Our Anniversary of Cookrye: A retrospective

Happy anniversary to us! If my math is right, we are about to begin our dozenth year (dozenth year!) of culinary delights and misfires. This year, I'm sharing the things that I make often, and then the things I look back at and say "I really should do that again." 

Clicking on each recipe title will take you to the post so you can make it for yourself. 

Snow Muffins

Even though snow isn't enchanting since the great Texas blackout, I still like to make these at least once every winter. They're really good on a freezing night, especially with hot tea. They have a special flavor I haven't found in anything else, which is either from the snow or from the quarter-teaspoon of mace in the batter. (You don't see mace in a lot of American recipes, and you very rarely see it used on its own.) 

I shared this with a friend who lives in Montreal, and was absolutely delighted to find he'd already heard of them. I'm always a little surprised when people corroborate recipes that are allegedly from their home countries. This doesn't always happen-- especially with cookbooks that came out decades before people could go online and verify.

To this day, people still have the same objection as when I first made these: "You're using snow? Like, off the ground?" To which I say: We all know where potatoes come from, right?

Incidentally, these are also good with sleet if snow is not available. Often, the sleet pellets still aren't quite melted when you get the muffins into the oven. I'm not sure if the little ice-pockets improve the muffins or if it doesn't matter. But if you feel like going outside with a measuring cup, these muffins are a delight.
 

They are best when fresh. But if you put them in a sealed container, they're still pretty good after a quick turn in the microwave.

Italian Delight

This is spaghetti with canned corn in it. I didn't think I would like it, but the flavor combination is unexpectedly satisfying. Also, I have to give credit to Mrs. Anna Wendt (the person who got this recipe printed in the newspaper recipe contest): this volumizes the heck out of your beef. I cut the recipe in half, and we still had this much food in the pan:

This pan only contains a half-pound of beef (or about two hectograms).

And that's before we further volumized the beef with pasta and canned corn. So if you want a single hamburger patty's worth of beef to serve four to six, this is your recipe. And somehow, the combination of beef, tomato paste, corn, and Worcestershire sauce add up into something far better than it should.

Cocoanut Tea Rolls

I started out trying to find the date of a raisin pie and ended up flipping through a lot of Australian newspapers. Even though we found this only a few weeks ago, it has already made their way to our box of recipe cards.

It's so nice to finally get semidecent at using a typewriter after so many years of crossed-out letters.

This is one of those recipes that make others excited when they see the ingredients on the counter and realize what they add up to.
 

Cranberry-Celery Gelatin

I didn't think I would like cranberries and celery as much as I do. If you've never tried putting them together, you should! And if you doubt me too much to commit to an entire recipe, you can keep it low-stakes by simply spreading a little whole-berry cranberry sauce in celery sticks like you're making ants on a log.

Meatball-Mushroom Pie

Admittedly, this one was a lot more fun before beef tallow became a political cause. But this is one of my favorite splurge recipes when we have extra beef. I've made it often enough to get a lot better at searing meatballs without smushing them. 

For comparison, our first attempt looked like this:

But now, just look at those near-spherical meatballs as they splash into the pie!

Don't worry that the meatballs are seared but not cooked. This bakes for 40 minutes.

 It may not look great in that picture, but it comes out like this:

 

Whiskey-Rye Blondies

Didn't expect to like these as much as I did. I ended up keeping the bottle of whiskey just to make these again. (It was a gift from someone who forgot I lost interest in liquor.) I had been planning to let my friends use it to start fires. Of course, I couldn't resist burning at least a little of it.

These are also pretty good without the whiskey. The browned butter's flavor comes through a lot more.

Sweet Potato Boulettes

If this isn't my favorite way to cook sweet potatoes, it's pretty darn close. I like that they're not sugared and syruped into a dessert. And dried parsley goes unexpectedly well in them. 

The boulettes are sitting on top of sweet-sour cabbage, which is coming up on this list.

Speaking of sweet potatoes... 

Sweet Potato Pudding

I like this more than I expected. And after making this recipe enough times that you don't have to pause and get confused, it's surprisingly fast to put together. The only tedious part is having at the sweet potatoes with a stick blender until they're perfectly smooth. 

 

...Wow. I forgot how bad it looked the one time I tried to unmold it. These days I serve it scooped out like ice cream.

I really like how simple the recipe is. Sweet potato pudding isn't trying to impress company, it just tastes good.

War Cake

Also known as "that vegan cake." This recipe was either invented or rediscovered during World War I. It uses neither dairy nor eggs, which was great during wartime shortages. Believe it or not, you can't tell anything is missing. Instead, it tastes like a spice cake that your grandmother may have gotten from her own grandmother.

If you don't like raisins, you can substitute any other dried fruit (dried cranberries were really good, and dried cherries were exquisite one extravagant week). But don't leave them out completely-- the cake is incomplete without them. 

 

Pepperless Pepper Cake

This cake originally had black pepper in it. When I read the recipe, I thought that black pepper and cake batter might be some "don't knock it until you try it" combination like cocoa powder and chili. They were not. But after removing the pepper, the recipe makes some surprisingly satisfying, dense, chewy bars.

 

Incidentally, the recipe calls for "well beaten" eggs. When we got the stand mixer from the thrift shop, we decided to try whipping the eggs and sugar for a solid fifteen minutes before adding everything else. The resulting cake puffed up a lot more than every pepperless cake we ever made before.

It has orange spots because we used butterscotch chips.

When we cut into it, we found that the top had risen far above the rest of the cake, leaving a big hollow space behind.

And this wasn't a delicate sheet of pastry that fell into flakes as soon as you touched it. It lifted up some of the butterscotch chips and held them in midair. You could tap it with your fingernail and get a hollow sound without breaking anything. 

Like anyone who believes in the scientific method, we repeated the experiment got the same result: a puffy-topped cake with a big airspace just below the surface. We've been meaning to try injecting some sort of filling in there, but we can't decide what it should be.

Chocolate Chunk Cookies

We had a few issues with the amount of flour (which has been happening with all my cookies lately. It might be something to do with this year's wheat crop). But once we got the recipe right, these are so, so good. I often bake half the dough before stirring in the chocolate because the cookies are good on their own. (And really, why waste chocolate on otherwise bad cookies?) 

 

Ginger Cookies

I haven't written about these yet, but they really hit the spot when I'm in the middle of some frustrating project that involves a soldering iron.

Haluski

This was the first recipe that made me really like cabbage. It is very simple but so, so good.

On a scientific note, we made a batch of this with purple cabbage. I later put some extra scrambled eggs into the container, figuring they would microwave well together. Overnight, the eggs turned the cabbage blue wherever the two touched.

 

I knew that red cabbage kind of works as edible litmus paper, but I'm not sure what this says about the eggs. 

When I tried this again with leftover cabbage and rice, the eggs turned it a surprisingly nice shade of blue in the fridge. I have dyed several of my birthday cakes that color.

And speaking of cabbage...

Cabbage Cooked in Milk

I didn't think I'd like this one. But when the weather gets cold and the drafts creep in, it is unexpectedly satisfying. The cabbage is cooked just long enough to be tender. As it simmers in the pot, it almost turns sweet. And somehow, cooking it in milk makes it taste unexpectedly complete.

While excavating various cabinets that have undisturbed strata of kitchen gadgets, I found small cache of food processor attachments. I don't think I'll ever bother using the lemon juicer, but the slicer looked promising if I could get it to work. 

We couldn't get the metal disc to stay put. Eventually I figured out that we were missing a little bit that screws on top and holds it all in place. I then nearly emptied the cabinets of at least 30 years of things that were probably only used once until I found it. (I then tried and failed and res-compress all that junk back where it came from. We now have a few cabinets of better-organized junk, a discreetly well-filled trash can, and a medium-sized pile of overflow on the floor.)

That little white plastic bit was truly well-buried.

I was really excited to try shredding my cabbage the modern way. When I dropped the first chunk of cabbage in, the machine whizzed it to confetti so fast I didn't have time to realize it had finished. Things went great until the motor came to a sudden stop with a fatal-sounding THWACK! 

So if you want to make coleslaw for fifty people, this thing can apparently handle it. But you can't keep shoving whole heads of cabbage through the machine and into a waiting bucket. You have to periodically stop and clean out leaf buildup. 

As is often the way with modern kitchen gadgets, this didn't save much time and also added a lot more cleanup. I still had to clean a knife and cutting board because you have to hack the cabbage into small enough pieces to fit in the food processor's little chute. Then I had to hand-wash the little blade disc because it looks like three trips through the dishwasher would rust it. And despite aiming the spout right into the waiting pot, we had a lot of stray cabbage on the counter.

This did shave my cabbage a lot finer than I'll ever manage by hand, but I don't think I chose the right dish for it. It was like eating lovely, creamy grass clippings. Still, the food processor might be great for slicing the really tough parts of the cabbage into tiny shreds so I don't have to throw them out. 

Looks like cabbage porridge, doesn't it?

 So even if you can cut cabbage into eighth-inch slices, this probably isn't the recipe to show off your knife skills. The cabbage is better if you don't turn it completely into confetti.

We'll close with the good picture because I don't want to end a good recipe with a bad impression.

 

Sweet-Sour Cabbage

This is like the warm-weather version of milk cabbage. When the temperature rises and all those rich foods get too heavy, this hits the spot in all the same ways that milk cabbage does during scarf season.

Those orange balls are the above-mentioned Sweet Potato Boulettes. 

Raisin-Butterscotch Pudding

Or as I call it, "Butterscotch Raisinpud." 

We love a good sugar onslaught here at A Book of Cookrye. And I think raisins are the chopped celery of desserts: underwhelming on their own, but they add such a lovely flavor to other things. (I know not everyone likes raisins, but this recipe is also good with other dried fruits.) 

And conveniently for people who either are really economizing or found a container of near-fossilized raisins on the back of the top shelf, this recipe is almost meant for thise hardened raisins that have almost turned powdery. Softer raisins tend to sink out of the batter as it cooks, but the truly desiccated raisins stay in the cake and also absorb a lot of the syrup as it filters through to the underside. 

This is also really good with strawberry-marshmallow ice cream on top.

Graham Coconut Cake

This was the first of my great-grandmother's recipes that we found. I honestly made it just to see if I could turn the hastily-scrawled notes into something edible. And of course, it's not every day you get handwritten recipes from relatives you never knew. 

 

Betty Feezor's Brownies

And a simple variation that I make a lot: peanut butter brownies!

I have a lot of brownie recipes-- the extra-rich ones, the dark ones, the ones that are really good but take a while... you get the idea. But these are the ones I make when I just want brownies with no effort. 

This brownie is topped with Apricot Whip.

I also love switching this recipe into peanut butter brownies (which is super easy: replace half the butter with peanut butter, and melt them together. Add an extra-generous splash of vanilla, and omit the cocoa).

 

Cinnamon Icing

I got this recipe from a friend in high school, and it's still my go-to when I just want to dump something on a cake and call it iced. The butter and cinnamon make it so good.

This icing is going onto a Wacky Cake. Since the cake has such big pores, the icing soaks right in and is amazing.

 

And speaking of wacky cake...

Wacky Cake

This is now my go-to chocolate cake recipe. It's so easy, and it tastes like a vintage birthday party. I like it best with coffee stirred in it. (I do mix it in a bowl instead of right in the pan, though. That way we can grease the pan first.)

 

 

Pizzelles

We make a lot of pizzelles here at A Book of Cookrye. They started as an act of post-breakup grief, but I kept the waffle irons long after I realized that I was mourning who I thought the bastard was instead of mourning the person I actually lost. 

I like how pizzelles are an edible craft project. And people always think they look pretty, so they've become one of my default choices when I want to bring a gift that looks like a lot fancier than it was to make. Out of all the pizzelle recipes I've tried, these are the ones I keep coming back to:

• Honey-nutmeg pizzelles: These have such a special flavor that you'd think I got the recipe from someone's Italian great-aunt instead of finding the recipe online. And as a bonus, you only need to stir the ingredients together and get out a waffle iron. So this is also the recipe I make when I'm bringing a gift but don't want to spend too long in the kitchen.
• My ex's grandmother's pizzelles: This is the first pizzelle recipe I made. These taste professional.
• Fante's pizzelles: If my ex's grandmother's pizzelles taste like a professional made them, Fante's taste homemade in the best way you can imagine. And really, it's fitting that their recipe should be so good. I learned most of what I know about making pizzelles from Fante's Kitchen Shop, whether from their pizzelle page or by emailing and also telephoning the store to beg for help. They offered wonderful advice free of charge.
• Aunt Angie's pizzelles: These are super delicate, fragile, and wonderfully buttery. They are also a bit tricky to get off the iron intact for the same reasons they're so good, so I don't make them as often as the others. But I am always glad when I do.

Spinach-Bacon Pie

After taking out half the steps (you can't tell the difference after baking), this is pretty quick to slap together. Well, except for making the pie crust for yourself, but nothing is stopping you from buying a frozen one. If you make the pie crust yourself, it's really good if you add a few herbs (just a couple shakes of oregano can do wonders) and an extra pinch of salt.

One-Egg Cake

Do I have one of these in the oven as I'm typing this? Yes.

This cake is so easy: put everything in a bowl, insert electric mixer, then bake. And you can't taste the economizing. If you want a homemade cake with nearly no effort, this is it.  

 

Red Velvet Brownies

The only reason I don't make these more often is that I keep forgetting to get more red food coloring.

 

Slow Cooker Caramelized Onions

This isn't necessarily a recipe in itself so much as a shortcut to other, much better things. But these days I like to just put an entire bag (or two) of frozen chopped onions in a crock pot. When they're beautifully browned, I put them in the refrigerator and add a scoop to whatever needs more onion in it. And when a recipe actually does start off with caramelizing onions, it's nice to have them on hand so I can skip to step two.

 

Perfect Pie

This newspaper article from my great-grandmother's recipe binder did wonders for my pie-making ability. My pies have never been crisper or flakier. I will note that the ingredient amounts in the recipe make enough for the top and bottom of one pie, not two as is claimed. 

It almost looks like puff pastry, doesn't it?

As is suggested in the article, I have also started cutting vent-slits into the top crust before draping it over the pie. Of course, this often means they end up off-center, but anyone who criticizes pie ventilation is actually saying they don't want any pie. (Happily, this has never happened to me because I don't permit such people in my life.)

This newspaper article has been just as helpful as Delia Smith's video. I have never before made a pie crust I could crimp at the edges like that. They've always been too brittle or too crumbly to withstand that kind of bending.

Our first fluted pie slumped a bit in the oven, but I think it still looked really nice.

Out of curiosity, I searched for the first sentence of the article in exact quotes: "Any little housewife may turn out delicious, flaky pastry if she will but follow the directions carefully." I've done this with a few of the newspaper articles in my great-grandmother's binder when I wish I could date them, but nothing ever turns up. (I'd need another free newspapers.com trial to pin the years on the clippings.)

But this time, I found the complete text on Project Gutenberg in something called Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book. That's the same Mrs. Wilson from the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger who has already made several appearances here. Apparently her newspaper column got syndicated at least as far as Chicago (unless my great-grandmother happened to obtain newspapers from Philly). Clearly Mrs. Wilson was going to find me one way or another.

Anyway, I am no longer surprised that this newspaper article was so helpful. Mrs. Wilson's recipes have never failed us.  

Gumdrop Cookies

Everyone who's had these likes them. I don't make them often because 1) cutting up gumdrops is tedious business, and 2) it's hard to resist eating the candy before I'm done making cookie dough. But when I do make them, everyone really likes them.

 

Elizabeth's Rolls

This is my favorite recipe for rolls if I have enough time to let the dough rise some three or four times. I found it handwritten in the back of my school library's copy of the Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, and tried them out just to see if the recipe should  be allowed back out of a locked cabinet in the library's special collections. I am so glad I did.

 Seriously, these are so good that I once made a quintuple-batch of these and gave them away one Christmas, with little instruction tags saying to freeze then now, then brown and serve later. This was how I learned not to try to make a dozen dozen rolls in a household kitchen. You have nowhere to let them all rise. But everyone liked them the one year I did it.

 

Blueberry-Oatmeal Muffins

This recipe has leverage. I've gotten far too many favors out of it. Everyone else in the house keeps asking me to make them. If I'm being honest, I only occasionally eat these myself. But apparently if you like blueberry muffins, this is a really good recipe for them. 

Incidentally, our muffin pan couldn't handle more than six or seven batches of these. From the top, it started to look ever-so-slightly worn...

...but then I flipped it over. 

 

It has been retired from service and dispatched to the municipal hereafter.

Candied Sweet Potatoes

This is another thing that I don't like but other people do. If you like candied sweet potatoes, this is apparently a good recipe for it. The empty plates speak for themselves. 

If you've never had candied sweet potatoes, imagine a sweet potato casserole (the kind that is practically a dessert) without mashing the potatoes. Sometimes I'll have a very tiny bowl, say "Ah, it tastes like Thanksgiving!" and then be done with these. But like I said, everyone else seems to like them.

My great-grandmother put them in the oven and basted them a lot. After getting tired of pulling out the oven rack every few minutes for nearly an hour, I cooked them in a frying pan instead. They turned out the same, and only took a few minutes.
  

Honorable mention: Fruit "Salad"

This is simply canned peaches suspended in red Jello. I made it once and didn't like it very much, but everyone else who passes through the kitchen seems to love it. (The secret is to replace some of the water with the syrup from the can.)

 

And now, to close out, recipes that I am surprised I haven't made more often:

Fanny Cradock's Swiss Roll

Fanny Cradock was right. This thing did not crack when we rolled it up. It felt like rolling up a sheet of upholstery foam. And it was really good when we ate it. But for whatever reason, I haven't made a Swiss Roll since.

 

Chocolate Mousse From That 1990s Flourless Cake

We were unimpressed with the chocolate flourless cake, even though I remember them being a bit of an upscale trend in the 90s. We followed the directions and got a well-presented chocolate mush. (And in a sign of pre-pandemic grocery prices, we didn't mind using, like, an entire carton of eggs when we made it.) But the mousse we spread on top was so good. It's definitely worth making again, even if the rest of the recipe isn't so impressive once it's no longer seasoned with high-price cachet.

 

Cream Onion Tarts

Granted, I was a little frustrated after these were so bad the first time. I assume that a typesetting error caused our problems (some other recipes from the same newspaper got printed with similarly ruinous mistakes). But these tarts were so good after correcting the recipe that I really should revisit them.

 

Incidentally, after speculating that these might be good with celery instead of onion, I made a batch of celery tarts just to see if I was right. I was not. My brilliant idea gave me overcooked vegetables in an eggy mess. Celery will never be as good as onions.

 

Date Cream Tarts

I'd make this more often if dates weren't pricy. They must have been a lot cheaper back in the day. People seemed to used them interchangably with raisins, even in the middle of the depression. 

 

Orange-Raisin Squares

Sometimes I really want raisin-loaded baked goods, but for some reason it never occurs to me to try this one again.

 

 

 

 

 

Well, that's the end of this year of cooking! Hopefully the next one brings more exciting recipes (whether they're really good, or so bad they're fun) and lower grocery prices!