Fried Rosettes: or, Adventures in deep-fried collectibles

Sometimes it seems like I'm not unloading junk so much as trading it for junk I actually want.

Rosettes or Timbales 1 cup flour ½ cup whole or evaporated milk ½ cup water 1 teaspoon sugar ¼ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon vanilla 2 eggs Put all ingredients into a mixing bowl and stir gently with a spoon until batter is smooth and as firm as thick cream. If you have to get out a whisk and vigorously beat the lumps away, let the batter stand for an hour before frying. If you used a plastic bowl, transfer the batter to something heat-resistant so you don't accidentally touch the bowl with the hot iron and melt it. You may prefer to pour the batter into a shallow baking pan rather than a bowl- it might make dipping easier. Heat oil to 325°-350°F, or about 160°-190°C. If you don't have a frying thermometer, dip a knife in the oil long enough to heat it. Quickly wipe it dry, then dip the tip into the batter and fry it. The batter should become golden in about 40 seconds. Dip the rosette or timbale iron in the oil long enough to heat it up. Wipe the oil off the bottom of it (just the bottom, not the sides) and dip it in the batter. Be sure the batter doesn't go over the top of the iron. Fry until golden, which should take about 40 seconds. When you lift the rosette out of the frying pan, tip it upside-down to pour out the oil that got in it. Then gently loosen it from the iron onto a plate with paper towels on top. I'm not good enough at making these to give precise directions, but here are the hints from the instruction sheet: If the rosettes have blisters, your eggs or batter were overbeaten. Let it stand for an hour. If patty shells are not crisp, the batter is too thick. Dilute it with more milk. The bottom of patty shells can be made fried more crisp by putting them back into the oil and letting them free-float for a bit. Your oil is too hot if: Your rosettes drop from the iron before being removed from the oil. Your batter falls in a partially-cooked noodly mess, right back into the dipping-bowl as soon as you lift the iron out. Your rosette comes off the iron in the oil.  The rosettes are too soft when cooked. If your rosettes start coming out soggy, your oil has cooled too much. (Every fresh rosette sucks some heat out of it, and not all stove burners can keep up.) Just let the oil rest and reheat for a minute or two. You can reheat these in the oven or in a toaster oven. The temperature doesn't matter too much, so if you're already baking something else you can just put them on a small pan and slide them in the oven. If you're not already baking something else, just set the oven (or toaster oven, no need to heat up the big one) to 350°. US Utilities wafflet iron instruction sheet, 1933

Several years ago, we had to empty out a late relative's apartment in Chicago. (I think I've said this before, but this was how I found out that I had relatives in Chicago.) We have only just now gotten around to going through many of the boxes that we threw in the back of a U-Haul and then stuffed into various closets back home. A lot of things are only interesting because no one threw them out ninety years ago, like handwritten electric bills or toothbrushes from the Jazz Age. But every time we consider just flinging it all in the trash, we find things like my great-grandmother's recipe binder or some amusingly gossipy letters. (Her husband was a mortician. She had occasional opinions on how various decedents were dressed and how their houses looked for the wake.)

Anyway, Mom tacitly encouraged me to help her regain some space in the house by taking anything I either liked or thought might be worth selling. This included a lot of swag from the 1933/1934 Chicago World's Fair. Either they went to the fair repeatedly (it was in their town, after all), or they visited for one tightly-packed day and grabbed absolutely every free flyer they could carry. I don't think that mass-produced flyers count as "irreplaceable family treasures," so online they went (and didn't sell for very much).

Selling world's fair souvenirs involved looking through a lot of already-sold listings for price comparisons, which in turn made Ebay's algorithm think I was absolutely obsessed with the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. Even had I wanted to buy historical clutter, most of the collectibles were too collectibly priced. But it turns out that even the most devout world's fair collectors aren't very interested in old kitchen things. I got these for cheaper than buying on Wish and without the risk of lead poisoning. (Yes, Ebay's algorithm finally got me again.) I thought it'd be fun to try making them.

More of these await in the box.

 Like pizzelles, I had never been particularly interested in making timbales until I decided to buy the implements. But fortunately, this has no underlying post-breakup motivation. I just thought they'd be fun.

You can tell the Depression was on when these were made. They printed DELICIOUS --- INEXPENSIVE --- EASY TO MAKE (emphasis mine) right on the box.

Also, I love how they ended the address with "Chicago, U.S.A." like you're mailing international packages. They really wanted people to buy these and take them home around the world. I wonder if any of these would turn up if you peeped through kitchen cabinets on other continents?

These may look cute and dainty in pictures with no scale reference, but they were surprisingly big. Like, a single one nearly covered the plate. 

Of course, plates don't come in standard sizes. So here it is on a 3x5-inch index card.  

I put our new toys on the kitchen scale. We have a pound of metal.

Because my scale is bilingual, here it is in grams. I want everyone to appreciate the heft, whether you use customary or metric.

Some of the irons were, um, seasoned with cooked-on grease. I found this reassuring. If someone got these to work at some point, in theory I didn't buy commemorative duds.

These particular irons have an exciting feature: you can screw this little flat plate onto the bottom and make little tartlet-shell things instead of flowers or snowflakes. I've seen irons that make those cute little fried wagon-wheels and irons that make tartlet shells, but I've never seen ones that can do both. I wonder if they never worked as well as advertised, and therefore no one bought them?

And if you take the little plate off, it looks like a souvenir medallion.

The other one might look like a random cloud design, but it's actually a take on the logo from the world's fair where it was sold (ie, that planet-looking thing on the box). It even says 1933 if you flip it over. I find that absolutely delightful.

I've never fried rosettes before, but I didn't want to look up instructions online. I'm not as good as I'd like at spotting AI slop. Until the AI bubble pops, it is not safe to mix boiling-hot fat and inhuman garbage. Fortunately, someone selling another set of these irons uploaded pictures of the instruction sheet.

 

After skipping over the more brand-specific directions, cutting out the product placements, and undoing some of the more peculiar ad-agency capitalization, let's see what they have to say:

GENERAL INSTRUCTIONS

Heat mold in your favorite fat at a temperature from 325 to 375 degrees. (ed. note: about 160° - 190°C.)

("Your favorite fat"! I love it.)

If no thermometer is used, dip point of knife in batter, then hold it in hot fat. It should brown in about 40 seconds. Never let fat smoke.

I tried this, and you should know two things: First, heat the bare knife in the fat before dipping. Second, wipe it dry and quickly dip it in batter before it cools off. If you don't wipe off the hot oil, the batter will just slide right off.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, the damn batter did not come off the knife after frying. I had to soak each test-knife (I did this multiple times over the course of frying) overnight.

When molds are hot, remove and lightly wipe bottom on cloth. Dip hot mold into batter but never let batter go over top of mold. Then place back into hot cooking fat and fry until a delicate brown— about 25 to 35 seconds. Wafflets must be fully covered with cooking fat while being cooked.

When patty shell plate is not in use, always keep the small screw in the hole in the bottom of the mold.

Well, keeping the screw in place makes sense. First, you don't have to remember where you mislaid the darn thing. Second, you won't get batter stuck in the screw-hole.

TO MAKE PATTY SHELLS

First screw patty shell plate on THIN side of mold by using point of knife or coin.

First, I am NOT jabbing the end of my good kitchen knife into a flathead screw. Second, did people not have screwdrivers at home in those days? Even my friends who can't use tools have a cheap one lying around from the last time something broke.

Heat up mold and dip into batter about ¾ its depth. Then lower mold gently into hot cooking fat, keeping mold level so patty shell will swell evenly all around as it rises to top of mold. Let mold rest on bottom of pan to cook.

(Never heard of keeping things at the bottom of the pot while you're frying before. I'd have thought they would burn.)

To make "cream puff" cover for patty shell, remove the plate and make a very shallow rosette.

That actually sounds so cute! I wanted to try it as soon as I read it.

All right, now we're getting to the handy hints section:

POINTS TO REMEMBER

If wafflets drop from mold before being removed from utensil, your lard is too hot. If they are too soft when cooked they have been cooked too quickly. If they show blisters your eggs or batter have been beaten too much. If patty shells are not crisp the batter is too thick and must be diluted with milk. The bottom of patty shells can be made fried more crisp by putting them back into hot lard and cooking more while they float on top.

Rosettes or patty shells can reheated by placing in a warm oven.

Fancy colors are obtained by mixing pure vegetable colors into the batter. Rainbow colors are obtained by mixing various colors into different parts of the batter before putting the molds in.

All of that seemed good to know. But I'm not sure how well food coloring would work in these. It tends to look bad when things get cooked brown. Just look at the top of the pink cake I made once. The inside of the cake is as pretty as it was as a batter, but the browned top did not look right. (This is why we cover our festively colored cakes with icing.) If you really wanted to dye these, you would probably want to stick to reds, oranges, and yellows. Your purples or greens would look sickly and terrible when mixed with the golden-brown color of something fried crisp.

If we zoom in on the instruction sheet I didn't buy, we have a recipe. Some of the words are cut off in the picture (understandable since they were trying to sell merchandise rather than document random instruction sheets for posterity), but we can infer what's missing.

If this is the recipe they use for demonstrations, hopefully it's good enough to sell me on not trying to return these.

Well I feel like I am ready to fry some rosettes, don't you? 

The directions tell us to pile all our ingredients into a bowl and "stir gently" with a spoon. (Apparently if you overbeat the batter, these don't fry right.) However, my gentle spoon-nudging only yielded a lumpy mess.

I had to get out a whisk and defy the warnings about blisters on my patty shells. After beating this hard enough that Fanny Cradock would have approved, our batter resembled "thick cream" as specified. It was also thoroughly impregnated with little bubbles, which presumably is why our instruction sheet threatened blisters. Fortunately, the directions have a remedy:  let the batter stand for an hour should an unfortunate whipping occur. Patience would ward off ruination.

While our batter recovered from a severe overbeating, I got everything else ready. After screwing the rosette iron onto the handle, I thought to myself that it looked hopelessly cute. If you were in charge of coming up with props for a kiddie play, some spray paint and glitter would turn this into a really good fairy wand. (Though if children are the same as I remember from that age, you'd have to prevent whoever was playing the good fairy from bashing people with the wand as soon as they felt the heft.)

After getting our batter whipped and letting it recover, it was time to fry. As a safety note, choose a pot that gives your oil plenty of room to boil up. Don't settle for something that is technically deep enough to immerse your rosettes and patty shells. I ended up switching to a saucepan after this proved inadequate.

Just because you have a fire extinguisher in the kitchen doesn't mean you should use it.

I wanted to make the little "patty shells" as the direction sheet calls them. Dipping and frying seemed like a wonderfully fast way to crank out lots of tartlet shells without any pastry fuss. However, our first attempt looked sad and bulbous.

The leaflet says this will "add dignity and pleasure to your parties."

I think I know why no one makes interchangeable rosette/pastry case irons. We had some batter leak past the removable plate, firmly anchoring our patty shell. We couldn't get it off without ripping it. (I would later carefully bend the screw-on plate back into flatness, but that would wait until everything was cooled off and dried.)

I decided that my pastry case (or "patty shell" in company parlance) dreams would have to wait until further practice. Until then, I would try out every single one of the irons in our one-pound bag of goodies, starting with our special 1933 commemorative iron. This one was my favorite because it couldn't have come from anywhere but the world's fair. So it presumably was only available for a few short months of a single year, in one demonstration booth in a single city. (Well, I say that. There's a good chance they sold the surplus in the local office or gave them away as curiosities to customers and employees until they were finally gone.)

My first attempt at making special 1933 crispy things failed before we even made it to the oil. The batter flash-cooked on the iron and fell back into the bowl in hot, slimy noodles.

I referred back to the instruction sheet, which says "If wafflets drop from mold before being removed from utensil, your lard is too hot." So I turned off the burner, let the oil cool a little, and used the intermission to wipe the splats from the countertop.

Our next attempt at making a crispy fried 1933 went better until I tried to get it off the iron. But at least my lard wasn't too hot anymore.

After some more attempts, we actually got one to stay intact! See, it's an art-deco cloud swirl that says 1933, the year of the fair. It is also full of oil since I didn't know you're supposed to tip the iron upside down before getting your cooked creation off of it.

I wondered if they designed a 1934 iron when the fair was extended into the next year.

Dizzy with success and airborne grease, I decided next to try the little iron that makes two at once. If it worked, I thought I'd use it for making things like mini quiches and other things that you hand around on occasions when a fork is too inconvenient. The batter half-slipped off, which simultaneously gave me the sting of failure and the happy chance to read A CENTURY OF PROGRESS- U.S. UTILITIES on my limited-edition kitchen clutter. (Future patty-shell attempts would be more successful.)

At this point, I began to reconsider whether this as an economical way to make treats in the summertime. The box says they're inexpensive, and I had thought that perhaps frying would be cheaper than running the oven. But between sopping up the ongoing mess and wiping the irons before every dip, I think the massive outlay of paper towels offset any energy savings.

With that said, I decided next to try these very small irons. I don't know if they're part of this set or if they just got dumped into the same bag when someone's kitchen was being emptied out.

The starburst/flower one came out really cute, but I think the other two were amorphous fried blobs. If you didn't know these are supposed to be a fish and a butterfly, could you tell?

At this point, I decided that I had gotten marginally better at making these (though not good enough to promise anyone a tray of them), and dared to revisit our first iron. Our next stars came out so pretty I could imagine buying them off a cart in the park. As a side note, I love how you can see the flathead screw in the center.

Despite the massive pileup of failures in the trash can, the successful ones were really good. They were incredibly light and delicate, like fragile floating bits of crispiness. After tasting one, I was ready to brave the mess again (but not tonight!).

Naturally, I had to take one of our more successful mini-shells and fill it with something, just to see if I could. With that in mind, I had made a half-recipe of applesauce-date mallow. It involves nearly no heat (aside from microwaving the applesauce for a bit), which is perfect when we're trying to keep things easy for both the air conditioning and the electric bill. Also, I was right when I speculated that it is a lot better when lightly spiked. Unfortunately, it is the same color as our patty shell.

Just to complete things, I put the matching lid on top.

These make wonderfully crisp shells. It was almost like very thin layers of puff pastry, except fried. I don't know how long you can leave these pre-filled before they get soggy, but it was fantastic. It's like picking the breading off of fried foods, except in really cute shapes.

I'm not going to close with detailed instructions on how to use rosette irons because I wouldn't know. But I will list my first-time mistakes so that you can avoid them:

• Put your batter in a shallow bowl (or a baking pan, I saw some people do that in videos) before you try to dip the iron. It's a bit awkward trying to get in a deep bowl with a piece of metal on a stick.
• Don't use a plastic bowl. Otherwise, your hot iron might melt a hole in it when you dip.
• Have a metal slotted spoon ready in case they fall off the iron and back into the oil. (Obviously, a plastic spoon will melt!)
• Line your work surface for easier cleanup. There will be a big mess. In the old days I would have suggested a thick layer of newspapers. These days I might suggest the brown paper they use to pad out boxes for shipping. Whatever you use, it will be so much easier to just roll up your entire splattery mess and throw it out.

Second-Stab Saturday: Sorry I didn't like these pizzelles as much as someone else apparently did

I couldn't let go of the pizzelle recipe that covered an entire box. As a reminder:

Est! Est!! Est!!! Pizzelles 6 eggs 1 tsp vanilla 1 tbsp anise extract, or ¼ tsp anise oil 1 tsp orange or lemon extract 1 cup sugar 1 cup butter or oil Pinch of salt 2¼-2½ cups flour 2 tsp baking powder If using butter, melt it and set it aside to cool. Combine flour and baking powder in a sifter, set aside. Beat eggs and flavorings with an electric mixer until very light. Gradually add the sugar, beating the whole time. Beat until very thick. Gradually pour in the butter or oil, beating on high speed the whole time. Then set aside the mixer. Sift in the flour and stir it in by hand. Cook on a hot pizzelle iron until crisp and golden. If desired, take out about a third of the batter. Mix in ¼ cup cocoa powder. Cut this into the rest of the batter for a marbled effect. (Note: Apparently lots of people can make chocolate pizzelles, but the cocoa powder makes them stick horribly to the iron every time I try. So beware!) Source: handwritten recipe on a pizzelle iron box

Whoever wrote this recipe gave it the entire side of a pizzelle iron box, like they were declaring that this was the one and only. You don't do that with a dud. I decided to bring the recipe back to its native iron.

As I mentioned last time, I happen to have the same iron that this recipe came with. This isn't as much a coincidence as you may think. This seems to be one of the most common stovetop pizzelle iron designs, and I can see why. First, it looks really pretty. Second, it lets go of waffles ever-so-easily. With other irons, I often need to get out a fork and gently ease the pizzelles out of the grooves. But they fall right out of this one.

I wanted to give this recipe a fair shake, mostly because apparently someone really liked it. So on a lovely chilly night, I fired up the record player, cleared off the counters, and made pizzelles.

As much as I hate to admit it, it seems like the best pizzelle irons come from Ohio.* Our Pennsylvania iron turned this recipe into bendy wafers, but they were a lot thinner and crisper when cooked on a Cleveland native. But they were still oddly flexible and their texture just wasn't the best. I won't make these again, but I didn't throw the rest out.

They did photograph very well, though.

*Ohio has a large Italian community-- particularly in the greater Cleveland area, which may be why pizzelles are more common among Italian-Americans than still-in-Italy Italians. It is speculated that Cleveland's metalworking industry made it a lot easier to produce specialized waffle irons.
As for why I would have problems with Ohio and the cookware made in that state, it's for (admittedly shallow) personal reasons. For those who missed it, I got into making pizzelles after a bad breakup with someone whose family is from Ohio, which has left me salty about the entire state.↪

Cabbage rolls: Not bad, but not sure if they're worth the effort

Today, we are risking an explosion!

Cabbage Rolls 1 large head cabbage 2 (10½-oz each) cans tomato soup 1¼ cup water       Filling: 2 pounds lean ground meat 2 tsp salt ½ tsp pepper other seasonings to taste ¼ cup finely chopped onion 2 cups cooked rice 2 eggs Place the whole cabbage in the freezer. Leave it for a day or two, then thaw. This softens the leaves so you can work with them. Carefully peel off the leaves. Cut off any pieces of the cabbage core that stay on them. Mix the filling ingredients, adding other seasonings if desired. Place a portion of the meat on each cabbage leaf. Roll it up like an eggroll or a burrito. Then put the cabbage rolls on a rack in a pressure cooker. (You can stack them on each other- there's no need to separate them in the pot.) Pour the soup and water over them. Set the cooker to 15 PSI. Cook for 8 minutes, starting the time when the pressure is reached. Then instantly release the pressure (check your cooker's instruction manual to see how). Note 1: If desired, you can assemble the cabbage rolls a day ahead and refrigerate them until you're ready to cook them. Note 2: If desired, you can freeze any unused cabbage leaves for later use. When you use them, be sure to cook them thoroughly since they were in such close contact with raw meat. But really, they will be mushy and bitter after getting frozen and thawed twice. So you might just discreetly let the trash collectors take them away instead unless you have chickens in the yard.Carmella Oszterling

This comes from my ex's Italian grandmother's recipes. I'm not sure if it's actually Italian or if she copied it out of a pressure cooker instruction book. I really love the note at the bottom: "Maybe cut this in half." You know a recipe makes a lot when someone's Italian grandmother writes that perhaps you should make less of it. 

I actually did have these cabbage rolls at my ex's mother's house. I don't remember if I liked them or not. I was too overwhelmed at being presented to the entire extended family to notice the food, even if it was his mother's cooking. But I think that she skipped the pressure cooker and put them in a Crock Pot. 

However, what should turn up when I was rummaging through the cabinets, but a complete pressure cooker! When I say a complete one, I mean everything. The little rack you're supposed to put in the bottom of it, all the rubber bits, and the weight you're supposed to put on top. And when I flipped it over, I could tell that it had been used a lot.

There were two weights tucked inside it. One of them was worn out.I would love to know how long that took.

I didn't trust the pressure cooker. I've heard too many stories about pressure cookers exploding. Also, I didn't know how the heck to use it. I found the instruction manual online, and also a lot of videos of people. Most of the people showing how to use a pressure cooker talked about canning. It seems like the microwave superseded the pressure cooker (until the Instant Pot arrived) for everything except home canning.

With that in mind, I had to test two things. First, would this thing explode? And if it didn't, would it hold pressure? I don't know how old it is, how worn out it is, or any of that. I decided to take this outside so I wouldn't have to clean the entire kitchen in the event of catastrophic failure.

The grill burner is nearly useless for cooking purposes and leaves horrible soot on every pot, but it came in handy tonight. 

I was afraid to get near the cooker. After all, it could blow at any second. While I paced in the yard at what I hoped was a safe distance, that little weight that's supposed to start wobbling refused to move. The whole apparatus hissed a lot, which might be how it's supposed to work but made me even more afraid to get near it. Was some rubber bit old enough to lose its grip and leak? Was I supposed to give the weight a starting nudge?

Eventually, the little weight started rocking, which apparently means that this thing still holds pressure. Having proven that the cooker worked, I turned off the burner below it and left it for a few hours. I didn't want to touch it until it got completely cold in case it blew up in my hands.

When I brought it in, I removed the foil from below and was so glad I used it. Look at that horrible soot!

And now, it was time to actually make food-- or so I thought. The instructions begin with "Pour boiling water over leaves. Let stand for 5 minutes." But I couldn't even get to that point.  It turns out that cabbage leaves are nearly impossible to peel off intact. The first ones fell right off, giving me false hope.

But after this early success, the rest of them ripped apart as soon as I tried to get them off the cabbage head. This is one of the more intact ones.

 

Also, our leaves (intact or not) were hopelessly rigid. As the directions say, I poured boiling water over them and waited five minutes. That made no difference. I then decided to turn on the burner under the few leaves, at which point I discovered that boiling cabbage smells awful.The whole house reeked, and the leaves were as unrollable as ever.

We've cooked a fair amount of cabbage here at A Book of Cookrye, but I've never boiled it before. Or at least, not for longer than a few brief minutes. I therefore have never deliberately caused such a horrible stink on the stove. The whole house smelled like "You're not getting up from this table until you eat your vegetables."

I've never flunked out of a recipe at the first sentence, but I couldn't handle any more explosive cookers or foul-smelling and uncooperative cabbage. I almost felt someone gently putting their hand on my shoulder and saying "Now is not the time. That's enough for tonight." We had figured out how to get the cooker to pressurize, we had the filling made, and that was enough. We could let all our progress wait in the freezer.

Now, I don't remember where I read this, but apparently you can soften vegetables by freezing them. I think it was some listicle of cooking hacks. It seemed obvious enough-- frozen vegetables are always mushy when you thaw them. So I dropped the entire cabbage into the chest freezer until I was mentally ready for cabbage rolls.

A while later, I decided the time was right to load the pressure cooker with cabbage. Also, everyone else was away from the house. I wouldn't have to field any complaints about the stink. 

In utter ignorance of the smell to come, I put the frozen cabbage in a bowl and left it uncovered in the refrigerator. (We don't have any cabbage-sized containers anyway.) The cabbage started to smell overcooked as soon as it thawed. Seriously, my nose thought I had boiled it all day. I thought that cabbage only smelled bad if you cooked it too long, but apparently freezing it releases the stench too.  The refrigerator reeked within a few hours. Shortly thereafter, the cabbage smell seeped out of the fridge and into the kitchen. It then crept over the entire house. By nightfall, a faint yet persistent odor greeted me every time I came in from outside. I began to dread the others getting home a day early.

The next day, the cabbage had finished thawing and the whole house smelled like it. Nevertheless, I could peel the leaves off perfectly intact as long as I was careful about it. Look at this lovely pile of leaf skins, ready to receive the meat!

Now, each of these leaves had a big, fibrous vein in the center. I didn't know if it would cook soft or not, but I didn't want to eat extra-fibrous almost-woody cabbage rolls. So I carefully shaved off the excess vein. (Once again, let me remind everyone to keep your kitchen knives sharp!)

And now, it was time to make the cabbage rolls! After all our long preparation, this was almost insultingly fast.

Soon, we had a whole container of cabbage rolls ready for the pressure cooker. This seemed like a lot of fuss, but keep in mind that we have stretched the heck out of our beef. There's only one pound of meat in this whole container. Perhaps the extra effort makes sense when you have to feed a whole family with no budget. 

As suppertime approached, I had to face the pressure cooker. This time I had to do it indoors and with a lot of grocery money in it waiting to blow up. 

The recipe calls for two 10½ ounce cans of tomato soup. I was absolutely astonished to find that tomato soup cans haven't shrunk at all in the decades since this recipe was written down.

Well, this is the moment that took so long to get to!

Reminder: this is only one pound of meat.

Actually, I didn't want to cook a massive pot of cabbage in canned tomato soup. So, I went off-book and added a can of blenderized tomatoes. It didn't make much of a difference, but at the time it seemed like it might. 

Thar she blows!

Now, the recipe claims that we should only cook these for eight minutes. At first I thought that was preposterously short for how much raw meat and everything else was in the pot. But the cooker's handle has a handy guide which had some insanely short cooking times. You can allegedly cook rice in five minutes. Even microwaves aren't that fast.  

Eight minutes after the top started to gently rock back and forth, I turned off the stove and prepared to unveil our dinner. This brings me to something I didn't realize about pressure cookers until too late: You can't take a peek at your food. Nor can you give it a quick stir to prevent anything from burning at the bottom. You have to stop the cooking entirely, depressurize the pot, and then reseal and repressurize it if you need to cook things a bit longer.

Grievances aside, the cooker worked exactly as advertised. By the time eight minutes had elapsed, these looked like they'd been cooking all day.

All right, so they're limp and nearly gray. And the semi-congealed tomato on top is not helping. But they actually didn't look so bad once we got them onto a plate.

I honestly don't get the point of wrapping these in cabbage leaves. You can't just eat them like you would egg rolls or burritos. No matter how skilled you are with cutlery, you end up with a slimy heap of leaves on the plate and a brown log of meat.

Maybe I'm not very traditional but I would sooner make a casserole of all of this. But with that said, I do like getting meat, rice, and greens in one easy portion that you can lift out of the pot with a pair of tongs. And the meat itself was incredibly tender, like it had been simmering all day.

I do think these needed more seasoning though. I saw a few variations where you add cheese and other things to the meat, which I think would improve it. But even though these were a bit bland, I was very glad the leftovers were waiting for me.

Electric Pizzelles: or, Dabbling in modernity

I hate when someone happens to check the porch before I do. I can't lie about where my splurges came from.

 

I liked the idea of electrical pizzelles even after our first attempt was a bust. For one thing, standing over a hot stove with a waffle iron isn't as fun in hot weather. I also like cooking with friends, and not all of them have suitable stoves. And all my Italian friends and their mothers keep giving me weird looks for doing this on the stovetop.

This particular model (and its sales price) seemed perfect. As shallow as this sounds, I liked that it was not made in Ohio.* And it looked so darn cute. If you're going to end up staring at a waffle iron lid while waiting for things to cook, it may as well look nice on top. And I loved the designs inside this one. They remind me of handmade doilies.

 

This one also looked better suited for pizzelles than the first one we bought. It has very sturdy hinges. (I checked the pictures before I made that final buying click.) Therefore, in theory we can squeeze it tightly shut and get pizzelles that are as thin and crisp as our stovetop ones.

And look at the handles! Our pizzelle iron/sandwich press has thin sheet-metal handles, but this thing has big chunky rods. So I don't think this one will bend or flex like our first one did.

I found the instructions online. In addition to telling us how to use it, they put a handy pronunciation guide right on the front cover:

Naturally, I had to use this the very night it arrived. Who has the patience to let their new toys sit untouched? I soon found that due to a particularly bad combination of short power cords and inconvenient socket placement, this would only work if I perched it over a stove burner. 

After getting the iron steady on its feet and within range of a socket, it was time to choose its first recipe. The first thing you make on any new kitchen implement sets the tone for its future life on your countertop. I made Fante's recipe because it's hard to go wrong with Philadelphia. Besides, we used beef fat instead of shortening in the batter, which was a perfect match for is iron's beefy hinges.

I'm always surprised at how quickly you can mix pizzelles. Maybe it's because any recipe that involves clearing most of the countertops feels like an event. But sooner than I thought, we were putting our first-ever splots of electrified dough onto the iron. It was both momentous and anticlimactic.

The instructions made it look like these would cook almost instantly, which I figured was just marketing hype. But sooner than I thought, the smells coming off of the iron had lightly-toasted overtones. I opened our new electric treasure to find that my pizzelles were clinging to the lid. I managed to get them off of the iron with almost nothing staying behind. But since hot pizzelles are as sturdy as wet toilet paper, they looked like this.

Not bad, but I'm not thrilled either.

Our next pair of pizzelles was... well, they're not the best. But they did come off of the iron intact. And as a bonus, they pulled out the crumbs that the first ones left in the grooves and notches. 

Things got better with each attempt. Before I could realize how fast we were cooking, we had used up all of the dough. Six pizzelles may seem like a paltry amount, but I cut the recipe down to one-sixth the original amount. Then, two of them went directly into the trash because they stuck to the iron and then tore apart. Lastly, because I haven't worked out the right amount of batter per pizzelle, I kept putting too much on the iron. So, more than a few would-have-been pizzelles oozed out and got scraped into the trash.

First-time foibles aside, I liked making these. But I wasn't impressed with the results. They just weren't as nice as the stovetop ones. But as I told myself, this is my first time making pizzelles the modern electric way. And my first stovetop pizzelles were not very good either. So with that in mind, I will not say that electrical pizzelles are inferior. I'm just not very good at making them yet.

Of course, you can only get better at electric pizzelles if you make them again. But when I plugged the iron for more fun, it stayed cold. At first I thought I had accidentally plugged in something else (all those power cords look the same), but I checked and I didn't. So, I tested every problem I could think of, starting with the easiest to fix. 

First, I tried a different power cord. (This iron uses the same detachable power cord as most percolators.) When that didn't help, I undid those two big screws on the lid to see if anything looked visibly wrong in there. Everything under the top cover looked fine, even though I didn't really know what I was looking for. Next, I took off the bottom plate. 

Before looking in there, I had thought it might be the thermostat on this thing because there's nothing else in there to go wrong. Really, aside from the thermostat switch, this is basically an incandescent bulb if you're drawing up a wiring diagram. So as I unscrewed the bottom, I was worrying about whether I would have to figure out the cutoff temperature of a pizzelle thermostat, or whether I had bought an overpriced dust collector. But that part looked fine (or at least, I didn't see any big burn marks). 

I soon found the problem: One of the wires had disconnected itself from the heating element. The real surprise here is that this held up long enough to make a batch of pizzelles in the first place.

You don't need to be an expert to surmise that the bare wire should be connected to something.

My electrical experience is limited to occasionally buying one of those lamp rewiring kits from a hardware store, but I knew this would be a basic job for someone who knew what they were doing. And so, I went to the one shop that still does appliance repairs. I've been there so often that he just asked "What have you broken this time?" 

He didn't even bother taking it to the back of the shop. Instead, he propped it up, told me to hold it still, and resoldered it on the front counter. Naturally, we couldn't wait a single day before cooking with electricity again. 

Now, I've been watching a lot of videos of people using electric pizzelle irons since I don't have anyone to drop by and show me how. And I've noticed that people don't grease the iron before every single splot of dough. And so, I put our next pizzelles onto an absolutely dry iron. Even though this apparently works for everyone online, this happened.

I gave the iron one more chance before basting it with grease, and the pizzelles didn't tear apart. They also didn't let go.

This time, I could gently peel them off intact. For the first time, all those recipes that say "remove with a fork" made sense. A spatula was too blunt an instrument, but a dinner fork is perfect for carefully sliding and jimmying under the hot waffle.

Because practice makes perfect and it's always a good time for cookies, I made another batch very soon thereafter. This time, I decided to grease the iron for the first ones, but not thereafter. Also, I thought that perhaps this wouldn't be such a drippy, messy process if I lightly brushed on the shortening instead of slathering it on. And... well... we were almost successful.

After just a few batches, I'm beginning to understand why so many instruction manuals say to throw out the first pizzelles. The rest of them came out all right, but the first ones seem to love tearing apart. 

At first I hated the ragged-looking edges, which don't happen on stovetop pizzelles because any excess batter-drips burn off instead unless you're quick to scrape the iron with a knife. But while I was making these, a friend of mine happened to text me a picture saying "Mom made pizzelles last night!" And wouldn't you know it, his mother's pizzelles at had ragged edges too.

Even after just a few times, making our pizzelles electrically had proven easier than doing it on a stove. It felt like I was just zapping pizzelles into existence. I didn't even realize I had reached the end of the batter. 

I'm getting the knack of using this thing, but I think I like making them on the stove better. This isn't some weird sort of stovetop purism- I just think it's more fun. For one thing, it feels weird to me to carefully focus on a tiny waffle iron instead of a whole stovetop. And also, I can't get the pizzelles to stop having raggedy edges, and that irks me. It'd be nice if they had packaged it with a matching round cookie cutter so you could quickly trim them while the dough was still hot and soft.  

I'll use this at least a few more times before I decide if I like it, but it may go back into the world to find someone new.

*For those who missed it, I got into making pizzelles after a bad breakup with someone whose family is from Ohio, which has left me salty about the entire state.↪