Jello 1-2-3: The actual original still-in-the-box powder!

Today's adventure begins with something innocuous:

Let's talk about brand dilution...

Yes, jello! Someone else in the house randomly craved a box of the stuff, and it was both easy and cheap to make. This soon led to encasing canned fruit in gelatin, which is benign creation but also the gateway to terrible and jiggly times. 

It turns out that making the fruit properly float in the gelatin is a matter of careful timing. If you put the fruit in too early, it will just sink to the bottom of the bowl. If you wait too long, the gelatin will completely set and you can't get the fruit in it. You have to keep checking it every quarter hour or so, hoping it has reached that perfect "egg white consistency."

If you're like me, you will forget all about your congealing salad until it is too firm to accept the fruit, but there is a way to fix it. You can just microwave it, stirring after every ten seconds, until partially melts. It'll look kind of chunky on top, but who cares? 

Here is the innocent beginning of our gelatin voyage. Don't the suspended fruit slices look like they're swimming in a strange aquarium? 

As much as I remain dumbfounded at serving gelatin as a "salad," I had to admit that the gelatin-suspended fruit was an unexpectedly perfect side dish for the pot roast we had that night. I highly recommend fruit suspended in Jello when when you're serving pot roasts- the light, cooling dessert (or salad, if you prefer to call it that) is a perfect counterpoint to the rich, heavy main dish. 

Also, and I am not the first to note this, gelatin extends the life of nearly-expired fruit by at least a few days. If those last uneaten strawberries are starting to look a little wrinkly, they will remain fresh for another week if you put them in gelatin.

Perhaps detecting future jiggly schemes, others in the house said "This is so good, it's the only gelatin you should ever make!" Despite the hopeful tone in their voices, we were just beginning our congealed journey. Other dear acquaintances who don't even live in the same state saw the ill-advised future already firming up in the refrigerator.

They were right to be worried. Scavenging the back of the pantry, we found some forgotten crushed pineapple. The can had no rust, so we decided it must be safe for human consumption. This led to the creation of a Hawaiian Fruit Salad. As you know, in the world of processed foods, "Hawaiian" means "contains canned pineapple." 

The fibrous canned pineapple embedded in the gelatin made it feel like you were cutting into a steak. The shreds of pineapple itself had no flavor in them (I may have over-enthusiastically squeezed the excess juice out of them), so they did nothing but get stuck in one's teeth. No one wanted to eat the Hawaiian Fruit Salad. It was discreetly given to the raccoons. 

But all of that is a warmup for what turned up in a recent pantry excavation:

Yes, we found an inexplicable box of Jello 1-2-3, a product that has a small yet devout nostalgic following long after it was discontinued. It seems a lot of people remember Jello 1-2-3 as the first thing they ever made and served to their family. A lot of people online reminisce about how they felt so grown up when they ritualistically poured the mixture into wineglasses and later brought them out of the refrigerator for dessert. 

Jello stopped making 1-2-3 in the previous millennium, so this is definitely one of the less well-advised things we have reconstituted. I didn't expect it to be any good after who knows how many years (although the box had no expiration date), but I wanted to see if it really did that magical layer separation promised on the box photo.

The camera really doesn't show the bright pink that appeared when we reconstituted the powder. It was the same color as the plastic they use in Barbie accessories. 

I'm not going to dwell on the foul stench that conquered the kitchen. There's nothing surprising about a box of 30-year-old gelatin product expiring and lightly decaying in the many decades in which it was ignored in the pantry. But I would be remiss not to mention the olfactory attack at least once. Also, despite smelling distinctly like long-expired milk, this product is dairy-free.

And so, with the kitchen timer counting down the two minutes specified on the back of the box, we inserted the electric mixer. The directions say we should use a blender if possible, but I didn't feel like gathering all the blender parts from the various drawers in which they reside.

From here, the instructions are quite straightforward. First, your about half of the mixture amongst the random transparent glasses you have chosen from the cabinet. Then, you go back pour the rest of it, filling each glass in the same order as the first time. I didn't know why we're supposed to do incrementally pour it instead of just dump it out. But I figured that unless I go out and deliberately pay for another box of expired gelatin, this will be the only chance I get to make this fabled discontinued product.

The Jello 1-2-3 didn't really have three layers immediately after pouring. If you count the beer-like foam on top as a layer, you could say it had two. I thought that perhaps it separates into three layers as it sits, but it did not. I guess it sort of had a middle layer if you looked closely enough. 

Here they are, all firmly set and ready to throw out! The camera's autofocus actively sabotaged my attempt to document this historic culinary event. Also, I don't know why this stuff looks like it is a tasteful salmon color in all the pictures. I promise, it was the same color as the girl's section of a toy store.

The middle layer is really the foam on top as it partially sank into the gelatin beneath. You will notice that unlike the three-tiered confection pictured on the box, we really have two stripes on top of a translucent pink mass. Since it's a bit hard to see in the photographs, here it is in MS-Paint:

If we peep into this from the top, it looks like dense pink cobwebs.

If we pretend this is edible and scoop some of it out (and after it spent who knows how many years of putrefying in the pantry, you'd be foolish to try), it looks like you made a normal box of Jello with milk instead of water. As aforementioned, smelled exactly like extremely putrid milk. I double-checked the ingredient label, and this product contains no dairy derivatives. I wonder what non-dairy substances smell just like expired milk after spending at least 20 years in the pantry.

Lastly, here's what it looked like in motion! This may be the only video of Jello 1-2-3 in existence. A lot of people have made homemade-ish reconstructions (often involving a box of modern-day Jello and a tub of Cool Whip) and filmed it, but this is the actual prefabricated original in all its jiggliness! Apparently gelatin retains its power long after the natural and artificial flavors have decomposed. Anyway, this is both the rarest food-related event yet documented on A Book of Cookrye, and proof that I should not be the one documenting it.

As a final note, I compared the ingredient labels of both the Jello 1-2-3 and a box of normal, non-expired Jello that we had. The only major difference is that 1-2-3 had maltodextrin in it. So if anyone reeeeally wants to recapture what has long ceased production, and the new recipes just don't do it for you, try obtaining some maltodextrin and adding a spoonful to an otherwise factory-standard box of Jello.

I have to reiterate two things in closing. First, none of the previous photos capture how synthetically pink this stuff was--- but you can finally see an honest show of the aggressively pink color in this photo of the splats that dripped from the bowls into the dishwasher.

Second, this really did smell like thirty year old expired food. When I heard the dishwasher start draining, I hastily turned on the kitchen faucet to flush the drain in the sink and make very sure that the foul steam coming from the dishwasher didn't have a chance to re-stink the kitchen. 

In closing, we at A Book of Cookrye do not recommend attempting to reconstitute food products from the last millennium.

Raisin-Coffee Cupcakes or, Finding recipes instead of repairs

Not to get into a typewriter detour again, but they are why I found today's recipe. I was flipping through this person's typewriter repair blog admiring all the pretty pictures of antique machines getting rescued from rust and grime. It's so satisfying to see these derelict machines get taken apart, cleaned for the possibly the first time in this millennium, and then brought back to life. 

On a recent post, she said that her mother had typed the family cookbook on a typewriter just like the one she was currently fixing. She then provided a sample with the note "Midcentury recipes are a window into a mysterious time." With that introduction, I expected something a lot more strange than this:

Source: My Old Typewriter

Raisin Cupcakes 1 c raisins ⅔ c hot coffee ½ tsp cinnamon 1 c sugar ⅔ c shortening ½ tsp baking powder ½ tsp baking soda ½ tsp salt 2 eggs 1½ c flour    Glaze: 1 c powdered sugar ¼ c coffee Heat oven to 350°. Put paper liners in a cupcake pan. Combine raisins, cinnamon, and coffee. Set aside and let stand. Cream shortening, sugar,baking powder, baking soda, and salt, beating until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each. Then add the flour and undrained raisins all at once. Mix just until combined. Fill each cupcake paper about ⅔ full. Bake 20 minutes, or until a toothpick in the center comes out clean. Mine took 40 minutes instead of 20, so be sure to test for doneness before removing from the oven. When they are done, whisk together the glaze ingredients and pour onto the hot cupcakes. It will soak right into them. Let the cupcakes cool, then ice as desired. Note: The recipe claims to yield 2 dozen cupcakes. I got only half that. Source: My Old Typewriter

Before beginning, we had to type out the recipe. Other people can cook with a laptop in the kitchen, but I am too splatter-prone to risk it. I thought it would be cute and rustic to type the recipe in White-Out on a scrap brown paper that was used as padding in a recent delivery. This method of typing may yield photogenic results, but it doesn't work very well and is hard to read. 

My friend has taken to purchasing broken typewriters and reviving them as a meditative hobby. This is his latest.

This recipe is a window into a mysterious time? Not a gelatin mold with whipped cream, fruit, and olives? Not something from the brightly-illustrated pamphlet of exciting ways to serve American cheese and mayonnaise? The only possibly mysterious thing about this cake is the inclusion of coffee-soaked raisins. Granted, the use of shortening instead of butter in cakes has declined a little in recent years, but it's not a mysterious ingredient from bygone days. If no one was using shortening at home, grocery stores wouldn't give it so much shelf space.

And so, we commence with soaking raisins in coffee. The coffeepot contained a surplus from earlier today, and I didn't think stale coffee would break the recipe. But in case hot coffee would help soften the raisins faster, I popped it in the microwave for a bit.

While the raisins got a spa-grade caffeine immersion, we moved on to the mixing bowl where everything was white. I thought about using butter, but we still have shortening leftover from the green velvet cake that crowned the Saint Patcaken.

That white is so unnaturally perfect we could advertise it as "scientifically pure." Before adding the egg, I tasted the synthetically white contents of the bowl. It tasted like knockoff Oreo filling with added grit from the sugar.

At least the egg made it look less preternatural. Heck, the resulting yellow looked downright cheery.

At this point, I couldn't decide whether to separately add the flour and raisins or to just dump everything in. On the one hand, the recipe seems to say that everything goes in all at once. On the other hand, you usually add the flour separately when making cakes. Was separately adding the flour considered too obvious to bother writing down?

Unfortunately, I can't go around to some random stranger's house and ask what their mother meant when writing out a recipe. So, I went with the easiest option. 

After a short time in the unstoppable stand mixer, we had a competent-looking cake batter. It tasted like we had added a lot more complex multilayered flavors than raisins, coffee, and a tiny allowance of cinnamon. We didn't even add vanilla. Also, this cake batter tasted decidedly old-fashioned. It also tasted like it should be in a bundt pan instead of cupcake papers.

Speaking of old-fashioned things, we have previously mentioned that older cupcake pans seem a lot smaller than new ones. We halved this recipe, so we should have gotten one dozen. Instead we got five.

After getting half as many cupcakes as the recipe promised, I thought the recipe typist didn't know how to measure a cupcake. I revised that theory after these needed a lot longer than the 20 minutes claimed in the instructions. Meaning, the oven heat had to penetrate a lot more cake batter per cupcake than the recipe writer allowed for when giving the baking time. Our cupcakes baked for twice as long as originally intended.

I mixed the glaze as originally written, and it was, shall we say, a bit runnier than I expected. The recipe says to moisten the powdered sugar with coffee, not dissolve it.  But using the ingredient amounts specified in the recipe, this happened.

The syrup completely soaked in after a surprisingly short time, leaving only a suggestive glisten on top.

 

We wanted to fix the erroneous icing and put a lovely-looking topping on the cupcakes. Drawing on previous strawberry cake experience, we did not attempt to add powdered sugar to the icing until it thickened. As we have learned, you have to dump half the bag of the stuff into the icing before you see a difference. Instead, we dribbled the icing very slowly into a fresh bowl of sugar. 

We very easily got a lovely glaze, but in retrospect we should have made just a little bit more of it. Also, as we later learned, some people dip cupcakes in glaze instead of trying to drizzle it on. That probably would have looked better than, um, this.

Be very careful where you serve anything dribbled with white glaze.

If we look at a cross section, these cupcakes came out perfectly. You'd think baking cupcakes for forty minutes would ruinously dry them, but you need to trust that toothpick when you jab it into the cake. If it comes out wet, regardless of how long they've been baking, just let them remain in the oven until they are officially done.

At this point I kind of want to tentatively retract my misgivings about the uselessly runny "glaze." The ingredient amounts seemed even more incorrect after it completely soaked into the cake. But that meant the entire cupcake was infused with coffee-flavored syrup. Some of it soaked right into the tops of the cupcakes. The excess syrup ran down the sides and puddled at the bottom of the paper lining, where the cake absorbed it and  took on a lovely coffee flavor on top of everything already in it. 

Apparently a lot of bakeries nowadays squirt syrup on their bare cakes before icing them, so maybe this recipe is ahead of its time. Also, the runny "glaze" that soaked into the cupcakes made it easier to ice them without (gasp!) crumbs. Or at least, it would have been easier to ice them had I bothered to get out a piping bag and do this properly.

Despite the short ingredient list, these cupcakes have a really interesting, complex flavor that suggests that you spent a long time delicately balancing the spices that went into them.  I thought they would taste strongly of coffee, but you can barely recognize it- and that's if you already know it's there. We have already typed up this recipe (this time with actual ink) to keep it.

Sour Cream Spice Cake: or, The innocuous beginning of a stack of old recipes

Free newspaper trials can be dangerous. Some people uncover surprise family skeletons in the marriage and divorce records. I on the other hand spent those three precious days of free access frantically snipping assorted recipes to foist on friends. Today, we're going to make something that passes for normal. We have to gently ease everyone else in the house into the wonderful world of outdated food, so we are making a spice cake.

Sour Cream Spice Cake ⅓ c butter, margarine, or shortening 1 c dark brown sugar 1 egg ⅔ c sour cream ⅓ c water 1 tsp vanilla 1 tsp baking soda 1 tsp cloves ½ tsp nutmeg 2 tsp cinnamon ⅛ tsp salt 2 c flour Heat oven to 350°. Cut a piece of parchment paper to fit a 9" square pan. Grease the pan, press down the paper, and grease it again. Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy in a large bowl. Add the rest of the ingredients and beat well for two minutes. Pour into the prepared pan and bake 25 minutes. Caramel Frosting: 1 c dark brown sugar ⅔ c white sugar 2 tbsp butter 1 c water ½ tsp vanilla Combine everything except the vanilla in a large saucepan (it needs plenty of room to boil up). Cook over high heat to soft ball stage (235° F), stirring constantly. Set aside to cool for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes, beat well until thick and creamy, but still runny enough to easily pour. Quickly pour over and spread on the cake. If the icing has thickened too much to spread, put it back on the stove and stir until it thins again. Source: "Helping the Homemaker" by Louise Bennett Weaver, Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram morning edition, Fort Worth TX, May 3 1933, page 5

This is our first venture into the Louise Bennett Weaver-written "Helping the Homemakers." Unlike Laura Kirkman of Efficient Housekeeping fame, Louise seems to have branched out from newspaper columns and written a substantial number of recipe books. All of her books have a story to tie the recipes together, starring a woman named Bettina. Usually, such story-cookbooks have cute little plots like "Little Clara is visiting her quaint country relatives who show her how to do rustic things and also how to cook the old-fashioned way" or "Eleanor just got married and is hopeless in the kitchen until the friendly women in her neighborhood come to her aid." But Louise Bennett Weaver chose to write all her story-cookbooks about Bettina, a know-it-all housewife who's irritatingly perfect but also too nice to hate. 

Apparently I'm not the only one looking up these books almost a century later; they appear not just on archive websites but on the Kindle store. On a last note, A Thousand Ways to Please the Family (book 2 in the Bettina series) is the only book I have ever seen where they make the copyright notice into a picture.

A Thousand Ways to Please a Family with Bettina's Best Recipes, Louise Bennett Weaver (you can read it online for free here)

Back to today's recipe. I do love how the recipe just calls for "⅓ cup fat." First of all, it's the Depression. If we can't afford butter or lard this week, we can just scrape together a third cup of the drippings from last night's dinner and thus avoid cake deprivation. Second, fat may have been acceptable in the 1930s, but it has since become the dietary demon of the west. No one today is going to brazenly use the word "fat" in an ingredient list.

As you can see, we are opting for shortening instead of butter. We still had a bit of it left from the green velvet cake that crowned the Saint Patcaken, and I hate to permit groceries to go rancid. After scraping the shortening can very well with a rubber spatula, we had exactly one third cup of fat like the recipe calls for. The brown sugar completely camouflaged it after creaming the two together as directed. Can you tell there's any shortening in this bowl?

At this point, the recipe tells us to just dump everything in the bowl and beat it really hard for two minutes. I was going to use the mixer for this, but I saw an ad from the same year as this recipe advertising a stand mixer for $19.95. That's like $425 in the year 2022. I'm going to assume that most housewives couldn't convince their husbands to pay that much for a mixer, especially since they were probably still paying off the sewing machine. 

It's true that a lot of newspaper recipes from this time leave out a lot of instructions in the interest of cramming as much as possible into the limited space. One might think that the housewife of 1933 would be expected to infer that you're not supposed to literally put everything into the bowl all at once. But this one expressly tells us to dump every thing else in and start stirring. I wanted to try this new method that's probably meant to be thoroughly foolproof (if you have the arm strength).

As we started piling all the ingredients in, we noted that this recipe uses a lot of spices. People often complain that food from this time is underseasoned and bland (and often they are correct), but look at how much spice is going into this thing! You should know that despite my usual inclination to dump in spices with a generous hand, I carefully measured these so I could make this recipe as originally intended.

I found it amusing how the blob of sour cream dislodged all the spices and landed with an almost-audible WHOMPH! on the other ingredients.

With my eye on the second hand of the nearest clock, I proceeded to give the ingredients the cement-mixer treatment for the specified two minutes. The batter fought back a lot harder than I expected. Those of you trying this at home will want to use a bigger bowl than I did.

The recipe just says to "pour into a shallow pan" without specifying a size. I wanted to make a square sized cake instead of a huge 9"x13" one, but had some misgivings about possible overflow since I wasn't halving the recipe. But after a short pause for thought, I figured that any extra batter could become a cupcake or two. I needn't have worried about an excess of cake. Upon pouring, it appeared I had placed the cake batter in the correct-sized pan. But seeing how thick it was made me wonder if I had mismeasured something somewhere.

I decided to make the icing right after getting the cake into the oven rather than waiting until it was ready to be bedecked. Usually I don't mix the icing until it's time to apply it so that it doesn't have any time to dry or harden-- and also because I usually spend the entire baking time cleaning away cake-related splatters and smears from the countertops. But this recipe specifically tells us we must cool the icing for 25 minutes before getting it onto the cake. With that in mind, I figured that both icing and cake would be ready at the same time. And if the cake was still a little warm come cake-dressing time, maybe that would help the icing spread over it.

For those keeping track, this recipe puts more sugar on the cake than in it. This icing looks similar to the salted caramel icing from our Patcaken adventure that turned out to be a faulty recipe. You may remember that it turned out unpleasantly greasy from an excess of butter. This recipe only uses a tiny little blob of the stuff.

As I stirred the the pot, I wondered how many people in the 1930s clipped this out of the newspaper and made it at least once. Did anyone save it? How many people spent a (surprisingly) long time stirring a pot of brown sugar water while it boiled into candy so they could put it on this very cake? 

An article tracing the history of various people's family recipes found that most of these edible treasures come from forgotten ads, clippings, and cookbooks. Some people out there may still make this very recipe, not knowing that their mother got it from her mother got it from her grandmother who cut it out of the morning paper. 

After a while, the kitchen smelled a little bit like we were making a war cake.  The pot also looked very similar to the beginnings of a war cake, aside from the absence of raisins.

After cooking the icing to the named temperature, the contents of the pot had turned from sugary water to a syrup that looked about right to pour on one's pancakes. The kitchen also smelled like brown sugar, with an odd and distinctive antique-recipe overtone to it. You could see how thick the syrup was if you gave the pot a quick spoon-swipe.

After the icing has cooled for 20 minutes, the recipe tells us to add vanilla and then beat the icing "until creamy." It seemed pretty thick and creamy before we even started stirring it, but who am I to dispute Louise Bennett Weaver? I'm not the one with an entire book series and a syndicated newspaper column.

Besides, by following the recipe instructions I can be sure that whatever failure I get is absolutely in no way my fault. That's what I often tell myself when things seem a bit odd in a recipe: I can blame the writer if I end up throwing away a big pan of failure after carefully following someone else's instructions. And that's exactly what I expected to do as I kept stirring my pot of brown sludge with no visible change. Then, all of a sudden it started to get lighter in color at a rapid rate.

Soon, it was the color of peanut butter and only barely runnier. This is the first time I have ever made a boiled icing before, and it was looking absolutely divine. If you have never made a boiled icing, you should. Also, you should know that you have about thirty seconds between when it's just creamy enough to spread and when it sets into heartbreakingly perfect fudge.

At least it was a the same color as the cake. That made this whole production look slightly less inept if you gazed upon the vintage magnificence from afar. I scraped a lot of the icing off the top, microwaved it until it melted again, and tried to pour it around the edges. I can't decide if that made the cake look worse, but at least everyone got icing on their piece of cake.

We may have flunked presentation, but this is a really good cake! There's nothing particularly antiquated in the ingredients, but it tasted like a recipe one would get handed down on a brittle paper scrap after everyone else in the family has gotten to make it. It's also very wonderfully effort-free to make--- well, the cake itself is, anyway. The icing clearly will require a few attempts to get right. With that said, the two are made for each other. The cake is really good uniced, but the icing just goes so perfectly with it. 

But I was very disappointed that I failed to ice the cake properly. This seems like one of those techniques that nearly everyone knew until it just sort of fell out of the kitchen. So, I decided to give the icing another go, being very aware that you have about 30 seconds to get it on top of the cake before it hardens. This time, we put it on top of the nun brownies. 

Unfortunately, I got too overenthusiastic about leavening the brownies with the new stand mixer. This brownie recipe has no added leavener, so the only thing that leavens it is your effort as you beat the batter (before adding the flour, of course). Rather than getting out a wooden spoon and treating the batter like it just said a naughty word, I let the mixer run for an extremely long time while I tidied up. The mixture got aerated until it looked (and tasted) like the best chocolate mousse I have ever eaten. I may get pasteurized eggs and do it on purpose. But the point is, the sin of pride struck my well-aerated nun brownies, and they overflowed the pan.

This is what happens when you contravene the instructions of nuns.

But after (badly) trimming away the spillover, we could get it iced. If you don't want to wait 25 minutes for the icing to cool like the recipe says, you can set the whole pot in a pan of cold water and lightly stir it ever few seconds. The water sucks the heat right out of your impending icing.

We poured the icing onto the brownies perhaps a bit early. It puddled right into the center of them. We had to spend a minute or so pushing the icing back onto the edges with a spoon before it suddenly set. And once this icing sets, it shall not be moved. We tried to pour a bit of excess from the pot onto the brownies, and it refused to spread from where it landed.

This icing may require a few practice attempts to get it right. But when you succeed, it's like you coated the cake in caramel fudge. We definitely recommend both the icing and the cake, either separately or together. In closing, I have to share this short article from the same newspaper page.

Radish Relish: or, Raw vegetables in 30 seconds or less

As soon as I dumped these onto a plate, someone said "Ooo, dirt apples!"

Radish Relish 8 oz radishes 4½ tsp sugar 2 tbsp vinegar ¼ tsp salt Wash radishes, then cut off tops and ends. Put radishes, two or three at a time, through food processor. Process until coarsely chopped. Empty the food processor between batches so they don't get too finely ground. Mix with other ingredients. It's ready to eat as soon as it's made. Keep refrigerated. This relish has the short shelf life of chopped fresh vegetables. If you won't be using all the radish relish in only a few days, reduce how much you make. Source: Mrs. William H Ridgway, West Bay Street box 196, Barnegat, New Jersey, Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, 21 June 1935 morning edition, p. 12

I had to find out if "radish relish" is as fun to make as it is to say. This recipe comes to us from Mrs. William H Ridgeway of Barnegat, New Jersey. During our thrilling weekend of binge-clipping recipes on a free Newspapers.com trial, I was a little annoyed that most of the ones I found were from syndicated columns. Sure, test kitchens put out some lovely things that make their way onto many tables, but what if I want actual recipes from nonprofessional people's houses? 

It turns out the Philadelphia Inquirer has all the amateur-derived recipes I could want! The newspaper had a weekly recipe exchange, and printed two full pages (minus the ads) of recipes every week. You want recipes from ordinary people? The Philadelphia Inquirer will give you so many you choke on them! If your submission was good enough to get printed in the weekly Recipe Exchange, you got a $2.00 basket of groceries from the store of your choice. That's about $50 of groceries in the Year of Our Pandemic 2022. 

Philadelphia Inquirer morning edition, November 3 1935, p. 42

Radish relish looked like a nice introduction to making your own pickles because you don't actually do any home pickling. You simply grind and mix ingredients. I should note that we at A Book of Cookrye rarely eat radishes. I would say that we're like most people in that respect, but radishes wouldn't have so much shelf space in the supermarket if no one eats them.

As much as I like shoving things through the meat grinder, I unfortunately do not have it in my possession. But I do have access to its motorized equivalent:

I was ready to say that I had reduced the radishes to confetti in less than a minute, but a lot of large chunks revealed themselves among the magenta radish granules.

I should have just let the big radish bits be. By the time they were pulverized, everything else was almost a paste.

We finished the rest of this recipe finished in thirty seconds. One merely stirs in the vinegar, and--- Did you know that radishes change color on contact with vinegar? You can see the radishes at the bottom of the jar changing color while the vinegar puddles around them.

Is it hard to see in that picture? Well, here are a spoonful scraped off the sides of the food processor and one that had gotten acidulated when I dumped in the vinegar.

But enough about the chemistry of radishes, because Mrs. William Ridgway now directs us to add a small amount of sugar. I didn't think three tablespoons was a lot until I saw it mounded on top of the radishes.

The refrigerator smelled like radishes only two hours after I put this jar in it, and I had to transfer the radish relish to something more airtight.

Our finished radish relish tasted like bread-and-butter pickles, but with the flavor of radishes instead of cucumbers. I did think it was a bit bland, though. Radish relish will lubricate your sandwich, but it won't add a lot of flavor to it. I'm surprised we didn't have some dill in this-- or any other spices.

But let's get to the real problem of this recipe--- it makes a lot of radish relish. Two cups may not be a lot of chocolate chips, but it is an unbelievable amount of pulverized radishes. (You will notice that I cut the recipe in half when I typed it out.) Unless you have a lot of radish lovers in your house, you will find yourself trying to shove radish relish into every ill-advised food you can spoon it into before it expires. You will decide that peanut butter and pickle sandwiches were good enough that peanut butter and radish relish sounds like a good lateral substitution (don't do this). You will dump radish relish on every plate of hot vegetables in the hope that it will substitute for other seasonings.

I really wanted to like radish relish. It has a stunning magenta color you almost never get without artificial coloring. It's easy to make. Even at pandemic prices, it's very cheap. I've been trying to eat more vegetables, and radish relish seemed like a nice low-effort way to add variety to them. Plus, since you don't cook the radish relish, all those precious water-soluble vitamins don't dissipate in steam.

But, this relish does not have enough vinegar to preserve it. We opened the jar about a week after making it, and thirty seconds later someone across the house shouted "What's that smell?"

Short shelf life aside, I think the real fault lies not with the recipe, but with the radishes we tried to relish. I've gotten radishes from farmer's markets that were almost spicy enough to burn- like biting into fresh ginger. I think that pepperiness would have made this radish relish perfect. I don't think Mrs. Ridgway left out the seasonings to keep the radish relish politely bland. I think it was because the radishes one would purchase in 1935 would be flavorful enough on their own. The watery modern radishes we naively bought for relish-making were just too bland to live up to the recipe's intentions. 

With all that said, I tried a big smear of it on a ham sandwich. It does add a bit of extra flavor, but it tasted less like pickle relish and more like sweet hummus-- which is better than I expected after eating a spoonful of the radish relish on its own.

I wish the radish relish was as flavorful as it was pretty. It even made the jar look like shower gel when I emptied and rinsed it.

We will be revisiting this recipe if we get properly peppery radishes.