'Tis the season to shop your way to personal growth

Christmas has seemed laid-back for the past few years, but this year it seems like people really didn't bother. Even the conservative news networks reduced "the war on Christmas" from a major media campaign to a few perfunctory screeds.

Closer to our little outpost, Al CaBone the 12-foot Christmas skeleton did not emerge in the neighbors' yard. Further up the street, someone bought one of those leg lamps from A Christmas Story and put it in the window, but they left it turned off all month. Another house a few blocks over still has its Halloween decorations up. (Naturally, I dropped off a batch of cookies and a note of appreciation.) The few houses with a full arsenal of festivity look really out-of-place. As someone who has long hated the mandatory cheer of Christmas, I am fine with this at surface level. But I wish it wasn't yet another sign of how tired we all are from the relentless onslaught of current events.

We at A Book of Cookrye have avoided any pretense of the holidays. I've been telling people our Christmas tree was tired, so we let it stay in its box and rest this year. (Like other people do with Christmas decorations, I drag that line out every year.) Even though the holiday hasn't managed to force its way through our door, I decided that this is the season for retail therapy.

For those who haven't followed along, I first got into making pizzelles when my Italian ex caught the seven-year itch right on schedule and ran off with someone barely legal. (I still think I deserved a more original breakup than that.) We had been kicking around the idea of making pizzelles together in our last few months. Instead, I bought my own damn iron and made his grandmother's recipe without him.

Making pizzelles for the first time was an emotionally bizarre experience. You know those stories about people who break up with their fiancees at the very last minute, and end up going alone on the honeymoon they had already booked? Imagine a watered-down version of that. I was simultaneously sniffling that "We were supposed to do this together!" and spitefully muttering that his "I never learned to cook" ass will never taste these even if he gets the recipe card for himself. In the midst of these feelings, I somehow also managed to be giddy about playing with my new stovetop toy.

I wasn't planning for pizzelles to turn into a metaphor for a breakup. But a few weeks after I made my first successful batch of them, I brought a batch with me to visit relatives. As everyone marveled at how pretty they were, I let myself take a long bath in self pity that started with "I am feeding these people my grief." Sometimes misery feels good.

After a fair amount of time and a lot of pizzelle batches, I bought the zigzaggy iron. It comes from the same manufacturer as our first one. I partially bought it just to see what pizzelles made on it looked like. But this was also a careful step towards moving on. My first pizzelle iron was the same one my ex's grandmother had. I hadn't set out to get one like hers, even though it felt oddly satisfying at the time. But now, I had one that looked radically different.

But lately, I began to think it's a little weird that my ex's late grandmother picked out my kitchenware. I really like this iron and am not about to sell it. But at the same time, I decided that I should stop making pizzelles for a dead relationship and start making them for myself. This was around the same time I could finally look at pictures of us without painfully wishing that we were still still hanging off of each other and carelessly laughing.

It was time to choose my own damn iron. I didn't want one from the same company as the other two. In fact, I didn't want it to come from a factory anywhere near Cleveland. My ex's family is from there, which means the city no longer has anything for me.*

Unfortunately, winter is a terrible time to buy pizzelle irons, even if you don't care if they were made in Ohio. It turns out most people restrict pizzelle-making to Christmas and Easter, and apparently everyone selling one knows they can charge a hefty Christmas markup. But while windowshopping, I absolutely fell in love with one particular design that I saw a few times. To make it even better, it was made in Pennsylvania and not Ohio. However, the painful prices kept me from buying any of them. Apparently every seller knows that at this time of year, people want a pizzelle iron and they want one now. As much as the prices frustrated me, I was amused to see listings for fifty identical irons, each described as "rare."

 

Purely for the heck of it, I sent one person an offer of half their asking price before falling asleep one night. I drowsed off thinking that they would either reject it or send a counteroffer that I could decide was too high, thus ending the entire business with an unscathed wallet. Instead, I awoke to an email saying that a payment had been automatically withdrawn from my account. At first, I panicked and thought I had been hacked. When the box arrived, I snatched it off the porch before anyone could see that I had sinned.

Pennsylvania represent!

In the privacy of the bedroom, I admired what I had chosen for myself. It is full of stars. Even the flower in the middle has bouquets of stars growing out of it.

The first night when no one was around to ask where it came from, I brought it out of hiding and into the kitchen. Because I couldn't tell whether it was well-seasoned or just full of old gunk, I didn't know whether to try to deep-clean it or not. I went with the option of least effort, and therefore decided it was lovingly seasoned. 

But before I could put the iron over the flames, I had to remove the remains of a very low sales price that was written on it in permanent marker. I was afraid that if I put it on the stove, the ink would permanently burn itself into the metal. If I had only paid $5.49 (plus shipping), I would have let the price remain and then shown it to anyone who got near me while I was using it. But instead, it was an irritating reminder that someone at some point got this for a lot cheaper than I did.

The metal was too porous for rubbing alcohol to remove the ink. Acetone might have worked, but finding where in the garage the can has wandered to often takes an entire afternoon. And so, I borrowed a tiny dab of metal polish and buffed the ink off in a meditative yet frustrating fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, the polished aluminum had such a beautiful shine that the rest of the iron looked dingy and pathetic.

If the makers of Simichrome ever start making skin cream instead of metal polish, the entire beauty industry will go out of business.

Now that the iron was priceless, it was time to make our first pizzelles. But what would our first recipe be? The first thing you make with new cookware is a very important choice, and sets the tone for the future of your kitchen. Because I was moving on from my ex and his family, I ruled out both his grandmother's and Aunt Angie's pizzelles. Instead, I made Minnie's pizzelles because I got that recipe online and have no idea who Minnie is.  And because it's not every day we inaugurate a new waffle iron, I added some beautiful color. (Again, the post-breakup recovery metaphors keep piling up.)

 

 

I've seen a lot of people on YouTube add sprinkles to pizzelles, and they always come out so pretty. After the sprinkles melt and spread with the batter, the pizzelles end up looking like spin art at a carnival.

And so, after such a long emotional journey, I put the new pizzelle iron onto the burner. It needed an unexpectedly long time to heat up. As it got warmer, it smelled hot and musty, like when you turn on the furnace for the first time in the winter.

When the iron was ready, I put a cautiously small spoonful of batter on it. A runty pizzelle is always better than hot batter dripping out the sides. 

Soon enough, the iron emitted a subtly toasty smell that told me its first-ever pizzelle in my hands was done. I lifted the handle to see that our beautiful colorful creation was stuck.

I managed to pry it off intact. This pizzelle felt like a good enough beginning, even if a spatula was needed at the very last step.

The batter hadn't spread as much as I thought it would. Maybe all the grooves in this iron hold more pizzelle dough than the other one? For the next pizzelle, I put a daringly huge mound of batter onto the iron. It stayed completely contained except for one green splatter that popped out.

 

We soon had a small batch of beautiful, colorful pizzelles. I really loved how they all looked tie-dyed.

All of the pizzelles needed a gentle assist from the spatula to come off, but I figured that was because of the sprinkles and therefore didn't worry. But in full disclosure, the melted sprinkles left a hard residue that would not scrub off. I ended up dissolving them in hot water like I do any other melted candy on cookware.

Those melted sprinkles may look like you could pop them off with your fingernail, but that was not the case.

Now, a lot of pizzelle iron instructions have dire warnings to never, ever clean them with water. This includes the stovetop ones even though they have no wiring to ruin. I imagine this is because water gets into the hinges and stays there long enough to rust them. To prevent this, I put the empty iron back on the stove until the steam stopped, and then another 2 minutes for good measure.

But heating a waffle iron is a waste of gas if you don't put something on it. I decided to return to the first recipe pizzelle recipe I ever made, because sometimes you need to go back to where you started. Yes, this meant making my ex's grandmother's pizzelles on my new Pennsylvanian iron. Again, "pizzelles as a post-breakup metaphor" is too damn perfect. Every recovery has a few relapses on the way. (Also, it's a good recipe.)

 

I thought this iron would make adorable mini-pizzelles. It took a few tries to get the dough placement right, but they were ever-so-cute when I succeeded. Again, the pizzelles didn't free-fall out of the iron like the others. This surprised me, because this recipe has proven to be the easiest one that never gives any problems. But I figured that the iron would improve with use.

Of course, it seemed rude to make my ex's grandmother's recipe while rejecting her iron. (Well, not her iron specifically, but the same model.) We have multiple stove burners, meaning that theoretically, this is possible.

Fante's pizzelle guide helped me believe this is possible. They write:

"Consider using two different irons running simultaneously. Borrow one from a friend or relative and prepare both batches ahead. Then, take the phone off the hook, kick off your shoes, and sit down. It takes a lot of coordination and considerable effort to run two different irons at once, but for those challenged for time it can be the best way to get a job done, especially around holiday season."

I'll be honest, I didn't do very well with this. But I can see how with practice, I might become someone who can.

In full disclosure, we had a lot of failures that went to the municipal hereafter.

 

At this point, I had to acknowledge that our new iron had a few problems. Most obviously, one handle was bent. Even though the seller had clearly shown this in their photos, I somehow didn't notice until I had used the iron multiple times.

On closer examination (the kind that is only possible when you're standing over the stove and staring at a waffle iron for a long time), I noticed that one of the hinge-pegs was slowly worming its way to freedom. I tried to hammer-tap it back, and it didn't move.

And so, I took the iron to a local machining shop to see what might be done for it. One of the men took it out of my hands and carried it away. I heard some loud clanging from the back of the shop that sounded just like a medieval movie with a blacksmith scene.  He soon brought it back with a straightened handle and a perfectly reset hinge. (Yet again, the post-breakup parallels keep coming. We couldn't do it alone and had to reach out for help.) They didn't charge me for these highly-skilled two minutes. I was prepared for such generosity and handed them a bag of pizzelles.

Of course, I had to re-inaugurate the iron after getting it fixed. Things seemed to go all right, but the pizzelles kept sticking. I then tried something I read on Fante's website. They tell you to season the iron by brushing it with shortening while it's still cold, and then putting it on the stove and turning it every minute or so as it gets hot. When I did this, I could thwack the back of the iron with a spatula and the pizzelles would slowly fall out. This was an improvement over using a spatula to peel them off as if I was pulling the skin off a fish. But with great reluctance, I had to accept that the iron needed to be stripped.

If you looked closely, you could see colonies of cinders in the iron's various cavities and grooves. I'm not surprised our pizzelles kept sticking. I'm surprised we ever managed to get them off.

Unfortunately, our iron is made of aluminum. This means that oven cleaner, which usually is a great choice for ancient cinders, would destroy it. Also, a brass brush would scratch it, and a plastic brush was too soft. I looked up guides for cleaning burnt waffle irons, but everything I found was for people cleaning up a single burnt mistake, not several decades of carbon. 

I took my problem to some of my friends who think a broken engine is a fun project, and was introduced to something called "aircraft remover." This stuff so dangerous that my friends required me to read all the warnings and instructions out loud before permitting me to use it. One person said she got a drop of aircraft remover onto a plastic flashlight. The aircraft remover melted a hole in it. 

I donned some protective gear (as we learned during the worst of the pandemic, face shields are surprisingly cheap), took the pizzelle iron outdoors, and applied the solvent as directed. Whenever the breeze took a pause, even for a few seconds, the fumes coming off of it made me dizzy. But the aircraft remover melted our problems away after three 45-minute soakings.

See that gelatinous stuff on the iron? That is aircraft remover. Don't use it unless all else has failed.

Although I got all the small clumps of charcoal out of the iron, I didn't get the shiny, new-looking aluminum I hoped for. I thought about taking it to an engine shop. If anyone knows about getting ancient cinders out of delicate metal without damaging it, it's an engine shop with a few semi-derelict classic cars parked out front. But before finding a mechanic willing to work on a waffle iron, I decided to test it and see if it was clean enough to release the pizzelles. And happily, it was.

Again, the post-breakup parallels keep piling up. I had to use dangerous and drastic measures to dislodge the stubborn gunk. And even then, some stains remained that will never come out.

 

When I made the first post-aircraft-remover batch of pizzelles, I deliberately put a massive glob of dough on the iron. I wanted it to go all the way to the edges and spill down the sides, absorbing any chemical residue that remained after my post-solvent rinsing. I didn't intend to also burn the sacrificial pizzelle, but (again) the metaphor is perfect. This burnt, probably toxic waffle is the deepest step of post-breakup grief. It is the last stop before you start to feel better. And it absorbs toxicity and takes it away.

It went to the trash, but for a good cause.

But now, the iron is fully repaired, ineptly cleaned, and happily baking away! It releases pizzelles and lets them freely fall out. Here is the first batch from after its drastic cleaning. As you can see, somebody got impatient and ate half of one before taking a picture.

As much as I love these starry pizzelles, I have to admit that you can't really appreciate the design unless the light is right. Otherwise, the stars just look like bumps. Again, we have yet more post-breakup parallels. Other people can't always see the beauty of personal growth unless they're looking at you under the right conditions.

And so, in closing, we wish everyone a happy holiday that brings at least a partial recovery from whatever has hit you this year. I hesitate to say "and a happy new year" because a rough time is coming after inauguration day. Instead, we will end with "Best wishes."

*Side note: Cleveland has a surprisingly large Italian community. My first pizzelle iron even had an Ohio return address on the box. Two of the biggest stateside manufacturers of Italian-specific cookware (Villa Ware and Vitantonio) were based there before every factory in America got abandoned and then converted into upscale lofts. It is speculated that pizzelles are bigger among Italian-Americans than still-in-Italy Italians because the Ohio metalworking industry made it easier for the people living there to start making waffle irons. ↪