Peanut Butter Pudding: or, Let's microwave our way through the summer heat

Summer is here whether we like it or not! Because the the air conditioner has enough problems without any cooking, today's recipe only involves a hot stove if you don't feel like microwaving.

Peanut Butter Pudding ⅓ cup sugar, white or brown 4½ tsp cornstarch, or 3 tbsp flour ¼ tsp salt 2 cups milk* ⅓ cup peanut butter (85 grams)† 1 tsp vanilla       To cook in the microwave: In a large microwave-safe bowl, mix the sugar, cornstarch, and salt, eliminating all lumps. Stir in the milk, mixing well. Cook in the microwave, stopping and stirring every thirty seconds, until thick. (Mine was ready about when it first started simmering.) Remove from the microwave and add the peanut butter, stirring until it completely mixes in and the pudding is smooth. (If the peanut butter doesn't completely melt and mix in, just microwave it a little bit and then stir again.) Press a sheet of plastic wrap onto the pudding's surface. You want it to make contact with the top of the pudding-- this prevents a skin from forming. Cool until lukewarm, then stir in the vanilla. Transfer the pudding to a storage container (or just leave it in the bowl-- we at A Book of Cookrye don't judge). Press the plastic wrap back onto it, and refrigerate. If the pudding accidentally becomes too thick as it chills overnight, simply stir in more milk, a spoonful at a time, until it is right. If desired, top each serving with chocolate syrup or fruit jelly.       To cook on the stovetop: In the top of a double boiler, mix the sugar, cornstarch, and salt, eliminating all lumps. Stir in the milk, mixing well. Place over boiling water and cook until it thickens, stirring often. Add the the peanut butter and stir until the it melts and mixes in, making the pudding completely smooth. (Be sure to use a double boiler. This pudding will want to scorch if you cook it directly on the burner.) Remove from heat, transfer to a storage container, and press a sheet of plastic wrap onto its surface. You want it to make contact with the top of the pudding-- this prevents a skin from forming. Cool until lukewarm, then stir in the vanilla. Press the plastic wrap back onto it, and refrigerate. If the pudding accidentally becomes too thick as it chills overnight, simply stir in more milk, a spoonful at a time, until it is right. If desired, top each serving with chocolate syrup or fruit jelly. * If you don't have fresh milk, you can use evaporated milk or powdered milk. Since this pudding is cooked, you won't know the difference between powdered milk and fresh. † Instead of scraping peanut butter in and out of a measuring cup, I found it easier to put the entire bowl of steaming pudding on the kitchen scale, tare it, and then drop in spoonfuls of peanut butter until it came up to 85 grams. Or, as Poppy Crocker suggested in the comments, tare the jar of peanut butter, then scoop out the peanut butter until it comes to negative 85 grams. Source: The Betty Feezor Show (November 22, 1976)

This recipe comes to us from Betty Feezor, whose brownie recipe has become a part of my life. (It's the most splattered card in my box.) For those who don't know, Betty Feezor had a cooking-and-homemaking television show from the 1950s to the 1970s in North Carolina. People in the area still fondly remember her today, even though barely any footage remains to remember her by. (Almost all of her shows were broadcast live and unrecorded.) Her TV station even renamed the her former soundstage the Betty Feezor Studio.

Betty presented this recipe on the only episode that has made its way online. I love her polite honesty about home budgeting. As she's spooning the pudding into a serving glass, she says "I think particularly on a Monday, when maybe you had a nice dessert for the weekend but you probably ate it all, and there's none of that left. And you maybe have realized that your grocery money is not going to extend until the end of the week if you don't let up a little bit. So these are ingredients that you probably already have in the house."

Since the temperature has made itself at home in the triple digits, I decided this recipe was meant for the microwave. It contains no eggs, so it can't curdle. (Well, I suppose if you cooked it far too long, but...) And besides, Betty Feezor warned that it will scorch onto the pot if you cook it directly over the burner instead of in a double boiler. With the microwave, our milk won't be right on top of a literal fire and therefore ready to burn onto the pot.

After we failed to make the replacement microwave fit in our kitchen, someone surrendered and changed out the light bulb in the one we already had.

In just a few scorch-free minutes, our pudding was ready to receive its peanut butter. To tell the truth, I don't like to press peanut butter into a measuring cup and then scrape it back out. Instead, I put the bowl of steaming pudding onto the kitchen scale and drop in spoonfuls of peanut butter until it came up to 85 grams, which the nutrition label tells me is the same as one-third cup.

If you think this looks a bit overcooked, it is. But don't worry, it turned out all right with a bit of last-minute repairs-- and yours can, too.

And if you find that you accidentally cooked the pudding until it got too thick, thus making it too gluey and gummy to eat, not all is lost-- even if it looks like this.

Custard should not hold up a spoon.

You only need to stir in more milk, a spoonful or so at a time, until the pudding is right. If your custard seems ruined, just think of what Betty Feezor said earlier in the same episode when discussing a sewing project that went wrong, "So don't despair, there's always a way that you can correct your mistake." 

I'll admit, it doesn't look Instagram-ready. But it doesn't need to. If you want, you can drizzle a bit of hot fudge sauce on top. I think the extra-dark chocolate sauce overwhelmed the taste of the pudding underneath, but it did wonders for appearance. If you're trying this at home, just get a bottle of chocolate syrup instead. It's what Betty Feezor did.

I really liked that this recipe worked so well in the microwave-- particularly in our ongoing heat wave. As we all know, there are a lot of things you can technically cook in the microwave, but they never come out as good as with an actual stove. But this recipe comes out the same either way. And you get exactly what Betty Feezor promises as the ingredients appear on the screen: a peanut butter pudding.

I also liked that this pudding wasn't excessively sweet. It doesn't need to be. It is definitely a bit humbler than a lot of other things we've featured here, but I liked it enough to make it twice.

Mardi Gras Salad: or, Have you ever tried ginger-flavored pineapple?

With the heatwave firmly in place, we at A Book of Cookrye are trying to indulge ourselves without turning on the oven. Even if the power company ran buy-one-get-one-free special on kilowatt-hours, who wants to pull cookies out of the oven when it's 105 degrees out? (That's 41° for our Celsius friends.) So, instead of baking a heavy dessert, we are making a nice, refreshing salad.

Mardi Gras Salad 1 (3-oz) package lemon gelatin 1 cup boiling water 1 cup ginger ale 1 (20-oz) can diced pineapple or pineapple tidbits* ½ cup maraschino cherries (or one 10-oz jar) 4 oz mini marshmallows (or two heaping cups) Whipped cream, if desired Pour the pineapple into a strainer and let it sit for about 30 minutes. If desired, cut the pineapple into smaller pieces afterward. Meanwhile in a large mixing bowl, dissolve the gelatin in the boiling water. Set aside to cool. Cut half of the cherries into quarters. Save the remaining cherries for garnish. Mix the ginger ale, pineapple, cherries, and marshmallows into the gelatin. Refrigerate, stirring occasionally, until it is firm enough that the marshmallows don't float and the fruit don't sink. If you want to speed this up, you can put the bowl in a much larger bowl full of ice water (or pot of ice water, or whatever else is big enough) and stir it for a few minutes. When the salad is firm enough, pour it whatever container or mold you want it to serve it from. (I just let it firm up in the bowl.) Refrigerate overnight. Serve "piled gayly" (the original recipe's words) in small bowls. Garnish each one with whipped cream (if desired) and a cherry. *Be sure you get the correct type of canned pineapple. I accidentally used crushed pineapple the first time and it never set. Note: If you want to very strictly follow the original recipe, pour the salad into a square baking dish to firm up. Cut into squares when set. Serve each portion on lettuce, and top each one with mayonnaise mixed a little pineapple juice (which you saved from draining the pineapple). Garnish each one with a cherry. Or, spoon the salad into "slim stemmed sherbet glasses" and top with whipped cream and a cherry. Chicago newspaper clipping, 1930s-50s Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

...Did you think we would make a lettuce salad in these cyclosporic times? It seems like every week brings more produce recalls.* I know we are all glad to have eliminated all those tedious food regulations and made everything more efficient.

 

This salad comes from my great-grandmother's recipe binder. As a reminder, she was from Chicago and therefore from the Midwest. Therefore, this is not a dessert even though it contains marshmallows.

Before we did anything else, we set our pineapple aside to drain. Doesn't it look like a beautiful mound of blue Hawaii?

 

Next, the recipe calls for diced maraschino cherries. I quartered them because it seemed like the perfect size. Their flavor would probably disappear if we cut them too small.

As a recipe note, I also cut the pineapple into smaller pieces. 

And now, with all the advance preparation out of the way, we got to the foundation of our salad: Lemon Jello! (Or lemon store-brand gelatin because I'm not paying extra for a different logo on the same box.) It smelled like a bowl of knockoff Lucky Charms. Of all the gelatins, Lemon Jello is one of the most frightening ways to begin a salad. You never know whether you're going to get fruit, olives, or Spam in it. (Or, any combination of the three!) Since this recipe starts with pineapple instead of horseradish, I wasn't too worried.

So many salad disasters start with a bowl that looks just like this.

Next, we added our diced cherries and... an entire quarter-pound marshmallows. In the olden days, anyone making this salad would have needed to cut up every last one of the sticky things. But at some point after my great-grandmother clipped this from the newspaper, some blessed and ingenious person (who was probably tired of gummy scissors) invented mini marshmallows. Can you tell that a salad lies half-assembled beneath them?

I don't know if this recipe came out during WWII rationing. But in a ration-coupon sense, it is sugar free.

I tried a spoonful of our uncongealed salad and liked it more than I expected. I've seen a lot of unnerving congealed salads from the Midwest around my great-grandmother's time, but this one is pineapple, lemon, and ginger with a cherry on top. No olives lurk in the ingredients waiting to ruin everything. (We are at some point supposed to get out the mayonnaise, but we'll get there when we get there.)

The recipe next says to "let the mixture cool, stirring occasionally, til it starts to thicken." I first thought this would be like the applesauce-date mallow, where the marshmallows slowly dissolve and exude enough gelatin to firm it up. But after leaving it on the countertop for several hours, it hadn't changed at all. So I think you can just put it right into the refrigerator and stir it every now and then to redistribute everything as the gelatin activates. There's no point in waiting for a thickening that will never come at room temperature.

As the marshmallows half-dissolved and revealed the rest of the salad, it looked different than I expected. I had imagined a transparent, sparkling creation (fit for the daintiest of luncheons) with all the goodies floating in it like decorative beads in a bottle of shower gel. You know, something like this:

Source: The Gallery of Regrettable Food

Instead, we had white marshmallows and red cherries interspersed throughout an nearly-opaque quivering mass.

The pineapple hid surprisingly well. Can you see it in the picture?

As we approached serving time, the note above the recipe says it "may be served in green and gold blocks on crisp lettuce." Maybe the suggestion of "green and gold blocks" means if you were really feeding a crowd, you would have made a second batch with lime Jello. 

Regardless of what color my gelatin blocks may be, crisp lettuce is not happening in this presidential administration. Fortunately for those of us who are learning about cyclosporiasis just in time to avoid it, the directions go on to say that it may be "piled gayly into a slim stemmed sherbet glass and offered ["offered"!] with a cherry and a fluff of whipped cream for a luncheon finale." No biohazardous greens are required. Incidentally, a lot of recipes from that time (salad or otherwise) end with "serve in sherbet glasses." Did more people own sherbet glasses back then?

Moving on from the sherbet glasses I don't own and the lettuce I am not purchasing, I refused to buy mayonnaise for the sole purpose of defiling a salad. But in a happy coincidence, someone else in the house recently wanted cold sandwiches, which brought about a shopping trip. I discreetly encouraged a small jar of mayo to fall into the grocery cart. 

When salad time arrived, I found that mayonnaise flavored as directed with "a little of the drained off pineapple juice" tastes terrible. Nevertheless, I carefully dripped a little bit of our, um, salad dressing onto a spoonful of mardi gras salad (just a spoonful, we didn't want to contaminate a whole serving) to see if everything combined into something unexpectedly good. You never know when two apparently disparate ingredients will be the next mayonnaise and ketchup. The salad with mayonnaise tasted like very questionable thousand island dressing-- the kind that you throw out and then worry that you'll soon be at the doctor's office.

We couldn't even use the mayonnaise to make the salad look cute. Even the smallest half-spoonful of pineapple juice turned it into a dribbly mess. So not only did the mayonnaise ruin the salad, I couldn't even get a picture like the mayonnaise-topped cranberry salad.

That's not whipped cream on top.

If we serve our salad bare and free of mayonnaise, it was a summery delight. The flavor is perfect for this hot weather. The ginger gives it a really nice bite, the pineapple tastes unexpectedly fresh (you almost can't tell it was canned), and the marshmallows add lovely creamy interspersions throughout. Pineapple and ginger go shockingly well together. I don't just mean they don't clash-- they add up to something a lot better than either one by itself. I'm going to have try to find more ways to bring pineapple and ginger together.

___________________
*It is true that there are always new food recalls, every single day, no matter how well things are going in the world. However, you need to be very good at deluding yourself if you want to claim that there hasn't been a huge spike ever since our friendly friends in the White House cut all those annoying pesky regulations.  ↪

Strawberry Whip: or, Spring is turning into summer

We overestimated how much we wanted strawberries.

Strawberry Whip 2 tbsp gelatin, or 1 (¼-oz) envelope 1 tbsp water About 8 oz fresh strawberries A little lemon juice, if desired 1 tsp vanilla Red food coloring, if desired 1 cup cream ½ cup sugar Mix the gelatin and water in a small microwave-safe bowl. Set aside to soak about 5 minutes. Puree the strawberries, then pour through a strainer to remove the seeds and stringy bits. Microwave the gelatin until melted and watery, about 5 seconds or so. Add the gelatin, lemon juice, and vanilla to the strawberries. If desired, add a few drops of red food coloring. Whip the cream and sugar in a large bowl. Then fold in the strawberries. Transfer to the container of your choice, and place in the coldest part of your refrigerator. Chill and serve. Adapted from a handwritten manuscript, 1930s-1940s Notebook of Hannah Dannehy O'Neil

Strawberries have been astonishingly cheap these past few weeks. I don't know if it's a bizarre confluence of economic coincidences, if we live near a lot of strawberry farms and didn't know it, or if it's some combination of the two. Furthermore, the berries are actually in season (ish), so they taste like strawberries instead of like nothing. We got one small box last week, and they were so good that we bought a lot of them the next time we went grocery shopping. They soon started to get pruny and squishy, and I didn't want to lose them.

I could have suspended the berries in red Jello. As many have noted before me, gelatin is surprisingly good at extending the lifespan of fresh produce. But today, I wanted to adapt my great-grandmother's apricot whip. Instead of stewing apricots, we're blenderizing strawberries.

After a good pulverization, I ran the strawberries through a sieve. This was the only tedious(ish) part of this whole recipe, but would you want all these seeds and stringy bits in your pink fluff?

As soon as I realized I was making "pink fluff," I had horrible visions of the ballistic-grade pink pie we made a while ago. 

Also, pink fluff is one of the more infamous midcentury desserts. It's almost a symbol of the insipid "cooking" that involves creatively dumping three cans into one bowl, which truly came into its own in the 1950s. But then I figured this particular pink fluff is literally strawberries and cream (with some gelatin for stability, of course).

Speaking of strawberries, I decided they needed a bit of artificial assistance to look their best after getting blenderized. Fruit is rarely fruit-colored enough.

This reminds me a lot of the cream of strawberry pie we made a while ago. Both of them are basically strawberries and whipped cream. And both of them looked so pretty at this stage.

This recipe was agreeably fast since we didn't have to wait on a pot of simmering dried fruit. Only ten minutes after sprinkling the gelatin over the water, we were ready to, as the recipe says, "Chill and serve." And then, of course, we discovered that the bowl-scrapings were delicious.

 

This wasn't as magical as I fantasized it would be, but it was still very good indeed. It did get a bit bland in the refrigerator, though- which surprised me. I know strawberry is perhaps the most inoffensive of artificial flavors, but the actual fruits tend to actually have a taste. So while this isn't necesessarily the best way to appreciate fresh strawberries, it's pretty good if they've slipped just a bit past it. 

 

Lemon Pie no. 2: It's always time for lemon pie

I can't imagine needing two lemon pie recipes.

Lemon Pie #2 3 egg yolks Juice and rind of 1 lemon 3 tablespoons flour 1 cup sugar ½ teaspoon salt 1 cup boiling water 1 tablespoon butter 1 9-inch pie shell Heat oven to 350°. Bake the pie shell until slightly golden. Whip the egg yolks and lemon juice until very light, set aside. Sift together the flour, sugar, and salt into a saucepan. Whisk in boiling water until smooth. Add the lemon rind and stir over medium-high heat until it thickens and comes to a boil. Turn off the heat. Add the butter and the egg yolks, stirring until the butter melts. Pour into the pie shell and bake until set, about 25-30 minutes. If desired, top with meringue and return to the oven until lightly browned. I thought this was better with whipped cream instead. Serve at room temperature or refrigerated, depending on preference. Meringue: Beat 3 egg whites (which you saved from separating the egg yolks for the filling) with an electric mixer on high speed until stiff peaks form. Continue beating while gradually sprinkling in 5 tablespoons of sugar. Beat until the sugar is dissolved and everything is smooth and glossy. Spread on the pie, return to the oven, and bake until the meringue is lightly browned. Handwritten note, probably 1930s-1950s Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

We may have found why my great-grandmother occasionally needed "a pleasant change from a piece of lemon meringue pie." I can't imagine making lemon pie so often that I needed a second recipe for it.

I was going to skip over this recipe. We already made a lemon pie from her book and liked a lot. Why would anyone need multiple lemon pies? But then again, I have multiple brownie recipes for different moods (the extra-rich brownies, the very sweet brownies, the quick and easy brownies, etc). 

With that in mind, if there is any real variation in lemon pies, I've never found it. They always taste like the recipe on the back of the cornstarch box, whether I make them myself or buy them at the fanciest bakeries my budget can forgive. This pie looked a bit different, which made me wonder: are there other lemon pies and I've been missing out all this time?

Furthermore, I can't imagine why someone would write down a second recipe for the same pie unless it was better than the first.

And lastly, my car battery died and I wanted to bake my way out of being despondent. I didn't mourn the car battery, but I was forced to confront the insane prices of car parts amidst a trade war and an actual war. (Nothing has trickled down to my neighborhood yet.) Lemon pie it would therefore be. 

Three tablespoons of flour didn't seem like much until I got it into the sifter.

I hadn't made this pie yet, and I already liked it more than the one that shows up on the back of the cornstarch box. That one never seems to set unless I burn an offering to Fornax (the Roman goddess of hearth and oven), and even then I sometimes end up euphemistically calling it custard.This one uses a lot more to hold it together.

Let the record show that because we semi-always follow directions here at A Book of Cookrye, I did in fact get out the sifter for this. It seemed like more bother than I'd usually do for a lemon pie, but I'm not the one who wrote this down. 

As directed, I stirred in boiling water "until smooth," which was a lot easier than I expected. I thought I'd have to thrash this with a whisk, but we were done in a few seconds.

I did this in a separate bowl because I actually like my nonstick pot now.

The recipe doesn't mention using the lemon rind, but I think it really makes the flavor pop. I'm going to assume people would have done that instead of throwing out ingredients that were right on the countertop and waiting. Maybe cooks back then thought adding the rind was too obvious to write down, like "discard the eggshells."

This particular recipe calls for egg yolks "beaten light," which I've never seen in a lemon pie before. Usually you just put everything in the top of a double boiler and stir it for a minute or two. I put the whisk attachment into our mixer to see what the point of this might be. Seeing a single whisk (they were too cheap to put two in the box) hovering over the food made me think of when I replaced my broken handmixer with a power drill (which at the time led to several unsolicited and unculinary wall perforations).

I thought that one lemon wasn't enough for a whole pie, so I bought two. (Perhaps my great-grandmother meant a large lemon, rather than the smaller ones?) But a generously-dipped tasting spoon showed me that the first lemon was more than enough for the pie, so I put the other one away for future plans.

We are next told to add the butter and whipped egg yolks right to the pot. There's no mention of slowly spooning hot filling into the egg yolks until they're tempered. I was in a bit of a mood, so I decided to see if I really needed to bother with that. Maybe whipping them changes something and thus forestalls egg drop soup?

 

To my surprise, this actually worked. Nothing got scrambled, and we had a few swirls of foam that floated on top of the pot. I had thought they'd completely deflate and mix in. Perhaps this is like one of those sponge puddings that bake in layers? (Also, I really should have slipped in some artificial dye. This would have been really cute if it was pink.)

I decided not to make a meringue because they only last a day or so before deflating and dripping out those little brown beads. (Remember the rice pudding?) I do like a good meringue, but I also like desserts that last a bit.

However, this pie was incomplete without some sort of white fluff on top. I always thought people just did the meringue for presentation, but lemon pie is a lot better when dressed. So I gave it a dollop of whipped cream.

 

I didn't think a single lemon would be enough for a whole pie, but you'll notice that this is a relatively shallow pie so it all worked out. It was really good. More so than the other pie, this one tasted like fresh lemon. It's easy to make and hard to give away. If you don't want to make a whole pie of it, this would make really good lemon squares if you bake it on a shortbread cookie crust. Or, imagine it in a pavlova or a blitz forte.

Fresh Berry Whip: or, You probably shouldn't skimp on the title ingredient

Strawberries have been almost absurdly cheap. (Well, cheap by wartime prices.) Naturally, we bought a lot and forgot they have a shelf life of about two minutes. But because our refrigerator has been perhaps a bit too enthusiastic since its most recent repair, the strawberries didn't expire. They just shrivelled and looked like it. And as soon as I mashed them a bit with a spoon, they smelled deliciously like fresh strawberries.

Fresh Berry Whip 1½ cups raspberries or sliced strawberries (about 8oz or 225g) ⅓ cup sugar 2 tablespoons lemon juice (from a fresh lemon instead of a bottle if possible) 1 (&frac14oz) envelope unflavored gelatin, or 1 tablespoon gelatin powder ¼ cup cold water ¾ cup boiling water ⅛ teaspoon salt Red food coloring, if desired If you don't have an ice maker, place a large bowl of water in the refrigerator ahead of time to get very cold. Crush the berries slightly in a small bowl or large cup. Mix in the sugar and let stand 10 minutes. Then stir in lemon juice to taste. While the berries are standing and waiting, sprinkle the gelatin over the cold water in a small bowl, and let stand five minutes. Then add the boiling water and stir until dissolved. After ten minutes, force half of the berries through a sieve. Place the pulp in a measuring cup and add the syrup that came out of them as they soaked. Then add enough water to make ¾ cup. Pour into a medium-sized mixing bowl. Add the gelatin and salt to the sieved berries. Place the bowl in a large bowl of ice-cold water. Stir until it gets thick and syrupy. If desired, add red food coloring to make it a prettier shade of pink. (It'll be kind of pale-looking without it.) Then beat with an electric mixer (or a handcranked eggbeater) until it is whipped. Refrigerate until it is half-firm but not quite set, which may only take a few minutes. To check, sprinkle one or two of the remaining berries on top. They should stay on top instead of sinking to the bottom of the bowl. Then fold in the remaining berries. Refrigerate until firm. Turn into a serving bowl or pile in individual bowls. Garnish with whole or sliced berries, if desired. Will keep for a couple of nights in a sealed container. Serves 5. Good Desserts A-Plenty!, Minute Gelatin (General Foods Corporation), 1942-ish

I actually like when fruit goes slightly off in the fridge. I can't forgive myself for putting fresh and lovely fruit into a batch of muffins where it cannot be fully appreciated. But when the fruit is squishy or half-hardened, I'm no longer being extravagant when I cook it. Instead, I'm starving the garbage can.

We just happened to have the perfect recipe for the fruit in this tiny slip of a cookbook from the WWII rationing era. And I do mean a "tiny slip" of a booklet. It's only 2.5 by 5 inches of very small print (or about 65 by 130 millimeters for our metric friends). 

This stapled wallet-sized book is such a product of its time. First, the title "Good Desserts A-Plenty!" (with a jaunty exclamation mark) attempts to reassure you that you'll still have sweets amid food shortages. Second, it has little patriotic stars up and down each page. Third, it's printed as cheaply as possible. They didn't even cut the pages on the alignment marks; a lot of the text is ever-so-slightly crooked. 

The book has no date, but I'm going to guess that it's from right before rationing officially kicked in. I only say that because there's no cheery mention of stretching your "ration points."

Speaking of food shortages, we didn't have quite enough berries for this recipe. I think this is why our "fresh berry whip" ultimately didn't come out as good as it could have. But as I was measuring things, I decided that I was making a period-correct mistake. Also, I didn't want to buy more fruit just to pulverize and gelatinize it.

I was going to forcefully mash the berries through the sieve (I didn't see that they were supposed to be sliced until too late), but they put up a better fight than I anticipated. Fortunately, we recently got a new toy at a flea market:

I'm leaving the price tag on because I love how cheap this was.

I don't know if sugar was rationed when this book came out, but I think people were already cutting back regardless. It may look like we put a lot of sugar on the strawberries, but that's only because everything is confined into one small cup.

 

After ten minutes, the sugar had done its hygroscopic business on the strawberries and made an incredibly delicious syrup. If the rest of the recipe fails, you might want to stop here and spoon this into cute (and very small) bowls. To make it extra-fancy, you could add a drop of balsamic vinegar or a spoonful of wine.

We didn't get a lot of pulp out of our sieved strawberries, even though I managed to force everything through the mesh except a few stringy bits. This recipe may serve five, but it is not meant to serve five with leftovers.  

Interestingly, our cup of sieved strawberries stayed in layers. The syrup is on the bottom, then the strawberries in the middle, then the water we added floated over the rest.

I was surprised when our mixture whipped up as well as it did. And it stayed whipped instead of deflating as soon as I turned off the mixer. When I put the rest of the fruit on top, the foam held it up.

When I tried a spoonful, this tasted unexpectedly artificial-- and it wasn't the good kind of artificial flavoring. This tasted like the candy you throw away when you get home from trick-or-treating. To be fair, this recipe called for more fruit than we actually had threatening to go off, so I probably watered it more than I should have. Also, it probably would have been a lot better had I squeezed a fresh lemon instead of using the cheap bottled juice that's been in the fridge for a while. The recipe has promise, but I wasn't thrilled with what was about to congeal.

As I cleaned up, I had to finally acknowledge that our recipe used a lot of bowls. And with all our sieving and other fruit-related excitement, it made a splattery mess of the countertop. The impending crowded dishwasher and the rest of the mess had me muttering "this had better be worth it" as I waited for our fresh berry whip to refrigerate.

I can never decide if pink fluff looks cute and vintage, or if it looks like it came out of a medical textbook.

As aforementioned, I think I underserved this recipe by scrimping on fruit. Then again, I think that a lot of people back then probably did the same thing. (The shortages were real.) But with insufficient strawberries, this tasted like cheap fruit Jello. However, I imagine this would be a lot better if I actually used enough berries in it.

Also, don't go away thinking this looked normal. It wobbled unnervingly.

If strawberries remain cheap, I just might try this again with all the fruit it's entitled to (and with fresh lemon juice). It seems like it wants to be a very nice summery recipe, just the thing for when central AC hasn't yet made its way into homes. (Why do you think people kept going out to see cheesy matinee movies in the theater?) I also imagine this being really good on a summer picnic. But if you don't use enough fruit, it's just water and a third-cup of sugar.

Cranberry Meringue Pie

When you make the crust, you should put a pie in it.

Cranberry Meringue Pie 1¾ cups granulated sugar ¾ cup cold water 4 cups cranberries 2 tbsp flour 4 eggs, separated ¼ teaspoon salt 2 tbsp butter 1 teaspoon vanilla 4 tablespoons powdered sugar 1 baked deep-dish pie shell In a large saucepan, cook the sugar and water until thick and syrupy. Add cranberries. Cook, stirring constantly, until they stop popping. Then remove from heat and let cool for five to ten minutes. In a small bowl, mix the flour, salt and yolks of the eggs until smooth. With a fork (or a mini whisk if you have one), gradually beat in three tablespoons of the juice of the cooked cranberries (don't worry if a few berries get in there), beating out any lumps. If the mixture is too thick to easily stir into the rest of the pie filling, beat in more juice one spoonful at a time. Then add it to the pot of berries and simmer for three minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and stir in the butter and vanilla. Set aside to cool. When ready to bake, heat oven to 325°. Turn the filling into the pie shell. Beat the egg whites until frothy. Then add the powdered sugar one spoonful at a time, beating until each one is dissolved before adding the next. Spread on top of the pie and bake about 15 minutes. Note: If you cut the recipe to three-quarters (that is: go from four eggs to three, and adjust the other ingredients to match), this recipe will fit very nicely in a normal, non-deep-dish pie pan. Miss Hanna Katz, Apartment 49B, Sylvania Gardens, 48th Street and Osage Avenue, Philadelphia; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; November 8, 1935; page 14

While I was purchasing frozen fruit, I saw cranberries semi-hidden on one of the lower shelves. This is the first time I've seen them outside of a can except for those few short weeks when they take over half the fruit section.

Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; November 8, 1935; page 4

As often happens with cranberry recipes, we start with a lot of sugar.

Next, we get to our featured ingredient: cranberries! After I measured them out, a small handful remained in the bag. Since I don't want to let nearly-empty packages of frozen this-and-thats pile up in the freezer, I dumped the rest of the berries into the pot. There's nothing wrong with a heaping fruit pie. 

A quick digression: The newspaper gave Miss Hanna Katz's address as an intersection, which is a very Philadelphia way of doing it. Since most of the city is a grid, people often say "Oh, the museum's on 33rd and South" instead of "It's at 3260 South Street." In case that gives her too much privacy for a newspaper-famous cook, they also printed her apartment number. I can only guess that you were supposed to send her a postcard (it's cheaper than letters) if you made the pie and liked it. By the way, the museum on 33rd and South is the Penn Archeological Museum. I used to love going there to see the glassware from ancient Rome.

Anyway, getting back to Miss Katz's pie. We're supposed to cook the cranberries until they stop popping. I didn't know if they still pop after getting frozen, but I figured we would get a pie out of them either way. Unfortunately, I couldn't hear whether the cranberries had started popping, much less when they stopped. You see, cranberries don't make a loud noise like popcorn. Instead, they pop with a soft pft... pft.... And the oven drowned out the noise.

The fan in the oven that cools the circuit boards has been making that horrible noise for a few months now, and none of use want to take the oven out of the wall and fix it. Does anyone in a house ever get around to all the problems waiting to be dealt with? If you've ever cleared the to-do list, how did it feel and how long did it last?

Since I couldn't listen for the sound of popping, I turned off the burner when the cranberries looked like they had all split open. This was close as we could get to following the directions.

We had a few little clumps of floury egg yolk that I didn't manage to whisk away, but I figured that the pie would be just fine anyway. Besides, I don't think anyone sending recipes to the newspaper in the middle of the Depression would fault me for choosing not to throw this out and start over.

At first I thought Miss Katz was bonkers for simmering this with egg in it. Wouldn't that just turn our pie filling into cranberry-flavored egg drop soup? I told myself that she got this printed in the newspaper with her name and apartment number under the title. Surely she wouldn't have risked people knocking on her door with complaints. Still, I was surprised when this actually worked. If you disregard the lumps that never went away, our pie filling was so pretty you'd think it came from a can.

When I tried a sample spoonful, it was about as sweet as cranberry juice from the bottle. The excess of sugar was not in fact an excess. I won't say you should never doubt someone who got their recipe published, but it is worth pausing to ask if you're sure you know better.

Just I thought our pie was ready to bake, I realized I had forgotten the last two ingredients:

I'm not sure what the butter does in recipes like this. It's not like a couple of spoonfuls will dramatically change the flavor or anything. But I figured the butter must be there for a reason. So I carefully scooped the pie filling back out of the crust (most of it, anyway) and added what I forgot.

Having gotten our complete pie ready to bake, we only needed to put the meringue on top. When I tried a spoonful, it was a bit blander than I thought. I nearly added more sugar before thinking "Don't we have enough in the pie already?"

I expected to have a hard time covering the pie since we made a lot less meringue than what Miss Katz thought we should. But this recipe still made a lot of meringue. I imagine that if you make the full recipe, you'd have one of those extra-puffy meringues that's taller than the rest of the pie.

When we lifted out a slice, it actually lifted out.

I thought this would taste more or less like cranberry sauce in a pie pan, but somehow it had an extra richness to it. (Maybe this is why we added butter and eggs.) It wasn't excessively sweet (small mountain of sugar notwithstanding). But if the sight of so much sugar in a saucepan makes you quake, you could tip a fair amount of it back into the bag before you missed it. 

However, if you're not economizing like it's 1935, I think this would be fantastic if you skipped the meringue and served it with ice cream.