French Lace Cookies: Lovely to look at, lousy to eat

I didn't expect Betty Crocker of all "people" to print a cookie recipe that is worse after baking.

French Lace Cookies ½ cup light corn syrup ½ cup shortening ⅔ cup packed brown sugar 1 cup all-purpose flour 1 cup finely chopped pecans Heat oven to 375°. Have cookie sheets lined with parchment paper. Heat corn syrup, shortening, and brown sugar to boiling in 2-quart saucepan over medium heat, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and gradually stir in flour. Then mix in the pecans. Drop batter by teaspoonfuls about 3 to 4 inches apart onto cookie sheet. To keep the batter from hardening between batches, perch the saucepan over a smaller pot of simmering water. Or, place a sheet of parchment paper onto the counter and drop teaspoon-size portions of dough onto it until you've used up all the batter-- don't worry about giving them room to spread. Let them sit for a minute or two to firm up. Then lift them off the paper and place them onto (paper-lined!) pans to bake, one batch at a time. Bake about 5 minutes or until set (they will still be bubbly on the pan-- you may not think they look done). Cool 3 to 5 minutes on the pan. Then slide the pan out from under the cookies, letting the whole paper sheet land on the countertop. Then allow to cool completely. Drizzle with melted chocolate when cooled, if desired. If you wish, you can roll these cookies up instead of serving them flat. Roll them around a wooden spoon handle (or other object of choice) as soon as they're barely cooled enough to handle (they need to be very hot). If they crack, put them back in the oven to re-soften and try again. Betty Crocker's 40th Anniversary Edition Cookbook, 1991

Betty Crocker's 40^th Anniversary Edition Cookbook, 1991

Today we're making another recipe I always saw when flipping through Mom's Betty Crocker book, always thought would be really nice, but never actually tried. Don't they look almost as pretty as the pizzelles?

As it happens, I've made the pizzelles too.

Like all good American things, these cookies start with shortening and corn syrup. I didn't know whether to turn on the burner or recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

It's never a good sign when your cookie dough (or whatever this is) has a slick of melted fat on top. But I figured that since following the directions got us in this mess, following the rest of the directions should get us out of it.

The recipe tells us to "gradually" add the flour and the pecans to the boiling-hot mixture. Usually, flour siezes into gummy clumps when you add it to something this hot, but I gave it a try anyway. It worked, which shouldn't surprise me. Say what you will about Betty Crocker's taste (especially from the fifties to the seventies), her recipes always work. 

As we noted a few recipes ago, I've come to appreciate nonstick pots after years of resenting that you're not supposed to use an electric mixer in one. I think this is another recipe that really makes you appreciate nonstick pots, even if you have to fret about scratching them.

When I added the pecans and tried a test spoonful, our dough (or whatever it is) tasted like half-decent pralines. And it looked like pralines when I dropped spoonfuls onto the pan.

The cookies spread a lot, which I understand is how they're supposed to turn out.

You can tell they printed this recipe before every supermarket had parchment paper. In the early nineties, you had to grease a pan and carefully get a spatula under the still-molten cookies. These days, you can just slide the pan out from under the paper and let it land on the counter.

After they had cooled, I could see why they call them French lace cookies. They had a sort of wispy, lacy look to them.

I'm glad I tried one before drizzling any chocolate on them. They are great for looking at, but not good to eat. I thought they'd be super-delicate and crisp, but they were more like forgotten hard candy that melted and then re-hardened in a hot car. They tasted really bland and got stuck in your teeth. The unbaked cookies were decent (ish) brown-sugar fudge balls (or something like that), but I don't recommend putting them in an oven.

I'll give the Betty Crocker people credit: The recipe does exactly what it promises. It just isn't very good. And it made me want to make pralines because the raw dough was so close to being good ones.

Second-Stab Saturday: It turns out rice pudding doesn't like the stovetop

Today, we're trying and failing to make rice pudding without an oven.

Rice Pudding 3 cups milk 1 tablespoon corn starch 2 eggs, separated 1 pinch salt ⅓ cup sugar 1 cup cooked rice 1 teaspoon vanilla ¼ cup sugar (for meringue) Heat oven to 350°. Grease a medium-sized baking dish. Place it in a larger, empty pan. Have the egg yolks ready in a medium bowl, set aside. Cook milk and cornstarch ten minutes in double boiler, or over low heat if you're really good at preventing anything from sticking to the bottom of the pot. (You may want to mix the cornstarch with a little bit of the milk before putting it all in the pot-- it prevents having to chase lumps with a spoon.) After the time is up, start whisking the egg yolks, then slowly pour in about half the milk, beating very hard the whole time. Return to the pot. Add the salt, sugar, rice, and vanilla. Pour into the baking dish. Set on the oven rack and pour boiling water into the bigger pan around it. Bake in hot water until thickened (mine took 45 minutes). When it's ready, beat the egg whites until frothy. Gradually add the sugar, beating as you go. Continue beating until stiff peaks form. Carefully spread onto the pudding (no need to let the pudding cool first). Bake until golden on top, about 15 minutes. Allow to cool to room temperature, then refrigerate. I thought this was better the second day (even if the meringue didn't look nearly as nice). Note: If desired, skip the meringue and just put whipped cream on top. Undated newspaper clipping, Chicago area (probably 1930s-1940s), credited to "Mrs. B. E. B."

When last we made rice pudding my great-grandmother literally cut-and-pasted from the newspaper, we asked if it really has to be baked. It seemed like it would come out just as well in a saucepan without heating the oven. And I really wanted it to come out just as good in a saucepan because this is the first rice pudding I've actually liked and summer is coming.  

The easiest way seemed the best: get it all in the pot and heat it up. Unfortunately, the easiest way gave us a lot of little egg globules that refused to mix with everything else.

After whisking everything together very hard and adding the rice, we were ready to take this to the stove.

We cooked this until it passed the finger-swipe test. (That's where you swipe your finger across a custard-coated spoon and see if it leaves a line.) It was runnier than I wanted, but I put it in the refrigerator to hope it thickened more as it cooled.

The next day, it was hopelessly drippy. You'd never know I cooked it.

Instead of throwing out the pudding, I waited until the next time I was baking something. (Since the eggs were cooked, this could afford to wait a week in the fridge.) Then I slid the rice pudding into the oven next to dinner. It didn't really set, but it firmed enough to actually serve. (I skipped the meringue because it looked terrible and tasted pointless last time.) Since you already have to scoop it into bowls instead of slicing to serve, I was able to stir in the good vanilla after baking it without cooking any of it away.

Before I risk closing with too happy an ending, I have to note that the leftover pudding got extremely runny after a few days in the refrigerator. There's probably some deep-level chemistry going on here because this didn't like getting cooked twice. So even though we're reaching the end of baking season (on this side of the equator at least), you should probably put this in the oven like the original directions say. 

However, I still think it's better without a meringue on top.

Chocolate Cookies: Best when frozen

The next time I visit anyone who lives in the Carolinas, I'm making them take us to Harris Teeter.

Chocolate Cookies 1¼ cups sugar 1 cup butter 1 egg 1 teaspoon vanilla 2 cups flour ⅓ cup cocoa powder 1 teaspoon baking soda ½ tsp salt (if butter is unsalted) 1 (12-ounce) package semisweet chocolate chips, if desired Melt butter in a large bowl, getting it very hot. Then whisk in the cocoa powder and let stand until it comes back to room temperature and firms up. (If desired, you can skip this step and just stir the cocoa powder into everything else. But getting the butter hot and then letting the cocoa sit in it draws out more chocolate flavor.) Heat oven to 375°. Have paper or foil-lined baking sheets ready. Cream sugar and butter. Beat in egg and vanilla. Add flour, baking soda, and salt (if using), stirring just until mixed. (If using an electric mixer, mix in the flour on low speed.) Stir in chocolate chips, if desired. (These cookies are so rich on their own, you might want to bake half the dough and add chips to the rest. Then you can try it both ways.) Drop dough by rounded tablespoonfuls 2-inches apart onto ungreased cookie sheets. Bake at 375°F for 8-11 minutes, or until set. They will not look done. Remove them from the oven anyway. Cool 1 minute on the pan before removing. Source: Harris Teeter sugar bag

This recipe makes a lot of cookies, so naturally I cut it in half. This meant I get to inaugurate my new kitchen toy: a one-sixth measuring cup! I'm so glad its first use is chocolate.

Someone 3D printed this for me. It's not not dishwasher safe, but I am willing to welcome it anyway. I only had to send off the dimensions, which another friend had worked out for me. I do know enough math to figure out the dimensions of a cylinder with given volume x, but the rounded bottom threw me off. And I wanted it to be a bit rounded at the bottom because who wants to gouge ingredients out of a sharp corner? 

Anyway, for those who either have 3D printers at home or know someone who does, here are the dimensions so you can have your very own: 

Moving on to everything else we needed to measure, we soon found out why Harris Teeter printed this recipe on their sugar labels. You use half the bag to make these cookies.

The dough was reassuringly firm. I've found that if cookie dough is too sticky to handle, it inevitably bakes into a runny mess. But these cookies were actually acting like cookies instead of future hot dough puddles.

The recipe says to drop by rounded spoons. But our dough was firm enough to shape into balls, so I did that with a few of them. The balled cookies came out just a little bit smoother on top, but I don't think it matters enough to bother. The spooned ones were just fine. They might even be a bit cuter with their crinkled tops.

Balled on the left, spoon-dropped on the right.

These were like Harris Teeter's brownies but in cookie form. They're not an intense chocolate, but more like a chocolate-flavored toffee. They were so crisp on the outside you'd almost think I rolled them in sugar first. Contrary to the official ingredient list, I think these were better without the chocolate chips in them. These cookies were, as I've heard people say, "plenty good enough" without stirring anything else in.

Also, as we found out after putting the extras away, they are amazing right out of the freezer. It's nice to have a frozen chocolate lift on hand, if a bit dangerous to know it's there.

Prune-Pecan Soufflé: It's better than you think

Spring is here, strawberries are in season, and we are stewing prunes!

Pecan-Prune Souffle 1 (8-oz) package prunes 3 egg whites Pinch of salt ⅓ cup granulated sugar ½ teaspoon cinnamon ½ teaspoon vanilla ⅔ cup coarsely ground pecans Cook the prunes in simmering water until very soft. Depending on the prunes, this can take anywhere from five to thirty minutes. When they're done, coarsely chop them in a food processor or hand-cranked grinder. Place in a large mixing bowl and set aside. Heat oven to 325°. Grease a souffle dish (I used the insert from a rice cooker). Beat the egg whites and salt until stiff peaks form. Continue beating while you gradually sprinkle in the sugar. Beat until the whites are glossy and the sugar is dissolved. Fold the egg whites into the prunes in two or three additions. Then fold in the cinnamon, vanilla and nuts. Turn into the dish. Bake 20 to 30 minutes. Serve at once with whipped cream, hard sauce (see below) or a custard sauce made with the egg yolks. For extra presentation, place in sherbet glasses and top each portion with a pecan half. Serves six to eight. Miss Mary Crow, 511 5th ave, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; November 8, 1935; page 14

Hard Sauce ¼ cup butter 1 tsp. vanilla ½ tsp. lemon extract ⅛ tsp. salt 1 tbsp. boiling water About 1¼ cups sifted powdered sugar Cream butter, beating until very soft and light. Stir in the vanilla, lemon extract, salt, and water. (They won't quite incorporate yet, but get them as mixed as possible.) Beat in the powdered sugar a little at a time until you have a very thick mixture. (You basically are making buttercream icing that is too firm to spread on a cake.) Transfer to a plate and shape into a flat patty. Refrigerate at least half an hour. When serving, cut in thin slices and place on top of warm pudding. Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

Recipe Exchange; Philadelphia Inquirer; November 8, 1935

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

Now that we can buy cheap out-of-season produce (or at least, it was cheap-ish before the war), we have more or less forgotten how to turn dried fruit into lovely things. Sure, we still have a few recipes like oatmeal-raisin cookies. But given where global events are headed, we might want to collectively relearn how to expressively use dried fruits. Our half-century run of December blueberries may have been bombed to a halt.

So we meet again: boiled prunes!

At first I thought ramming wet prunes through a meat grinder would only yield a drippy mess on the floor. But (short of getting out and subsequently cleaning the food processor) I couldn't think of any other way. Would you want stewed prunes slithering all over a cutting board?

Just like last time, this step of our prune whip actually looked kind of pretty. I loved the contrast between the dark, shiny fruit pulp and the pure white meringue. I may make a prune pavlova next time the holiday season rolls around. As long as no one asks what's in it until after they've tried it, I think everyone would like it.

As I knew would happen, our beautiful study in color contrast turned into a sand-colored mess with brown stringy bits.

And now we get to our other featured ingredient: pecans! Miss Mary Crow thought we should use walnuts, but I am allergic to them. Walnuts make me break out in rants.

Our sample spoonful tasted a lot better than I expected. Our last prune whip was underwhelming and bland, but this was actually good. Unfortunately, it was about as ugly as the applesauce-date mallow.

The last time we made a souffle, we had to use the insert from a rice cooker. But these days, with a full complement of pans crammed into the cabinets, we were able to select the perfect baking dish for this. It was... wait for it... the insert from the rice cooker.

I made sure our souffle would have plenty of rise in its pan. No one wants to clean burnt prunes off the oven floor. (Also, I don't want to break my 7-month streak of not having to take down the kitchen smoke detector.) This souffle barely puffed up, which hopefully meant it wouldn't dramatically shrink.

Don't you love when your dessert matches the table?

Next, it was time to put on the "hard sauce," which apparently is a booze-free brandy butter. In other words, it's buttercream frosting that is too thick to smear onto a cake. 

I borrowed a recipe from our favorite World's Fair giveaway book, Mrs. Mary Martensen's Recipes. She says "The exact amount of sugar cannot be stated, but the sauce must be stiff enough to stand alone." So I added enough to make our tiny little mound of butter hold up a spoon.

Our hard sauce tasted like very lemony buttercream, and was delicious as it melted and soaked into the prunes.

The prune souffle tasted unexpectedly like oatmeal-raisin cookie dough. I shouldn't be too surprised. Prunes taste a lot like oversized raisins, and the pecans and cinnamon completed the flavor.

As an afternote, I put the leftovers in the refrigerator overnight. (We do not have "six to eight persons" eager for prunes.) By the next day, the souffle had shrunk to a little prune puck. 

It's a little hard to appreciate the shrinkage, so let's add a dinner fork for scale.

So if you want to make your prunes serve six to eight, you probably shouldn't make this ahead.

Runza Casserole: Put it all in one pan and you're done

Today, we are making runza casserole!

Runza Casserole 2 pounds ground beef 2 onions, finely chopped (or one 12-oz package frozen chopped onions) 4 cups finely shredded cabbage Salt, pepper, and other seasonings to taste (I added garlic powder and a lot of paprika) 2 tubes refrigerated crescent rolls (or one large batch of biscuit dough) 1 pound mozzerella cheese, shredded (I used cheddar instead) Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9x13 pan. Brown beef and onion in a large pot. Drain and return the pot. Reduce heat to medium-low. Sprinkle the cabbage on top of the meat. Put the lid on the pot and let it cook without peeking for about eight minutes. Then stir in the salt and seasonings. While the cabbage is steaming, unroll one tube of crescent rolls. Place them in a flat layer in the pan. Press to close seams. Put the meat and cabbage over the rolls. Sprinkle the cheese on top. Then unroll the second tube of crescent rolls and lay them on top. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes. Cover with foil for the last 10 minutes (this softens the top crust). Note: If you cut this in half, it fits nicely in an oven-safe skillet. Irene Biederstedt (McLaughlin, South Dakota); KFYR-5 TV 40th Anniversary Cookbook; Bismarck, North Dakota; 1993

I love the picture on the front cover. It looks like a snapshot from the Thanksgiving office potluck. Also, that light looks like a late-1980s spaceship.

KFYR-5 TV 40th Anniversary Cookbook; Bismarck, North Dakota; 1993

As I understand it, runzas are yeast rolls stuffed with meat and cabbage. They look like something that originally was a complete meal in an edible handheld package. Today, we're simplifying the process by putting everything into one big pan.

Speaking of simplifying things (or at least trying to), we are shredding today's cheese the modern way! I already planned to electrically shred the cabbage, so I thought I might try to do the same with the cheese. 

One pound of cheese may seem a lot for one casserole. But if you read the ingredients, we're using a lot of everything. If you make this recipe in full quantity, it will feed a whole family, any friends have wandered in, and anyone looking for leftovers the next day.

I have to admit, I like the electric cabbage shredder more than I thought it would. Fussing with all those food processor attachments seemed pointless the first time-- especially when I had to clean every one of them. But sometimes I just want to make dinner without any knife skills. And even though this adds a lot more dishes to the pileup in the sink, sometimes it's nice to get dinner ready faster. 

Back to the casserole, we didn't manage to shred the cheese on the first attempt. (A copy of the food processor instruction manual would have been nice.) Instead, I put all the accessory pieces together wrong and squished the cheese.

After some trial and error, we were soon shredding cheese at an astonishing rate. If I'd gotten this right the first time, it would have been twice as fast as using a normal grater. Instead, I think I delayed dinner by at least ten minutes.

Next, we got to why I had the food processor out: the cabbage. This seemed like one of those recipes where you want the cabbage in very fine slivers, which I can't do by hand (though I'm better than I was). Also I just wasn't in the mood for a lot of hand-slicing.

Are we using equal amounts of cabbage and cheese?

Now that we were done spending time trying to save time, it was time to get to the meat of the recipe. I forget where I read this (I think it was on Tumblr), but someone said "Half of all 'good family recipes' start with 'cream the butter and sugar,' and the other half start with 'brown the beef and onions.'" Naturally, we used frozen onions so I didn't have to chop them myself.

We are next directed to put the cabbage on top and let it steam for a bit. This strained our skillet's capacity, but we managed to get everything crammed in there and put foil on top. I really hoped the cabbage would shrink in the steam.

 

We are supposed to use canned crescent rolls for the top and bottom of this casserole. I used homemade biscuit dough because I forgot to get the cans.

Speaking of canned bread, I was going to write that if you halve the recipe, you can purchase two canned pizza crusts and fit it in a cast-iron skillet. Then I stopped by the canned biscuit section and checked the prices. Two cans of crescent rolls would have cost more than the beef! I'm not a snob (though I get how it can seem like that sometimes), but canned biscuits are absolutely not that good.   

Shopping aside, we were now ready to assemble. I accidentally made this a lot harder than it needed to be. Had I followed the directions, it would have been a simple matter of lining a 9x13 pan with bread dough and then tipping the skillet into it. Instead, we had to empty the pan long enough to put bread in the bottom first. So remember: even if a recipe is only ten sentences long, be sure to read the whole thing!

The recipe's final line of instruction confused me: "Cover with foil the last 10 minutes to soften the crust." I figured this would make sense when the time came. Ten minutes before the time was up, the top crust had hardened to a big cracker. Even though I didn't think anything could fix it, I put our runza casserole under a foil tent to finish out the baking time. The crust turned back into soft bread, which again proves that you should always read the recipe.

This was a lot better than I thought. It hit the same satisfying spot as the meatball-mushroom pie. It's hard to go wrong when your recipe starts with a pound of beef, a lot of onions, and bread on top. 

It's a really nice meal-in-one-pan for when you want meat, vegetables, and no fuss (assuming you don't find canned biscuits too expensive). When I was making this, I thought it might need more vegetables in it. But I think it had the perfect meat-to-cabbage ratio. It's simple, but satisfying. And if you remember to get canned biscuits and don't mind the expense, it's pretty fast to put together, too. 

It was a lot better when I halved the filling to match my half-size pan, though.