Chinook Sausages: or, Economical deep fried breakfast

Do the ingrates in your home demand steak three times a day with no regard for the budget? You don't need to put rat poison in the hashed mutton, Mrs. Wilson of the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger is here to help!

Chinook Sausage 2 oz dried beef, or ¾-1 cup leftover meat* 2 white or yellow onions ½ tsp powdered thyme ½ tsp black pepper 1 cup cornmeal 2 cups water Flour for coating Run the meat and onions through the food processor. Place in a saucepan. Add thyme, pepper, cornmeal, and water. Cook over medium heat until it is very thick. (It should just about hold up a spoon.) Allow to cool completely. Scoop out portions of this mixture and roll it into sausages. Roll these in flour. Fry until golden-brown. Serve hot with white or brown gravy. You can make these the night before, refrigerate them, and fry them the next day. *If using leftover meat, add 1 teaspoon salt. Note: These are very good if you stir in about ½ cup shredded provolone or mozzarella. Add the cheese as soon as you take the pot off the stove, stir until melted, and then allow to cool before shaping. Source: "Ask Mrs. Wilson," Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, 29 September 1919, page 12

Evening Public Ledger, 29 September 1919, page 12

 Today, Philadelphia's cooking columnist extraordinaire comes to the aid of a constant reader who has to take in lodgers who apparently don't appreciate the food she puts on the table. Exasperation fills "A Constant Reader's" one-paragraph plea, culminating with "These men seem to think I should have a steak three times a day, which is entirely out of the question."

Mrs. Wilson's tips are still useful today: buy foods in bulk, make good use of leftovers, cook ahead of time whenever possible, etc. She suggests serving a lot of potatoes (fair advice in any era), making pancake and cornbread batter ahead of time and refrigerating it, and tells how to easily make eight omelets at a time in the oven (while stretching your eggs with breadcrumbs).

Mrs. Wilson's domestic-science credentials really come through when she brings men's bowels into a cookery column. She directly addresses this three-steaks-a-day nonsense: "To provide eight healthy men with meat three times a day would really be doing them an injury. Eating meat constantly like this would in time lead to serious intestinal disorders."

As we noted in an earlier post, digestion and digestibility were big business in the early days of home economics. Even in this modern time when we've realized that fresh greens are good for you without boiling them to a paste, I have to agree with Mrs. Wilson's take on excess meat. I'm not necessarily worried about destroying men's digestive tracts with three steaks a day, but I don't think the bathroom fan could keep up with the aftermath.

But enough about early 20^th century domestic science (and its peculiar obsession with one's internal business). Let's get to the sausages. At the bottom of the recipe, Mrs. Wilson notes that "corned beef or other meat may be used to replace the dried beef." And so, with Mrs. Wilson's blessing, last night's dinner and a lot of onions got shoved through the meat grinder.

You may wonder where we found the means to pulverize so much meat. For various complicated economic reasons, pork has been astonishingly cheap of late. Or at least, the big roasts have been cheap. As I have speculated in earlier posts, I think a lot of people believe a 7-pound anvil of meat is a daunting project whereas the pre-sliced pork chops and ever-present boneless skinless chicken breasts seem friendlier. Regardless of whether I'm right about this or not, big pork roasts are cheap(ish) these days.

And so, following grocery the budget where it leads us, I decided we would have a "Sunday roast" every week like the people in those exported British TV shows. While there has been no objection to a weekly slab of meat, the leftovers tend to languish until I discreetly dispatch them to the municipal hereafter. Since no one was eating the extra meat anyway, it was a blank canvas of cut-price protein for me to use however I want.

Getting back to the sausages, Mrs. Wilson's recipe goes together unexpectedly fast. It's therefore perfect for someone who has eight ungrateful lodgers and a million chores to do. After a short(ish) time at the meat grinder, we could get everything into the pot and onto the stove.

You know the saying "It's going to look worse before it looks better?"

We are directed to make a meat-infused cornmeal mush after grinding our ingredients. I am fine with this, but I made a ruinous mistake with the first batch. We didn't have normal cornmeal, but we had the kind you use for tortillas. I thought it's the same thing, but more finely ground. It is not.

As a result of out ill-advised substitution, our mush never set. It thickened a little bit, but it remained too goopy to shape into sausages no matter how long I stirred it over a hot burner. Because onions are too beautiful to waste, I gamely plopped it by the spoonful onto a flour-coated plate and flattened it into patties. After letting them spend the night in the refrigerator in the hopes that they'd firm up (they didn't), I fried them the next day.

We didn't have any cooking oil. But we do have a lot of beef fat in the freezer. If you ever get nostalgic for "the old McDonald's fries," this moment may mean a lot to you.

We dropped our first Chinook patties into the hot fat, which spattered and reminded me why (aside from diet-watching) I never fry anything unless paper towels are on sale. 

 

The casual prevalence of deep frying in older recipes astounds me. It's popular to joke about how Americans can and will fry anything, but I don't know many people who do it at home unless it's a special occasion. Or at least, people don't get out a deep fryer without saying something like "I thought we'd have something really special tonight!" Apparently people in Mrs. Wilson's day would routinely put a vat of hot fat on the stove almost as routinely as we start a pot of boiling water. 

I thought our sausage patties would firm up in the hot fat the same way pancake batter turns into funnel cakes. But frying merely added a brown crust to the otherwise unchanged goo.

 Because I wanted to see if these were still good without immersing them in fat, I put one of our "sausage" patties onto a hot griddle. And... let's just say you want to deep-fry these.

After these goopy things failed to turn into sausages, I was willing to discard the entire mess and mutter that even Mrs. Wilson has dud recipes sometimes. But as aforementioned, we didn't use the right type of cornmeal in this. In the name of testing the Chinook sausages as Mrs. Wilson intended them (and also because shoving leftovers through a meat grinder is therapeutic), I obtained cornmeal and made them again.

It turns out that when you actually use the ingredients listed in a recipe, it's more likely to turn out right. After a few minutes on the stove, our cornmeal mush became thick enough to hold up a spoon. It felt like slightly gritty Play-Doh. And so, like children making clay worms, we turned it into sausages.

It looks more impressive when you have a whole plate of them.

Upon tasting the sausage mixture as it was meant to be, I thought it needed cheese. I don't mean that cheese would make the sausages better. I mean it seemed like cheese was missing. I put a big steaming spoonful of hot Chinook mush into a bowl and stirred in a handful of shredded mozzarella until it was melted. And indeed, it tasted complete. I don't think you need a lot of cheese to make this recipe taste right. It just needs that little bit of extra cheesy lift, not a Wisconsin-grade dairy infusion.

Because I didn't want to waste any beef fat (even though I have a lot of it), I got out the smallest pan in the house. I think you're supposed to cook individual fried eggs in it.

After turning the sausage to reveal the golden-colored underside, I briefly thought I should call these "mock fish sticks." They look like fish sticks to me.

Mrs. Wilson's Chinook sausages tasted like something caught between Thanksgiving turkey stuffing and onion rings. I've heard that fried turkey stuffing is a thing some people do with their holiday leftovers, so this recipe doesn't seem very farfetched.  Had I used a bigger frying pan, I can easily imagine putting them into the oil at once and cranking them out for hungry lodgers.

I liked these sausages a lot more than I expected to. Yes, deep-frying them definitely helps the recipe a lot. But if you're going to get out the deep fryer and spatter grease all over your stove, this is a pretty good recipe to do it with. If you can spare a few more coins from your purse than someone with eight lodgers to feed, you should definitely add cheese.

Paprika Chicken a la Viennoise: or, It's a beautiful day for those who love onions

They had me at "The correct frying of the onions is very important."

Paprika Chicken a la Viennoise 1 chicken (or 3 to 4 pounds of chicken meat) 1 pound onions 2-3 tbsp chicken or bacon fat* 1 cup water 1 clove garlic, pressed or chopped ½ cup tomato puree, fresh or canned 1 tbsp flour 1 tbsp paprika Cut chicken into serving pieces. Rub it with salt, pepper, and other seasonings to taste. Set aside. Cut onions in half from top to bottom. Then slice diagonally as thinly as possible. Heat chicken fat in a large skillet. Add onions and cook, stirring constantly, until lightly golden brown. Then add water, bring to a simmer, and cook over medium-low heat for about 5 minutes. Add the chicken, garlic, and tomato puree. Stir constantly until the chicken takes on a reddish brown color. Then cover the pan and allow to steam over low heat until chicken is tender. Stir in the flour, beating very hard where it lands in the skillet so that you break it up before it can form lumps. Then add the paprika and any other seasonings desired. Allow to simmer for another ten minutes. *If you don't obsessively save your bacon drippings like it's still 1935, cooking oil will obviously be fine. Note: This is also very good made with stewing pork, cut into 2-inch-ish pieces before cooking. Mrs. Florence Sokol; 836 Washington Street, Cape May, New Jersey; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; 30 August 1935; page 12

I do like a good onion or five, and Mrs. Florence Sokol's "Paprika Chicken A La Viennoise" promised to deliver. 

Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; 30 August 1935; page 12

I don't know if this recipe has any connection to Vienna, but it looked too good to care. A lot of recipes begin with an offhand "brown the beef and onions," but today we are told that the correct preparation of the onions is crucial to Chicken Paprika A La Viennoise. I've never met Mrs. Sokol, but I like her after just one recipe.

Lately, I've been using frozen chopped onions in all my recipes so I can skip the business of cutting them up myself. But slicing them into rings is a lot faster than chopping them. I may not have managed to get my onions as "like fine noodles" as Mrs. Sokol specified, but I didn't skimp on the onions either.

If in doubt as to the weight of your onions, always round up.

It turns out that onions expand a lot when you cut them. Our onion rings overflowed the bowl.

Even though we cut the onions a lot faster than usual, it still threatened to be an eye-watering task. Fortunately, a friend of a friend gave me this charming fan from his shelf of unfinished projects. (The phrase "just get it out of here" was deployed.) It needed nothing more than a new power cord and a new motor wire to blow my tears away.

Reading further down the recipe, tomato puree gets involved near-ish to the end. The grocery store didn't have any, so we got canned tomatoes and blenderized them.

Having gotten all out preparation done, it was time for the bacon drippings to meet the skillet. Before the pandemic, I would never have bacon drippings on hand. But as I have mentioned (often), the ever-rising price of food has caused me to obsessively save all the pan-drippings that I threw out in happier pre-pandemic times.

I soon found that I did't melt enough bacon fat for a Mrs. Sokol-approved deluge of onions. I say this in the most excited way possible.

We carefully watched the pans and got the onions to a golden color. After all, as Mrs. Sokol says, "the correct frying of the onions is very important."

 

Mrs. Sokol calls for one tablespoon of "imported paprika." But since she sent this recipe to the newspaper during the Depression, hopefully she would understand why I used store-brand paprika instead. I made sure to use a lot, though.

 

At last, we were ready to get everything into the pan. I didn't buy a whole chicken but a tray of leg quarters. They nostalgically remind me of Canada. Restaurants on this side of the border rarely serve whole leg quarters that you have to cut up for yourself. 

At this point, we only needed to cover the pan and let it mind its own business while we loaded the blessed dishwasher.

I regretted using chicken leg quarters as soon as I served this. I don't mind cutting meat at the table (after all, I chose to cook it like this), but today's chicken skidded all over the tomato-lubricated plate and pushed the correctly-fried onions onto the tabletop.

 

Self-inflicted inconvenience aside, the chicken was tender and tasted exquisite. We served the tomato-sauced onions on the side as a vegetable. Even the people who aren't onion fanatics liked them. 

But with that said, all of the spices (including the paprika) cooked out during the long simmering time. The kitchen smelled really nice, but our dinner just tasted like chicken, onion, and tomato. For a later batch, I waited until the last ten minutes of cooking before adding the spices. That gave them enough time to meld with everything, but not enough time to boil away. One might argue that we lost something when we didn't dry-cook the paprika with the onions. But I argue that spices are a lot more effective when you can actually taste them.

Spices aside, the tomato sauce in which everything swam became marvelously rich as everything simmered. I think leaving the bones in the chicken helped a lot. As you can see, it became quite gelatinous in the refrigerator. Twenty years after she got her recipe in the paper, Mrs. Sokol could have unmolded this onto a plate of lettuce and called it a salad.

The gelatinized leftovers unnerved everyone. They remained leery of the Paprika Chicken a la Viennoise even after the microwave made it look normal again.

I made this again a week later, but I used stewing pork (which I cut into small-ish pieces) instead of chicken. I figured the recipe's long simmering time would cook the meat until quite tender. Also, it seemed like a welcome change from the usual crock-pot pork we've been having every week since pork got so cheap. And... it's divine. I cannot recommend it enough.

In closing, this recipe is delicious regardless of whether you use pork or chicken in it. Just as I hoped, you absolutely cannot go wrong with a recipe from someone who gets opinionated about onions.

Italian Delight (featuring canned corn)

I was going to talk about how there's no way this could possibly be Italian. But the last time I did that, someone in the comments pointed out that the recipe in question was actually a pretty faithful copy of an actual recipe from Italy.

Italian Delight 8 oz shell macaroni 1 pound ground beef ¼ cup olive oil 1 large onion, finely chopped 1 clove garlic, pressed or finely chopped 1 green bell pepper, finely chopped 1 12-oz can tomato paste 1 16-oz can of corn, drained 16 oz fresh sliced mushrooms 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce ½ cup (or more) grated cheese (use a cheese that melts well) Heat oven to 350°. Grease a large casserole or 9"x13" pan. Cook the beef in a large frying pan. Then remove it from the pan, drain it, and set aside. (I just put the meat in a strainer over a bowl and let it wait until its time came.) Add the onion, garlic, bell pepper, mushrooms, and olive oil to the hot pan. Cook until the mushrooms are done. Then stir in the tomato paste, corn, and Worcestershire sauce. Add salt and pepper to taste. Mix in the meat and pasta. Pour into a large casserole coated with cooking spray. Top with cheese and bake about 20 minutes. Note 1: If you add the pasta to the boiling water when you start cooking the mushrooms and onions, everything will be ready around the same time. Note 2: You can make the sauce ahead of time, then refrigerate or freeze it. When ready to bake, cook the pasta and mix it in (and crown it with cheese, of course!). You might want to give it an extra 5 or so minutes of baking time because of the refrigeration. Mrs. Anna D. Wendt; 233 North Street, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; 16 August 1935; page 8

The Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, 16 August 1935, page 8

I'm fond of recipes from before people started worrying about "authenticity." Italian food crossed the Atlantic, got filtered through the grocery stores that didn't have half the ingredients, made its way to areas where no Italian-American person ever trod, and gave us recipes like this. It starts out with an all-American mound of beef.

So many older recipes with browning beef. If you had no idea what to cook on any given night, you only needed to put hamburger in a frying pan and then see where the contents of your refrigerator took you.

Mrs. Anna D. Wendt directs us to use a half-cup of olive oil-- which is a lot of oil for a single pan of food. 

The Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange printed the submitter's address right after their name. (This will be relevant to the cooking oil very soon.) I'm always curious to see what sort of house begat any given recipe.  And so, as I can never resist doing, I looked up Mrs. Wendt's house on Google Street View. Mrs. Wendt's neighborhood is near the river that runs through town. Ignoring the appalling real estate prices of today, it looks like it was initially home to people who worked in the various warehouses and commercial docks on the water. 

This brings us to the excessive amount of oil that starts the recipe. Since I don't need to come up with enough calories to sustain a family working laborious jobs, I cut the oil in half. It still made a respectable slick in the pan.

Because I love modern conveniences as much as anyone else, I used frozen bell peppers and frozen onions. I could have properly weighed them out, but instead I eyeballed what looked like one onion and one bell pepper's worth of frozen vegetable confetti.

Our next ingredient caused problems: canned mushrooms. I usually like to follow recipes as written. After all, why bother with someone else's instructions if you intend to ignore them and cook as you always do? Also, as I have often said, following a recipe as written means I can blame someone else when things go bad. But I refused to ruin beef with canned mushrooms. They are bitter, slimy, and revolting. I try to keep an open mind and try things before I don't like them, but I refuse to touch canned mushrooms.

Things were looking good so far. The vegetables had exuded a lot of flavorful juices as they cooked- almost enough to turn this into a vegetable soup. It may look like I added water, but everything in the pan came from the vegetables cooked in it. 

I forgot to purchase fresh garlic, so I had to cheat a bit and use powdered garlic instead. When I stirred it in, the skillet exhaled the scent of the best garlic bread I can imagine.

And now we get to the tomatoes. You may think that spaghetti sauce made with canned tomato paste sounds (to put it delicately) inauthentic. But is canned paste really any worse than the pasty-pink out-of-season tomatoes you can purchase these days?

The sauce tasted a lot like the lasagna an ex-roommate's mom dropped off when we were in college, which had been lovingly assembled from canned tomatoes with cheddar cheese on top. And while it was as "inauthentic" as you can expect such a creation to be, it really hit the spot after getting all our posessions up three flights of stairs.

 

At this point, we were ready to get out the most expensive part of this recipe: the beef. It was surprisingly hard to see after stirring it into the rest of our Mediterranean fantasy.

We were now one ingredient short of completing our Italian delight. Mrs. Wendt calls for a can of corn or peas. I choose to pretend she never mentioned canned peas. As the can of corn hovered over the pan of beef and tomatoes, I faltered. I tried to tell myself that corned spaghetti would be perfectly fine, if less than ideal. I told myself that this recipe, corn and all, got printed in the newspaper and won a $2 basket of groceries. I told myself that polenta is really commonplace in Italy, so corn is not an alien vegetable to them,and therefore this recipe is more plausible than it seems. I also told myself that this Italian delight came from someone's house, and not some corporate test kitchen trying to shove their products into as many recipes as possible.

Ultimately, I couldn't tip out the corn. It definitely didn't help that most stories about "my awful mother-in-law sabotaged my cooking" seem to involve somebody sneaking into the host's kitchen and ruining the homemade spaghetti sauce (it's almost always spaghetti sauce) with something from a can. 

I didn't think Mrs. Wendt was maliciously sabotaging everyone clipping dinner ideas from this week's Recipe Exchange, but I couldn't ignore the similarity. Maybe she actually liked canned corn on her spaghetti. Or, she may have simply added corn to nearly everything she made, and subjected her Italian delight to the same treatment. Or, maybe she was using canned corn to "volumize" the recipe (as my mother puts it). After all, there was a Depression on and she probably had a lot of kids and a husband to feed.

 

Even though I couldn't bring myself to add a can of corn to a massive vat of spaghetti sauce, I wanted to know if it was any good. And so, I removed some of the pan's contents and added the unbelievable ingredient. The corn kernels, with their bright yellow color, looked horribly out of place. It was like the Italian delight had suddenly sprouted yellow warning lights.

If Mrs. Wendt was "volumizing" the spaghetti with canned corn, she must have had a very large family at home. The Italian delight nearly overflowed the skillet. And keep in mind that I have removed about a quarter of the delight so that I could put corn in a test sample of it.

I thought that Mrs. Wendt had skimped on the cheese, but then again there was a Depression on.

As the cheese melted, it dripped into the pits and crevices all over the the top of the Italian delight, unveiling the corn that it had halfheartedly hidden before baking. I think the corn made it look like a sort of beef-noodle casserole instead of a pasta bake. To Mrs. Wendt's credit, she never said this was a pasta bake but an "Italian delight."

The Italian delight with, um, "corned beef" was surprisingly good. You just had to reframe your mind. It isn't the baked pasta we would make today. It's more like more like a beef-tomato casserole with macaroni in it. Honestly, I would have gone ahead and added chopped celery with the canned corn.

It's easy to forget that even simple things like baked pasta can change a lot in 90 years. I was really thrown off because this was similar to something we'd make today. When I make something so old it's archaic (such as mincemeat with raisins and kidneys), it's easy to act like I'm trying foods from a country I've never been to. But I wasn't prepared for the food to be so similar to modern-day dishes, yet unignorably different. 

But for those who can't countenance corn in spaghetti, here is a plate of the corn-free Italian delight.

The corned spaghetti was good enough that I would have kept the leftovers even if they didn't contain a lot of beef. Like a lot of things we've made from the Recipe Exchange, it's not fancy but it's something you'd love to come home to. In a weird way, the remaining pan of "normal" corn-free Italian delight tasted like something was missing. Or maybe I'm daft-- or both. Either way, after nixing the canned mushrooms, this recipe was a delight.

Copper Pennies: or, Cool off with carrots!

Who would guess carrots could be so good on a hot day?

Copper Pennies 8 ounces of carrots (4 or 5 medium-sized), thinly sliced crosswise ¼ cup canned tomato soup, undiluted ¼ cup sugar 1 tbsp cooking oil 3 tbsp cider vinegar ¾ tsp dry mustard ¾ tsp Worcestershire sauce One-quarter onion (white or yellow), finely chopped One-quarter bell pepper, finely chopped 1 stick celery, finely chopped Lettuce leaves for serving Place carrots in a small microwave-safe bowl. Add a little salt and a spoonful of water. Cover with a dinner plate (or anything that will keep in the steam without forming an airtight seal) and microwave until fork-tender, about 4 minutes. In a medium or large microwave-safe bowl, whisk together all remaining ingredients except the onion, bell pepper, celery, and lettuce. Microwave until it comes to a rolling boil, about 1 or 2 minutes. Remove, and stir to mix. Then add the carrots, onion, and celery. Transfer to a container with a well-sealed lid. Refrigerate overnight. Serve cold. You can serve it on lettuce leaves if desired. Miss Lennee Lacey; The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

 I saw this one in The Cotton Country Collection a long time ago, and always was a bit skeptical. It looked like nothing but sliced carrots with some inadequate attempts to improve them. The recipe may look underwhelming, but it periodically pops into my head when I'm trying to use up the last of a bag of carrots. 

The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

Unfortunately, I could not get the recipe simply by opening the book I first saw it in. As mentioned in earlier posts, my copy of The Cotton Country Collection fell apart and therefore went to the municipal hereafter, taking the copper pennies with it. However, when I was windowshopping at an antique store with friends, I found a copy for sale. 

You may think I promptly bought it, but you would be wrong. I took it off the shelf, "casually" sauntered to another part of the store where the clerk couldn't see me, and whipped out my phone. The hardest part was discreetly reshelving the book right in front of the clerk and pretending I happened to change my mind.

As I was reading the directions, I realized that we can modernize the recipe with the microwave. Cooking this on the stove is as outdated as the recipe name. (These days, it should be called "copper-plated zinc pennies.") There's no reason to boil the carrots when the microwave will do the job faster.

If you're quartering the recipe like I did, you finish cutting everything pretty quick. After slicing the carrots, we only had to chop these.

Having finished everything that involves a cutting board, we could get to the dressing. The instructions tell us to simply put everything in a pot and boil it. Like the carrots themselves, this seemed easier in the microwave than on a stove. As we got everything into the bowl, I realized I had underestimated how much sugar this recipe uses.

Things looked more normal after getting all the spices in there.

As I removed the steaming-hot tomato dressing from the microwave, it smelled sharply and pungently of the 1970s in a way I didn't expect and can't explain.

And so, after a bit of microwaving and a smaller-than-expected amount of chopping, our copper pennies were ready to stir together and put away. I liked the pretty and bright colors. Also, the vinegary tomato sauce tasted better than I thought it would.

The next day, the colors on the fresh produce had dulled a bit. But the bell peppers and onions were just as crunchy as the day before. (I didn't bother serving this on lettuce because I didn't want to purchase a head of it and let the rest rot in the fridge.)

The copper pennies are downright refreshing after being outside in this heat- like the vegetable equivalent of an iced tea. I expected to say that this recipe is better if you reheat it the next day, but it's surprisingly good served cold. I didn't think I would like it cold, but somehow it works.

Of course, the cooked carrots don't really taste like much of anything, though marinating them overnight in a tomato-vinegar sauce definitely helped. The onions and the bell peppers added all the flavor that the carrots lacked. I think copper pennies would be a really good choice any time people get together in hot weather. Heavy rich foods just aren't as appealing when it's hot outside. (At many summer picnics, the fruit tray gets completely demolished while the decadent cakes sit nearly-untouched all day.)

Picnics and other encounters with people aside, I think this recipe makes a great side dish while it's so hot outside. As a bonus, very little effort goes into actually making this. And if you use the microwave instead of the stove, you won't even heat up the kitchen.

In conclusion, this recipe is a lot better than I expected, and worth making again.