Chamita Meatballs: or, You can't hide economization with potatoes

Autumn is officially here! Even though the nighttime temperature has barely dipped to 70 degrees (that's 21 degrees for our Celsius friends), people are determinedly going through all the rites of the season. This includes lighting their fireplaces, overworked air conditioning be damned. The whole neighborhood has that faint smell of woodsmoke that permeates the air when the frost really sets in. Of course, we at A Book of Cookrye aren't so cavalier about running up the electricity bill as to light a fire when our jackets are still in the closet from last winter. But we are letting ourselves get a little bit more carefree with the oven. 

It feels almost strange to turn on the oven in the midafternoon, but the lower temperatures allow us to do so without destroying the air conditioning or breaking the entire Texas power grid. Also, I don't need to fret so much when I find myself baking meatballs for an entire hour while the sun is out.

Chamita Meatballs ¼ cup milk 1 onion, finely chopped 1¼ teaspoons salt ½ teaspoon pepper 1 teaspoon chili powder 1½ cups grated raw potatoes (no need to peel them) 1½ pounds ground beef ¼ cup shortening Place milk, onion, and seasonings into a large mixing bowl. Grate and add the potato. (You want to wait until you've got everything else in the bowl and ready before grating the potato, because shredded spud does not like to sit out in the open air.) Add the meat, mix well, and form into small balls. Put the shortening in the skillet and brown the meatballs. Cover and steam one hour. They may be steamed with spaghetti and tomato sauce. If desired, you can bake them instead (it's a lot easier). Place meatballs into a 9"x13" pan coated with cooking spray. (Don't bother to brown them first.) Cover tightly with foil and bake at 350° for 1 hour. Keep the foil on after removing them from the oven, and allow to rest for 5 minutes before uncovering and serving. Source: A program for a cooking school hosted by Mrs. George O. Thurn, sponsored by the Salina [Kansas] Journal, circa 1940-1941, via Yesterdish

Today, we are once again hearing from Mrs. George O. Thurn! But this time, we're not making a recipe from her book. For those who don't recall, a friend stopped at an antique store when taking a road trip and got me "the most ancient cookbook" (those were the exact words) on a rack of cheap ones. 

I had never heard of Mrs. George O. Thurn before getting her book. So naturally, I looked for whatever traces of her career were floating around the internet. There's not a lot, but I did find a handout from a cooking class she did in Kansas about six years after my book was printed. The person who posted it dates it from 1940-1941, because we see the World War II "Pledge of Health" but we haven't yet started rationing.

Conveniently, today's recipe is right next to her portrait. Source: Yesterdish

1940 must have been a rotten year (aside from the diversion of a music-hall cooking class). The news was full of the war brewing in Europe in a time when many people still were still on postcard terms with relatives "in the old country." Meanwhile, the Depression was still ruining everyone's lives. 

Even though no one was doing any wartime rationing yet, these meatballs are half beef and half economization by volume. Mrs. George Thurn's meat-stretching may prove timely again today, given how beef prices have shot through the stratosphere.

I had to ask: what is a "Chamita?" When I looked up the word, I only found a tiny town in New Mexico. Perhaps the recipe comes from the town of Chamita. Or, western/southwestern recipe names may have been code for "this is cheap," in the same way that the word "Hawaiian" means "contains canned pineapple." In other words, these meatballs might be as Chamita-related as Mrs. Wilson's economical sausages are Chinookan.

Depression-era budget concerns aside, potatoes seemed better than breadcrumbs or other fillers that go into a lot of meatballs. "Meat and potatoes" is a cliche for a reason.

I was going to cook these exactly as the recipe directs: browning them in a frying pan and then steaming. But these were the mushiest meatballs I have ever made. Any attempt to push them around a frying pan would have led to squishing them into the beginnings of Chamita chili (which is an unexpectedly catchy name). Apparently, the economizing (barely-)prewar housewife had to be very skilled with a spatula if she wanted meatballs.

In an act of self-kindness, I decided skip the frying pan and go right to steaming. Our rice cooker came with a steamer basket, which seemed perfect until I saw how many meatballs the recipe made. Keep in mind that since we only had one pound of beef in the freezer, I reduced the recipe by a third. Clearly, Mrs. George O. Thurn did not endorse wasting kitchen heat on tiny batches.

Cooking these for one hour (as specified in the recipe) seemed excessive. Perhaps this ensures that we don't have any raw potato in our beef?

Speaking of spuds, I didn't want to waste the potato after grating half of it into the meatballs. But as we all know, potatoes have absolutely no shelf life after cutting them. So, to economize on time and get the most use out of the oven heat, I plonked the half-spud onto the oven rack next to the pans of meat. It wasn't nearly as good as when we baked potatoes in an extra-hot oven for nearly two hours, but the weather isn't cold enough for that yet.

After baking, I peeled back the foil and unveiled... um... this.

Back when we made porcupine meatballs, I knew the raw rice would expand into bristly protrusions (as if the name doesn't give it away). But potatoes tend to stay the same size when you cook them. I therefore had thought these meatballs would look normal.

Perhaps the potato shreds didn't expand, but the meat shrank away from them as the fat rendered off. After all, we had a lot of melted fat in the pan by the time these were done. I saved it for future use in frying pans. (We don't throw away seasoned beef fat.)

Something tells me I should have served these with gravy.

The meatballs were unbelievably soft and moist. I almost thought they weren't fully cooked until I remembered that they baked for a full hour. 

They taste like a really good meatloaf. Unexpectedly, you can barely taste the potatoes. They certainly add, um, visual interest to the meatballs, but they don't alter the flavor at all. So while the hourlong baking time gives me pause during most of the year, I won't mind making these again as the nights get chilly.

Caramel Dessert: or, The real pudding was the bowls we used along the way

The recipe was so disjointed that I saw it as a challenge.

A Book of Selected Recipes, Mrs. George O. Thurn, 1934

 

Caramel Dessert 1 egg, beaten 2 cups milk 2 tbsp cornstarch ¾ cup light brown sugar (or ¼ cup white sugar and ½ cup dark brown sugar) 1 tbsp butter ¼ cup chopped nuts ½ tsp vanilla Beat the egg in a large heavy bowl, set aside. Take out about 2 tablespoons of the milk, dissolve the cornstarch in it, set aside. Scald the remaining milk,* cover it with a lid (or suitable-sized dinner plate) to keep hot, and set that aside too. In a medium saucepan over medium heat, melt the brown sugar and butter together. Use a flat-ended spoon and scrape the bottom of the pot constantly. The sugar will first turn clumpy and gravelly, and then gradually become what looks like a thick sauce. Turn off heat and add the scalded milk, one spoonful at a time, stirring very hard as you go to prevent it from clumping. (Watch out for steam when you add the first few spoonfuls of milk.) Turn the heat to medium-low, and stir until all is dissolved. Slowly pour this onto the egg, whisking very hard the whole time. If you have no one to hold the bowl, you really want to use a heavy one. That way the weight of the bowl will keep it from tipping or wandering as you whisk everything with one hand and slowly pour steaming-hot custard with the other. Return the egg mixture to the pot. Stir up the cornstarch mixture to dislodge anything that settled to the bottom. Then stir it into the pot along with the nuts. Cook over medium heat until thickened. The mixture should coat a spoon. Remove from heat and add the vanilla. Pour into your storage container of choice, and cover it with plastic wrap. Press the wrap directly onto the custard so it's in contact (this prevents a skin from forming). If desired, you can cool the custard faster by setting the container in a large bowl of iced water. Stir the pudding until it is lukewarm. (If you don't have ice, you can use cold tap water. You may need to change the water a time or two as it absorbs the heat from the pudding.) Then cover it with plastic wrap, pressing it directly onto the custard so it's in contact. Refrigerate until ready to serve. If you make this a day or two ahead, you may find that some water has separated out and is sitting on top (rather like a container of yogurt or sour cream). Just stir it back together. Serve with whipped cream on top. *While you can scald the milk on the stovetop, we recommend doing it in the microwave. It's faster, and you don't need to worry about scorching. Just put the milk in a bowl that has a fair bit of room on top in case it boils up. Then microwave it until you see it start steadily simmering around the edges. Turn off the microwave before it starts boiling all over. A Book of Selected Recipes, Mrs. George O. Thurn, 1934

That's right, today we are returning to our sporadically-successful attempt to make a recipe every month that I've been wanting to try for a while. This one comes from Mrs. George O. Thurn, whose recipes have made regular appearances here at A Book of Cookrye. 

In her (apparently only) book, Mrs. Thurn's recipes are somewhat unevenly written. Some have tidy lists of ingredients at the top and crisp, clear instructions below. Others, like today's caramel dessert, read more like a note-to-self. But while many of the recipes seem like quick notes instead of explicit directions, this is the only one in the entire handout that is so indecipherable. I had to reread it several times and then write out the steps in actual chronological order. (Maybe the recipe would have made sense upon the first reading had I attended one of her demonstrations and brought a notepad.)

After reworking the instructions into what seemed like a logical order of steps, we could proceed. I have to admit that I was less interested in the results of the recipe than I was in making it work. I imagined that after turning the recipe's four scrambled sentences into something usable, we would get an ordinary yet lovely brown sugar custard.

I've done a few recipes like this before. They require patience. You will spend an inordinately long time stirring a pot of sugar that looks resolutely unchanged.

After a while, the sugar starts to turn into gravelly brown clumps. You may wonder if you've ruined everything as they scratch against the sides of the pot. The sugar will continue to look like this for a long time, which likely will make you wonder if it's ever going to melt like the recipe claims. But eventually, you will see the slightest hints of a sludge seeping across the bottom of the pot. 

 

This first signs of melting will disappear as you keep stirring, but eventually you'll have a pot of sludge-soaked rocks.

And after a very long time, you will have what looks like the sauce you'd pour into a pan if you were making pineapple upside-down cake. (But it's scorching hot. Keep your fingers out.)

After reducing the sugar to sludge, we reach the point in the recipe where I have ruined it so many times before: adding some form of liquid to this near-candy. If you dump it all in at once, your sugar instantly hardens into big rocky shards and you've ruined the recipe. So you have to beat the contents of the pot very hard while you carefully pour the first small splash in. Also, watch out for the steam!

It may end up looking like steaming-hot paste, but that's fine. As long as you don't have any extra-large shards of hard candy in there, it'll come out fine. Just keep beating the dessert really hard so that any hardened sugar doesn't have a chance to turn into big chunks. As Fanny Cradock would say, think of someone you've never really liked but you're too well-bred to say anything so you take it out on the dessert.

Despite your best efforts, you'll probably still have small granules of hardened sugar, but they'll dissolve after a minute or two over a hot stove.

And so, we reach the other tricky part of the recipe: tempering an egg. In other words, pouring this boiling-hot stuff into the bowl of beaten eggs without making a syrupy egg-drop soup. Once again, one must beat furiously. Use a bigger bowl than you think lest you slosh your half-made dessert all over the counter.

At this point, the recipe is a simple matter of stirring it until thickened. It occurred to me that I could probably do this part in the microwave, but I didn't want to risk turning this into a bowl of scrambled eggs in syrup.

We put the custard away to cool, but it stayed quite sloshy and runny. However, a test spoonful tasted almost exactly like the the candy coating on Cracker Jack. I was very annoyed at having something so delicious yet so gloppy. Then I noted that I mismeasured a crucial ingredient. Instead of using 2 tablespoons of cornstarch, I added only two teaspoons of it. (For those who only speak metric, I only added one-third of the cornstarch that I should have.)

I thought that perhaps I can add the missing amount of cornstarch, reheat the whole custard, and fix it. That didn't work. No matter how careful you are with a thermometer in one hand and a spoon in the other, an egg custard absolutely will turn into a curdled mess if you try to cook it twice. However, it was the perfect thickness. If you get your ingredients right the first time, it's a really good pudding. 

Unfortunately, it looks terrible if you cook it twice and curdle the eggs. The little chunks of chopped nuts suspended in it didn't help.

 

Whipped cream would have solved the unfortunate appearance, but we didn't have any. But this tasted too good to leave a bad visual impression. Instead, here is an attempted rendering of what it could have been.

I don't like wine and therefore love to use to use wineglasses for everything else.

I thought the caramel dessert would be pleasantly bland, but it has a very nice burnt-sugar undertone that makes it better than it has any right to be. However, it seems like it should be on top of something, or perhaps served in little tartlet shells. 

But as much as I liked the caramel dessert, I only recommend making it if you have a dishwasher. You'll have a lot of dirty bowls when you're done. But if you do have one of those wonderful machines under the kitchen counter, then I would definitely make this. After all, what effort is washing dishes when you merely put them on the rack and push the magic button?

Coffee Icing: or, Fun with percolators

I made these as an excuse to use the percolator.

Coffee Icing 1½ cups granulated sugar ¾ cups strong black coffee 1 tsp butter Cook coffee and sugar until they form a soft ball when tested in cold water (about 240°F with a candy thermometer). Drop the butter on top without stirring it in. Then allow to cool until lukewarm. Beat the mixture until it thickens and lightens in color. Quickly spread onto the cake (it sets very fast). This is very good on spice cakes. Note: The original recipe was for fudge icing. If you want to make it as written, stir three tablespoons of cocoa powder into the sugar before you begin (eliminating any lumps), and use milk instead of coffee. Source: A Book of Selected Recipes, Mrs. George O. Thurn, 1934

A Book of Selected Recipes, Mrs. George O. Thurn, 1934

I don't like coffee, but I just find percolators so entertaining in their own understated way. And so, I wanted an excuse to use the one I have lying around the house. First, we revisited Mrs. George O Thurn's mocha cake. I have let that recipe lie dormant for too long. Good recipes should not be pressed into the pages of a book, they should be splattered with errant eggs.

 

But that was only one batch of coffee. And obviously, we can't drink quarts of iced coffee just as an excuse to operate the percolator again. You may think I'm daft just because I love the burbling sounds of this thing, and seeing the water splash up in the glass knob in the lid and gradually get darker. Also, it looks like an 1800s silver teapot with a power cord coming out the back. As things get tougher and tougher, sometimes it's nice to take pleasure in the little things without worrying about how silly you look. 

Anyway, we've made a few attempts at boiled icing, and I thought that today was the perfect day to try making it with coffee. If it came out right, it would be like topping a cake with a delicious cup of iced coffee made to A Book of Cookrye standards. As a reminder, a cup of coffee in my happy world looks like this:

 

I took a boiled fudge icing recipe from Mrs. George O. Thurn's book. At first I was like "Why does she have six recipes for boiled icing?" But actually, having six icing recipes allowed us to pick the one that matched what ingredients we had on hand. Five of them used egg whites, and I didn't want to waste egg yolks. One called for heavy cream, which never buy unless I have specific plans for it. And so, only one recipe remained to suit my percolator-related needs.

And so, we took Mrs. George O. Thurn's recipe for fudge icing,  omitted the cocoa powder, and replaced the milk with coffee. As an aside, boiled icings use a lot of sugar. Just like the last time we dabbled in boiled icing, we are putting more sugar on top of the cake than we put in it.

In other words, after adding the coffee to the pot, I could have either made a batch of icing or drunk this as-is. I should note that I reduced the recipe to two-thirds its original quantity because I couldn't imagine putting nearly a pound of sugar on top of a small square cake- even though I only made the cake as a vehicle for said icing. Even after getting out the tiniest thing that was stovetop-safe, we barely had enough coffee to coat the bottom of it.

For the longest time, nothing happened in the pot. I began to wonder if the stove was defective or something. (I have a bit of a combative history with flat-top stoves.) But after a long time, the coffee boiled up so much that I wished I'd used a bigger pot.

This mixture took a surprisingly long time to reach the soft-ball stage.  I began to wonder if the milk used in the original recipe was crucial to making this icing work. But eventually, after a lot of stirring, the icing formed a soft ball when tried in iced water. And so, we set aside our syrup to cool down to nearly room temperature. I would have forgotten to add the butter had I not measured it out at the beginning and left it conspicuously waiting right in front of me.

And so, we left the coffee syrup out to cool, just as we did when we made Louise Bennett Weaver's spice cake. Then came the long beating. And I do mean the long beating. I must have spent a solid fifteen minutes with a wooden spoon before seeing anything different in the pot. I began to wonder if I needed to return it to the stove for further boiling. Then, at long last, we began to see the slightest suspicion of a color change. After beating the snot out of the icing for still longer, it finally lightened to about the color of peanut butter.

I've seen a lot of candy instructions that say "beat until it loses its gloss," and decided that made sense for today's icing. We were again bitterly reminded of (what apparently is) a fundamental truth of boiled icing. You may have to beat the icing for half an eternity, but once it's ready you have at most 45 seconds to hastily smear it onto the cake. As you can see, I was not fast enough.

Indeed, while the icing had been obstinately runny for a long time, it completely solidified onto the pot while I hastily tried to scrape it out and smear it onto the cake.

However, an easy solution to our icing ineptitude was at hand: the presentation platter! We could cut away and conceal all the unsightly edges, even if it meant no one (besides those who did the baking) got a corner piece.

The cake, of course, was fine. But I was more concerned with the icing on top..... which was absolutely delicious. You may think that boiling coffee for so long would ruin it, but it was just fine.

Imagine a cake topped with coffee-flavored fudge on top, because that's what we got. I would definitely make it again. However, in the future, you shouldn't beat it too firm. As soon as it barely begins to lose its gloss, get it onto the cake- and fast. I wouldn't try to use boiled icing to cover a layer cake. The icing would probably set in the saucepan before you were halfway done. But it's great for when you're serving a cake out of the pan, or for drizzle topping. 

Also, this kind of icing requires patience. But on the bright side, you may offset the calories with the arm workout that comes with making it.

Italian Spaghetti by way of Ohio: or, You just never know what's going to be good!

Today, we turn to an unexpected source for Italian recipes: the Depression-era Midwest!

Italian Spaghetti 1 (8-oz) package corkscrews, shells, butterflies, or any other pasta that goes with a chunky sauce 3 good-sized onions, chopped 9 pieces of celery, chopped 3 cloves of garlic, minced 3 tbsp olive oil 4 tbsp fat 6 bay leaves ½ tsp thyme ¾ tsp salt pepper to taste One (28-oz) can chopped tomatoes, undrained Put fat, olive oil, onions, garlic, and celery in a large pot over high heat and stir until heated through. Reduce heat to low. Cook uncovered until golden, stirring and scraping the bottom of the pot every few minutes. This takes longer than you may think- 45 minutes or so. But you don't need to babysit the pot the whole time- you can just periodically stir it every 5 or so minutes. You don't need to stand over the stove and stir constantly until the last few minutes when they're almost done. Then add the tomatoes, bay leaves, thyme, salt, and pepper. Bring to a simmer and cook slowly 1 hour, adding a little water if the mixture cooks down too much. Towards the end of the simmering time, boil the pasta in salted water until done. Remove the bay leaves from the sauce and mix in the noodles. If desired, grated cheese may be served with it, sprinkling over the top of each portion as it is served. This is very good with a side of sauteed mushrooms. Note: You can caramelize the onions, garlic, and celery ahead of time. They will keep in the refrigerator for a few days. *The original recipe calls for a #2 can of tomatoes, which is 20 ounces. They did not have those at the store, so I purchased the next size up and rescaled the rest of the ingredients. Source: A Book of Selected Recipes, Mrs. George O. Thurn, 1934

A Book of Selected Recipes, Mrs. George O Thurn, 1934

Mrs. George O. Thurn included this recipe in the vegetable chapter between "Corn Pudding" and "Escalloped Cabbage." This suggests that Italian recipes had already become normal outside of the Italian neighborhoods in New York. Seeing an Italian recipe in Midwestern cooking handout goes against the popular story among food historians that Italian food was too weird and too foreign for Americans before WWII soldiers returned from Italy. (But then again, food historians try to prove that everything in America originates from Manhattan.)

So, let's get this out of the way before we even start chopping vegetables. Boiling your already-cooked spaghetti for another 15-20 minutes will yield a pot of mush. Maybe people in Depression-era Ohio had to make do with massive German or Scandinavian noodles that need half an hour to cook. (Are German noodles like that?) 

I will be nice and assume Mrs. George O Thurn didn't really believe that spaghetti should be boiled into mush. So, let's pretend that people in the area had to make spaghetti with Teutonic mega-noodles because that's all they had in the region. Aside from the part where you boil the spaghetti into a porridge, this looks like a  modern(ish) tomato sauce recipe. Mrs. George O Thurn even adds olive oil to the pot.Although we note that she uses no oregano. These days (in America at least), it's not truly Italian if it doesn't contain oregano.

We begin with a bit of a recipe error. For whatever reason, I thought Mrs. George O. Thurn had us cooking the onions in bacon fat. Cooking dinner in the drippings from that morning's breakfast certainly seems like a good choice for the middle of the Depression. But Mrs. George O. Thurn simply tells us to use "four tablespoons fat." Since we cooked bacon recently, we figured that the leftover drippings might make dinner a little bit more flavorful. (You couldn't taste the difference, but at least we economized!)

Frozen vegetables weren't a thing in the 1930s, but I think Mrs. George O. Thurn would have approved. She was really big on saving time by modernizing. If you simply dump a bag of frozen onions into the pot instead of chopping fresh ones for yourself, this is all the knife-work you have to bother with.

Of course, after we saved time by not chopping the onions, we then had to give them over an hour to cook. Recently, I read an article about how you can't caramelize onions in five minutes. After spending all my cooking life blaming myself that I never could get the onions "golden brown" in less time than it takes to steep a pot of tea, it was so blissfully liberating to learn that you really need at least half an hour to cook onions without burning them. I don't think it's quite the correct word choice to say I felt vindicated, but I certainly felt something. I didn't mind the long cooking time since I merely had to give the pan a quick stir every now and then. I didn't even bother staying in the kitchen until the vegetables were nearly done.

The onions and celery may have ended up cooking for over an hour, but I only spent ten minutes fussing over them.

However, the long cooking time meant a very late supper. For all the times I've read this recipe and wondered if Midwestern spaghetti was any good, I didn't see the extremely long cooking time. I had to apologize to everyone and tell them that the "quick supper" required over two hours on top of the stove. To Mrs. George O. Thurn's credit, this recipe demands a lot of the pot's time but asks very little of yours.

I blame Mrs. George O. Thurn for the bay leaves. At least she doesn't subscribe to the myth that you drop one lonely leaf into a huge pot of simmering supper. But since we had to purchase the things, I can join the legions of people who have a canister of bay leaves on the back of the shelf slowly gathering dust. It also meant I had to find all of them and fish them out of the pot later on. It turns out that bay leaves make cooking just ever so slightly more annoying. You have to stir your pot very carefully lest you break one of them- or else you'll later be hunting down little leaf-shards with a slotted spoon.

I got out the big spaghetti pot to make this, but that was an oversized mistake. While we in this millennium are used to serving spaghetti as a one-pot meal, let's go back to the 1930s and look at the last sentence of Mrs. George O. Thurn's directions: "This will serve six people when served with other things." Those last five words should have gotten a lot more emphasis, because this tiny pot of spaghetti is not going to serve six people on its own. No amount of ranting about increased portion sizes over the past several decades will make up for the small yield of spaghetti. Apparently people in the 1930s didn't put a single steaming pot on the table and declare that dinner was served.

As aforesaid, we pretended we never saw Mrs. George O. Thurn's instructions to boil the spaghetti until quite dead. Instead, we dumped the cooked noodles into the sauce and declared it done. This wasn't really a "sauce." Mrs. George O. Thurn gave us more of a hot pasta salad than the spaghetti-with-jarred-sauce that we know today.

It tasted like we tossed spaghetti with fresh vegetables, but with more effort into making it come out nice. You wouldn't think boiling canned tomatoes for an hour would do that, but a surprise is a surprise. The celery, despite cooking for two hours, was still crunchy. I would definitely recommend this as for the summertime, with some sauteed mushrooms on the side. Even the two-hour cooking time won't heat up the kitchen as much as you might think. The stove burner is set to low the whole time. Things really only get hot and steamy when it's time to boil the noodles. And this spaghetti tastes very light and summery. Whether Mrs. George O. Thurn's spaghetti is Italian or not, it is very good.

Hump-Day Quickie: Gilt-Edged Potatoes

I can't argue with potatoes and cheese.

A Book of Selected Recipes, Mrs. George O. Thurn, 1934

Gilt-Edged Potatoes     Amounts to taste: Cooked, peeled potatoes Shredded cheddar, colby jack, or any yellow cheese Salt Heat oven to 350°. Grease a sheet pan. Put the potatoes through a ricer or a grinder. Spread in a layer on the pan, taking care not to compress them. Leave them nice and fluffy. Sprinkle lightly with cheese, and (if desired) with salt. Bake until cheese is melted and slightly browned, about 30 minutes. A Book of Selected Recipes, Mrs. George O. Thurn, 1934

It's gotten cold again, which means we're no longer insane to bake potatoes in an extra-hot oven for over two hours!

I tried to make the butter stand up like a stegosaurus spine, but it melted too fast.

British-style jacket potatoes only happen when it's cold out, which makes them a rare treat in this climate. I was more excited about the potatoes than the pot roast. However, they don't refrigerate well. When you reheat them in the microwave, they're just like any other microwave-baked potato. You lose the crispy-crackly skin and the almost unrealistically fluffy interior that you had when the potato came out of the oven. Look at that beautiful, almost caramelized layer of potato that lies just beneath the skin when you peel them!

While I do still pop the occasional potato in the microwave for a low-effort snack, these potatoes which were so perfect the first time seem like they deserve better. Fortunately, Mrs. George O. Thurn has a way to hopefully keep these spuds as magical as they were the first time. It involves one of my favorite kitchen devices: a meat grinder!

I would love to say that you can use a cheese shredder since more of us have one of those than a potato ricer or a meat grinder. But despite my most determined attempts, cheese shredders are useless on baked potatoes. 

Apparently Mrs. George O Thurn could direct her readers to get out a potato ricer without her entire audience telling her she was out of touch and that no one had one of those things at home. Maybe instant mashed potatoes rendered the spud ricer obsolete to everyone who didn't have passionate opinions about mashed potatoes.

I've noticed that recipes meant to creatively alter leftovers pervade cookbooks right until everyone got a microwave. After that, we abruptly stopped putting effort into making last night's dinner exciting again. That makes gilt-edged potatoes a true relic from a bygone culinary era. You rarely see "Your family won't recognize those leftovers!" in the note above a recipe published in the last thirty years.

I love how Mrs. George O Thurn just says to use "yellow cheese." Also, it occurs to me: we already have the potatoes, so does that make the cheese the gilding? If calling the cheesy spuds "gilt-edged" is Mrs. George O Thurn's way of saying cheese is as good as gold, we at A Book of Cookrye heartily endorse the message.

In full disclosure, this doesn't look particularly presentational when you drop a spatula-load of spuds on a plate. However, cheesy potatoes are so delicious that the presentation doesn't matter at all.

The potatoes didn't get as crisp as I expected, but I don't care. This is delicious. Also, leftover gilt-edged potatoes are better in the microwave than the leftover baked potatoes you started with.

As a final postscript, I told my grandmother that we were using an extravagance of oven heat to make baked potatoes. When I told her how we cut crosses in the tops and then bake them in an extra-hot oven for two hours, she said her mother used to do potatoes just like that! It's so neat to accidentally land on what would have been a family recipe had anyone written it down.

Happy Anniversary to Us!

Today, February 18th, marks six(!) years of writing about what we hath wrought in the kitchen. I first started writing this sitting on my dorm room bed, and didn't even know what to name it. So I named it after the cookbook that happened to be nearest to me on the bed: a 1591 book I had found transcribed online that I printed at work and sewed together using an old folder for the cover. Ever since, I've thought that I should have used English spelling from this millennium.
But, as a special anniversary treat, I thought I'd share some fondly-remembered culinary delights that I never quite got around to writing about.

We Attempted Extremely Rapid Tea
A while ago, some British company devised a tea machine that could supposedly make tea within seconds of adding boiling water. In the promotional video, even they seem unconvinced in their own adorably awkward way. If you didn't watch the full thing, this should tell you everything you need to know:

We took offense at the thought of paying Sur La Table prices for a tea whirligig when we could do it with things already handy in our own kitchen.

Yes, this is a teabag lashed by its own string to my mixer.

If you try this at home, use a narrow cup rather than a bowl. In just three very intense seconds, we burned ourselves and send boiling-hot water all over the kitchen. Also, you're going to need something a lot sturdier than a paper tea bag. Witness the paper shards and tea dregs sitting in what tea remained in the bowl.

Fortunately for us, it turns out that if boiling water is atomized into little flying drops, it will (barely) cool enough to not burn your skin on contact. The idea of motorized tea does have premise, though. The remaining water had in fact turned into a decent puddle of tea.

Ranch Meatloaf
Remember when we swiped food from the wee children? By which I mean we helped ourselves to the surplus lunches they had from kiddie engineering summer camps? To the engineering department's credit, they didn't throw away the extra food, but left it out on tables for who might soever need it. However, they had thought that a bunch of kids stuck in math class all summer would be happy with low-salt pretzel sticks, miserable puny baby carrots with ranch dip, and dried cranberries. The last one is particularly galling in retrospect as I have since learned that since the cranberries are cooked in syrup before drying them, all the vitamins and other nutrients are mostly leached out and replaced with sugar. Rather than give the wee ones candy disguised as healthy snacks, why couldn't they just give them chocolate?

When you're nine years old, this is not an acceptable substitute for caramel sauce.

We at A Book of Cookrye, ever short of funds, did not throw any of this bounty away. We had scored some extremely discounted ground beef and decided to try an old church-lady cooking legend: dump ranch into your hitherto unexciting main dish for a zippy, peppy supper!

Yes. That is ground beef and ranch dressing. Since ranch is mostly mayonnaise (or some synthetic mayonnaise-style product), the meat technically has egg in there to bind it together. Or some petroleum-derived equivalent. This is something I only realize in retrospect. At the time, I just dumped salad dressing onto beef and made meatloaf because after eating mostly vegetables due to funds, I wanted a big log of dead cow.

No, I did not buy the ketchup squirted on it, though I did think that diamond pattern was oddly adorable. Someone left it in the refrigerator with no name on it. And as we repeatedly mentioned, if you left something in the fridge with no name, it was community property.

The pan was also abandoned in the kitchen cabinets by some previous student. I still use it as the tray for my tea-making alarm clock.

I do not like ranch most of the time because it totally obliterates the taste of whatever you put it on. This would explain why it's been used by generations of people to get vegetables into their children (and sometimes themselves- some of us never learn to like lettuce). However, mixing the ranch into the meat and baking it toned down into a nice mellow seasoning mix. If you're doing meatloaf, hamburger patties, meatballs, or anything that involves molding ground meat into shapes and cooking it, try adding a generous squirt of ranch dressing into it.

This turned up in the dorm microwave

Colleges should require students to pass a microwave proficiency test before being allowed to have one in their rooms. It would prevent having to march down the stairs at least once a week for yet another fire drill.

Lemongrass Tea
We at A Book of Cookrye have rarely featured drink recipes. This was something we made when we visited back home over one summer.

When we joined Our Mom of Cookrye earlier in the springtime on the annual pilgrimage to the plant nurseries to choose what would grace the flowerpots that year, we got a few lemongrass plants. We had thought they would add vertical interest and look really nice when surrounded by creeping low flowers. The lemongrass promptly spread like grass and took over every flowerpot it was in. Upon hearing how we had an unexpected and undeserved bumper crop, our grandfather said when he was growing up in Mexico, lemongrass tea sweetened with honey was very popular in the summer.

The first batch was watery and sad. So, as you can see above, we made it again with a lot more grass in the pot this time. The result? Something so refreshing you really should make it by the pitcher instead of by the cup. Just be sure to use a lot of lemongrass when you're making it. You need to really crowd and cram it into the water.

Lemon-Makgeolli Beef Slabs
Much to our delight, the grocery store near our school often had big hunks of beef on clearance. Having made meat loaf of one, meat balls of another, and senior-citizen potluck sandwiches of a third, we one day decided to slice one into steaks.

We never cooked with expensive beef because of money. But we had read in Miss Leslie's Directions for Cookery that laying frozen meat in water was "the only way to extract the frost without injuring the meat." And so, having absolutely no other advice to go to, that's what we did. I'm sure that modern food safety inspectors would have absolutely no objection to leaving beef all day in a bowl of water on top of the refrigerator.

In retrospect, we could have just bought a bottle of lemon juice and saved time. But we didn't, and when the lemons failed to give enough juice to immerse the beef, we dumped in the last of a bottle of makgealli. That's this stuff right here:

We often got our vegetables, tea, and rice from the Vietnamese supermarket nearby, which made things like this cheap rather than priced like rare foreign delicacies. I'm still not quite sure what makgealli is. But I do know that while I didn't like it when I tried just drinking a little, it made a really tasty meat marinade.

On the bright side, since we weren't using the marinade after taking the steaks back out, we didn't need to bother taking out the lemon seeds.

And so, having soaked the meat all day in water to extract the frost, we soaked it all night in this boozy lemon stuff. We even threw the peels back in with the beef in case they had any flavor to add.

All I did to cook them was put the clay pot they'd been marinating in over the stove and come back in a few hours. I didn't get any tempting pictures after I cooked them. But, this marinade turned some sliced chuck into some outrageously tender steaks. Before the rare-meat-is-the-only-meat crowd comes in here a-grousing, I was not about to eat rare beef that had sat out in room-temperature water all day, singing its siren song to all our microscopic friends.
I never eat steaks these days because whenever people cook them, they dogmatically leave them raw in the middle which I don't like. So, rather than being burned at the stake for blasphemy whenever I tell people I want the entire steak cooked rather than just the outside of it, I just say I don't like steaks.
Anyway, these were actually tender all the way through despite being fully-cooked. I'd do them again, but I still don't go around buying steaks.

Our First Cake We Decorated After Taking A Class

They said we could write whatever we wanted on top. Everyone else got to take their cakes home. Ours was requisitioned by the teacher for a faculty prank.

Impossible Coconut Pie
Impossible pies are one of those corporate recipe inventions that became popular enough that they still show up in fundraiser cookbooks thirty or forty years later. The batter supposedly separates into multiple layers as it bakes. In theory, the magic of kitchen science gives you both a crispy top crust and a delightful filling from a single mixture. This didn't work, but it was a decent if somewhat eggy coconut cake.
When we gave the recipe a go, we were so impatient to see if the self-layering gimmick worked that we we made the cake cool off faster than the people in the General Mills test kitchens probably intended.

Would you believe someone tried to throw that amazing fan away?

Apple Skillet

It's apple pie in cast iron. I don't know why I felt that the pie needed to be in a skillet, but it seemed adorable and homey at the time. Unfortunately, I made it as a present for someone and thus needed to bother an unsuspecting recipient to give me the pan back.

Chickpea and Spinach Salad with Pumpkin Chips

You know how we cut two whole pumpkins into tiny slivers and candied them? Well, we ran out of friends we could dump the jars of sugary lemon-flavored pumpkin on, and had to get really creative when using them up. This was actually really delicious. The hypersweet, lemony pumpkin, when cut into little bits, made a nice counterpoint to the bitterness in the fresh spinach. Spoon on a little extra syrup from the jar, add a shake of garlic salt, and it's absolutely exquisite.
We found that cut-up pumpkin chips go really well on any bitter salad greens. The concentrated tartness and sweetness are a perfect flavor counterpoint.

Banana Frozen Custard
Remember when we tried the Depression-era banana mousse, which ended up being far too runny to call a mousse?

We ended up freezing the goop so we could just claim it was supposed to be ice cream the whole time, and it was in fact quite lovely.

We thought to ourselves, what would happen if we just froze it in the first place instead of pretending it was supposed to be a mousse? Or perhaps Mrs. George Thurn intended for that recipe to be frozen, and we would have known that had we attended any of her music-hall cooking classes.
Anyway, we further decided to make it extra-smooth by putting the custard and the bananas into a blender.

After we boiled and cooled the custard, we just dumped everything into an ice cream freezer.
When it was ready, it was so rich and smooth that I'm still not sure why I haven't made it again and often. We would not encounter a better frozen custard until we got a brief string of jobs in Wisconsin- they're pretty big on dairy there, you know.

Sometimes Recipes Come Back Around Again
Remember when we cracked open our 1920's cookbook and made apples-and-meatballs? We were surprised to find a near-identical recipe in one of those foofy, ultra-trendy food magazines.

The only real difference is that they didn't bother making meatballs, instead taking the easier route of just cooking it in a frying pan.

There may be a way to make a pretty picture of cooked ground beef, but we haven't found it.

This tastes astonishingly like sausage. If you added a few spices (maybe nutmeg, mustard powder, and a little sage) it would be near-indistinguishable. We were surprised at how good it was, and we've already made the recipe before.

We Found Flatbread That Fit Our Waffle Iron Perfectly

We then had to forbid ourselves from buying it because we got fat on novelty grilled cheese. This is not the first time we have needed to restrain ourselves from buying flatbread that exactly fit our pans...

This skillet is about the size of a pizza.

Sandwich Recipes Found in Random Comments Sections

It was indeed delicious, and that's without bothering to butter the outside.

Speaking of ham sandwiches...

We Made The Oldest Written Recipe for Sandwiches

Miss Leslie, Directions for Cookery in its Various Branches, 1837

It was after Easter. There were leftovers.

Consoling a laid-off friend with cake

Like many people looking to help others in their bad times, we default to bringing unsolicited desserts.

Fortifying Cornbread in our Blender
You know how we had to replace our wedding blender with a 1970s survivor? Well, we decided to add calcium to a batch of cornbread the modern way with modern appliances.

Yes, that is a whole egg in there. The eggshell would in theory be pulverized to powder, which apparently is a good source of calcium.

Dumping in the remaining ingredients, we had what almost passed for normal cornbread batter.

Looks nice and innocent, doesn't it?

To the surprise of no one, it turns out that blenderizing eggshells into your bread gives you the same result as dumping in sand. Take our advice and find better ways to be sanctimoniously healthy. Speaking of using our blender for bad ideas...

Sauerkraut Casserole
These are the things I make when no one else is home to whine about the kitchen fumes. We start with this kale no one has eaten...

Add a lot of sauerkraut and all its vinegary juice...

I really like both sauerkraut and garlic, so much so that I use things like this to test potential dating partners.

And then we decide to add this bell pepper that has reached the end of its shelf life.

We could have cut it up, but we were too lazy. We were planning to use eggs (without their shells) in this baked mess anyway.

The blender also contains like 5 garlic cloves.

And so, we start filling the pan with these frozen chicken hunks.

That's what's reassuring about a lot of these questionable casseroles. You at least know there's meat in the middle and cheese on top. This is what you remind yourself as you cover the chicken with this mess.

And so, with the help of some cheese nearing its expiration date, we have a casserole ready to bake!

It looks like cafeteria slop and tastes like concentrated kraut. I regret nothing.

And so, here's to a wonderful future of cooking adventures! We've gathered over recipes with friends, and discovered horrors and delights. And remember, as we said to a music-major friend who needed post-ordeal brownies on jury day...