Fresh Apple Cookies: or, Tantalization leads to misfortune

It's been a while since a recipe went straight into the trash.

Fresh Apple Cookies ½ cup shortening 1½ cups firmly packed brown sugar ½ tsp salt ½ tsp nutmeg 1 tsp cloves 1 tsp cinnamon 1 tsp baking soda 1 egg 2 cups sifted flour 1 cup finely chopped unpeeled apples 1 cup raisins 1 cup chopped pecans, if desired ¼ cup milk Vanilla spread: 2½ tbsp (7½ tsp) milk 1½ cup powdered sugar 1 tbsp butter ⅛ tsp salt ¼ tsp vanilla Heat oven to 400°. Have greased cookie sheets ready. Cream together the first eight ingredients, beating well. Then add the flour. When all is mixed, stir in the apples, raisins, pecans, and milk. Drop by the teaspoon onto the baking sheet. Bake 12-15 minutes. While the cookies are baking, make the vanilla spread. In a small microwave-safe bowl, heat milk until steamy. Add the butter, stir until melted. Add remaining ingredients, and beat until creamy. If you have a large glass measuring cup, it is better than a bowl for making the icing. The pour-spout makes it so much easier to put onto the cookies. Spread the icing onto the cookies while hot. Source: Mrs. John Stevens; Metarie, Lousisiana; The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

I saw the recipe name and was intrigued. Apples don't seem very strange in cookies, but I have never seen anyone use them. Also of note, this recipe uses equal amounts of apples and raisins. With a hopeful heart, I wondered if this was a plate-free version of sticky apple man-bait.

To Mrs. John Stevens' credit, this recipe comes together pretty quickly. After you've dumped the first round of ingredients into the bowl, you're halfway done.

Also, this spiced dough tasted fantastic. Mrs. John Stevens doesn't use many spices, but she uses a lot of each one. Our cookies already tasted like apple pie before we added the apples.

Upon adding the flour, things got unnervingly crumbly in the mixing bowl. But we are next directed to add a small bit of milk, which I figured would make everything right with our cookie dough. It did.

I liked how quick this recipe went. After a pleasantly short time, we were already adding our apples. Mrs. John Stevens expressly tells us not to bother peeling them first, which only made me like her more.

And so, only a few minutes after we first chopped the apples and set them aside, we had the first batch of cookies onto the pan and ready to bake. I should note that the apples kept falling out of my little dough plops as I got them onto the pan. It is never a good sign when your cookies can't hold onto their own ingredients. But I thought that all would be well after baking them.

While our cookies baked, Mrs. John Stevens tells us to make the vanilla spread. The recipe looked a lot like our dearly beloved cinnamon icing, except without the cinnamon and a bit thicker. Just like our cinnamon icing, we are directed to put it onto the cookies while they're hot. 

Upon opening the oven, I immediately regretted the expense of using real vanilla in the icing. I can't say that I've never been so glad I halved a recipe. However, I've never been so unexpectedly glad I halved a recipe. I was very excited about these cookies right up to the moment they were done baking.

First of all, Mrs. John Stevens baked these far too long. Also, these were hopelessly runny in the oven. I had already scooped batch no. 2 onto the pan. But after seeing our first batch come out like single-serving cow turds, I smushed the second batch back into the bowl and worked more flour into them. I don't know how much, but we're not talking "just a spoonful to make things right." Mrs. John Stevens' ingredient amounts were grossly (interpret that word any way you like) inaccurate.

While our heavily-corrected second batch of cookies baked, I tasted one of the less-burnt cookies to see if they were any good. And... they were fine(ish), but you couldn't tell the apples were in them. They tasted intensely of raisins. Imagine oatmeal-raisin cookies, but without the oatmeal. 

This is the first time the title ingredient of a recipe has made absolutely no difference. We've made a few recipes where the title ingredient ruined it (lest we forget the pepper cake), but this is the first time we've encountered a recipe ingredient where the title ingredient was pointless.

Someone else came into the kitchen, stared at the cookie-shaped failures, and was naturally curious about what they were supposed to be. When I explained that they were supposed to be apple cookies, he said "I assure you I smell no apples." He did not stick around long enough to taste one.

I rarely tip an entire pan of cookies directly into the trash. I've even put subpar cookies into a food processor so that they could be salvaged into a crumb crust. But Mrs. John Stevens' cookies were more suited for the city dump than anyone's kitchen.

During all this disappointment, our second batch of cookies was steadily baking. I pulled them out of the oven a lot earlier than Mrs. John Stevens claimed I should. They looked acceptably better than the first cookies, but were already a little burnt.

As you look at the near-blackened spots on these cookies, keep in mind that I removed them from the oven early.

If I hadn't already made the "vanilla spread," I wouldn't have iced these cookies. The icing didn't make them look any better. I don't mind unphotogenic cookies, but a bit of ugliness certainly makes me feel worse when they taste bad.

I cannot recommend this recipe. But as it happily happens, we have recently made cookies that are everything Mrs. John Stevens' fresh apple cookies wish they could be: fruit cookies. If you either replace the dates with raisins (or omit the dates since the recipe already has raisins), you will succeed where the fresh apple cookies failed. 

And maybe you can add apples too. I have no idea if they made a difference or not. It's interesting that in both the fresh apple cookies and the fruit cookies, the title ingredient is relatively downplayed. But in the fruit cookies, the fruit actually makes a difference.

Seven-Ingredient Cake: or, This is not a pudding

Today's pudding is actually a cake.

Seven-Ingredient Cake 1 cup syrup* 2 eggs 4 tbsp butter or shortening ½ cup sour milk, buttermilk, or sour cream 1 tsp baking soda 2 cups flour 1 cup raisins Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9" square cake pan. Place the first six ingredients into a mixing bowl. Beat until well-mixed with a whisk or electric mixer. Then stir in raisins. If desired, you can add spices like cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, mace, etc. Pour into the pan and bake 20-30 minutes, or until the center springs back when lightly pressed with a fingertip, or a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. This is delicious as-is. Or, you can top it with fruit custard or vanilla sauce. *Not sure what syrup the recipe calls for. I used cane syrup since the store near me sells it. Source: "Ask Mrs. Wilson," Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, March 4 1919, page 14

"Ask Mrs. Wilson," Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, March 4 1919, page 14

Today on A Book of Cookrye, we are trying out Mrs. Wilson's seven-ingredient pudding! You may recall when we made her potato bread (which was so good that we have since given it away as appreciation gifts). On the day Mrs. Wilson ran that recipe in the newspaper, she gave a recipe for what she called a "seven-pudding" directly underneath it.

The only hard part of this recipe was figuring out what Mrs. Wilson meant by "sirup" in the ingredient list. At first I ruled out corn syrup as too new for this recipe, but Wikipedia tells me that 1) corn syrup goes back a lot further than I thought and 2) the Karo people spent obscene amounts of money advertising their product as a wartime sugar substitute. So the home cooks of 1919 would have at least heard of the stuff. 

But after our previous experiences baking with corn syrup, I had absolutely no desire to use it again. Instead I bought a jar of cane syrup, which was a bit pricier than I wanted. For those who've never heard of it, cane syrup is basically sugarcane juice that has been boiled a lot. (Basically, they make it the same way as maple syrup, but start with a different plant sap.) It tasted like milder molasses.

Having resolved the syrup-purchasing conundrum, the rest of the recipe seemed pretty easy: pile everything into a bowl and insert a whisk.

After just a minute or two of beating, we had what looked like a really good cake batter. Mrs. Wilson writes that "spices may be added if desired," and I decided to justify my recent purchase of a canister of mace by adding some to today's cake. The mace added a really nice, subtle flavor that almost made me feel like it was worth buying.

As we prepared to stir in the raisins and bake, I realized I had forgotten a certain crucial ingredient:

Our cake (or pudding, if we believe the recipe title) batter looked just a little better after getting all of the ingredients into it. Now that we had added the forgotten egg, it was ready to get beraisined and enter the baking pan.

We have encountered a fair number of recipes that don't quite match what the title calls them. The so-called banana dessert bars were a (very good) cake. The crocus carrot cake was a pie and also a disappointment. The butter finger dessert bars were actually a pecan pie with coconut in it. And today's recipe is called a "pudding" is in fact a cake.

I've noticed that every time we've made a boiled pudding, it came out like a bag of cake. So my totally unfounded (because I am too lazy to look it up) theory is that eventually people started putting their pudding mixture into baking pans instead of faffing about with a pudding bag and a massive pot. I think the name "pudding" persisted for a while because it was the same batter that the old-style boiled puddings were made of. (Or at least I think it's the same batter that boiled puddings were made of.)

Mrs. Wilson's seven-ingredient "pudding" tasted astonishingly like our unexpected favorite, the war cake. And unlike the war cake, you don't have to wait for the batter to cool off overnight. 

It is what you hope for when people say something is "old-fashioned." If you're making the recipe in its original amounts, I'd suggest baking it in a loaf pan and telling everyone it's a pound cake. It's a lot better than it should have been. So far, Mrs. Wilson has not put a dud of a recipe in our kitchen. This cake will be made again.

Potato Custards: or, Sometimes the mundane things are the strangest

Ever wished your mashed potatoes had more dignity?

Potato Custards ½ cup mashed potatoes* ½ cup milk 1 egg ½ tsp salt 1 pinch mace Heat oven to 350°. Grease five or six individual custard cups. Or, coat a cupcake pan with cooking spray. Thoroughly whisk everything together. Or, if using fresh potatoes that still have a few lumps in them after mashing, drop all the ingredients into a blender and let it run until everything is perfectly smooth. Pour into the prepared pans, filling them about two-thirds full. Bake until they are firm and puff up, about 15-20 minutes. Serve warm. *Instant mashed potatoes are fine. Source: Ask Mrs. Wilson, Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, July 7 1919, page 12

This comes to us from Ask Mrs. Wilson, who gently yet firmly taught the Philadelphia newsreading public how to cook things the domestic-science-approved way. But Mrs. Wilson did not pretend that everyone with a copy of the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger had bottomless grocery budgets. Only a few months before today's column, Mrs. Wilson ran a recipe for a one-egg cake in response to a spike in egg prices. Today, Mrs. Wilson ran an entire recipe of exclusively potato recipes for the benefit of those of us on a tight budget.

Ask Mrs. Wilson, Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, July 7 1919, page 12

However, the first line of her article about potatoes hasn't aged as well as the recipes: "This nutritious tuber is said to have saved the Irish people from famine...."

Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, July 7 1919, page 12

Mrs. Wilson may have an incomplete understanding of then-recent history, but she treads on sounder footing further down the page when she says "Boiling potatoes in their jackets will cause the potato to lose about 2 percent of its nutritive value, while peeling before cooking causes a loss of 14 percent." In other words, Mrs. Wilson endorses our practice of finger-picking the skins off of cooked potatoes instead of spending long irksome hours with a potato peeler. She confirms this in her directions for edible potato cups (for containing salads): "Boil medium-sized potatoes in their jackets. Cool and then peel."

All of this brings us to today's recipe: potato custards. It was the only unusual recipe on the entire page. While some of the other recipes are a little different than today (the potatoes au gratin uses white gravy instead of cheese sauce), the custard recipe was the only one that I literally couldn't imagine what it tasted like. Therefore I had to make it.

Mrs. Wilson directs us to mash the potatoes and force them through a sieve. This ensures that are mashed potatoes are perfectly smooth. But we at A Book of Cookrye had a much easier way to ensure spud perfection: use a box of instant flakes.

After you have either mashed or reconstituted your potatoes, the recipe is pretty simple: add the rest of the ingredients and get out a whisk. That little smattering of brown powder floating on top of our mixture is the only expensive part of this recipe: a pinch of mace. 

We haven't used mace for anything since the snow muffins, and the canister had long since disappeared. Much of it got used up when I said "I'm not using this anyway" and added it to cinnamon toast. I considered substituting nutmeg for mace since we already have it (nutmeg and mace come from the same plant), but decided that I should probably do this recipe correctly. This involved purchasing and paying for a (small!) shaker of mace.

Recipes like this make me wish stores had dispense-it-yourself spices, the same way a lot of them let you bag and price your own peanuts. It would be very helpful for those of us who want a single teaspoon of a spice we will never use again.

After a quick stir, our potato custards looked like an unusually pale cake batter.

I decided to bake the custards in miniature pie pans because it seemed cute. I also noticed at this point that there was no sugar in these custards. While I am no stranger to savory custards, the omission seemed odd. And so, I sweetened one of the custards and baked the other exactly as written. (The sugary spud custard was bad. So we don't need to mention it again.)

I have to credit Mrs. Wilson with this: every single one of her recipes I've tried has worked. Whether the potato custards were any good remained to be seen, but they behaved perfectly in the oven. Like our pumpkin tarts, they even puffed into nicely-shaped domes when they were done. Apparently ingredients are never unruly when Mrs. Wilson is in charge. 

These were the most formal mashed potatoes I've ever made. They had the exact texture of a really good cheesecake, but they tasted like mashed potatoes. It was like we subjected a cheesecake to a flavor transplant. The mace was an unexpectedly good addition. If you take nothing else from this recipe, try adding a pinch of mace to your mashed potatoes. 

If you have ever wished your mashed potatoes were more presentational and dignified, this is the recipe for you. No more must your mashed potatoes be sloppily presented in whatever splattered shape they landed on the plate. 

Today's potato custards seemed typical of Mrs. Wilson's recipes: fancier-looking than than I would have ever bothered with, but without adding any extra ingredients to the grocery list (aside from the mace, which will probably follow me from spice shelf to spice shelf until the end of time). In full disclosure, I definitely noticed the absence of butter in these, so you may want to add a bit to the recipe. But with that said, this is not a bad way to serve mashed potatoes.

Herbed Spaghetti: or, This is why we are all obsessed with pasta

Sometimes, the best things are simple and buttery.

Herbed Spaghetti 1 pound thin spaghetti 4 to 6 cloves garlic, pressed or finely minced 3 tbsp olive oil ½ cup butter, melted 1 cup fresh herbs, chopped (chives, parsley, dill, green onion tops) Salt to taste Cook the spaghetti in salted water until done. While the spaghetti is cooking, saute the garlic in the oil until golden. Remove from heat. Add butter, herbs, and salt. After draining the spaghetti, toss it with the herbs. Serve immediately. Serves 6.     Herbed Pasta with Mushrooms: Quarter all ingredient amounts. Instead of spaghetti, use pasta shells, corkscrews, or any other noodle shape that is suitable for mixing with chunky things. (With spaghetti or any other string-type pasta, the mushrooms will never quite mix in.) Saute the garlic in the olive oil (just like the original recipe). After the garlic is golden, add 8 oz of sliced mushrooms to the frying pan. Saute the mushrooms until done. Then slowly add about 2 tablespoons of flour to thicken the pan juices, stirring very fast to prevent lumps. Stir in the butter and herbs. When the butter is melted and all is mixed, remove from heat. Mix with the hot, drained noodles and serve immediately. Note: If you're not serving the spaghetti directly out of the pot, put it in the serving bowl before adding the herbs. That way, none of the herbs cling to the pot and get left behind. Source: The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

This recipe appears in a community cookbook with no one's name underneath it. I find the unsigned recipes in compilation cookbooks the most interesting. Why would anyone send a recipe and not want credit for it? Or do anonymous recipes happen when the Cookbook Committee feel like something should not be omitted from the book, even if no one sent it in? Perhaps someone in a Committee (always capitalized) meeting said something like "No one sent in herbed spaghetti? That shows up at every summer social!" and wrote the ingredient list out on the spot.

At any rate, this seemed like as good a time as any to try out this knife I got for Christmas. Its premise of operation looked intriguing, although the eagle on the handle is a bit much for me. I don't like my kitchenware to look like it's headed to a political rally.

Questionable iconography aside, I was a bit leery of the wooden cutting board that came with it. It seemed like it would not do well with my "shove everything in the dishwasher" approach to kitchen management.

I was going to cut up the herbs in small batches. Then I decided that the best way to test this thing was to overload it. Realistically, I need to know how well a kitchen device holds up to moderate-to-severe misuse before deciding whether it should permanently move into the kitchen. And so, I crammed all the green stuff into the bowl that came with this thing. It looked unexpectedly photogenic.

The bowl may not appear overloaded, but that's because the knife is weighing the herbs down.

I was pleasantly surprised at how well this thing worked. In a surprisingly short time, it reduced all our lovely fresh herbs to green confetti. It was like using a food processor without having to clean all the plastic parts later.So while this isn't something I can't live without, I won't rush to re-gift it either.

Countertop toys aside, here is where we get to the real fun of the recipe: adding enough garlic to weed out unworthy men. (As I mentioned in an earlier post, I think garlic bread is a relationship test.) You should know two things. One, I put in exactly as much garlic as the recipe calls for, and no more. Two, I quartered the entire recipe- garlic included. My eyes literally watered (that is not a complaint) while I stirred this.

The rest of the recipe is agreeably straightforward. We are supposed to melt the butter before we stir it in, which makes sense if you're not quartering the recipe. By the time you've melted an entire Junior League's worth of butter, the garlic already in your pan will have burnt. But  after quartering the recipe, I figured this small piece of butter could melt in the pan quickly enough. For those making the recipe in its original amounts, a whole stick of butter may seem excessive and also stereotypically southern. But keep in mind that said butter is going onto an entire pound of spaghetti. (It's still a lot of butter, though.)

Lastly, we add in the herbs. I noted that the recipe has you adding them at the absolute very end of the recipe. I guess our greens would go black and slimy if they cooked in the butter for more than a few seconds. The main thing to note is that ever since weed got upscaled to cannabis, I can never look at a pan of green stuff in oil the same again.

Our herbs shrank a lot in their short time in a hot pan. I wasn't expecting them to be reduced to such a small pile on top of the noodles.

Reminder: this green pile started out as enough herbs to fill a medium-sized salad bowl.

After stirring our herbed spaghetti together, it looked like I thought it would when I first decided to make it. It also smelled every bit as wonderful as I hoped.

I wasn't expecting to like dill in this, but I put it in anyways because someone (again, the recipe has no one's name under it) thought it was good enough to add here. Also, I've only ever encountered dill in pickles, and was curious to see what happens when dill gets separated from cucumbers. It was really good here, and I would definitely add it when making this again.

In short, this recipe is as good as it is simple. It's one of those recipes that seems too easy to bother writing down, just like few people need to consult instructions when making cinnamon toast. But I hadn't thought of making spaghetti with fresh dill and would never have done it had I not seen this written down.

Since I had a lot of extra dill and parsley in the refrigerator, I made herbed spaghetti again as soon as the garlic smell from the last batch got out of the house-- which took an unexpectedly long time. A house is never drafty when you need it to be. 

I couldn't help thinking that the recipe would be fantastic with few mushrooms in it. Because it's almost impossible to stir large things like sliced mushrooms into spaghetti (they always separate out and end up in a pile at the bottom of the pot), I used pasta shells instead. That way, everything would mix together.

And so, after the garlic had become a golden brown but before adding the herbs, we filled the frying pan with fungus. This led to a problem I should have seen coming: the mushrooms exuded a lot of juice. I didn't want to drain it off and throw it out (in part because I'd be pouring away the precious roasted garlic with the mushroom fluid). But I didn't want a puddle of mushroom-water at the bottom of an otherwise exquisite plate of pasta. 

And so, muttering to myself that no Italians were watching anyway, I stirred in enough flour to turn our mushroom water into a sauce that would stick to the noodles. I should note that the mushroom gravy tasted even better than I anticipated because it drew out the flavor of the garlic the entire time the mushrooms cooked. I hadn't even added our herbs yet, and this was already turning into something divine. The rest of the recipe was just as easy as last time: dump the herbs into the pan, pour everything onto the noodles, and serve. 

It's the best pasta I've had in ages. I cannot recommend it enough. Obviously, the herbs are open to variation.  But I strongly suggest trying fresh dill among the greens you choose.