Roast Pumpkin Soup: or, Carrots can't be everything

Today, we are making more Delia recipes!

Roasted Pumpkin Soup with Melted Cheese 1 3-3½ pound whole pumpkin 1 tablespoon peanut oil 1 large onion, finely chopped 3 cups vegetable or chicken stock 2 cups minus 2 tablespoons whole milk 2 tbsp butter Nutmeg to taste 4 oz Swiss cheese (Gruyere or Fontina), cut into ¼-inch cubes (or any other cheese that melts well) 6 tbsp cream or creme fraiche Fresh parsley (dried will do in a pinch) Croutons Salt and pepper to taste Before beginning, take the cheese out of the refrigerator so it'll be at room temperature by the time you serve it. Heat oven to 475° (gas mark 9, 240°C). Cut the pumpkin in half from top to bottom (ie, from the stem to the blossom end). Quarter each section lengthwise (so you have eight pumpkin slices). Scoop out the seeds and string. Brush with oil, shake on salt and pepper to taste, place on a heavy baking sheet (thin ones will warp), and bake until fork-tender, 25-30 minutes. While the pumpkin bakes, melt the butter in a large pot over high heat. Cook the onion until it just begins to turn color. Reduce heat to low and cook, stirring occasionally, for around 20 minutes. When the pumpkin is done, remove from the oven and let cool. Then scoop the "meat" off the rind and add it to the pot. Add the milk and stock, then salt pepper and nutmeg to taste. Simmer for 15-20 minutes. Then blenderize the soup. (Unless you have a large blender, you'll want to do this in batches.) Leave the center cap of your blender lid open (or whatever sort of opening the blender has at the top to allow you to pour in things while it's running). For reasons I don't understand, when you turn a blender full of very hot liquid, it suddenly pressurizes enough to pop off the lid and splatter everywhere. Leaving the lid a little open prevents that, just like loosening the lid on a container of leftovers before putting it in the microwave. Pour the soup through a strainer to catch any stringy bits that the blender missed. At serving time, heat the soup to a very low barely-simmer. Stir in the cheese cubes until they's warmed through and barely starting to melt. You don't want to melt the cheese. This soup is so much better with the soft cheese floating through it. Ladle the soup into bowls (preferably warmed). Spoon a little cream into each one. Sprinkle with croutons and parsley. Delia Smith's Winter Collection, 1995

I've said this before, but I really love watching Delia Smith videos. She somehow manages to give very precise directions, but somehow comes off as calming instead of nitpicky. It is a rare skill, which I think is a big part of why her career has lasted so long. 

A lot of her ingredient lists involve things that are special-order items on this side of the Atlantic (even when there isn't an ill-advised trade war on), but this one looked easy to shop for. However, I didn't want to use a pumpkin. For one thing, you can't get a fresh pumpkin in midwinter without nicking someone's leftover porch decorations. Also, I didn't want to dull my knife by hacking through a raw squash. So instead, we're using... these!

To my surprise, our carrots actually took a little longer than a pumpkin would have. But they smelled unexpectedly good toward the end of their roasting time. To emphasize: Delia Smith is so good that she can make carrots enticing, and she didn't even use carrots in this recipe.

Moving away from carrots and onto happier ingredients, I doubled the onion in the recipe. It doesn't look like a lot because we halved the soup. But you can take my word that we are being wonderfully generous with the onions.

Here we get to the first reason to use an actual pumpkin instead of carrots. Had we used pumpkin, the rind would have been charred but the edible part would have been fine. Since we didn't follow the recipe, we had to cut the blackened underside off of each carrot before putting it in the pot. (The second reason to use pumpkin is that carrot soup just isn't as nice.)  

Now that the pot was fully loaded, we could get to the toppings. I had cut up some French bread to make our own croutons, and slid them in the oven under the carrots. You shouldn't make croutons at nearly 500 degrees, but I thought it preposterous to get out the toaster when the oven was already fiendishly hot. 

I'd love to say they came out perfect, and they were indeed just the right shade of golden on top. But when we flipped one over, they were a little well done. Fortunately, they weren't completely burnt. If you like dark toast, they'd be fine.

At this point, we only needed to simmer and wait. Unfortunately, I forgot to make extra croutons to snack on while the soup cooked. I've said this before, but I really like croutons. When I let myself buy them, I eat them right out of the box the way other people go through potato chips.

The carrots plumped up a bit, but they didn't look great.

The blender made things look worse. Had this soup got any more unsightly, I could have passed it off as a diet recipe.

I forgot that carrots tend to cook to a brighter color than pumpkins. Our "pumpkin" soup looked like a safety warning sign. Maybe that's another reason to follow the recipe and use pumpkin: no one wants their soup to look like melted crayons.

This reminds me: a lot of the bigger Crayola boxes have a color called "macaroni and cheese."

All right, so our soup is kind of ugly. But let's dress it up with everything the recipe calls for:

That looks so much nicer, doesn't it? I know sprinkling on dried parsley lacks the panache of garnishing with fresh, but it still adds a nice flavor.

This soup was sweeter than I thought it'd be. But then again, it had roasted carrots and half-caramelized onions, so should I be surprised? The nutmeg added a bit of a sausage-y overtone which I thought was really nice. And of course, the half-melted cheese interspersed throughout was amazing. I would have liked provolone better, but that's just because I really, really like provolone.

For the record, carrots make a perfect counterfeit pumpkin pie, but they do not make a similarly magical pumpkin soup. This was good enough to save the leftovers, but I won't use carrots for this again. If I can get my hands on an actual cooking pumpkin (and perhaps a Sawzall with food-grade blades) I will revisit this recipe.

Cranberry Cabbage: or, Cranberries that aren't a dessert

We must bid a reluctant farewell to cranberry season. 

Spiced Cranberry Cabbage 1 pound (450g) red cabbage, quartered lengthwise 4 oz (110g) cranberries 2 teaspoons peanut oil 1 medium onion, chopped 1 (or 2) large garlic clove, finely chopped ¼ tsp cloves ¼ tsp cinnamon ½ tsp nutmeg Salt and pepper to taste 1 tbsp brown sugar 7½ tsp red wine vinegar Shred the cabbage finely (about ¼ inch or so). Discard the stalks and tougher portions of the leaves. Place oil in a large frying pan over medium heat. When it's hot, cook the onion for 2 to 3 minutes. Add the garlic and cook another 2 to 3 minutes. Then turn the heat up to high. Add the cabbage and cook, stirring constantly, for about 3 or 4 minutes. Then add the seasonings and cranberries. Reduce heat back to medium and cook until tender, about 5 to 10 minutes. Add the sugar and vinegar, stir well, taste to see if it has enough sugar, and serve. Note: Any leftovers are really good mixed with mashed potatoes. Delia Smith's Winter Collection, 1996

Today's recipe comes from Delia Smith's Winter Collection. Apparently she somewhat infamously started a cranberry fad after using them so heavily in the book. So I was really excited to see what creative ideas she had. This one looked a lot like a variation on the sweet-sour cabbage we have made, except with cranberries instead of apples.

I was excited to make this because every other cranberry recipe we've made has been some variant of cranberry sauce: boil cranberries and add a lot of sugar. Even the apple-cranberry pie felt like putting cranberry sauce into a pie crust instead of a serving bowl. The cranberry cream is only non-sauce recipe we have made until today.

Now that all our ingredients were lined up, it was time to try cabbage like I've never made it before. 

New recipes can sometimes be daunting. But if you are ever in doubt, start with onions!

Our refrigerator has been a bit overzealous since getting repaired. It half-froze the onions. So, I turned the heat a little higher than Delia did. Our onions were perfect and golden right on time.

I know I've said this before, but cabbage expands a lot when you shred it. This was going to be one of those recipes that leaves a ring of half-dried flyaways around the pan.

So far, this recipe had been a simple matter of sauteeing cabbage. But now, we have gotten to the special ingredient: Fresh (ish) cranberries!

After just a few seconds, the first berries popped. I was so excited. You would never know they'd been in the refrigerator for at least three weeks.

As I found out on the first taste, cranberries get very bitter when you cook them. I nearly threw out the whole thing, grocery money be damned. But just in case, I added the vinegar and brown sugar because Delia told me to. To my surprise, they fixed the dish and unlocked the flavors that I didn't know were in there. Though I should note that I had to add a few more spoonfuls of sugar to balance out the cranberries' bitterness.

I liked this a lot more without the spices (yes, I made it twice). It was also one of the few times I get almost as excited about the leftovers. We had special plans that involved a mashed potato.

 This was exactly as good as I hoped it would be.

Of course, we didn't close out cranberry season with healthy vegetables. Instead, we made cranberry blondies. (The recipe is my Mom's. By which I mean it came out of her Betty Crocker cookbook.) 

They didn't come out of the pan without a lot of well-chosen language, but they were delicious. 

 

Cocoanut Tea Rolls

Today, we are venturing to Australia!

Coconut Tea Rolls 1 egg ¼ cup milk 8 oz (2 cups) self-raising flour (to substitute plain flour, see below) 2 oz (¼ cup) butter 8 oz (1 cup) sugar 4 oz (1 packed cup) shredded coconut Additional milk and coconut flakes for rolling Heat oven to 400°. Have greased or lined baking sheets ready. Beat the egg and milk together, set aside. Sift the flour into a large bowl. Or, stir the flour with a whisk to break up any clumps and fluff it up. Gently rub in the butter with your fingertips until the two are thoroughly combined. Mix in the sugar and coconut. Then mix in the egg and milk. It may seem dry and crumbly at first, but keep mixing and it should all come together into a stiff dough. (If it doesn't, you can add milk one small spoonful at a time.) Knead for about thirty seconds. Dough will be sticky. Roll into small balls. Brush each one with milk, then roll in coconut. Place on the baking sheet, giving them plenty of room to spread. Bake until golden at the edges, about 10-15 minutes. To substitute plain all-purpose flour: Using a measuring cup: Put 1 tablespoon of baking powder and 1 teaspoon salt in a measuring cup, then spoon in flour until it comes up to two cups. Using a scale: Tare it out, add 1 tablespoon baking powder and 1 teaspoon salt, then add flour until it all adds up to 8 ounces. The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; May 30, 1932; page 1

When we made the economical raisin pie, we said that we tried to figure out how old the recipe was and instead found a different economical raisin pie in an Australian newspaper. It was printed above something called "bloater paste," which is apparently mashed smoked herrings. It might be easy to snark on herring paste, but that's only because they didn't call it "pâté." After all, smoked salmon pâté semi-reliably shows up in high-tax-bracket restaurants that would never serve salmon paste.

The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; May 30, 1932

I'm not in a rush to make the raisin pie from the same news page (though I haven't ruled it out either), but I really wanted to try the "Cocoanut Tea Rolls." (As a side note: I love that the recipe column was literally top-center of the front page.)

Since I now own a kitchen scale, I didn't have to convert weights to cups. Nevertheless, I couldn't get past the first line of the ingredient list without having to look things up. I needed to know how much baking powder to use because I wasn't about to buy self-raising flour. (Or self-rising, depending on where you live.) Skipping past the AI slop (is it worth it?) and SEO garbage in my search results, I found what I sought on Betty Crocker's website.

I have pause and give credit to the General Mills people. We all know that Betty Crocker is not a charity operation, but they give out a lot of paywall-free cooking advice. They even have an "Ask Betty" section on their website where you can send in any question and get a free professional answer. It almost makes up for the company getting children hooked on part-of-this-complete-breakfast sugar kibble before they're smart enough to know better.

We don't really do self-raising flour in the US. Most stores stock it, but it doesn't pop in recipes very often. This may be the one time we Americans aren't lazier than everyone else. We may drive anywhere that's farther than a three-minute walk (that's 1.8 hectoseconds for our metric friends), but by God we will get out a little spoon and measure our own baking powder. 

That little mound of white powder is all-American hard work.

Now that we had all our ingredients sorted (both self-raising and otherwise), it appears our "tea rolls" start out like scones. You mix the flour and butter together like you're doing a pie crust, add some other things to make a firm dough, then knead it a bit and bake. 

 

If you look at our dough balls, you can see that this was a sticky process. I wondered if I had done something wrong. I've made a lot of rolls, and the dough isn't supposed turn your hands into a mess.

Well, here they are, rolled in coconut and ready to bake! I immediately thought of Alec Baldwin's Schweddy Balls.

The recipe says to bake "until golden," but I started to worry before the dough got slightly warm. Some of the coconut had already browned and we had a long baking time left. Would I end up scraping cinders off my tea rolls?

I couldn't decide if I made these right. On one hand, they're called "tea rolls" but ours were more like cookies. However, it is my understanding that only Americans use the word cookie. I haven't jaunted to Australia or the UK to find out, but I did search for the word "cookies" across every issue of the the newspaper that today's recipe comes from, and only got a lot of occurrences of the word "cockies." (If anyone from Australia happens to drop by, please tell me what the heck that means!) 

So if the word "biscuit" changes meaning across every international border and "cookies" cease to exist outside of The Land Of The Free, perhaps we made perfectly correct Australian tea rolls. Sure, they are a tiny bit overbaked, but they don't seem to mind too much. Some recipes are ruined if they bake just twenty seconds too long, but cocoanut tea rolls will forgive you for not hearing the timer.

As soon as I tried one of these, I stopped worrying about whether they came out as Australia intended. No recipe can go wrong and be this good. They're dense and chewy with a wonderfully crisp outside. Everyone who tried these liked them. One person came back to the kitchen, grabbed quite the handful, and said "Work can wait."

We're going to sign off with what is apparently an iconic piece of Australian culture:

 

Second-Stab Saturday: Candied Sweet Potatoes without all the fuss

My great-grandmother didn't have to make these the long way.

Candied Sweet Potatoes 3 pounds sweet potatoes (just round to the nearest potato) ¼ cup water ½ cup sugar (brown, white, or maple) 3 tbsp butter ¼ tsp salt (only add this if butter is unsalted) Cinnamon to taste Boil or microwave the potatoes until done. Then pick off the skins and cut them into pieces a little larger than bite-size. Bring the sugar and water to a boil in a large frying pan. Reduce heat to medium and boil until thick and syrupy. Turn off the heat, add the butter, salt, (and cinnamon, if desired), and stir until all is melted and mixed. Add the potatoes to the pan. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly and scooping the syrup off of the pan and pouring it on top of the potatoes. (A large serving spoon is better than a flat wooden spoon for this. Continue cooking until all of the syrup sticks to the potatoes. They are done when the syrup no longer forms puddles in the pan when you stop stirring. If desired, you can use orange juice instead of all or part of the water when making the syrup.  Source: Handwritten recipe, probably 1920s-1930s Notebook of Hanora Frances "Hannah" Dannehy O'Neil

As I said the last time we made my great-grandmother's candied sweet potatoes, I don't like them but everyone else does. (I think everyone who cooks a lot ends up with at least a few recipes like that). Well, when you don't like something, you rarely want to spend too long make it, even if you're cooking it to be nice. This brings us to the new (to me) shortcut: doing these over the stove.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I first saw a recipe for candied sweet potatoes in Mrs. Wilson's newspaper column. Instead of parboiling the potatoes and baking them, she told her readers to fully cook the potatoes and then put them in syrup over a stove burner. 

Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger; April 23, 1919; p. 12

I probably should have done this in a bigger frying pan, but the potatoes came out all right (even if I had to keep putting escapees back).

I'm not sure that I'm making these right. An image search for "candied sweet potatoes" yields pictures of neatly sliced sweet potatoes with a perfectly even glaze. Mine always come out smushed, no matter how gentle I am with my basting. But I've had no complaints.

I hate to say my great-grandmother wasted a lot of effort on her candied sweet potatoes, but these were ready after about two minutes on the stove. I wouldn't mind the longer baking time if I could forget the potatoes until the timer went off. But her way involves constantly coming back to baste. I thought that perhaps the long baking time allows the syrup to really penetrate the potatoes. But you couldn't tell the difference. 

With the printed-and-pasted recipes in my great-grandmother's book, it's easy for me to imagine that she skipped over the unnecessary fusswork. But she wrote this one out by hand, so I guess she actually kept coming back and bending over the oven with a basting spoon.  

As I said last time, these taste like a sweet potato casserole if you didn't get out a potato masher. Since I don't like sweet potato casserole, I can't say that I love these. But everyone else seems to like them, so this must be a good recipe. You can't argue against a well-scraped plate. 

Hot Macaroni Salad Revisited: Not perfect, but we haven't seen the last of it

When last we tried the hot macaroni salad from my great-grandmother's book, it was really good except for the meat. The original recipe called for a pound of balogna meat, which made me feel icky. We therefore replaced it with summer sausage, which seemed nice in theory but wasn't very good. The rest of the salad was all right, so we decided come back and try it again.

Hot Pasta Salad ½ cup water 1 tbsp flour 1 tsp salt ½ tsp dry mustard 1 egg ¼ cup vinegar 1 pound sliced mushrooms 3 tbsp finely chopped onion ¼ cup oil or bacon drippings 8 oz elbow or shell macaroni, cooked in salted water Whisk together the water, flour, salt, mustard, egg, and vinegar; set aside. In a large frying pan, cook the mushrooms and onion in the bacon drippings. Turn off heat, and stir in the flour mixture. Heat to a slow simmer, stirring constantly, and cook 5 minutes. Add the pasta, mix well, and serve. Adapted from an unidentified magazine or pamphlet clipping, probably 1952-1953 Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

Today, we are replacing the meat with... these!

I reduced the water in the sauce to make up for the juice that came out of the mushrooms. (If I'm being honest about how much I overthink things, I cooked a batch of mushrooms for unrelated purposes, then got out a measuring cup and a strainer.)

Since I didn't have to fuss with a sandwich press full of meat this time, I only needed to dump the noodles into everything else and stir for a few seconds.

This recipe's flavor almost works, but it doesn't. You would have to take out the mustard from the original recipe and put in something else. Aside from the seasonings, this is simply noodles and mushrooms, so the mustard is the only thing that doesn't quite fit.

Before reheating the leftovers, I tried a few of the noodles and they were really good cold. The mustard coating was unexpectedly perfect. (The cold mushrooms were terrible, but we'll set that aside.) So I'm going to say this is like the hot potato salad: better if you cross the word "hot" off the recipe title. The refrigerator improves it. It's probably really nice with some chopped bell peppers and fresh onions in it.

In general, this recipe tasted outdated in a very midcentury-specific kind of way. It's tempting to simply say that our foods have changed over the decades. And while that is true, I think this has a more specific cause: we don't smoke nearly as much as we used to. 

I don't have official stats on this so I could be wrong, but it seems like we hit peak smoking in the middle of the 20th century before everyone got fed up with smelling like a fermented bowling alley in the 1990s. I think that in our current happy era of restaurants where we can breathe the free air, we forget just how awful and omnipresent the smell used to be. Indoor stadiums used to have a literal tobacco fog during games.

As for how cigarettes explain this recipe: we all know that smoking dulls your taste. But I think that in addition to that, foods taste different when pre-seasoned with airborne tar.* And I feel that this is an underestimated part of why midcentury food tastes so bizarre now that we have cleaner lungs. The flavors are incomplete without an ashtray at the table. This salad's hot mustard noodles and crispy balogna slices probably made more sense under those cough-inducing conditions. But since I'm not about to take up smoking that I may fully appreciate the flavors of yore, I'll just serve this pasta chilled instead. 

 

 

 

*When I said this in a recent post, Lace Maker commented that mayonnaise is apparently very good for cleaning away cigarette tar. Which leads me to a new theory: are all those midcentury mayonnaise-heavy recipes an attempt to de-tar ones taste buds enough to taste the salad? Maybe people didn't think of it that way, but they might have noticed that foods were more flavorful under gobs of mayonnaise.   ↪

Economical Raisin Pie: Exactly what it sounds like

I know we all love economizing and raisins.

Economical Raisin Pie 2 cups (13 oz) raisins 2 cups water ½ cup brown sugar 2 tablespoons cornstarch 1 teaspoon cinnamon ⅛ teaspoon salt   1 tablespoon butter 1 unbaked 9-inch pie shell, plus pastry for a top crust Bring raisins and 1¾ of water to a boil. Reduce heat to medium and cook for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Meanwhile, combine the brown sugar, cornstarch, cinnamon, and salt. Then mix the remaining ¼ cup of water into the sugar. Add sugar to raisins, stirring constantly until mixture boils again and thickens. Remove from heat and add the butter, stirring until it melts and mixes in. Allow to cool completely. You can either let the pot sit out for a while, or you can speed this up by setting it in a larger pot full of cold water (iced if you have an ice maker) and stirring until it reaches room temperature. When it has cooled, stir in the vinegar. When ready to bake, heat oven to 425°. If desired, brush the pie shell with cooking oil or thoroughly coat it with cooking spray. (Not necessary, but it helps keep it crisp while baking.) Pour and spread the (cooled!) filling into the pie shell. Brush or finger-paint the edge of the bottom crust with water, then lay the top crust over it. Gently press the two crusts together, then cut vents in the top. Bake for 25 minutes. Source: Sun-Maid raisin package, probably 1930s-1940s Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

I tried to date this by searching for "economical raisin pie." I found a few people who have uploaded images of this same box label, which means that this recipe made it into a few kitchens besides my great-grandmother's instead of simply getting thrown out when the package was empty. 

I also found a different economical raisin pie in an Australian newspaper. I only note this because it was printed directly above something called "bloater paste." Here is the recipe if anyone wants to make it:

The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; May 30, 1932; page 1 

All right, so the name "bloater paste" doesn't exactly sell the dish. But before we mock recipes of yore, let's remember that refrigeration had to become very cheap before you could get fresh fish without catching it yourself.

Fish paste aside, I'm going to guess that our pie from the Depression because they put "Economical" right in the recipe title. Also, the illustration looks similar to a lot of 1930s cookbooks and food ads. As a smaller detail that might help with dates, the recipe says to cook it in "a hot oven" and gives the actual temperature as a parenthetical afterthought. From what I've read, recipes had mostly switched to giving the temperature without any description like "slow/moderate/hot oven" by the 1950s (though as with all things, it was a slow change). So this is probably from no later than the 40s.

Setting aside the recipe's age, you know it is economical because it starts off with raisins and water. If this pie is good, I might try replacing some of the water with rum.

As I got further into the recipe, I thought of those proverbial people who give out "healthy" raisin boxes on Halloween. I've heard a lot of sniping about them, but I've never known anyone who actually got Halloween raisins in real life. But in case anyone out there is thinking of making a valiant crusade of fruit against candy, raisins are mostly sugar anyway. (Although if you're looking for a way to economize on groceries, those trick-or-treat raisins might get you some free eggs if you scrape them off your door fast enough!)

On another economical note, this pie doesn't use much sugar. The raisins make up for it.

After five minutes of bubbling on the stove, our raisins looked singularly unappetizing. I haven't seen dried fruit look this bad since the prune whip.

Things looked a little better after adding the cornstarch and cooling this off. The raisins at least passed for a semidecent compote.

Finishing off the ingredient list, I think the vinegar is an economical substitute for lemon juice. We've seen this elsewhere in cookbooks. People who couldn't afford lemons used to make vinegar pie.

At this point, I decided to diverge from the recipe and make the Eccles cakes from the same Delia Smith video that taught me to make sausage rolls. Those little dried currant tarts she made looked better every time I rewatched. (Also, making individual pies allowed me to economically cut our raisin usage in half.)

These felt like the time I made runzas. (Or more correctly, the time I made something runza-adjacent with whatever happened to be in the fridge at the time.) You pinch the corners together, then squeeze the whole thing shut, put it seam-side down on the pan, and hope your raisins don't leak. Of course, mine looked inept and misaligned after pressing them shut, but you bake these seam-side down anyway.

As an exciting bonus, I set aside a small bit of the dough and worked in some cheese. This is because in the comments for our sausage rolls, Freezy suggested we try making a sour cherry turnover in a cheesy crust. I couldn't find any sour cherry preserves in the store, so I mixed a little splash of lemon juice into some cherry-blueberry fruit spread. 

Delia has us brush these with a beaten egg white and then sprinkle with granulated sugar, but I didn't want that gritty top today. Instead, I decided to make like Fanny Cradock and sift powdered sugar on them instead. Seriously, watch her Christmas mincemeat show and (don't!) take a shot every time she snows the food with "sifted icing sugar."

Our little sorta-Eccles cakes (I think they have to contain currants to be truly Eccles-iastical) puffed up adorably in the oven. More importantly, they didn't fall apart. The cherry-cheese tart got a little oozy, but at least the preserves came out through the vent-slits instead of leaking from elsewhere.

The cherry-cheese turnover was delicious. This is no surprise- we all know fruit and cheese go together like peanut butter and pickles. I might (prices permitting) make this again with dried cherries which would hopefully not be quite so drippy.

Getting back to our featured recipe, our raisins were better than I thought. But, this tasted like raisins and nothing else. It reminded me of the sugar-coated raisins in Raisin Bran. If you used to eat the raisins out of that and put the flakes back in the cereal box, you might like this a lot. 

I think this recipe works better as little turnovers than a big pie. But I can see how a full-size raisin pie would hit different in an era before cheap(ish) out-of-season fruit.