Hot Mustard Fruit: Better than I thought!

As the sun rises on Thanksgiving Day, squirting mustard onto fruit seems like a perfect metaphor for the upcoming four years.

Hot Mustard Fruit ¼ cup butter, melted ½ cup firmly packed brown sugar 2 tbsp prepared mustard* 1 16-oz can sliced peaches, drained 1 13½-oz can pineapple chunks, drained 2 large bananas, cut into chunks Heat oven to 325°. Grease a 6-cup casserole. (A loaf pan will do in a pinch.) Mix together butter, sugar, and mustard in a large bowl. Take out ¼ cup of this and set aside. Stir the fruit into remaining mixture. Place into the casserole. Spoon reserved topping over it. Bake 40 minutes. Serve warm. *ie, the stuff you squirt onto sandwiches (as opposed to dry mustard powder). Mrs. J. R. Burrier; Nicholasville, Kentucky; Favorite Recipes of America: Desserts; 1968

Favorite Recipes of America: Desserts, 1967

This recipe has been staring at me for a long time. Even when I haven't opened the cookbook in ages, I know that the hot mustard fruit lurks within. But I was always afraid to go for it. I have asked several friends to go on the hot mustard journey with me (who wants to do such things alone?), but everyone always muttered awkward excuses or mysteriously forgot. 

Eventually, I shared the hot mustard fruit with a recipe swap group I'm in and asked if anyone wanted to have a virtual hot mustard fruit party. By "virtual party" I meant that whoever had the courage could make it and share a few pictures and (probably well-censored) opinions. Many people said it sounded fun. But for whatever reason, no one has shared their hot mustard as of this writing.

Getting to the recipe, Mrs. J. R. Burrier wastes no time getting to our featured ingredient. And she really puts the "mustard" into "hot mustard fruit." Look at the size of that mustard blob! It looks like I let an unsupervised five-year-old use a squeeze bottle.

Our resulting mixture tasted like the beginnings of some really good barbecue sauce. I wasn't prepared to think this was any good.

Those lumps are there because I decided to throw in all of the rock-hard clumps in the brown sugar and hope they dissolved.

I have to give Mrs. Burrier credit. This recipe comes together really fast. After melting our butter and squirting mustard on it, we merely need to open some cans and cut up a banana. I was ready to stir and bake until I saw that I had purchased something more revolting than mustard-loaded fruit.

It turns out that canned peaches and canned oranges have insidiously similar labels. It's hard to tell one picture of orange semicircular wedges from another when you're already telling yourself this could be your last chance to experience consequence-free folly before grocery prices have another pandemic. 

You may think I would simply use the oranges instead of peaches. But I truly detest canned oranges. At best, they are those weird sticky things that I pluck out of the fried rice when I make the mistake of paying for Panda Express. 

I didn't even want to repurpose them. Yes, I could come up with some lovely recipes that would make the canned orange segments semi-edible. But anything I made to salvage the canned oranges would be better if I omitted them. And so, I decided to reluctantly accept that my stupidity cost me $1.49 and thank the oranges for teaching me to carefully scrutinize canned fruit. (I apologize to anyone who likes canned oranges. Before you get too offended that I hate them, keep in mind that I also think cranberry sauce is better with chopped celery in it.)

And so, I went back to the grocery store for canned peaches. As much as I thought this recipe was nuts, I wanted to give it a fair chance by using the ingredients Mrs. Burrier wrote down. In the canned food aisle, I carefully read the labels and made sure I got the correct fruit in the correct-sized can. Instead of saying "How are you," the clerk asked "Are you sure this is all you forgot?" I said yes, I was quite sure. Yes, I had already planned and bought for all of this year's Thanksgiving baking. Yes, I was certain I wasn't forgetting anything else. Yes, I had double-checked. Based on the cashier's concerned face and determined questioning, a lot of people had boomeranged in and out of the store in a horrible panic.

Back at the house, I had already dumped the pineapple into the mustard mixture before realizing I had purchased canned oranges. Before going out for peaches, I put the mustard masterpiece-in-progress in the refrigerator. I know that both sugar and mustard are famously antimicrobial, but a little bit of food refrigeration never hurt anyone. When I returned, the pineapple chunks had taken on an unnerving resemblance to cut-up chicken soaking in a particularly pungent marinade.

If we pretend I didn't need to go to the grocery store twice, this recipe is really quick to make. Only a few minutes after melting the butter, we were finished mixing it together.

I think the banana is the only healthy thing in the recipe.

Now, Mrs. Burrier says to use a 1-quart casserole pan. Since I cut the recipe in half, I got out the smallest baking dish in the cabinets. Aside from today's recipe, I only use it when slipping a single-serving dinner into the oven next to something larger. 

Purely out of curiosity, I flipped the dish over to see if they stamped its size underneath. They did, and this is a one-quart casserole just like Mrs. Burrier wanted. I only say this because I cut the recipe in half. Had I used Mrs. Burrier's original amounts, we would be putting twice this much mustard fruit into a casserole of exactly this size. I think that would boil over, don't you?

And so, we only needed to spoon our reserved topping over the rest of the fruit and bake. Until tonight, drizzling caramel has always made things look even better than before. But today, it made the fruit look like it followed me under the car the last time I changed the oil.

40 minutes later, our hot mustard fruit was ready to serve. If you ignored your nose, it actually looked pretty good. I would have put some sort of crumble topping on it, but Mrs. Burrier didn't think it was necessary. Maybe she didn't want to distract anyone from the delicious flavor of mustard.

For those who can't get enough mustard in their fruit, there were a lot of pan juices ready to spoon over your portion. I think a bowl would be better than a plate for serving this. But I didn't realize that until it was too late.

This was a lot better than I expected. I think the fruit definitely benefited from the protracted baking time. It gave the vinegar in the mustard plenty of time to boil away. It's like dipping fruit in honey-mustard sauce, only a lot richer. With great surprise, I'm going to say this is actually pretty good. The mustard adds a bit of complexity that makes this just a bit better than an assemblage of canned fruit would normally be. Heck, if you have the ingredients for this, why not slap it together really quick and jam it next to the Thanksgiving turkey? 

In closing, it's definitely weird, but it's not bad.

Caramel Carrots: or, Serve as a vegetable or a dessert

Autumn is here, and the carrots have struck again!

Caramel Carrots 8 medium-sized carrots, scrubbed 1½ cups sugar ½ cup butter ½ tsp salt 1 tsp nutmeg 1 tsp cinnamon ¾ cups water (saved from the cooking water if you boil the carrots) Scrub off the outer layer of the carrots. Slice them. Cook the carrots until tender, either in the microwave (place them in a loosely covered bowl with two or three spoonfuls of water) or by boiling them. Drain the carrots if you boiled them. Mix with all remaining ingredients in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce heat to medium and cook until syrup is thick. Mrs. Walter Newberry, Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928

Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928

I was recently asked to make a pumpkin pie. Naturally, I served a carrot pie instead. (No one knew the difference.) Unfortunately, this left me with the remainder of a two-pound bag of carrots. Fortunately, the Fort Worth Woman's Club has an easy way to get rid of them: slice them and boil them in syrup. In theory, they will become little discs of orange candy. 

This cookbook comes from 1928, which puts it barely before the rise of bizarre 1950s salads. Nevertheless, we can see the early whisperings of future recipes that end with notes like "serve as a salad or dessert."

At first, I was going to microwave the carrots instead of boiling them as specified, figuring that Mrs. Walter Newberry would have done the same had microwaves been invented at the time. But the recipe directs us to save some of the cooking water for the upcoming syrup-making. I thought that perhaps we need to extract some of the carrot flavor in order to ensure the correct final result. As you can see from the barely-tinted color of the water we so carefully saved, that was pointless.

Having cooked the carrots, we are next directed to dump more sugar onto them than I used to put on my cornflakes when I was too carefree to worry about things like "nutrition" and "empty calories."

At first I wondered if the puny allotment of water we saved would suffice. It barely made a puddle in the bottom of the pot. But as soon as I stirred in the sugar, our syrup began to grow. Water seemed to come out of nowhere. This pot of carrots was nearly dry before I stirred in the sugar. After only thirty seconds (and before I had turned on the burner), it looked like this:

By the time the first simmering bubbles appeared, we had so much syrup that you'd think I never drained the carrots in the first place. It turns out that sugar is so hygroscopic (a word we learned while making a previous cake) that it sucks the juice right out of carrots.

Our simmering caramel carrots smelled like dessert and looked like the beginning of a vegetable soup.

I served the caramel carrots with a very heavy meat and sauerkraut stew, and they were an oddly perfect side dish. Maybe those people who serve desserts as a "salad" are on to something.

I'm not surprised that the caramel carrots tasted good. We've already learned that you can use carrots instead of pumpkin for all your pie needs, and this recipe is basically one blender and a couple of eggs away from becoming pie filling. But I didn't expect it to go so well with the rest of supper.

I must also note that the caramel carrots left us with a lot of leftover caramel syrup. I won't need to worry about what to put on toast for quite some time.

In closing, I am going to file the caramel carrots under "a lot better than I expected." Who would have thought that half-candied carrots would be good? I would say I'll make them again since they're fast, easy, and taste good. But I have reservations about putting so much sugar into the vegetables. However, the holiday season is mercilessly approaching, along with it a massive disregard for things like "nutrition" and "draining away the excess fat." With that in mind, caramel carrots would be perfect next to everything else that is good and buttery.

Brownies from Yvette's: or, Of course I took away chocolate from a website with aliens

Let's talk about the early days of the internet. Or at least, the first days it was open to people who couldn't write computer code. Every house's mailbox was full of those AOL promotional CDs. (Seriously, AOL CDs were so inescapable that they spawned their own genre of craft projects.) The phrase "social media," if it existed, was still tightly locked up in conference rooms. No one had heard of "search engine optimization," and only coders used the word "algorithm."

Double Fudge Cream Cheese Brownies        Brownies: 1 cup butter or margarine 4 (1-ounce) squares unsweetened chocolate* 2 cups sugar 4 eggs 1 tsp salt 1 tsp baking powder 2 tsp vanilla 1½ cups flour 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips        Filling: ¼ cup sugar 2 tbsp butter or margarine, softened 3 oz cream cheese, softened 1 tbsp all~purpose flour 1 egg 1 tsp vanilla         To make the brownies: Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9"x13" pan. To make the brownies, place the butter and unsweetened chocolate in a large saucepan over medium heat. Cook, stirring constantly, until melted. Remove from heat and mix in the sugar. Beat in the eggs one at a time. Then add vanilla, salt, and baking powder and beat very well. Mix in the flour, then stir in the chocolate chips. Set aside.         To make the filling: In a small bowl, beat the sugar, butter, cream cheese, and flour until light. Then beat in the egg and vanilla.         To assemble: Spread half of the batter into a pan. Spread the cream cheese mixture on top of it. The filling won't completely cover the brownie batter. Then spoon the remaining batter all over all, and spread it to cover. Bake for 30-35 minutes, or until brownies begin to pull away from the sides of the pan. *If desired, you can substitute ¾ cups cocoa powder. Increase the butter to 1¼ cups. After melting the butter, stir it together with the sugar and cocoa. Then proceed with the rest of the recipe as written. Yvette's Bridal Formal

No one in those days worried about their "engagement stastics" or their "presence." Website layouts hadn't yet been standardized. When discussing webpages of the early modern era, it is contractually mandatory to deploy the phrase "it was like the wild west." Let it not be said that I neglected my cliched duty. 

This brings us to one of the ancient legends of terrible web design: Yvette's Bridal Formal. This bridal shop's website stretched the limits of 1990s web design as far as they could go. If you haven't heard of Yvette's Bridal Formal, this screenshot should suffice:

Yvette's website has long outlived the actual store, which permanently closed when a hurricane destroyed the building. But long after the splintered remains of the Florida strip mall that housed Yvette's were hauled to the city dump, enthusiasts and gawkers have kept the website preserved and alive.

Yvette's website is like electronic outsider art. At first, your eyes are overloaded by the jangly, crowded design. (For those who stayed awake in art history class, the phrase "horror vacui" comes to mind.) But after one goes through page after mesmerizing page, a certain internal logic becomes apparent. Yvette's website makes sense on its own terms. After a while, you almost appreciate the aesthetic consistency.

Apparently Yvette's website was the work of the owner's friend or relative (depending on who you ask). As the website got shared among people who had no interest in weddings or prom dresses, it became a bit of a liability for the people trying to actually run a business. Apparently whenever someone called the store to ask if they were really the people behind that wacky website, the clerk would hang up the phone with a cold "Thank you for calling Yvette's Bridal Formal."

Anyway, Yvette's has recipes on its webpage if you look past the alien art, personal manifestos, and conspiracy theories. Most of the recipes look ordinary, especially compared to the rest of the site. Perhaps that is why these brownies wedged themselves into my mind.

Further research indicates that this recipe comes directly from the Land O Lakes website, but that is neither here nor there.

We have previously encountered cheesecake encased in chocolate cake. Even when we got that misguided recipe to work, it wasn't as good as it sounded. But cheesecake and brownies seemed like a better match.

The recipe starts by melting your brownie ingredients in a saucepan. At first I wondered why anyone would do this on a stovetop instead of the microwave. Then I realized that by doing the brownies in a pot, we are saving the mixing bowl for the cheesecake. After all, most people don't have multiple mixers on the countertop. But because sometimes you get lucky at thrift shops, I do! And they came with microwave-safe bowls!

After finishing the brownie batter, it was time to make the cheesecake. Like most cheesecakes, it was a simple matter of siccing an electric mixer on the ingredients. We were soon ready to get this into a pan and bake it. The recipe notes that the top layer of brownie batter "will not entirely cover cream cheese mixture," but I didn't have that problem. Instead, the cheesecake didn't cover the batter in the first place.

Our second round of brownie batter was a bit tricky to coax into place, but it tasted too good to care.

The brownies leveled themselves off in the oven, so my ineptitude with a rubber spatula proved harmless. And the brownies had developed that perfect crisp, shiny, crackly top.

Upon cutting the brownies, we found that the cream cheese looked a little unnervingly aerated. It was almost leavened like bread. I worried that I had ruined a batch of brownies with an intrusion of Dormeyer cheesecake.

When we cut the brownies, my camera decided to actively sabotage me. Every picture I tried to take looked like this.

I haven't had such rotten luck since I tried to take pictures of the marzipan-stuffed brownies. But you can take my word that they were really good. Consider the bad pictures as proof of how good the recipe is. The brownies didn't last long enough for me to try again.

Even though there were already hints that I should make these again, I don't like a recipe that exists solely for a gimmick-- even if said gimmick is cheesecake. I wanted to know if the brownies were any good without the help. We all know that cream cheese icing can fix almost any failure, and these brownies have a baked-in injection of it. So I carefully cut out an edge piece (you will recall that the cream cheese didn't reach the edges), and... the brownies are really good. They're almost as good as the recipe we brought home from Canada. So, we at A Book of Cookrye recommend two things: making this recipe, and exploring the weirdness that is Yvette's Bridal Formal.

Copper Pennies: or, Cool off with carrots!

Who would guess carrots could be so good on a hot day?

Copper Pennies 8 ounces of carrots (4 or 5 medium-sized), thinly sliced crosswise ¼ cup canned tomato soup, undiluted ¼ cup sugar 1 tbsp cooking oil 3 tbsp cider vinegar ¾ tsp dry mustard ¾ tsp Worcestershire sauce One-quarter onion (white or yellow), finely chopped One-quarter bell pepper, finely chopped 1 stick celery, finely chopped Lettuce leaves for serving Place carrots in a small microwave-safe bowl. Add a little salt and a spoonful of water. Cover with a dinner plate (or anything that will keep in the steam without forming an airtight seal) and microwave until fork-tender, about 4 minutes. In a medium or large microwave-safe bowl, whisk together all remaining ingredients except the onion, bell pepper, celery, and lettuce. Microwave until it comes to a rolling boil, about 1 or 2 minutes. Remove, and stir to mix. Then add the carrots, onion, and celery. Transfer to a container with a well-sealed lid. Refrigerate overnight. Serve cold. You can serve it on lettuce leaves if desired. Miss Lennee Lacey; The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

 I saw this one in The Cotton Country Collection a long time ago, and always was a bit skeptical. It looked like nothing but sliced carrots with some inadequate attempts to improve them. The recipe may look underwhelming, but it periodically pops into my head when I'm trying to use up the last of a bag of carrots. 

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

Unfortunately, I could not get the recipe simply by opening the book I first saw it in. As mentioned in earlier posts, my copy of The Cotton Country Collection fell apart and therefore went to the municipal hereafter, taking the copper pennies with it. However, when I was windowshopping at an antique store with friends, I found a copy for sale. 

You may think I promptly bought it, but you would be wrong. I took it off the shelf, "casually" sauntered to another part of the store where the clerk couldn't see me, and whipped out my phone. The hardest part was discreetly reshelving the book right in front of the clerk and pretending I happened to change my mind.

As I was reading the directions, I realized that we can modernize the recipe with the microwave. Cooking this on the stove is as outdated as the recipe name. (These days, it should be called "copper-plated zinc pennies.") There's no reason to boil the carrots when the microwave will do the job faster.

If you're quartering the recipe like I did, you finish cutting everything pretty quick. After slicing the carrots, we only had to chop these.

Having finished everything that involves a cutting board, we could get to the dressing. The instructions tell us to simply put everything in a pot and boil it. Like the carrots themselves, this seemed easier in the microwave than on a stove. As we got everything into the bowl, I realized I had underestimated how much sugar this recipe uses.

Things looked more normal after getting all the spices in there.

As I removed the steaming-hot tomato dressing from the microwave, it smelled sharply and pungently of the 1970s in a way I didn't expect and can't explain.

And so, after a bit of microwaving and a smaller-than-expected amount of chopping, our copper pennies were ready to stir together and put away. I liked the pretty and bright colors. Also, the vinegary tomato sauce tasted better than I thought it would.

The next day, the colors on the fresh produce had dulled a bit. But the bell peppers and onions were just as crunchy as the day before. (I didn't bother serving this on lettuce because I didn't want to purchase a head of it and let the rest rot in the fridge.)

The copper pennies are downright refreshing after being outside in this heat- like the vegetable equivalent of an iced tea. I expected to say that this recipe is better if you reheat it the next day, but it's surprisingly good served cold. I didn't think I would like it cold, but somehow it works.

Of course, the cooked carrots don't really taste like much of anything, though marinating them overnight in a tomato-vinegar sauce definitely helped. The onions and the bell peppers added all the flavor that the carrots lacked. I think copper pennies would be a really good choice any time people get together in hot weather. Heavy rich foods just aren't as appealing when it's hot outside. (At many summer picnics, the fruit tray gets completely demolished while the decadent cakes sit nearly-untouched all day.)

Picnics and other encounters with people aside, I think this recipe makes a great side dish while it's so hot outside. As a bonus, very little effort goes into actually making this. And if you use the microwave instead of the stove, you won't even heat up the kitchen.

In conclusion, this recipe is a lot better than I expected, and worth making again.

Cranberry Gelatin: or, Surprisingly good places to put celery

Cranberries are in season, which means we at A Book of Cookrye can bring out a recipe that I've sometimes stared at for years.

Cranberry Gelatin 2 cups cranberries 1½ cup water, divided into ½ and 1 cup 1 c sugar 1 tbsp (or one envelope) powdered gelatin* 1/2 c finely diced celery 1/2 c chopped nuts, if desired 1/2 tsp salt Sprinkle gelatin into ½ cup of water, set aside.† Wash berries and coarsely grind them. If you don't have a meat grinder, put the cranberries in a food processor and run it until they are lightly pulverized. Process only about half a cup of cranberries at a time so that they all get evenly chopped.‡ Put the berries and 1 cup of water in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low, put a lid on, and simmer for 10 minutes. Add the salt and sugar, then raise the heat to high until it boils again. Reduce the heat back to low, put the lid back on, and cook 3 minutes more. Add the gelatin and stir until dissolved. Then remove from heat. Refrigerate until partially set. It should be thick enough that the berries don't sink or float after you stir it, but instead stay in place. Then add celery and nuts. (If not adding celery or nuts, give it a quick stir when it's half-set to redistribute the berries.) Pour into molds. Refrigerate until firm. Then unmold and serve. Or, you can skip the unmolding business and pour the mixture into a cute serving bowl. A clear glass (or plastic) bowl will show the cranberries' lovely color better than a ceramic one. *One standard-size (¼-ounce) envelope of powdered gelatin contains a little less than the full tablespoon the recipe calls for. But if you're going to serve this out of a bowl, one envelope of gelatin is fine. You only need a full tablespoon of gelatin if you want this to be firm enough to stand up on its own. †If desired, squeeze the juice from one or two oranges, and add enough water to make ½ cup. Then let the gelatin sit in that. By adding the orange juice after you remove the pot from heat, you avoid boiling away its flavor. ‡You can leave the berries whole if you want. The recipe will come out a little different, but it's good either way. Source: Handwritten note, The Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928

Like so many of the recipes I've been meaning to get around to, I simply never had an excuse to make it. Well, the grocery store was desperately trying to unload the last of the cranberries that remained from the holidays. That was as good an excuse as any to purchase them and make a lovely.... salad? Cranberry sauce? I'm not sure what this is, and our handwritten recipe giver didn't record a title above the directions.

I've never bought fresh cranberries before. They are unexpectedly white in the middle. When you cut one open, it kind of looks like half of a tiny apple. Also, I've heard people claim that fresh cranberries are unbearably bitter without sugar, but I thought they were just fine. Fresh cranberries might stomp out the flavors of everything else in your fruit salad, though. 

Anyway, this recipe begins with our meat grinder! We haven't used it in far too long, and it was nice to get it out and pulverize some produce. Since I'm grinding fruit instead of beef, I don't have to worry about cleaning raw-meat germs off the grinder afterward. 

Setting aside the cranberries, we had to attend to the gelatin. Our recipe calls for one tablespoon of the stuff. I thought that one tablespoon of it would be the same as one envelope, but I poured our happy hoof powder into a measuring spoon just to be sure. It turns out that one standard-size packet of gelatin is almost one tablespoon, but not quite. Because I didn't want to mess up a recipe with a measurement error, I opened a second packet of gelatin to make up for the deficiency. 

Pictured: one standard-sized envelope of gelatin. It is less than one tablespoon.

Whoever wrote this recipe down used the spelling "jelatine." They also spelled it "jelatine" every other time a recipe uses it. I wondered if "Jelatine" was a long-discontinued brand of gelatin. If it was, it's thoroughly forgotten. 

However, a quick search through newspaper archives (thank you to the local library for the free Newspapers.com access) found various recipe pages spelling it "jelatine" until at least 1986. This is the most recent "jelatine" I found, though I only looked for a few minutes. You should know that this diet dessert was printed between recipes for chocolate macadamia muffins and a "chocolate hazelnut truffle log."

"Southern Living Cooking School," Wichita Falls (Texas) Times, September 14 1986, page 10G

Never let it be said that I don't bloom my gelatin. Our writer didn't tell us to, but people made a lot more gelatin in those days. I think she didn't tell us to soften the gelatin for the same reason no recipe ever tells you "crack open the eggs, save the inner contents, and discard the shells."

While our gelatin sat and softened in water, we could get our main attraction onto the stove.

This is what we came here for.

After stirring the pot for a minute or so, the cranberries dyed our spoon a rather fetching shade of pink.

As the timer ticked down the berries' ten minutes of simmering, we wiped up the various errant juice splats and chopped the celery. A lovely cranberry smell came from under the pot lid before the cooking time was halfway elapsed.

This may sound daft, but I was not prepared for my cranberry sauce to smell like cranberries. For me, cranberries have always existed in those plastic made-from-concentrate juice bottles or cans of gelatinized sauce. I have never smelled cranberry odor from anything that looked like it was derived from nature.

After ten minutes, we opened the lid to add a lot of sugar. Our simmering cranberries had turned a stunning shade of red. I didn't know you could produce such a vivid color without artificial food coloring. It looked like a pot of Kool-Aid with fruit pieces floating in it.

As directed, we let the cranberries cook another three minutes with the sugar, and then it was time to let the gelatin slither into the pot.

While we were waiting for our creation to semi-congeal in the refrigerator, I realized that I didn't know what I was making. While this would probably be a "salad" by gelatin-era standards, cranberry sauce is basically a gelatin mold. As far as I know, it is the only sauce in the world that can be served free-standing. So, were we making sauce or salad? I sent the recipe to a friend in Wisconsin with an uncalled-for question. 

There you have it. We're making cranberry salad. Though perhaps the cranberry sauce/salad divide is about as muddy as the boundary between cupcakes and muffins. 

Anyway, after a bit of leisurely reading with a nice cup of tea, our salad had half-congealed and was ready to receive the completing ingredients. In full disclosure, I wasn't sure about adding nuts to this so I divided our cranberry mixture in half. One portion got the full nuts and celery, the other got celery only.

It was then time to put our cranberry salad into the various small bowls that today must pass for molds. I have to admit, our original writer's handwriting gets a bit hard to read as we reach the bottom of the page. I thought she had written "drive into moulds," which I figured must be a charmingly outdated phrase from the days when we spelled it jelatine. The phrase "drive into moulds" seems appropriate when forcing ingredients to assume all manner of freestanding shapes that they never wanted to be. I was even planning to reintroduce the phrase "drive your gelatin into molds" in future recipes. But someone pointed out that the last line simply says "pour into moulds" in particularly scrawly handwriting.

And here it is, all firmed up and ready to serve!

Unfortunately, we had some structural failures when we unmolded our jelatine. Half of it stuck to the bowl, and half of it fell out. Despite our almost-successful reassembly job, our salad was not likely to get a commendation in anyone's home economics class.

But before we taste it, we at A Book of Cookrye have a special and favorite way to eat cranberry sauce! (Or cranberry salad.)

You may think macaroni and cheese and cranberry sauce is a weird combination. But really, it's a lateral move from those cheese-cracker-and-expensive-jelly trays you see at unpleasantly boring business events. (One day I'll find out where they get those extra-bland crackers topped with flavor-free herb flecks.)

Setting aside my inept unmolding, this recipe is delicious. I would have never thought to add celery to cranberry sauce (or cranberry salad), but the two go together really well. I probably should have cut the celery smaller, but that's easy enough to do next time. However, I did not like the nuts in this. Unlike the celery, they were hard without being crunchy. And they barely added any flavor. Really, they just seemed like they landed in the gelatin by accident. And after a few days in the refrigerator, the nuts became soggy like vegetables that have boiled for too long. 

Since we had a lot of cranberry salad, we discovered it was really good on rye toast.

And of course, cranberry toast led to sandwiches like this.

If you think I am batty for dumping celery into cranberry sauce (or cranberry salad, depending on your perspective) and then putting it into a peanut butter sandwich, well, you may be right. In full disclosure, I like to take home those long pickles that come on the side of deli plates and do this:

 

 

Shudder if you want, but peanut butter and pickle sandwiches show up in several decades' worth of cookbooks. There is precedent.

Getting back to cranberries, I liked this salad (or sauce) enough to make it again. However, I couldn't help but to wonder if we really needed to chop the cranberries. And so, I left the berries intact to see what would happen. At first, I thought the recipe's given amount of water wasn't enough to cook the cranberries without chopping them- even though the pot looked charmingly like a cranberry bog in a TV commercial. But our cranberries cooked just fine, and we did not need to raise the waterline.

Speaking of cranberries floating in water, those cranberry commercials featuring people wading through picturesque berry-covered bogs don't show you the swarms of spiders. You know how farmers keep a few semi-feral cats around as pest control? Well, cranberry farmers do the same thing... with spiders. So when people put on their thigh-high galoshes and go into cranberry bogs that are not being filmed for those quaint-looking advertisements, they are covered with literally hundreds of spiders, all of them crawling to the nearest object (or human) to get out of the water.

Getting back to our spider-free stovetop, I used a single envelope of gelatin, which is a bit less than the tablespoon that the original directions demand. I was reasonably sure our salad would still set, but I wanted to confirm that before saying that it's possible. I also decided to forget about unmolding and just serve it from the container in which it congealed. As I poured it out of the pot, I couldn't get over what a beautiful color it was.

I realize that for some people, adding celery to cranberries is like that horrifying moment when you see someone dump a can of green beans into the spaghetti sauce. But I liked the combination a lot. The celery was a perfect crunchy flavor contrast to the sweet and tart cranberries. And it made the salad (or sauce) so substantial that you could put some of it in a small bowl and eat it on its own.

The second batch of cranberry sauce (or salad), with its slightly reduced allotment of gelatin, wasn't quite as firm as the first. I liked it better that way- it seemed agreeably soft instead of bulletproof. So if you want to skip unmolding and let your cranberry sauce firm up in the bowl you will serve it in, I think one envelope of gelatin is better than one tablespoon of it. But for those who want their cranberries to stand on their own, you'll a bit of extra jiggly reinforcement.

For those who don't like celery in their cranberries quite as much as I do, we're going to close today's recipe with the last moment before I greened up the sauce.