Raisin Butterscotch Pudding: or, That got into the oven quick

Two words: "Luscious raisins."

Raisin Butterscotch Pudding 1 cup sifted flour 2 tsp baking powder ½ tsp salt ¾ cup white sugar ⅔ cup raisins (light or dark) ½ tsp grated lemon rind ½ cup milk 1 tbsp melted butter ¾ cup brown sugar 1 tbsp lemon juice 1⅓ cups hot water Heat oven to 350°. Grease a deep 8" square or 9" round pan. Sift together flour, baking powder, salt, and white sugar. Mix in the raisins, making sure they're well-coated with the powder. Then stir in half of the lemon rind, milk, and melted butter. Blend well. Spread in the pan. Sprinkle the brown sugar over it. Mix the lemon juice, remaining lemon rind, and hot water. Carefully pour over the top. Bake 40-45 minutes. Serve warm. Note: Even if you usually line your cake pans with paper, don't do it with this one. The paper will float up into the sauce as it bakes. Source: Undated newspaper clipping (probably 1930s or early 1940s), Chicago area

By happy accident, our raisin pudding is egg-free. Don't you love when recipes of yore accidentally turn topical again? 

Let us pause and appreciate how amazing it is that you can turn a yellow-brown piece of ancient newspaper into something this easy to read.

This newspaper clipping comes from my great-grandmother's binder, which has been a fascinating insight into people I never met. They always look grimly tired in pictures, which made me expect a lot of recipes like "boil the spinach for forty-five minutes" or pot roasts seasoned with one-eighth teaspoon of pepper. But apparently they really liked desserts.

Getting to today's recipe, the newspaper proudly printed in large type that it is "just bursting with luscious raisins." Given how polarizing raisins are, the writers may have meant for that sentence to entice half the readers and warn off the rest. 

This recipe is undated, but everything in the book seems to be from the 1930s and 40s. Many of the desserts in the binder (and again, there are a lot of desserts) mention stretching your wartime sugar rations, which places them somewhere in the early to mid 1940s. Since this recipe uses a dizzying amount of sugar, it almost certainly came out before the food restrictions set in. 

Setting aside any speculation about this recipe's year, I'm going to guess that the newspaper printed it in the wintertime because 1) you bake it for 45 minutes and most houses didn't have air conditioning yet, and 2) it looks really rich. 

I went slightly off-book and sanded the lemon rind and sugar together between my fingers. This always helps bring out the lemon flavor. This recipe's massive mound of sugar wouldn't have fit into the flour sifter anyway, so this minor deviation both improved the taste and made this recipe less prone to spill onto the countertop.

I did not think this recipe would be so quick. Aside from a brief detour to get the rind and juice out of a lemon, it's as simple as a batch of muffins. First you mix the dry ingredients, then you mix the wet ingredients, and then you stir them all together. I should note that even though the directions don't mention this, I stirred in the raisins into the dry flour to ensure that they didn't hold together in stubborn clumps. 

Out of curiosity, I timed myself the second time I made this, starting after I had all the ingredients on the counter but before I did anything else. I didn't want to include the time spent digging through the shelves and muttering "Now where did the baking powder go?" 

The lemon is in there somewhere.

To keep things realistic, I didn't rush my way through the recipe. And because I didn't want to fudge my results, I didn't do any prep-- not even measuring the flour. I started the clock at the moment I start grating the rind off the lemon, and ended when I shut the oven on dessert. We had this baking in a smidge less than fifteen minutes. That includes digging out a correct-sized pan and also finding where the scissors went so I could open another sugar package. (Again, this recipe uses a lot of sugar.)

Look at this batter, just bursting with luscious raisins!

Also, do not use a paper pan liner in this recipe. See the note in the recipe box.

I was afraid the batter would be difficult to coax to the edges of the pan. But even though it we had to spread it a bit thin, it slid into place easily.

And now, it's time to make this pudding's magic sauce! You see, this is one of those fun recipes that completely rearranges itself as it cooks. What was on top will be on the bottom, what was beneath will be above, and we don't even have to get out second bowl. We only need to put a lot of brown sugar on top, and then pour enough hot water to almost dissolve it. The recipe doesn't say how hot the water should be, so I went with "hot enough to make you say 'ouch,' but not enough to scald your finger."

In case you didn't notice, this recipe puts equal amounts of sugar in the cake and on top of it.

In case you couldn't tell, this is very sloshy before baking. If you don't have a deep pan, the journey from countertop to oven is perilous. 

 

I had suspected that I would end up with a soggy cake, but I could see the water starting to hide under the batter after just a few minutes. I then wondered if the water would take the brown sugar to the bottom of the pan with it, or if the cake would filter it out and leave a crackly sweet crust on top.

When the timer went off, we had a triumphant dome of cake that didn't look soggy at all. You could also see what the newspaper tells us is a "delicious rich sauce of brown sugar" bubbling up from below.

In case I had any doubts about the self-forming sauce, the cake slid back and forth in the pan with every twitch of my wrists-- as if it was floating on something. 

The cake deflated and flattened back to normal within 5 minutes of de-ovening. But when I put a spatula in there, I found that it had leavened a bit. So, I could put aside my misgivings about a hardened layer of dough-paste. This recipe produced an actual cake, just like the headnote promised.

I should note that when I made this again, I did not mix the raisins with the dry ingredients. As the sauce burrowed under the cake, it took the raisins with it. The pudding still tasted as good as ever, but the free-floating raisins looked like bugs. 

The cake should be "just bursting with luscious raisins," not the sauce! 

Even if you mix the raisins with the dry ingredients, they make make their way under the cake anyway. But at least they mostly cling to the underside of the cake instead of turning into free-floating roaches. I could have tinkered with the recipe to try and make the raisins stay in the cake batter while the sauce filtered through to the other side, but I decided to just let the this pudding be what it is. After all, who wants to make a frustrating ordeal out of an easy dessert?

If we take a close look at the leftovers, you can see how the raisins aren't so much in the cake as they are attached to its underside. If you want to borrow the newspaper's phrasing, you might say that the raisins just burst out of the cake.

I love making pre-social-media recipes.

Setting aside our leftovers and how bad they look, the clipping says "You'll get an extra measure of praise from your family." I didn't record everyone's comments, but I'll let the pan speak for itself.

If you're not watching your sugar, this is really good! It reminds me of the apple-raisin man bait. It's so rich, you'd never guess it has no eggs and nearly no butter. Also, the raisins absorbed a lot of brown sugar and lemon as the sauce migrated through the cake. They became, dare I say it, luscious. Even if you hate raisins, this tastes incomplete without syrup-soaked dried fruit in it. So, pick something else to stir in. 

I'm not going to say that every recipe in my great-grandmother's binder is amazing, but it's looking really good so far.

Sweet Potato Pudding

Today, we're trying one of my great-grandmother's recipe clippings! We have made a few handwritten recipes from her binder, but this is our first time making something that she pasted in from the newspaper.

Sweet Potato Pudding 1 tablespoon (or one ¼-oz envelope) powdered gelatin ½ cup water 1 large sweet potato (big enough to yield at least 1 cup when mashed) ½ cup brown sugar 2 tsp cinnamon ⅛ tsp nutmeg ½ tsp salt 1 cup heavy cream ½ cup coarsely ground hazelnuts* Sprinkle the gelatin over the water and set aside. While the gelatin is soaking, cook and peel the sweet potato.† Then firmly pack it into a measuring cup. You want one cup of potato. (Reserve the extra potato for another use, or season to taste for a quick snack.) In a large mixing bowl, lightly break up the hot potato with a fork. Add the gelatin and stir until it is melted. Then mix in the brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt. Insert an immersion blender and blenderize until completely smooth.‡ Let stand to cool and thicken. When the sweet potato mixture is about as thick as whipped cream, whip the cream and fold it in. Pour into gelatin molds or a large serving bowl. Refrigerate or freeze overnight. Serve chilled or frozen, with the nuts sprinkled on top. Store in an airtight container. This will keep in the refrigerator for at least a week, and in the freezer for about as long as any other ice cream. *Use black walnuts if you really want to stick to the original. †In the old days, you would have needed to boil or bake the sweet potato until it was done. We recommend using a microwave instead. Simply prick the potato a few times with a fork or knife, and microwave it until it's soft when you stick a fork in it, about 6 to 8 minutes. ‡You can do this in a normal blender by putting the soaked gelatin in the bottom and adding the potato. You'll need to stop a few times and use a rubber spatula. When it's almost thoroughly blenderized, add the sugar (it will help the blender finish its job). Or, if you have no blender of any kind, you can do it the old-fashioned way: force the sweet potato through a sieve. Then, while the potato is still hot, mix in the gelatin. Source: Undated newspaper clipping (Chicago area), probably 1930s or 1940s

 Whoever wrote this loved the word "pulp."

I really wanted this recipe to be good. For one thing, if you microwave the sweet potato, you can make this in the summer without heating the kitchen. Furthermore, it is egg-free, which is really nice as the price of eggs keeps rising. (And given the recent mass-firings of government scientists, bird flu is probably not going away.)  

The directions tell us to add "moistened gelatin" with no further explanation. I assumed this means to sprinkle it over water and let it sit, as one usually does. 

While our gelatin was moistening and our potato was microwaving, I measured out our brown sugar and spices. I had cynically assumed this recipe would be underspiced, but look at the massive mound of cinnamon on top of the sugar!

I soon discovered that one cup of sweet potato requires a bigger spud than the fist-sized one I bought. But I decided to just go with what we had. I'm sure that anyone else who clipped this recipe did the same.

My mistakes are period-correct.

At this point, we were supposed to mix the still-hot sweet potato and the moistened gelatin. The pulp smelled like steaming dog food.

It's been a long time since I got a hard whiff of hot hoof powder.

I had initially thought this would be a long, laborious recipe. But at this foul-smelling moment, I was already halfway done. And so, with strong hopes that the brown sugar and spices would obliterate the gelatin's stink, I dumped them in. I didn't realize how much cinnamon this recipe uses until the smell of it unclogged my nose. 

Because I don't hate myself, I used a potato masher instead of forcing the pulp through a sieve. I am not persnickety about presentation, so I figured that I didn't need perfectionism. But after mixing everything together, my pulp was unpleasantly lumpy. 

I got out an immersion blender and made our pulp smoother than anyone with a sieve could have done. Heck, it was velvety. Unfortunately, it was also the color of a well-splattered bathroom.

Questionable color aside, the blender also whipped the potato unexpectedly well. I wondered if I could have run it long enough to aerate the pulp and make the whipped cream unnecessary.

Before adding the cream, I paused to taste our pudding-in-progress. It wasn't bad, but the flavor lacked something. Also, the cinnamon was unexpectedly harsh. But, I thought, maybe the spices would meld and mellow in the refrigerator overnight. After all, my great-grandmother wouldn't have clipped and saved a bad recipe... right?

I may have let the pulp sit and cool off for too long. Because it had gotten so thick and heavy, I'm not sure if I carefully folded the whipped cream in, or if I did an unusually tedious job of deflating and stirring it. But even if the cream added no fluff at all, it changed our pudding from an ugly brown to a cute orange. And it made the pudding's flavor complete in a way I can't explain.

Some readers may notice that I didn't add any walnuts to the pudding. As we learned with the cranberry-celery salad, nuts turn soggy when they spend the night in gelatin. Also, walnuts are terrible. I've heard that walnuts are delicious when they're fresh off the tree, and I'm willing to keep an open mind. But no one in my area has a walnut tree, so I am restricted to the walnuts on the supermarket shelf. They always taste bitter and slightly rancid, regardless of how far in the future the expiration date is. 

I have a theory that people back then didn't mind the taste of bitter supermarket walnuts because everyone smoked. Even nonsmokers probably smoked a pack a week secondhand. Why else would people freely contaminate everything from gelatin to brownies with walnuts? In all seriousness, I think the more bizarre flavors of older recipes make more sense when pre-seasoned with nicotine.

Walnuts aside, the directions end by saying this is good both chilled and frozen. So, I put half in the refrigerator and froze the rest. We are also told to "place in molds and chill." Since I don't have any, I put a serving of pudding into a measuring cup. I wanted the complete recipe experience-- except the walnuts.

By the next day, the pudding had become astonishingly resilient. It's always strange when your dessert can bounce. When I finally got it to fall out (which involved a lot of spoon-thwacking and hot water), I saw that my gelatin molding skills are quite bad.

In order not to ruin this dessert's appearance with my own ineptitude, I put it in a cute bowl and sprinkled hazelnuts on top. Unlike walnuts, hazelnuts taste good. Also, hazelnuts are called "filberts" in some places, and walnuts don't have such a cute-sounding name (nor do they deserve one).

When you taste this, it is surprisingly hard to tell whether it has sweet potatoes or pumpkin. But I do like how using a sweet potato instead of pumpkin lets us drastically reduce the sugar (and therefore the grocery money) going into dessert.

When I made this again, I decided to heat the cream, add the spices to it, and let it infuse while it cooled. But it turns out that scalded and spiced cream refuses to whip. I don't know if heating the cream denatured something, or if the spices reacted with something in it. Either way, the cream looked like this after ten minutes with an electric mixer. It didn't turn to butter, it didn't whip, it just wasted my time.

There's a science lesson here, but I don't know what it is.

I felt terrible about the waste, but at least everyone reading this will know not to repeat my mistakes. So hopefully my cream didn't go down the drain in vain.

But I don't want to end a good recipe with a mistake. So I'll by close by saying this is really easy to make, and very sating after a light supper. Since you have to refrigerate it overnight anyway, it's perfect for making ahead. And just as the directions say, it freezes really well. If you refrigerate it, it's like a mousse. If you freeze it, it's like ice cream.

Second-Stab Saturday: New England Cinnamon Drops (they are now raisin-free!)

Today, we are revisiting a recipe that had so much potential but came out so bland.

New England Cinnamon Drops 1 cup sugar ¼ cup shortening ¼ cup butter 1 tsp baking soda ½ tsp salt 1 tsp baking powder 1 egg 1½ tsp vanilla ½ tsp almond extract 1 cup thick sour milk, or buttermilk (I used sour cream) 3 cups flour Cinnamon-sugar for sprinkling Heat oven to 375°. Grease a cookie sheet. Cream the sugar, butter, shortening, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Add the egg and extracts. When thoroughly mixed, add the sour cream and beat well. Then mix in the flour. Drop by the teaspoon onto baking sheets. Then sprinkle the cookies with cinnamon sugar. If desired, pat them into a neater shape after sprinkling (the cinnamon-sugar will keep them from sticking to your fingertips). Bake 10-12 minutes, or until golden on the bottom. Bertha Lyman Shellington, 3 West Park Avenue, Haddonfield, NJ; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, June 21 1935, page 12

Some readers may recall when we made the New England Raisin Drops. At the time, we asked "Would it have killed Bertha Lyman Shellington to add some damn vanilla?" Well today, we are flavoring the cookies with the fermented seed pods of a vining orchid that only grows in the beautiful tropics! That is, we are adding some damn vanilla. And also a little almond extract because I felt like it.

You can see the the vanilla right where it should be: in the mixing bowl instead of on the shelf.

Our cookie dough was a lot floppier than last time. Our previous New England Raisin Drops were firm enough to shape with the hands. But today's dough was too sticky for anything but spoon-dropping. Well, they are called New England Raisin drops, so I can't be mad when they acted like their name. Anyway, Bertha Lyman Shellington spoon-dropped her cookies, and she won the $2 basket of groceries.

I didn't know if today's softer dough would spread and flatten in the oven, or if the cookies would retain their shape like the last ones did. After sprinkling on the cinnamon sugar, I patted away the pointier protrusions just in case. I'm glad I did, because these cookies spread a little but not much. Also, they puffed up a lot. I could easily have made them smaller.

And of course, I will grab any excuse to play with the cookie press. For this recipe, I resisted the temptation to use every stencil in the box. I am already learning that the star is the most reliable stencil in the box. It's not the fanciest one, but the other shapes can bake into sad-looking blobs if your cookies are in a bad mood.

Our cinnamon stars looked ever-so-cute. However, I don't know whether I recommend using a cookie press for this recipe or not.

If you own a cookie press and want to try these for yourself, you should know that they did not come off the ungreased pan without a fight.

It's been a surprisingly long time since I had to scour a baking sheet.

Adding flavorings to the dough did wonders for the cookies. When I let everyone try these, one person said "These are dangerous!" and left the kitchen with two in each hand.

The cookies vanished rapidly when I wasn't looking. (Of course, I contributed to their disappearance too.) The spoon-dropped ones are what muffin tops wish they could be. They're almost like little snickerdoodle cakes. That generous splash of vanilla did wonders for them. And so did de-raisining the recipe.

French Orange Cake: or, Getting continental with raisins

I'm a sucker for recipes that drop the word "French" in the title.

French Orange Cake Grated rind of 1 orange 1 cup sugar ⅓ cup shortening 1 tsp baking soda 1 tsp baking powder pinch salt 1 egg 1 tsp vanilla 1 cup sour cream* 2 cups sifted flour 1 cup chopped raisins        Topping: Juice of 1 orange ½ cup sugar Whipped cream for serving (optional) Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9" square pan. Rub together the orange rind and sugar until the sugar is a bright yellow and smells strongly or oranges. Cream together the sugar, shortening, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Add the egg and vanilla, and beat until very light. Add about one third of the flour. When mixed, add about half of the sour cream. Repeat this with another third of the flour and the remaining half of the sour cream. Then mix in the last third of the flour. When all is combined, stir in the raisins. Bake for 25 minutes, or until a toothpick in the center comes out clean. While the cake is baking, make the topping. Mix the sugar and the orange juice, and then heat until the sugar dissolves. You can either do this in a small saucepan over medium-low heat, or you can use the microwave by cooking it for 15 seconds at a time, stopping the microwave and stirring the juice after each time. As the juice gets hot, watch carefully so it doesn't boil over. As soon as the cake comes out of the oven, pour the syrup on it. Allow to cool, or serve it warm. If desired, serve with whipped cream. *or sour milk, or buttermilk Mrs. John E. Meeter, 239 College Ave, Chambersburg Pennsylvania; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, September 13 1935, page 12

Mrs. John E. Meeter starts off strong. We're only a minute or two into the recipe, and we already have oranges and sour cream.

Because this recipe makes a lot of cake, I halved it. This entailed splitting an egg in half, which has become a surprisingly undaunting task after doing it enough times. I'm not complaining about the egg-splitting. I only point it out so I can note that the orange rind had turned the sugar such a beautiful color that the bright yellow egg looked like a hideous beige spill on top of it.

Our finished cake batter was thick enough to suspend in the beaters.

When the batter landed in the pan, it looked a lot like 1234 cake.

You may have noticed that the recipe calls for raisins, and our cake batter doesn't contain any. The raisins, predictably enough, incited an ideological split in the house. Some people really didn't want those creepy crawly brown things in the cake. I, on the other hand, wanted to see if they improved the cake at all. After all, Mrs. Meeter put raisins into the cake, and she got her name and recipe in the newspaper and a $2 basket of groceries. Maybe the raisins make the cake French.

And so, after putting half the cake batter into the pan, I did this to what remained:

I didn't realize that the raisins would add volume to the cake batter. So, I ended up beraisining half the batter but therefore two-thirds of the cake.

With the cake in the oven, it was time for the topping. Mrs. Meeter would have dissolved the sugar and orange juice in a tiny pot on the stovetop (perhaps by setting it over the stove's pilot light), but we can use a microwave instead.

Our resulting glaze looked just like that syrup in canned peaches with a bit of extra yellow food coloring in it. For the record, I didn't add any dyes to the cake or the glaze. Oranges produce a really pretty shade of yellow on their own.

Getting back to the cake itself, I thought it would level itself off in the oven. It did not.

Looks like a child's modeling clay project, doesn't it?

The glaze highlighted every finger-smudged contour of the cake and made it look worse. It's very rare for a glaze to make a cake look bad, but we succeeded today.

As is often the case with cake, it looked better after cutting. The visual shortcomings all but disappeared. However, some people thought the intrusive raisins cancelled out any aesthetic improvements.

Raisins or not, everyone really liked the cake. The orange glaze added beauty to perfection. Seriously, I would save the glaze recipe even if I didn't make the cake again.

Bizarrely, you couldn't tell the raisins were there. You couldn't taste them, they didn't change the texture, they didn't even add little pockets of moistness. It appears the power of oranges can defeat raisins. So unless you're trying to sneak raisins into everyone's food like a parent slipping pulverized broccoli into lasagna, you can omit them and lose nothing. Maybe Mrs. Meeter knew the raisins wouldn't alter the cake at all, and that's why she added them. After volumizing the cake with imperceptible raisins, there's more cake for your hungry children, your spouse who just got home from a factory job, a few unexpected guests who followed your progeny home, and yourself. You might even have an extra slice to pack into your husband's lunch the next day.

Raisin-based economizing aside, this is a really good cake. It turns out that using actual oranges to make orange-flavored things is delicious.