Date Refrigerator Pie: It is so good

Today, we are making a recipe my great-grandmother didn't clip and should have.

Date Refrigerator Pie 2 tablespoons unflavored gelatin, or 2 (¼-oz) packets 1 tablespoon cold water 2 tablespoons sugar 2 egg yolks ½ cup lemon juice (2 medium-sized lemons) 1 cup orange juice (fresh squeezed if possible) ½ cup milk ⅓ cup sugar 1 cup whipping cream ⅔ cup chopped dates ⅔ cup halved dates 1 orange, segmented 1 baked pie shell, or 1 graham cracker crumb crust (baked if desired) If you made your own graham cracker crust and didn't bake it, put it in the freezer so it doesn't fall apart when you fill the pie. Put the gelatin in a small bowl. Add the water and stir quickly so it mixes before the gelatin soaks it up and hardens. (This is easier to stir with a toothpick or skewer than a spoon.) Set aside and let stand. In the top of a double boiler, whisk together the two tablespoons sugar and the egg yolks. When thoroughly combined, whisk in the fruit juices. Cook over boiling water until slightly thickened. (It's not going to thicken very much.) Remove from heat. In a small cup or bowl, scald the milk by microwaving it until it simmers. Then drop in the gelatin and stir until melted. (This is easier to stir with a table knife than a spoon. With a spoon, the gelatin gets stuck in the bowl-end.) Slowly pour the milk into the yolks while stirring vigorously. Let cool to room temperature. Then stir in the chopped dates. Cut the orange segments and date halves into bite-size pieces. Whip the cream and fold it in. Pour into the pie shell. Arrange on the top alternate circles of date halves and orange segments. Refrigerate until firm. Source: Chicago Tribune; April 17, 1936

Some readers may recall that when we made wilted lettuce, we had to write to the Chicago Public Library for help reading the newspaper clipping. (An unfortunately-placed ink smudge had blotted out part of the ingredient list.) Instead of sending me the wilted lettuce on its own, they sent me all of the Chicago Tribune's recipes for that day. This pie looked too good to pass up.

Chicago Tribune, 17 April 1936, with thanks to the Chicago Public Library

This pie fits perfectly with our ongoing series of recipes that don't heat up the kitchen (or at least, things that don't heat the kitchen very much). Granted, we will have to get out a double boiler, but that's the only heat unless you bake a pie crust. We did graham crackers instead.

I know baking the crust would make it nice and toasty, but I didn't want to turn on the oven.

Today's adventure begins with pie insurance, which some people know as "unflavored gelatin." I occasionally slip a discreet envelope of the stuff into pies that are too gloppy to slice. Its presence on the ingredient list made the whole recipe feel more reassuring. 

So, before we get to the dates and fresh oranges, we soften our gelatin in--- hold on a minute. Usually when you soften gelatin, you sprinkle it in enough water to easily dissolve, like this:

But this recipe has us soften our gelatin in barely enough water to make it wet. Was tap water scarce in the Depression? (And with the maddening buildout of enough AI datacenters to use an entire Texas' worth of energy, will it be scarce again?)

It occurred to me: was the Turkish paste supposed to turn into a rubbery clod like this?

Having gotten the rest of our ingredients together, I was surprised at how yellow this pie was shaping up to be. It looked downright pretty.

 

After getting over the stove, our egg yolk mixture didn't firm up very much (if at all). I even got out a meat thermometer to see if how close it was to scrambling and therefore if I could get away with cooking it any longer. 

But its persistent runniness didn't surprise me. Egg yolk custards never seem to set as well as when you use the whole egg. Besides, we had gelatin on standby. I've already said this today, but a box of unflavored gelatin is like food insurance.

Next, it was time to add our dates, which had turned into a sticky mass in the measuring cup. I have to ask: were dates that much cheaper back then? Today they're one of the pricer items on the dried fruit shelf, but in the 1930s you see them as often as raisins. Granted, I splurged a bit on really good dates from the upscale grocery store. But even the prepackaged dates you can get at most supermarkets aren't cheap these days. 

The whipped cream turned this into a cute-looking fluff. I think that as Lace Maker pointed out in the comments under our underwhelming pineapple Bavarian, you could call this a "date Bavarian" if you put it in a gelatin mold instead of a pie shell.

As I discovered when dressing the top of the pie, it's surprisingly tricky to make concentric rings of garnish in a six-inch pan. There's simply no space. (In retrospect, I should have started from the rim instead of the center.) But I told myself it passed for a lovely freehand mosaic anyway and put our pie in the fridge for the night.

This was every bit as good as I thought it would be. The fresh oranges on top were a perfect counterpoint to the rich pie beneath. And the dates were great little sweet interspersions through the pie's tartness. It's one of those desserts where you can get away with serving small slices without disappointing most people. It's just the right amount of rich.

All that fuss with cardboard circles, lifting-handles, and plastic wrap paid off. We got the pie out in one piece. The graham cracker crust didn't even try to crumble.

This turned out to be one of those recipes where you spend a lot of time prepping your ingredients, but it flies together once everything is ready. It also tasted so good I almost regretted halving it. I do think it was worth juicing my own oranges and lemons-- they're a big part of the flavor. 

However, it is one of those recipes that really depends on good ingredients. The dates should be flavorful enough to eat right out of the package. The oranges should smell like oranges before you even cut them. (Really, most fruit should smell like fruit before you cut into it. If it smells like nothing, it'll taste like nothing.) But when the fruits are right, this pie is a wonderful way to serve them.

Don't trust a Chicago Englishwoman to make Yorkshire pudding

We have already made Yorkshire pudding from an American cookbook and we have made it with cornmeal. Today, we're attempting to make it as they apparently do in England.

Chicago Englishwoman's Yorkshire Pudding “Dear Marion Holmes: I am sending a simple recipe for Yorkshire pudding as we make it in England: One pint of flour, one saltspoonful of salt dissolved in lukewarm water, beat in three eggs, add water to make a batter, not too thin. Stir briskly and pour into a hot pan with a tablespoon of dripping or lard. The batter should be a thin layer to cover the pan. Bake until slightly brown. “Chicago ENGLISHWOMAN.” Newspaper clipping, Chicago area, 1930s-50s Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

The last time we made a corn-free Yorkshire pudding, it was a semi-elaborate production that involved an electric mixer and made a horrible mess in the oven. (It was utterly worth it.) It also came from a book written by someone who was literally as old as the US Constitution. So now, we're moving to a recipe that's at least from our side of electric lighting.

Newspaper clipping, Chicago area, 1930s-1950s

The recipe specifies lukewarm water, which was the only nitpicky part in the entire paragraph. So, I figured that "Chicago Englishwoman" specified it for a reason. When a recipe is full of annoying little steps, you can often skip half of them. But when the writers only get fussy over one or two points, you should probably heed their directions.

Our Chicago Englishwoman tells us to make "make a batter, not too thin." I didn't know how "not too thin" should look, so I made it about right to drop onto a waffle iron. As a reminder, our last Yorkshire pudding was almost watery before we baked it. (Think of the kind of thin batter you use for crepes.) Absent any baking powder, I didn't know what would raise our pudding but guessed that its own internal steam might puff it up like choux paste.

"Add water to make a batter,  not too thin."

We are next told to put our batter "into a hot pan with a tablespoon of dripping or lard." Since I chose to actually read the recipe ahead of time, I had put a small skillet in the oven before turning it on.

That sizzling is the sound of planning ahead.

This particular skillet has been moody the past few months; everything I've made in it has gotten stuck. But I didn't want to make a full-size Yorkshire pudding until I got the recipe to work, and this was the only small pan at hand. But I figured we would at least know if we got it right regardless of whether I had to scrape and gouge my pudding out.

We tried to "bake until slightly brown," but some 40 minutes later our pudding hadn't changed color at all. It was a little tinted around the edges, but I think that color was only from the drippings soaking in.

This recipe fundamentally didn't work as written. There may be some implied steps that would fix it, but the directions gave us a flat patty of hardened dough. I could have lifted it out of the pan and thrown it like a frisbee if I wasn't worried about breaking a window. 

Perhaps I removed our pudding from the oven before it was "slightly brown" enough, but I don't think baking it longer would have improved anything. I now wonder how many people (my great-grandmother possibly included) tried the Chicago Englishwoman's recipe and ended up with big pucks of hardened flour. 

This recipe confounds me more than any of the others I've tried. Since we found it pasted into someone's personal recipe book, it must have worked for someone at least once. Who clips and saves a recipe that doesn't work? I'm slightly tempted to say that we'll figure out how to get a Yorkshire pudding out of this clipping since clearly at least one person did (unless she booby-trapped her recipe book). But we already have Miss Leslie's Yorkshire pudding, and her version actually works.

Pineapple Water Ice: So easy, but so good

Pineapple juice is too good to throw away.

Pineapple Water Ice ⅔ cup sugar ⅔ cup water 1 cup pineapple juice Mix the sugar and water in a saucepan. Boil and stir until dissolved and clear. Measure out one cup of this syrup and add it to the pineapple juice while still hot. Freeze in an ice cream machine. (Depending on your machine's directions, you may need to chill the mixture first.) Ginger-Pineapple Water Ice: Make the syrup with ginger tea instead of water. Note: You can easily adjust this for however much pineapple juice you have (say, if you're making a small batch using the juice you drained off a can of pineapple). Just use equal amounts of juice and syrup. Directions for Cookery in its Various Branches, Miss Leslie, 1844 edition

When a recipe starts with draining a can of pineapple, I hate discarding the juice. I often drink it on ice, but this time I decided to put the juice in the fridge until I decided what to do with it. I might have put it in cake batter, but that would require turning on the oven in this horrible heat. Then I realized: We can make water ice!

Directions for Cookery in its Various Branches, Miss Leslie, 1844 edition

Eliza Leslie (or, as she billed herself on her own title pages, Miss Leslie of Philadelphia) appended a lot of water ices to the end of her cookbook as the editions kept going. Actually, she tacked on a lot of unsorted recipes over the years. (Eventually, she decided that had added so many that she just wrote another book.)

It's very fitting that a proudly Philadelphian cookbook writer would have so many water ices in her book. It's still a popular hot-weather treat in Philadelphia to this day. 

Getting to today's recipe, I always thought they were too expensive to eat in Miss Leslie's time. But her book has recipes for preserved pineapples (she preserves them whole with the green tops still attached), pineapple ice cream, iced pineapple lemonade, and today's pineapple water ice. I don't know if she included such extravagances for the sake of wealthier people who bought her book, or if pineapples were more affordable than I thought.

Now that we don't need to squeeze the juice out of a pineapple or skim the scum from of our sugar (back then, you had to get the dead bugs and detritus out of sugar every time you cooked), this recipe is ridiculously fast to make. We start off by making a syrup with a little bit of water and almost enough sugar for my cornflakes when I was six.

At this point, we only needed to add the pineapple juice to the syrup and start the ice cream machine. Really, I was going to call this recipe a hump-day quickie were it not for setting up the ice cream machine.

That's it. We're done.

While we're waiting for our pineapple ice to get cold enough to freeze, let's chat about the new machine. I have a mixed relationship with it.

On one hand, having to put those bowls in the freezer is annoying, though they don't take up any more space than a bag of ice. On the other hand, it is nice not to have to buy ice and hope it doesn't melt in the car.

However, the freezer bowls only have so much cold to give. With the usual kind of ice cream maker, you can repack half-frozen ice cream in a fresh round of ice and salt if the first round doesn't do it. With this one, you're kind of screwed if your ice cream doesn't freeze the first time. This means that not only must you remember to put the little bowls in the freezer beforehand, you also have to refrigerate your ice cream overnight. Cuisinart gives us no spontaneity.

 

But even if this machine isn't all I ever wanted, it does appeal to the part of me that used to open the washer and watch the laundry. (Well, I shouldn't say "used to.")

One of these days I'm going to dribble hot fudge sauce in there right before I turn off the motor.

I thought about adding some food coloring to make our water ice look more like it came from a pineapple, but then I decided not to bother. The wan-looking yellow I got "naturally" (if canned pineapple is natural) would be fine--- yellow snow jokes aside. But to my surprise, this froze into a beautiful snowy white. It just shows that we should always trust Miss Leslie except when she's boiling vegetables beyond their death. 

 

As I was getting the water ice out of the machine, I realized that I should have added some ginger to it. We've learned from my great-grandmother's newspaper clippings that pineapple and ginger go almost shockingly well together. But then again, Miss Leslie didn't put any ginger in her pineapple water ice, and she wrote one of the best-selling cookbooks of the century. 

I decided to make some ginger blondies just because I knew what I was missing. (The recipe is simple: add a lot of ginger to a batch of blondies.) And... these two went together like birthday cake and ice cream. 

I know this will surprise everyone, but pineapple water ice tastes like pineapple. It had the perfect texture, like a Slurpee without industrial chemicals in it. However, I wasn't prepared for how much this tasted like fresh pineapple. Somehow the canned taste froze away. So, I'm going to keep this recipe on hand for whenever I have to drain a can of pineapple. It'll be like a little bonus treat.

Cornmeal Yorkshire Pudding: or, Cornbread by any name

I don't know if autumn is here or if we only get a short reprieve from the heat, but we can turn on the oven!

Cornmeal Yorkshire Pudding 2 eggs 1 cup boiling water 1 cup white cornmeal (white if you have it) ½ tsp salt Drippings from roasted meat Heat oven to 350°. Pour the drippings into a 9" round or square pan. Beat the eggs until thoroughly whipped and lemon-colored, set aside. Pour the boiling water over the cornmeal, stirring constantly. Add the salt. Gently mix in the eggs, trying to deflate them as little as possible. Bake until the top springs back when lightly pressed in the center, about 30-35 minutes. While it's baking, baste it 3 times with additional pan drippings. Newspaper clipping, Chicago area, probably 1930s-1940s Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

Apparently they really liked Yorkshire pudding in my great-grandmother's house. Or maybe she frequently roasted large slabs of meat and Yorkshire pudding was an easy standby. Either way, she has two recipes for it, carefully nestled together in her binder. 

We have already made what I think is normal Yorkshire pudding, so today we're going to find out what the heck the cornmeal version is.

As I've often mentioned, I started saving beef fat when beef is too expensive to throw any part of it out. So even though we're not buying beef for a while, I still have a lot of what I call "saute-grade" fat in the fridge at any time. This is my term for the meat-filled beef drippings that have a beefy taste and a shorter shelf life. You can't use it for everything, but it's still good enough for things like sauteeing onions. 

The point is, I had drippings (which apparently no Yorkshire pudding is complete without) even though I didn't have any meat roasting in the oven. To this I added paprika, garlic, and a few other basic necessities. I figured if I had spooned the drippings out of a roast-in-progress, there would be seasonings. 

After our pan was ready, it was time to make the pudding itself. It involved fewer ingredients than I expected. I always thought Yorkshire pudding was very "continental" and perhaps a bit fancy, but this is almost the cheapest batter you can make-- even including the eggs.

I didn't know if whipping the eggs would make a difference, but they actually fluffed the batter a little bit. You could even see the last sloshes of egg foam that didn't quite want to mix in. Had I needed to hand-whisk the eggs, I would have been annoyed at how little the batter changed, but this was only two minutes with an electric mixer.

As a quick aside: I like how aside from a brief encounter with an eggbeater, this was a mindlessly easy recipe. It's perfect for slapping together when you already have a fully-loaded stove to tend to.

The directions say to "baste three times while baking with some of the dripping from roasting pan," but I didn't know how much fat to baste this with. So I put a few little splats on top and hoped I guessed right.

After baking, the pudding bubbled on top where we had basted it. This would subside after a minute or two, but not in my mind. After the suds were gone, this merely looked like bread with well-seasoned splats on top. Which was what it turned out to be.

Those bubbles! Why does it look like I put dish soap on top?

The newspaper called called it "Yorkshire pudding," but this is cornbread. Basting it with seasoned pan drippings did add some nice flavor to it, but it's cornbread. With that said, it's pretty good cornbread. Since it's not raised with baking powder, it doesn't have any chemical taste hiding deep in there. It was just light enough to be nice, but still dense enough for perfect plate-sopping.

In case you're wondering, today's pud is floating on this.

Baggie ice cream never worked for me

I made this for six-year-old me.

Baggie ice cream Multiply amounts by how many you servings you're making. 1 cup milk 1 tbsp sugar ½ tsp vanilla About 2 tbsp rock salt Put the ingredients in a ziploc sandwich bag and press closed. Put the bag in the quart bag. Fill with ice, add the rock salt, and press closed. Shake until the milk in the inner bag theoretically becomes ice cream-- though it never worked for me and I ended up putting it in an ice cream machine instead.

The other week, my mother was out of town visiting her grandchild. She asked me to send a picture of a page out of her recipe notebook so she could cook together with the baby. I couldn't help flipping through the other recipes just to see the food I grew up on. In the midst of various old friends' names and other causes for reminiscence, I saw... this.

In theory, you can put unfrozen ice cream in a baggie, put that bag in a larger one full of ice and salt, and shake it until it turns into ice cream. This was a staple activity in classrooms and at birthday parties when I was growing up. And now, after more years than I'm happy to admit, I would like to know: Did it ever actually work for anyone? No matter how long I shook my bag of ice, I only got very cold milk. Some people I knew got a few feeble crystals that melted on contact with the bowl, but I don't remember anyone getting ice cream.

The last time I did this was at a nostalgia-themed dorm event. At the time, I thought that perhaps I would get better results than I did as a daft and impatient child. I didn't, but neither did anyone else. Fortunately, the RA who put the event together had done what every wise parent and teacher did back in the day: purchase a massive bucket of backup ice cream.

Looking at this with a broader perspective than I had at age six, I can see why parents would do this as a party activity. You can keep all of those little hands full and busy for a long time before the kids start whining that nothing's happening in the bag. Also, this is relatively healthy as far as party food goes. Really, it's just a glass of milk with a tablespoon of sugar in it. Your kids probably added more sugar to their milk at home if you let them use the chocolate syrup bottle unsupervised.

But now, I have an ice cream machine that can do a lot better than anyone ever could with a baggie of ice and salt. I wanted to give my present-day self the ice cream that 4-foot-tall me was denied.

Whole milk might be the better choice for this, but I used the same 2% milk that 1990s parents poured by the gallon into their children. I don't remember my mother or any unfortunate school chaperones buying whole milk, and I don't think any of them would have dared. Doctors had firmly banged into our heads that 2% milk would save your children from future osteoporosis, but whole milk would turn them into eight-year-old heart patients. 

 

This started to set a lot faster than I thought. (If only it had done that when I was shaking a plastic bag of the stuff...) Within 5 minutes, I could see the same half-hearted ice crystals that some of my more persistent friends managed to get. And just like all those classroom parties, they were swimming in a melty soup. 

This didn't churn easily as I thought it would. Instead, it stubbornly wanted to coat the sides of the bowl in solid ice. I had to reach through the little hole on top and press the dasher down and into place.

After just five minutes on the machine, the ice cream (it can be so called) had set enough that it didn't move anymore. It just hung onto the dasher in a frozen blob. I was ready to finally taste the success that no plastic bag had ever yielded.

 

Of course, as soon as I removed it from the machine it dripped and melted on contact with room-temperature air. So, I turned put it back where it came from, turned the machine back on, and knocked the ice cream around with a wooden spoon to force it to freeze better. In retrospect, this stage might have gone better had I turned off the motor and stirred with a rubber spatula for a few minutes.

Remembering how quickly this always melted (even before it reminded me upon my first attempt to serve), I had put a bowl in the freezer earlier. This meant our "ice cream" landed like fluffy snow. I know that no parent with a houseful of kids high on birthday cake would have the presence of mind to put twenty little bowls in the freezer ahead of time, but I really wanted to taste success even though this recipe had never let me.

 

So, in the absolute, almost unrealistic best case for this recipe, you get a sort of milk granita. You might want to leave out the vanilla though- it only makes this slightly bitter. If you think ice cream is too heavy and rich, you might like this. However, even success doesn't make this good.

Had this ever actually frozen in a baggie, I think kids would only like it because they made it themselves. So if you're a parent trying to put some novelty on your child's umpteenth glass of milk in the same day, it might be worth trying. As for me, I'm going to give six-year-old me one bowlful of retroactive success and move on to better recipes.

Blue Lotus Cream: They forgot to mention the strainer

Today, we at A Book of Cookrye are making a recipe that I've thought about for a long time.

Lotus Cream Juice of 3 lemons 2 cups sugar Pinch of salt 2 lemons, sliced thin  4 cups milk 2 tbsp sugar 1 pint whipping cream Combine lemon juice, 2 cups sugar, and salt. Mix in the lemon slices and let stand for 2 hours. Combine milk and 2 tablespoons sugar in a separate bowl. Freeze, stirring occasionally, until it is mushy. Pour the lemon mixture through a strainer into the milk, discarding the peels. Mix well. Lastly, whip and stir in the cream.* Freeze in an ice-cream machine. *There's no point in worrying about folding in the whipped cream. The ice cream machine will stir it anyway. Mrs Claude Earnest, The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

 

The Cotton Country Collection, 1972

It looks fairly easy, doesn't it? If you said yes, then I agree except for one sentence: "Slice lemons very, very thin." When I first saw the recipe, I could barely manage to insert the correct part of a knife into food. Slicing things very, very thin was absolutely impossible. As a reminder, this used to happen whenever I tried to cut up a cake:

I'm amazed I remembered to insert a knife into food sharp-side first.

When I first saw today's recipe, the rest of the directions looked just as intimidatingly difficult as knife competence: putting the milk in the freezer and getting out when it is the perfect consistency of "mush," whipping and folding in cream.... the whole business seemed like such a long and complicated procedure when I first read it and every time thereafter. Also, I realized that no one but me would like ice cream with lemon slices suspended in it.

But thin lemon slices need not scare me anymore. I have gotten a lot better at using a knife. Also, I've become almost fanatically obsessed with keeping the good knife sharpened. I always knew sharp knives are safer in the kitchen, but I grew up in a house where the knives kind of knocked loosely around the kitchen drawer. It took me a while to experience a truly sharp knife.

So, let's start off with the most daunting part of the whole recipe:

That wasn't nearly as bad as I feared. We should all sometimes revisit the things we thought were too hard and see if our skills got better while we weren't looking.

Knife intimidation aside, this recipe lodged itself in my head because I couldn't imagine how it would possibly turn out. It was starting to starting to look like it's going to be like marmalade ice cream for people who don't want to make marmalade. 

Would you believe that even with all that sugar, this was still puckeringly tart? 

After freezing, our lotus cream looked so cute with its little lemon slices peeping out.

As is often my way, I tried a spoonful before putting it in the freezer to firm up-- and found that I really should have taste-checked this before turning on the machine. The lemon peels were hard and almost woody. This wasn't a nice crunch like adding nuts, it was a dental trial. 

I should have known this would happen. Back when I used to make marmalade, I once used a recipe that called for both orange and lemon peels. Long after the orange peels were practically a mush, the lemon peels were still as hard as when I dropped them into the pot.

Back to the lotus cream, I had thought that perhaps sugar would penetrate them and do something, but instead I had made ice cream that you couldn't safely eat. I know the recipe says to slice the lemons "very, very thin" and perhaps I'm just not that good with a knife, but I don't think better slicing would have fixed this. Unfortunately, the ice cream also tasted good enough to keep. So, I put it through a sieve and back into the machine.

This is an act of culinary salvage.

By this point, the kitchen mess had finally gotten to me (we had racked up a lot of countertop splats and sticky spots by this point). The stress of future wipedowns combined with the futility of our our super-special thinly sliced lemon peels was too much vexation for one dessert. So, I therapeutically dyed the ice cream blue.

This is actually pretty good if you don't put a lot of raw lemon peels into it. Soaking the peels in sugar sludge gave the ice cream a depth of flavor and a really nice kick. But you should strain them out before anything goes into the ice cream machine.