Spekdikkens: or, Dutch meat cookies!

Waffle irons do strange things to me.

Spekdikken(s) 250 g rye flour (2¼ cups) 83 g all-purpose flour (¾ cup) 266 g butter or margarine (1 cup plus 1 tbsp) 166 g light brown sugar(¾ cup) 1 teaspoon salt 1 egg 116 g sliced breakfast bacon (4 ounces), into 1" or 2" pieces 1 hectogram (3½ ounces) dry Drentse sausage in thin slices* 1 tsp ground anise seed, if desired In a large saucepan, boil the sugar and water to dissolve, stirring constantly. Cook until a spoonful drizzled over a cold plate is about as thick as pancake syrup when it cools off. Remove from heat and stir the butter into the syrup until it melts. Allow to cool completely. Add flour, salt, eggs, and anise seeds (if using). Whisk everything into a batter (it will be lumpy). Cover the pot tightly and let it sit overnight in a cool place.† It will thicken overnight. The next day, add water to the dough until it is a little thicker than pancake batter. Stir in only a spoonful water at a time at first to prevent having to chase down hard lumps in the bowl. You can add the water more freely as the dough softens. Heat up a wafer iron. When ready, brush it with melted shortening. (It really does work better than cooking spray.) Drop a spoonful of batter onto the iron. Use a knife to push the batter off the spoon. Add a slice of bacon and two slices of sausage, close the iron and cook for about half a minute. The bacon does not become crispy, but remains limp. *If you, like me, can't get Drentse sausage, pick a dried, cured sausage that is ready to eat without further cooking. †While the batter may have enough sugar and spices in it to keep the egg from going off when left out overnight, I decided to play it safe and refrigerate it. To soften it the next day, I microwaved the batter on the microwave's lowest power setting. I stopped and stirred every 15 seconds until the batter was back to room temperature. Note: This batter also makes very good cookies. Add cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and similar spices when you mix it. Let it sit overnight as directed, but do not thin it out with additional water the next day. Roll the dough into small balls, and pat each one about ¼" thin between your hands. Place on a greased cookie sheet and bake until golden around the edges. They are better the second day- the spices get stronger overnight. Note 2: If you're not into the whole meat-and-cookies business, these make very good spiced wafers if you add ginger, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, etc. They come out very crisp. After baking them, let them rest overnight for the spice flavors to strengthen. Source: Landleven Magazine via Google Translate

Today, we are once again getting recipes through Google Translate. Because I hate having a waffle iron that only exists for one recipe, I went online and asked what other things I could make on it. Today's recipe, which comes from the Netherlands, was my favorite suggestion. 

Unfortunately, the person simply said "You could try spekdikkens" without saying what they were, much less giving a recipe. So I looked them up. The images I saw were quite mystifying to my uneducated American self. I couldn't imagine how wafers with sausage and bacon on them would taste, so I had to make them.

Speaking of Google Translate, here's how to pronounce today's recipe!

I would love to know what occasions spekdikkens are for. Do people only make them on special holidays? Are they a once-a-week treat that people make at home? Do people make spekdikkens any time they get together with friends or relatives? Or, are they something people make to keep on hand? I'd love to know. If anyone from the Netherlands happens to drop by, do share!

Moving back to this side of the Atlantic, a lot of my friends had reservations about spekdikkens. One said "That looks like a heart attack."

I answered "Well, it's from northern Europe. It gets cold up there."

The hardest part of making spekdikkens wasn't getting the waffle iron, which (as previously mentioned) I simply found on Ebay. No, the hardest part of this entire recipe was finding rye flour. When I checked the baking aisle, the shelf space for the rye was empty. I thought I would simply wait for it come back into stock, that never happened. (Or maybe they got a steady series of shipments over the next few months, and people snatched them off the shelves. Is there some baking fad involving rye that I haven't heard of?)

After several weeks with no rye, I went to the foofy, fancy grocery store to see if they had rye flour. After all, the sort of people who buy organic quail eggs are more likely to dabble in artisan baking than the rest of us. Not only did the store have no rye, they didn't even have any vacant shelf space where the rye should have been. And so, like nearly every time I go into upscale supermarkets, I left empty-handed. At this point, I wondered if there's a rye shortage going on. However, the only news articles I found about rye shortages were from a few years ago.

Anyway, since I'm on greeting terms with most of the late-night stockers at the supermarket, one of them got out her phone and checked when the next shipment of rye was due in. They even offered to put a bag of it on hold for me. That didn't quite work out. I ended up calling my mother and asking her if the stores had any rye flour where she is. And so, she bought a bag and saved it until we next met.

This bowl contains precious rarities.

Having finally gotten the rye flour, we finally had all the ingredients we needed. And so, we begin by boiling a sugar syrup. At first I thought we were supposed to just heat the water until the sugar dissolves. And so, I got out a tiny pot (we're quartering the recipe) and put it on the stove. The sugar was dissolved in about a minute.

After I turned off the burner, I wondered if I understood the directions correctly. After all, today's recipe was translated by a computer which has never baked anything in its entire existence. Our instructions were vague, but it seemed that we are supposed to dump the flour into the boiling-hot syrup. While I've seen a few recipes like that (choux paste comes to mind), usually adding flour to a boiling pot results in miserable gelatinous clumps of failure. And so, I decided to find some videos of people making these things. This would prove more difficult than I thought.

If you poke around YouTube, you can find plenty of videos for spekdikken. Many of them show people lovingly placing batter and meat onto hot waffle irons. A lot of spekdikken-making videos are filmed at various events in big rent-a-halls, and show long rows of people sitting at folding tables happily plonking meat and batter onto hot waffle irons. (I'd love to know how they manage to run like 20 waffle irons without popping a circuit breaker.) So I guess spekdikkens are more of a special-occasion food than an everyday one. Also, people generally seem really cheerful when they're making them, as if spekdikkens are a happy event unto themselves.

I did eventually find a video of someone who started at the beginning of the recipe instead of skipping to the fun part that involves a waffle iron and meat. It turns out I was correct in surmising that we need our syrup to cool off before adding the flour. Also, his syrup wasn't some watery fluid like I had on my hands. Instead, his was almost (but not quite) thick enough to pour onto pancakes. And so, I put our syrup back on the stove. As our sugar water heated up, it reminded me that it needs a lot of saucepan space to boil up. I turned off the stove and got out a bigger pot.

Ahhh, that's better.

I think my annoying habit of using undersized pots and baking pans comes from my many years without a dishwasher. I have to remind myself that I no longer need to worry about cleaning each pan one at a time.

After boiling this until it looked right to my uneducated eyes, I set it aside to cool. Naturally, I tasted the syrup as soon as I turned the burner off (using a tiny spoon so our sample cooled off, of course). It was better than any pancake syrup I have ever purchased. Heck, I liked it even more than molasses (which, as I have sometimes mentioned, I pour onto waffles instead of maple syrup.) If I take nothing else from today's recipe, I am definitely making this syrup again. 

The rest of the recipe seemed pretty simple: dump everything into the syrup after it cools off and whisk it together. As our robo-translated instructions claimed, we had a "lumpy batter" which we are directed to leave overnight in a cool place. 

At this point, I sampled the batter and it was unexpectedly and incredibly good. I've never made cookies with rye, but I'd love to make something like this again. However, I was a bit leery about leaving the batter overnight because of the raw egg. Of course, I have eaten a lot of cookie dough and cake batter, but none of that was left at room temperature for several hours. And so, I decided to put the rye batter in the refrigerator. Maybe I was worrying too much, but I didn't want to create an inadvertent microbe nursery.

The next day, our batter had turned into a surprisingly hard clay. I figured the flour would absorb some of the water overnight. It was physically impossible to shove the beaters of an electric mixer into the dough. I ended up putting it into the microwave (at its very lowest power setting) to soften it.

Before we proceeded to have fun with meat, I wanted to see if this dough made good cookies. And so, I scooped some of the dough out and put it into the oven next to dinner. I didn't know if the dough would spread or not, so I flattened one cookie and left the other in a ball. 

Unfortunately, I forgot they were baking and left them in the oven for a bit too long. But if you trimmed away the overcooked edges, they were really good. They were crisp and unexpectedly light. I didn't think they'd rise at all, but they puffed up while they baked. Between the cookies and the pancake syrup, it appears that spekdikken is the kind of recipe that gives you even more recipes as you make it.

If we crack one of the cookies, we can see that it rose quite a bit. Take a look at all the little air bubbles in it.

And so, at long last, it was time for meat cookies! Although I found very few videos of people mixing spekdikkens together, there are a lot of videos that skip to the fun part where you start putting meat on a waffle iron. I'm sure everyone has their own recipe, but the batter looked about the same from one video to the next. We want something that looks like this:

RTV Noord

From a lot of experience, I knew that if I dumped a lot of water in this all at once, I would end up with hard lumps swimming in slurry. The trick with this is to gradually add the water at first, starting with so little water that it can't even form puddles on top. You want the water to disappear and leave a few soggy spots on the dough, which you disperse through the dough as you stir. (This will involve a lot more spoon-force than you're probably used to using on a bowl of dough.)

After doing this a few times, the dough will have softened enough to add the water more generously. Eventually, you end up with a batter that looks like this. Or at least, I think it's supposed to look like this. Like I said, I can't read Dutch and have nothing but a robo-translated recipe and some videos to go on.

With the batter ready, it was time to bring out the meat. 

I'm sure no one will be surprised that I don't have the means to order a "Drentse sausage" from over the Atlantic. However, I found homemade sausage from last year buried at the bottom of the chest freezer. My aunt and uncle gave them to everyone two Christmases ago, and I froze mine for a special occasion. As often happens with chest freezers, I forgot that it was there and it fell between the containers of leftovers and stayed hidden. The lesson here is don't save the nice food for a special occasion. Just eat it.

At any rate, when I undid the vacuum-packing plastic that encased it, the delicious smell of wood smoke filled the kitchen. I was so glad I got this out of the freezer for this recipe. I didn't want to put cheap meat into our homemade waffles (store-brand bacon notwithstanding).

I can't get over the sight of a meat-and-cookie-dough assembly line. I'd love to hear what everyday foods in America would provoke a similar mildly-dumbfounded reaction in this recipe's home country. Again, if anyone in the Netherlands happens to pop in, do share your thoughts!

I must be getting better at using this iron. On my first attempt, the batter came almost to the edge without oozing out.

After things started to smell toasty, opened the lid just a bit so I could have a peep. I saw that we were going to have some structural integrity problems with our spekdikkens. The bacon clung to the lid of the iron and ripped free of the waffle.

After some angry muttering and spatula-jabbing, we got everything involved in today's recipe to let go of the waffle iron. But the batter had shrunk away from the meat on all sides. Even if nothing had gotten stuck, our first-ever spekdikken would have fallen apart. And so it did.

Our next spekdikken also stuck to the iron, but at least the batter didn't pull away from the meat as it cooked. Things were slowly improving. By now, the kitchen smelled like a breakfast buffet.

After we made a few of these, it became obvious that the meat would stick to the iron no matter what we did. But we developed a working technique for getting spekdikken out of the waffle iron. First, we barely opened the iron enough to slide a spatula in there. Then we ran a spatula directly under the iron's lid to dislodge everything that needed dislodging. Having liberated the spekdikken on one side, we could open the iron and extract the meat cookie. But I should disclose that none of these were sturdy enough to stack or to carelessly drop onto a plate. 

Our spekdikkens' fragility could be the result of my inexperience. But I should note all the spekdikkens I saw in other people's pictures also looked like they could fall apart at any minute. So I think I got these right.

As for the taste: if you have ever slid your breakfast sausages across the plate into the puddle of pancake syrup, these are like that... but a lot more so! The rye part stayed soft, the sausage got crisp, and the bacon... well, it certainly was bacon. I honestly thought that the spekdikkens would be too weird for my ignorant American tastes, but I liked them a lot. But after a while, wondered if the vegetarian version was any good. (Also, I was getting tired of dislodging meat residue from the waffle iron.) But before putting any of the remaining batter on the waffle iron without the meat, we paused to add a lot more spices.

Without the meat in there keeping the iron from shutting all the way, the wafers came out wonderfully crisp. The rye flour added such a good flavor that I wondered why you don't see it in a lot more gingerbread recipes. (Then again, maybe rye flour has always been sporadically unavailable, and therefore a shaky foundation on which to build a culinary tradition.)

In conclusion, once one gets over putting meat in the cookies, these are unexpectedly good. And if one doesn't want meat in cookies, they're very good without it. Also, if you stop after the first few steps of the recipe, you've made the best pancake syrup you can get without tapping a maple tree. 

I've thoroughly enjoyed this trans-oceanic recipe journey. While I couldn't possibly get away with serving these to family with a straight face, I am seriously contemplating bringing a plate of these the next time any of my friends has a gathering.

Krumkakes: or, Culinary greetings from Norway!

Today, we are taking our Norwegian wafer iron to its home turf! Or at least, we're culinarily bringing it to its home. I'm not about to jet across the ocean with a waffle iron in my carry-on. Though I would if I had a few buckets of money weighing down on me.

Krumkakes 4 eggs 1 cup sugar 2 cups flour (if desired, replace ½ cup of the flour with whole-wheat) ¾ cups butter, melted Splash of vanilla Pinch of salt (if butter is unsalted) Spices to taste (cardamom,* lemon zest, cinnamon, etc) Lightly beat eggs. Mix in everything else in order given. Cook on a krumkake iron brushed with melted shortening (it really does work better than cooking spray). When done, form into a cone shape by rolling around a wooden spoon handle or (they also make wooden cones specifically for this) as soon as you get them off the iron. When serving, fill with whipped cream or fruit. *I am informed by others that these must have cardamom in them.

For those who know as little as I do about basic Norwegian phonics, I should note that you don't pronounce "krumkake" like "crumb cake." If Google Translate is to be believed, you pronounce "krumkake" like this:

I was showing off my pizzelle iron online (as one does), and soon someone said they had a krumkake iron very much like it. This soon turned into several people showing pictures of the various working antiques living in their kitchen cabinets. (It was a good day.) I mentioned offhand that I had a krumkake iron but had never made its namesake recipe, nor did I have a recipe to make. Someone promptly responded with this, saying it came from their "great-grandma's nursing home treasury."

We decided to start the recipe by cleaning out the pantry. I don't know where this stuff came from, but no one has wanted to use it.You're supposed to mix it with sour cream and use it as a fruit dip. No one around here ever has the patience to set up a presentational fruit tray.

Those ornamental sugar crystals look pretty, but no one wants gritty waffles. So I pulverized it. The resulting powder tasted like powdered raspberry candy, which is not surprising since the main ingredients are sugar and dried raspberries. 

Not all of my friends were impressed by my use of natural fruit flavoring. One person asked me "Are you making food for crested geckos?"

When I was reading the directions, I thought this looked functionally identical to the pizzelle recipe. So I asked the person who sent it: are you supposed to beat the eggs into a cloud of foam as one does for pizzelles, or do you just stir them in? The answer: No, just whisk them for a few seconds.

Without the extended egg beating, our krumkakes were as easy to mix as brownies. You just put everything into the bowl one ingredient at a time, and stir after each. After about a minute, we had some absolutely delicious batter. It was so runny that I looked into the near future and saw a hot ruinous ooze coming out the sides of the iron. But since I know nothing about Norwegian cooking, I figured the batter was probably as it should be. I therefore resisted the temptation to add more flour to correct it.

Having made our batter, we put it to the side so we could clear the counters, heat up the iron, and melt the shortening for brushing onto it. Speaking of shortening, I'll never know why the shortening the clings to the side of the bowl never melts in the microwave.

If you look around online for a pizzelle iron, you inevitably bump into the term "krumkake." A lot of people sell "pizzelle or krumkake" irons, which made me think they were two names for the same thing. I've seen some people say that Italian pizzelle irons have deeper ridges than the shallow grooves cut into Norwegian krumkake irons. In other words, a pizzelle iron makes waffles, a krumkake iron makes engraved cookies. But other people can't see the difference between the two. As for myself, I'm just happy to make the recipe this iron was meant for.

During the few minutes we spent getting everything ready, our krumkake batter hardened into an unexpectedly firm cookie dough. Instead of pouring it out, you could scoop it with a spoon and it would (mostly) hold its shape. You just never know when you'll be glad you followed the directions instead of acting like you're smarter than whoever wrote out the recipe.

And so, in very short order, we arrived at the big moment: getting batter onto the iron. At this point, I would like to thank whoever wrote up Fante's pizzelle webpage, because it has the most helpful instruction I've ever found for making these: "Use a knife to push off dough from spoon." That one sentence, inserted as a parenthetical note on their recipe handout, has spared me from constantly wiping sticky batter off my fingers every time I've made anything on a stovetop waffle iron.

Our first krumkake was nicely cooked, but it turns out that I shouldn't have placed the batter on the center of the iron. It didn't spread backwards at all. So when making krumkakes, you might want to put the batter towards the back of the iron instead of right in the middle of it.

Our recipe tells us to "roll around spoon handle or cone while hot, and fill with whipped cream or fruit." Some quick searching told me that you can buy little wooden cones for wrapping these on. But since I don't have one, I used a spoon handle instead. It turns out you need to get these things wrapped up the instant you get them off the iron. Because the krumkake seemed so fragile, I let it sit for a few seconds to firm up. As a result, the cake cracked when I tried to roll it up.

Our second one, which we rolled up as soon as it fell off the iron, came out much better. But in full disclosure, I must note that the edges were singed.

But with happy practice, we eventually got it right. Behold the tubular perfection! I later found out that these are supposed to be shaped like cones, not pipes. But at least my inauthenticity was photogenic.

At this point, I had the idea of trying to get a more cone-like shape. As you can see, the krumkake cracked even though I had already racked up several minutes of experience in making them. 

The krumkakes may look like it fell apart at the fissure as soon as I tried to move they, but they proved surprisingly sturdy.

The person who shared the krumkake recipe also sent this helpful photo of rolling them on a spoon handle. It turns out that with a little practice, you can get cones instead of cannolis even if you don't have a cone to roll these onto. (And if your first attempts end up torn and malformed, they'll still taste good.)

And so, instead of rolling my krumkakes around the business end of the spoon, I tried using the handle. After all, the recipe says to use the spoon handle (even though the wide end of the spoon seemed more logical to my non-Norwegian self). Counterintuitively enough, you get better cones with the narrow end of the spoon than with the end that is a flared out. But in full disclosure, I had a lot of malformed krumkakes before I got it right.

After getting our cone-rolling technique right, these things were just so darned pretty.

 

And of course, I wanted to make a few of these as flat cookies just to see what they're like. Anyone following along at home should know that if you're not rolling your krumkakes up, you can't hide when they end up a bit off-center like this:

However, even if your cookies fall short of aesthetic perfection, anyone who complains has either inadvertently offered to make them for you, or has just announced that they don't want cookies.

As I was tasting these, I thought that a bit of whole-wheat flour might go well with the flavor. I'm not trying to pretend we can turn krumkakes into health food-- even if you put fruit in them at the end. I thought that like Mrs. Kahn's Banana Cake, a bit of whole-wheat flour would add a nice flavor undertone. And... it does. The krumkakes with a little whole-wheat flour came out more substantial and just a bit nicer. 

We don't have any cream (whipped or otherwise) in the house, and I didn't think to go to the coffee shop and try to cadge any earlier in the day. And so, we went with fruit instead. Blueberries and raspberries have been one of our more routine splurges. It's easy to say that we need to cut the budget on snacks and chips, but it's hard to argue in favor of eating less fruit. 

However, if I wanted to put fruit in my krumkakes, I would need to find something different to wrap them around. I had to cram and stuff the blueberries in. You might think that the cookies cracked when I was trying to insert fruit with brute force, but they're sturdier than I expected. 

I was telling a friend of mine that I was finally making the recipe that my krumkake iron was meant for. He said that I must put cardamom in them. 

 

I've never purchased cardamom in my life, and it cost $10 per shaker at the store nearest to me. And so, the next time I was in a city with a large-sized Asian supermarket, I went to the spices and found cardamom for a lot cheaper. Naturally, I had to open the bag and smell it as soon as I got into the car. I didn't recognize the scent at all. Given how often cardamom shows up in pumpkin spice or in gingerbread or other autumnal foods, I had expected to be like "Oh, that spice!" But this is apparently my first cardamom ever.

I would later learn that there are two main types of cardamom: black and green. I purchased the black kind. When I tried to look up what I had bought, I found that lot of websites have the same copy-pasted paragraph about black versus green. After I managed to machete my way through all the search-engine-optimized garbage, I gathered that apparently you don't generally use black cardamom in sweets or desserts. But although my black cardamom was apparently incorrect, I couldn't return it without driving several hours. And so, I proceeded to make these with our inappropriate cardamom, and they came out just fine. The cardamom added an almost-burning intensity to the other spices.

As for the taste? These are so much better than the short list of ingredients suggests. I thought that they would be identical to pizzelles, but they're sturdier instead of delicate. In terms of texture, they remind me a lot of waffle cones. You can probably use them as waffle cones if you're a little careful when you scoop ice cream in them.

 

Apparently these are traditionally made around the holidays. But for those of us who have no cultural connection to Norway, I would actually say these are better in the springtime or the summer. You're supposed to put fresh fruits in them, and winter just isn't the best time for that. Anything with whipped cream and fresh fruit is best in the summertime. And the cookies themselves are very light and crisp, which is always nice in the summertime.

Also, you can make a batch of these without starting the oven. If you use an electric krumkake iron, you may not even feel your kitchen heating up. And so, as springtime ensues, we at A Book of Cookrye recommend bringing a bit of Norway into your kitchen.

Savory Stew: It lives up to the name!

A surprising amount of recipes from the Depression have proven good enough to keep in the kitchen.

Savory Stew 3 tbsp bacon fat 3 tbsp chopped celery 2 tbsp chopped onion ½ cup chopped carrots ½ cup cooked rice* ½ cup peas, fresh or frozen 1 can (16 oz, or the nearest size to it) diced tomatoes, undrained ⅔ tsp salt (or to taste) Chili powder and other seasonings to taste Melt bacon fat in a small, heavy-bottomed saucepan. Add celery and onion. Cook over medium heat until they are browned. (If you don't have a heavy-bottomed saucepan, do this in a small frying pan. Then tip everything into a saucepan.) While the celery and onion are cooking, place the carrots in a microwave-safe container with a spoonful of water. Set the lid loosely on the container. Microwave the carrots 45 seconds at a time until they are fork-tender. When the celery and onions are ready, add the carrots and all remaining ingredients. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to a simmer. Place a lid on the pot and let simmer undisturbed for 20 minutes. Add remaining ingredients, and bring to a boil. If desired, sprinkle shredded cheddar cheese on top when serving. *If you don't have leftover rice, use 8 teaspoons of raw white rice and ⅓ cup water. There's no need to change the recipe directions. Just add them to the pot with everything else. Adapted from "Helping the Homemaker," Fort Worth [Texas] Star-Telegram morning edition, October 28 1933, page 5

"Helping the Homemaker," Fort Worth [Texas] Star-Telegram morning edition, October 28 1933, page 5

Actually, that image came out just a little too blurry to read some of the numbers in the ingredient list. And so, I went to the local library. Through the magic of library database access, I found the recipe in a different newspaper. (As we previously discovered, "Helping the Homemaker" was a syndicated column.) This scan is also blurry, but it's nevertheless easier to read the ingredient amounts.

Abilene [Texas] Daily Reporter, October 27 1933, page 7

Since we went to the library for today's recipe, this is the perfect time for a word from the author of Coraline, American Gods, the Sandman comics, Good Omens (co-written with Terry Pratchett), and other works that have become popular Netflix series:

Let's get back to savory stew. The first thing I noticed: This recipe doesn't make a lot of it. These days, most people I know make soup in large quantities, even if they live alone. But we should keep in mind that in 1933, relatively few people had a refrigerator to put a vat of soup in. Although people cooked food ahead of time in those days, the available appliances at the time didn't allow for "meal prep" as we know it. 

It's true that you could buy an electric refrigerator in 1933. But if you had the money for one, you were probably so wealthy that you could hire servants and never personally enter the kitchen. Many people in the 1930s had iceboxes, which were more affordable but weren't exactly suited for loading with planned leftovers. Given these limitations, our friends at "Helping the Homemaker" were a bit more helpful to the home cooks of 1933 than it may seem to our 21st-century eyes.

This recipe has us cooking the onions and celery in bacon grease. Because the last few years have inspired some Depression-grade cooking habits in our own kitchen, we actually had bacon grease on hand. In addition to saving beef fat, I have been carefully pouring bacon grease into little containers and putting them in the refrigerator for quite some time. It was nice to live in the pre-pandemic times when I could carelessly throw all that fat away. But while things have been on heading downhill for a while now, at least I have discovered that onions cooked in bacon fat are delicious.

This recipe doesn't use a lot of onions or celery. But it uses a lot of bacon fat. I wasn't planning on deep-frying our chopped onions, but "Helping the Homemaker" had other ideas.

The recipe directs us to "brown celery and onions." I left the pan to mind its own spattery business while I got the rest of supper into the oven. That may have been a mistake, because I accidentally let the onions go past browned and right into taco-platter territory.

To round out the ingredients, "Helping the Homemaker" calls for a smattering of cooked vegetables and a little cooked rice. But as much as I love trying the foods of other times, I did not want to thoroughly cook the vegetables and then put them into a pot to slowly boil for another twenty minutes. We already know what happens to vegetables that get boiled for almost an hour. We also already know that Helping the Homemaker's recipes sometimes had good ingredients listed above bad instructions.

The ingredient list may say that all the vegetables should be cooked before beginning the recipe, but don't think "Helping the Homemaker" meant for us to get out multiple small pots and separately cook all these vegetables before putting them into the stewpot. Instead, I think we're meant to put a smattering of leftover vegetables into the pot, and also add the extra rice that no one ate last night.

I didn't have any leftover vegetables sitting in the refrigerator, so I went with the fresh or frozen ones instead. Because I'm convinced that this recipe is meant for leftovers, I figured that the vegetables would have been seasoned when I first served them. And so, I figured a generous shake of chili powder would not go amiss. 

I also didn't have leftover cooked rice, so I added enough raw rice and water to theoretically add up to the correct amount after the stew was ready. It occurred to me that perhaps cooking leftover rice for another 20 minutes (as directed in the original recipe) might be intended to soften the rice until it breaks down and thickens the whole stew instead of merely floating in it. But then I figured that this wasn't a recipe worth getting pedantic over.

I briefly considered that 20 minutes might be too long a cooking time for the peas. If I was really obsessed with having every ingredient in its finest state, I might have waited until the stew was nearly done to add them. Then I decided that I wasn't in the mood to put excessive effort into this recipe. And so, I dumped everything in the pot all at once, clapped on the lid, and called it done.

Assuming one has the leftover vegetables on hand, "Helping the Homemaker" really lives up to its name with this recipe. After browning a little bit of celery and onion (the small amounts used in the recipe mean you can frugally save the rest of the onion for another day), you just put your leftover vegetables into a pot, add a can of tomatoes, and let it all sit on a hot stove for a while. Personally, I would only let the pot simmer for a few minutes if the vegetables were already cooked, rather than the full twenty minutes that the recipe demands.

For such a simple recipe, this was unexpectedly satisfying. Unfortunately, the carrots weren't quite done, but that is my fault and not the recipe's. The ingredients clearly specified "½ cup cooked carrots," and I arrogantly thought I knew better than the recipe professionals. (I corrected my mistake when writing out the recipe directions.) 

In serving this, I added something that may have been an extravagance in this recipe was first printed: shredded cheese.

I liked this stew. But unlike a lot of stew recipes, this isn't really a complete meal in a pot. It's more of a side dish. However, it's a really good side dish. The flavor reminded me of Uncle Joe's Minestrone, which we got out of that Italian cookbook and still make on a semi-regular basis. Given the very similar ingredient lists, the resemblance shouldn't be a surprise. 

In short, we at A Book of Cookrye recommend this recipe. Like most things we've made from "Helping the Homemaker," it is easy, cheap, low-effort, and a lot better than the starting ingredients suggest.