Second-Stab Saturday: Harris Teeter lemon squares, correctly this time!

There is no logical reason for Harris Teeter to be on my mind.

Lemon Squares       Crust: 2 cups flour ⅔ cup powdered sugar 1 cup butter, softened Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9"x13" pan.* (We recommend lining the pan with parchment paper or foil first.) Mix butter, flour, and sugar together until crumbly. Press into the pan and bake until light brown, about 18-20 minutes. Make the filling while the crust bakes.       Filling: 4 eggs 2 cups sugar ¼ cup flour ½ tsp baking powder ⅓ cup lemon juice† 2 tbsp powdered sugar Mix all dry ingredients except powdered sugar. Whisk in the eggs and beat well. Then stir in the lemon juice. Pour over the hot crust and bake until set, about 20 minutes. When cooled, sprinkle with powdered sugar. You can make the powdered sugar look much nicer if you sprinkle it through a sifter. *The original recipe claims you can do this in an ungreased pan, but I have always had rotten luck with that. †If squeezing your own lemons instead of using juice from a bottle, grate off the rind and add that also. Note: If halving this recipe, use an 8" square pan or a 9" round. Source: Harris-Teeter powdered sugar label

The last time I made the lemon squares from the back of a bag of Harris Teeter powdered sugar, they were a goopy failure. And I know I didn't remove the previous batch from the oven too early because they were as brown on top as well-done toast. Here is a visual reminder:

That hot mess still pops into my mind to this day. 

Usually, the recipes on food labels are very thoroughly tested. (Apparently, some commercial test kitchens deliberately make the most likely cooking mistakes to ensure that people at home still get a passable result.) At the time, I figured that I must have made a mathematical error when halving the recipe. And so, I decided to actually write down the halved amounts this time. Furthermore, I did all my ingredient calculations and double-checked everything before even softening the butter.

Having ensured that our recipe was completely correct, we could proceed with the first part of it: the crust. Just like the previous time, we got a slightly crumbly shortbread dough. It's not very sweet, but I figure all the sugar in the filling makes up for that. Of course, this recipe uses far more butter than I've encountered in other pastries. We must remember that Harris Teeter is from the American South. The Midwest may be famous for its life-size butter sculptures, but southerners eat it instead.

Back when we first made this recipe, the crust baked perfectly. And it did the same today. 

Because the last lemon squares went wrong at the filling, I was afraid of once again feeding the trash can. A last-minute double verification of my recipe math did not make me feel better. Nevertheless, I whisked everything together and poured it out. Twenty minutes later, our lemon squares were baked and goop-free.

Although lemon squares had firmed up and set beautifully, they looked a bit pallid and underwhelming on top. This must be why Harris Teeter printed this particular recipe on the back of their powdered sugar bags. A quick sprinkle of white fairy dust made them look so pretty!

I love how they molded themselves exactly to the precautionary foil that I put in the pan.

Harris Teeter's lemon squares are almost as good as the lemon loves (and that is high praise). I think they'd be a lot better if you used fresh lemon juice in the filling (and also grated in the rind). The flavor would pop a lot better. Of course, using bottled lemon juice speeds up the recipe and eliminates the need to clean out a juicer. But whether you use pre-bottled lemon juice or squeeze it yourself, these lemon squares are really good. And if you don't mess up your amounts when halving or doubling the recipe, they will come out perfect. 

Stuffed Potato Surprise: or, Are you plagued with leftover ham?

Autumn is upon us! Inflatable ghosts and witches have sprouted in many people's yards. The supermarkets are replacing the beach balls and picnic sets with pumpkins and plastic skeletons. Large hams are once again migrating into the meat section. For those who will soon struggle with the problem of leftover ham crowding out the drinks in your refrigerator, Helping the Homemaker is here for you!

Stuffed Potato Surprise 4 baked potatoes* 2 tbsp cream ¼ tsp paprika ¼ tsp onion salt ¼ tsp celery salt ½ cup chopped cooked ham 2 tbsp butter Heat oven to 375°. Cut potatoes in half lengthwise. Scoop out centers while still hot, and mash. Stir in rest of ingredients and beat until fluffy. Scoop this mixture back into the potato cases. Bake 10 minutes. *Even if you usually don't like microwaving your potatoes, it's fine for this recipe. They will get crisp after baking them again. "Helping the Homemaker;" Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram; October 17, 1934; page 5

Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram; October 17, 1934; page 5

Based on old refrigerator ads, leftover hams used to be quite the problem in earlier decades. Those of us who only purchase a ham for various large holidays will never know the struggle of earlier homemakers, who had to figure out how to get their grousing husbands and whining children to eat the rest of the extra-large ham that took up an entire shelf in the refrigerator. (As a reminder, most 1930s "family size" refrigerators and iceboxes were the size of the mini-fridges that college students put in their dorm rooms today. People did not have the space to casually let leftovers sit for a week.)

Getting to today's recipe, I like to make twice-baked potatoes as a way to stretch meat. However, I tend to be a little more extravagant than Helping the Homemaker, adding such expenses as chopped green onions and bell peppers. But even with such wanton grocery spending as fresh produce, twice-baked potatoes let you get four or even six economical servings out of a single pound of beef.  Helping the Homemaker is using the same method to make a single slice of ham serve four people.

 

I have to credit Helping the Homemaker for writing such an easy recipe. After scooping out the insides of the potatoes, we were halfway done. Also, the paltry amount of things in the mixing bowl is a harsh reminder that there was a depression on. We don't even have fresh onions-- just onion salt.

The quarter-teaspoon of paprika in this recipe is doing a lot of the work in making these potatoes look like we loaded them with rich ingredients. You would almost think I mixed in so much ham that the spuds can barely hold themselves together.

You will note that for one of the potatoes, I went off-recipe and added cheese on top. We all know that ham and cheese go together like pumpkin-spice and lattes. But because cheese may have been too expensive for the economizing household of 1934, I left it off the other spud. After all, it's silly to make big changes to a recipe without first trying it as written (unless you're omitting the walnuts from brownies, of course).

The cheese-topped potato had a certain "institutional cafeteria" pallor to it after baking, but a minute or two under the broiler would have solved that had I the patience.

I don't think I need to tell you that these were really good. It's hard to argue with ham and potatoes. Also, you can slap these together really quickly. They make a good hot lunch on a chilly day (when we get around to having those), and are also a nice light supper for when the rest of the day was full of rich, heavy foods.

I do love when the good recipes are also the easy ones. This one may seem too simple to be worth writing down, much less putting in the newspaper. But I had never thought to put ham into twice-baked potatoes before. As the season of leftover ham approaches, spuds are a great way to serve it.

Butter Alert! Are things too moist in your kitchen?

Have you thought about the moisture content of your butter lately?

This post is loosely dedicated to a commenter who wrote that they tried Maxine Menster's cookies and the dough came out too runny. They said that they even went out of their way to purchase-- and pay for!-- stick-type margarine as specified in the recipe. When I read their comment, I wrote that the dough is supposed to be a bit runnier than expected (which it is), and that it will harden in the refrigerator (which it does).

However, I recently made the cookies again (they make regular appearances at this house) and the dough seemed runnier than usual. I refrigerated it anyway, secure in the knowledge that I have made this recipe countless times and it has never failed.

The thoroughly chilled dough was trickier to work with than usual, but again, I felt no worry. When you've made a recipe ten times, you assume that it will be the same on the eleventh. However, the cookies melted in the oven and barely resembled cookies when they were done. 

At first, I blamed myself. Then, the same problem showed up when I made a batch of chatters. Again, I've made these cookies many times. But for whatever reason, these chatters spread out so much that they fell apart when I tried to get them off the pan. They look like I squashed them after baking, don't they?

For reference, chatters usually come out looking like this:

At first, I blamed myself. I figured I must have mismeasured something. But this problem showed up again when I made chocolate chip cookies for a friend. 

As we all know, the best way to ruin a recipe is to make it for someone else. Baked goods always like to embarrass you in front of witnesses. Nevertheless, I didn't foresee any problems. (Also, no one talks about this, but chocolate chip cookies are actually kind of finicky to make.)

I made the recipe on the back of the chocolate chip bag, as countless people have done before me. I should note that many of my preteen batches of chocolate chip cookies ended up discreetly going to the trash (or at least they should have). But this time, I told myself that most of us are terrible bakers at the age of nine. Having since learned the importance of things like correctly measuring the ingredients, surely I wouldn't bake multiple pans of future compost. Besides, I was making chocolate chip cookies of all things! I wasn't doing something notoriously failure-prone like those foofy macarons that have been such an Instagram and wedding trend in the last few years.

The cookie dough looked just like I remembered, tasted just like remembered, and they came out just as terribly as the first time I made them.

Now, if you go online you will find fifty million possible fixes for this problem (many of which are on websites that may be entirely the work of bots with no human intervention). But the only one that works is adding more flour. No amount of adding refrigerating the dough or jockeying with the oven temperature will turn puddles into cookies, and it doesn't matter if the person claiming otherwise is wearing a chef's hat.

After angrily dumping the first batch of cookies directly into the trash without bothering to let them cool off, I threw a lot of flour into the bowl and rage-beat it into the dough with a wooden spoon that somehow didn't snap on me. I don't know how much I added, but it was a lot. We weren't twiddling with teaspoons of flour here, but fundamentally altering the recipe. Then, just to be very sure I wasn't about to throw away the rest of the chocolate chips and the dough they rode in on, I baked a single cookie to ensure I had everything right.

It looked so lonely in the cavernous oven, and I wrestled with the conflicting guilts of wasting electricity versus wasting ingredients. Chocolate may grow on trees, but grocery money doesn't. Ultimately, guilt from wasting chocolate won out over guilt from running a hot oven on a hot night to bake cookies one at a time. 

Happily, our extra-floury test cookie came out perfect. As I (successfully!) baked the rest of the cookies, I couldn't help wondering why they came out so badly when I made them as written. Did Nestle change the recipe? 

Fortunately for my doubts, the internet has everything, including people photographing old food packaging. I found a picture of a chocolate bag from (I think) the 1930s, and the recipe was the same.

Source: Old Recipes on Reddit

If you wanted to be painfully pedantic, you could point out that in the 1930s you were supposed to dissolve the baking soda in a little water, and today they tell you to simply stir it in. And the older recipe tells you to chop the chocolate because chocolate chips hadn't been invented yet. (In the early days, they sold a specially-molded chocolate bar just for these cookies, which was scored to break into very small pieces. It came with a special tool for breaking it up.) But aside from those truly pointless nitpicks, the recipe is the same.

So, I had made the recipe correctly. The recipe itself hadn't changed. Nor had I miscalculated anything when halving the ingredients. While eating some of the cookies and wondering why they couldn't come out so perfect when I actually made the recipe exactly as written, I remembered reading some online cooking-forum angst about watery butter.

Apparently post-2020 butter has more water in it than it used to. This has been ruining countless people's recipes, no matter how successfully they've made them before. (As a quick aside, true baking experts-- and people trying to look impressive-- use the term "moisture content" instead of "water." It sounds more authoritative.) Of course, all butter contains water and always has. But apparently post-2020 butter is simply too moist to be reliable.

Normally, I care about the "moisture content" of my butter as much as everyone else I know: not at all. Furthermore, I figured that all the people complaining about faulty water-to-fat ratios were making much more finicky things than I do. I wasn't making a Frisian Domme Snobbersguod torte, I was making chocolate chip cookies! Nevertheless, the problem of watery butter had at last come to my kitchen and sabotaged me.

So, if you are having problems with runny cookie dough, you have two options. The easiest: Add more flour!

The second option requires a bit of planning ahead. First, melt your butter. Get it really hot, not just barely melted. Then, pour it into a small bowl or cup so it hardens into a block instead of a flat disc. Let it sit out at room temperature for an hour or two so the water (or "moisture content" if you prefer) can separate out and sink to the bottom. Then refrigerate the butter until it is hard. You can now lift out the butter and discard the water it left behind.

In these times of uncertain butter and inconsistent oleo, I must also recommend baking a single cookie before committing an entire pan of them to the oven. It may be an extravagance of energy, but it's better than possibly sending your grocery money directly to the dump.

Whatever you do, be careful with your butter and your oleo! Treachery and betrayal are packed into those boxes.

Caramel Carrots: or, Serve as a vegetable or a dessert

Autumn is here, and the carrots have struck again!

Caramel Carrots 8 medium-sized carrots, scrubbed 1½ cups sugar ½ cup butter ½ tsp salt 1 tsp nutmeg 1 tsp cinnamon ¾ cups water (saved from the cooking water if you boil the carrots) Scrub off the outer layer of the carrots. Slice them. Cook the carrots until tender, either in the microwave (place them in a loosely covered bowl with two or three spoonfuls of water) or by boiling them. Drain the carrots if you boiled them. Mix with all remaining ingredients in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce heat to medium and cook until syrup is thick. Mrs. Walter Newberry, Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928

Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928

I was recently asked to make a pumpkin pie. Naturally, I served a carrot pie instead. (No one knew the difference.) Unfortunately, this left me with the remainder of a two-pound bag of carrots. Fortunately, the Fort Worth Woman's Club has an easy way to get rid of them: slice them and boil them in syrup. In theory, they will become little discs of orange candy. 

This cookbook comes from 1928, which puts it barely before the rise of bizarre 1950s salads. Nevertheless, we can see the early whisperings of future recipes that end with notes like "serve as a salad or dessert."

At first, I was going to microwave the carrots instead of boiling them as specified, figuring that Mrs. Walter Newberry would have done the same had microwaves been invented at the time. But the recipe directs us to save some of the cooking water for the upcoming syrup-making. I thought that perhaps we need to extract some of the carrot flavor in order to ensure the correct final result. As you can see from the barely-tinted color of the water we so carefully saved, that was pointless.

Having cooked the carrots, we are next directed to dump more sugar onto them than I used to put on my cornflakes when I was too carefree to worry about things like "nutrition" and "empty calories."

At first I wondered if the puny allotment of water we saved would suffice. It barely made a puddle in the bottom of the pot. But as soon as I stirred in the sugar, our syrup began to grow. Water seemed to come out of nowhere. This pot of carrots was nearly dry before I stirred in the sugar. After only thirty seconds (and before I had turned on the burner), it looked like this:

By the time the first simmering bubbles appeared, we had so much syrup that you'd think I never drained the carrots in the first place. It turns out that sugar is so hygroscopic (a word we learned while making a previous cake) that it sucks the juice right out of carrots.

Our simmering caramel carrots smelled like dessert and looked like the beginning of a vegetable soup.

I served the caramel carrots with a very heavy meat and sauerkraut stew, and they were an oddly perfect side dish. Maybe those people who serve desserts as a "salad" are on to something.

I'm not surprised that the caramel carrots tasted good. We've already learned that you can use carrots instead of pumpkin for all your pie needs, and this recipe is basically one blender and a couple of eggs away from becoming pie filling. But I didn't expect it to go so well with the rest of supper.

I must also note that the caramel carrots left us with a lot of leftover caramel syrup. I won't need to worry about what to put on toast for quite some time.

In closing, I am going to file the caramel carrots under "a lot better than I expected." Who would have thought that half-candied carrots would be good? I would say I'll make them again since they're fast, easy, and taste good. But I have reservations about putting so much sugar into the vegetables. However, the holiday season is mercilessly approaching, along with it a massive disregard for things like "nutrition" and "draining away the excess fat." With that in mind, caramel carrots would be perfect next to everything else that is good and buttery.

Brownies from Yvette's: or, Of course I took away chocolate from a website with aliens

Let's talk about the early days of the internet. Or at least, the first days it was open to people who couldn't write computer code. Every house's mailbox was full of those AOL promotional CDs. (Seriously, AOL CDs were so inescapable that they spawned their own genre of craft projects.) The phrase "social media," if it existed, was still tightly locked up in conference rooms. No one had heard of "search engine optimization," and only coders used the word "algorithm."

Double Fudge Cream Cheese Brownies        Brownies: 1 cup butter or margarine 4 (1-ounce) squares unsweetened chocolate* 2 cups sugar 4 eggs 1 tsp salt 1 tsp baking powder 2 tsp vanilla 1½ cups flour 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips        Filling: ¼ cup sugar 2 tbsp butter or margarine, softened 3 oz cream cheese, softened 1 tbsp all~purpose flour 1 egg 1 tsp vanilla         To make the brownies: Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9"x13" pan. To make the brownies, place the butter and unsweetened chocolate in a large saucepan over medium heat. Cook, stirring constantly, until melted. Remove from heat and mix in the sugar. Beat in the eggs one at a time. Then add vanilla, salt, and baking powder and beat very well. Mix in the flour, then stir in the chocolate chips. Set aside.         To make the filling: In a small bowl, beat the sugar, butter, cream cheese, and flour until light. Then beat in the egg and vanilla.         To assemble: Spread half of the batter into a pan. Spread the cream cheese mixture on top of it. The filling won't completely cover the brownie batter. Then spoon the remaining batter all over all, and spread it to cover. Bake for 30-35 minutes, or until brownies begin to pull away from the sides of the pan. *If desired, you can substitute ¾ cups cocoa powder. Increase the butter to 1¼ cups. After melting the butter, stir it together with the sugar and cocoa. Then proceed with the rest of the recipe as written. Yvette's Bridal Formal

No one in those days worried about their "engagement stastics" or their "presence." Website layouts hadn't yet been standardized. When discussing webpages of the early modern era, it is contractually mandatory to deploy the phrase "it was like the wild west." Let it not be said that I neglected my cliched duty. 

This brings us to one of the ancient legends of terrible web design: Yvette's Bridal Formal. This bridal shop's website stretched the limits of 1990s web design as far as they could go. If you haven't heard of Yvette's Bridal Formal, this screenshot should suffice:

Yvette's website has long outlived the actual store, which permanently closed when a hurricane destroyed the building. But long after the splintered remains of the Florida strip mall that housed Yvette's were hauled to the city dump, enthusiasts and gawkers have kept the website preserved and alive.

Yvette's website is like electronic outsider art. At first, your eyes are overloaded by the jangly, crowded design. (For those who stayed awake in art history class, the phrase "horror vacui" comes to mind.) But after one goes through page after mesmerizing page, a certain internal logic becomes apparent. Yvette's website makes sense on its own terms. After a while, you almost appreciate the aesthetic consistency.

Apparently Yvette's website was the work of the owner's friend or relative (depending on who you ask). As the website got shared among people who had no interest in weddings or prom dresses, it became a bit of a liability for the people trying to actually run a business. Apparently whenever someone called the store to ask if they were really the people behind that wacky website, the clerk would hang up the phone with a cold "Thank you for calling Yvette's Bridal Formal."

Anyway, Yvette's has recipes on its webpage if you look past the alien art, personal manifestos, and conspiracy theories. Most of the recipes look ordinary, especially compared to the rest of the site. Perhaps that is why these brownies wedged themselves into my mind.

Further research indicates that this recipe comes directly from the Land O Lakes website, but that is neither here nor there.

We have previously encountered cheesecake encased in chocolate cake. Even when we got that misguided recipe to work, it wasn't as good as it sounded. But cheesecake and brownies seemed like a better match.

The recipe starts by melting your brownie ingredients in a saucepan. At first I wondered why anyone would do this on a stovetop instead of the microwave. Then I realized that by doing the brownies in a pot, we are saving the mixing bowl for the cheesecake. After all, most people don't have multiple mixers on the countertop. But because sometimes you get lucky at thrift shops, I do! And they came with microwave-safe bowls!

After finishing the brownie batter, it was time to make the cheesecake. Like most cheesecakes, it was a simple matter of siccing an electric mixer on the ingredients. We were soon ready to get this into a pan and bake it. The recipe notes that the top layer of brownie batter "will not entirely cover cream cheese mixture," but I didn't have that problem. Instead, the cheesecake didn't cover the batter in the first place.

Our second round of brownie batter was a bit tricky to coax into place, but it tasted too good to care.

The brownies leveled themselves off in the oven, so my ineptitude with a rubber spatula proved harmless. And the brownies had developed that perfect crisp, shiny, crackly top.

Upon cutting the brownies, we found that the cream cheese looked a little unnervingly aerated. It was almost leavened like bread. I worried that I had ruined a batch of brownies with an intrusion of Dormeyer cheesecake.

When we cut the brownies, my camera decided to actively sabotage me. Every picture I tried to take looked like this.

I haven't had such rotten luck since I tried to take pictures of the marzipan-stuffed brownies. But you can take my word that they were really good. Consider the bad pictures as proof of how good the recipe is. The brownies didn't last long enough for me to try again.

Even though there were already hints that I should make these again, I don't like a recipe that exists solely for a gimmick-- even if said gimmick is cheesecake. I wanted to know if the brownies were any good without the help. We all know that cream cheese icing can fix almost any failure, and these brownies have a baked-in injection of it. So I carefully cut out an edge piece (you will recall that the cream cheese didn't reach the edges), and... the brownies are really good. They're almost as good as the recipe we brought home from Canada. So, we at A Book of Cookrye recommend two things: making this recipe, and exploring the weirdness that is Yvette's Bridal Formal.

Meatball-Mushroom Pie: or, Some things are too good to care how they look

I can't argue with a single thing that goes in this recipe.

Meatball-Mushroom Pie 1 pound ground beef (as lean as possible) ½ teaspoon salt Black pepper to taste 2-4 tbsp cooking oil 1 medium onion, diced 6 tablespoons flour 1 pound fresh mushrooms, sliced up to 3 cups cold water Salt and pepper Biscuit dough (recipe follows) Heat oven to 325°. Make the biscuit dough. Cover it to prevent it drying out (setting a dinner plate on top of the mixing bowl will be good enough), and set it aside. Mix beef with salt and pepper. Form it into small balls. Heat oil in a frying pan (or ovenproof skillet) over medium-high heat. Add the meatballs and toss around in the frying pan until lightly browned and partially cooked. You may need to brown the meatballs into multiple batches. Remove the meatballs from the pan. Add the mushrooms and onion. Season with salt and pepper to taste and cook until done, about ten minutes. Stir in the flour, quickly beating out any lumps. Then gradually add the water until you have a thick gravy (you may not use it all). Taste it, and add more salt and pepper if needed. Remove most of the gravy to a small saucepan, leaving enough to generously coat the mushrooms and onions. This is easier if you pour it by the ladle-full through a strainer or slotted spoon, and then tip whatever it catches back into the frying pan. Return the meatballs to the frying pan and stir well. Add more gravy if needed. If your frying pan is not oven-safe, pour its contents into a baking dish which you have coated with cooking spray. Roll the biscuit dough out to fit the pan. Lay it over the pie. Cut some holes for venting. Bake about 40 minutes, or until golden on top.     Biscuits 1½ cups flour 1 tbsp sugar 2 tsp baking powder ½ tsp salt ¼ cup shortening (or beef fat) ⅓ cup milk 1 egg Mix the dry ingredients together. Cut in the beef fat (or shortening) like a pie crust. Add the milk and egg. Knead 12 times. Set aside until the pie is ready for it. To make biscuits (instead of using the dough as the top crust for this pie), heat oven to 425°. Roll the dough out until it's a half-inch thick. Cut into circles of desired size, and lay on a greased baking sheet. Brush the tops with milk. Bake 10-15 minutes, or until golden. Mrs. J M Donahue; 7049 Greenwood Avenue, Stonehurst Hills, Delaware County, Pennsylvania; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; January 10, 1936; page 11 Biscuit dough adapted from Pillsbury's Meat Cook Book, 1970 via Mid-Century Menu on the Wayback Machine

Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; January 10, 1936; page 11

It's hardly news that nowadays, beef is a priced like a premeditated splurge instead of something you toss into the grocery cart next to the frozen spinach and the Windex. When I flip through older cookbooks (which I sometimes read instead of novels), I am amazed at how much beef people used to put into their food every day.

With that in mind, I saw these magazines at an antique store recently.

I am tempted to say that the magazine cover proves prove that some things never change. But I did some research (by which I mean I talked to my parents) and learned that apparently beef was very cheap until the prices shot up in the 1970s. (Note that the magazine is dated April 1972, just in time for the beginning of grilling season.) My mother said that before then, they used to grill T-bone steaks as casually as I grill pork chops.

So if we were making today's recipe when it was first printed, it would have been a lot more economical than it is now. And so, let's get to our starring ingredient!

This is the reason I haven't made this recipe before.

The recipe says to form the meat "into small balls." With that in mind, I decided to scoop out the meat by the tablespoon. In short order, we had a plate of salted and peppered balls of extravagance.

Because we at A Book of Cookrye are always economizing, I did not put our meatballs into a pan coated with cooking oil. Instead, I cooked them in beef fat. As I have mentioned, the rising price of beef has led me to obsessively save everything I drain from the frying pan. The beef fat in today's recipe represented 20% of the purchase price, and I refuse to send grocery money to the city dump. (Also, it turns out we're nearly out of oil.)

Cheapskatery aside, beef fat seems more period-correct than oil. Yes, cooking oil existed back then. But based on the recipes I've seen, people didn't start their dinners with a splash of oil in a hot frying pan until well after the Depression was over. Maybe people in those days also obsessively saved every cent of grocery money that they drained out of various meat-laden skillets.

Having melted the fat, Mrs. Donahue tells us to "lightly brown" the meatballs. Here I should note that I never make meatballs on the stovetop, instead favoring the more foolproof method of putting them in the oven to mind their own business. This picture shows why.

Pushing meatballs around a frying pan is a skill, and I do not have it. Fortunately, I didn't have to completely cook them at this stage. (I'm assuming "lightly browned" means halfway cooked.) 

Having made an embarrassment of the beef, it was time to remove it from the pan and fail to convince myself that things would get better before the end of the recipe.

 

The plate of half-cooked, malformed meatballs would prove the aesthetic low point of this endeavor. But although things got better from here onward, the pie never turned into a visual masterpiece. 

In case you forgot there was a Depression on when this recipe came out, Mrs. Donahue uses a mountain of mushrooms and onions to stretch a single pound of beef into dinner for five. Granted, her recipe calls for canned mushrooms instead of fresh. But I added about the same amount of mushrooms by weight.

I thought the skillet might prove inadequate, but the mushrooms shrank as they cooked. After a few minutes, I dared to hope that the meatballs might actually fit in the pan. 

At this point, Mrs. Donahue's directions got a bit confusing. The part where we add flour and then water to make a gravy was straightforward enough. But one sentence after telling us to make a gravy with the mushrooms in the pan, she seems to tell us to skim off the excess gravy and then return the mushrooms to the pan. 

I had to reread the recipe several times before I realized I'm supposed to transfer everything from the frying pan to a baking dish. In theory, I'd scoop everything out with a slotted spoon, and then add just enough of the gravy to hold all together. The remaining gravy should stay in the frying pan until serving time, at which point everyone gets to spoon it over their pie.

However, we at A Book of Cookrye really like a single-pan recipe, so Mrs. Donahue's instructions got tactfully ignored.

After adding the flour to everything in the pan, our mushrooms and onions got a lot less photogenic. I'm not very good at flour-lump prevention. But even a perfectly smooth gravy wouldn't have prevented this from looking like dog food.

Mrs. Donahue has us adding three cups of water (that's 7-ish deciliters for our metric friends), which seemed a bit excessive to me. I was almost certain that adding nearly a quart of water would turn our gravy into a runny failure. Therefore, I went with the well-used method of gradually adding water until everything looked right. As expected, we used a lot less than Mrs. Donahue ordered.

And so, it was finally time for our meatballs to get back into the pool.

I had to look up Mrs. Donahue's address. Did she live in the middle of Pennsylvania coal country? Because this seemed perfect for feeding hungry miners. 

Well, you probably aren't surprised to find out that a town with a well-heeled name like "Stonehurst Hills" isn't near any mines. There isn't even a local steel mill. Instead, it's only a short streetcar ride away from Philadelphia.

Don't you hate when dinner looks like someone already vomited it back up?

Mrs. Donahue says to cover the pie with a "rich biscuit dough," but doesn't give a recipe for that. To be fair, this pie came from the newspaper. Printing a biscuit recipe under the main instructions would have used up precious column-inches and crowded other people out of the Recipe Exchange. Also, anyone who hadn't skipped home economics class probably didn't need directions to make biscuits.

I used the biscuit recipe that came from the disastrous cherry-ham cobbler. In keeping with the bovine theme of the recipe, I made the biscuit dough with beef fat. We have already learned that beef fat makes better biscuits than shortening. I then tried to tell myself that the mushrooms under the beefy bread count as a serving of vegetables.

As I laid the dough over the simmering mess in the pan, I thought to myself that canned biscuits might have been an ideal way to reduce the time and bowls that this recipe demands. I then considered that perhaps twenty years after Mrs. Donahue's recipe got printed in the newspaper, she might have modernized it by using canned cream of mushroom soup and canned bread dough.

Setting aside canned foods and returning to the pie at hand, I tried to make a decorative design with the excess dough trimmings. I don't think I succeeded.

Mrs. Donahue has us baking this pie at 425° for "about 40" minutes. I didn't know whether to believe her or not. On the one hand, that seemed like we'd burn the pie. On the other hand, we had a lot of raw beef under the rich biscuit dough. 

I cautiously trusted Mrs. Donahue's baking instructions, but I set the timer to go off ten minutes early anyway. I should have returned to the kitchen earlier still. Fifteen minutes after going into the oven, the pie was offensively well-done.

I should have seen this coming. A lot of our recipes from the Recipe Exchange never quite work as written. Indeed, this isn't even the first time the Recipe Exchange gave us a ruinously high baking temperature. 

Fortunately, only the top of the pie was overcooked. The biscuit dough underneath the half-burnt crust had turned into perfect bread. And the oven didn't harm the meatballs underneath.

I rarely write about the leftovers, but I have to note that while this pie could at best be called "homely" when fresh from the oven, it looked like pig slop when transferred to a storage container.

But the pie was too delicious to care how unsightly it looked. There are some leftovers that you only eat because you know how much grocery money went into making them. This pie was so good that I put the leftovers on the bottom refrigerator shelf and pushed them all the way back so no one thought to look for them.

Because I liked the pie so much, I made it again as soon as the grocery budget permitted. This time, I did a much better job of mixing in the flour without any lumps. Practice may not make perfect, but it makes a successful mushroom mud.

Emboldened by our improvement, I decided to dump the all three cups of water that the recipe demands into the pot all at once. After all, the flour was completely and thoroughly mixed in, which meant it would theoretically have better thickening powers than it did last time. And while that may have been true, we ended up with mushrooms floating in cloudy water. Our "gravy" tasted as diluted as it looked.

On the bright side, we had enough gravy to pour on top of the pie as well as bake in it. Things were going as the recipe intended. 

Incidentally, you can tell that this recipe comes from a time when money was tight. Instead of using up more grocery money making sauce to pour on top of the pie, we are directed to take it out of the pie itself.

I added more seasonings to the, um, "gravy" to make it taste less like water with mushrooms that fell in by accident. Then I added more flour because it was barely thicker than tap water. If this isn't how the recipe's supposed to look, it's got to be pretty darn close.

Incidentally, this is the first time I've ever poured gravy onto biscuits.

This recipe is unapologetically from before the social media era. While more adept hands could have made a prettier pie than I did, Mrs. Donahue clearly didn't care if this pie was good enough for Instagram. I actually like when recipes don't care about being good enough for a Tiktok video. 

Anyway, because I hate posting recipe directions that don't work (and also because I really like this pie), I made it a few weeks later. This time, I gradually added enough water to our befloured mushrooms to make a gravy without ruining it. Since I didn't over-dilute it, the resulting gravy tasted wonderfully of all the mushrooms, beef, and onions that were in it.

I then found a near-instantaneous way of separating out the gravy that is supposed to go on top.

Despite getting the recipe right, the actual pie looks like a dog's dinner before we put a crust on top. But it smelled amazing.

As baking time arrived, I decided to try another possible recipe error. The original directions call for baking the pie at 425° for forty minutes. (For our metric friends, 425°F is a searing 220°C, and forty minutes is 24 hectoseconds.) As previously mentioned, I thought the pie needed such a long and extra-hot baking time to cook the raw beef within. But every time we made it, the pie would be nearly burnt long before forty minutes had elapsed. 

After multiple nearly-burnt pies, I thought that perhaps someone in the Philadelphia Inquirer's typesetting department had accidentally grabbed the wrong number from the type drawer when they got to the baking temperature. (It has happened before.) And so, I reduced the temperature to a more moderate 325° (160° for our Celsius friends).

Our resulting pie was golden and perfect right on schedule. And because it was in the oven for 40 minutes, we knew that the meat was completely cooked by the time it was done.

In closing, this tastes so good. It's hard to argue with beef, onions, and mushrooms, but Mrs. Donahue took a promising group of ingredients and made them even better than expected. This pie is the dinner you want to come home to. I had feared it would be underseasoned and bland, but it came out far better than it needed to. I think that putting the meatballs into the pan while half-raw allowed the mushroom juices to penetrate them as they finished cooking.

However, today's pie involved a lot more mixing bowls most single-pan meals. As another cleanup note, I baked this in a cast-iron skillet so I could do it all in one pan. Unfortunately, the errant splatters of gravy (of which there were many) welded themselves to the iron. Even though I cleaned the pan before it had time to get cold, it was as hard to wash as if I'd let it dry on the countertop for several days. So, you may want to do the stovetop part of this recipe in an ordinary, dishwasher-safe frying pan. You can then transfer the hot mushrooms and meat into a casserole dish that can soak overnight in the sink without rusting.