shell until slightly golden. Whip the egg yolks and lemon juice until very light, set aside. Sift together the flour, sugar, and salt into a saucepan. Whisk in boiling water until smooth. Add the lemon rind and stir over medium-high heat until it thickens and comes to a boil. Turn off the heat. Add the butter and the egg yolks, stirring until the butter melts. Pour into the pie shell and bake until set, about 25-30 minutes. If desired, top with meringue and return to the oven until lightly browned. I thought this was better with whipped cream instead. Serve at room temperature or refrigerated, depending on preference. Meringue: Beat 3 egg whites (which you saved from separating the egg yolks for the filling) with an electric mixer on high speed until stiff peaks form. Continue beating while gradually sprinkling in 5 tablespoons of sugar. Beat until the sugar is dissolved and everything is smooth and glossy. Spread on the pie, return to the oven, and bake until the meringue is lightly browned. Handwritten note, probably 1930s-1950s Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

We may have found why my great-grandmother occasionally needed "a pleasant change from a piece of lemon meringue pie." I can't imagine making lemon pie so often that I needed a second recipe for it.

I was going to skip over this recipe. We already made a lemon pie from her book and liked a lot. Why would anyone need multiple lemon pies? But then again, I have multiple brownie recipes for different moods (the extra-rich brownies, the very sweet brownies, the quick and easy brownies, etc). 

With that in mind, if there is any real variation in lemon pies, I've never found it. They always taste like the recipe on the back of the cornstarch box, whether I make them myself or buy them at the fanciest bakeries my budget can forgive. This pie looked a bit different, which made me wonder: are there other lemon pies and I've been missing out all this time?

Furthermore, I can't imagine why someone would write down a second recipe for the same pie unless it was better than the first.

And lastly, my car battery died and I wanted to bake my way out of being despondent. I didn't mourn the car battery, but I was forced to confront the insane prices of car parts amidst a trade war and an actual war. (Nothing has trickled down to my neighborhood yet.) Lemon pie it would therefore be. 

Three tablespoons of flour didn't seem like much until I got it into the sifter.

I hadn't made this pie yet, and I already liked it more than the one that shows up on the back of the cornstarch box. That one never seems to set unless I burn an offering to Fornax (the Roman goddess of hearth and oven), and even then I sometimes end up euphemistically calling it custard.This one uses a lot more to hold it together.

Let the record show that because we semi-always follow directions here at A Book of Cookrye, I did in fact get out the sifter for this. It seemed like more bother than I'd usually do for a lemon pie, but I'm not the one who wrote this down. 

As directed, I stirred in boiling water "until smooth," which was a lot easier than I expected. I thought I'd have to thrash this with a whisk, but we were done in a few seconds.

I did this in a separate bowl because I actually like my nonstick pot now.

The recipe doesn't mention using the lemon rind, but I think it really makes the flavor pop. I'm going to assume people would have done that instead of throwing out ingredients that were right on the countertop and waiting. Maybe cooks back then thought adding the rind was too obvious to write down, like "discard the eggshells."

This particular recipe calls for egg yolks "beaten light," which I've never seen in a lemon pie before. Usually you just put everything in the top of a double boiler and stir it for a minute or two. I put the whisk attachment into our mixer to see what the point of this might be. Seeing a single whisk (they were too cheap to put two in the box) hovering over the food made me think of when I replaced my broken handmixer with a power drill (which at the time led to several unsolicited and unculinary wall perforations).

I thought that one lemon wasn't enough for a whole pie, so I bought two. (Perhaps my great-grandmother meant a large lemon, rather than the smaller ones?) But a generously-dipped tasting spoon showed me that the first lemon was more than enough for the pie, so I put the other one away for future plans.

We are next told to add the butter and whipped egg yolks right to the pot. There's no mention of slowly spooning hot filling into the egg yolks until they're tempered. I was in a bit of a mood, so I decided to see if I really needed to bother with that. Maybe whipping them changes something and thus forestalls egg drop soup?

 

To my surprise, this actually worked. Nothing got scrambled, and we had a few swirls of foam that floated on top of the pot. I had thought they'd completely deflate and mix in. Perhaps this is like one of those sponge puddings that bake in layers? (Also, I really should have slipped in some artificial dye. This would have been really cute if it was pink.)

I decided not to make a meringue because they only last a day or so before deflating and dripping out those little brown beads. (Remember the rice pudding?) I do like a good meringue, but I also like desserts that last a bit.

However, this pie was incomplete without some sort of white fluff on top. I always thought people just did the meringue for presentation, but lemon pie is a lot better when dressed. So I gave it a dollop of whipped cream.

 

I didn't think a single lemon would be enough for a whole pie, but you'll notice that this is a relatively shallow pie so it all worked out. It was really good. More so than the other pie, this one tasted like fresh lemon. It's easy to make and hard to give away. If you don't want to make a whole pie of it, this would make really good lemon squares if you bake it on a shortbread cookie crust. Or, imagine it in a pavlova or a blitz forte.

Fresh Berry Whip: or, You probably shouldn't skimp on the title ingredient

Strawberries have been almost absurdly cheap. (Well, cheap by wartime prices.) Naturally, we bought a lot and forgot they have a shelf life of about two minutes. But because our refrigerator has been perhaps a bit too enthusiastic since its most recent repair, the strawberries didn't expire. They just shrivelled and looked like it. And as soon as I mashed them a bit with a spoon, they smelled deliciously like fresh strawberries.

Fresh Berry Whip 1½ cups raspberries or sliced strawberries (about 8oz or 225g) ⅓ cup sugar 2 tablespoons lemon juice (from a fresh lemon instead of a bottle if possible) 1 (&frac14oz) envelope unflavored gelatin, or 1 tablespoon gelatin powder ¼ cup cold water ¾ cup boiling water ⅛ teaspoon salt Red food coloring, if desired If you don't have an ice maker, place a large bowl of water in the refrigerator ahead of time to get very cold. Crush the berries slightly in a small bowl or large cup. Mix in the sugar and let stand 10 minutes. Then stir in lemon juice to taste. While the berries are standing and waiting, sprinkle the gelatin over the cold water in a small bowl, and let stand five minutes. Then add the boiling water and stir until dissolved. After ten minutes, force half of the berries through a sieve. Place the pulp in a measuring cup and add the syrup that came out of them as they soaked. Then add enough water to make ¾ cup. Pour into a medium-sized mixing bowl. Add the gelatin and salt to the sieved berries. Place the bowl in a large bowl of ice-cold water. Stir until it gets thick and syrupy. If desired, add red food coloring to make it a prettier shade of pink. (It'll be kind of pale-looking without it.) Then beat with an electric mixer (or a handcranked eggbeater) until it is whipped. Refrigerate until it is half-firm but not quite set, which may only take a few minutes. To check, sprinkle one or two of the remaining berries on top. They should stay on top instead of sinking to the bottom of the bowl. Then fold in the remaining berries. Refrigerate until firm. Turn into a serving bowl or pile in individual bowls. Garnish with whole or sliced berries, if desired. Will keep for a couple of nights in a sealed container. Serves 5. Good Desserts A-Plenty!, Minute Gelatin (General Foods Corporation), 1942-ish

I actually like when fruit goes slightly off in the fridge. I can't forgive myself for putting fresh and lovely fruit into a batch of muffins where it cannot be fully appreciated. But when the fruit is squishy or half-hardened, I'm no longer being extravagant when I cook it. Instead, I'm starving the garbage can.

We just happened to have the perfect recipe for the fruit in this tiny slip of a cookbook from the WWII rationing era. And I do mean a "tiny slip" of a booklet. It's only 2.5 by 5 inches of very small print (or about 65 by 130 millimeters for our metric friends). 

This stapled wallet-sized book is such a product of its time. First, the title "Good Desserts A-Plenty!" (with a jaunty exclamation mark) attempts to reassure you that you'll still have sweets amid food shortages. Second, it has little patriotic stars up and down each page. Third, it's printed as cheaply as possible. They didn't even cut the pages on the alignment marks; a lot of the text is ever-so-slightly crooked. 

The book has no date, but I'm going to guess that it's from right before rationing officially kicked in. I only say that because there's no cheery mention of stretching your "ration points."

Speaking of food shortages, we didn't have quite enough berries for this recipe. I think this is why our "fresh berry whip" ultimately didn't come out as good as it could have. But as I was measuring things, I decided that I was making a period-correct mistake. Also, I didn't want to buy more fruit just to pulverize and gelatinize it.

I was going to forcefully mash the berries through the sieve (I didn't see that they were supposed to be sliced until too late), but they put up a better fight than I anticipated. Fortunately, we recently got a new toy at a flea market:

I'm leaving the price tag on because I love how cheap this was.

I don't know if sugar was rationed when this book came out, but I think people were already cutting back regardless. It may look like we put a lot of sugar on the strawberries, but that's only because everything is confined into one small cup.

 

After ten minutes, the sugar had done its hygroscopic business on the strawberries and made an incredibly delicious syrup. If the rest of the recipe fails, you might want to stop here and spoon this into cute (and very small) bowls. To make it extra-fancy, you could add a drop of balsamic vinegar or a spoonful of wine.

We didn't get a lot of pulp out of our sieved strawberries, even though I managed to force everything through the mesh except a few stringy bits. This recipe may serve five, but it is not meant to serve five with leftovers.  

Interestingly, our cup of sieved strawberries stayed in layers. The syrup is on the bottom, then the strawberries in the middle, then the water we added floated over the rest.

I was surprised when our mixture whipped up as well as it did. And it stayed whipped instead of deflating as soon as I turned off the mixer. When I put the rest of the fruit on top, the foam held it up.

When I tried a spoonful, this tasted unexpectedly artificial-- and it wasn't the good kind of artificial flavoring. This tasted like the candy you throw away when you get home from trick-or-treating. To be fair, this recipe called for more fruit than we actually had threatening to go off, so I probably watered it more than I should have. Also, it probably would have been a lot better had I squeezed a fresh lemon instead of using the cheap bottled juice that's been in the fridge for a while. The recipe has promise, but I wasn't thrilled with what was about to congeal.

As I cleaned up, I had to finally acknowledge that our recipe used a lot of bowls. And with all our sieving and other fruit-related excitement, it made a splattery mess of the countertop. The impending crowded dishwasher and the rest of the mess had me muttering "this had better be worth it" as I waited for our fresh berry whip to refrigerate.

I can never decide if pink fluff looks cute and vintage, or if it looks like it came out of a medical textbook.

As aforementioned, I think I underserved this recipe by scrimping on fruit. Then again, I think that a lot of people back then probably did the same thing. (The shortages were real.) But with insufficient strawberries, this tasted like cheap fruit Jello. However, I imagine this would be a lot better if I actually used enough berries in it.

Also, don't go away thinking this looked normal. It wobbled unnervingly.

If strawberries remain cheap, I just might try this again with all the fruit it's entitled to (and with fresh lemon juice). It seems like it wants to be a very nice summery recipe, just the thing for when central AC hasn't yet made its way into homes. (Why do you think people kept going out to see cheesy matinee movies in the theater?) I also imagine this being really good on a summer picnic. But if you don't use enough fruit, it's just water and a third-cup of sugar.

Cranberry Meringue Pie

When you make the crust, you should put a pie in it.

Cranberry Meringue Pie 1¾ cups granulated sugar ¾ cup cold water 4 cups cranberries 2 tbsp flour 4 eggs, separated ¼ teaspoon salt 2 tbsp butter 1 teaspoon vanilla 4 tablespoons powdered sugar 1 baked deep-dish pie shell In a large saucepan, cook the sugar and water until thick and syrupy. Add cranberries. Cook, stirring constantly, until they stop popping. Then remove from heat and let cool for five to ten minutes. In a small bowl, mix the flour, salt and yolks of the eggs until smooth. With a fork (or a mini whisk if you have one), gradually beat in three tablespoons of the juice of the cooked cranberries (don't worry if a few berries get in there), beating out any lumps. If the mixture is too thick to easily stir into the rest of the pie filling, beat in more juice one spoonful at a time. Then add it to the pot of berries and simmer for three minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and stir in the butter and vanilla. Set aside to cool. When ready to bake, heat oven to 325°. Turn the filling into the pie shell. Beat the egg whites until frothy. Then add the powdered sugar one spoonful at a time, beating until each one is dissolved before adding the next. Spread on top of the pie and bake about 15 minutes. Note: If you cut the recipe to three-quarters (that is: go from four eggs to three, and adjust the other ingredients to match), this recipe will fit very nicely in a normal, non-deep-dish pie pan. Miss Hanna Katz, Apartment 49B, Sylvania Gardens, 48th Street and Osage Avenue, Philadelphia; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; November 8, 1935; page 14

While I was purchasing frozen fruit, I saw cranberries semi-hidden on one of the lower shelves. This is the first time I've seen them outside of a can except for those few short weeks when they take over half the fruit section.

Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; November 8, 1935; page 4

As often happens with cranberry recipes, we start with a lot of sugar.

Next, we get to our featured ingredient: cranberries! After I measured them out, a small handful remained in the bag. Since I don't want to let nearly-empty packages of frozen this-and-thats pile up in the freezer, I dumped the rest of the berries into the pot. There's nothing wrong with a heaping fruit pie. 

A quick digression: The newspaper gave Miss Hanna Katz's address as an intersection, which is a very Philadelphia way of doing it. Since most of the city is a grid, people often say "Oh, the museum's on 33rd and South" instead of "It's at 3260 South Street." In case that gives her too much privacy for a newspaper-famous cook, they also printed her apartment number. I can only guess that you were supposed to send her a postcard (it's cheaper than letters) if you made the pie and liked it. By the way, the museum on 33rd and South is the Penn Archeological Museum. I used to love going there to see the glassware from ancient Rome.

Anyway, getting back to Miss Katz's pie. We're supposed to cook the cranberries until they stop popping. I didn't know if they still pop after getting frozen, but I figured we would get a pie out of them either way. Unfortunately, I couldn't hear whether the cranberries had started popping, much less when they stopped. You see, cranberries don't make a loud noise like popcorn. Instead, they pop with a soft pft... pft.... And the oven drowned out the noise.

The fan in the oven that cools the circuit boards has been making that horrible noise for a few months now, and none of use want to take the oven out of the wall and fix it. Does anyone in a house ever get around to all the problems waiting to be dealt with? If you've ever cleared the to-do list, how did it feel and how long did it last?

Since I couldn't listen for the sound of popping, I turned off the burner when the cranberries looked like they had all split open. This was close as we could get to following the directions.

We had a few little clumps of floury egg yolk that I didn't manage to whisk away, but I figured that the pie would be just fine anyway. Besides, I don't think anyone sending recipes to the newspaper in the middle of the Depression would fault me for choosing not to throw this out and start over.

At first I thought Miss Katz was bonkers for simmering this with egg in it. Wouldn't that just turn our pie filling into cranberry-flavored egg drop soup? I told myself that she got this printed in the newspaper with her name and apartment number under the title. Surely she wouldn't have risked people knocking on her door with complaints. Still, I was surprised when this actually worked. If you disregard the lumps that never went away, our pie filling was so pretty you'd think it came from a can.

When I tried a sample spoonful, it was about as sweet as cranberry juice from the bottle. The excess of sugar was not in fact an excess. I won't say you should never doubt someone who got their recipe published, but it is worth pausing to ask if you're sure you know better.

Just I thought our pie was ready to bake, I realized I had forgotten the last two ingredients:

I'm not sure what the butter does in recipes like this. It's not like a couple of spoonfuls will dramatically change the flavor or anything. But I figured the butter must be there for a reason. So I carefully scooped the pie filling back out of the crust (most of it, anyway) and added what I forgot.

Having gotten our complete pie ready to bake, we only needed to put the meringue on top. When I tried a spoonful, it was a bit blander than I thought. I nearly added more sugar before thinking "Don't we have enough in the pie already?"

I expected to have a hard time covering the pie since we made a lot less meringue than what Miss Katz thought we should. But this recipe still made a lot of meringue. I imagine that if you make the full recipe, you'd have one of those extra-puffy meringues that's taller than the rest of the pie.

When we lifted out a slice, it actually lifted out.

I thought this would taste more or less like cranberry sauce in a pie pan, but somehow it had an extra richness to it. (Maybe this is why we added butter and eggs.) It wasn't excessively sweet (small mountain of sugar notwithstanding). But if the sight of so much sugar in a saucepan makes you quake, you could tip a fair amount of it back into the bag before you missed it. 

However, if you're not economizing like it's 1935, I think this would be fantastic if you skipped the meringue and served it with ice cream.

Apple Brown Betty: Best served outdoors

Don't tell anyone I made this just to get rid of the breadcrumbs in the freezer.

Apple Brown Betty 4 cups breadcrumbs 4 cups sliced apples ½ cup brown sugar ½ cup white sugar ½ tsp nutmeg 1 tsp cinnamon ½ tsp salt (if butter is unsalted) ½ to 1 cup water Juice and rind of ½ lemon Heat oven to 350°. Grease a large casserole pan. Mix the sugars, spices, and salt (if using). Sprinkle a third of the crumbs into the pan. Place half the apples on top, then sprinkle with half the sugar. Dot with a third of the butter. Repeat these layers, dotting again with butter. Sprinkle the last of the crumbs on top, then dot with the last of the butter. Pour in enough water to come almost up to the top. Drizzle with the lemon juice and rind. Cover the pan with foil (or a lid if you have one) and bake 45 minutes. Uncover the pan after the first 25 minutes. Serve warm with whipped cream, hard sauce (see recipe here), or lemon sauce. 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

Because I hate waste, I've been saving all of the bread that goes stale, letting it harden overnight in the refrigerator, pulverizing it in the food processor, and then dutifully freezing the resulting crumbs. Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was saving all these lovely breadcrumbs for. We don't deep-fry a lot of things here, nor do we make innumerable casseroles that want crumbs on top. You can see why I might make a recipe uses a lot of crumbs.

Brown Betty seemed perfect for the weather. We're in that time of year when the temperature oscillates between late autumn and early summer from one day to the next. You go to bed with an extra blanket (there's no point in running the furnace for a single night), and you wake up gasping in sweat and flinging all the bedclothes to the floor. The next night, you go to sleep with the fan aimed right at you and wake up in shivers. (I also thought the leftovers would pass for a decent breakfast in the same way that extra pie does in the holiday season.)

Yes, we used an orange instead of a lemon. It's always more economical to use what you have in the house.

I have hazy memories of liking brown Betty on camping trips. (Yes, there was a time when I went camping, though it wasn't necessarily my choice.) When told this to some friends while slicing the apples, no one believed I ever went camping. One of them said "I would pay to see you camp." To this I replied that he didn't have the money to pay me enough. (I swore at age fourteen that I would never be more than five minutes on foot from a hot shower and a toilet that flushes.)

Even when cooking in the great indoors, I can see why someone might have made this when Mrs. Mary Martensen's book came out. This dessert is made for cooking on a Depression-era budget. After all, the main ingredients are stale bread, water, and apples. 

After trying this, I could see why I liked it when camping. It's the perfect carb hit for the end of a long day of swatting mosquitos in the great outdoors. And it's really easy to slap together when your "kitchen" is a wobbly picnic table and you have nowhere to wash dishes. But as much as I liked brown betty when it was served out of a cast iron Dutch oven that had been sitting in the campfire (or at least I think I liked it), it wasn't as nice in the house. It tastes like apple pie filling and breadcrumbs. It's not bad. But it is exactly what went into it and nothing more. 

Going back to how perfect this is for a 1930s budget (and quite possibly a 2020s one), I will note that this is very filling. And with a Depression on, going to bed full is worth a lot of money. 

French Lace Cookies: Lovely to look at, lousy to eat

I didn't expect Betty Crocker of all "people" to print a cookie recipe that is worse after baking.

French Lace Cookies ½ cup light corn syrup ½ cup shortening ⅔ cup packed brown sugar 1 cup all-purpose flour 1 cup finely chopped pecans Heat oven to 375°. Have cookie sheets lined with parchment paper. Heat corn syrup, shortening, and brown sugar to boiling in 2-quart saucepan over medium heat, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and gradually stir in flour. Then mix in the pecans. Drop batter by teaspoonfuls about 3 to 4 inches apart onto cookie sheet. To keep the batter from hardening between batches, perch the saucepan over a smaller pot of simmering water. Or, place a sheet of parchment paper onto the counter and drop teaspoon-size portions of dough onto it until you've used up all the batter-- don't worry about giving them room to spread. Let them sit for a minute or two to firm up. Then lift them off the paper and place them onto (paper-lined!) pans to bake, one batch at a time. Bake about 5 minutes or until set (they will still be bubbly on the pan-- you may not think they look done). Cool 3 to 5 minutes on the pan. Then slide the pan out from under the cookies, letting the whole paper sheet land on the countertop. Then allow to cool completely. Drizzle with melted chocolate when cooled, if desired. If you wish, you can roll these cookies up instead of serving them flat. Roll them around a wooden spoon handle (or other object of choice) as soon as they're barely cooled enough to handle (they need to be very hot). If they crack, put them back in the oven to re-soften and try again. Betty Crocker's 40th Anniversary Edition Cookbook, 1991

Betty Crocker's 40^th Anniversary Edition Cookbook, 1991

Today we're making another recipe I always saw when flipping through Mom's Betty Crocker book, always thought would be really nice, but never actually tried. Don't they look almost as pretty as the pizzelles?

As it happens, I've made the pizzelles too.

Like all good American things, these cookies start with shortening and corn syrup. I didn't know whether to turn on the burner or recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

It's never a good sign when your cookie dough (or whatever this is) has a slick of melted fat on top. But I figured that since following the directions got us in this mess, following the rest of the directions should get us out of it.

The recipe tells us to "gradually" add the flour and the pecans to the boiling-hot mixture. Usually, flour siezes into gummy clumps when you add it to something this hot, but I gave it a try anyway. It worked, which shouldn't surprise me. Say what you will about Betty Crocker's taste (especially from the fifties to the seventies), her recipes always work. 

As we noted a few recipes ago, I've come to appreciate nonstick pots after years of resenting that you're not supposed to use an electric mixer in one. I think this is another recipe that really makes you appreciate nonstick pots, even if you have to fret about scratching them.

When I added the pecans and tried a test spoonful, our dough (or whatever it is) tasted like half-decent pralines. And it looked like pralines when I dropped spoonfuls onto the pan.

The cookies spread a lot, which I understand is how they're supposed to turn out.

You can tell they printed this recipe before every supermarket had parchment paper. In the early nineties, you had to grease a pan and carefully get a spatula under the still-molten cookies. These days, you can just slide the pan out from under the paper and let it land on the counter.

After they had cooled, I could see why they call them French lace cookies. They had a sort of wispy, lacy look to them.

I'm glad I tried one before drizzling any chocolate on them. They are great for looking at, but not good to eat. I thought they'd be super-delicate and crisp, but they were more like forgotten hard candy that melted and then re-hardened in a hot car. They tasted really bland and got stuck in your teeth. The unbaked cookies were decent (ish) brown-sugar fudge balls (or something like that), but I don't recommend putting them in an oven.

I'll give the Betty Crocker people credit: The recipe does exactly what it promises. It just isn't very good. And it made me want to make pralines because the raw dough was so close to being good ones.