Chinook Sausages: or, Economical deep fried breakfast

Do the ingrates in your home demand steak three times a day with no regard for the budget? You don't need to put rat poison in the hashed mutton, Mrs. Wilson of the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger is here to help!

Chinook Sausage 2 oz dried beef, or ¾-1 cup leftover meat* 2 white or yellow onions ½ tsp powdered thyme ½ tsp black pepper 1 cup cornmeal 2 cups water Flour for coating Run the meat and onions through the food processor. Place in a saucepan. Add thyme, pepper, cornmeal, and water. Cook over medium heat until it is very thick. (It should just about hold up a spoon.) Allow to cool completely. Scoop out portions of this mixture and roll it into sausages. Roll these in flour. Fry until golden-brown. Serve hot with white or brown gravy. You can make these the night before, refrigerate them, and fry them the next day. *If using leftover meat, add 1 teaspoon salt. Note: These are very good if you stir in about ½ cup shredded provolone or mozzarella. Add the cheese as soon as you take the pot off the stove, stir until melted, and then allow to cool before shaping. Source: "Ask Mrs. Wilson," Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, 29 September 1919, page 12

Evening Public Ledger, 29 September 1919, page 12

 Today, Philadelphia's cooking columnist extraordinaire comes to the aid of a constant reader who has to take in lodgers who apparently don't appreciate the food she puts on the table. Exasperation fills "A Constant Reader's" one-paragraph plea, culminating with "These men seem to think I should have a steak three times a day, which is entirely out of the question."

Mrs. Wilson's tips are still useful today: buy foods in bulk, make good use of leftovers, cook ahead of time whenever possible, etc. She suggests serving a lot of potatoes (fair advice in any era), making pancake and cornbread batter ahead of time and refrigerating it, and tells how to easily make eight omelets at a time in the oven (while stretching your eggs with breadcrumbs).

Mrs. Wilson's domestic-science credentials really come through when she brings men's bowels into a cookery column. She directly addresses this three-steaks-a-day nonsense: "To provide eight healthy men with meat three times a day would really be doing them an injury. Eating meat constantly like this would in time lead to serious intestinal disorders."

As we noted in an earlier post, digestion and digestibility were big business in the early days of home economics. Even in this modern time when we've realized that fresh greens are good for you without boiling them to a paste, I have to agree with Mrs. Wilson's take on excess meat. I'm not necessarily worried about destroying men's digestive tracts with three steaks a day, but I don't think the bathroom fan could keep up with the aftermath.

But enough about early 20^th century domestic science (and its peculiar obsession with one's internal business). Let's get to the sausages. At the bottom of the recipe, Mrs. Wilson notes that "corned beef or other meat may be used to replace the dried beef." And so, with Mrs. Wilson's blessing, last night's dinner and a lot of onions got shoved through the meat grinder.

You may wonder where we found the means to pulverize so much meat. For various complicated economic reasons, pork has been astonishingly cheap of late. Or at least, the big roasts have been cheap. As I have speculated in earlier posts, I think a lot of people believe a 7-pound anvil of meat is a daunting project whereas the pre-sliced pork chops and ever-present boneless skinless chicken breasts seem friendlier. Regardless of whether I'm right about this or not, big pork roasts are cheap(ish) these days.

And so, following grocery the budget where it leads us, I decided we would have a "Sunday roast" every week like the people in those exported British TV shows. While there has been no objection to a weekly slab of meat, the leftovers tend to languish until I discreetly dispatch them to the municipal hereafter. Since no one was eating the extra meat anyway, it was a blank canvas of cut-price protein for me to use however I want.

Getting back to the sausages, Mrs. Wilson's recipe goes together unexpectedly fast. It's therefore perfect for someone who has eight ungrateful lodgers and a million chores to do. After a short(ish) time at the meat grinder, we could get everything into the pot and onto the stove.

You know the saying "It's going to look worse before it looks better?"

We are directed to make a meat-infused cornmeal mush after grinding our ingredients. I am fine with this, but I made a ruinous mistake with the first batch. We didn't have normal cornmeal, but we had the kind you use for tortillas. I thought it's the same thing, but more finely ground. It is not.

As a result of out ill-advised substitution, our mush never set. It thickened a little bit, but it remained too goopy to shape into sausages no matter how long I stirred it over a hot burner. Because onions are too beautiful to waste, I gamely plopped it by the spoonful onto a flour-coated plate and flattened it into patties. After letting them spend the night in the refrigerator in the hopes that they'd firm up (they didn't), I fried them the next day.

We didn't have any cooking oil. But we do have a lot of beef fat in the freezer. If you ever get nostalgic for "the old McDonald's fries," this moment may mean a lot to you.

We dropped our first Chinook patties into the hot fat, which spattered and reminded me why (aside from diet-watching) I never fry anything unless paper towels are on sale. 

 

The casual prevalence of deep frying in older recipes astounds me. It's popular to joke about how Americans can and will fry anything, but I don't know many people who do it at home unless it's a special occasion. Or at least, people don't get out a deep fryer without saying something like "I thought we'd have something really special tonight!" Apparently people in Mrs. Wilson's day would routinely put a vat of hot fat on the stove almost as routinely as we start a pot of boiling water. 

I thought our sausage patties would firm up in the hot fat the same way pancake batter turns into funnel cakes. But frying merely added a brown crust to the otherwise unchanged goo.

 Because I wanted to see if these were still good without immersing them in fat, I put one of our "sausage" patties onto a hot griddle. And... let's just say you want to deep-fry these.

After these goopy things failed to turn into sausages, I was willing to discard the entire mess and mutter that even Mrs. Wilson has dud recipes sometimes. But as aforementioned, we didn't use the right type of cornmeal in this. In the name of testing the Chinook sausages as Mrs. Wilson intended them (and also because shoving leftovers through a meat grinder is therapeutic), I obtained cornmeal and made them again.

It turns out that when you actually use the ingredients listed in a recipe, it's more likely to turn out right. After a few minutes on the stove, our cornmeal mush became thick enough to hold up a spoon. It felt like slightly gritty Play-Doh. And so, like children making clay worms, we turned it into sausages.

It looks more impressive when you have a whole plate of them.

Upon tasting the sausage mixture as it was meant to be, I thought it needed cheese. I don't mean that cheese would make the sausages better. I mean it seemed like cheese was missing. I put a big steaming spoonful of hot Chinook mush into a bowl and stirred in a handful of shredded mozzarella until it was melted. And indeed, it tasted complete. I don't think you need a lot of cheese to make this recipe taste right. It just needs that little bit of extra cheesy lift, not a Wisconsin-grade dairy infusion.

Because I didn't want to waste any beef fat (even though I have a lot of it), I got out the smallest pan in the house. I think you're supposed to cook individual fried eggs in it.

After turning the sausage to reveal the golden-colored underside, I briefly thought I should call these "mock fish sticks." They look like fish sticks to me.

Mrs. Wilson's Chinook sausages tasted like something caught between Thanksgiving turkey stuffing and onion rings. I've heard that fried turkey stuffing is a thing some people do with their holiday leftovers, so this recipe doesn't seem very farfetched.  Had I used a bigger frying pan, I can easily imagine putting them into the oil at once and cranking them out for hungry lodgers.

I liked these sausages a lot more than I expected to. Yes, deep-frying them definitely helps the recipe a lot. But if you're going to get out the deep fryer and spatter grease all over your stove, this is a pretty good recipe to do it with. If you can spare a few more coins from your purse than someone with eight lodgers to feed, you should definitely add cheese.

Seven-Ingredient Cake: or, This is not a pudding

Today's pudding is actually a cake.

Seven-Ingredient Cake 1 cup syrup* 2 eggs 4 tbsp butter or shortening ½ cup sour milk, buttermilk, or sour cream 1 tsp baking soda 2 cups flour 1 cup raisins Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9" square cake pan. Place the first six ingredients into a mixing bowl. Beat until well-mixed with a whisk or electric mixer. Then stir in raisins. If desired, you can add spices like cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, mace, etc. Pour into the pan and bake 20-30 minutes, or until the center springs back when lightly pressed with a fingertip, or a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. This is delicious as-is. Or, you can top it with fruit custard or vanilla sauce. *Not sure what syrup the recipe calls for. I used cane syrup since the store near me sells it. Source: "Ask Mrs. Wilson," Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, March 4 1919, page 14

"Ask Mrs. Wilson," Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, March 4 1919, page 14

Today on A Book of Cookrye, we are trying out Mrs. Wilson's seven-ingredient pudding! You may recall when we made her potato bread (which was so good that we have since given it away as appreciation gifts). On the day Mrs. Wilson ran that recipe in the newspaper, she gave a recipe for what she called a "seven-pudding" directly underneath it.

The only hard part of this recipe was figuring out what Mrs. Wilson meant by "sirup" in the ingredient list. At first I ruled out corn syrup as too new for this recipe, but Wikipedia tells me that 1) corn syrup goes back a lot further than I thought and 2) the Karo people spent obscene amounts of money advertising their product as a wartime sugar substitute. So the home cooks of 1919 would have at least heard of the stuff. 

But after our previous experiences baking with corn syrup, I had absolutely no desire to use it again. Instead I bought a jar of cane syrup, which was a bit pricier than I wanted. For those who've never heard of it, cane syrup is basically sugarcane juice that has been boiled a lot. (Basically, they make it the same way as maple syrup, but start with a different plant sap.) It tasted like milder molasses.

Having resolved the syrup-purchasing conundrum, the rest of the recipe seemed pretty easy: pile everything into a bowl and insert a whisk.

After just a minute or two of beating, we had what looked like a really good cake batter. Mrs. Wilson writes that "spices may be added if desired," and I decided to justify my recent purchase of a canister of mace by adding some to today's cake. The mace added a really nice, subtle flavor that almost made me feel like it was worth buying.

As we prepared to stir in the raisins and bake, I realized I had forgotten a certain crucial ingredient:

Our cake (or pudding, if we believe the recipe title) batter looked just a little better after getting all of the ingredients into it. Now that we had added the forgotten egg, it was ready to get beraisined and enter the baking pan.

We have encountered a fair number of recipes that don't quite match what the title calls them. The so-called banana dessert bars were a (very good) cake. The crocus carrot cake was a pie and also a disappointment. The butter finger dessert bars were actually a pecan pie with coconut in it. And today's recipe is called a "pudding" is in fact a cake.

I've noticed that every time we've made a boiled pudding, it came out like a bag of cake. So my totally unfounded (because I am too lazy to look it up) theory is that eventually people started putting their pudding mixture into baking pans instead of faffing about with a pudding bag and a massive pot. I think the name "pudding" persisted for a while because it was the same batter that the old-style boiled puddings were made of. (Or at least I think it's the same batter that boiled puddings were made of.)

Mrs. Wilson's seven-ingredient "pudding" tasted astonishingly like our unexpected favorite, the war cake. And unlike the war cake, you don't have to wait for the batter to cool off overnight. 

It is what you hope for when people say something is "old-fashioned." If you're making the recipe in its original amounts, I'd suggest baking it in a loaf pan and telling everyone it's a pound cake. It's a lot better than it should have been. So far, Mrs. Wilson has not put a dud of a recipe in our kitchen. This cake will be made again.

Potato Custards: or, Sometimes the mundane things are the strangest

Ever wished your mashed potatoes had more dignity?

Potato Custards ½ cup mashed potatoes* ½ cup milk 1 egg ½ tsp salt 1 pinch mace Heat oven to 350°. Grease five or six individual custard cups. Or, coat a cupcake pan with cooking spray. Thoroughly whisk everything together. Or, if using fresh potatoes that still have a few lumps in them after mashing, drop all the ingredients into a blender and let it run until everything is perfectly smooth. Pour into the prepared pans, filling them about two-thirds full. Bake until they are firm and puff up, about 15-20 minutes. Serve warm. *Instant mashed potatoes are fine. Source: Ask Mrs. Wilson, Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, July 7 1919, page 12

This comes to us from Ask Mrs. Wilson, who gently yet firmly taught the Philadelphia newsreading public how to cook things the domestic-science-approved way. But Mrs. Wilson did not pretend that everyone with a copy of the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger had bottomless grocery budgets. Only a few months before today's column, Mrs. Wilson ran a recipe for a one-egg cake in response to a spike in egg prices. Today, Mrs. Wilson ran an entire recipe of exclusively potato recipes for the benefit of those of us on a tight budget.

Ask Mrs. Wilson, Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, July 7 1919, page 12

However, the first line of her article about potatoes hasn't aged as well as the recipes: "This nutritious tuber is said to have saved the Irish people from famine...."

Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, July 7 1919, page 12

Mrs. Wilson may have an incomplete understanding of then-recent history, but she treads on sounder footing further down the page when she says "Boiling potatoes in their jackets will cause the potato to lose about 2 percent of its nutritive value, while peeling before cooking causes a loss of 14 percent." In other words, Mrs. Wilson endorses our practice of finger-picking the skins off of cooked potatoes instead of spending long irksome hours with a potato peeler. She confirms this in her directions for edible potato cups (for containing salads): "Boil medium-sized potatoes in their jackets. Cool and then peel."

All of this brings us to today's recipe: potato custards. It was the only unusual recipe on the entire page. While some of the other recipes are a little different than today (the potatoes au gratin uses white gravy instead of cheese sauce), the custard recipe was the only one that I literally couldn't imagine what it tasted like. Therefore I had to make it.

Mrs. Wilson directs us to mash the potatoes and force them through a sieve. This ensures that are mashed potatoes are perfectly smooth. But we at A Book of Cookrye had a much easier way to ensure spud perfection: use a box of instant flakes.

After you have either mashed or reconstituted your potatoes, the recipe is pretty simple: add the rest of the ingredients and get out a whisk. That little smattering of brown powder floating on top of our mixture is the only expensive part of this recipe: a pinch of mace. 

We haven't used mace for anything since the snow muffins, and the canister had long since disappeared. Much of it got used up when I said "I'm not using this anyway" and added it to cinnamon toast. I considered substituting nutmeg for mace since we already have it (nutmeg and mace come from the same plant), but decided that I should probably do this recipe correctly. This involved purchasing and paying for a (small!) shaker of mace.

Recipes like this make me wish stores had dispense-it-yourself spices, the same way a lot of them let you bag and price your own peanuts. It would be very helpful for those of us who want a single teaspoon of a spice we will never use again.

After a quick stir, our potato custards looked like an unusually pale cake batter.

I decided to bake the custards in miniature pie pans because it seemed cute. I also noticed at this point that there was no sugar in these custards. While I am no stranger to savory custards, the omission seemed odd. And so, I sweetened one of the custards and baked the other exactly as written. (The sugary spud custard was bad. So we don't need to mention it again.)

I have to credit Mrs. Wilson with this: every single one of her recipes I've tried has worked. Whether the potato custards were any good remained to be seen, but they behaved perfectly in the oven. Like our pumpkin tarts, they even puffed into nicely-shaped domes when they were done. Apparently ingredients are never unruly when Mrs. Wilson is in charge. 

These were the most formal mashed potatoes I've ever made. They had the exact texture of a really good cheesecake, but they tasted like mashed potatoes. It was like we subjected a cheesecake to a flavor transplant. The mace was an unexpectedly good addition. If you take nothing else from this recipe, try adding a pinch of mace to your mashed potatoes. 

If you have ever wished your mashed potatoes were more presentational and dignified, this is the recipe for you. No more must your mashed potatoes be sloppily presented in whatever splattered shape they landed on the plate. 

Today's potato custards seemed typical of Mrs. Wilson's recipes: fancier-looking than than I would have ever bothered with, but without adding any extra ingredients to the grocery list (aside from the mace, which will probably follow me from spice shelf to spice shelf until the end of time). In full disclosure, I definitely noticed the absence of butter in these, so you may want to add a bit to the recipe. But with that said, this is not a bad way to serve mashed potatoes.

One-Egg Cake: or, Economizing never tasted so good!

The cost of eggs this last winter made it almost prohibitive for the housewife of moderate means to do much baking, yet most folk just love a bit of homemade cake. Therefore I am giving you a recipe for a one-egg cake.

...Aside from the fact that food columnists no longer assume that only housewives bake at home, that recipe introduction hasn't aged a bit since it appeared in 1919.

One-Egg Cake ¾ cup sugar 1 egg 4 tbsp shortening 2 cups sifted flour 4 tsp baking powder 1 tsp flavoring of your choice ¾ cup water Heat oven to 350°. Grease a loaf pan or two 8" round pans. Place all ingredients into a bowl. Beat with a whisk until well mixed. Pour into the pan(s). If baking a layer cake, spread the batter a little thinner in the center and a little higher on the sides. Bake until it springs back when lightly pressed in the center, about 20 minutes for round pans. The cake will not turn as golden as you may expect, so check it even if it still looks too pale to be fully baked. To make a raisin cake, spread ¾ cup raisins on top of the cake when it's ready to put into the oven. Then dust it lightly with flour (sprinkle a very little bit through a sifter). The raisins will sink into the rising cake and distribute themselves as it bakes. Instead of raisins, you can use any of these: ½ cup currants, 1 cup finely chopped nuts, or ½ cup finely chopped candied citron. If making a layer cake, Mrs. Wilson suggests spreading the bottom layer with jelly and then sprinkling coconut on it, and then topping the stacked cake with more jelly and a thick layer of coconut. Or, you can use finely chopped nuts instead of coconut. Note: To halve this recipe and make a small cake, beat the egg well, then measure out half of it. You can refrigerate the other half of the egg for up to two days, or freeze it. (Thaw it in the refrigerator, not at room temperature.) Source: Ask Mrs. Wilson, Philadelphia Evening Ledger, April 23 1919, p. 12

Philadelphia Evening Ledger, April 23 1919, p. 12

While a lot of Mrs. Wilson's columns suggest that she had very strong opinions about the Right and True way to prepare food, she was definitely looking out for everyone whose purses had gotten a bit lightweight. She ran a half-page of suggested variations under the recipe so that everyone could have the cake they wanted without using up all the eggs.  In case you weren't in the mood for a one-egg Boston cream pie, fruitcake, or shortcake, she even had little cake-drop spice cookies. Mrs. Wilson may have been powerless against high grocery prices, but she absolutely would not let the bills get between her readers and a good dessert.

I wanted to try the one-egg cake as all the people subscribing to the Evening Public Ledger would have tasted it in 1919, but I was leery of using shortening instead of butter. Shortening tastes like nothing and has an unnaturally long shelf life. I went online and poked through a lot of old books, trying to find some period-correct justification for using anything but that scientifically white miracle fat. But ultimately (and because shortening was cheaper anyway), we went with the shelf-stable option. 

I should note that since I am halving the recipe, this is not a one-egg cake but a half-egg cake. I don't even mind splitting eggs in half anymore. After one does it enough times, the task of beating an egg in a small cup and then measuring out half of it becomes quick and easy.

Here I started to wonder whether I would regret following this recipe to the letter. We're supposed to dump water into this. While it certainly will do the job of turning these ingredients into a nice, fluid cake batter, water literally tastes like nothing unless the pipes in your walls need a good cleaning. Was I currently resurrecting written proof of how bland the food was in home economics class before the Jazz Age?

The use of shortening and tap water instead of butter and milk may seem like an attempt to modernize baking by moving away from those old-fashioned farmhouse ingredients and toward modern, scientific ones. Or maybe dairy had gotten as expensive as eggs. After all, the war had barely ended and there was a pandemic on.

Like Louise Bennett Weaver would direct readers to do for her spice cake recipe, Mrs. Wilson has us just put everything in the bowl all at once and then give it the cement-mixer treatment. I decided that a whisk would probably make this faster. Was I ever right! We had this completely beaten together in about thirty seconds.

At first I was unsure of what to do here. Mrs. Wilson directs us to "Beat hard to mix for five minutes." But we had this mixed in about one-tenth of the time. Were we supposed to beat the snot out of the cake batter for another four and a half minutes to develop the texture or something? Then I thought about how Louise's spice cake took a similarly long time because I used a spoon instead of a whisk. Perhaps Mrs. Wilson didn't think everyone following her recipes at home had whisks. They may have been more associated with whipped cream and other frivolities than everyday cooking, and therefore a somewhat rarer find in the average kitchen of 1919.

I do not think I have the forearm strength that Mrs. Wilson lacked. You can't convince me that with a whisk instead of a spoon, Mrs. Wilson couldn't have this cake batter beaten completely smooth in less time than it takes to crack open the one egg required to make it. Does she look like someone whose arms gave out halfway through a recipe?

Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, December 5 1918, page 12

I gave the batter a careful tasting and... it was a lot better than I expected. Given that this cake contains shortening and tap water, I thought it would be hopelessly bland. Instead, it tasted like a very good cake. I should stop doubting Mrs. Wilson.

Perhaps because it contains no milk, this cake stayed very pale the whole time it baked. That may be another reason Mrs. Wilson used water instead of dairy. A lot of cookbooks in those days had helpful tips on how to keep your cake from browning too much on the outside, such as putting the cake pan in a larger pan full of sand. Apparently people cared a lot about that at the time. This cake almost didn't brown at all. In fact, it looked like one of the cakes from a microwave cookbook instead of something I baked at 350°.

I should have baked this in a smaller pan--- say, an 8" one instead of the 9" pan that I used. It's true that the cake is a bit domed on top, but Mrs. Wilson did say to "spread the mixture higher on the sides, leaving the center shallow." Unfortunately, I didn't see that instruction until it was too late. 

I was going to top this cake with the icing from the graham-coconut cake since I like it a lot, but it uses an egg white. I didn't want to defeat this cake's entire purpose for existing by cracking open another egg to ice it. Instead, I chose to top this cake with cinnamon icing. It uses zero eggs, meaning that this entire cake, including the icing, contains just half an egg.

Also, to be quite honest, I was dead certain that a cake made with shortening and tap water would be the blandest thing I've ever served for dessert. I figured the cinnamon icing would help make up for what I was quite sure the cake lacked.

To Mrs. Wilson's credit, this cake was delightfully light and fluffy when we cut into it.

Upon tasting this cake, it was.... unexpectedly delicious. I was not prepared for this cake to taste as good as it does. And I know I'm not the only one who thought so. Others tried some of the cake and told me that I need to type the recipe onto a card and keep it on file. Even if we weren't economizing on eggs, it's really good.

After all, the cost of eggs these days has made it almost prohibitive for anyone on a tight budget to do much baking, yet most folks just love a bit of homemade cake. Therefore I definitely recommend this recipe for a one-egg cake.

Virginia Potato Bread: Indeed, we all preferred it to the cake

We've trusted random people who submit to the Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, but now it's time to bring in professionals.

Virginia Potato Bread 1½ cup mashed potatoes 2½ tbsp butter or shortening ½ cup milk ¼ cup sugar 1½ tsp salt 1 egg ½ envelope (or 1⅛ tsp) dry yeast About 3½ cups flour In a large, microwave-safe bowl or a large saucepan, scald the milk. Stir in the shortening until it is melted. Then stir in the sugar and allow to cool to 80°. Whisk in the mashed potatoes, egg, and yeast. Then stir in enough flour to make a firm, workable dough. (It should be supple, not crumbly.) Knead for 15 minutes. Rinse the bowl, wipe it dry, grease it, and place the dough back in it. Then spritz the top of the dough with cooking spray, or brush with oil or melted shortening. (This helps prevent the dough from crusting over.) Put the dough in a warm, draft-free place and allow to rise for three hours. Punch or knead down, then allow to rise one hour more. Place the dough on a floured board and shape into a loaf. Place in a well-greased loaf pan and let rise 45 minutes. When ready to bake, heat oven to 375°. Bake for 30 minutes. Then reduce heat to 350° and bake 20 minutes more. Note: If using leftover homemade mashed potatoes, you can eliminate any tiny spud lumps by putting the potatoes in a blender with the milk and the egg. Note 2: This is halved from the original recipe. Note 3: Check whether your bread is baked a lot earlier than you may think! Mine was done after 30 minutes. "Ask Mrs. Wilson," Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, March 4 1919, page 14

That pudding recipe is already on my list of things to make.

A decade or two before the Philadelphia Inquirer trusted its readers to come up with their own recipes for the weekly Recipe Exchange, the Philadelphia newsreading public had Mrs. Wilson, a former "personal cuisiniere to Queen Victoria." After she was done with Buckingham Palace, she apparently returned to the United States and wrote for the newspaper. As she proudly listed on the title page of her cookbook, she was also a home economics teacher for the University of Virginia and a cooking instructor for the U.S. Navy. 

Here's the photograph that introduced her to everyone reading the newspaper. She looks ready to take on the people of the greater Philadelphia area, don't you think?

Apparently Mrs. Wilson was an early pioneer in the art of being a multimedia cooking expert, because outside of her newspaper column she made short films demonstrating recipes that were quite the event in the Philadelphia movie theaters. Or maybe the theater owners wanted to come up with more reasons to get the public to come in on weekday afternoons. At any rate, little announcements like this regularly appear under her headlines.

Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, September 29 1919, page 12

Mrs. Wilson wrote all her introductory articles and gave her recipes in a crisp, home-economics-teacher style. Similarly, her recipes often seem to come out of an early-1900s domestic science textbook. Each page begins with a short article and a few recipes Mrs. Wilson thinks we need this week. The rest of the page is given to answering reader's questions. All of the reader questions are written in a flattering tone, opening with "My dear Mrs. Wilson," which according to basic secretarial practice is the standard salutation for informal correspondence. 

All of Mrs. Wilson's answers are bluntly terse (but in a ladylike way). She also does not repeat recipes, ever. Whenever someone writes in asking for a recipe that she published, she tells them to go to the newspaper office and have someone pull the relevant backissue for them. Have a look at how she knocks out four questions in one short paragraph.

At least Dear Abby reprints the pecan pie recipe every year.

Take a look at how politely she prepared one hopeful reader for disappointment.

Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, June 23 1919, page 14

 

I love how quickly we collectively ditched the cooking fireplace as soon as the kitchen stove hit the mass market. Only two generations earlier, fellow Philadelphian Miss Leslie's best-selling cookbooks taught how to cook everything on a fireplace. By the time Mrs. Wilson had a newspaper contract, she apparently couldn't even say something like "If your kitchen still has that old-fashioned thing your grandmother used..." By 1919, we already had electric stoves. 

Indeed, even the curt Mrs. Wilson praised the modern electric "fireless cooker" as enthusiastically as I endorse the dishwasher. "Fireless cookers" were considered the most modern way to cook in the early 1900s. They were sort of the forerunners of the countertop slow cooker. Fireless cookers were airtight boxes that were so insulated as to barely need any heat (say, a single oil lamp) to slowly cook food over several hours. To people used to cooking over blazing coal stoves or wood fireplaces, fireless cookers must have been a welcome change.

For our first attempt at one of Mrs. Wilson's recipes, we're making potato bread! Ms. H.L.S., the person who wrote in to request the recipe, says that "The bread itself was snow white and fine; delicious as any white mountain cake I have ever tasted. Indeed, we all preferred it to the cake," which is a bold claim. We had to find out. At the beginning of the recipe, you're supposed to mash your own potatoes and then force them through a sieve to eliminate absolutely all the lumps. We at A Book of Cookrye have an easier way to make perfectly smooth mashed potatoes:

I don't think Mrs. Wilson would object to using instant potato flakes instead of boiling and sieving the spuds for ourselves. In the preface of her cookbook (which you can download and read for free here), she writes that "economical, palatable food is within your reach if you will discard the ideas and methods of long ago. Remember, you would not prefer to ride in a horse car, as a means of conveyance, so why use the recipes of those days?"

Perfectly smooth, without resorting to a sieve.

Speaking of moving our cooking techniques out of the horsedrawn days, we did the milk-heating and shortening-melting business without even touching the stove! As previously discussed, the microwave can do so many things in the kitchen if you just let it.

We needed to cool the milk back down lest the yeast get cooked before it can raise the bread. In the pre-dishwasher days (which I am so glad are behind me), I would have done the milk-scalding in the same big bowl I would use for the whole bread recipe. But since it is nearly no extra effort to place an additional cup with the other dirty dishes in the machine, I could scald the milk in its own little container and then pour it into a stone-cold mixing bowl. After thirty seconds of swishing the milk in the bowl, we were ready to, as the kids apparently say, get this bread.

At this stage, this recipe looked a lot like Elizabeth's Rolls. Both of them start off with a thin, gravy-like batter that involves mashed potatoes and yeast. The recipes diverge at this point, where Mrs. Wilson tells us to add all of the flour at once instead of adding only a small part of the flour and letting the yeast have a feast before adding the rest.

At this point, we are directed to knead this dough for fifteen minutes. That is a long time to spend working dough. At first I thought it was a mistype of 5 minutes. However, while someone in the Evening Ledger's typesetting department may have absent-mindedly grabbed two numerals out of a type drawer, I doubt they would have picked up and set all the letters required to spell the word "fifteen" without realizing the mistake. Therefore, I kneaded the dough for fifteen minutes as directed. The dough felt so right while kneading. It was warm, wonderfully soft, supple, and--- well, it felt like a big hug for my hands. Towards the end of the fifteen minutes, the dough actually got springy and snappy in a way that boded very well for the recipe. This is only our first recipe from Ask Mrs. Wilson, and so far, her directions are correct down to the last tick of the clock.

After kneading, we are directed to let the bread rise for three hours. I didn't think we would need such a long time because of our newfound method of heating up the oven with a pot of boiled water. (Obviously, people have been using this method for a long time, but it took me until last year to find out about it for myself.) But after 45 minutes, the dough looked resolutely unchanged, with barely a suggestion of puffiness. Even though it looked like I had just wasted time and flour, I figured it couldn't hurt to just leave the dough where I parked it.

Indeed, after three hours, the bread dough decided spring to yeasty life! I have to again give Mrs. Wilson credit: so far her recipe works and her times are correct. This doesn't always happen. We've long learned that just because a recipe is in print doesn't mean that it will work. But behold how much this bread decided to rise while I wasn't looking!

Mrs. Wilson directs us to punch or knead the dough down and then return it to its cozy leavening nest for another hour. When I punched the dough down, it felt so dang nice in my hands- it was soft and yet still springy from the extra-long kneading. I've never had bread dough that felt so satisfying to handle. I had my doubts that it would rise again in one hour when last time it needed thrice that. But sure enough, our bread was marvelously airy in exactly the time Mrs. Wilson specified. It seemed less like risen bread dough and more like a delicate foam.

At this point, Mrs. Wilson's recipe gets less precise than it had been heretofore. She just says "mold into loaves and then place in well-greased pans." How many loaves should we be making? How big should they be? Does she mean freestanding loaves that you bake on flat metal sheets, or do we need loaf pans to keep the bread from turning into a flat dough puddle? If one reads the sentence slowly, one notices that she says to place IN pans, not ON them. I figured that no one bakes things IN a flat cookie sheet, so I got out a loaf pan.

While the bread is rising, I would like to make a short point about how much I love dishwashers. I've often mentioned that I hate pre-rinsing dishes and refuse to ever do it. This brings us to the aftermath of this recipe, which was piled up in the sink. As anyone who makes bread knows, you have a gummy, hard, paste-like residue on the bowl that requires hard scouring to get off. However, I just put the bowl upside-down on the dishwasher rack looking like this:

You may think I found cooked-on dough clumps after the dishwasher finished its cycle, but the bowl cameo out perfect and spotless. As I have often said, Life is too wonderful to spend it doing the dishwasher's work for it. It's a dishWASHER, not a dish-BAPTIZER. Don't rinse and scrub the dishes before putting them in the machine. It will get them clean while you do literally anything else.

Let us now return to the recipe! Mrs. Wilson's rising times are extraordinarily accurate. I can't put microbes on tight schedule, but apparently Mrs. Wilson can. At this point, I just trusted the former personal cuisiniere to Queen Victoria, set a timer for 45 minutes, and left it. Indeed, the bread had risen to the perfect height and was ready to bake after 45 minutes.

Those of you keeping track will note that the bread had been rising for almost 5 hours at this point. Obviously the long rising time wasn't a bother- it's not like I spent 5 hours working away. However, others in the house had minor objections to how long the bread spent minding its own yeast business. Someone said "You know what I hate about bread? It smells so good but you can't have it yet!"

Fortunately for everyone in the house, the bread was done long before Mrs. Wilson claimed it would be. I don't blame her for the incorrect timing since I left the pan of dough in the oven while it heated up instead of removing it for preheating purposes. After the making the house smell so good for half the day, everyone was ready to cut into this barely after removing it from the oven.

I should note that when I tried to cut it into thin slices, the bread did not let that happen. (Maybe I need a freshly sharpened bread knife.) 

However, when you cut it into slices that almost qualify for Texas Toast, which incidentally I did not first encounter in Texas.

The crust on this crackled when I cut it. The inside was so beautifully fluffy. This tastes like what you hope for when someone says they're bringing homemade bread. If you want to make homemade bread that tastes like you've been baking for years but you haven't, definitely give this recipe a go! At first, I expressed the thought that I should have put the bread dough in a muffin pan instead of making a loaf that would go stale before we ate it all. My attempt at practicality was defeated with one sharp question: "But how could we make sandwiches with it?"

And while this bread is so delicious that you could just stand over the cutting board and eat it as you slice more off, it also makes delicious sandwiches. It also made the best grilled cheese I've had in a long time. 

We will definitely be revisiting this bread recipe- and perhaps often. The long time it spends rising doesn't bother me because I don't even need to stay in the house! This is easily the best white bread I've made aside from Elizabeth's rolls. Which, come to think of it, both of them contain mashed potatoes. Maybe every truly great bread needs spuds.