Chicken 'n Stuffing: or, Canned soup with food interspersions

I think this might be what Midwesterners call a "hotdish"?

Chicken-and-Stuffing 2 chicken breasts, cooked and cubed or 2½ cups cubed leftover chicken 1 can cream of mushroom soup (or cream of celery, or whatever cream-of-something you like) ¼ cup milk ¼ cup chicken broth       Topping: 1½ cups seasoned stuffing mix or croutons ½ cup chicken broth 4 tablespoons butter, melted Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 1½ quart casserole dish. Mix all ingredients, place in casserole. Then mix together the topping ingredients and sprinkle on top. Cover casserole with foil and bake 30 minutes. Remove foil and bake 20 minutes more. Use and Care Book for Deluxe Toaster Oven/Broil, Proctor-Silex, 1970s-ish

I accidentally cooked more chicken than I needed for dinner. Ordinarily I would have frozen the surplus for twenty years, but the summer heat has mostly gone away and it's oven season again! Today we're trying this random recipe from a toaster oven manual.

Use and Care Book for Deluxe Toaster Oven/Broil, Proctor-Silex, 1970s-ish

One of my friends found an old instruction manual and asked me to scan it that it may be uploaded to the internet. This is what happens when other people think color-correcting is a mysterious art. But I can't complain because these are the people who do a lot of freebie repairs for me. 

At any rate, this manual is an accidental 1970s time capsule. The illustrators even took the time to draw the vinyl simulated woodgrain on the sides. 

At any rate, I thought this casserole looked pretty good when I saw it. I thought it'd be a one-dish meal until I looked closely at the ingredients. This is basically canned chicken soup if you were to add your own chicken.  But sometimes a gloppy casserole is exactly what you need, even if you have to come up with a vegetable to serve next to it.

The recipe starts with a little bit of stuffing mix. Unfortunately, you can't buy small packages of that. After a bit of consideration, I decided that stuffing mix is usually a feedsack full of croutons. The substitution was obvious, and also meant I could eat the rest of the box of croutons.

 

Next, we get to the canned soup! The recipe calls for cream of mushroom, but I argue that cream of celery is a superior casserole glue. Ours kind of held the shape of the can as it glorped into the bowl, like a half-pecked-at gelatin mold that is drooping at the end of a luncheon.

In less time than I thought, we were ready to bake our big beige mess.

 

This wasn't so much a casserole as I understand it but a very thick soup with bread on top. Think onion soup gratinee if it came out of a factory. I wouldn't have minded the goopiness if this had been any good, but...

This tastes like a recipe from when everyone smoked. But mostly, it wasn't very good. I like canned soup as a casserole binder, but it tastes bland and slightly metallic on its own. Whether you use cream of mushroom or cream of celery, you have to really like the taste of barely-altered canned soup if you make this. 

But I'll give credit where it'd due: our chicken was neither bland or dry. If you're trying to figure out what to do with that dry chicken that you feel guilty about, this recipe could be what you're looking for.

For the record, I think the Canadian version of this idea was better. But this one barely involved any more work than just throwing things into a pan.

Bubble Bread: or, Crispy dipping crackers

This recipe is for all you rolling pin lovers.

Bubble Bread 2 cups flour 1 tsp salt 2 tbsp melted butter Boiling water Heat oven to 375°. Have greased or parchment-lined baking sheets ready. Mix the flour and salt. Add the butter and a spoonful or two of boiling water. Mix in more boiling water until you have a stiff dough that you can easily shape in your hands but doesn't stick. Knead for about 30 seconds or until smooth ish. Roll out fairly thin, then cut into small squares. Then roll each one as thinly as possible. Bake until a light golden brown (about 15-20 minutes), rotating the pan about halfway through. (A lot of recipes don't care if your oven is a little uneven, but you definitely want to rotate the pan for this one.) "In the Kitchen;" The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; 21 August 1933; page 1

Now that the temperatures have dropped, we can turn on the oven. I've cheated and used it a few times over the summer, but it still smelled like burning dust when I heated it up.

This is the first time I've seen "bake until bubbly" at the end of a non-casserole recipe.

For those outside of America, we have our own "bubble bread" which bears no resemblance to what they printed in Katanning. The American bubble bread involves slathering small pieces of bread dough (homemade or canned, depending on one's mood) in butter, cinnamon, and sugar. You then pile them into a tube pan and bake. When you serve it, everyone can break off pieces.  (I've also seen a savory variant with garlic and Parmesan.)

These days, getting everybody's bare hands all over the food seems like a quaint holdover from the pre-pandemic era. But if you can put microbes out of your mind, it's a fun edible centerpiece-- especially for kids. All of this is to say that the competing versions of bubble bread had me emailing more librarians in Australia before we were done with this recipe.

Getting to what is apparently the Australian version of bubble bread, the dough was almost suspiciously easy to mix together-- especially since we have an electric kettle to pour the boiling water from. Naturally, I couldn't plug it in without also making tea.

This dough rolled out more easily than I was prepared for. It was just elastic enough not to crumble or crack, but just firm enough to keep itself together instead of tearing apart. I got the feeling I could have gotten it as thin as tissue paper without borrowing language from hockey fans.

We're next supposed to cut it into pieces and roll each one again, which I took to mean that we should all of them as thin as possible, one at a time. And since I wasn't working with a massive dough sheet, it was easy (astonishingly easy!) to get this almost as thin as paper.

 

I had thought our dough would inflate into a sort of cut-budget copy of cream puffs (the recipe does say "when cooked it's all bubbly"), but it turned into something like crackers.

I guess it kind of looks bubbly...?

I didn't know if my bubble bread was correct. So, before deciding whether this was any good, I decided to once again send trans-hemispheric emails to whatever librarians in Australia might be willing to answer. I first wrote to the Katanning public library since I found this recipe in their newspaper and got no answer. After accepting that they would never reply, I sent a message to the city library in Adelaide because I hadn't emailed them over the beef dripping Depression cake. (I don't want to be a semiregular presence in the same library inboxes every time I get stuck in a recipe, even if this means I will eventually run out of cities.) Whoever replied suggested I contact the National Library of Australia before adding "From a personal point of view, as it doesn’t use yeast, it seems more like a flat bread, that has some bubbles in it when cooked. Probably good for things like yiros or dips."

Since emails don't require international postage, I went where I had been redirected. The librarian who answered started off with "Unfortunately, the National Library cannot comment on the accuracy of recipes published in items in our collection as this is beyond the service we offer. Since we are not a baking service, we cannot offer any instructions as to how these goods were supposed to come out, nor can we offer you any recipe improvements."

After that very final-sounding paragraph, the librarian had mercy on me. She went on to say "I can, however, show you a few ways you can research this recipe for yourself from overseas. You could compare your recipe and results with some of the other versions of this recipe published in digitised newspapers on Trove." [Note: Trove is the Australian newspaper archive that I've been getting all these Katanning newspapers from. Imagine newspapers.com without a paywall.]

I can't believe I didn't think to just look up the recipe myself and see what other people had to say! The librarian put in a series of links to various bubble bread recipes that she had found for me, including one with pictures and someone making bubble bread recently enough to post it on Facebook! Each of the recipes she sent differed from each other (as recipes for the same thing all tend to do), but they all produced little savory crackers like what we had made. Also, all of them had us rolling our dough "very very thin," or "to wafer thickness,"  or to "to paper thickness (this is important)."

One recipe got into more detail at the end, helpfully noting that "Bubble-bread is usually served in square pieces about four or five inches square. It should be allowed to bake until crisp and it should he a delicate pale brown in colour." Another recipe concluded with "If preferred, the squares can be left flat and the ends will then curl up slightly with the cooking," which is what happened with mine. It's nice to have my results corroborated. I can't guarantee that I made these right, but I think I got close.

So, I made these again, getting them very thin and raising the oven temperature a little bit. They came out a lot better. Imagine a wispier version of pita chips (or do Australians call them pita crisps?). Which, given the wince-inducing price of pita chips these days, I am more than happy to be able to do these myself. They felt a bit fragile, but proved sturdy enough for most dips. 

They were also nice with our recent fig pudding on them.

I also thought these would be very good if you added some other things to the dough. And indeed, some of the later-decade variants sent to me had things like Parmesan cheese or herbs mixed in, which was probably a lot more financially feasible after the Depression ended. 

In short, these are very good. But you do end up rolling each one out individually before baking. So if you make these, I hope you really love your rolling pin.

Don't trust a Chicago Englishwoman to make Yorkshire pudding

We have already made Yorkshire pudding from an American cookbook and we have made it with cornmeal. Today, we're attempting to make it as they apparently do in England.

Chicago Englishwoman's Yorkshire Pudding “Dear Marion Holmes: I am sending a simple recipe for Yorkshire pudding as we make it in England: One pint of flour, one saltspoonful of salt dissolved in lukewarm water, beat in three eggs, add water to make a batter, not too thin. Stir briskly and pour into a hot pan with a tablespoon of dripping or lard. The batter should be a thin layer to cover the pan. Bake until slightly brown. “Chicago ENGLISHWOMAN.” Newspaper clipping, Chicago area, 1930s-50s Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

The last time we made a corn-free Yorkshire pudding, it was a semi-elaborate production that involved an electric mixer and made a horrible mess in the oven. (It was utterly worth it.) It also came from a book written by someone who was literally as old as the US Constitution. So now, we're moving to a recipe that's at least from our side of electric lighting.

Newspaper clipping, Chicago area, 1930s-1950s

The recipe specifies lukewarm water, which was the only nitpicky part in the entire paragraph. So, I figured that "Chicago Englishwoman" specified it for a reason. When a recipe is full of annoying little steps, you can often skip half of them. But when the writers only get fussy over one or two points, you should probably heed their directions.

Our Chicago Englishwoman tells us to make "make a batter, not too thin." I didn't know how "not too thin" should look, so I made it about right to drop onto a waffle iron. As a reminder, our last Yorkshire pudding was almost watery before we baked it. (Think of the kind of thin batter you use for crepes.) Absent any baking powder, I didn't know what would raise our pudding but guessed that its own internal steam might puff it up like choux paste.

"Add water to make a batter,  not too thin."

We are next told to put our batter "into a hot pan with a tablespoon of dripping or lard." Since I chose to actually read the recipe ahead of time, I had put a small skillet in the oven before turning it on.

That sizzling is the sound of planning ahead.

This particular skillet has been moody the past few months; everything I've made in it has gotten stuck. But I didn't want to make a full-size Yorkshire pudding until I got the recipe to work, and this was the only small pan at hand. But I figured we would at least know if we got it right regardless of whether I had to scrape and gouge my pudding out.

We tried to "bake until slightly brown," but some 40 minutes later our pudding hadn't changed color at all. It was a little tinted around the edges, but I think that color was only from the drippings soaking in.

This recipe fundamentally didn't work as written. There may be some implied steps that would fix it, but the directions gave us a flat patty of hardened dough. I could have lifted it out of the pan and thrown it like a frisbee if I wasn't worried about breaking a window. 

Perhaps I removed our pudding from the oven before it was "slightly brown" enough, but I don't think baking it longer would have improved anything. I now wonder how many people (my great-grandmother possibly included) tried the Chicago Englishwoman's recipe and ended up with big pucks of hardened flour. 

This recipe confounds me more than any of the others I've tried. Since we found it pasted into someone's personal recipe book, it must have worked for someone at least once. Who clips and saves a recipe that doesn't work? I'm slightly tempted to say that we'll figure out how to get a Yorkshire pudding out of this clipping since clearly at least one person did (unless she booby-trapped her recipe book). But we already have Miss Leslie's Yorkshire pudding, and her version actually works.

Cornmeal Yorkshire Pudding: or, Cornbread by any name

I don't know if autumn is here or if we only get a short reprieve from the heat, but we can turn on the oven!

Cornmeal Yorkshire Pudding 2 eggs 1 cup boiling water 1 cup white cornmeal (white if you have it) ½ tsp salt Drippings from roasted meat Heat oven to 350°. Pour the drippings into a 9" round or square pan. Beat the eggs until thoroughly whipped and lemon-colored, set aside. Pour the boiling water over the cornmeal, stirring constantly. Add the salt. Gently mix in the eggs, trying to deflate them as little as possible. Bake until the top springs back when lightly pressed in the center, about 30-35 minutes. While it's baking, baste it 3 times with additional pan drippings. Newspaper clipping, Chicago area, probably 1930s-1940s Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

Apparently they really liked Yorkshire pudding in my great-grandmother's house. Or maybe she frequently roasted large slabs of meat and Yorkshire pudding was an easy standby. Either way, she has two recipes for it, carefully nestled together in her binder. 

We have already made what I think is normal Yorkshire pudding, so today we're going to find out what the heck the cornmeal version is.

As I've often mentioned, I started saving beef fat when beef is too expensive to throw any part of it out. So even though we're not buying beef for a while, I still have a lot of what I call "saute-grade" fat in the fridge at any time. This is my term for the meat-filled beef drippings that have a beefy taste and a shorter shelf life. You can't use it for everything, but it's still good enough for things like sauteeing onions. 

The point is, I had drippings (which apparently no Yorkshire pudding is complete without) even though I didn't have any meat roasting in the oven. To this I added paprika, garlic, and a few other basic necessities. I figured if I had spooned the drippings out of a roast-in-progress, there would be seasonings. 

After our pan was ready, it was time to make the pudding itself. It involved fewer ingredients than I expected. I always thought Yorkshire pudding was very "continental" and perhaps a bit fancy, but this is almost the cheapest batter you can make-- even including the eggs.

I didn't know if whipping the eggs would make a difference, but they actually fluffed the batter a little bit. You could even see the last sloshes of egg foam that didn't quite want to mix in. Had I needed to hand-whisk the eggs, I would have been annoyed at how little the batter changed, but this was only two minutes with an electric mixer.

As a quick aside: I like how aside from a brief encounter with an eggbeater, this was a mindlessly easy recipe. It's perfect for slapping together when you already have a fully-loaded stove to tend to.

The directions say to "baste three times while baking with some of the dripping from roasting pan," but I didn't know how much fat to baste this with. So I put a few little splats on top and hoped I guessed right.

After baking, the pudding bubbled on top where we had basted it. This would subside after a minute or two, but not in my mind. After the suds were gone, this merely looked like bread with well-seasoned splats on top. Which was what it turned out to be.

Those bubbles! Why does it look like I put dish soap on top?

The newspaper called called it "Yorkshire pudding," but this is cornbread. Basting it with seasoned pan drippings did add some nice flavor to it, but it's cornbread. With that said, it's pretty good cornbread. Since it's not raised with baking powder, it doesn't have any chemical taste hiding deep in there. It was just light enough to be nice, but still dense enough for perfect plate-sopping.

In case you're wondering, today's pud is floating on this.

Hump-Day Quickie: Spinach-Cheese Rice

A lot of our nearly-heatless recipes have been desserts because, well, it's nice to treat yourself when you're hiding indoors from the weather. Also, most of our low-heat suppers have been a simple matter of "put it in frying pan and cook until done." I've also made the occasional batch of haluski even though it involves two burners, and maaaaybe turned on the oven to serve frozen fish alongside it. (Shhhhhh....) But today, we're presenting a vegetable side that barely heats the kitchen.

Spinach Rice You don't need to precisely measure out anything except the rice and cooking water. ¾ cup rice 4 oz spinach (about a third of a 12-oz package, just eyeball it) ½ cup shredded cheese (use more or less depending on taste. Choose a kind of cheese that melts well.) Salt and seasonings to taste Squeeze the juice out of the spinach and add enough water to make 1½ cups. Add salt to taste and cook the rice in this, whether you use a rice cooker or a saucepan. When the rice is done, add the cheese and stir until melted and mixed. Then stir in the spinach and seasonings to taste.

Not to go all Agatha Thrash on everyone, but whenever I use frozen spinach in anything, I try to put find some room in the recipe for the juice I just squeezed out. (Or sometimes I don't bother draining it at all) The spinach juice takes a lot of flavor away with it when you drain or wring it out. It's hard to eat your spinach when you've reduced it to blank fiber wads. 

I guess I also halfheartedly worry about throwing out water-soluble vitamins, but mostly I don't want my vegetables to taste like nothing. For today's recipe, the spinach juice adds a lovely flavor to the rice in a way that you simply cannot get by cooking the rice first and seasoning it later.

You may wonder why we bother draining the spinach at all if we're going to put the juice back in later. Well, I tried skipping that and got a soppy mess of rice-and-spinach glop. It kind of looked like the savory baked rice before we baked it. It was edible and I reluctantly didn't throw it out, but I didn't do it twice. With that in mind, the easiest way to drain the spinach is to stack another bowl on top of it and then squeeze it over the rice cooker. 

This is the only annoying part of the whole recipe.

Today, we're also getting some of the beef stock out of the freezer from the most expensive meatball pie I have ever made. You know, since we can't buy beef at any price until further notice. I didn't bother completely thawing it- I just let it half-defrost enough to gently mash the ice into the rice cooker. I figured it would melt in its own good time if I didn't mind the wait.

When that the rice is done, it's time to improve it with cheese. I like to mix the cheese in before adding the spinach so that I can be sure the rice has enough retained heat to melt it. (And I do like to add a lot of cheese. We're eating our vegetables, not punishing ourselves.)

I ended up adding "just a bit" more.

At this point, I like to try a small spoonful and make sure it has enough salt in it. If it doesn't, I add it with our spinach which has been patiently waiting next to the rice cooker. The spinach does want to stay in little hard clumps, so you have to kind of spoon-jab it to break it up.

So there we have it: cheese and spinach rice! It doesn't heat the kitchen any more than a single rice cooker, it's mostly good for you (I think), and it's low-effort enough for when it's too hot to lovingly cook anything. It may not be the most exciting thing anyone's ever made, but it's pretty darn good.

Cheese and Ham Pie: or, Carbohydrate bliss interspersed with meat

Today, we are continuing our Australian salute to cheese!

Cheese and Ham Pie 4 oz ham, cut into into bite-size pieces 6 oz egg noodles, cooked in salted water 4 oz (1 cup) grated cheese 1 oz (2 tbsp) butter, cut into small pieces 1 cup milk 1 egg Pastry for one crust Salt and pepper to taste Heat oven to 350° (gas mark 4, 180°C). Coat a pie pan with cooking spray. Sprinkle the ham in the pan. Place the noodles on top. Then sprinkle the cheese over the noodles. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Then dot with the butter. Whisk together the egg and the milk, then pour over all. Cover with a top crust and cut holes to vent. Bake about 30 minutes or until golden. Note: If you're buying ready-made pastry instead of doing it yourself, puff-paste would be really good on top of this. "In the Kitchen," The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; July 8, 1935; page 3

"In the Kitchen," The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; July 8, 1935

This is the season for leftover ham. I deliberately took home a lot of leftover ham from Easter and froze it until the time felt right, which I decided is now. 

As it turned out,  ham is the first word in the recipe title but we don't use much of it. This is what happens to cooking when the Depression was on.

Not pictured: 1 ounce butter.

What the recipe lacks in ham, it makes up with carbs and cheese. Six ounces of macaroni is a lot more than you may think. After mounding the cheese on top, our pie overtopped the pan.

Lastly, we laid on the pie crust. I folded the extra dough back over the pie-- partially to make a should-have-been cute border but mostly because I was too lazy to trim it.

This pie is what leftovers should be: smothered in carbs and buried in cheese. I probably could have baked it a little longer, but I didn't. It was plain, simple, and just what I hoped for.

In full disclosure, some free-swimming liquid did seep into the freshly-vacated parts of the pie pan when we served it. But although weeping pies usually bother me, this is one of those recipes where I don't think there's any point in caring about drips. Of course, you can serve this with more bread to soak them up. After all, carbs go great with carbs.

Summer Spaghetti: or, Good tomatoes never need help

We meant to go to the hardware store and ended up at a roadside produce tent.

Summer Spaghetti 2 pounds very ripe tomatoes 1 small sweet onion, finely chopped 1 clove garlic, minced or pressed 2 tablespoons finely minced fresh parsley ½ teaspoon basil ¼ cup olive oil Red wine vinegar* Salt and pepper to taste 8 oz shell pasta Freshly grated Parmesan to taste Peel and dice the tomatoes.† Add the onions, garlic, parsley, basil and olive oil to the tomatoes. Season to taste with vinegar, salt, and pepper. Set aside. Cook and drain the spaghetti. Toss the hot spaghetti with the tomato mixture. Serve immediately tossed with cheese. The tomato mixture may be prepared ahead and refrigerated. Bring it back to room temperature before mixing with the hot spaghetti (you can just microwave it for a short time). This is also good served cold, especially with fresh lime juice squeezed over it. *The original recipe uses tarragon wine vinegar, but that seems hard to find these days. † Peeling tomatoes is not as irksome as you may think. If you cut a slit in them, then dip them in boiling water for 30-60 seconds, then put them in cold water, you can pull the peel off with your fingers. Here's a video showing how to do it. The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

After several years of nothing but supermarket vegetables, it was amazing to find peaches that smelled like peaches. The scent of the cantaloupes actually hit us as soon as we walked in the tent and told us how good they were. For once, we actually ate all of the produce instead of letting it slowly rot in the fridge with our other good intentions.

Getting to today's recipe, we got some really big tomatoes. Like, usually you can't get tomatoes like this unless your neighbor has a tomato patch in her spare time. They looked ordinary sitting by themselves, so here's one with my typewriter for scale.

These were good enough to just slice onto a plate, but we got a lot of tomatoes. So I decided to make something called "Summer Spaghetti."

The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

I've been eyeing this recipe for a long time, but I could tell that it absolutely depends on good ingredients. And for some reason, the farmer's markets around here all close close bizarrely early in the morning. Even if I end up trudging in the hottest part of the miserable afternoon, I refuse to set an alarm clock to buy vegetables.

The recipe calls for peeled and diced tomatoes. I had horrible visions of squishing the tomatoes into a sad mess while hacking at them with a paring knife, which nearly made me give up before I had put the spaghetti in the pot. Then I figured that if anyone could make peeling tomatoes easier, Delia Smith could. Sure enough, she has a video about peeling tomatoes that requires no knife skills. She says that if you put them in boiling water for a minute or so, "you'll find the skins will slip off really easily." It sounded too good to be true, but it worked! Doing our tomatoes the Delia way was as easy as picking the peel off of a cooked potato with your fingers. I've said this many times, but Delia Smith never fails to come to your aid.

In full disclosure, chopping the tomatoes was a slithery, messy process-- even with a freshly sharpened knife. I don't think there is an easy way around that without some very specific factory machinery. Also, that runoff so delicious that I tipped the cutting board into a teacup.

Aside from waiting for our pasta to boil, this was surprisingly fast to put together. This is all the chopping you have to do for this recipe. If you're half-decent with a knife, you can probably do it while the spaghetti's cooking.

I should have put the tomatoes in a bigger bowl to make room for everything else. But doesn't it look gorgeous anyway?

I should note that our tomatoes got soupy within a few seconds of stirring everything together. This must be why we're told to serve immediately.

I had prepared the full amount of tomatoes since the recipe says we can do that ahead if desired, but only cooked half the pasta. I think this accidentally improved our summer spaghetti. This is the recipe if you make it as written. Don't you think it needs more tomato?

But if you should double the tomatoes (or halve the pasta without halving the tomatoes), you get this. Doesn't it look better?

Note that we splurged on actual Parmesan instead of canned powder.

I don't understand why the recipe writer tried to stretch the summer produce with extra pasta. Farmer's market vegetables don't tend to have a shelf life, and there's no point in parsimony with short-lived ingredients.

This is one of those recipes that reminds you that vegetables can be so damn good. Obviously, if you use the produce from the supermarket, this would be as thrilling as one of those droopy broccoli trays in an office breakroom. But in the summertime when the really good tomatoes appear at farmer's markets, you owe it to yourself.