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.

Salt-And-Vinegar Hot Potato Salad: or, Better than I knew I could wish it to be

I can't think of a sound argument against potatoes and bacon.

Salt And Vinegar Hot Potato Salad 4 cups sliced new potatoes 6 strips bacon, chopped 1 tbsp flour ¼ cup vinegar 1½ tsp salt ½ tsp pepper ½ cup water 1 sliced green onion* Boil the potatoes in salted water until tender. Meanwhile, fry the bacon until crisp in a large pan. Stir in the flour and blend well. Add the vinegar, salt, pepper, water, and the (thinly sliced) white part of the green onion. Cook for 5 minutes over medium heat. Drain and add the potatoes. Gently mix. Stir in the rest of the green onion just before serving. If you cook the potatoes ahead of time, you can reheat them with the sauce in the top of a double boiler (or the microwave, of course!). *the original recipe calls for one tablespoon sliced green onions, but who wants to cram those into a tiny measuring spoon? Chicago Tribune, undated (1930s or 1940s?)

This recipe comes from my great-grandmother's binder. She pasted two hot potato salads onto the same page, but this one starts with bacon.

First off, I love that picture and want a copy of it to hang in the kitchen. It goes past strange and straight to art. I almost want to say it's "geometric" and "art-deco inspired," but maybe I'm just a bit bedazzled from seeing hot dogs and sandwich bread arranged with so much intentionality. This puts our modern-day party trays to shame. 

Getting down to the salad, I love how the writers let us economically dodge the cost of hot dog buns. Instead, we have a decorative, aesthetically pleasing arrangement of sandwich bread and sausage. (Well, if you consider hot dogs to be sausage...) I supposed you're supposed to take a piece of bread and then plonk a wiener on top of it?

If you add a few condiments, it looks like a very nice one-tray meal. But I have a hard time imagining following the newspaper's advice to serve this at a "picnic supper" unless I packed a chafing dish.

Getting down to spuds, I decided to do everything involving a cutting board before I turned on the stove. I don't always manage that kind of advance planning, so it's nice when I think of it. Aside from sliced potatoes, the recipe calls for "one tablespoon sliced green onions, including tops." I briefly tried measuring them out properly, but I can't reconcile green onions and level tablespoons.

Moving down the ingredient list, we're using a lot of bacon today. The newspaper may have named this "hot potato salad," but I think the bacon should have also gotten title billing.

I've never seen bacon look so bad. Like, we all know where meat comes from. But this mess looked more like a slimy heap of dead animal than most of the meat that passes through the kitchen, including the occasional recognizable organs.

As we learned from The Philadelphia Inquirer, chopping the bacon before cooking allows all the grease melts off better. 

I think that the recipe was more interested in harvesting the fat that melted off the bacon than the bacon itself. A lot of recipes call for bacon fat without using the bacon itself, but this one is perfect for those of us who no longer keep bacon grease jar next to the stove. 

In just a minute or two, the meat itself shrank to brown confetti, but the grease remained in abundance.

For some reason, the flour made the grease fizz.

We were now ready to add everything else to the pan except the potatoes, which were still boiling in the saucepan next door. As a recipe note, I omitted the tablespoon of sugar in the recipe. I don't know what it's supposed to do, but I don't like adding adding sugar to things that aren't sweet. Every time I make sloppy joes, I omit the brown sugar.

It kind of looks like cheese dip, doesn't it? After telling us to add the green onions at this point, the recipe suggests waiting until the end. If you're trying this at home (and if you like salt-and-vinegar chips you should), wait til you take the pan off the stove to add the green onions. They soon withered to nothing. But in this moment, everything looked really nice.

I thought the sauce was far too drippy at first, but after 5 minutes it became nice and creamy. Also, you'll notice that the green onions have all but vanished. Again, I should have taken the recipe writers' hint to ignore their own instructions. But at this point, only one thing remained: add the potatoes!

I didn't serve this with rye bread because do we really need carbs with a side of carbs? While we're on the subject, I like that they don't suggest serving it with toasted rye bread. For one thing, toasters were still expensive. Also, since (I'm guessing) the depression was on, you didn't have to worry about uneaten toast going stale. Instead, you could just put the extra bread back into the breadbox.

The newspaper suggests serving this with frankfurters. I didn't think that was necessary when I was getting groceries. But as I served this, I couldn't help thinking "This would be great with hot dogs..." 

 

I shouldn't have been surprised this was so good. This was salt and vinegar bliss. If you like salt and vinegar chips, you owe it to yourself. But in full disclosure, the salad didn't reheat very well. The leftovers weren't bad, but they lost their zest after a night in the refrigerator. 

As a postscript, I have to note a fun variation I made on this. You see, others in the house had bought a frozen pizza a while ago and never bothered to eat it. As I watched it slowly get freezer-burnt in its own box, I thought to myself "I wonder if this is any good with pepperoni grease instead of bacon drippings..."

Things soon looked like someone's first-ever shift in a diner kitchen. Everything in the pan thickened up exactly as it should have, but it didn't look very good.

I never thought pepperoni would be almost too hot to handle. Rendering off the pepperoni grease and then cooking the meat in its own fat released a capsaicin payload I didn't know pepperoni had. Until today, I never knew pepperoni contained actual peppers. I always thought it was salt and nitrates. 

Even though I omitted the salt, this was a lot saltier than I wanted it to be. The pepperoni-potato salad was fun in theory, but it just wasn't that great in practice. 

I want to say this is a nice recipe for hot weather since you don't turn on the oven. However, you do end up standing over two stove burners, one of which is steaming at you and the other is full of spattering grease. But even as I write this, I didn't regret purchasing enough spuds and bacon to make it again.

Sweet-Sour Cabbage: or, It's almost ready after you've cut the greens

Some of my friends in northern latitudes can't plant anything outside yet, but down here the heat is already setting in. We haven't gotten to the truly miserable temperatures yet, but winter is definitely over. 

With that in mind, we had half a cabbage in the refrigerator, and cooking it in milk doesn't seem as nice without the chilly weather.

Sweet-Sour Cabbage 2 tbsp butter, cooking oil, or fat of choice 4 cups shredded cabbage 2 tart apples, thinly sliced Salt and pepper to taste Boiling water 2 tbsp flour ¼ cup brown sugar 2 tbsp vinegar Melt the fat in a large skillet. Add the cabbage and apples. Season with salt and pepper. Pour in enough boiling water to almost cover everything. Bring to a brisk boil, then cook for about 6 minutes or until tender but slightly crisp, stirring and submerging everything with the spoon so that all is evenly cooked. As the cabbage and apples soften, they will shrink and stay under the water on their own. While the cabbage is cooking, mix the flour and brown sugar in a small bowl, breaking up any flour-lumps. Then stir the vinegar into them. When the cabbage is ready, pour the vinegar mixture into it and quickly stir to prevent it from clumping. Cook for another minute or two, until thickened. Note: If you slice the apples thinly, you don't need to worry about peeling them. The small strips of apple peel will blend right in with the cabbage. Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

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

I love the bygone lyricality of a sentence like "Heat fat in spider."

Today's directions don't mention peeling the apples, so I didn't. When this book was printed, the Depression was on. Who in their right mind would pare away their grocery money and throw it in the trash?

When you start a recipe by melting butter in a skillet, you usually add your next ingredients and push them around the pan for a while. But today, we are told to skip the tedious pan-frying business and just boil everything. This recipe economizes on time as well as groceries. 

The directions don't tell us how much water to add, so I poured in enough to almost cover the cabbage. In theory, the cabbage would shrink enough to be immersed without swimming in a watery surplus. 

Of course, someone in Mrs. Mary Martensen's day would have needed to set a pot on the burner next to the skillet (or "spider" as they used to call it), but we at A Book of Cookrye took a leap of extravagance and bought... this!

It can boil a pint of water in like 90 seconds-- and even faster in the summer when the tap water isn't as cold. (For our metric friends, it boils about 5 deciliters in 9-ish decaseconds.) I never realized how much time I spend waiting for water to boil until I no longer had to. 

I theorize that our electric kettle is so overpowered because it comes from Canada. After all, their tap water is ice-cold during much of the year.

Kitchen toys aside, it was soon time to add the sweet and the sour to the cabbage. I like that Mrs. Mary Martensen waits until the end of the cooking time before adding the vinegar. Otherwise it would have boiled away, leaving the kitchen pungent and the cabbage bland.

We are directed to serve this with "potato dumplings," so I found room in the oven for some sweet potato boulettes next to the dessert.

This recipe delivers exactly what the title promises. It is sweet, it is sour, and it is cabbage.This recipe was just sweet enough to be nice without being candied. True, it wasn't a gastronomical thrill on its own. But I think that makes it a very versatile side dish. It's flavorful enough to be good, but also neutral enough to go with nearly anything. 

 You might think the apple skins were unpleasant, but they blended right in with the surrounding cabbage. If you cut your apples as thinly as shown below, you will barely notice the peels.

In a later batch, I used cider vinegar and also added a shake of nutmeg. (Some online friends from Germany taught me that nutmeg and cabbage go together like salt and pepper.) I should have heeded the warning in the book's introduction: "Experimental changes in a good recipe are rarely successful." The cider-vinegar-and-nutmeg version tasted like apple pie with cabbage in it. 

I tried to tell myself that it was like a pie from the time before developed a rigid savory-sweet divide between the main dish and dessert. I also reminded myself that cabbage is cheap but it isn't free. I didn't throw the cabbage/apple pie filling away, but I won't repeat it. 

But I don't want anyone to leave today thinking this is a dud recipe just because I made some ill-advised changes. It's pretty good if you stick to the ingredients that are written. It's especially nice in hot weather because it's not too rich or heavy. And the short cooking time means you barely heat up the kitchen. 

Cheese-Stuffed Mushrooms

To the apparent surprise of Americans who believe conservative podcasters, Canada is a sovereign nation.

Cheddar-Stuffed Mushrooms 6 large portobello mushrooms, or 1 to 1½ pounds baby mushrooms ¼ cup (60 mL) butter, divided ¼ cup (60 mL) chopped roasted salted cashews (or nuts of your choice) 5 or 6 green onions 1 clove garlic (or more if desired), minced 2 tbsp (30 mL) flour 1 cup (250 mL) milk 1 cup shredded cheddar, or cheese of your choice 2 tbsp (30 mL) soy sauce 2 tbsp (30 mL) cooking oil Salt and pepper to taste Heat oven to 425°F or 220°C. Line a baking sheet with foil.* Remove the stems from the mushroom caps and chop. Set aside. Melt half the butter, mix with the chopped nuts. Set aside. Thinly slice the green onions, keeping the white and green parts separated. Set aside the green parts. Melt the remaining butter in a large frying pan over medium heat. Add the whites of the green onions and cook for 4 minutes, or until wilted. Stir in the garlic and chopped mushroom stems. Add salt and pepper to taste. Continue cooking 8-10 minutes, or until mushrooms are cooked and most of their juice has dried. Sprinkle the flour over the pan (if you have one of those miniature sifters, it's perfect for this), stirring rapidly to prevent lumps. While still quickly stirring, add the milk one splash at a time. You can add it more freely as the mixture thins out. After all the milk is added, cook until smooth and thickened, about 2 minutes. Then remove from heat, and immediately stir in the cheese and the green parts of the green onions. Mix the oil and soy sauce. Brush them all over the mushroom caps. Then lay the caps concave side up on the baking sheet. Fill them with the cheese sauce, adding enough to almost come to their rims. Put some of the chopped nuts and butter on top of each. Bake 20-25 minutes, or until mushrooms are cooked and the cheese is golden at the edges. Serve warm. *You don't need to line the pan with foil. But come cleanup time, you'll be glad you did. Adapted from Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

Right after election night, I said that I hoped Trump's dumber policies would inconvenience enough people who have sufficient money to influence him, thus bringing at least a little sanity back into national politics. And already, we are seeing little ripples of dismay in various top-floor offices. I would be bitterly amused if I had a lot of money to throw away on rising prices.

Liquor store employees in Canada have been removing American alcohol from the shelves as shoppers carefully avoid it. It turns out that people get irked when threatened with annexation and whapped with tariffs. Canadians may not be able to vote in US elections, but they can definitely vote with their money.

A friend sent me this picture from a store in Montreal.

 

Sinking sales over the border haven't bred executive desperation yet, but there are already signs of consternation. After all, stores never let freshly-cleared shelf space stay vacant. The president of the Kentucky Distillers' Association took to Twitter and begged Canadians to keep buying bourbon. The distillers' plea came on the same day that the Liquor Control Board of Ontario yanked American alcohol from every single store in the province. Other Canadian provinces have followed suit. 

The Globe and Mail

All of this to say, today we are getting out that magazine I took home from Ottawa's airport, and making a recipe from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario.

Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

Or at least, we are trying to make a recipe from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. As we have learned, a lot of the recipes from their beautifully-photographed magazine seem like they were only tested in commercial kitchens. I suspect the LCBO's recipe developers didn't always think about the realities of cooking in a house that does not have a full complement of restaurant equipment.

On a minor cross-cultural cooking note, I'm surprised the recipe writers used volume instead of weight* when writing the metric measurements of ingredients like shredded cheese and flour. I thought that people in Canada (and everywhere else that isn't the US) had kitchen scales.

We begin the recipe by making puffed wild rice. It was surprisingly hard to find plain wild rice at the store. There were plenty of rice mixes that contained it, but only one store in town could sell us a bag of standalone wild rice.

My puffed wild rice tasted burnt. I threw it out and tried again, watching the pan a lot more carefully. But I got more burnt (yet puffy) wild rice. After two failures, I figured that I needed a better tutorial than a few recipe sentences. But when I looked online, everyone's Instagram-worthy pictures showed rice that was just as burnt as mine was. Maybe everyone has been burning their wild rice and trying to convince themselves that it has a "deliciously nutty flavor" as the recipe headnote claims.

Since my burnt rice looked just like everyone else's, I gamely put it into the spice grinder. After it was as pulverized as it would get, it had a lot of unnerving translucent crystals that looked like Plexiglas sawdust.

With a skeptical yet open mind, I tried some of our allegedly completed "wild rice crunch." It was like eating gravelly dirt. This stuff threatened to sand off my teeth. At this point, I went off-recipe and tried putting it in hot water to soften it-- you know, what people normally do with rice. I thought I could put a dab of the resulting paste into the bottom of each mushroom for that, um, earthy flavor. But the rice was just as gritty as ever. Since I don't like ending every meal with a visit to the dentist, I threw it out. 

Setting aside the failed wild rice, it was time to go nuts.

We're supposed to use pecans, but this isn't the most economical time of the year to purchase them. Instead, I helped myself to a quarter-cup of cashews from the household snack stash. I could have chopped them with a knife, but we already had the spice grinder out from our recent wild rice misadventures.

I mixed the nuts with the melted butter as directed. If the wild rice hadn't been so terrible after getting burnt and pulverized, it would have been here also. But even though the paste looks terrible, but it tasted really good. I could already tell it would be an amazing topping for what was to come.

The next part of the recipe involved the white parts of our green onions and a lot of butter. I don't usually cook green onions, so this felt a bit odd. But it smelled really good. We should have been using a leek, but those were very expensive and only sold in large bunches. I didn't want to commit to two pounds of leeks for the sake of one mushroom recipe.

We are next directed to add the chopped mushroom stems. I like that the recipe uses the whole mushroom instead of telling us to snap off the stems and then discard them.

I usually don't cook mushrooms until dry, but I followed the directions and kept stirring the frying pan until all of the juices had bubbled away. The mushroom reduction in the pan was fantastically good, but I don't know if it was worth it.

The next part of the recipe is easy if you can make a competent white sauce (which, admittedly, is tricky to get right on the first five attempts). After we have made gravy of the pan, it was time to add the cheese. The ingredients list calls for "old cheddar," but I chose to use up the various scraps of cheese lurking in the refrigerator. Besides, "five-cheese sauce" sounds so much better than "cheddar sauce."

 

One taste of the cheese sauce and I forgave the recipe writers for the burnt wild rice.

And so, it was finally time to assemble everything! The recipe calls for large portobello mushrooms, but full-sized ones were extremely costly compared to the little ones. I know nothing about fungiculture, but the price difference suggests that mushrooms are difficult to grow to a large size. So, I figured we would have dainty little stuffed mushrooms instead of big ones. And they looked so cute before we baked them.

I know that this magazine is meant for autumn recipes, but realistically we can only serve these on Halloween. They look like we should call them "zombie pustules."

Things didn't look any better after coming out of the oven.

Before I get too disappointed about their appearance, I should note that the magazine's army of photoshoot professionals couldn't make their mushrooms look any less oozy. Their picture is a lot prettier than what happened in our kitchen, but I think this is an inherently untidy recipe.

Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

Even though our mushrooms looked like I had dropped them onto the floor before serving, I figured there was no way mushrooms and cheese could possibly taste bad. On a related note, I wonder if there's a visual equivalent of an "acquired taste." You know, how you think something looks ugly until spend several years forcefully convincing yourself that you like it.

These were as delicious as they weren't pretty. I know the recipe calls for pecans on top, but I thought the cashews were a lot better. That salty hit on top of the cheese made the mushrooms taste like really good bar food, without having to pay $20 for a beer in some place where the music is as loud as a high school dance. 

And so, once again, a recipe from this magazine didn't go where the directions told us to, but took us somewhere delicious. These mushrooms don't make up for the horror show that currently passes for national politics. But on the (very small) bright side, our northern neighbors who gave us the recipe aren't pretending any of this is normal.

*In the purest, most pedantic sense, it is true that the kilogram is a unit of mass, not a unit of weight. However, unless someone has decided to whip up some stuffed mushrooms while in a vomit comet or somewhere far away from Earth's surface, mass and weight are functionally interchangeable in the kitchen. Anyone wishing to waggle their irate index finger at me is advised to direct their corrective urges at the manufacturers of kitchen scales that switch between pounds (a unit of weight) and kilograms (a unit of mass) at the press of a button.↪