Cheese and Ham Pie: or, Carbohydrate bliss interspersed with meat

Today, we are continuing our Australian salute to cheese!

Cheese and Ham Pie 4 oz ham, cut into into bite-size pieces 6 oz egg noodles, cooked in salted water 4 oz (1 cup) grated cheese 1 oz (2 tbsp) butter, cut into small pieces 1 cup milk 1 egg Pastry for one crust Salt and pepper to taste Heat oven to 350° (gas mark 4, 180°C). Coat a pie pan with cooking spray. Sprinkle the ham in the pan. Place the noodles on top. Then sprinkle the cheese over the noodles. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Then dot with the butter. Whisk together the egg and the milk, then pour over all. Cover with a top crust and cut holes to vent. Bake about 30 minutes or until golden. Note: If you're buying ready-made pastry instead of doing it yourself, puff-paste would be really good on top of this. "In the Kitchen," The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; July 8, 1935; page 3

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

This is the season for leftover ham. I deliberately took home a lot of leftover ham from Easter and froze it until the time felt right, which I decided is now. 

As it turned out,  ham is the first word in the recipe title but we don't use much of it. This is what happens to cooking when the Depression was on.

Not pictured: 1 ounce butter.

What the recipe lacks in ham, it makes up with carbs and cheese. Six ounces of macaroni is a lot more than you may think. After mounding the cheese on top, our pie overtopped the pan.

Lastly, we laid on the pie crust. I folded the extra dough back over the pie-- partially to make a should-have-been cute border but mostly because I was too lazy to trim it.

This pie is what leftovers should be: smothered in carbs and buried in cheese. I probably could have baked it a little longer, but I didn't. It was plain, simple, and just what I hoped for.

In full disclosure, some free-swimming liquid did seep into the freshly-vacated parts of the pie pan when we served it. But although weeping pies usually bother me, this is one of those recipes where I don't think there's any point in caring about drips. Of course, you can serve this with more bread to soak them up. After all, carbs go great with carbs.

Runza Casserole: Put it all in one pan and you're done

Today, we are making runza casserole!

Runza Casserole 2 pounds ground beef 2 onions, finely chopped (or one 12-oz package frozen chopped onions) 4 cups finely shredded cabbage Salt, pepper, and other seasonings to taste (I added garlic powder and a lot of paprika) 2 tubes refrigerated crescent rolls (or one large batch of biscuit dough) 1 pound mozzerella cheese, shredded (I used cheddar instead) Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9x13 pan. Brown beef and onion in a large pot. Drain and return the pot. Reduce heat to medium-low. Sprinkle the cabbage on top of the meat. Put the lid on the pot and let it cook without peeking for about eight minutes. Then stir in the salt and seasonings. While the cabbage is steaming, unroll one tube of crescent rolls. Place them in a flat layer in the pan. Press to close seams. Put the meat and cabbage over the rolls. Sprinkle the cheese on top. Then unroll the second tube of crescent rolls and lay them on top. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes. Cover with foil for the last 10 minutes (this softens the top crust). Note: If you cut this in half, it fits nicely in an oven-safe skillet. Irene Biederstedt (McLaughlin, South Dakota); KFYR-5 TV 40th Anniversary Cookbook; Bismarck, North Dakota; 1993

I love the picture on the front cover. It looks like a snapshot from the Thanksgiving office potluck. Also, that light looks like a late-1980s spaceship.

KFYR-5 TV 40th Anniversary Cookbook; Bismarck, North Dakota; 1993

As I understand it, runzas are yeast rolls stuffed with meat and cabbage. They look like something that originally was a complete meal in an edible handheld package. Today, we're simplifying the process by putting everything into one big pan.

Speaking of simplifying things (or at least trying to), we are shredding today's cheese the modern way! I already planned to electrically shred the cabbage, so I thought I might try to do the same with the cheese. 

One pound of cheese may seem a lot for one casserole. But if you read the ingredients, we're using a lot of everything. If you make this recipe in full quantity, it will feed a whole family, any friends have wandered in, and anyone looking for leftovers the next day.

I have to admit, I like the electric cabbage shredder more than I thought it would. Fussing with all those food processor attachments seemed pointless the first time-- especially when I had to clean every one of them. But sometimes I just want to make dinner without any knife skills. And even though this adds a lot more dishes to the pileup in the sink, sometimes it's nice to get dinner ready faster. 

Back to the casserole, we didn't manage to shred the cheese on the first attempt. (A copy of the food processor instruction manual would have been nice.) Instead, I put all the accessory pieces together wrong and squished the cheese.

After some trial and error, we were soon shredding cheese at an astonishing rate. If I'd gotten this right the first time, it would have been twice as fast as using a normal grater. Instead, I think I delayed dinner by at least ten minutes.

Next, we got to why I had the food processor out: the cabbage. This seemed like one of those recipes where you want the cabbage in very fine slivers, which I can't do by hand (though I'm better than I was). Also I just wasn't in the mood for a lot of hand-slicing.

Are we using equal amounts of cabbage and cheese?

Now that we were done spending time trying to save time, it was time to get to the meat of the recipe. I forget where I read this (I think it was on Tumblr), but someone said "Half of all 'good family recipes' start with 'cream the butter and sugar,' and the other half start with 'brown the beef and onions.'" Naturally, we used frozen onions so I didn't have to chop them myself.

We are next directed to put the cabbage on top and let it steam for a bit. This strained our skillet's capacity, but we managed to get everything crammed in there and put foil on top. I really hoped the cabbage would shrink in the steam.

 

We are supposed to use canned crescent rolls for the top and bottom of this casserole. I used homemade biscuit dough because I forgot to get the cans.

Speaking of canned bread, I was going to write that if you halve the recipe, you can purchase two canned pizza crusts and fit it in a cast-iron skillet. Then I stopped by the canned biscuit section and checked the prices. Two cans of crescent rolls would have cost more than the beef! I'm not a snob (though I get how it can seem like that sometimes), but canned biscuits are absolutely not that good.   

Shopping aside, we were now ready to assemble. I accidentally made this a lot harder than it needed to be. Had I followed the directions, it would have been a simple matter of lining a 9x13 pan with bread dough and then tipping the skillet into it. Instead, we had to empty the pan long enough to put bread in the bottom first. So remember: even if a recipe is only ten sentences long, be sure to read the whole thing!

The recipe's final line of instruction confused me: "Cover with foil the last 10 minutes to soften the crust." I figured this would make sense when the time came. Ten minutes before the time was up, the top crust had hardened to a big cracker. Even though I didn't think anything could fix it, I put our runza casserole under a foil tent to finish out the baking time. The crust turned back into soft bread, which again proves that you should always read the recipe.

This was a lot better than I thought. It hit the same satisfying spot as the meatball-mushroom pie. It's hard to go wrong when your recipe starts with a pound of beef, a lot of onions, and bread on top. 

It's a really nice meal-in-one-pan for when you want meat, vegetables, and no fuss (assuming you don't find canned biscuits too expensive). When I was making this, I thought it might need more vegetables in it. But I think it had the perfect meat-to-cabbage ratio. It's simple, but satisfying. And if you remember to get canned biscuits and don't mind the expense, it's pretty fast to put together, too. 

It was a lot better when I halved the filling to match my half-size pan, though.  

 

Horrid Tamale Pie

Nothing helps economize like olives and raisins!

Tamale Pie 4 cups cornmeal mush* 2 cups leftover meat, ground or finely chopped 1½ cups gravy or meat stock 1 garlic clove, minced 6 olives, chopped 1 tablespoon raisins, chopped 1 tablespoon chili powder 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup (or more) shredded cheese, if desired Make the cornmeal mush the night before. Put it in a well-greased shallow pan, cover or wrap tightly, and refrigerate overnight. When ready to bake, heat oven to 350°. Grease a casserole dish. Line the the bottom and sides of the casserole with about two-thirds of the cornmeal mush, pressing it into place. Mix the meat, gravy or stock, garlic, olives, raisins, and chili powder. Pour this into the casserole. Break the remaining cornmeal mush into small chunks and sprinkle them on top. Sprinkle with cheese if desired. Bake 20-30 minutes. Serve hot, directly from the baking dish. *If you don't know how to make cornmeal mush, here is a recipe. It makes the right amount for this pie. Source: Mexican Cookery for American Homes, Gebhardt Mexican Foods Company via Mid-Century Menu

I've seen many versions of tamale pie. The good ones stretch your expensive ingredients without tasting like a tight budget. The bad ones... well, they do what's needed when the grocery money runs low. This particular recipe uses, um, olives and raisins.

Mexican Cookery for American Homes, Gebhardt Foods

 

I really didn't want to put olives in this. They reminded me of the beef-and-olive Hudson sandwiches, which I have never felt compelled to repeat. Then I thought that perhaps the olives and raisins (raisins!) act as some sort of counterpoint to each other and add up to something unexpectedly lovely. I told myself that olives and raisins could be the next tomatoes and cocoa, which make for really good chili.

I have never felt so uncomfortable around raisins. Even putting them next to the garlic didn't help.

The recipe has us mix today's bad ideas into leftover gravy. We didn't make any gravy with this pot roast, but I had some leftover from a previous meatball-mushroom pie. I felt more than slightly guilty about ruining it.

I didn't realize that when you want a stiff cornmeal mush, you have to let it sit in the refrigerator overnight. After all, I only learned how to make mush for the mock pumpkin pie. But after trying a bit of the pie filling, I decided this wasn't worth any mush-related fretting. I pressed what we had into a sort of nest for the meat and thanked myself for cutting the recipe in half.

After getting the meat into the pie, it looked like an exciting pan of pet food.

It's nice to make recipes strictly as written, but this one desperately needed cheese on top.

To my surprise, the cornmeal mush puffed up in the oven.I almost thought this might be all right until I tried to get some on a plate. As soon as I jabbed a spatula into our finished pie, I could tell that it would be far too gloopy to lift out. I don't mind that a casserole that has to be spooned out, but I didn't see the point in boiling a separate pot of mush (which added another pot to the dirty dishes) just for a pan of cafeteria slop.

All right, so this recipe is not meant to be Mexican even though it has tamale in its name. That doesn't bother me-- I am not chasing "authenticity." But this recipe fails on its own terms. It's just bad.

The cornmeal mush that got crusty against the sides of the pan was nice. The cheese on top was pretty good. Everything else was a waste of dishwasher space.

To complete the flavor, this recipe needed a very period-correct accompaniment: 

I don't know how they deodorized this before selling it.

I've gotten into this before so I'll keep it short today, but I think a lot of the kookier mid-century flavors make more sense if you smoke like it's still the 1950s. This includes today's olive-raisin beef.

I thought that perhaps the pie would improve after melding overnight in the refrigerator. It wasn't worse, but it still wasn't worth the dirty dishes. 

Even if you forget the olives and raisins, this just isn't a good way to make a tamale pie. I don't mind creatively pulverizing leftovers, but encasing them in mush only yields a pan of mush. You're better off just cracking an egg into the minced meat and making an olive-free, raisinless hash.

I'm stunned that this recipe came from a seasoning company. I looked up Gebhardt's (the company name-dropped in the ingredient list) and they were based in San Antonio.* You'd think that a company that put "Mexican Foods" in their name and started in a city with a lot of Mexican neighborhoods would do better than this-- even if they stuck to basics like garlic and onion powder. 

 

 

 

 

*The brand still exists, but Gebhardt's as a company is long gone. It's been passed around various food-industry conglomerates since 1960. ↪

Sausage Rolls the Delia Way!

It's easy to see why Delia Smith superseded Fanny Cradock.

Sausage Rolls with Quick Flaky Pastry There's really no point in writing directions when Delia Smith can show us how faster than anyone could read it. Just watch her video and you'll see how easy this is. If you prefer to use nonmetric units instead of the quantities in the video, here are the amounts: 4 oz butter (ie, 1 stick or ½ cup) 6 oz flour (1½ cups) Pinch of salt A little cold water        Filling: 1 pound pork sausage meat 1 medium onion, finely minced (use a mini food processor if you have one) 2 rounded tablespoons chopped sage leaves (about ⅓ oz, chopped together with the onion) -- use dried sage if the fresh sage is either too expensive or looks ratty in the store Salt and pepper to taste 1 egg, beaten with 1 tablespoon milk, for the glaze Note: If you're economizing on eggs, you can use milk instead (both for sealing the rolls shut and for brushing on top). You won't get that super-shiny layer on top, but they'll still be really good. Source: Delia Smith Online

Sometimes I play Delia Smith videos just to decompress my mind. Even if you're not looking for clear and precise recipe guides, Delia's videos are very relaxing while your thoughts wander to other places. You can't look away from Fanny Cradock, but Delia is so much easier to watch. The sausage rolls in this particular video look better every time.

Now, as an ignorant American, our version of "sausage rolls" involves wrapping cocktail weenies in bread dough and then baking them. The British wrap raw sausage meat in pastry and then bake until the meat is cooked. And having made British-style sausage rolls once, our American version will never be the same.

And we found the perfect meat for this. With our crisis of refrigeration safely over, I've been semi-regularly going through the chest freezer to see what I forgot was in there. When we hastily flung everything into there, I didn't have time to bother examining what I was trying to save. So, a lot of fairly old frozen things got buried among half-empty sauce jars and chopped vegetables. This is why I recently dug out a batch of uncooked turkey burgers that are perhaps embarrassingly old. (The last time I made them, I doubled the recipe and froze half for some future night when I didn't want to cook.)  

I was going to simply bake them as they were, but then I decided they could become really good sausage rolls. It's tempting to say they'd be reduced-fat since they're turkey meat, but don't forget how much raw bacon got ground into them.

Since I made the sausage filling a year ago, I only needed to make the pastry. I found an earlier video of Delia doing the same recipe in the pre-metric days. The method is the same, but there were no mentions of grams or milliliters. The older recipe uses exactly one stick of butter. I'm not going anti-metric, but I went with the one that wouldn't leave me with odd-size butter partials in the refrigerator. 

Not long after putting the bowl on the countertop, we had a big pile of frozen butter curls just like in the video. I have to say, if you follow Delia Smith's directions, things almost always come out just like the video. This is why she has been popular for some fifty years.

Delia tells us to use a palette knife to mix everything, but I don't have one. A plain knife from the cutlery drawer did the trick.

Here is our butter, all coated with flour and ready to become something great!

We are directed to mix the dough by repeatedly cutting into it with a knife. This reminded me of our "perfect pie" article which says that we "can not hurt this dough if you will just mix it as a man does with mixing mortar with a hoe." (I'm still not sure what that means.) Seeing the same advice in different places shouldn't surprise me. After all, basic methods are the same no matter who is presenting them.

We had a lumpy dough after a minute or two. I checked the video, and Delia's looked a bit lumpy too. And since Delia never does any fake recipes or trick editing, this means that our dough was exactly right. 

Our pastry had some hairline cracks when I got it out of the (blessedly working!) refrigerator. They don't look bad, but I could tell they would expand into major fissures as I rolled the dough out.

Fortunately, the other side was nice and smooth. I flipped the dough over and hoped the cracks underneath would smush together instead of spreading.

Things looked really great from the beginning. Again, if you follow a Delia Smith recipe, you cannot go wrong unless you go off-book. Just look at how perfectly straight the sides are after giving them a good sideways thwack with the rolling pin!

Delia says to roll out the dough to 20 x 30 centimeters, but I didn't want to bring a ruler into the kitchen. For one thing, I'd have to find where at least one of them went. Second, I didn't want to accidentally strip off the markings when I gave it an alcohol rubdown after being so close to raw meat. So, we made our dough one rolling pin wide and one-and-a-half rolling pins long. 

Measurements aside, look at how perfect the dough came out! No cracks, no rips, just a beautiful rectangle of paste. (On a side note, I finally see why we all switched from saying "paste" to "pastry." Who wants to say things like "Working with paste is a skill" or "my paste cracked while rolling it"?)  

I didn't get my meat into a long, neat log like Delia did in the video. Instead, I ended up just laying short segments of meat on top of the dough and hoping they'd stick together after cooking. Also, I figured that wouldn't matter after the meat was encased in a tube of dough.

Delia's sausage rolls were so much easier to close than the ones we made for our British picnic. The person in the 1930s video had to pinch the dough together. But Delia simply rolls the crust around the sausage and then presses the whole thing closed.

These sausage rolls were a LOT bigger than I expected. Our previous British-style sausage rolls were sized like finger food, but two or three of these are a complete dinner if you remember to come up with a vegetable.

For reference, this is the big pan. It can hold 20 cookies.

Naturally, we lined the pan. I was going to anyway, but Delia warned us that "The liner is going to save you an awful lot of scrubbing and cleaning later on." She doesn't usually mention washing dishes in her videos, so I figured this pan would become a truly dire project without protection.

Next, we are told to use scissors to snip three vent-holes on each one. When we held the scissors at a slant instead of vertically, we got the same cute little V's that Delia did. 

I got to use my new favorite kitchen shears for this. I really like these scissors ever since my friend sharpened them for me. In the short time since I got them out of the closet and back into use, they have been involved in a lot of things involving raw meat. The blades are slowly becoming shinier from getting repeatedly wiped with rubbing alcohol.

Just before getting these into the oven, I had to diverge from Delia's directions. She has us brushing the rolls with an egg wash, and I'm trying to cut back on our egg use for the next couple of weeks. A couple of nights ago, I really wanted an omelet and my attempts kept sticking to the pan. I would ordinarily decide that scrambled eggs are a perfectly good second choice, but this time I wanted an omelet and nothing else would do. I am not thrilled about how many greasy scrambled messes went into the trash can, but I figured I should probably cut back on gratuitous egg use until it averages out. So I brushed these with milk instead. (I also brushed milk on the insides of these to seal them together. It worked just fine.) I know that an egg wash would have given us a shiny, crackly top. But sometimes we have to economize and make up for yesterday's extravagance.

To make up for not brushing on an extra-crisp top layer, I sprinkled the rolls with cheese. I know that deviating from a Delia recipe means that you no longer have a 100% guarantee of success, but I figured this was a safe change.

After about a minute of baking, I heard a horrible CLANG! and feared that my future held some very expensive appliance repairs. But no, it was just our baking sheet, which had decided to suddenly warp. I might have tried to carefully slide the fully-loaded baking paper onto a different pan, but our homemade flaky pastry had already become half-melted. So, I had to simply hope that the lowest row of sausage rolls wouldn't mind all of the grease sliding down to them.

After baking these rolls, I saw why we were warned to line the pan to avoid "an awful lot of scrubbing and cleaning later on." Since I heeded Delia's instructions, I only had to roll up the paper and throw the would-have-been labor into the trash.

I had worried about encasing raw sausage meat in dough with nowhere for the grease to drain to, but I felt a lot better after lifting the liner away. Instead of staying inside the rolls, the sausage grease had seeped out and then hid under the paper.

I didn't mind handwashing the grease from the pan since the really charred-on mess was already in the trash. And anyway, cleaning the pan was a perfect way to avoid waste while I was running the hot water to the sink before starting the dishwasher.

But enough about cleanup- let's get back to the sausage rolls. I cut one in half and the crust crackled on contact with the knife. When Delia Smith promises something, she delivers. She said this was flaky pastry, and it flaked deliciously. I am so glad I didn't mistakenly cut the recipe in half. 

Chili As Apparently Made In Chicago

Keep in mind the small amount of beef in this recipe the whole time we're making this.

Chili 1 pound ground beef 12 scallions or 1 large onion, chopped ½ of a (20-oz) can chopped tomatoes, or 2 chopped and peeled medium tomatoes 1 16-oz can beans, drained ¾ cup water Salt, chili powder, paprika, garlic powder, etc to taste Brown the beef in a large skillet with a lid. Drain the fat unless using very lean meat. Add the onions, tomatoes, beans, and water. Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat, and simmer for one hour. Add the seasonings about 5 or 10 minutes before you turn off the heat. (I've found that simmering dried spices for an hour cooks away all their flavor, which makes the house smell great but leaves the food bland.) Source: 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

Since I live in Texas, you'd think I wouldn't have to go up to Illinois and 90 years into the past for a chili recipe. But I was curious to see what might have appeared on tables where chili is a food and not a religion. Turns out that like every other pot of the stuff I've ever made, it starts with beef.

At the sight of the greasy pan, our household's local chapter of the Society for the Conservation of Beef Fat called an emergency meeting. The recipe never mentions draining the meat, but we all agreed that no one wants to greasy chili. I know that some chili purists will mechanically repeat the mantra "fat equals flavor", but this was a lot. Like, you could probably get a half-batch of pizzelles out of this.

Also, the recipe calls for "ground round steak" and we used 80% hamburger. Maybe period-correct meat wouldn't have turned our skillet into a grease pit. And so, we drained the meat and economically saved the drippings for another time.

History doesn't always repeat, but it often rhymes.

Speaking of economizing, Mrs. Mary Martensen's chili only uses a half-can of tomatoes, thus allowing us to save the rest for another day. Tomatoes are one of the cheapest vegetables on the canned food aisle, so you know times are tough when you're splitting them in half. 

Setting aside the can opener, our recipe economizes on time as well as grocery money. This is all the knife-work required for the entire recipe. I think I spent more time peeling the onion than cutting it.

And here is where you can really tell this recipe comes from hard times: this is everything we're using to stretch the beef. Keep in mind how puny the meat looked by itself in the pan. 

The onion slices were impossible to stir into the pan, so I laid them on top and hoped they'd mix in better after they softened in the steam.

Now in Texas, chili is a religion. Multi-generational feuds have been launched over a half-teaspoon of liquid smoke. People with pure hearts and true beliefs can argue for multiple days about whether garlic powder is a heretical shortcut (or if garlic should be permitted at all). But I think all of them would agree that noodles are sacrilege. And even those who permit noodles would agree that you don't boil them for an hour.

However, Mrs. Mary Martensen's chili isn't meant to win any cookoff prizes. It is for you, the housewife of 1933, whose grocery budget consists of a few pennies leftover from last week. Also, this recipe comes from Chicago in the 1930s. It was still an industrial town. No amount of noodle-free purism would hold up against a table full of people who just got home from a long shift. So, noodles it is.

Even after I decided to include the noodles, I thought I'd skip simmering them for an hour. But then I wondered if this would come out better than I thought. Perhaps the noodles absorb a lot of the chili flavors. Or, maybe they would dissolve and turn into an economical thickener. 

In the absence of a lid, we pressed foil on top of the pan as best we could. The chili barely fit in there, so we had to use a lot of pressure to keep it in place. Again, I have to give credit to Mrs. Mary Martensen and the home economics staff of The Chicago American. They made a single pound of beef nearly overflow the skillet.

As is customary with chili, I was going to make cornbread to go with it. Then I realized that the noodles made it redundant. Mrs. Mary Martensen really is looking out for her readers: she got meat, vegetables (if you count a half-can of tomatoes), and bread into a single, nearly-overflowing pot.

I did not stay in the house for the entire one-hour simmering time. When I returned from some errands, every room smelled like really, really good chili. Given the small amounts of seasonings, I was surprised. 

But when the time was close to over, I sampled a spoonful and immediately shook a lot of chili powder into the skillet. I'm going to charitably assume that this recipe's tiny doses of seasonings were meant as a starting point rather than the absolute final amount. Otherwise, anyone following this recipe would have eaten some very bland meat. 

On the positive side, I liked how the onion rings had turned into long noodles. It helped their flavor stand out more than if I'd chopped them. However, the actual noodles had turned to slime. As a result, our chili had become a slithery porridge that happened to have meat in it. You had to imagine your way past a lot of slippery, half-disintegrated noodles before you could like what you were eating.

But before I complain about the noodles too much, I have to note that I wasn't hungry again for hours. Like, some dinners have you drifting back to the kitchen before bed, but with this you're good until tomorrow. And that's worth a lot on a Depression-era grocery budget.

To give the recipe a better shake, I made it again without any noodles. I also tripled the seasonings and added some truly uncalled-for garlic. Omitting the pasta meant I economized on time since I didn't have to get out a strainer and a second pot. Also, the supermarket nearest me sells French bread for embarrassingly cheap, so we still economized on ingredients.

If you triple the seasonings and serve noodles on the side (if at all), this recipe is a pretty good way to make an easy meal-- even if it's not the most exciting. Even without the noodles, that single pound of beef went an astonishingly long way. And it was good enough that I was happy to have the leftovers. I wouldn't take this to a chili contest, but it's great for dinner at home.