Wilted Lettuce: or, When the old times come back, the old recipes come with them

Are your salads getting monotonous? Do you need a "pleasant variation from the day's usual tricks?" Are you concerned about budget cuts to food safety monitoring and therefore want to ensure that any stowaway microbes don't get past your stovetop?

Wilted Lettuce 3 hard cooked eggs, sliced 1 large head lettuce ½ teaspoon salt (or more to suit taste) 1 teaspoon sugar 6 slices bacon, cut into small (half-inch ish) pieces 2 tbsp vinegar Wash the lettuce thoroughly, drain it, and chop it into pieces slightly larger than bite size. In a very large frying pan, cook the bacon until it is crisp and the drippings have come out of it. Reduce heat to medium-low. Add the vinegar, then add the lettuce and eggs. Cook until the lettuce is tender but still bright green.  Serve at once. The leftovers aren't as good as when it's fresh, so make only as much as everyone will eat the first time. We recommend serving with a crusty bread to soak up the juices. Source: Chicago Daily Tribune; April 17, 1936

Today, we are opening my great-grandmother's recipe binder and trying one of her newspaper clippings. I ran into problems at the first line of the ingredient list. An unfortunately-placed ink smudge made it impossible to read amount of boiled eggs. I couldn't tell if it called for six or eight.

I emailed the Chicago Public Library, asking if they could track this recipe down and find a more legible copy. A reply arrived within a few hours: "Today is your lucky day, this recipe happened to be in the Chicago Tribune, whose database we can pretty easily search. The recipe is attached. It looks like 3 is the number of eggs."

Join or donate to your local Friends of the Public Library, everybody!

 

At first I wondered what kind of lettuce I should put in this. Today, we mostly default to iceberg, but how common was it in 1936? Before I let myself get caught up in period-correct salad greens, I checked the prices. Iceberg lettuce suddenly seemed perfect.

Back at the house, the lettuce had to wait until I had boiled the eggs. Since I never remember how to do that, I have to look up Delia Smith's guide every single time. I didn't think to look if she has a guide for neatly slicing them elsewhere on her site. But if you look past my inept knifework, you can see that these came out of the pot at the perfect time. Unfortunately, they also stank up the kitchen.

I have previously mentioned my theory that the weirder and wackier flavors of yesteryear made more sense when everyone smoked, whether they lit their own or inhaled a pack a week secondhand. In a similar vein, I would like to and speculate that people didn't mind adding boiled eggs to everything because you couldn't smell them over the omnipresent stale smoke. Price of eggs notwithstanding, it seems like people these days don't "volumize" casseroles with chopped boiled eggs as often as we did when sofas were incomplete without an ashtray balanced on the armrest.

After getting the eggs ready, our recipe conveniently has us cover the faintly sulfurous smell with bacon. This is one of those recipes where cheap bacon (the kind that's mostly fat) might actually be the better choice. I don't think the recipe necessarily wanted to add bacon meat much as harvest the drippings for lettuce-wilting.

This salad can torture everyone in the next room of the house. First, they get the tantalizing scent of sizzling bacon. Then, all at once, they get the bitter smell of hot lettuce. I wonder if the people in a certain Chicago apartment were leery whenever they smelled bacon coming from my great-grandmother's stove. Sometimes you get bacon and waffles, other times you get wilted lettuce.

Speaking of title ingredients, we were ready to wilt our lettuce! We are told to "wash lettuce, drain, and chop." It is surprisingly hard to get all the water out of lettuce after you've washed it. I didn't want to go out and buy a salad spinner, but I definitely wanted to borrow one.

I'm making one-third of the recipe today, and the biggest skillet was barely up to it. Did everyone in Chicago have paella pans?

Just like fresh spinach, the lettuce shrank a lot. This may be why people don't cook lettuce very often. But on the other hand, it's a lot easier to eat your greens when you can compress them into a small bowl.

 

Things were going so well with this recipe until I added the egg after the lettuce was done. While I was stirring everything long enough to warm up the egg, the lettuce lost its bright green color. It took on the dull gray look that says "You're not leaving this table until you finish your vegetables."

That bowl contains a third of a head of lettuce. That's, like, two or three wedge salads. Lettuce shrinks a lot on the stove.

Did you know iceberg lettuce has a flavor? Well, after shrinking it down to a seventh of its original size, its flavor is concentrated. The bitter lettuce (not overcooked, just its actual taste), salty bacon, vinegar, and boiled eggs went together better than I thought. But you have to be in the mood for pungency before you think this is "a pleasant variation from the day's usual tricks." As I said earlier, I can't help wondering if the flavor of this made more sense when life had a background of cigarettes and higher liquor sales.

Purely for the heck of it, I sent a picture of this to Marcus, longtime friend who definitely isn't traumatized from trying various recipes on the blog. He did not seem to regret being too far away to drop by and share the experience.

 

Because I still had two-thirds of a lettuce and another boiled egg in the refrigerator. I soon made a second wilted salad. This time, I cut up the bacon before I cooked it instead of after. As we learned from the cream onion pie, the bacon gets crispier and the fat renders off better. I also didn't have to pause mid-recipe for a chopping break. (As a food safety note, chop your lettuce and get it off the cutting board BEFORE cutting up the bacon. That way, you don't get raw-meat germs in the greens.)

This time, I added the boiled eggs just as everything was heating up. The lettuce stayed green this time, but I don't think it made a dramatic visual difference. There's really no way to make iceberg lettuce look pretty after you've cooked it.

This recipe is neither disgusting, nor is it a classic waiting for rediscovery. You have to be in the mood for some well-placed bitter flavors before you can like it. But if you're like me and always keep a jar of sauerkraut on hand, you might not be disappointed. Some of my friends suggested I try this with kale instead of lettuce, so I'm going to keep an eye on the clearance produce. 

But I'm not going to cross out the wilted lettuce in my reprinted copy of the book. This recipe may have regained a place in our kitchens thanks to CDC budget cuts. It might be wise to start cooking all our vegetables again-- or at least briefly heating them to get rid of any microscopic stowaways. And of course, this salad a good way to salvage any salad greens that aren't quite as fresh as they were when you bought them.

Salt-And-Vinegar Hot Potato Salad: or, Better than I knew I could wish it to be

I can't think of a sound argument against potatoes and bacon.

Salt And Vinegar Hot Potato Salad 4 cups sliced new potatoes 6 strips bacon, chopped 1 tbsp flour ¼ cup vinegar 1½ tsp salt ½ tsp pepper ½ cup water 1 sliced green onion* Boil the potatoes in salted water until tender. Meanwhile, fry the bacon until crisp in a large pan. Stir in the flour and blend well. Add the vinegar, salt, pepper, water, and the (thinly sliced) white part of the green onion. Cook for 5 minutes over medium heat. Drain and add the potatoes. Gently mix. Stir in the rest of the green onion just before serving. If you cook the potatoes ahead of time, you can reheat them with the sauce in the top of a double boiler (or the microwave, of course!). *the original recipe calls for one tablespoon sliced green onions, but who wants to cram those into a tiny measuring spoon? Chicago Tribune, undated (1930s or 1940s?)

This recipe comes from my great-grandmother's binder. She pasted two hot potato salads onto the same page, but this one starts with bacon.

First off, I love that picture and want a copy of it to hang in the kitchen. It goes past strange and straight to art. I almost want to say it's "geometric" and "art-deco inspired," but maybe I'm just a bit bedazzled from seeing hot dogs and sandwich bread arranged with so much intentionality. This puts our modern-day party trays to shame. 

Getting down to the salad, I love how the writers let us economically dodge the cost of hot dog buns. Instead, we have a decorative, aesthetically pleasing arrangement of sandwich bread and sausage. (Well, if you consider hot dogs to be sausage...) I supposed you're supposed to take a piece of bread and then plonk a wiener on top of it?

If you add a few condiments, it looks like a very nice one-tray meal. But I have a hard time imagining following the newspaper's advice to serve this at a "picnic supper" unless I packed a chafing dish.

Getting down to spuds, I decided to do everything involving a cutting board before I turned on the stove. I don't always manage that kind of advance planning, so it's nice when I think of it. Aside from sliced potatoes, the recipe calls for "one tablespoon sliced green onions, including tops." I briefly tried measuring them out properly, but I can't reconcile green onions and level tablespoons.

Moving down the ingredient list, we're using a lot of bacon today. The newspaper may have named this "hot potato salad," but I think the bacon should have also gotten title billing.

I've never seen bacon look so bad. Like, we all know where meat comes from. But this mess looked more like a slimy heap of dead animal than most of the meat that passes through the kitchen, including the occasional recognizable organs.

As we learned from The Philadelphia Inquirer, chopping the bacon before cooking allows all the grease melts off better. 

I think that the recipe was more interested in harvesting the fat that melted off the bacon than the bacon itself. A lot of recipes call for bacon fat without using the bacon itself, but this one is perfect for those of us who no longer keep bacon grease jar next to the stove. 

In just a minute or two, the meat itself shrank to brown confetti, but the grease remained in abundance.

For some reason, the flour made the grease fizz.

We were now ready to add everything else to the pan except the potatoes, which were still boiling in the saucepan next door. As a recipe note, I omitted the tablespoon of sugar in the recipe. I don't know what it's supposed to do, but I don't like adding adding sugar to things that aren't sweet. Every time I make sloppy joes, I omit the brown sugar.

It kind of looks like cheese dip, doesn't it? After telling us to add the green onions at this point, the recipe suggests waiting until the end. If you're trying this at home (and if you like salt-and-vinegar chips you should), wait til you take the pan off the stove to add the green onions. They soon withered to nothing. But in this moment, everything looked really nice.

I thought the sauce was far too drippy at first, but after 5 minutes it became nice and creamy. Also, you'll notice that the green onions have all but vanished. Again, I should have taken the recipe writers' hint to ignore their own instructions. But at this point, only one thing remained: add the potatoes!

I didn't serve this with rye bread because do we really need carbs with a side of carbs? While we're on the subject, I like that they don't suggest serving it with toasted rye bread. For one thing, toasters were still expensive. Also, since (I'm guessing) the depression was on, you didn't have to worry about uneaten toast going stale. Instead, you could just put the extra bread back into the breadbox.

The newspaper suggests serving this with frankfurters. I didn't think that was necessary when I was getting groceries. But as I served this, I couldn't help thinking "This would be great with hot dogs..." 

 

I shouldn't have been surprised this was so good. This was salt and vinegar bliss. If you like salt and vinegar chips, you owe it to yourself. But in full disclosure, the salad didn't reheat very well. The leftovers weren't bad, but they lost their zest after a night in the refrigerator. 

As a postscript, I have to note a fun variation I made on this. You see, others in the house had bought a frozen pizza a while ago and never bothered to eat it. As I watched it slowly get freezer-burnt in its own box, I thought to myself "I wonder if this is any good with pepperoni grease instead of bacon drippings..."

Things soon looked like someone's first-ever shift in a diner kitchen. Everything in the pan thickened up exactly as it should have, but it didn't look very good.

I never thought pepperoni would be almost too hot to handle. Rendering off the pepperoni grease and then cooking the meat in its own fat released a capsaicin payload I didn't know pepperoni had. Until today, I never knew pepperoni contained actual peppers. I always thought it was salt and nitrates. 

Even though I omitted the salt, this was a lot saltier than I wanted it to be. The pepperoni-potato salad was fun in theory, but it just wasn't that great in practice. 

I want to say this is a nice recipe for hot weather since you don't turn on the oven. However, you do end up standing over two stove burners, one of which is steaming at you and the other is full of spattering grease. But even as I write this, I didn't regret purchasing enough spuds and bacon to make it again.

Soft Molasses Cookies: or, Delicious and exquisite

Every word in the recipe title made me want these cookies more.

Soft Molasses Cookies 1 cup shortening 1 cup molasses 1 tbsp. vinegar ½ level tsp. baking powder 1 level tsp. salt ½ tsp. cloves or allspice 1 cup sugar 1 egg 5 tbsp. cold coffee or water 3 cups flour 1 tsp. soda 1 tsp. ginger Heat oven to 350°. Have greased or paper-lined baking sheets ready. Beat the shortening in a large bowl until very soft and creamy. Add the sugar gradually, then cream well. Add the egg and beat until light. Then mix in the molasses, vinegar and coffee. Mix and sift all the dry ingredients into the liquid. Add more flour if necessary to make a very soft dough that pulls away from the side of the bowl when you stir it. Bake until darkened around the edges, about 15 minutes. Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

I know I've said this before, but I really love molasses. I even pour it right onto waffles. I noticed this recipe the first time I flipped through my copy of this book, and it has held my attention ever since.  

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933

The recipe starts with shortening and sugar. Because shortening seems like an act of sacrilege against nature, I was going to use butter instead. But as some lovely commenters pointed out in an earlier recipe, shortening has a higher melting point, which affects how the cookies spread. So I stuck with the recipe. Hopefully using shortening means the cookies don't have as much of a chance to melt into dough puddles before they start setting up.

I never planned to get good at dividing an egg in half, but it has proven a wonderful way to economize. Even if we weren't trying to keep the grocery budget well-trimmed, splitting eggs lets me try a new cookie recipe without committing to make, like, six dozen of them. 

At this point, the recipe calls for "cold coffee or water." I imagine that a lot of people would have simply poured in the last of the coffee from earlier that day. But since no one in the house drinks coffee, we don't have a coffee pot stationed on the countertop, much less one with a bit of coffee sitting in the bottom of it and waiting for a rinse. So, I made an iced coffee to Book of Cookrye standards just to save out this tiny little splash of it.

Soon it was time to bring on the molasses. Look at this tar-slick of exquisite flavor!

My faith in the recipe wavered as I started stirring and shortening curdled in the molasses. As we have learned, one should be wary when your cookie dough curdles.

I put the sticky mess aside to deal with the dry ingredients. For a recipe that doesn't mention spices in the title, Mrs. Mary Martensen uses a lot of them. These are measured exactly as written-- I didn't even do "heaping" or "generous" teaspoons. With that in mind, the spices covered up a lot of the flour, didn't they?

We ended up with a really thick batter than a dough, but I decided to bake it anyway. As I told myself at the time, You don't know how a recipe is supposed to go until you make it.

Although I've always had good results from this book, I've had very hit-or-miss results with my cookies. They always seem to go flat without extra flour. So, I carefully put a single dough plop onto the pan. I wanted to make sure things were going right. Baking cookies one at a time often feels like a waste of oven heat, but it prevents throwing out panfuls of failure.

After our first cookie melted into a puddle and cooled into a brown rock, I got out the bowl and added more flour until the dough started pulling away from the sides as I stirred. That seemed like a favorable sign, so I baked some more cookies just to see how our dough was feeling. And wouldn't you know it, they came out just right!

Based on how the cookies came out, the extra flour made the dough exactly how it should be. It was really sticky, but barely firm enough to shape into balls with my hands if I wanted the cookies to look neater. But I don't think shaping the cookies into nice balls is worth the bother. They come out the same as if you drop them from a spoon, just a little more wrinkly on top. But even if you put the spoon-dropped and the hand-shaped cookies side by side, it's hard to tell the difference.

As is often the case with anything gingerbread-adjacent, these cookies needed to ripen overnight before they tasted good. They were bland when they came out of the oven, but the spice flavor was a lot stronger after a full night of rest. The coffee added a nice undertone to the flavor, but they would still be delicious without it. And they had a perfect soft texture. They also stayed soft for several days. This tells me that they're perfect to keep on hand. Instead of immediately going stale, they'll be a lovely, reassuring presence in the kitchen.

 

Do not make the apricot brandypud!

Don't try this at home.

When last we saw the raisin butterscotch pudding, some lovely people suggested that we try using dried apricots, and also adding brandy to the sauce. Which sounds good enough to make, but I didn't think my method through very well.

My thought process was quite simple: Replace some of the water that you pour over the batter with brandy. As it happens, this bottle of conveniently flavor-matched apricot brandy happened to be in the cabinet. I don't know how long it's been there, but it hasn't been uncapped since the last time I made a honey fruit pie.

Yes, it is empty now. And yes, that is foreshadowing.

Let's start with the things that that went right. Our chopped apricots looked unexpectedly pretty when I dropped them onto the batter. Incidentally, it turns out that a six-ounce package of dried apricots yields about the ⅔ cup of raisins that the original recipe calls for.

After I mixed the apricots in, I couldn't thinking this looks like one of those salad recipes that ends with the direction "Stir in the marshmallows and refrigerate until dissolved."

As we noted when we made this as written, this recipe goes by really fast. This means we wasted very little time getting to the fire hazards. You see, we had about a half-pint of brandy left in the bottle. (For our metric friends, that's a scant quarter-liter.) Partially to eliminate a shelf-sitting bottle and partially as a nod to the fact that "the relatives from Chicago" were reportedly the very schnockered type of Irish, I poured all of the brandy into the sauce. Also, I had just read a few articles about "tipsy cake" and thought the name was too whimsical to pass up.

Here I had my first warning thoughts about what was going on. The recipe calls for hot water, and putting a lot of liquor in the microwave didn't seem wise. I heated the heavily brandied water on the stove instead, where the vapors had plenty of room to dissipate. I may have been a worrywart, but our microwave remains undamaged. Also, I took this opportunity to put the lemon rind in the pot to better draw its flavor. This was one of the last happy moments before I realized what danger I had just stirred my way into.

After getting the brandy-water into the cake pan, things looked almost normal. I closed the oven, set the timer, and was really excited about our boozy adventure for a few very short minutes. Then I had an awful realization: A lot of the alcohol was going to cook out of this, and the flammable vapors in the oven had nowhere to dissipate to. 

I tried to tell myself that I've made a lot of rum cakes without incident, but none of those involve putting a half-pint of liquor in a hot oven. Before long, I had terrible visions of the alcohol vapors making their way to the red-hot baking coil, leading to something like this:

And so, thanking every available god that no one else was in the house, I kept going to the oven and vigorously flapping the door every few minutes to dispel the fumes. The first time I did that, I got ever-so-slightly dizzy from inhaling so much alcohol. (Or maybe I was imagining that in my worried state of mind.) I don't know if this would have been just fine and I was scaring myself for nothing. But I would like to proudly point out that at the end of the recipe, the oven remained unexploded.

Amid all the angst, the brandied sauce filtered down to the bottom of the pan, just as the non-alcoholic version does. But then it erupted into little bubbling geysers as the baking time wore on. It left the cake perforated with tunnels and holes. 

After most of the sauce boiled away, what remained reminded me of of what sits on a pineapple upside-down cake after you flip it out of the pan.

I tried some of this as soon as it cooled off. It was like doing shots with dessert. Seriously, the alcohol nearly burned. The flavors almost fit together, but this was the first time I've wanted a chaser after a cake.

But with that said, it occurred to me that perhaps some whipped cream was just what this needed. These days, I keep a pint of cream on hand because a lot of recipes call for the occasional splash or spoonful. It took nearly no time at all to make this happen:

I hate how good this was. Like, you could serve it at a wedding. I don't know what sort of magic happened, but the whipped cream on top made united everything below it. I never would have expected such ecstasy from a hasty recipe that had threatened to blow up the kitchen. It's delicious. It is exquisite. I would actually pay for it at restaurants.

And so, in conclusion, I don't think anyone should make this. (You'll note that I didn't even put a recipe on top because I care about all of you.) Just because you have a fire extinguisher in your kitchen doesn't mean you should use it.

But the fault here is with how I did this, not with the idea of an apricot-brandy pudding cake. And the flavor combination is just so good. I'm already thinking about how to make it in ways that don't involve nearly blowing up the kitchen. Perhaps make the apricots-and-brandy sauce on the stove and serve it with the cake?

Applesauce Meringue: Low effort, and not that bad

Ever want to make dessert without putting in the effort?

Applesauce Meringue 2 eggs, separated 2 cups applesauce Sugar to taste 3 tbsp powdered sugar (for meringue) Heat oven to 350°. Grease a small baking dish. (Like, a really small one. I used a round pan about 5 inches across.) Beat the egg yolks in a medium or large mixing bowl. Mix in the applesauce, and add sugar to taste. Pour into the baking dish and bake 15 minutes. When the baking time is almost over, beat the egg whites until frothy. Gradually add the powdered sugar, beating all the time. Then continue beating until the mixture forms stiff peaks. After the applesauce has baked 15 minutes, remove it from the oven and carefully spread the meringue on top. Bake for another 15 minutes, then allow to cool completely. Undated newspaper clipping, Chicago area (probably 1930s or 1940s)

Today we are revisiting my great-grandmother's cooking notebook. I get the impression that this recipe was made for those days when you feel fundamentally done with cooking but still want dessert. It also looks perfect for those who are short on both money and time (and keep in mind this was probably printed in the 1930s). 

 

That's barely legible, isn't it? It was a little better in person, if not by very much. But if we really mess with color filters, we can make it almost easy to read.

And so, we begin by putting egg yolks into applesauce. Of course, egg yolks are a pretty standard way to thicken custards. But I almost got the impression that we're only adding them here because we already cracked the egg whites for the meringue. After all, it's hard to justify throwing out eggs in any era.

The recipe says to add two cups of "sweetened applesauce." I don't know if they meant to purchase sweetened applesauce, or if they were implying to add your own sugar without wasting any column-inches on extra words. Our applesauce was factory-sweetened but a bit bland, so I stirred in about two tablespoons of sugar to help it along.

If this recipe didn't involve making a meringue, I would have called this a Hump-Day Quickie. We had it in a baking dish only three minutes after our egg yolks landed in the mixing bowl. 

After the prescribed fifteen minutes, our apple custard hadn't set. I would have baked it longer, but I don't know if two egg yolks were up to the task of setting an entire pint of applesauce. They might only serve to make the dessert "richer" in some undefined way. So I got the meringue on top of it as best I could without mixing the two together. I didn't have an aesthetic triumph, but it's kind of silly to get hung up on presentation when the recipe was supposed to be simple.

Really, the meringue is the only part of this recipe that takes more than a minute. But hand-cranked eggbeaters had already gotten cheap by the time this recipe was printed. So even if you couldn't afford the monthly payment on an electric mixer (or if the electricity in your city was either unreliable or absent), this wasn't an hourlong ordeal with a whisk. And I can't imagine the newspaper's recipe writers having someone hand-whisk a meringue only to spread it on applesauce.

Of course, I didn't turn on the oven just for this little bowl. But that's another advantage of the recipe: if you're baking your dinner, you can easily find room on the rack for dessert. Of course, as often happens when I economize on oven heat, the tiny pan took longer to bake than everything else. I tried and halfway succeeded to convince myself that it's not too horrible a waste of heat if I simply leave the oven on for a few minutes after dinner is ready.

The meringue puffed up beautifully in the oven. At first I was absolutely delighted, then I realized that every time they rise like that, they always fall back down. But for a short half-minute, our dessert had a golden, airy dome on top.

Sure enough, the meringue deflated only a few minutes after it left the oven. Even though I made sure it made contact with the pan all the way around the side, it ripped off and shrank away. I could have gotten dismayed about this, but instead I told myself that 1: this is supposed to be "a simple dessert" (their words) and 2: there is no point in fretting over barely-modified applesauce.

After our simple dessert had cooled off, I put it in the refrigerator. I can't imagine anyone liking warm applesauce for dessert.

I almost want to say this is bad, but it's more like... exactly what you think it is. I was going to throw it out, but then I was like "Hmm... I actually kinda like it." And even though applesauce never excites me, this was really nice with lunch on a hot day. I wouldn't go out of my way to make it again, but I wouldn't mind sliding it into the oven if I was already baking something.