French Lace Cookies: Lovely to look at, lousy to eat

I didn't expect Betty Crocker of all "people" to print a cookie recipe that is worse after baking.

French Lace Cookies ½ cup light corn syrup ½ cup shortening ⅔ cup packed brown sugar 1 cup all-purpose flour 1 cup finely chopped pecans Heat oven to 375°. Have cookie sheets lined with parchment paper. Heat corn syrup, shortening, and brown sugar to boiling in 2-quart saucepan over medium heat, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and gradually stir in flour. Then mix in the pecans. Drop batter by teaspoonfuls about 3 to 4 inches apart onto cookie sheet. To keep the batter from hardening between batches, perch the saucepan over a smaller pot of simmering water. Or, place a sheet of parchment paper onto the counter and drop teaspoon-size portions of dough onto it until you've used up all the batter-- don't worry about giving them room to spread. Let them sit for a minute or two to firm up. Then lift them off the paper and place them onto (paper-lined!) pans to bake, one batch at a time. Bake about 5 minutes or until set (they will still be bubbly on the pan-- you may not think they look done). Cool 3 to 5 minutes on the pan. Then slide the pan out from under the cookies, letting the whole paper sheet land on the countertop. Then allow to cool completely. Drizzle with melted chocolate when cooled, if desired. If you wish, you can roll these cookies up instead of serving them flat. Roll them around a wooden spoon handle (or other object of choice) as soon as they're barely cooled enough to handle (they need to be very hot). If they crack, put them back in the oven to re-soften and try again. Betty Crocker's 40th Anniversary Edition Cookbook, 1991

Betty Crocker's 40^th Anniversary Edition Cookbook, 1991

Today we're making another recipe I always saw when flipping through Mom's Betty Crocker book, always thought would be really nice, but never actually tried. Don't they look almost as pretty as the pizzelles?

As it happens, I've made the pizzelles too.

Like all good American things, these cookies start with shortening and corn syrup. I didn't know whether to turn on the burner or recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

It's never a good sign when your cookie dough (or whatever this is) has a slick of melted fat on top. But I figured that since following the directions got us in this mess, following the rest of the directions should get us out of it.

The recipe tells us to "gradually" add the flour and the pecans to the boiling-hot mixture. Usually, flour siezes into gummy clumps when you add it to something this hot, but I gave it a try anyway. It worked, which shouldn't surprise me. Say what you will about Betty Crocker's taste (especially from the fifties to the seventies), her recipes always work. 

As we noted a few recipes ago, I've come to appreciate nonstick pots after years of resenting that you're not supposed to use an electric mixer in one. I think this is another recipe that really makes you appreciate nonstick pots, even if you have to fret about scratching them.

When I added the pecans and tried a test spoonful, our dough (or whatever it is) tasted like half-decent pralines. And it looked like pralines when I dropped spoonfuls onto the pan.

The cookies spread a lot, which I understand is how they're supposed to turn out.

You can tell they printed this recipe before every supermarket had parchment paper. In the early nineties, you had to grease a pan and carefully get a spatula under the still-molten cookies. These days, you can just slide the pan out from under the paper and let it land on the counter.

After they had cooled, I could see why they call them French lace cookies. They had a sort of wispy, lacy look to them.

I'm glad I tried one before drizzling any chocolate on them. They are great for looking at, but not good to eat. I thought they'd be super-delicate and crisp, but they were more like forgotten hard candy that melted and then re-hardened in a hot car. They tasted really bland and got stuck in your teeth. The unbaked cookies were decent (ish) brown-sugar fudge balls (or something like that), but I don't recommend putting them in an oven.

I'll give the Betty Crocker people credit: The recipe does exactly what it promises. It just isn't very good. And it made me want to make pralines because the raw dough was so close to being good ones.

Raisin Swirl Steamed Pudding: or, Who put a cake in the humidifier?

Winter is still here after three days! That doesn't always happen in post-climate change Texas. It's so cold that the sleet and snow are still on the ground 72 hours after landing. Three AM looks like twilight because of all the light bouncing off the white ground. Cars are carefully creeping up streets that haven't seen salt, sand, or plows. 

In our house, some of the people are watching the ERCOT dashboard and national power outage maps the way many men stare at weather maps as soon as thunder claps outside. I've been getting thrice-hourly reports shouted across the room, telling me which counties in what states have gone dark. My friends and relations have all been calling to "check up on" each other. I think it's partially to make sure everyone's doing all right, and mostly to have some human contact while the roads are too iced to actually see anyone. I call my sister, established that she was safe and warm in her house, and didn't hang up for another two hours.

A lot of my friends up north have said that we're soft for being rendered semi-helpless at 12° (Or -11° if you prefer celsius). But the cold here hits different. First, the state of Texas doesn't believe in slowplows, or salting, or road sand. Instead, the roads are nearly unnavigable until the ice melts from the heat of the cars going over it. Second, houses here aren't really built for freezing weather. A lot of them aren't even insulated. This means the cold in Texas doesn't stay outdoors. It follows you inside, cuts its way into your bedroom, and gets under the blankets with you. 

With that in mind, I made this as an excuse to steam the kitchen for two hours.

Raisin Swirl Steamed Pudding ½ cup shortening 1¼ cup sugar 1 tsp nutmeg 1 teaspoon each vanilla and almond extract (the original recipe uses rum extract instead) 2 eggs 2 cups flour 1½ tsp baking powder ¼ tsp baking soda 1½ tsp salt ⅔ cup milk 1½ cups (9.5 oz) raisins ½ cup chopped pecans ½ cup (2.6 oz) shredded coconut 1 ounce unsweetened chocolate, melted (or 3 tablespoons cocoa powder) Grease a 2-quart pudding mold (or any pan or heat-safe bowl that you can completely fit inside a large pot), then cut a circle of paper to fit the bottom of it and press it into place. In a large bowl, beat shortening, sugar, and nutmeg until fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating each in thoroughly. Then beat until light. Mix flour, baking powder, soda, and salt. Add these alternately with milk to the sugar mixture. Stir in raisins, walnuts and coconut. Divide batter into two parts. To one-half of batter, add melted chocolate. Spoon light and dark batters alternately into well-greased 2-quart mold. Swirl batters lightly with a knife. Cover tightly with foil. If desired, tie a lifting-handle out of string around the mold. Place on a rack in large pot. If you don't have a rack, just improvise a way to lift the mold off the bottom of the pot. A lot of people put the mold on an upside-down ceramic plate in there. Or you can put some wads of aluminum foil for the pudding to sit on. Pour in boiling water to come halfway up mold, then put a lid on the pot. Simmer for two and a half hours. Lift out of the pot, remove the foil cover, and let rest for two minutes before turning out onto a plate. If desired, sprinkle with powdered sugar, sprinkled through a sieve to keep it from landing in clumps. Serve with your favorite sauce. Chocolate syrup would be good, and so is the sauce from when we made Golden Treasure Pudding. Store any leftovers in a tightly sealed container- they go stale quickly. Note: If halving the recipe, steam it for the full time instead of taking it out of the pot early. Favorite Recipes of America: Desserts, 1968

I'm actually understating why I made today's recipe. I've been staring at it for a long time and wondering how it would come out if I ever made it. 

It comes from that all-dessert cookbook my grandmother found for me in a thrift store. The writers had me sold at the first sentence above the recipe: "An unusual dish that calls for an extra bit of care and proves well worth it—that's Raisin Swirl Steamed Pudding." Unusual, you say? "Well worth" the "extra bit of care," you say?

Favorite Recipe of America: Desserts, 1968

I miss the days when food photographers made elaborate still lifes instead of using shallow focus and sparse white backgrounds. Also, you just know they individually arranged the raisins poking out of that pie in the background.

Favorite Recipes of America: Desserts, 1968

Getting to the recipe, I initially thought I would let our pressure cooker shorten our steaming to a few minutes. Just to confirm it would work before ruining dessert, I looked up pressure cooker puddings to see what other people have to say about them. 

I found a lot of AI slop that said I should do it. Or at least, I think it was AI. I'm not as good as I wish at spotting it. But I generally figure it's AI if it seems like the work of an unusually soulless ad copywriter.

Eventually, I found a real person asking our very question on Nigella Lawson's website. Nigella's staff (who, crucially, are real people) basically said it was technically possible but "we are unable to guarantee the results."

The baking powder was their main misgiving. They thought it might not raise the pudding under high pressure because all those little gas bubbles would get squeezed and compressed. At first I thought that it wouldn't matter. Then I remembered that high altitude causes recipe havoc, and it is a tiny twitch on the barometer compared to a pressure cooker. I therefore decided to follow the directions instead of ignoring them. 

The pudding mold was a bit trickier because I don't have one. After dropping various heatproof bowls into pots to see what would fit in what, I settled on the insert from our rice cooker.  

Having resolved the cooking method, we had a LOT of things to stir into this pudding. I naturally traded the walnuts for pecans because walnuts are horribly bitter. (As I've said in earlier posts, I've heard walnuts are good right off the tree, but no one near me has one in their yard.)

As we got to the main bowl, I couldn't figure out why we were steaming this instead of baking it. It looked like a cake batter. (Because I sometimes love a good kitchen project, I also contemplated whether I should put this in a pudding bag if it went right the first time.) 

This recipe doesn't make a lot of cake batter compared to all the incoming fruit and nuts. Is this supposed to be some sort of heavily-loaded fruitcake?

The fruit and nuts volumized our batter a lot.

I used cocoa powder instead of melted chocolate because we had it on hand. It noticeably stiffened the batter. You can see the white batter slumping in the pan while the chocolate batter stays very upright.

Here it is, all swirled up and ready to steam!

The original recipe only says to "cover tightly" before steaming without further detail, but I happen to have watched enough British cooking videos about Christmas puddings. Therefore, I know that you simply must make a pleat on top so your pudding has room to expand. I don't think it mattered given how little pudding we had in the basin. But if our raisin swirl came out flat, I could blame the recipe and not my unpleated ignorance.

Our cooker made an interesting racket as the pudding boiled. (We did end up using the pressure cooker because it's the biggest pot in the house, but I didn't pressurize it.)

And here it is, a beautifully risen cake! Given how perfectly flat it is on top, maybe we should steam all of our cakes. It would make stacking layers a lot easier.

Our pudding failed upon unmolding. Half of it fell out nicely, and the other half stuck to the pan. But that isn't ruination, it's just your first guideline when cutting slices.

I love that you can see two-toned batter splotches like the ones in the cookbook photo. It means that our pudding came out just like it did for the food stylists (or it at least came close). It would have been cute if it hadn't ripped in half. 

 

Our pudding tasted like a marble cake, and somehow seemed I added a very generous splash of coffee to it. It also had an interesting texture: light, fluffy, and somehow dense at the same time. I thought of the Bangor brownies which were halfway between cake and fudge. I didn't like the nuts in this recipe, though. They got just softened enough to be... off.

The recipe says to serve with "your favorite sauce." I tried a small sample and didn't think it needed anything on top, but I poured a little bit of the sauce from our Golden Treasure Pudding on it anyway. The golden sauce made the pudding more photogenic, but it neither helped nor hindered the taste.

As promised in the recipe headnote, this was absolutely wonderful on a cold night. But the pudding got stale very quickly on an open plate. So you'll want to either put the leftovers in a sealed container as soon as they're cold, or just dunk the stale pudding in tea or hot cocoa.

The Whiskey Thing

Whiskey is the only legible word in this recipe. 

Found in a copy of The Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928

 

The Whiskey thing 1 tbsp (or one ¼-oz envelope) unflavored gelatin ½ cup cold water 1 dozen ladyfingers (or stale cake cut into narrow slices) 6 eggs, separated* 1 cup sugar, divided in half 2 or 3 tsp vanilla A truly unholy amount of whiskey In a very small bowl, sprinkle the gelatin in cold water. Put this in a larger bowl of hot water and let sit for three to five minutes. (Or, skip the bowl-in-a-bowl business. Soak the gelatin and then microwave it, three or four seconds at a time, until it melts.) While the gelatin is soaking, split ladyfingers open and thoroughly soak them in whiskey. Grease a loaf pan and put them around the edges. (If you don't want to try to unmold this, it'd look very nice in a clear glass pan.) Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form. Then gradually add ½ cup of sugar, beating constantly. Add the vanilla, and continue beating while you slowly pour in the gelatin, or add it one spoonful at a time. Put this into the pan, cover tightly, and refrigerate for at least 8 hours. Just before serving, make the sauce: Beat the egg yolks and remaining ½ cup sugar in the top of a double boiler. Add whiskey to taste and place over boiling water. Cook until thickened, stirring constantly. (We recommend stirring it with a rubber spatula.) *Refrigerate the yolks immediately after separating the eggs, since you won't be using them for a while. If raw eggs are a concern for you, use pasteurized-in-the-shell eggs. Found in a copy of The Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928

This recipe was handwritten in my college library's copy of The Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book. It was printed in 1928, but this particular book had recipe clippings from right after Repeal* tucked between the pages.

Setting aside Prohibition and history, I think I may have inadvertently landed on an example of an iconic type of southern dessert: the severely alcoholic cake. Apparently certain genteel ladies' associations prefer to get drunk off of dessert (perhaps because doing shots is unladylike?). It seems like every novel set in the American south has at least one old lady whose boozy cake sent someone to detox. Even if alcoholic food not a plot point, southern novelists will often add some "local color" by having a character offhandedly mention that somebody was banned from bringing her signature sherry torte to the Christmas benefit after the year someone else's nephew got into an argument with the chickens and then went headfirst onto a fencepost.

Speculation aside, I've been semi-sporadically staring at this recipe ever since I first scanned it from my college library's copy of The Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book. It always looked like an intimidating assembly project, so I never dared make it.

But recently, our refrigerator clogged itself with frost. The fix was easy: unplug it for a day and let its internals melt. Of course, that meant we had to put all the food somewhere. Fortunately, we have a chest freezer that has slowly become a resting place for leftovers I feel bad about throwing out but refuse to eat after everyone else loses interest. I also borrowed ice chests from Mom and other people.

As a brief warning to anyone with the same problem, your refrigerator will take longer than you think to re-chill itself. I planned to plug it in before bed and reload it when I awoke, but it took a lot longer. You'll need to re-ice your coolers more times than you think before you can transfer everything back.

As I returned our eggs and green onions to their rightful place, I decided that this was the perfect time to have a refrigerator party! And what better way to celebrate the return of the refrigerator than by making something that would be a health hazard without it?

The recipe starts off with ladyfingers, which are really hard to get nowadays. A lot of older dessert recipes begin with "Soak one package of ladyfingers in syrup/juice/wine/etc," but apparently all of those things went out of style while none of us were looking. I used to be able to get ladyfingers on the cookie aisle, these days it's a toss-up whether I can get them from an actual bakery. I thought about making them myself from scratch, but we conveniently had a lot of Mrs. Mary Martensen's sour cream cake going stale on the counter.

I thought this particular cake was perfect for soaking in liquor. It had a nice flavor on its own. And it had that firm, slightly springy texture that made it seem perfect for getting sopping wet. Things got a bit crumbly while I sliced, but the cake would soon be too drunk to care.

This brings us to the whiskey. I got this for being in my brother's wedding party, and then I skipped his wedding twice. (He got married in 2020, and had another ceremony the next year when it was safe-ish to actually invite people). Even for his second wedding when we all had the vaccine, I was leery of going through an airport. So instead of wrangling all the relatives into a photogenic row, he sent me a bottle of alcohol in return for staying at the house.

Any readers who like whiskey, let me know: Did my brother have good taste?

I haven't opened this bottle until today. I'm not saving it for a special occasion; I just lost interest in alcohol a long time ago. For all I know, I'll use the rest of the whiskey as lighter fluid the next time someone in the house is daft enough to try grilling over a wood fire instead of propane.

Anyway, we got the cake absolutely soaked. Thinking of Fanny Cradock making a trifle, I pressed lightly on the cake to feel for dry spots, and poured more whiskey wherever it was needed.

Meanwhile, our gelatin was soaking in water. Our recipe writer tells us to then put the bowl into a larger bowl of hot water to melt it. But we at A Book of Cookrye live in the modern era, when we can microwave our gelatin instead. It was ready in four seconds.

It looks like plain water, but it is so much more.

Logically, we needed to line our mold with cake. I first coated it with cooking spray in the hopes that I could unmold our masterpiece intact, but I wasn't too worried about failure. Even if this creation ripped apart on its way out of the bowl, I still could serve it "attractively heaped in bowls" (to quote a lot of recipes from the time).

Purely out of curiosity, I tried a piece of cake as I was arranging it into the bowl and found that I might have overdone it with the whiskey. I am no stranger to boozy desserts, but this is the first time a cake has ever burned.

Note that we even found a place for the crumbs because we do not waste cake.

Setting aside our intoxicating cake, it was time to make the meringue. 

I've never mixed gelatin and egg whites like this, but dumping it all in at once seemed like it would end badly. So, I slowly dribbled the gelatin in while the mixer ran. Naturally, the egg whites and lukewarm hooves smelled absolutely dreadful. But we got all of the gelatin in there without deflating everything.

I hadn't expected this to work so well. Whipped whites always seem so fragile, like they'll lose their air if you look at them in the wrong tone of voice. I would have never thought you can pour gelatin into them without ruining all those delicate little bubbles. But our gelatinized egg whites were just as light and airy as they did before we added that magical yet malodorous powder. They even looked just a bit creamier.

 

At this point, I realized that the recipe didn't mention adding anything besides sugar and gelatin to our meringue. I didn't want to fill our whiskey-soaked cake with a flavorless fluff. I veered a bit off-recipe and added some vanilla. We already had plenty of whiskey in the cake, so the white part was free to taste like something else. Besides, I'm pretty sure vanilla extract has about the same ABV anyway.

Sooner than I thought, we had reached the moment where it all comes together. I had always thought this recipe would be a long, difficult process, but it was over in 45 seconds. I tried to get the white stuff into all the gaps between the cake slices. I don't think I did very well because the cake kept falling out of place on contact with the meringue.

Based on this recipe, I think I can confidently say that whoever wrote it down had an electric mixer or at least a hand-cranked eggbeater in her house. If you have one of those, this is a cinch. Like, this was almost as fast as Fanny Cradock making souffles.

The next day, our dessert was beautifully chilled as only a working refrigerator could do. I was kind of surprised when it slid right out, but slide right out it did.

I have never really ventured into the exciting world of unmolding gelatins, but you can see what this could have been in skilled hands. The soggy cake and gelatinous meringue almost make an attractive striped pattern. But I must set aside my lack of experience and give credit to our handwritten friend. This recipe does exactly what it should.

Since we were ready to serve, it was time to make the sauce. Speaking of which, I didn't understand this whole "sauce to be made just before serving" business. It makes this dessert difficult to serve at all. If you're bringing this to someone else's house, you can hardly go into their kitchen and get their pots dirty. And if you're having a party at your own place, you still have to duck away from the guests and say "Excuse me, I have to make the sauce." Even if you're only serving this for family and not for guests, who wants to get up from the table and stand over a stove between dinner and dessert?

Then I realized: this person probably had household help to deal with all sauce matters. As a reminder, we found this in the Fort Worth Woman's Club cookbook. This is the photo of the clubhouse on the frontispiece.

So if our handwritten friend didn't have a cook in the house at all times, I'm sure she could afford to hire someone for when she was entertaining. 

We are told put our yolks in a pot, stir in a half-cup of sugar, and to then add an unspecified amount of whiskey. I had no idea what I was doing, but I figured it would be about right to add enough whiskey for this to turn into a custard instead of a paste. I may have turned the stove up a little high, because we did get one or two bits of scrambled egg in there. But if you poured this through a tea strainer, no one would ever know.

Today's recipe is a great reminder that people in "the good old days" could drink us under the table. Like, I think drinking straight shots would burn less. After all, a shot of whiskey is over in less than a second. This might be an amusing novelty dessert on someone's 21st birthday (or whatever the drinking age is where you live). It is also perfect for a distillery-sponsored cookoff. But I really did not like it.

 I tried carefully carving out some of the fluffy stuff from the center to see if it was any good when separated from the drunken cake. But over the course of the night, the alcohol fumes from the cake slices had thoroughly penetrated it. I was tempted to see if the dessert would ignite if I set a match to it, but I don't have any pans I'm willing to risk ruining with a flaming gelatin. 

But I have to credit whoever wrote this down: everything in the recipe comes together as intended. You could slice this just like a cake. And it had just enough gelatin to keep the egg whites fluffy without making them too rubbery or bouncy. Like the Radio Pudding, the recipe succeeds even if it's not very good.

Going back to what we said about Repeal, I think that our handwritten friend was a little too excited about buying liquor again. And really, I wouldn't be surprised if the whole country had a collective post-Repeal binge-drinking phase. Just look at these people from the night alcohol was relegalized. Like, they were prepared for this. One of them has a novelty glass boot the size of his forearm. And the guy drinking out of a barrel doesn't care that the man holding it is about to burn a cigarette hole in his jacket.

Wikimedia

As for the recipe: I'm willing to try it again, but I'd borrow an idea from Fanny Cradock and use 50-50 orange juice and sauterne wine. I don't have the alcohol tolerance of a Southern lady. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*For those outside of the US, capital-R "Repeal" refers to the end of the United States' prohibition on alcohol in 1933. The US banned alcohol by constitutional amendment in 1920 and repealed the ban by popular demand thirteen years later. Alcohol is the only reason a constitutional amendment has been repealed in all of US history. ↪

Hot Mustard Fruit: Better than I thought!

As the sun rises on Thanksgiving Day, squirting mustard onto fruit seems like a perfect metaphor for the upcoming four years.

Hot Mustard Fruit ¼ cup butter, melted ½ cup firmly packed brown sugar 2 tbsp prepared mustard* 1 16-oz can sliced peaches, drained 1 13½-oz can pineapple chunks, drained 2 large bananas, cut into chunks Heat oven to 325°. Grease a 6-cup casserole. (A loaf pan will do in a pinch.) Mix together butter, sugar, and mustard in a large bowl. Take out ¼ cup of this and set aside. Stir the fruit into remaining mixture. Place into the casserole. Spoon reserved topping over it. Bake 40 minutes. Serve warm. *ie, the stuff you squirt onto sandwiches (as opposed to dry mustard powder). Mrs. J. R. Burrier; Nicholasville, Kentucky; Favorite Recipes of America: Desserts; 1968

Favorite Recipes of America: Desserts, 1967

This recipe has been staring at me for a long time. Even when I haven't opened the cookbook in ages, I know that the hot mustard fruit lurks within. But I was always afraid to go for it. I have asked several friends to go on the hot mustard journey with me (who wants to do such things alone?), but everyone always muttered awkward excuses or mysteriously forgot. 

Eventually, I shared the hot mustard fruit with a recipe swap group I'm in and asked if anyone wanted to have a virtual hot mustard fruit party. By "virtual party" I meant that whoever had the courage could make it and share a few pictures and (probably well-censored) opinions. Many people said it sounded fun. But for whatever reason, no one has shared their hot mustard as of this writing.

Getting to the recipe, Mrs. J. R. Burrier wastes no time getting to our featured ingredient. And she really puts the "mustard" into "hot mustard fruit." Look at the size of that mustard blob! It looks like I let an unsupervised five-year-old use a squeeze bottle.

Our resulting mixture tasted like the beginnings of some really good barbecue sauce. I wasn't prepared to think this was any good.

Those lumps are there because I decided to throw in all of the rock-hard clumps in the brown sugar and hope they dissolved.

I have to give Mrs. Burrier credit. This recipe comes together really fast. After melting our butter and squirting mustard on it, we merely need to open some cans and cut up a banana. I was ready to stir and bake until I saw that I had purchased something more revolting than mustard-loaded fruit.

It turns out that canned peaches and canned oranges have insidiously similar labels. It's hard to tell one picture of orange semicircular wedges from another when you're already telling yourself this could be your last chance to experience consequence-free folly before grocery prices have another pandemic. 

You may think I would simply use the oranges instead of peaches. But I truly detest canned oranges. At best, they are those weird sticky things that I pluck out of the fried rice when I make the mistake of paying for Panda Express. 

I didn't even want to repurpose them. Yes, I could come up with some lovely recipes that would make the canned orange segments semi-edible. But anything I made to salvage the canned oranges would be better if I omitted them. And so, I decided to reluctantly accept that my stupidity cost me $1.49 and thank the oranges for teaching me to carefully scrutinize canned fruit. (I apologize to anyone who likes canned oranges. Before you get too offended that I hate them, keep in mind that I also think cranberry sauce is better with chopped celery in it.)

And so, I went back to the grocery store for canned peaches. As much as I thought this recipe was nuts, I wanted to give it a fair chance by using the ingredients Mrs. Burrier wrote down. In the canned food aisle, I carefully read the labels and made sure I got the correct fruit in the correct-sized can. Instead of saying "How are you," the clerk asked "Are you sure this is all you forgot?" I said yes, I was quite sure. Yes, I had already planned and bought for all of this year's Thanksgiving baking. Yes, I was certain I wasn't forgetting anything else. Yes, I had double-checked. Based on the cashier's concerned face and determined questioning, a lot of people had boomeranged in and out of the store in a horrible panic.

Back at the house, I had already dumped the pineapple into the mustard mixture before realizing I had purchased canned oranges. Before going out for peaches, I put the mustard masterpiece-in-progress in the refrigerator. I know that both sugar and mustard are famously antimicrobial, but a little bit of food refrigeration never hurt anyone. When I returned, the pineapple chunks had taken on an unnerving resemblance to cut-up chicken soaking in a particularly pungent marinade.

If we pretend I didn't need to go to the grocery store twice, this recipe is really quick to make. Only a few minutes after melting the butter, we were finished mixing it together.

I think the banana is the only healthy thing in the recipe.

Now, Mrs. Burrier says to use a 1-quart casserole pan. Since I cut the recipe in half, I got out the smallest baking dish in the cabinets. Aside from today's recipe, I only use it when slipping a single-serving dinner into the oven next to something larger. 

Purely out of curiosity, I flipped the dish over to see if they stamped its size underneath. They did, and this is a one-quart casserole just like Mrs. Burrier wanted. I only say this because I cut the recipe in half. Had I used Mrs. Burrier's original amounts, we would be putting twice this much mustard fruit into a casserole of exactly this size. I think that would boil over, don't you?

And so, we only needed to spoon our reserved topping over the rest of the fruit and bake. Until tonight, drizzling caramel has always made things look even better than before. But today, it made the fruit look like it followed me under the car the last time I changed the oil.

40 minutes later, our hot mustard fruit was ready to serve. If you ignored your nose, it actually looked pretty good. I would have put some sort of crumble topping on it, but Mrs. Burrier didn't think it was necessary. Maybe she didn't want to distract anyone from the delicious flavor of mustard.

For those who can't get enough mustard in their fruit, there were a lot of pan juices ready to spoon over your portion. I think a bowl would be better than a plate for serving this. But I didn't realize that until it was too late.

This was a lot better than I expected. I think the fruit definitely benefited from the protracted baking time. It gave the vinegar in the mustard plenty of time to boil away. It's like dipping fruit in honey-mustard sauce, only a lot richer. With great surprise, I'm going to say this is actually pretty good. The mustard adds a bit of complexity that makes this just a bit better than an assemblage of canned fruit would normally be. Heck, if you have the ingredients for this, why not slap it together really quick and jam it next to the Thanksgiving turkey? 

In closing, it's definitely weird, but it's not bad.