Date Refrigerator Pie: It is so good

Today, we are making a recipe my great-grandmother didn't clip and should have.

Date Refrigerator Pie 2 tablespoons unflavored gelatin, or 2 (¼-oz) packets 1 tablespoon cold water 2 tablespoons sugar 2 egg yolks ½ cup lemon juice (2 medium-sized lemons) 1 cup orange juice (fresh squeezed if possible) ½ cup milk ⅓ cup sugar 1 cup whipping cream ⅔ cup chopped dates ⅔ cup halved dates 1 orange, segmented 1 baked pie shell, or 1 graham cracker crumb crust (baked if desired) If you made your own graham cracker crust and didn't bake it, put it in the freezer so it doesn't fall apart when you fill the pie. Put the gelatin in a small bowl. Add the water and stir quickly so it mixes before the gelatin soaks it up and hardens. (This is easier to stir with a toothpick or skewer than a spoon.) Set aside and let stand. In the top of a double boiler, whisk together the two tablespoons sugar and the egg yolks. When thoroughly combined, whisk in the fruit juices. Cook over boiling water until slightly thickened. (It's not going to thicken very much.) Remove from heat. In a small cup or bowl, scald the milk by microwaving it until it simmers. Then drop in the gelatin and stir until melted. (This is easier to stir with a table knife than a spoon. With a spoon, the gelatin gets stuck in the bowl-end.) Slowly pour the milk into the yolks while stirring vigorously. Let cool to room temperature. Then stir in the chopped dates. Cut the orange segments and date halves into bite-size pieces. Whip the cream and fold it in. Pour into the pie shell. Arrange on the top alternate circles of date halves and orange segments. Refrigerate until firm. Source: Chicago Tribune; April 17, 1936

Some readers may recall that when we made wilted lettuce, we had to write to the Chicago Public Library for help reading the newspaper clipping. (An unfortunately-placed ink smudge had blotted out part of the ingredient list.) Instead of sending me the wilted lettuce on its own, they sent me all of the Chicago Tribune's recipes for that day. This pie looked too good to pass up.

Chicago Tribune, 17 April 1936, with thanks to the Chicago Public Library

This pie fits perfectly with our ongoing series of recipes that don't heat up the kitchen (or at least, things that don't heat the kitchen very much). Granted, we will have to get out a double boiler, but that's the only heat unless you bake a pie crust. We did graham crackers instead.

I know baking the crust would make it nice and toasty, but I didn't want to turn on the oven.

Today's adventure begins with pie insurance, which some people know as "unflavored gelatin." I occasionally slip a discreet envelope of the stuff into pies that are too gloppy to slice. Its presence on the ingredient list made the whole recipe feel more reassuring. 

So, before we get to the dates and fresh oranges, we soften our gelatin in--- hold on a minute. Usually when you soften gelatin, you sprinkle it in enough water to easily dissolve, like this:

But this recipe has us soften our gelatin in barely enough water to make it wet. Was tap water scarce in the Depression? (And with the maddening buildout of enough AI datacenters to use an entire Texas' worth of energy, will it be scarce again?)

It occurred to me: was the Turkish paste supposed to turn into a rubbery clod like this?

Having gotten the rest of our ingredients together, I was surprised at how yellow this pie was shaping up to be. It looked downright pretty.

 

After getting over the stove, our egg yolk mixture didn't firm up very much (if at all). I even got out a meat thermometer to see if how close it was to scrambling and therefore if I could get away with cooking it any longer. 

But its persistent runniness didn't surprise me. Egg yolk custards never seem to set as well as when you use the whole egg. Besides, we had gelatin on standby. I've already said this today, but a box of unflavored gelatin is like food insurance.

Next, it was time to add our dates, which had turned into a sticky mass in the measuring cup. I have to ask: were dates that much cheaper back then? Today they're one of the pricer items on the dried fruit shelf, but in the 1930s you see them as often as raisins. Granted, I splurged a bit on really good dates from the upscale grocery store. But even the prepackaged dates you can get at most supermarkets aren't cheap these days. 

The whipped cream turned this into a cute-looking fluff. I think that as Lace Maker pointed out in the comments under our underwhelming pineapple Bavarian, you could call this a "date Bavarian" if you put it in a gelatin mold instead of a pie shell.

As I discovered when dressing the top of the pie, it's surprisingly tricky to make concentric rings of garnish in a six-inch pan. There's simply no space. (In retrospect, I should have started from the rim instead of the center.) But I told myself it passed for a lovely freehand mosaic anyway and put our pie in the fridge for the night.

This was every bit as good as I thought it would be. The fresh oranges on top were a perfect counterpoint to the rich pie beneath. And the dates were great little sweet interspersions through the pie's tartness. It's one of those desserts where you can get away with serving small slices without disappointing most people. It's just the right amount of rich.

All that fuss with cardboard circles, lifting-handles, and plastic wrap paid off. We got the pie out in one piece. The graham cracker crust didn't even try to crumble.

This turned out to be one of those recipes where you spend a lot of time prepping your ingredients, but it flies together once everything is ready. It also tasted so good I almost regretted halving it. I do think it was worth juicing my own oranges and lemons-- they're a big part of the flavor. 

However, it is one of those recipes that really depends on good ingredients. The dates should be flavorful enough to eat right out of the package. The oranges should smell like oranges before you even cut them. (Really, most fruit should smell like fruit before you cut into it. If it smells like nothing, it'll taste like nothing.) But when the fruits are right, this pie is a wonderful way to serve them.

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.

Cornmeal Yorkshire Pudding: or, Cornbread by any name

I don't know if autumn is here or if we only get a short reprieve from the heat, but we can turn on the oven!

Cornmeal Yorkshire Pudding 2 eggs 1 cup boiling water 1 cup white cornmeal (white if you have it) ½ tsp salt Drippings from roasted meat Heat oven to 350°. Pour the drippings into a 9" round or square pan. Beat the eggs until thoroughly whipped and lemon-colored, set aside. Pour the boiling water over the cornmeal, stirring constantly. Add the salt. Gently mix in the eggs, trying to deflate them as little as possible. Bake until the top springs back when lightly pressed in the center, about 30-35 minutes. While it's baking, baste it 3 times with additional pan drippings. Newspaper clipping, Chicago area, probably 1930s-1940s Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

Apparently they really liked Yorkshire pudding in my great-grandmother's house. Or maybe she frequently roasted large slabs of meat and Yorkshire pudding was an easy standby. Either way, she has two recipes for it, carefully nestled together in her binder. 

We have already made what I think is normal Yorkshire pudding, so today we're going to find out what the heck the cornmeal version is.

As I've often mentioned, I started saving beef fat when beef is too expensive to throw any part of it out. So even though we're not buying beef for a while, I still have a lot of what I call "saute-grade" fat in the fridge at any time. This is my term for the meat-filled beef drippings that have a beefy taste and a shorter shelf life. You can't use it for everything, but it's still good enough for things like sauteeing onions. 

The point is, I had drippings (which apparently no Yorkshire pudding is complete without) even though I didn't have any meat roasting in the oven. To this I added paprika, garlic, and a few other basic necessities. I figured if I had spooned the drippings out of a roast-in-progress, there would be seasonings. 

After our pan was ready, it was time to make the pudding itself. It involved fewer ingredients than I expected. I always thought Yorkshire pudding was very "continental" and perhaps a bit fancy, but this is almost the cheapest batter you can make-- even including the eggs.

I didn't know if whipping the eggs would make a difference, but they actually fluffed the batter a little bit. You could even see the last sloshes of egg foam that didn't quite want to mix in. Had I needed to hand-whisk the eggs, I would have been annoyed at how little the batter changed, but this was only two minutes with an electric mixer.

As a quick aside: I like how aside from a brief encounter with an eggbeater, this was a mindlessly easy recipe. It's perfect for slapping together when you already have a fully-loaded stove to tend to.

The directions say to "baste three times while baking with some of the dripping from roasting pan," but I didn't know how much fat to baste this with. So I put a few little splats on top and hoped I guessed right.

After baking, the pudding bubbled on top where we had basted it. This would subside after a minute or two, but not in my mind. After the suds were gone, this merely looked like bread with well-seasoned splats on top. Which was what it turned out to be.

Those bubbles! Why does it look like I put dish soap on top?

The newspaper called called it "Yorkshire pudding," but this is cornbread. Basting it with seasoned pan drippings did add some nice flavor to it, but it's cornbread. With that said, it's pretty good cornbread. Since it's not raised with baking powder, it doesn't have any chemical taste hiding deep in there. It was just light enough to be nice, but still dense enough for perfect plate-sopping.

In case you're wondering, today's pud is floating on this.

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.