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In general, this recipe tasted outdated in a very midcentury-specific kind of way.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. 

 

Raisin Swirl Steamed Pudding: or, Who put a cake in the humidifier?

Winter is still here after three days! That doesn't always happen in post-climate change Texas. It's so cold that the sleet and snow are still on the ground 72 hours after landing. Three AM looks like twilight because of all the light bouncing off the white ground. Cars are carefully creeping up streets that haven't seen salt, sand, or plows. 

In our house, some of the people are watching the ERCOT dashboard and national power outage maps the way many men stare at weather maps as soon as thunder claps outside. I've been getting thrice-hourly reports shouted across the room, telling me which counties in what states have gone dark. My friends and relations have all been calling to "check up on" each other. I think it's partially to make sure everyone's doing all right, and mostly to have some human contact while the roads are too iced to actually see anyone. 

A lot of my friends up north have said that we're soft for being rendered semi-helpless at 12° (Or -11° if you prefer celsius). But the cold here hits different. First, the state of Texas doesn't believe in slowplows, or salting, or road sand. Instead, the roads are nearly unnavigable until the ice melts from the heat of the cars going over it. Second, houses here aren't really built for freezing weather. A lot of them aren't even insulated. This means the cold in Texas doesn't stay outside. It follows you into the house, cuts its way into your bedroom, and gets under the blankets with you. 

With that in mind, I made this as an excuse to steam the kitchen for two hours.

Raisin Swirl Steamed Pudding ½ cup shortening 1¼ cup sugar 1 tsp nutmeg 1 teaspoon each vanilla and almond extract (the original recipe uses rum extract instead) 2 eggs 2 cups flour 1½ tsp baking powder ¼ tsp baking soda 1½ tsp salt ⅔ cup milk 1½ cups (9.5 oz) raisins ½ cup chopped pecans ½ cup (2.6 oz) shredded coconut 1 ounce unsweetened chocolate, melted (or 3 tablespoons cocoa powder) Grease a 2-quart pudding mold (or any pan or heat-safe bowl that you can completely fit inside a large pot), then cut a circle of paper to fit the bottom of it and press it into place. In a large bowl, beat shortening, sugar, and nutmeg until fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating each in thoroughly. Then beat until light. Mix flour, baking powder, soda, and salt. Add these alternately with milk to the sugar mixture. Stir in raisins, walnuts and coconut. Divide batter into two parts. To one-half of batter, add melted chocolate. Spoon light and dark batters alternately into well-greased 2-quart mold. Swirl batters lightly with a knife. Cover tightly with foil. If desired, tie a lifting-handle out of string around the mold. Place on a rack in large pot. If you don't have a rack, just improvise a way to lift the mold off the bottom of the pot. A lot of people put the mold on an upside-down ceramic plate in there. Or you can put some wads of aluminum foil for the pudding to sit on. Pour in boiling water to come halfway up mold, then put a lid on the pot. Simmer for two and a half hours. Lift out of the pot, remove the foil cover, and let rest for two minutes before turning out onto a plate. If desired, sprinkle with powdered sugar, sprinkled through a sieve to keep it from landing in clumps. Serve with your favorite sauce. Chocolate syrup would be good, and so is the sauce from when we made Golden Treasure Pudding. Store any leftovers in a tightly sealed container- they go stale quickly. Note: If halving the recipe, steam it for the full time instead of taking it out of the pot early. Favorite Recipes of America: Desserts, 1968

I'm actually understating why I made today's recipe. I've been staring at it for a long time and wondering how it would come out if I ever made it. It comes from that all-dessert cookbook my great-grandmother found for me in a thrift store. The writers had me sold at the first sentence above the recipe: "An unusual dish that calls for an extra bit of care and proves well worth it—that's Raisin Swirl Steamed Pudding." Unusual, you say? "Well worth" the "extra bit of care," you say?

Favorite Recipe of America: Desserts, 1968

I miss the days when food photographers where made an elaborate still life instead of using shallow focus and sparse white backgrounds. Also, you just know they individually arranged the raisins poking out of that pie in the background.

Favorite Recipes of America: Desserts, 1968

Getting to the recipe, I initially thought I would let our pressure cooker shorten our steaming to a few short minutes. Just to confirm it would work before ruining dessert, I looked up pressure cooker puddings to see what other people have to say about them. (I knew that I absolutely was not the first to have this genius idea.) I found a lot of AI slop that said I should do it. (Or at least, I think it was AI. I'm not as good as I wish at spotting it. But I usually figure it's AI if it seems like the work of an unusually soulless ad copywriter.) Eventually, I found a real person asking our very question on Nigella Lawson's website. Nigella's staff (who are also real people and not AI bots) basically said it was technically possible but "we are unable to guarantee the results."

The baking powder was their main misgiving. They thought it might not raise the pudding under high pressure because all those little gas bubbles would get squeezed and compressed. At first I thought that it wouldn't matter. Then I remembered that high altitude causes recipe havoc, and it is tiny twitch on the barometer compared to a pressure cooker. I therefore decided to follow the directions instead of ignoring them. 

The pudding mold was a bit trickier because I don't have one. After dropping various heatproof bowls into pots to see what would fit in what, I settled on the insert from our rice cooker.  

Having resolved the cooking method, we had a LOT of things to stir into this pudding. I naturally traded the walnuts for pecans because walnuts are horribly bitter. (As I've said in earlier posts, I've heard walnuts are good right off the tree, but no one near me has one in their yard.)

As we got to the main bowl, I couldn't figure out why we were steaming this instead of baking it. It looked like a cake batter. (Because I sometimes love a good kitchen project, I also contemplated whether I should put this in a pudding bag if it went right the first time.) 

This recipe doesn't make a lot of cake batter compared to all the incoming fruit and nuts. Is this supposed to be some sort of heavily-loaded fruitcake?

The fruit and nuts volumized our batter a lot.

I used cocoa powder instead of melted chocolate because we had it on hand. It noticeably stiffened the batter. You can see the white batter slumping in the pan while the chocolate batter stays very upright.

Here it is, all swirled up and ready to steam!

The original recipe only says to "cover tightly" before steaming without further detail, but I happen to have watched enough British cooking videos about Christmas puddings. Therefore, I know that you simply must make a pleat on top so your pudding has room to expand. I don't think it mattered given how little pudding we had in the basin. But if our raisin swirl came out flat, I could blame the recipe and not my unpleated ignorance.

Our cooker made an interesting racket as the pudding boiled. (We did end up using the pressure cooker because it's the biggest pot in the house, but I didn't pressurize it.)

And here it is, a perfectly risen cake! Given how perfectly flat it is on top, maybe we should steam all of our cakes. It would make stacking multiple layers a lot easier.

Our pudding failed upon unmolding. Half of it fell out nicely, and the other half stuck to the pan. But that isn't ruination, it's just your first guideline when cutting slices.

I love that you can see the two-toned batter splotches just like in the cookbook photo. It means that our pudding came out just like it did for the food stylists (or it at least came close). It would have been cute if it hadn't ripped in half. 

 

Our pudding tasted like a marble cake, and somehow seemed I added a very generous splash of coffee to it. It also had an interesting texture: light, fluffy, and somehow dense at the same time. I thought of the Bangor brownies which were halfway between cake and fudge. I didn't like the nuts in this recipe, though. They got just softened enough to be... off.

The recipe says to serve with "your favorite sauce." I tried a small sample and didn't think it needed anything on top, but I poured a little bit of the sauce from our Golden Treasure Pudding on it anyway. The golden sauce made the pudding more photogenic, but it neither helped nor hindered the taste.

As promised in the recipe headnote, this was absolutely wonderful on a cold night. But the pudding got stale very quickly on an open plate. So you'll want to either put the leftovers in a sealed container as soon as they're cold, or just dunk the stale pudding in tea or hot cocoa.

Hot Cocoa To Serve Fifteen: or, Winter has finally arrived

Winter is coming in! The grocery stores are stripped, people are panicking, and everyone in Texas is worried that the power will go out again. All the bars and restaurants are extraordinarily crowded, which suggests to me that everyone wants to get some human contact in before the roads are iced over.

Hot Cocoa for Thirty 1¾ cups boiling water ¾ cup cocoa powder 1¾ cups boiling water (again) 2½ cups sugar 1 tbsp vanilla extract To make the syrup: You're really going to need a double boiler (or a mixing bowl set over a saucepan) for this one-- you can't just cook it directly on a stove burner no matter how low you set the dial. Place the first portion of boiling water in the top of a double boiler (or a heatproof mixing bowl). Sprinkle the cocoa powder on it, and whisk thoroughly. Add the second portion of boiling water and beat well. Cook over simmering water for one hour. Whisk it occasionally, scraping any hard cocoa deposits that form on the sides of the bowl. Don't worry if it looks burnt on the edges; the cocoa is merely dried and will be just fine after mixing it back in. Mix in the sugar and cook for another thirty minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat, allow to cool, and add the vanilla. If desired, pour it through cheesecloth to strain out the last little lumps of cocoa. To serve: Add two tablespoons of syrup to ¾ cup hot milk. (You can just microwave the milk in the mug.) Add more syrup if desired. To serve thirty: Scald six quarts of milk, beat in the syrup, and serve at once. Unknown book or pamphlet clipping, probably 1930s-1950s Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

The last big freeze was awful, but this one stands to be worse. Texas' power grid (or what passes for a power grid, anyway) now has a lot of AI datacenters weighing it down. Closer to home, I was a little amused to see that absolutely no flour remained in the baking aisle. It's very optimistic to think we'll all be able to bake our way through the frost on Texas power.

With all that said, we're making hot chocolate in case we get to have a blackout-free freeze.

This comes from my great-grandmother's recipe binder. Clippings like this make me wonder about her. Did she often take charge of the kitchen in the church basement? Or did she have company over a lot more often than I would have expected? (For those who don't recall, I've been informed that she was "a cranky old woman who didn't like children" which doesn't indicate someone who would voluntarily become famous for her hospitality.)

I was going to make the full amount until I measured out the sugar and thought of the grocery budget. This recipe calls for two cereal bowls of it. (Well, it is meant to serve thirty.) Since I didn't want to use half a bag of sugar in one night, I decided to make cocoa for fifteen.

To repeat, the full recipe uses two of these.

The recipe tells us to put our cocoa powder into the water and "let stand undisturbed until moistened." I guess that's to prevent kicking up a cloud of cocoa dust when stirring. I was going to obediently let this sit undisturbed, but that mound of powder would have taken all night to finally get wet. I nudged it with a spoon and let it remain undisturbed for a minute after that.

After a bit of short mixing, the recipe basically tells us to leave this on the stove for an hour. (I assume this is meant to really draw out the flavor from the cocoa powder.) So this is perfect for setting on the back burner while you're cooking other things.

I absolutely refused to babysit this for an hour. Instead, I left the kitchen and only came back and stir it occasionally. The bowl developed dark rings of half-dried cocoa powder in my absence. I know it looks burned on the edges, but keep in mind this is a double boiler. The cocoa didn't get hot enough to burn, it merely dried out.

At the end of the time, our cocoa was almost but not quite syrupy. Assuming the recipe was going right, it next needed a small mountain of sugar.

When I tried a bit on a test spoon, I was amazed at how chocolatey this was. And we weren't done steeping the cocoa over simmering water.

This got surprisingly thick during its last thirty minutes on the stove. You can really tell when looking at the drippings from the whisk I periodically stirred it with.

I didn't see the point of pouring this through cheesecloth (nor do I have any). But after just a few seconds, a dark sediment settled to the bottom of our cocoa. I suppose if you really can't stand that, you can strain this through cloth. I decided to skip the extra fretting.

And of course, what better way to serve our hot cocoa than with gingersnaps!

I tasted this and thought "This is very weak." It's like when you've reached the end of a bottle of chocolate syrup and try to force one more glass of chocolate milk out of it. So I added enough syrup to make our drink properly chocolatey. Then I was absolutely delighted. This was so rich that I didn't even mind the mean serving size. One small cup is perfect.

Incidentally, I also tried serving this cold, thinking "Well, we basically made chocolate syrup." But it just didn't taste very good. This is meant to be hot cocoa. We know that foods often taste bad when you serve them at the wrong temperature. (Just look at how bad our eggnog was after freezing it.) So I'm not debunking the recipe, just noting that (as is often the case) you should serve it at the temperature the recipe says.

In closing, here are some handy preparation tips from someone who mostly survived the Great Texas Winter Blackout. I'm not bothering with any advice that involves shopping. Panic buyers have probably already stripped the grocery stores.

• First, wash things while you've still got electricity to run the machines:
• Do your laundry. All of it. Wash your bedsheets because if everything else is going wrong, a fresh clean bed feels so, so good. Wash all your rags so you have a clean stash ready to wipe any messes that arise before electricity returns. And of course, don't forget to clean your clothes!
• Clean your dishes, especially if you use a dishwasher instead of doing them by hand. You don't want your last pre-blackout dishes to slowly ferment while you wait. Even if you don't mind doing dishes in the dark, sometimes the sink won't drain right until things melt.
• Wash yourself! Take a good, long shower. If the water goes out, you want to start the next few days feeling fresh and clean.
• Find the biggest bucket or pot in the house and fill it with tap water. We lost our tap water because our local water plant does not have emergency generators. Don't let it happen to you unawares.
• If your kitchen sink is on an outside wall, open the cabinets under it so that warm air can drift past the pipes. Also, leave the faucet on a slow drip, even if the sound gets annoying.
• Charge all your internet-y things.
• If you have candles or oil lamps or suchlike, get them out and put them where you'll want them. And don't forget to dig out the matches or lighters! Put them right next to the candles so that you don't need to rummage for them in a cold dark house.

Well, good luck everyone! I'd love to chirp that following these easy steps will make blackouts a breeze, but I didn't believe that long enough to type out that sentence. But at least things won't be so bad. And who knows, maybe we'll all be fine and simply put all our candles away until next time.

Cranberry Salad while we still have cranberries

Cranberry season is drawing to a close! The last of the fresh cranberries have tragically migrated from the discount produce rack to the dumpster behind the store. This means that I only have the embarrassingly high number of cranberry bags I piled into my cart when I saw the clearance sign.

Cranberry Salad 1 (3 oz) box red jello (raspberry, strawberry, or suchlike) 1 cup boiling water 1 or 2 oranges, supremed (see guide here)-- or if that looks like too much work, simply juice the oranges (or use canned oranges) About 6 oz fresh cranberries 1 or 2 tart apples 1 can (undiluted) orange juice concentrate (You won't use it all) Around ¼ cup sugar Mix the gelatin and boiling water, stirring until dissolved. Wring out all the juice from the supremed oranges and stir it in. Coarsely grind the cranberries in either a hand-cranked grinder or a food processor. Then grind the apples a bit more finely than the cranberries, and stir them in. (You want to grind the apples last so they don't have any time to sit out and go brown.) If any juice dripped out of the fruit, add it to the pot (or just drink it). Add the sugar. Then add about 1 or 2 tablespoons of orange juice concentrate. Taste it, and either add more sugar, more orange concentrate, or both to taste. Place in a clear bowl and refrigerate until smooth. (It looks best in a clear bowl-- the light coming through it really shows off the color.) Note: This doesn't set very firm-- it's more like a spreadable relish than a freestanding gelatin. Source: Poppy Crocker in the comments for my great-grandmother's cranberry salad

Today, we are trying a cranberry salad from our Pieathlon friend Poppy Crocker, who writes over at Grannie Pantries. If you haven't looked at her blog, you should. She lovingly chronicles all the bygone foods that present-day food historians have desperately tried to bury. 

Anyway, I first read the recipe and thought "This looks pretty good!" Then I thought "Wait a minute, cranberry sauce without the celery?"

If you want the approximate recipe (well, halved since you always make half-recipes, and also approximate since grandma was never big on measuring): 1 box red gelatin dissolved in 1 cup hot water (we usually used raspberry). Mix half-bag of fresh cranberries and 1-2 apples-- both ground in the meat grinder, and do the cranberries first so the apples won't get brown-- with about 1/4 cup of sugar, then add to Jell-O. Add 1-2 oranges (supremed) and whatever juice you can wring out of the membranes and 1 8-oz. can of crushed pineapple. (Try tidbits if you don't want the texture of crushed.) Add a couple tablespoons of thawed orange juice concentrate. Stir it all together. Taste it and add more sugar and/or orange juice concentrate until you hit the flavor you like. Then refrigerate for a few hours and serve right out of the bowl. (It's not thick enough to unmold, plus who would want the fuss?)

We had to do some tedious knifework before we could get to the fun parts of the recipe. I'd never heard of "supreming" an orange, but I found this handy guide on Martha Stewart's website. I like that the last step is to wring all the juice out of your offcuts because 1) it reduces waste and 2) our recipe says to do that anyway. It's always reassuring when directions from different sources agree with each other.

So, to supreme an orange, you first have to cut off the peel. You can't just peel it off because you want all those membranes gone. This was surprisingly tricky because the orange gets squishier as you cut more off. Then you cut the fruit out from between the internal membranes. As bad as my attempt looks, I can conclusively say that I at least had a sharp knife. This is easy to prove: at no point did our navel oranges become blood oranges.

I thought purchasing two oranges was a bit excessive until I saw how very little orange we got out of them. Just compare the size of the discard heap to what we kept. I'm tempted to say that next time I'll just buy a can of oranges, but (as I've said before) I hate canned oranges. (If you like them, feel free to use I

To be fair, the waste heap shrank a little when I squeezed the juice out of the membranes (and out of the fruit that got cut off with the peel). And we had a lot of juice from what's supposed to be scraps.So I don't think I threw out any more orange than I usually do when juicing them.

All this juice came out of the offcuts.

Next, we are supposed to use red Jello. Poppy Crocker said they usually use raspberry, but that was surprisingly elusive at the grocery store. So I got cherry instead. This may have been a mistake, because it smelled like cough syrup.

Just look at that beautiful cherry red!

As a recipe note, I only added a couple spoons of sugar because 1) there was plenty of sugar in the Jello box, and 2) I don't like my cranberry salad to be sweet enough to top a cheesecake.

With our oranges supremed and the Jello dissolved, we were ready for the fun part: shoving a lot of fruit through a meat grinder.

I was really excited about this. Check out the fruit-to-Jello ratio. This salad does not skimp on the good stuff.

I probably should have ground the apples more finely, but I didn't think of that until I was halfway done.

Our recipe says to do the apples second so they wouldn't have any time to go brown. Happily, this also means that we won't leave any cranberries behind in the grinder. The apples will push the last berries out, and I won't feel nearly so bad about rinsing apple down the sink. You can get apples any time of year, but fresh cranberries are a precious resource.

Our grinder dripped a lot of juice as we cranked it. I tipped it into the pot, but only because I (barely) resisted the temptation to just drink it.

Next, it was time for the pineapple. I was so excited about the meat grinder that I forgot that this salad is incomplete without opening at least one can. As suggested, I got pineapple tidbits because I didn't like how fibrous the crushed pineapple was last time we put it in gelatin. But crushed pineapple might have been the better choice here. At the very least, it would have blended in better with all the other pulverized fruit. I decided to pluck the pineapple back out of the pot and get out the scissors. 

And here it is, ready to refrigerate! 

Actually, hold on a minute. Is this really a halved recipe? Poppy said it was in the comments, but this is a lot of cranberry salad. Clearly I'm not the only person who really likes cranberries when they're in season. I was looking forward to a lot of peanut-butter-and-cranberry sandwiches, serving this after dinner, and being able to just take out a spoonful whenever I felt like the day needed a cranberry lift. And it'd be great on cold-cut sandwiches throughout cranberry season.

As aforementioned, this came out more like a relish than a salad. You could add an extra packet of unflavored gelatin if you really want a cranberry salad that can stand for itself, but I liked this as it was. Freestanding gelatins are often like eating rubbery water anyway.

But I don't think I should have used cherry-flavored gelatin. If the lemon jello in the earlier recipe was too weak to cut through the cranberries, the cherry was too strong for everything else in it and made this taste like cold medicine. 

Artifical cherry aside, I like how unlike a lot of other cranberry salads, this seemed like an actual salad and not a rebadged dessert. It contains so much fruit that (unlike the other cranberry salads I've made) it might actually be good for you. Either way, it's a wonderful way to serve fresh fruit.