Cranberry Mallobet: or, Homemade Cranberry Soft-Serve

The original recipe was amazing right up to and excluding the last sentence.

Cranberry Mallobet 1¼ cup cranberry juice ¼ cup orange juice (fresh-squeezed if possible) 1 tsp lemon juice 1 cup sugar (white or brown), divided into two ½-cup portions 1 egg white* 20 marshmallows, or 5 oz mini marshmallows Red food coloring, if desired Melt the marshmallows in the cranberry juice, either by cooking in a saucepan over medium heat or in the microwave. If using a microwave, cook long enough to bring to a vigorous boil and then give a good hard stirring. Continue boiling and stirring until the marshmallows are dissolved. (Honestly, just do this step on the stove- it's faster.) Remove from heat and add the orange and lemon juice. If the cranberry juice was unsweetened before you added the marshmallows (check the label), add ½ cup of sugar and stir until dissolved. Chill the mixture. Then beat the egg white until frothy. Gradually add the remaining half-cup sugar, beating constantly. Gently fold it in. If desired, add food coloring to make it a more definitive cranberry red. Freeze in an ice cream machine. Then transfer to the kitchen freezer and leave until firm. *If raw eggs are concern, use a pasteurized-in-the-shell egg. If you're wondering what you'd do with the rest of a carton of pasteurized eggs, you can cook them the same as ordinary eggs. You can't tell the difference. Mrs. Russell Ayres, 1817 Forster St, Harrisburg Pennsylvania; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, September 13, 1935; page 12

I wanted to make this as soon as I read the name. The word "Mallobet" sounds almost cloyingly whimsical, like the name of a cartoon character of indeterminate species that you would see on one of those children's shows where everybody frolics among the flowers and learns about telling the truth and sharing toys. 

Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, 13 September 1935

Theoretically, the recipe is quite simple. You squeeze the juice out of cranberries, add some marshmallows to suds them up, add a whipped egg white to fluff it some more, and then put the whole mixture in the freezer before it has a chance to deflate. After a few hours, you should have a reasonable simulacrum of ice cream. 

I don't know why we're supposed to put baking powder in the water, but let the record show that I did.

In nearly no time at all, we were ready to shove our cranberries through a colander. The easiest way I found was to put a small plate on the mound of berries and shove it downward. After we had squeezed out all we could, the remaining cranberry paste was so tasty that I deeply regretted having no recipes lined up to use it.

Our juice tasted very diluted, like Kool-Aid after all the ice has melted. We also had a lot more of it than the 1¼ cups that Mrs. Ayres claims that we should. I poured the excess into a glass to taste it, and was underwhelmed. Nevertheless, I added precisely 20 marshmallows to what remained. These marshmallows had caused a minor scuffle in the kitchen when someone had the nerve to eat them.

"Don't eat those marshmallows!" I yelped. "They're counted!"

"What?" He stared at the bowl of marshmallows, trying to figure out why they had become a precious resource.

"How many did you eat?"

"Oh good grief...."

After replacing the marshmallows he ate (two of them, in case you wondered), we could proceed to turn our cranberries into a delicious ice cream. Or so I thought.

Things looked all right at first. The marshmallows turned into a thick layer of foam on top of the berries. But as they continued melting, the foam dissipated. Remember how our lemon-beer pie turned into a layer of suds on top of a murky fluid? We had that again, though this time it was a rather charming shade of pink instead of an ugly beige.

Looks like we might have accidentally landed on a new way to make our own Jello 1-2-3.

Our mallobet tasted like it could become really good ice cream if it acted like the recipe claimed. Most of the flavor came from the orange juice because Mom had sent me off from Thanksgiving with some really good oranges.  But I could still tell why Mrs. Ayres got the $2 basket of groceries and her name in the paper.

Had the mallobet-in-progress tasted underwhelming, I would have followed Mrs. Ayres's direction to "freeze in tray of automatic refrigerator without stirring." Then I would have thrown the ensuing pink ice brick into the sink and closed out the recipe with unsurprised disappointment. But this had potential. You could tell that it wanted to turn into something good.

So, I forced success upon our mallobet. Thinking of our earlier prune whip and the ambiguity of older freezers, I decided that perhaps you're supposed to refrigerate this without freezing it. Maybe the marshmallows add enough gelatin to turn it into a wobbly dessert. Refrigeration did nothing, so I decided to repair this mess with, naturally, more gelatin.

Our cranberry whip wasn't the mallobet Mrs. Ayres meant it to be, but it was still pretty decent. I wasn't excited or in a rush to repeat it, but I didn't mind having made it either.

However, I couldn't quite get the recipe out of my mind. In its earlier failed stages, it was was some of the best melted ice cream I've ever had. You could tell what it wanted to be. So with that in mind, I put the mallobet aside until the next time I was at my parents' house. They have an ice cream machine in the closet and an ice maker in the fridge. And really, what good is the ice maker if we don't completely empty it without asking everyone?

This time, I decided to spare myself the bother of juicing my own cranberry pulp. This is a new millennium, and we now have cranberry juice in bottles. Additionally, since it it is no longer winter (I made our first failed mallobet in early December), I let the stove stay cold and used the microwave instead. As I found out, marshmallows are surprisingly resilient in the microwave. For the first several minutes of cooking time (more than long enough to partially carbonize a standard-issue frozen dinner), they resolutely stayed like this.

If you see any lines through the marshmallows, that's where I tried to cut through them with a spoon. They glued themselves back together like sugary self-healing mats and remained frustratingly intact.

Eventually, the marshmallows broke into clumps, turning our bowl into a half-decent terrazzo sample.

After boiling the cranberry juice for a looooong time in the microwave, we still had a few specks of marshmallow that absolutely refused to give in. This might have been faster on the stovetop. I know we're trying to keep things low-heat, but you're looking at the result of twenty minutes of stopping and stirring.

Moving on with the recipe, we have previously learned that a whipped egg white can only take so much sugar before it loses its peaks. I knew this would happen, but did this anyway. We ended up with this sort of goop that floated over the berry juice. 

So now, we were ready to split off of Mrs. Ayres' directions and get out the ice cream machine! This is the same one I bought when I wanted to make water ice. I don't know whether to say it's surprisingly durable for still working after so many years or not. After all, it hasn't left its box since before the pandemic.

Or at least, the machine was durable. But after so many years of quietly gathering dust in the closet (I really should have closed the box), the barrel started leaking brine all over the counter. I always thought the motor would burn out first.

Behold the salt trail spurting out of the to the leak site.

As the sub-freezing brine uselessly dripped away, I got progressively angrier at this recipe and at fate. It felt like the universe was snatching my mallobet away from me. So, I went online to see if anyone was unloading an ice cream machine for cheap. I really wanted one of those fancy machines that has its own freezer so I wouldn't have to faff with ice and rock salt ever again. This turned up for $30.

I was super excited to get this, becoming more so when I read the instruction (of course I read the manual) that the bowl "The freezer bowl must be completely frozen before you begin your recipe."

"Ah!" I thought. "Its built-in refrigerator needs six hours to warm up!" So, I plonked one of the bowls into place and turned the machine on. The bowl started spinning, but I saw no way it could possibly get cold. It was then that I realized: I didn't miraculously get a self-freezing ice cream machine for the cost of a pizza delivery. I got one of those ones where you have to make room for an entire bowl in your freezer. This meant that I would have to wait a long time before we could see if the cranberry ice cream was any good.

Furthermore, both of the freezer bowls were leaking some unidentifiable white substance from around their top seams. I didn't know if they were now too poisonous to use (even after a trip through suds), or even if they still had enough fluid in there to make enough internal ice. I chucked them in the freezer because I couldn't return this machine anyway.

And so, muttering a lot of words unfit for impressionable children, I threw some badly folded towels on top of the dribbly ice cream machine, hoping that what ice remained would at least keep it cold.

After waiting a long time and fielding a lot of reasonable yet annoying questions like "What's that on the counter?" and pointing to all the styrofoam packaging to ask "What are you going to do with that mess?" it was time to see if our mallobet was capable of turning into ice cream. 

I was a bit nervous when I got it out of the machine. It seemed too runny to be a real ice cream-- like it would just turn into rock-hard ice in the freezer. But I think it was as frozen as the machine would ever get it. 

I shouldn't have worried. After a few hours in the freezer, our mallobet was perfect. And it tasted incredible. Using bottled cranberry juice added so much more flavor than our own homemade watery runoff. And it was fantastically smooth. I wonder if the gelatin in the marshmallows prevented little ice crystals from forming as it froze.

This stayed soft in the freezer (probably because the marshmallows added enough sugar to substantially lower the freezing point) and tasted amazing. It was well worth the second ice cream machine. Even though it has no dairy, it was wonderfully creamy. I'm very glad I didn't throw out the recipe after the first time it didn't work.

As a postscript, I mildly unnerved my sister when I said "It's dairy-free but it's not kosher!"

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.