Cocoanut Tea Rolls

Today, we are venturing to Australia!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

Economical Raisin Pie: Exactly what it sounds like

I know we all love economizing and raisins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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 inside, 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 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 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, crucially, are real people) 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 beautifully 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.