Making cheesecake the most modern way

 Today, we at A Book of Cookrye shall make something super special- cheesecake! And not just any recipe: this one is special. You see, in high school, my Spanish teacher would give us the last day of every reporting period off from lessons, presumably to get all the report-card paperwork in order. This led to us all bringing food and making a party three times per semester. As I already had a modest business and reputation selling baked goods to people at the end of every reporting period so they could have a bribe in their hands when trying to beg their grades up, it didn't take long before the class started putting in requests for what I'd bring. Before the year was halfway over, they'd actually vote on it. (Looking back, I'm astonished I ever fell into engineering school.) At any rate, at the end of one reporting period the the class voted on cheesecake. And this is how I came to possess a cheesecake recipe from my high school Spanish teacher.

Blueberry Cheesecake 3 (8-oz) bricks cream cheese 2 eggs 2 egg whites 8 oz sour cream 1 tsp vanilla 1 tsp lemon rind 1½ c blueberries    Crust: 1 c graham cracker crumbs 1 tbsp sugar 3 tbsp. melted butter    Topping: ½ c cream 1 tbsp cornstarch ⅓ c sour cream powdered sugar to taste Heat oven to 300°. Mix crust ingredients and press into a 9-inch springform pan. Beat cream cheese until smooth. Mix in the sugar. Add the eggs and egg whites one at a time. Add the sour cream, vanilla, and lemon rind. Fold in the blueberries. (If using frozen, just sprinkle them directly from the freezer onto the batter after it's in the pan). Pour into the pan and bake for 70 minutes. Turn off the oven and leave the cheesecake in it another 30 minutes. To make the topping, whip the cream and cornstarch (the cornstarch will keep it from going flat for a surprisingly long time- as in multiple days in the refrigerator). Add sugar to taste (don't make it very sweet or else it might overpower the cheesecake), then beat in the sour cream. (You can also mix 1 cup Cool Whip with ¼ cup sour cream.) Source: my high school Spanish teacher (really)

What is the impetus for this? Well, Our Father of Cookrye really likes cherry cheesecake. For years, he would get a cheesecake made from a Jell-O kit once every 365 days before he mentioned that he might not be quite so fond of cheesecake from the Jell-O box anymore. You might think this would have caused a shift to making a cheesecake properly (after all, how hard is it to make one once a year?), but this unfortunately put a stop to the flow of annual cheesecakes instead. At any rate, today we shall simply use cherries instead of blueberries.
But we at A Book of Cookrye will do this particular cheesecake a very special way....

Actually, cheesecake seems better suited to blenderizing than regular cake does since it has no flour. This summer, I'm taking a baking class in the name of a culinary arts degree. Rants about having to get up at sunrise when I can never get to sleep before first light aside, we all have heard a lot about gluten so far. Depending on the recipe, we encourage the gluten, relax the gluten, reduce the gluten, minimize the gluten, rest the gluten, work the gluten... I've spent more time per day learning about and working with gluten than I did on my past relationship. Point being, I can now stand on the authority of a partially-finished baking class and say that with no flour at all in the cheesecake, there is literally zero possibility of overworking any gluten and making the cheesecake come out overly tough. You may as well try to knead a smoothie. However, cheesecake is no task for a cheap blender.

For a while, the last piece of cream cheese just sat on top while everything whirled merrily around it.

Also, the motor turned itself off multiple times. I did not know blenders could do that when they felt overworked. For those trying this at home, you need to set your blender to its Ice Crusher speed.

Were this an ordinary blender, I would have transferred the glop into a bowl after the first few times the motor gave up, and pretended the blender never got involved. But this, my friends, is a wedding blender. This blender did not come from a store, but arrived new-in-box from someone's wedding. And if the small appliances from a wedding fail, it is a sure sign that the marrying couple had cheap friends.

We're up to the waterline, folks!

Incidentally, I have literally never filled a blender this high. As I gazed upon this pitcher of pure fat and sugar, I wanted to clap my hand to my heart, grab the nearest convenient made-in-China flag, and sing GOD BLESS AMERICA. All we are missing is an ungodly amount of high-fructose corn syrup.

Happy Fourth of July, everybody!

Adding the cherries (which today we are stirring in rather than putting on top) put us right up to the top of the pitcher.

By the way, those using frozen fruit might do what occurred to me about ten minutes after I got this in the oven: forget about mixing them in the bowl (or pitcher) and just scatter them on top once you've got everything in the pan. No matter how much you try to barely stir just until mixed, the frozen juice crystals will melt and dye the batter. Which, in this case didn't matter much since the cherries dyed it a pretty pink rather than some weird gray-greenish color like one gets with things like frozen blueberries. (Maybe I should have just gone with it and stirred until it was a uniform pink.) At any rate, if you don't want your frozen fruit dyeing the whole creation you're putting it in, consider scattering it on top right before baking instead of doing any mixing at all.

Also, if the top threatens to burn before the middle is cooked, be sure the foil you put on it doesn't touch the surface at all. Elsewise, this will happen.

I intended to put the topping in a little bowl so that everyone could decide for themselves how much of it they wanted, but for obvious reasons did otherwise.

There. You'd never guess the foil ripped off part of it.

And this is how it came out!

As you can see, the blender did a wonderful job of making a cheesecake! However, I suggest you only do this if either you have a really strong blender, or if you don't like your blender and have been waiting for it to burn out so you can replace it. Also, this is what the cheesecake looks like in the parts where the cherry juice didn't get quite so mixed in:

Ya gotta admit, a cream-colored cheesecake with dark red cherries throughout would have been a lot nicer-looking than a pinkish one.
Color aside, it's cheesecake. In a blender. We truly live in a wonderful age.

Chicken Charleroi: or, Burying one's meat in gravy

Today on A Book of Cookrye, we present something I can't pronounce!

Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928

If you're like me, you've never heard of a dish called "chicken Charleroi" before. I say that because searching for the term (with and without quotes) turned up various chicken restaurants in cities called Charleroi. One Charleroi is in Belgium, and the other is in Pennsylvania. You say the Belgian city's name like this, but the Pennsylvania one like this. Also, it seems that Charleroi, Pennsylvania blasts a 10:00 curfew horn every night. Or so claims this guy.

Chicken Charleroi  2 tbsp butter 1 c mushrooms  1½ c cooked, diced chicken 2 c diced baked ham 2 c thin cream sauce 1 can asparagus* Sauté the mushrooms in the butter. Add sauce. Heat, then add meat. Cook just until all is heated through. Serve with hot buttered asparagus tips. *Having heard numerous people say that canned asparagus tastes like grass clippings, I used frozen instead. Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928 (recipe contributor: Mrs. Lew Allen)

For the sake of maximum period-correctness (and also because I didn't feel like having two books on the counter), we're using a recipe from the same book for white sauce (which hopefully is what Mrs. Lew Allen meant by "thin cream sauce").

Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928

It did occur to me later on that I could have spared myself a lot of bother by going to the nearest fried chicken shack and ordering a pint of white gravy. White sauce (white gravy, béchamel sauce, cream sauce, whatever you want to call it) has been one of the hardest things for me to get right in all my 20 weeks of cooking school because I never liked it. It tastes like paste to me. Whenever I try to season it, it still tastes like paste. Then I ask someone else who likes white gravy to try it, and that person will say I got it wrong and bring over two or three spice shakers. After they fix it and assure me that it should taste like it now does, I will try some and it still tastes like paste. I can't tell the difference after someone fixes it.
I'm not whining that I have to make things I don't like in a cooking class, but it is harder than I thought to make something if you don't like it. And I have the sort of rotten luck where I make the recipe exactly according to directions under the assumption that the recipe writer knew how said thing should be made. Then, when I ask someone to try the white gravy/boiled greens/whatever it is I don't like, that person will say "This tastes... wrong. " Whether you're doing math, crafts, science, grammar, or cooking, it always stings to find yourself facing disapproval and pathetically whining "But I did exactly what the instructions said to!"

I have no idea if this is any good.

But we can now put the white gravy aside. This recipe looks an awful lot like a budget version of the chicken pie as made in England (which was published 26 years earlier) if one were to forget about putting it in a pie crust. Also of note: it's called "chicken Charleroi" and included with the poultry recipes, but contains more ham than chicken.

We very soon had a pot of grease with some mushrooms that fell in by accident.

All right, now we get to the part where you dump stuff in. This recipe went a lot faster than I expected. But then again, all you really do is make a pot of gravy, cook a pan of mushrooms, and then just dump a lot of cut-up cold meat into the pot of stuff.
Looking at the below picture, do you think the gravy would have fried at the edges had I not stirred the pot?

At this point, the recipe calls for leftover chicken and that mythical food called "leftover ham". I don't know about you, but in my family gatherings, there is no such thing. People start nonchalantly yet deliberately orbiting the ham well before everyone's been served, each waiting for the earliest possible chance to snatch the remains off the table and rush it into the car.

If Mrs. Lew Allen made this recipe enough to justify writing it down and sending it to the cookbook Committee (with a capital C, always), one may safely assume that she often had leftover chicken and ham to douse in gravy. But one must wonder, why not simply reheat the leftovers? Given the many, many recipes that use up leftovers in pre-1980s cookbooks, no one ever think of heating last night's dinner back up unaltered before the invention of the microwave?
Whatever. Let's sling this on a plate and call it done.

I could have followed directions and used only the asparagus tips, but then I would have a bunch of asparagus stalks languishing in the refrigerator.

You know, it looks surprisingly like a now-dated version of what once was classy. Like, had I put some actual effort into arranging the plate, I could see this dish in the center of a now-faded photo spread of an elegant dinner in an extremely old cookbook.
That said, you shouldn't even have to ask if this was good. It's a big plate of mushrooms, ham, and chicken. Even the gravy ended up being really good after taking on the flavor of everything in it. Heck, you probably could serve canned asparagus with this- that gravy was miraculous enough to completely obliterate any nasty taste after dipping the asparagus in it. I personally would cut the gravy amount in half. But, in the same way a pot of spaghetti makes it possible to get multiple dinner plates out of a tiny ration of ground beef, the gravy made a small allotment of meat more filling than it should have been. This recipe may have originated with someone trying to stretch last night's dinner.
This is now (so far) my favorite recipe to come out of the book.

Second-Stab Saturday: I really wanted blender cake to work

You know that zucchini bread we did in a blender in an attempt to get as much use as we can out of a wedding present? Its sad, gummy failure weighed heavily on my mind. Was it the blender's fault? Or was it the choice to use zucchinis in it? There was only one way to find out, and it involved more cake.

Nothing like a big blender of sugar and fat to start the cooking day!

For reference, we're making this cake recipe since we know it works when made like a normal person would.

Mix-Easy Two-Egg Blender Cake ½ c shortening or butter 1½ c sugar 2 eggs 2½ tsp baking powder ` 1 tsp vanilla 1 tsp salt 1 c milk* 2¼ c cake flour (I used all-purpose flour and removed 2 tablespoons) Heat oven to 375. Grease and flour cake pans (this cake is prone to sticking to the pan, so you want to also dust it with flour to be sure it comes out). When using a blender, stop the motor after each step to prevent overbeating. Put shortening, sugar, and eggs in blender. Thoroughly mix, stopping the motor to scrape the sides of the pitcher as needed. Add the milk, blend thoroughly. Then drop in the vanilla, salt, and baking powder. Blend until all the lumps disappear. Stop the machine if you haven't already, and add the flour all at once. Blend it in on the lowest speed the blender has, turning it off as soon as it is mixed. Pour into pan(s), poke out any large bubbles that rise up, and bake for about 20 minutes for cupcakes, 25 minutes for layers, or 35 minutes for a sheet cake.   *With butter, margarine, or lard, reduce milk by 2 tbsp. adapted from All-Electric Recipes Prepared Specially for your Dormeyer Mixer, 1946

And so, not knowing whether to be hopeful or not, we started the motor! Isn't that a pretty butter rosette?

You may have noticed the sugar on the edges of the pitcher was reluctant to blend in. However, I am quite capable of staring at the blender and waiting until, without warning, everything suddenly gets really runny.

Here I began to lose faith in ever making a blender cake. I've never had cake batter look this watery so early on. Had I irreversibly messed up the cake already?

As anyone familiar with Book of Cookrye philosophy can attest, we do not throw away failures. We expend more and more ingredients trying to salvage them until at last we have something that's almost good enough to eat. Then, having used more groceries than we would have had we thrown out the initial failure and started over, we eat our mediocre creation and try to feel better at having avoided waste. With that in mind, it should be quite obvious why, instead of sampling common sense on a trial basis, we dumped in the milk and proceeded with the recipe. An unexpected bright side of using a blender: when one is being cheap and using powdered milk, there is absolutely no way any powder clumps can survive.

We now had what looked and tasted like a blender of melted ice cream. It even had the exact same thickness. This may get dumped into the ice cream maker instead of mixed with flour and baked. Incidentally, adding all the flour didn't make as much of a visible difference as I thought. You know how cake batter tends to get thicker once you add flour? You could barely tell.
Though I have to say, the flour was mixed in seconds.

I considered making this into a layer cake, but just like last time, making cupcakes gets a lot more enticing when you don't have to keep dipping a little cup in the batter and then having said cup drip everywhere while you pour the batter out.
The cupcakes rose promisingly in the oven, but after seeing the zucchini muffins do the exact same and then deflate to zucchini paste, I remained wary of prematurely declaring triumph.

Just like last time, they looked puffy and perfect when first removed from the oven. But would they stay that way?

Indeed they did! Just as all cakes should, these looked exactly the same right out of the oven as they did after they cooled.

And how did they look in the middle? They looked perfect, that's what.

So yes, you can make cakes in a blender! They'll actually come out really good! As a bonus, absolutely nothing will splash all over the counter when mixing since you've got a lid on the blender. But don't take my word for it, get out a blender and try it yourself!

Italian Dinner: or, I guess this passed for Italian in the Jazz Age

Edit: An anonymous commenter has pointed out that, contrary to my frequent jabs at how barely-Italian this Italian recipe is, this is in fact a rather competent recipe for what (depending on where you are) is either called braciola or involtini.

Today's recipe starts with bleach. You see, the refrigerator has been incubating various molds and things in its back crevices, and we at A Book of Cookrye decided that we might consider giving it its once-per-decade scouring. The growths were worse than anticipated, and rather than just briefly wiping the shelves down, we ended up pushing it out onto the driveway and having at it with a garden hose and a spray bottle of Clorox.

The Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928

Italian Dinner Take a half-inch cut of round steak* and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Cover it with thin slices of garlic. Then lay small pieces of bread which you've dipped in a beaten egg over all. Roll it up, and tie it securely to keep its shape. Use any sturdy, non-synthetic string (you don't want plastic melting into your meat while it boils). Dust it with flour. Heat a little oil in a pot just big enough to hold it without the need to cram. Brown the meat on all sides. Then add 3 6-oz cans of tomato paste and water to about half an inch above the meat. Bring to a very low boil over medium heat, then cover the pot and reduce heat and simmer for 2-3 hours or until tender. Don't worry when it gets tough at first. Any pot roast you cook will go from directly raw to rawhide. It's the long, slow simmering that makes it break it down and become tender. Slice and serve over spaghetti, spooning the sauce and sprinkling Italian cheese on each plate. Leftover meat keeps well in the refrigerator. Store it with a lot of the sauce and it will not dry out. NOTE FROM THE ORIGINAL: It is also nice with a mild red wine, or coffee, and one grapefruit salad.† The Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928 (contributor: Mrs. M. A. Stainer) *You'd probably have to ask a butcher to cut one specially for you. I sliced half-inch slab off a pot roast instead. †You may think a grapefruit salad is a bowl of lettuce, other vegetables, and grapefruit pieces. The book has three recipes for grapefruit salad, all of which start with grapefruit juice, lemon or pineapple juice, and unflavored gelatin, and all end with serving on top of lettuce with mayonnaise (and maybe another dressing, depending on the recipe).

As a general book note, The Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book is really fascinating to anyone who is into old recipes. It shows us what food looked like for ordinary people (as opposed to the extremely wealthy people whose private chefs make history books) in a city that's not New York or Los Angeles during that brief period when the food industry really took off but before the Depression hit. The recipes make extensive use of things like canned vegetables (where people just a generation earlier would have had to preserve their own produce or wait for things to be in season). However, pre-made things had not yet become prevalent. It would be another few decades before you saw things like casseroles topped with unrolled canned croissants.
Back to today's perpetration, while emptying the refrigerator in preparation for its forceful cleaning, we found this buried in the back of the freezer:

Yes indeed, a huge beef slab was purchased on discount and frozen for some undefined future use. And that use will be an allegedly Italian dinner! We decided to hack off the top half inch or so (since the recipe says a half-inch steak) and hope whoever got out the rest of it didn't mind having a flat-top roast.
Rather than completely thaw it, shave off the top, and refreeze the rest, we decided it would be best to defrost it as little as possible so the unused part of it didn't taste like it had been repeatedly refrozen. While the outside of it was just thawed enough to slice through, the center of it had a rock-solid core of ice.

And this is why using dull knives is terrible.

After probably taking the edge completely off the knife, we had a thin slab of beef to transform into an Italian delight, and a much larger frozen beef rock to try to prevent from thawing while the freezer sat outside drying.

So obviously, this wouldn't pass for Italian today. However, just because it's inauthentic doesn't mean it's bad. It's hard to see how a recipe that starts with covering meat with garlic and ends with spaghetti could possibly go badly.

We got a lot of garlic.

I thought I might save time by putting all the garlic cloves in an egg slicer. However, as seen below, the slicer wires got about halfway through the garlic and gave up. This made us wonder why an egg slicer is even in the kitchen. It turned up in a drawer, still in the original packaging that appeared to be several years old (which says all you need to know about how often it's been used). Egg slicers apparently also confounded Terry Pratchett, who briefly detoured from the plot in Wintersmith to point out that everyone has an egg slicer, no one knows why, and that no one has ever knowingly gone out and bought one.

The egg slicer is as useful as expected.

As you behold the thorough garlic coverage on the meat, I should probably tell you that I found out through a mutual friend that my ex is still traumatized by excessive use of garlic four years later.

I'm not sure what the bread is for or why I'm supposed to dip it in egg, but there it is as specified.

We did actually learn how to properly truss meat in cooking school. And as anyone with sense may surmise, this ain't the right way. But at least I didn't wrap it so tight that it had weird bulges everywhere. Also, while I expected to have to poke and shove half the garlic back in there after rolling the meat up, nearly nothing fell out.

Whatever. No one's going to see the string job anyway.

You should know that nearly every step in the recipe from here forward left hard-to-scrape-off deposits of stuff on the counter. Dusting the meat with flour left a paste of flour and raw meat juice all over the cutting board that hardened in minutes. And it turns out errant splats of tomato paste will glue themselves to whatever they land on and leave a red stain that will not come out. You may want to fill the sink with water so you can drop things into it for soaking and have a wet rag on hand to swipe at anything that lands on the counter.

The recipe says to brown the meat in a skillet and then dump the meat and all the grease into a stewpot. I asked myself how much I wanted to wash both a pot and a frying pan and decided not to be so extravagant in the use of dishes. Also, I hope the suet grease wasn't supposed to add a critical flavor, because that's a special-order item these days. I used cooking oil instead.

As it got surprisingly late, the sight of the meat acting as a tomato paste barricade was more amusing than it should have been.

As I started adding water to this, it occurred to me that there would be a huge bucket of diluted tomato paste by the time I had the meat covered. The mere idea of having to find clever ways to recycle all that sauce was so bothersome (even it was nothing more than water and three cans of tomato paste which were not even imported even though the recipe said they should be) that I mashed the meat roll into a smaller pot just to reduce how much water was needed to cover it.

Looks like someone mistook the cooking pot for a chamber pot.

I will say this for doing pot roast (whether alleged to be Italian or not): the cooking time may seem endlessly long, but it's a great opportunity to not only clean up every stray splatter of raw meat juice in the kitchen, but also to take the dogs out, get groceries, do some housecleaning, and everything else you can think of to distract yourself from how long it's taking to stew and how you should have started this earlier instead of waiting until you were already hungry before starting a recipe that does not use the word microwave.

The meat kept floating up and the top part drying out, so a spoon held down with the pot lid was used to force it to stay underwater.

The Italian dinner may have unfortunately resembled a squishy brown log floating in the water, but surely it would look better when removed. Or so I hoped.

I had been hoping for some awesomely weird-looking jelly roll/meat hybrid slices to look unnervingly creepy, but the slice fell apart as I cut it off.

This is Italian, everybody!

Oh wait. We forgot to sprinkle the plate with "imported Italian cheese." As it happens, some parmesan (imported from Wisconsin) lurked forgotten in the back of the refrigerator. (You may think that someone in the 1920s would have been restricted to those shelf-stable cheese granules, but apparently those didn't exist yet.) And so, by accident, we actually made this entire recipe more or less as originally written, with almost no substitutions at all!

Never before have I needed a knife and fork for a bowl of mostly spaghetti.

And... this is good. Really good. The long boiling somehow removed the canned flavor from the tomato paste, and the bread somehow absorbed the garlic and turned into little concentrated nuggets of garlic-flavored bread stuffing.
This tastes about as Italian as you would expect a meat roll stewed in tomato paste to. Honestly, for a dinner, I'd ditch the spaghetti and the cheese, instead serving it with the usual things one eats with pot roast. With that said, I'd totally make it again. However, there was a lot of sauce with this. Anyone making this should be at least open to the idea of a pot of tomato-heavy soup because you will run out of meat long before you've used up all the sauce. Or, you might add a lot of vegetables toward the end of the cooking time and serve it up as a stew.

There really is a lot of sauce.

And so, we at A Book of Cookrye thank Mrs. M. A. Stainer and the Woman's Club of Fort Worth for a surprisingly delicious (if only barely Italian) pot roast! I had high expectations for a recipe that started with covering meat with garlic and ends with spaghetti, and this was still better than expected.

Attempting zucchini bread in a blender

The joke about people in certain regions locking their cars in the summer to prevent people leaving zucchinis in the seat may be as old as the one about how there's only one fruitcake in the world which gets regifted every year, but for whatever reason, 3 of the little buggers materialized in the refrigerator! No one grows zucchinis near here, and their season has not yet arrived. And so, the blender was brought in to pulverize them and make... zucchini bread!

That's the zucchini in the blender, along with the egg to make it actually blend instead of sitting still while the blades spin under it. It first occurred to me that several people into juicing probably make a blenderful of zucchini and egg on purpose routinely. After that, I thought "Is there any reason one can't just do all the mixing in a blender?" And thus the voyage of discovery began! Reading down the ingredient list, the next thing to get pulverized was the butter.

For the longest time, the butter refused to blenderize in. Instead, it made ever-more-minute butter worms that floated in the green. See all those lumps making everything look curdled? Those are the butter.

But if one runs the blender for long enough, the butter eventually stops looking like tiny little worms and actually mixes in. And now, let us bring on the sugar!

I have to admit, things were going great so far. The batter looked like a batter (instead of looking like something was going very wrong). And it actually tasted really good. Feeling happier than we should about zucchini bread, we dumped in the flour and set the blender to its slowest speed.

The flour formed isolated clumps that needed to be scraped away, but we still managed to have it all mixed in 45 seconds. Truly the blender is magical.

Further proof that the blender is magic: Check out how easy it is to pour cupcakes! If this is what I've been missing out on in the dark days before I owned a blender, would a food processor change my life?

I can't tell you how excited I was that I had discovered this new, mess-free way to use the magic of small kitchen appliances to make baking a snap. Heck, the blender even cleaned itself.

After an unusually long baking time, the zucchini muffins showed every sign of being done. The tops of them rose like perfect little green domes over the pan. When poked in the center, the probing implement came out nice and clean. They sprang back when pressed. Nevertheless, they looked like this within 10 minutes of leaving the oven.

All right, let's cut these open and see how bad an idea this was.

As you can see, the outside is almost bread-like,  but the inside is this core of paste. Ordinarily, this is a sign that I took them out of the oven too early. And I agree, it really looks like it. But I promise, they were completely baked through.
I think the big difference is that the zucchini was thoroughly blenderized to a paste. Last time, it was finely chopped, but still recognizable:

That batch of zucchini bread was really lovely. But this was the same sort of disappointing paste one gets with lousy carrot cake recipes or when trying internet-endorsed vegan egg substitutes. And for the record, you should not be able to make a cake do this.