The Whiskey Thing

Whiskey is the only legible word in this recipe. 

Found in a copy of The Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928

 

The Whiskey thing 1 tbsp (or one ¼-oz envelope) unflavored gelatin ½ cup cold water 1 dozen ladyfingers (or stale cake cut into narrow slices) 6 eggs, separated* 1 cup sugar, divided in half 2 or 3 tsp vanilla A truly unholy amount of whiskey In a very small bowl, sprinkle the gelatin in cold water. Put this in a larger bowl of hot water and let sit for three to five minutes. (Or, skip the bowl-in-a-bowl business. Soak the gelatin and then microwave it, three or four seconds at a time, until it melts.) While the gelatin is soaking, split ladyfingers open and thoroughly soak them in whiskey. Grease a loaf pan and put them around the edges. (If you don't want to try to unmold this, it'd look very nice in a clear glass pan.) Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form. Then gradually add ½ cup of sugar, beating constantly. Add the vanilla, and continue beating while you slowly pour in the gelatin, or add it one spoonful at a time. Put this into the pan, cover tightly, and refrigerate for at least 8 hours. Just before serving, make the sauce: Beat the egg yolks and remaining ½ cup sugar in the top of a double boiler. Add whiskey to taste and place over boiling water. Cook until thickened, stirring constantly. (We recommend stirring it with a rubber spatula.) *Refrigerate the yolks immediately after separating the eggs, since you won't be using them for a while. If raw eggs are a concern for you, use pasteurized-in-the-shell eggs. Found in a copy of The Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928

This recipe was handwritten in my college library's copy of The Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book. It was printed in 1928, but this particular book had recipe clippings from right after Repeal* tucked between the pages.

Setting aside Prohibition and history, I think I may have inadvertently landed on an example of an iconic type of southern dessert: the severely alcoholic cake. Apparently certain genteel ladies' associations prefer to get drunk off of dessert (perhaps because doing shots is unladylike?). It seems like every novel set in the American south has at least one old lady whose boozy cake sent someone to detox. Even if alcoholic food not a plot point, southern novelists will often add some "local color" by having a character offhandedly mention that somebody was banned from bringing her signature sherry torte to the Christmas benefit dinner after the year someone else's nephew got into an argument with the chickens and then went headfirst onto a fencepost.

Speculation aside, I've been semi-sporadically staring at this recipe ever since I first scanned it from my college library's copy of The Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book. It always looked like an intimidating assembly project, so I never dared make it.

But recently, our refrigerator clogged itself with frost. The fix was easy: unplug it for a day and let its internals melt. Of course, that meant we had to put all the food somewhere. Fortunately, we have a chest freezer that has slowly become a resting place for leftovers I feel bad about throwing out but refuse to eat after everyone else loses interest. I also borrowed ice chests from Mom and other people.

As a brief warning to anyone with the same problem, your refrigerator will take longer than you think to re-chill itself. I planned to plug it in before bed and reload it when I awoke, but it took a lot longer. You'll need to re-ice your coolers more times than you think before you can transfer everything back.

As I returned our eggs and green onions to their rightful place, I decided that this was the perfect time to have a refrigerator party! And what better way to celebrate the return of the refrigerator than by making something that would be a health hazard without it?

The recipe starts off with ladyfingers, which are really hard to get nowadays. A lot of older dessert recipes begin with "Soak one package of ladyfingers in syrup/juice/wine/etc," but apparently all of those things went out of style while none of us were looking. I used to be able to get ladyfingers on the cookie aisle, these days it's a toss-up whether I can get them from an actual bakery. I thought about making them myself from scratch, but we conveniently had a lot of Mrs. Mary Martensen's sour cream cake going stale on the counter.

I thought this particular cake was perfect for soaking in liquor. It had a nice flavor on its own. And it had that firm, slightly springy texture that made it seem perfect for getting sopping wet. Things got a bit crumbly while I sliced, but the cake would soon be too drunk to care.

This brings us to the whiskey. I got this for being in my brother's wedding party, and then I skipped his wedding twice. (He got married in 2020, and had another ceremony the next year when it was safe-ish to actually invite people). Even for his second wedding when we all had the vaccine, I was leery of going through an airport. So instead of wrangling all the relatives into a photogenic row, he sent me a bottle of alcohol in return for staying at the house.

Any readers who like whiskey, let me know: Did my brother have good taste?

I haven't opened this bottle until today. I'm not saving it for a special occasion; I just lost interest in alcohol a long time ago. For all I know, I'll use the rest of the whiskey as lighter fluid the next time someone in the house is daft enough to try grilling over a wood fire instead of propane.

Anyway, we got the cake absolutely soaked. Thinking of Fanny Cradock making a trifle, I pressed lightly on the cake to feel for dry spots, and poured more whiskey wherever it was needed.

Meanwhile, our gelatin was soaking in water. Our recipe writer tells us to then put the bowl into a larger bowl of hot water to melt it. But we at A Book of Cookrye live in the modern era, when we can microwave our gelatin instead. It was ready in four seconds.

It looks like plain water, but it is so much more.

Logically, we needed to line our mold with cake. I first coated it with cooking spray in the hopes that I could unmold our masterpiece intact, but I wasn't too worried about failure. Even if this creation ripped apart on its way out of the bowl, I still could serve it "attractively heaped in bowls" (to quote a lot of recipes from the time).

Purely out of curiosity, I tried a piece of cake as I was arranging it into the bowl and found that I might have overdone it with the whiskey. I am no stranger to boozy desserts, but this is the first time a cake has ever burned.

Note that we even found a place for the crumbs because we do not waste cake.

Setting aside our intoxicating cake, it was time to make the meringue. 

I've never mixed gelatin and egg whites like this, but dumping it all in at once seemed like it would end badly. So, I slowly dribbled the gelatin in while the mixer ran. Naturally, the egg whites and lukewarm hooves smelled absolutely dreadful. But we got all of the gelatin in there without deflating everything.

I hadn't expected this to work so well. Whipped whites always seem so fragile, like they'll lose their air if you look at them in the wrong tone of voice. I would have never thought you can pour gelatin into them without ruining all those delicate little bubbles. But our gelatinized egg whites were just as light and airy as they did before we added that magical yet malodorous powder. They even looked just a bit creamier.

 

At this point, I realized that the recipe didn't mention adding anything besides sugar and gelatin to our meringue. I didn't want to fill our whiskey-soaked cake with a flavorless fluff. I veered a bit off-recipe and added some vanilla. We already had plenty of whiskey in the cake, so the white part was free to taste like something else. Besides, I'm pretty sure vanilla extract has about the same ABV anyway.

Sooner than I thought, we had reached the moment where it all comes together. I had always thought this recipe would be a long, difficult process, but it was over in 45 seconds. I tried to get the white stuff into all the gaps between the cake slices. I don't think I did very well because the cake kept falling out of place on contact with the meringue.

Based on this recipe, I think I can confidently say that whoever wrote it down had an electric mixer or at least a hand-cranked eggbeater in her house. If you have one of those, this is a cinch. Like, this was almost as fast as Fanny Cradock making souffles.

The next day, our dessert was beautifully chilled as only a working refrigerator could do. I was kind of surprised when it slid right out, but slide right out it did.

I have never really ventured into the exciting world of unmolding gelatins, but you can see what this could have been in skilled hands. The soggy cake and gelatinous meringue almost make an attractive striped pattern. But I must set aside my lack of experience and give credit to our handwritten friend. This recipe does exactly what it should.

Since we were ready to serve, it was time to make the sauce. Speaking of which, I didn't understand this whole "sauce to be made just before serving" business. It makes this dessert difficult to serve at all. If you're bringing this to someone else's house, you can hardly go into their kitchen and get their pots dirty. And if you're having a party at your own place, you still have to duck away from the guests and say "Excuse me, I have to make the sauce." Even if you're only serving this for family and not for guests, who wants to get up from the table and stand over a stove between dinner and dessert?

Then I realized: this person probably had household help to deal with all sauce matters. As a reminder, we found this in the Fort Worth Woman's Club cookbook. This is the photo of the clubhouse on the frontispiece.

So if our handwritten friend didn't have a cook in the house at all times, I'm sure she could afford to hire someone for when she was entertaining. 

We are told put our yolks in a pot, stir in a half-cup of sugar, and to then add an unspecified amount of whiskey. I had no idea what I was doing, but I figured it would be about right to add enough whiskey for this to turn into a custard instead of a paste. I may have turned the stove up a little high, because we did get one or two bits of scrambled egg in there. But if you poured this through a tea strainer, no one would ever know.

Today's recipe is a great reminder that people in "the good old days" could drink us under the table. Like, I think drinking straight shots would burn less. After all, a shot of whiskey is over in less than a second. This might be an amusing novelty dessert on someone's 21st birthday (or whatever the drinking age is where you live). It is also perfect for a distillery-sponsored cookoff. But I really did not like it.

 I tried carefully carving out some of the fluffy stuff from the center to see if it was any good when separated from the drunken cake. But over the course of the night, the alcohol fumes from the cake slices had thoroughly penetrated it. I was tempted to see if the dessert would ignite if I set a match to it, but I don't have any pans I'm willing to risk ruining with a flaming gelatin. 

But I have to credit whoever wrote this down: everything in the recipe comes together as intended. You could slice this just like a cake. And it had just enough gelatin to keep the egg whites fluffy without making them too rubbery or bouncy. Like the Radio Pudding, the recipe succeeds even if it's not very good.

Going back to what we said about Repeal, I think that our handwritten friend was a little too excited about buying liquor again. And really, I wouldn't be surprised if the whole country had a collective post-Repeal binge-drinking phase. Just look at these people from the night alcohol was relegalized. Like, they were prepared for this. One of them has a novelty glass boot the size of his forearm. And the guy drinking out of a barrel doesn't care that the man holding it is about to burn a cigarette hole in his jacket.

Wikimedia

As for the recipe: I'm willing to try it again, but I'd borrow an idea from Fanny Cradock and use 50-50 orange juice and sauterne wine. I don't have the alcohol tolerance of a Southern lady. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*For those outside of the US, capital-R "Repeal" refers to the end of the United States' prohibition on alcohol in 1933. The US banned alcohol by constitutional amendment in 1920 and repealed the ban by popular demand thirteen years later. Alcohol is the only reason a constitutional amendment has been repealed in all of US history. ↪