Sauteed Lettuce Salad: A recipe repeat for our colon-cleansing times

We've run today's recipe before, but now that we have a cyclosporiasis outbreak I think wilted lettuce worth revisiting. After all, the surest way to kill germs is to cook them. Had you even heard of cyclosporiasis before the outbreak? Neither had most people outside of the CDC and the USDA. That's why (until Trump and his handlers took office) we fund government programs to keep these things out of our food. In theory, this means that we the laypeople can live happily unaware of things like "screwworms" and "explosive diarrhea parasites." But nowadays, you're better off assuming your salad is as germy as raw meat and thus getting it into a hot frying pan. 

Wilted lettuce (doesn't "sauteed lettuce" sound better?) and the latest outbreak also remind us that most weird-looking recipes evolved for a reason (with the exception of the mid-century burst of bizarre foods that came out of advertising companies spending more money on in-office alcohol than ad photographers). Now that every salad comes with an elevated risk of a surprise colon cleanse, it's easy to see why people used to cook it.

So, with that said, let's remember that 1) cutting government funds "for efficiency" without seeing what would break leads to nationwide disease, and 2) salad greens can be cooked, even if we're not used to it anymore. 

Anyway, in case it helps in these increasingly horrid times, here (again) is the wilted lettuce! 

~---------~ 

Are your salads getting monotonous? Do you need a "pleasant variation from the day's usual tricks?" Are you concerned about budget cuts to food safety monitoring and therefore want to ensure that any stowaway microbes don't get past your stovetop? (Didn't that last sentence age well?)

Wilted Lettuce 3 hard cooked eggs, sliced 1 large head lettuce ½ teaspoon salt (or more to suit taste) 1 teaspoon sugar 6 slices bacon, cut into small (half-inch ish) pieces 2 tbsp vinegar Wash the lettuce thoroughly, drain it, and chop it into pieces slightly larger than bite size. In a very large frying pan, cook the bacon until it is crisp and the drippings have come out of it. Reduce heat to medium-low. Add the vinegar, then add the lettuce and eggs. Cook until the lettuce is tender but still bright green.  Serve at once. The leftovers aren't as good as when it's fresh, so make only as much as everyone will eat the first time. We recommend serving with a crusty bread to soak up the juices. Source: Chicago Tribune; April 17, 1936

Today, we are opening my great-grandmother's recipe binder and trying one of her newspaper clippings. I ran into problems at the first line of the ingredient list. An unfortunately-placed ink smudge made it impossible to read the amount of boiled eggs. I couldn't tell if it called for six or eight.

I emailed the Chicago Public Library, asking if they could track this recipe down and find a more legible copy. A reply arrived within a few hours: "Today is your lucky day, this recipe happened to be in the Chicago Tribune, whose database we can pretty easily search. The recipe is attached. It looks like 3 is the number of eggs."

Join or donate to your local Friends of the Public Library, everybody!

 

At first I wondered what kind of lettuce I should put in this. Today, we mostly default to iceberg, but how common was it in 1936? Before I let myself get caught up in period-correct salad greens, I checked the prices. Iceberg lettuce suddenly seemed perfect.

Back at the house, the lettuce had to wait until I had boiled the eggs. Since I never remember how to do that, I have to look up Delia Smith's guide every single time. I didn't think to look if she has a guide for neatly slicing them elsewhere on her site. But if you look past my inept knifework, you can see that these came out of the pot at the perfect time. Unfortunately, they also stank up the kitchen.

I have previously mentioned my theory that the weirder and wackier flavors of yesteryear made more sense when everyone smoked, whether they lit their own or inhaled a pack a week secondhand. In a similar vein, I would like to speculate that people didn't mind adding boiled eggs to everything because you couldn't smell them over the omnipresent stale smoke. Price of eggs notwithstanding, it seems like people these days don't "volumize" casseroles with chopped boiled eggs as often as we did when every sofa had an ashtray balanced on the armrest.

After getting the eggs ready, our recipe conveniently has us cover the faintly sulfurous smell with bacon. This is one of those recipes where cheap bacon (the kind that's mostly fat) might actually be the better choice. I don't think the recipe necessarily wanted to add bacon meat much as harvest the drippings for lettuce-wilting.

This salad can torture everyone in the next room of the house. First, they get the tantalizing scent of sizzling bacon. Then, all at once, they get the bitter smell of hot lettuce. I wonder if the people in a certain Chicago apartment were leery whenever they smelled bacon coming from my great-grandmother's stove. Sometimes you get bacon and waffles, other times you get wilted lettuce.

Speaking of title ingredients, we were ready to wilt our lettuce! We are told to "wash lettuce, drain, and chop." It is surprisingly hard to get all the water out of lettuce after you've washed it. I didn't want to go out and buy a salad spinner, but I definitely wanted to borrow one.

I cut the recipe to one-third, and the biggest skillet was barely up to it. Did everyone in Chicago have paella pans?

Just like fresh spinach, the lettuce shrank a lot. This may be why people don't cook lettuce very often. But on the other hand, it's a lot easier to eat your daily quota of greens when you can compress them into a small bowl.

 

Things were going ever-so-well until I added the egg after the lettuce was done. While I was stirring everything long enough to warm up the egg, the lettuce lost its bright green color and took on that dull gray look that says "You're not leaving this table until you finish your vegetables."

That bowl contains a third of a head of lettuce. That's, like, two or three wedge salads. Lettuce shrinks a lot on the stove.

Did you know iceberg lettuce has a flavor? Well, after shrinking it down to a seventh of its original size, its flavor is concentrated. The bitter lettuce (not overcooked, just its actual taste), salty bacon, vinegar, and boiled eggs went together better than I thought. But you have to be in the mood for pungency before you think this is "a pleasant variation from the day's usual tricks." As I said earlier, I can't help wondering if the flavor of this made more sense when life had a background of cigarettes and higher liquor sales.

Purely for the heck of it, I sent a picture of this to Marcus, our longtime friend who definitely isn't traumatized from trying various recipes on the blog. He did not seem to regret being too far away to drop by.

 

Because I still had two-thirds of a lettuce and another boiled egg in the refrigerator. I soon made a second wilted salad. This time, I cut up the bacon before cooking it instead of after. As we learned from the cream onion pie, the bacon gets crispier and the fat renders off better. I also didn't have to pause mid-recipe for a chopping break. (As a food safety note, chop your lettuce and get it off the cutting board BEFORE cutting up the bacon. That way, you don't get raw-meat germs in the greens.)

Instead of waiting til the end, I added the boiled eggs just as everything was heating up. The lettuce stayed green, but I don't think it made a dramatic visual difference. There's really no way to make iceberg lettuce look pretty after you've cooked it.

This recipe is not disgusting, but it's also not a classic waiting for rediscovery. You have to be in the mood for some well-placed bitter flavors before you can like it. But if you're like me and always keep a jar of sauerkraut on hand, you might not be disappointed. Some of my friends suggested I try this with kale instead of lettuce, so I'm going to keep an eye on the clearance produce. 

Despite the lack of salad ecstasy, I'm not going to cross out the wilted lettuce in my reprinted copy of the book. This recipe may have regained a place in our kitchens thanks to CDC budget cuts. It might be wise to start cooking all our vegetables again-- or at least briefly heating them to get rid of any microscopic stowaways. And of course, this salad is a good way to salvage any salad greens that aren't quite as fresh as they were when you bought them.

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 weepimg 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.

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.

Savory Baked Rice: or, I swear someone's aunt makes this

I've never tasted this before, but I would swear I have.

Savory Baked Rice ¾ cup raw rice 1½ cups water About ½ tsp salt 1 chopped onion (or about 4 oz frozen chopped onion*-- no need to defrost) 1 well-beaten egg 1½ cups milk Salt and pepper to taste Cook the rice, water, onion, and salt until done-- whether you use a rice cooker or a saucepan. If desired, add some extra seasonings before cooking-- I really liked it with a generous shake of dried parsley. While you're waiting on the rice, beat the egg until uniform. When the rice is done, heat oven to 350° (gas mark 4, 180°C). Grease a pie pan. Mix the milk with the rice-- this cools it off enough to prevent curdling the egg. Then add the egg and mix well. Add salt and pepper, and any other seasonings to taste. Bake 20 minutes. Serve warm. *There's no need to precisely weigh out the frozen onion. I just eyeballed about a third of a 12-oz package. "In the Kitchen," The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; August 21, 1933; page 1

The recipe ends with "Serve with mashed potatoes and tomato sauce." I don't know anything about the town of Katanning, but I did note that more than half the newspaper was concerned with livestock and crops. Carbs with a side of carbs makes more sense out in farm country. 

"In the Kitchen," The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; August 21, 1933

Today, we're starting with rice and a special other ingredient: an onion! I don't know why I never thought to add a chopped raw onion to the rice cooker before, but I'm definitely doing it again whether I revisit this recipe or not.

I also put generous shake of dried parsley in the rice water. I think dried parsley is very underrated in modern food. It makes things taste properly seasoned and adds such an interesting flavor. Parsley deserves to be more than decorative sprigs on the side of fancy plates.

Aside from waiting for the rice to cook, this recipe was surprisingly quick to put together. You just put it all in a bowl and stir. Though since I didn't want any stubborn clumps of egg that refused to beat out, I made a short detour and beat our egg electrically. I imagine that anyone doing this in the 1930s could have used a handcranked eggbeater and done it nearly as fast. 

The recipe says "more eggs can be added," but the price of eggs still hasn't quite recovered from the last time Trump was president. 

 After mixing, it looked (as all unbaked rice puddings seem to do) like soggy porridge.

Things were a lot better after baking. The rice came out of the oven ever-so-slightly golden on top and smelling amazing.

This was a lot better than it should have been. Seriously, this tastes like something that somebody's aunt always brings. I don't think anyone in my family has ever made anything like this, but I would swear it spontaneously generated on the Thanksgiving table at least once. And like all good recipes that someone's aunt makes, there were a lot of leftovers and we were glad to have them. 

 

Potato-Egg Pie: It's so good you'd never believe we started with fresh ingredients

I think the pie pan makes this a pie.

Potato-Egg Pie 3 small potatoes, cooked and sliced (peel if desired) 3 hard-boiled eggs, sliced 2 tablespoons flour 1½ cups milk 1 tablespoon butter 3 ounces cheese (¾ cups shredded) Salt and pepper to taste About 3 tbsp breadcrumbs Heat oven to 350°. Grease a pie pan. Shake a little bit of salt and pepper in the bottom of the pan, then lay the potato slices on top of it. Lay the sliced boiled eggs on top of the potatoes. Melt the butter in a saucepan. Thoroughly whisk the flour into the milk. Then add it to the butter and cook, stirring constantly, until it boils. Remove from heat and add the cheese, stirring until it melts, Then add the breadcrumbs. Pour/spread this over the potatoes and eggs. Bake until lightly browned on top, about 20 minutes. "In the Kitchen," The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; July 8, 1935; page 3

As we noted a few recipes ago, The Southern Districts Advocate devoted an entire edition of "In the Kitchen" to cheese and pudding. Naturally, we couldn't resist trying the other cheesy recipes, starting with the pie. (The steamed puddings will have to wait until we dig our jackets back out of the closet.)

The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; July 8, 1935

When I saw the title "Cheese Pie" in all capitals, I imagined a whole pie shell filled with glorious cheese and barely enough other things to hold it together. I thought we would melt an entire party cheese tray into a single pie pan and euphemistically call it a casserole. It sounded so delicious that I barely managed to wait long enough for one of the last chilly nights of late spring.

Instead of starting with a cheese grater, the cheese pie starts off with potatoes. This is when I learned that no matter what you do, potatoes will always take longer than you think. I thought the pressure cooker might be faster than boiling, but we still had to wait half an hour. In a fortunate accident, the potato was perfectly cooked when the pressure cooker boiled itself dry and the top stopped jiggling. It had also unwrapped itself.

I had to kind of smush the potato slices into the pan, but they already looked like a mess anyway. Because I always like potatoes better with the skins left on, I kind of pressed the last little fallen-off bits into the gaps between potato pieces.

Next, we added the boiled eggs. I would like to once again say how much I love Delia Smith's egg-boiling tutorial. These came out perfect. No runniness in the center, and none of those unbearable gray rings that cause so much stove-side fretting.

Moving over to the melted butter, I wasn't sure why we're supposed to add the milk "gradually." Though it was kind of interesting to see the first splash of it turn into a yolk-free fried egg.

 

We are next directed to stir in the flour. I suspected this would end in a lumpy mess, but nevertheless gave The Southern Districts Advocate the benefit of the doubt. After all, every printed recipe theoretically worked for someone. 

Of course, I couldn't stir hard enough without sloshing the entire pan all over the stove. I had to pour everything back out so I could whisk it in something more suitable. (Isn't it nice to have a dishwasher so I don't have to worry about the pileup?)

I knew this lumpy mess would happen would do it anyway.

Ahh, doesn't that look better?

Next, it was finally time to put the cheese in the cheese pie! I know we're cutting this recipe to a third, but I expected a lot more cheese from a recipe that title-drops it. Perhaps I am a bit picky about my cheese pies, but I think the cheese should be a beautiful orange mountain over the sauce we're about to stir it into. I guess with a depression on, we had to economize on cheese even when featuring it.

Lastly, we are supposed to add "breadcrumbs to taste." Unfortunately, I am not Australian enough to have any taste in breadcrumbs. Then I remembered that Delia Smith made something called "bread sauce" in one of her Christmas specials. (I know Delia is British, but there's a lot of culinary overlap between the two countries so we'll just go with it.) I copied the amounts from her recipe because Delia has never done us wrong.

When we stirred this together, it tasted like a grilled cheese. (Or is it a cheese toastie in Australian?) Our sauce had also turned into a paste. The recipe says to "pour over potatoes, etc" but we ended up ineptly spreading it instead.

To my light surprise, our pie's top layer actually browned a little bit in the oven. It didn't look like a sauce, though. Instead, it was more like I had poured some sort of bread batter on top which had then baked in place.

When I tasted this, I couldn't believe the recipe didn't start with getting last night's dinner back out of the fridge. In the most carb-stupored way possible, this is what leftovers should taste like. It was the same kind of satisfying as Mrs. Mary Martensen's fish pie (which also uses potatoes and cheese). Very little of today's cheese pie remained to put away after the pan got cold. 

 

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.