Don't trust a Chicago Englishwoman to make Yorkshire pudding

We have already made Yorkshire pudding from an American cookbook and we have made it with cornmeal. Today, we're attempting to make it as they apparently do in England.

Chicago Englishwoman's Yorkshire Pudding “Dear Marion Holmes: I am sending a simple recipe for Yorkshire pudding as we make it in England: One pint of flour, one saltspoonful of salt dissolved in lukewarm water, beat in three eggs, add water to make a batter, not too thin. Stir briskly and pour into a hot pan with a tablespoon of dripping or lard. The batter should be a thin layer to cover the pan. Bake until slightly brown. “Chicago ENGLISHWOMAN.” Newspaper clipping, Chicago area, 1930s-50s Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

The last time we made a corn-free Yorkshire pudding, it was a semi-elaborate production that involved an electric mixer and made a horrible mess in the oven. (It was utterly worth it.) It also came from a book written by someone who was literally as old as the US Constitution. So now, we're moving to a recipe that's at least from our side of electric lighting.

Newspaper clipping, Chicago area, 1930s-1950s

The recipe specifies lukewarm water, which was the only nitpicky part in the entire paragraph. So, I figured that "Chicago Englishwoman" specified it for a reason. When a recipe is full of annoying little steps, you can often skip half of them. But when the writers only get fussy over one or two points, you should probably heed their directions.

Our Chicago Englishwoman tells us to make "make a batter, not too thin." I didn't know how "not too thin" should look, so I made it about right to drop onto a waffle iron. As a reminder, our last Yorkshire pudding was almost watery before we baked it. (Think of the kind of thin batter you use for crepes.) Absent any baking powder, I didn't know what would raise our pudding but guessed that its own internal steam might puff it up like choux paste.

"Add water to make a batter,  not too thin."

We are next told to put our batter "into a hot pan with a tablespoon of dripping or lard." Since I chose to actually read the recipe ahead of time, I had put a small skillet in the oven before turning it on.

That sizzling is the sound of planning ahead.

This particular skillet has been moody the past few months; everything I've made in it has gotten stuck. But I didn't want to make a full-size Yorkshire pudding until I got the recipe to work, and this was the only small pan at hand. But I figured we would at least know if we got it right regardless of whether I had to scrape and gouge my pudding out.

We tried to "bake until slightly brown," but some 40 minutes later our pudding hadn't changed color at all. It was a little tinted around the edges, but I think that color was only from the drippings soaking in.

This recipe fundamentally didn't work as written. There may be some implied steps that would fix it, but the directions gave us a flat patty of hardened dough. I could have lifted it out of the pan and thrown it like a frisbee if I wasn't worried about breaking a window. 

Perhaps I removed our pudding from the oven before it was "slightly brown" enough, but I don't think baking it longer would have improved anything. I now wonder how many people (my great-grandmother possibly included) tried the Chicago Englishwoman's recipe and ended up with big pucks of hardened flour. 

This recipe confounds me more than any of the others I've tried. Since we found it pasted into someone's personal recipe book, it must have worked for someone at least once. Who clips and saves a recipe that doesn't work? I'm slightly tempted to say that we'll figure out how to get a Yorkshire pudding out of this clipping since clearly at least one person did (unless she booby-trapped her recipe book). But we already have Miss Leslie's Yorkshire pudding, and her version actually works.

Baggie ice cream never worked for me

I made this for six-year-old me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

Pineapple Bavarian Cream: or, Self-Supporting whipped Cream

When all else fails, just eat the whipped cream.

Pineapple Bavarian Cream 1 (¼-oz) envelope unflavored gelatin (or 1 tablespoon) ¼ cup cold water 1 (8-oz) can crushed pineapple, undrained ¼ cup sugar 1½ tsp lemon juice 1½ cups cream If you don't have an ice maker, put a large bowl or pot of water in the refrigerator ahead of time and chill until very cold. Sprinkle the gelatin over the cold water, let stand for 5 minutes. Meanwhile, heat the pineapple and sugar until the sugar dissolves. (You can do this in the microwave or on the stove.) Add the lemon juice to the pineapple. After the gelatin has soaked 5 minutes, microwave it until completely melted, about 15-20 seconds. Then add it to the pineapple. Whip the cream and set it aside. Transfer the pineapple mixture to a large bowl. Set it in a pot or large basin of ice water (or the water you refrigerated earlier). Stir until it begins to thicken. Then fold in the whipped cream. Pour into a gelatin mold (I don't know if you're supposed to use cooking spray but I did) and refrigerate overnight. Or if you don't have a gelatin mold, use whatever container is the right size. If it's not a shape you think would look good unmolded, you can easily serve this (as they say in many an old gelatin recipe) "attractively heaped in small bowls." Note: This is halved from the original recipe and still makes plenty. Handwritten notebook, probably 1930s-40s Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

Our August electric bill came in a couple of weeks ago, and the air conditioning hit us as much as we expected. I don't want to imagine what the final price would have been if I hadn't avoided the oven. (I think I turned it on four times in the whole month.)

So, since the heat wave shows no sign of giving up, we are continuing our heatless recipes! (Or, mostly heatless. Sometimes you need to put a pot on the stove for a little bit.) This recipe comes from my great-grandmother's book. I've never made a Bavarian cream, pineapple or otherwise. I always thought they were a super-fussy and fiddly undertaking, which is why I didn't exactly rush to make this one. (Her intimidating cursive didn't make the recipe look any easier.) But today, I decided to make a Bavarian and find out what it is.

This recipe starts with unflavored gelatin, which I like to keep on hand anyway. Don't tell anyone with puristic opinions, but I often slip an envelope of it into my custard pies to make very sure they set enough to slice. 

Because I have learned at least a little bit about using gelatin, I popped this into the microwave after it had soaked for a while so it could melt. (I learned this from making the whiskey thing.) Because I looked away for about ten seconds, I cooked it too long and it came out steaming-hot. I've said this before, but hot gelatin smells like boiled rawhide. I can't believe the food industry successfully sold it as the foundation of ladylike desserts.  

Next, we get to our starring ingredient: canned pineapple. I've learned so many ways to use canned pineapple since I started using my great-grandmother's book. Before this, I only knew about pineapple upside-down cake and pineapple on pizza. (While we're briefly on the subject, I'm not particularly wild about the "traditional" "Hawaiian" pizza with pineapple and Canadian bacon. But I do like pineapple, pepperoni, and green bell peppers.)

For reasons only known to gelatin, this got sudsy as it thickened.

I was surprised at how quick this recipe was. For some reason, I thought a "Bavarian cream" was one of those recipes that involves far too much labor for far too little payoff. But after cooling off the pineapple until it was about as thick as a half-finished custard, we were nearly done.

Apparently they really liked pineapple Bavarian cream at my great-grandmother's house. I cut the recipe in half and it nearly filled the gelatin mold, which can contain up to a slightly heaping quart (about a liter for our metric friends) of magnificent salad. This is a lot of Bavarian cream.

I tried a spoonful before refrigerating. My hopes then dropped faster than the elevator descending from the top-floor observation deck at the Hancock Tower.^note Our magnificent Bavarian was nothing more than whipped cream with occasional interspersions of pineapple. Like, straight whipped cream. Since I had already made the thing, I refrigerated it anyway just to see if it would get any better.

To my surprise (and unlike the last time we used this thing), the mold let go of our gelatinized creation, which rose to a magnificent height. Keep in mind, this is half the recipe. Had I made it in the amounts my great-grandmother wrote down, we would have two of these.

My gelatin molding skills are not yet church-social ready.

I wasn't happy with my pineapple Bavarian cream. It is exactly what you put in the mold: whipped cream with just enough gelatin to keep it together. Aside from a small bit of canned pineapple, this is essentially the same as the secretly gelatin-fortified whipped cream that I put in the trifle last Easter. (The gelatin may unnerve you, but the whipped cream didn't deflate after a night in the fridge and three hours in the car.)

With our stabilized trifle in mind, I almost want to say that perhaps my great-grandmother meant we are supposed to put this in a dessert instead of making it be the dessert. However, she decisively ended the recipe with the words "mould and chill."

I almost want to say this dessert is perfect for the summer because it's light and airy. But it's also (almost) entirely made of heavy cream, which probably isn't appealing in hot weather regardless of how whipped or well-chilled it is. So while I was disappointed, this recipe mostly left me saying "I don't get it."

*Which, technically, my great-grandmother could have gone to see. They (barely) managed to finish the building during her lifetime, and it was only an el train ride away. ↪

Graham-Coconut Cupcakes: or, Just use a full-size cake pan. They're better.

Now that most of our neighbors have burned off their fireworks stashes, how was everyone's Fourth of July?

Everyone in our neighborhood was slightly more restrained with their fireworks this year than last. We only had a slight haze in the air. Last year, we had an honest-to-God London fog. You could only see about two or three blocks ahead in the smoke. The fireworks were a constant earsplitting crackle well into the night, and the stink of burning metal seeped into the house even though I remembered to shut the door. I know it was a miracle the entire county didn't go up in flames (there's a lot of dry grass at this time of year), but I missed the exuberance this year.

For this fourth of July, I wanted to introduce everyone to the absolute delight that is graham cracker cake. Then I decided to eliminate the hassle of paper plates and plastic forks by making cupcakes instead. That is how I learned that not every cake recipe makes good cupcakes.

Because I grew up in the nineties, I had to dye the icing turquoise. (Turqouise was everywhere in the nineties, whether it was the color of your entire car or just the logo on your normal-colored T-shirt.) I didn't realize until too late that I had color-matched the mixing bowl.

So many of my friends' parents had bathrooms in this color.

 The icing came out exactly as I planned, but the cupcakes were not so great. You know how I wrote in the original recipe that it really likes to stick to the pan? Well in this case it stuck to the paper no matter how carefully you tried to peel it off. You couldn't remove the paper without ripping away huge chunks of cake.

Even if you extracted the cupcake intact(ish), the batter seems to need a large pan to bake right. These were a little gummy and just a smidge on the wrong side of underwhelming. But at least they looked cute!

Happy belated independence day, everyone!

Sour Cream Cookies: I wouldn't bother if I were you

After so many successes, Mrs. Mary Martensen has let me down.

Sour Cream Cookies ¼ cup butter 1 cup sugar 2 eggs, beaten ½ tsp lemon juice 1 cup sour cream ½ tsp baking soda 3½ cups flour 1 tsp baking powder Heat oven to 400°. Have greased or parchment-lined baking sheets ready. Cream the butter, then thoroughly beat in the sugar. Mix in the eggs, lemon juice, and sour cream. Sift in the remaining dry ingredients. Roll one-fourth inch thick, sprinkle with sugar, and bake ten minutes. Makes sixty cookies. Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

I always keep sour cream on hand because it's nice in so many things, and my current container was getting close to expiring. And while one can throw out things that are at the end of their prime, aren't cookies better?

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933

Mrs. Mary Martensen tells us to add the sugar and a couple of other things to the bowl all at once, but I could already tell that would end badly. After all, our small allotment of butter was still clinging to the sides of the bowl in hard clumps. So I instead beat in the sugar until the two were thoroughly mixed before introducing the remaining ingredients.

Ahhhh, clump free!

We are directed to add "eggs, well beaten." I decided that the eggs would be plenty well-beaten after I was done mixing them in.

And so, it was time to add in the sour cream. Bearing in mind the New England raisin drops, I also added some vanilla-- and also some salt because I think they had unsalted butter in 1933.

After mixing in the flour, I began to doubt Mrs. Mary Martensen. (She had already disappointed us with the cabbage au gratin. At the time I charitably decided that no one's perfect.) No one could take a rolling pin to this sticky mess and make it a quarter-inch thick. 

I thought that maybe like Maxine Menster's cookies, you're supposed to refrigerate the dough first. Perhaps an experienced cook would have known that just from reading the recipe and mentally adding up all the ingredients in their head. 

But because I am not that good, I had already preheated the oven and refused to waste the electricity. So I forgot about doing things properly and thoroughly coated the mass of dough in flour to keep it from sticking. After that, I didn't need a rolling pin. I only had to pat it out with my fingers.

I was surprised at how nice and neat these cookies looked. My success felt like cheating fate.

I feared that these would melt into dough puddles, but instead they became adorable little poufs.

I tasted these and was immediately glad I halved the recipe. They're... not good. They have a perfect texture, but they taste like nothing. They're not merely bland. They taste empty. There is no absence of subtle flavor. Instead, there is no flavor. They weren't even sweet- the sugar somehow dissipated along with everything else. The dough had been promising, but all the life in the cookies got cooked out.

I guess it's nice that I cleaned out the fridge and avoided the temptation of excessive calories. Really, this recipe confounds me. The texture is perfect, but they're so depressing. These cookies are what Maxine Menster's are glad they ain't.

Rice Cheese: It needs more cheese

I couldn't argue with cheese and rice.

Rice Cheese 3 cups cooked rice ½ cup shredded cheese 1 cup tomato puree (fresh or canned)* 1 teaspoon melted butter Salt, black Pepper, and cayenne pepper to taste Heat oven to 325°. Grease a medium-sized casserole dish. Mix all ingredients. Place in casserole dish. If the rice is dry (or if it's right on the edge of being too dry), pour a little water over it. Cover with a lid (or with foil if your baking dish doesn't have a lid) and bake for around 20 minutes. Note: This didn't mind baking at 350°, so you can put it in the oven next to other things baking at that temperature. *In a pinch, you can put canned tomatoes in a blender. "In the Kitchen," The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; July 8, 1935; page 3

This recipe uses a lot more rice than I expected. I had initially thought it is supposed to creatively refresh leftover rice (because cheese solves everything). But as far as I know, few people cook enough rice to have nearly a quart of it left over. Obviously, we cut the recipe down a lot. 

"In the Kitchen," The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; July 8, 1935

It seems that people used to boil and drain rice like spaghetti, sometimes adding an extra step where you return the rice to the fire to separate the grains a bit. But today, we are embracing modernity-- even if it means we have to temporarily return our souffle pan (which also steams the occasional pudding) to its original home.

Moving down the recipe, we're supposed to mix the rice with cheese and "tomato sauce." I had a particularly unwelcome suspicion that tomato sauce is Australian for ketchup, so I picked an Australian supermarket chain to see what turned up on their website.

Thinking that perhaps food definitions have changed a bit since 1935, I decided to see if The Southern Districts Advocate ever had anything to say about "tomato sauce" around the same time they printed today's rice. Sure enough, one edition of "In the Kitchen" was devoted to preserving that year's apparently bountiful tomato harvest. They had a recipe for "A Good Tomato Sauce," which looks like ketchup as we know it today.

"In the Kitchen," The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; March 4, 1935; page 5

Note the addition of apples, which I think would be really nice if I ever decide to make my own tomato sauce instead of buying it. But getting back to the recipe we're actually making, I didn't want to make a big pan of rice and ketchup-- period-correct or not. (I would be willing to put something like Miss Leslie's ketchup in our rice, but her recipe was in the wrong hemisphere and already a century out of date.) Instead, I pulled some half-pruned tomatoes out of the back of the fridge and put them in our new toy mini-chopper.

The rest of the recipe was easy enough: stir it together and bake.

This tasted like a rough draft of Spanish rice. (Which doesn't surprise me-- both are mostly rice and tomatoes.) I think it could have used more a lot more cheese. I was hoping for something like macaroni and cheese but with rice. Instead we got rice with a gallingly tasteful seasoning of cheese. I wasn't thrilled, but I did keep the leftovers. 

 

If I revisit this, I'll probably triple the cheese. There's a time and a place for using cheese lightly (or so I've heard), and rice absolutely isn't it.

Second-Stab Saturday: Mushrooms will never be fish

We got shiitake mushrooms with the most beautiful emblem on top!

Isn't that 50% off sticker a work of art? I've never had shiitake mushrooms before. I always got the impression that shiitakes were, like, designer mushrooms. Or at least, they're like designer mushrooms if most of the cars in your supermarket parking lot were purchased used.

When I got the shiitakes out of the box, they felt limper and spongier than the ones I usually get. They also looked stringier. I don't know if shiitakes are supposed to be like that, or if this is why they were half price. Either way, I decided to cook them before they had a chance to expire and then let them wait until I figured out what to make of them.

Obviously, I couldn't help tasting them right out of the frying pan to see if they're as magically special as their non-discount price suggests. And... they're more intense and savory than the cheaper mushrooms I've always gotten heretofore. They almost tasted like I'd added soy sauce. They didn't taste dramatically different, but they somehow were mushroomier.

This brings us to the recipe I used them in: Mrs. Mary Martensen's fish pie. Remember how I said "Imagine this with mushrooms"?

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933

First, we had to make our lovely potato nest. 

I don't use the pressure cooker as much as I thought I would, but it's great for steaming potatoes-- especially when your recipe won't forgive them getting a little bit dried out as the microwave tends to do. This time, our rack tipped off its little improvised stand (an empty tomato paste can with both ends removed). Nevertheless, our spuds remained safely above the danger of getting sogged.

I know I said this last time, but I have to once again note that Mrs. Mary Martensen uses a lot of parsley in the gravy. And yes, today we're using premade gravy. It came on the side of some recent drive-thru chicken.

The pie nearly spilled out of the pan, but we got it into the oven with no sloshing whatsoever.

I wanted to write that despite the original recipe's high baking temperature, you can bake this at 350° (gas mark 4, 180°C) if you want to slide it next to something else in the oven-- or if you're trying not to abuse the air conditioning in the summer. Unlike tater tots or a frozen pizza, nothing about this seems like it needs to bake in an extra-hot oven. But I was unable to test that because the oven got commandeered for one of those frozen dinner-tray things that bakes at 450°. That's gas mark 8 or 230°C--- substantially hotter than the recipe's original oven by any measuring system. The pie didn't seem to mind.

I didn't think a pan of cheese and gravy could be so precisely calibrated for a specific ingredient, but this really tasted like it should contain fish. And while the scant pint gravy was right for the original recipe, it was far too much for the mushrooms.

I don't mind that it was a sloppy mess on the plate (some of the best foods are), but it's more of a casserole than a pie. The potatoes, in addition to making this better simply by being potatoes, did make our pan a lot easier to clean. None of the gravy or mushrooms made contact long enough to get burnt and stuck on. 

The mushrooms weren't bad in this, but it wasn't the best way to appreciate them. If I make this again (and I have a feeling I will), I will cut the gravy in half and omit the parsley. We already know that mushrooms and gravy go together like cranberry sauce and celery.

Apple Brown Betty: Best served outdoors

Don't tell anyone I made this just to get rid of the breadcrumbs in the freezer.

Apple Brown Betty 4 cups breadcrumbs 4 cups sliced apples ½ cup brown sugar ½ cup white sugar ½ tsp nutmeg 1 tsp cinnamon ½ tsp salt (if butter is unsalted) ½ to 1 cup water Juice and rind of ½ lemon Heat oven to 350°. Grease a large casserole pan. Mix the sugars, spices, and salt (if using). Sprinkle a third of the crumbs into the pan. Place half the apples on top, then sprinkle with half the sugar. Dot with a third of the butter. Repeat these layers, dotting again with butter. Sprinkle the last of the crumbs on top, then dot with the last of the butter. Pour in enough water to come almost up to the top. Drizzle with the lemon juice and rind. Cover the pan with foil (or a lid if you have one) and bake 45 minutes. Uncover the pan after the first 25 minutes. Serve warm with whipped cream, hard sauce (see recipe here), or lemon sauce. Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933

Because I hate waste, I've been saving all of the bread that goes stale, letting it harden overnight in the refrigerator, pulverizing it in the food processor, and then dutifully freezing the resulting crumbs. Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was saving all these lovely breadcrumbs for. We don't deep-fry a lot of things here, nor do we make innumerable casseroles that want crumbs on top. You can see why I might make a recipe uses a lot of crumbs.

Brown Betty seemed perfect for the weather. We're in that time of year when the temperature oscillates between late autumn and early summer from one day to the next. You go to bed with an extra blanket (there's no point in running the furnace for a single night), and you wake up gasping in sweat and flinging all the bedclothes to the floor. The next night, you go to sleep with the fan aimed right at you and wake up in shivers. (I also thought the leftovers would pass for a decent breakfast in the same way that extra pie does in the holiday season.)

Yes, we used an orange instead of a lemon. It's always more economical to use what you have in the house.

I have hazy memories of liking brown Betty on camping trips. (Yes, there was a time when I went camping, though it wasn't necessarily my choice.) When told this to some friends while slicing the apples, no one believed I ever went camping. One of them said "I would pay to see you camp." To this I replied that he didn't have the money to pay me enough. (I swore at age fourteen that I would never be more than five minutes on foot from a hot shower and a toilet that flushes.)

Even when cooking in the great indoors, I can see why someone might have made this when Mrs. Mary Martensen's book came out. This dessert is made for cooking on a Depression-era budget. After all, the main ingredients are stale bread, water, and apples. 

After trying this, I could see why I liked it when camping. It's the perfect carb hit for the end of a long day of swatting mosquitos in the great outdoors. And it's really easy to slap together when your "kitchen" is a wobbly picnic table and you have nowhere to wash dishes. But as much as I liked brown betty when it was served out of a cast iron Dutch oven that had been sitting in the campfire (or at least I think I liked it), it wasn't as nice in the house. It tastes like apple pie filling and breadcrumbs. It's not bad. But it is exactly what went into it and nothing more. 

Going back to how perfect this is for a 1930s budget (and quite possibly a 2020s one), I will note that this is very filling. And with a Depression on, going to bed full is worth a lot of money.