Homemade Tomato Ketchup!

Guess what we're cracking open for the second time! Yes, after the lovely, addictive kisses, we're getting out this Miss Leslie's Directions for Cookery in its Various Branches from 1837. Miss Leslie attended the first cooking school in the United States, so it seems only appropriate we should make her recipe for something so all-American it was banned in French schools: tomato ketchup!  Directions for Cookery has a whole chapter on "catchups" including mushroom catchup, lemon catchup, and what we're making today:

TOMATA CATCHUP. - Take a peck of large ripe tomatas.* Having cut a slit in each, put them in a large preserving-kettle, and boil them half an hour. Then take them out, and press and strain the pulp through a hair sieve.† Put it back into the kettle, and add an ounce of salt, an ounce of powdered mace, half an ounce of powdered cloves, the same of cayenne pepper, and eight table-spoonfuls of ground mustard‡. Mix the seasoning with the tomata pulp; let it boil slowly during four hours. Then take it out of the kettle, and let it stand till next day, in an uncovered tureen. When cold, stir into it one pint of the best cider vinegar. Put it into clean bottles, and seal the corks. It will be found excellent for flavouring stews, hashes, fish-sauce, &c. *1 peck of tomatas is about 10-12 pounds according to some quick searching. †We had mixed results with that, see below... ‡Having only 8½ pounds of tomatas and therefore about two thirds of a peck, we used this much of everything else:      ⅔ tsp. black pepper      ⅔ tsp. cayenne pepper      5 tbsp. + 1 tsp. dry mustard      2 tbsp. + 2 tsp. mace      2 tbsp. + 1 tsp. cloves      1 tbsp. + 1 tsp. salt      1⅓ c. cider vinegar

I'm getting a kick out of her ending tomato with an "a." Given she was from the northeast, do you think she rhymed "tomato" with "beta"?
Anyway, I regularly get my produce from the reduced shelf at the store. Usually getting this many tomatoes would be expensive, but since I got these from the iffy produce rack, they were stupendously marked down! I cleaned the shelf.

I don't care if something's growing in them, this'll be boiling well after it's dead.

I had no idea how many tomatoes were in a peck, but this has to be enough. Having borrowed a sieve for the first part of the instructions and found two abandoned stewpots in the kitchen, we were completely set!

Having weighed them on one of the store's produce scales before checkout, there were 8½ pounds or so. Having looked online, a peck of tomatoes is somewhere between 10 and 12. Therefore, we're making two thirds of the recipe.

This is what boiling tomatoes does to them.

While they were boiling in the skins, I realized a lot of these spices were in ounces and I don't have a scale. Why some of them are by weight and some by spoons I have no idea. However, it might behoove me to figure out how much of what I'm going to add to the pot fairly soon. Fortunately, this ounces-to-spoons table turned up, so some middle-of-the-night math yielded the amounts I ended up using.

Some of the tomatoes came out looking absolutely no different.

Having smushed the tomatoes through the sieve into the only thing we had to hold a sieve over, we had the bottom of a casserole's worth of tomato juice.

That's hardly for all the tomatoes that went in.

Having brought in someone's rice cooker to hold what wouldn't go through, we had this much leavings. Look at it! Despite smashing it at the wires, it leaked out juice afterward!

Clearly, we would need to try something else. Plan B was a blender someone left out:

However, this refused to go through the sieve too. Incidentally, in addition to the sieving being a waste of time, I had to powerwash the sieve in the shower to get the last embedded tomato pieces out. I never thought I'd be glad for the "flay yourself alive" setting erroneously labeled "massage."
There must be a better method than mashing at things with a wooden spoon to force them through, which brings us to plan C. A common method for thoroughly juicing things is to wring them through cheesecloth, which I don't have. However, I do have T-shirts I don't really like.

If you get the cloth wet first, it won't soak up everything you're trying to squeeze out.

About fifteen minutes of squeezing and twisting...

...only this much tomato remained.

Since it was still kinda damp, I thought trying it in something made of thinner cloth might work even better. It ruptured and squirted tomato across the kitchen.

I thought about saving the pulp for something, but it was pretty tasteless. Therefore, on with the ketchup! Sometimes I veer off of the ingredients list or alter the amounts, but for this I didn't. I have no idea how this is supposed to work, so I stuck to the measurements. If this goes wrong, it's all Miss Leslie's fault. That's what I told myself when I put an ungodly amount of dry mustard into the pot, at any rate.

I had to chase down mustard globules and smash them apart with the spoon.

I tried some of the juice and it was bitter and nasty. Hopefully it would get sweeter as it slowly boiled for 4(!) hours. Whatever. I was already going to be awake; I had an essay to write anyway.
...or so I thought. It looked like this after two.

By now it surely would have lost its nasty bitterness and pungency, right? Wrong!

So... brown...

Since it was already incredibly bitter and nasty anyway, there was no reason not to make it violently sour as well by dumping in an unspeakable amount of cider vinegar. Incredibly, it tasted a lot sweeter once a good-sized cupful or so was in. I later found out that vinegar counteracts mustard just like milk makes hot peppers stop burning you. (That's why the mustard in Chinese restaurants scorches your tongue- it's made with water and not vinegar.)

Let's analyze the results of what we hath wrought. The first thing you notice is it's really brown. I was expecting something this color:

Having tasted a tiny drop on my finger, I got the idea this would be tasty.

This is why you watch for what's on manager's special, everybody!

Yes, I took a steak practically bigger than my griddle and cooked it in ketchup. It was amazing. A-plus, would do again, will totally watch for tomatoes to go on sale just to have this.

So let's get this out of the way: This is not going to taste good squirted all over French fries. It is not ketchup as we would expect. However, it is a really good, sharp steak sauce- delicious if used with a light hand, nice if added to soups (as the recipe says), and overwhelmingly pungent if poured on thick over fried stuff.
However, I see no reason why you couldn't just drop the raw tomatas in a blender and skip to adding all the spices and slowly boiling it.

Southern lemony things!

Fall is upon us, and I don't know if there's a bigger saturation of pumpkin-spice everything or "news" articles about pumpkin-spice everything. Sometimes I think the coffee shops could give away three clippings about how pumpkin-spice is so over with every pumpkin-spice latte. At any rate, we at A Book of Cookrye are pretending it's still summer and making lemony things!

Lemon Loves Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9" round cake pan.* Because these tend to want to stick, I suggest you cut a piece of parchment paper to fit the bottom of the pan. Spray the empty pan, then press the paper into it, squeezing out as many bubbles as possible. Then spritz the top of the paper with additional cooking spray. That way, the cookies may cling to the paper but absolutely can not stick to the pan itself.       Crust: 1 cup flour ½ cup butter 2 tbsp sugar Mix together. It may be a bit sandy, but it should stay together when you take up a handful and firmly squeeze it. If not, add a spoonful or two of water. Press into the pan. Bake for 15 minutes.       Filling: 1 cup sugar 5 tbsp flour ½ tsp baking powder† 2 eggs 3 tbsp lemon juice Stir together the sugar, flour, and baking powder. Be sure to eliminate any lumps. Then thoroughly beat in the eggs, adding both at the same time. When all is mixed, stir in the lemon juice. Pour on top of the crust (no need to cool the crust first) and bake 25 minutes more. Cool completely before icing.       Icing: ¼ cup butter 1½ cup powdered sugar 2 or 3 tsp lemon juice Mix the butter and powdered sugar. Add enough lemon juice to make it a spreadable icing that still holds a shape instead of being drippy (if you add too much, just add more powdered sugar until it's not runny anymore). Spread it over the cookies after they have cooled. I think these are best with only a very thin layer of icing on top. *The original recipe specifies a 9" square pan, but I found those to be a little too thin. †I forgot to add this and they came out fine anyway. If you prefer a dense, more fudge-like lemon layer, leave the baking powder out. -Mrs. Charles Hamaker, The Cotton Country Collection, Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana, 1972

It seems I punctuate a lot of assignments with baked goods. It's reached the point that whoever's downstairs seems to start loitering in the kitchen vicinity whenever I come downstairs with my laptop and a sheaf of papers because they know I'm about to make something for while I'm working over whatever I have to do this time. Or perhaps it's been a long, trying week and I've decided I deserve a reward. Such is the case this week. In the span of three days, I had an essay, a test, and a presentation come up all at once. Therefore, lemony things!

Butter is dairy. Dairy is calcium. Therefore, I'll get sturdy bones.

I always wonder about the names of recipes like this. Does anyone ever say them out loud when asked "What are these?" Have you ever heard anyone say "Would you like a lemon love?" or "Peanut Butter Supreme, anyone?"

Halfway into pressing out the dough, the baking pot was as happy as I felt.

That said, these looked like they were going to be really good. The cookie dough was good enough to eat on its own, and the lemony stuff looked promising. I added in some anise extract that came from... somewhere... and it was ridiculously good. Although having found extracts I forgot I purchased and what I used them for, I think of Erma Bombeck who said "Once you get a spice in your home, you have it forever. Women never throw out spices. The Egyptians were buried with their spices. I know which ones I'm taking with me when I go." My parents have some in the house from five moves ago, and I'm sure I'll be no better.

Lemony.

The filling went on really nicely, but came out looking really desiccated.

What's with things coming out of my kitchen looking dried out lately?

Some of you may have noticed that I am in fact baking these in a saucepan. While I did have a cake pan I "borrowed" from my cousin and have used repeatedly for all manner of things that aren't cake, I accidentally left it at my parents' last time I visited. This is why you shouldn't buy pots with plastic handles, people!

Nothing wrong with making your icing really thick--- and mixing it in another pot.

Desiccated or not, icing on top makes almost everything not look so bad.

Heck, it might even look good.

And so, happy fall everyone! These are really good and you should try them.

The Imaginatively Named Mrs. Moran's Squares

Today on A Book of Cookrye, we are pleased to present... these things!

Mrs. Moran's Squares 4 egg whites ¼ tsp salt 1 c sugar 1 c graham cracker crumbs ½ c chocolate chips ½ c coconut ½ chopped walnuts* 1 tsp vanilla 9 graham crackers Heat oven to 350°. Line a square pan with foil, then line the bottom with graham crackers. Beat egg whites until foamy. Add the sugar in small amounts, scattering each addition over the top rather than just dumping it in one place and beating it in thoroughly before adding the next. Fold in the vanilla, then the rest of the ingredients. Spread in the pan and bake for 30 minutes. *No. Mrs. Richard C Moran, Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas: Favorite Recipes of America: Desserts, 1968

It's kind of rare to see someone sending in a recipe she named for herself. Maybe every time they had a church social, someone would say "Oh, Mrs. Moran, please bring some of those squares you make!" Or maybe she always set them out in the center of the dessert table whenever she had company because people always anticipated them. At any rate, they have to be good, right?

At the beginning, making these looks just like making kisses.

Well, they better be good, because the beginning of these involves a lot of time with an electric mixer. When your egg whites grow horns, does that mean they have reached adulthood, that you have a protective spirit in the kitchen, or that Satan will attack your hips?

Meringues may look like pretty ice sculptures when photographed, but this got really iffy looking with the rest of the stuff in it.

Fortunately, the graham crackers at the bottom didn't look any good either, so it all matched. Lacking a square pan, the pot was called into service. Square crackers do not go nicely into round pans.

I don't care how bad the foil looks; I didn't have to wash the pot afterward.

Ker-splot!

It went into the oven looking like someone dumped sand into icing...

...and came out looking like it went through a severe drought.

I thought about calling it "Texas Lakebed Cake."

Très tempting, non?

However, on the inside, all meringue-ness had disappeared. It just seemed like graham cracker, coconut, and chocolate chips held together by some magical force. With meringue on top.

However, these were really good. I really liked how the graham crackers went soft in baking. There was a crisp layer of meringue on top and at the edges. Not sure if they're quite worth the bother, but they're really good all the same.

Hump-Day Quickie: Banoffee Pie

We at A Book of Cookrye have regularly fielded the question Do we ever make anything recent? Ever? Well, today we're going to! We present... Banoffee pie!

Banoffee Pie 1 or 2 14-oz cans condensed milk* 2-3 bananas 1 baked pie crust, graham cracker or regular Boil the unopened cans of condensed milk on their sides for 2-3 hours, making sure they are always completely submerged in the water. With some recipes it would mess things up, but for this you can just dump cold water in to top it up. (Use a really deep pot so you don't have to obsessively check the water level every 5 minutes.) While it's boiling, make a pie crust and bake it. (You'll want to bake it even if you go with a graham cracker one). When the milk is done, cool it immersed in water lest the cans pop open (you can hurry this by putting them in ice water). Slice the bananas and lay them in the crust. Pour/spread the condensed milk on top. You can put whipped cream, chocolate, fruit, or whatever on top if you like. *One can will spread kind of thinly over the bananas, two will completely cover them. Pick whichever sounds better to you.

Can you drop something in boiling water?

Behold, the next two or three hours.

This isn't the first time I've seen people boiling condensed milk into cajeta. The Around-The-World Cookbook from Pan-Am Airways has a recipe for cajeta that involves stirring a pot of milk and sugar for hours until browned, as is the traditional way. A note under the recipe says that in many households people just boil a can of condensed milk instead. It may not be quite the same, but the last time I tried it the hard way, literally all the water boiled away and I was stirring a pot of powder.

If you share a kitchen, you may need to leave a note because people don't understand someone apparently abandoning an unopened can in boiling water for most of the night.

I actually found it quite odd this was invented in the UK. Cajeta and bananas both come from the Americas, so why did it take someone across the Atlantic to put them together?
You may be thinking "Two to three hours!?", but since all you have to do once it's on the stove is dump in water every half hour or so (assuming you're using a deep pot), you can just leave it and go about your other business. Or, if you're already doing a lot of cooking, just get it on the stove at the beginning. I let it go while I got caught up on a lot of homework.

I did not have the patience after it came off the stove.

If you cool them in ice water, you can freak out your friends. Since the outside of the can will cool off first while the center stays really hot, you can lift the apparently cold can out of the water, hand it to someone, and tell them to shake it. It'll go from cold to really hot in their hand in seconds. Incidentally, you can also tell it's cool enough to take out of the water and open without worrying about scalding milk splatters when you shake it and it doesn't get warm.

Aw, yeah.

As it's cooling, you can get out your best cutting board and slice the bananas.

...using your handy-dandy combination pie slicer, cake server, and tea strainer.

As you can see, one can just barely covers it. If you want the bananas completely coated, you'll want to boil two.

As it is, it comes off looking like a sort-of... I don't know. But it's good. I was kind of swarmed with people once word got out.

So... good....

Properly Managed Kisses

We at A Book of Cookrye have fielded a few accusations that we never make anything from any recipe source others have heard of. Today, it is our special pleasure to announce we're going to pull from one of the best-selling cookbooks of the century!
...The 19th century, that is. We are pleased to present, Kisses!

Kisses 1 c sugar 4 egg whites 1 tsp lemon extract Heat oven to 375°. Beat egg whites until stiff. Add lemon extract. Add the sugar, 1 teaspoon at a time. Scatter each spoonful over the top rather than just dumping it in so it doesn't clump together when you beat it. Beat each addition in thoroughly, so that there are no sugar grains (toward the end, they may be slightly perceptible) before adding the next. Mound onto paper, using about a spoonful or so per cookie, and sculpt into shape with the back of the spoon. It's actually easier to lift it out of the bowl on the back of the spoon than to lift it on the front, set it on the paper, then shape it with the back. Or you can put it in a baggie and squirt it on, which would probably be a lot easier. Bake until a nice sandy brown. Rather than peeling the paper off, you may find it easier to stick a fork or spatula under them.

As you can see, we didn't vary this from the recipe aside from cutting it in half:

Miss Leslie, Directions for Cookery in its Various Branches, 1837

I must say I agree with half of the last sentence. Kisses do indeed require so much practice and dexterity to manage properly. However, I can't personally attest to the last part. Is a candy shop really the best place to procure proper kisses? If I test this, I will be sure to pass on the results.

I forget what I was making, but at some point when I was still learning to cook I was making a recipe that started off with cracking fourteen egg whites. I cracked them all, then saw they were in fact kind of yellowish. Thinking I'd messed up and gotten yolk in there and just never seen it, I dumped about twenty minutes of tedium down the disposal. I've since learned that yes, egg whites do have their own yellowish tinge.

Sudsy.

Anyway, this recipe is really easy, if not so white you could get the Wite-Out people to sponsor it. (Note: I don't mean white as in the race; I mean... well, look at the (lack of) color in this!) Anyone who can hold an electric mixer can do it. However, let us contemplate the person making this when Miss Leslie published her book, using only a whisk because even the hand-cranked egg beater wasn't yet invented. Eesh.

It looks like either a magical ice kingdom or someone's lair.

At the end, we had an astonishingly thick mixture of egg whites and sugar. I had no idea they could get this stiff. If it wasn't so sticky, one might have used it for modeling clay.

Ever been impaled by egg whites?

At this point, I would like to share a quick Book of Cookrye lesson. You see, we had no parchment paper. Having decided that the original recipe says to use "white paper" anyway, we used the backs some old printouts.

It looks like a lot of soft-serve cones.

While it definitely worked, did you know that toner is heat transferable?

There's an art project waiting to happen here.

Remove the printout from the cookie sheet required drastic measures. Since heat glued it on, heat had to take it off.

Nothing like scouring a boiling pan with a scrubber on a spoon.

However, the cookies were really tasty and nearly weightless in your hand. They melted in your mouth. I really liked how the outside was crunchy but the inside was soft like the meringue on top of a pie. It wasn't raw or runny, it just wasn't hardened.

So good!

However, I don't know what Miss Leslie was talking about when she got to pressing them together when they came out of the oven and leaving them to cool. They cooled almost the instant they came off of the pan. Also, don't try to peel the paper off. This will happen.

It's a lot easier to jam a fork under them and force them off, although that's a little dicey too.

And granted, these got some seriously big air pockets in baking:

But that doesn't matter because these were just that good. We got about a dozen and a half kisses out of this, but they disappeared in less than 10 minutes. If you want them thoroughly crunchy, you could bake them longer. If you like them really soft in the middle, you can take them out just as they get barely browned.

These disappear really quickly.

Rose-Marzipan Spirals: The results of watching the discount rack

After the surprise cookies, we at A Book of Cookrye wanted to make something that would actually be good. Also, we grabbed a bunch of these out of the discount rack and wanted to make something of them.

We at A Book of Cookrye had no idea what to do with this marzipan. We are not unique in this regard; enough people don't know what to do with marzipan that they have a web address printed on the box for tutorials. Opening it up, we found it looks like beige Play-Doh, feels like beige Play-Doh, and tastes like almond extract.

Rose-Marzipan Spirals ½ c butter ¼ c sugar ½ tsp rose water* (or whatever flavoring you think goes with almond) Food coloring if desired 1¼ c flour 1 (7 oz.) box marzipan 1 tbsp. milk (approx.) Heat oven to 300°. Grease a cookie sheet well. Thoroughly beat the sugar and butter (it's easier if you leave the butter out to soften all day than if you microwave it). Stir in the extract and coloring, then mix in the flour. Roll the dough on a floured surface until it's a rectangle-oval-ish shape somewhere between ¼" - ½" thick. Roll the marzipan to the same size, also on a floured surface. Lift up the marzipan to be sure it is not stuck onto the counter. Transfer the dough on top of the marzipan (you may end up patching it on). Then-- this is the tricky part-- carefully flip it over so that when you roll it up, the cookie dough will be on the outside.† Roll it up, and slice into pieces ¼" - ½" thick. Bake about 20-30 minutes, or until they smell a little bit toasted. *This is fairly cheap in middle-Eastern stores. If there are none nearby and you have to go to a foofy upscale grocery before you find any rose water, spare yourself the expense and just use something else. †You could just put the marzipan on top of the dough. But, since the dough tends to stick to the counter and then come up in pieces anyway, I found this way actually ended up being easier. I didn't have to try to unstick it as I was rolling it up.

Tonight we are doing something with this cookie recipe and the marked-down marzipan! Also, we are going to make them pink because for some reason we have a lot of red food coloring.
Marcus' parents sent him home with this when he visited and asked if they had any food coloring for... you know, I forget what we meant to make. All I know is we're set to make three heart attacks' and a diabetic stroke's worth of red velvet cakes. Where does one buy this much food coloring?

Around 3AM when you're going nuts from homework, you can shake it at people who annoy you and say it's blood.

Having carefully dripped some drops into the dough, it was indeed pink. There may be no point in coloring late night homework sustenance, but we all have our ways of amusing ourselves. Besides, it would go well with the rose water.

It's pink!

Some people can roll things out into neat, tidy shapes. My great-grandmother could roll tortillas into perfect circles. I'm more like my sister, who once lifted the dough off the counter, held it up, and said it was Massachusetts.

I guess they're shaped like some tiny island countries somewhere.

And so, after sticking the cookie dough piecewise onto the marzipan and carefully turning it over, we had a floury beige patty with pink fluff underneath.

I don't know whether I think this looks good or like disappointment waiting to happen.

And so, to carry us through another long night of work, we have this pink and beige roll! The colors work surprisingly well.

So neat and tidy!

This may be the prettiest slice-and-bake I've made. Or maybe it's just really late.

Even the end of it looks vaguely like a flower bud. Or at least, what a flower bud might look like if you cut off the bottom half.

I almost want to make green cookie dough and make cookie-marzipan flower things.

We actually got surprisingly neat slices given how... er... free-form the roll was.

As they baked, we pondered how wrong they could go. A bit leery from the barbecue sauce brownies, we reminded ourselves there was nothing too unusual in these. The worst we had to fear was the cookies falling apart.

They expanded more than I thought.

Look at how pretty they are!

Look closer!

The only problem was that I might have left them in the oven about 5 minutes too long. The marzipan caramelized on the bottom. If you like the way a Butterfinger stays in your teeth, you wouldn't mind.

Since it was early enough for people to still be downstairs, I ended up getting several opinions on these, by which I mean people kept asking for one and I couldn't turn them down since I regularly waylay anyone with a pizza box. Everyone liked them. The only thing I might do differently aside from baking them less is maybe cut the dough slices in half. These were kinda big.

By the way, they hold up to tea dunking really well.