Cornmeal Yorkshire Pudding: or, Cornbread by any name

I don't know if autumn is here or if we only get a short reprieve from the heat, but we can turn on the oven!

Cornmeal Yorkshire Pudding 2 eggs 1 cup boiling water 1 cup white cornmeal (white if you have it) ½ tsp salt Drippings from roasted meat Heat oven to 350°. Pour the drippings into a 9" round or square pan. Beat the eggs until thoroughly whipped and lemon-colored, set aside. Pour the boiling water over the cornmeal, stirring constantly. Add the salt. Gently mix in the eggs, trying to deflate them as little as possible. Bake until the top springs back when lightly pressed in the center, about 30-35 minutes. While it's baking, baste it 3 times with additional pan drippings. Newspaper clipping, Chicago area, probably 1930s-1940s Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

Apparently they really liked Yorkshire pudding in my great-grandmother's house. Or maybe she frequently roasted large slabs of meat and Yorkshire pudding was an easy standby. Either way, she has two recipes for Yorkshire pudding, carefully nestled together in her binder. 

We have already made what I think is normal Yorkshire pudding, so today we're going to find out what the heck the cornmeal version is.

As I've often mentioned, I started saving beef fat when beef is too expensive to throw any part of it out. So even though we're not buying beef for a while, I still have a lot of what I call "saute-grade" fat in the fridge at any time. This is my term for the meat-filled beef drippings that have a beefy taste and a shorter shelf life. You can't use it for everything, but it's still good enough for things like sauteeing onions. 

The point is, I had drippings (which apparently no Yorkshire pudding is complete without) even though I didn't have any meat roasting in the oven. To this I added paprika, garlic, and a few other basic necessities. I figured if I had spooned the drippings out of a roast-in-progress, there would be seasonings. After our pan was ready, it was time to make the pudding itself. It involved fewer ingredients than I expected. I always thought Yorkshire pudding was very "continental" and perhaps a bit fancy, but this is almost the cheapest batter you can make-- even including the eggs.

I didn't know if whipping the eggs would make a difference, but they actually fluffed the batter a little bit. You could even see the last sloshes of egg foam that didn't quite want to mix in. Had I needed to hand-whisk the eggs, I would have been annoyed at how little the batter changed, but this was only two minutes with an electric mixer.

As a quick aside: I like how aside from a brief encounter with an eggbeater, this was a mindlessly easy recipe. It's perfect for slapping together when you already have a fully-loaded stove to tend to.

The directions say to "baste three times while baking with some of the dripping from roasting pan," but I didn't know how much fat to baste this with. So I put a few little splats on top and hoped I guessed right.

After baking, the pudding bubbled on top where we had basted it. This would subside after a minute or two, but not in my mind. After the suds were gone, this merely looked like bread with well-seasoned splats on top. Which was what it turned out to be.

Those bubbles! Why does it look like I put dish soap on top?

The newspaper called called it "Yorkshire pudding," but this is cornbread. Basting it with seasoned pan drippings did add some nice flavor to it, but it's cornbread. With that said, it's pretty good cornbread. Since it's not raised with baking powder, it doesn't have any chemical taste hiding deep in there. It was just light enough to be nice, but still dense enough for perfect plate-sopping.

In case you're wondering, today's pud is floating on this.

Baggie ice cream never worked for me

I made this for six-year-old me.

Baggie ice cream Multiply amounts by how many you servings you're making. 1 cup milk 1 tbsp sugar ½ tsp vanilla About 2 tbsp rock salt Put the ingredients in a ziploc sandwich bag and press closed. Put the bag in the quart bag. Fill with ice, add the rock salt, and press closed. Shake until the milk in the inner bag theoretically becomes ice cream-- though it never worked for me and I ended up putting it in an ice cream machine instead.

The other week, my mother was out of town visiting her grandchild. She asked me to send a picture of a page out of her recipe notebook so she could cook together with the baby. I couldn't help flipping through the other recipes just to see the food I grew up on. In the midst of various old friends' names and other causes for reminiscence, I saw... this.

In theory, you can put unfrozen ice cream in a baggie, put that bag in a larger one full of ice and salt, and shake it until it turns into ice cream. This was a staple activity in classrooms and at birthday parties when I was growing up. And now, after more years than I'm happy to admit, I would like to know: Did it ever actually work for anyone? No matter how long I shook my bag of ice, I only got very cold milk. Some people I knew got a few feeble crystals that melted on contact with the bowl, but I don't remember anyone getting ice cream.

The last time I did this was at a nostalgia-themed dorm event. At the time, I thought that perhaps I would get better results than I did as a daft and impatient child. I didn't, but neither did anyone else. Fortunately, the RA who put the event together had done what every wise parent and teacher did back in the day: purchase a massive bucket of backup ice cream.

Looking at this with a broader perspective than I had at age six, I can see why parents would do this as a party activity. You can keep all of those little hands full and busy for a long time before the kids start whining that nothing's happening in the bag. Also, this is relatively healthy as far as party food goes. Really, it's just a glass of milk with a tablespoon of sugar in it. Your kids probably added more sugar to their milk at home if you let them use the chocolate syrup bottle unsupervised.

But now, I have an ice cream machine that can do a lot better than anyone ever could with a baggie of ice and salt. I wanted to give my present-day self the ice cream that 4-foot-tall me was denied.

Whole milk might be the better choice for this, but I used the same 2% milk that 1990s parents poured by the gallon into their children. I don't remember my mother or any unfortunate school chaperones buying whole milk, and I don't think any of them would have dared. Doctors had firmly banged into our heads that 2% milk would save your children from future osteoporosis, but whole milk would turn them into eight-year-old heart patients. 

 

This started to set a lot faster than I thought. (If only it had done that when I was shaking a plastic bag of the stuff...) Within 5 minutes, I could see the same half-hearted ice crystals that some of my more persistent friends managed to get. And just like all those classroom parties, they were swimming in a melty soup. 

This didn't churn easily as I thought it would. Instead, it stubbornly wanted to coat the sides of the bowl in solid ice. I had to reach through the little hole on top and press the dasher down and into place.

After just five minutes on the machine, the ice cream (it can be so called) had set enough that it didn't move anymore. It just hung onto the dasher in a frozen blob. I was ready to finally taste the success that no plastic bag had ever yielded.

 

Of course, as soon as I removed it from the machine it dripped and melted on contact with room-temperature air. So, I turned put it back where it came from, turned the machine back on, and knocked the ice cream around with a wooden spoon to force it to freeze better. In retrospect, this stage might have gone better had I turned off the motor and stirred with a rubber spatula for a few minutes.

Remembering how quickly this always melted (even before it reminded me upon my first attempt to serve), I had put a bowl in the freezer earlier. This meant our "ice cream" landed like fluffy snow. I know that no parent with a houseful of kids high on birthday cake would have the presence of mind to put twenty little bowls in the freezer ahead of time, but I really wanted to taste success even though this recipe had never let me.

 

So, in the absolute, almost unrealistic best case for this recipe, you get a sort of milk granita. You might want to leave out the vanilla though- it only makes this slightly bitter. If you think ice cream is too heavy and rich, you might like this. However, even success doesn't make this good.

Had this ever actually frozen in a baggie, I think kids would only like it because they made it themselves. So if you're a parent trying to put some novelty on your child's umpteenth glass of milk in the same day, it might be worth trying. As for me, I'm going to give six-year-old me one bowlful of retroactive success and move on to better recipes.

Blue Lotus Cream: They forgot to mention the strainer

Today, we at A Book of Cookrye are making a recipe that I've thought about for a long time.

Lotus Cream Juice of 3 lemons 2 cups sugar Pinch of salt 2 lemons, sliced thin  4 cups milk 2 tbsp sugar 1 pint whipping cream Combine lemon juice, 2 cups sugar, and salt. Mix in the lemon slices and let stand for 2 hours. Combine milk and 2 tablespoons sugar in a separate bowl. Freeze, stirring occasionally, until it is mushy. Pour the lemon mixture through a strainer into the milk, discarding the peels. Mix well. Lastly, whip and stir in the cream.* Freeze in an ice-cream machine. *There's no point in worrying about folding in the whipped cream. The ice cream machine will stir it anyway. Mrs Claude Earnest, The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

 

The Cotton Country Collection, 1972

It looks fairly easy, doesn't it? If you said yes, then I agree except for one sentence: "Slice lemons very, very thin." When I first saw the recipe, I could barely manage to insert the correct part of a knife into food. Slicing things very, very thin was absolutely impossible. As a reminder, this used to happen whenever I tried to cut up a cake:

I'm amazed I remembered to insert a knife into food sharp-side first.

When I first saw today's recipe, the rest of the directions looked just as intimidatingly difficult as knife competence: putting the milk in the freezer and getting out when it is the perfect consistency of "mush," whipping and folding in cream.... the whole business seemed like such a long and complicated procedure when I first read it and every time thereafter. Also, I realized that no one but me would like ice cream with lemon slices suspended in it.

But thin lemon slices need not scare me anymore. I have gotten a lot better at using a knife. Also, I've become almost fanatically obsessed with keeping the good knife sharpened. I always knew sharp knives are safer in the kitchen, but I grew up in a house where the knives kind of knocked loosely around the kitchen drawer. It took me a while to experience a truly sharp knife.

So, let's start off with the most daunting part of the whole recipe:

That wasn't nearly as bad as I feared. We should all sometimes revisit the things we thought were too hard and see if our skills got better while we weren't looking.

Knife intimidation aside, this recipe lodged itself in my head because I couldn't imagine how it would possibly turn out. It was starting to starting to look like it's going to be like marmalade ice cream for people who don't want to make marmalade. 

Would you believe that even with all that sugar, this was still puckeringly tart? 

After freezing, our lotus cream looked so cute with its little lemon slices peeping out.

As is often my way, I tried a spoonful before putting it in the freezer to firm up-- and found that I really should have taste-checked this before turning on the machine. The lemon peels were hard and almost woody. This wasn't a nice crunch like adding nuts, it was a dental trial. 

I should have known this would happen. Back when I used to make marmalade, I once used a recipe that called for both orange and lemon peels. Long after the orange peels were practically a mush, the lemon peels were still as hard as when I dropped them into the pot.

Back to the lotus cream, I had thought that perhaps sugar would penetrate them and do something, but instead I had made ice cream that you couldn't safely eat. I know the recipe says to slice the lemons "very, very thin" and perhaps I'm just not that good with a knife, but I don't think better slicing would have fixed this. Unfortunately, the ice cream also tasted good enough to keep. So, I put it through a sieve and back into the machine.

This is an act of culinary salvage.

By this point, the kitchen mess had finally gotten to me (we had racked up a lot of countertop splats and sticky spots by this point). The stress of future wipedowns combined with the futility of our our super-special thinly sliced lemon peels was too much vexation for one dessert. So, I therapeutically dyed the ice cream blue.

This is actually pretty good if you don't put a lot of raw lemon peels into it. Soaking the peels in sugar sludge gave the ice cream a depth of flavor and a really nice kick. But you should strain them out before anything goes into the ice cream machine.