Virginia Potato Bread: Indeed, we all preferred it to the cake

We've trusted random people who submit to the Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, but now it's time to bring in professionals.

Virginia Potato Bread 1½ cup mashed potatoes 2½ tbsp butter or shortening ½ cup milk ¼ cup sugar 1½ tsp salt 1 egg ½ envelope (or 1⅛ tsp) dry yeast About 3½ cups flour In a large, microwave-safe bowl or a large saucepan, scald the milk. Stir in the shortening until it is melted. Then stir in the sugar and allow to cool to 80°. Whisk in the mashed potatoes, egg, and yeast. Then stir in enough flour to make a firm, workable dough. (It should be supple, not crumbly.) Knead for 15 minutes. Rinse the bowl, wipe it dry, grease it, and place the dough back in it. Then spritz the top of the dough with cooking spray, or brush with oil or melted shortening. (This helps prevent the dough from crusting over.) Put the dough in a warm, draft-free place and allow to rise for three hours. Punch or knead down, then allow to rise one hour more. Place the dough on a floured board and shape into a loaf. Place in a well-greased loaf pan and let rise 45 minutes. When ready to bake, heat oven to 375°. Bake for 30 minutes. Then reduce heat to 350° and bake 20 minutes more. Note: If using leftover homemade mashed potatoes, you can eliminate any tiny spud lumps by putting the potatoes in a blender with the milk and the egg. Note 2: This is halved from the original recipe. Note 3: Check whether your bread is baked a lot earlier than you may think! Mine was done after 30 minutes. "Ask Mrs. Wilson," Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, March 4 1919, page 14

That pudding recipe is already on my list of things to make.

A decade or two before the Philadelphia Inquirer trusted its readers to come up with their own recipes for the weekly Recipe Exchange, the Philadelphia newsreading public had Mrs. Wilson, a former "personal cuisiniere to Queen Victoria." After she was done with Buckingham Palace, she apparently returned to the United States and wrote for the newspaper. As she proudly listed on the title page of her cookbook, she was also a home economics teacher for the University of Virginia and a cooking instructor for the U.S. Navy. 

Here's the photograph that introduced her to everyone reading the newspaper. She looks ready to take on the people of the greater Philadelphia area, don't you think?

Apparently Mrs. Wilson was an early pioneer in the art of being a multimedia cooking expert, because outside of her newspaper column she made short films demonstrating recipes that were quite the event in the Philadelphia movie theaters. Or maybe the theater owners wanted to come up with more reasons to get the public to come in on weekday afternoons. At any rate, little announcements like this regularly appear under her headlines.

Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, September 29 1919, page 12

Mrs. Wilson wrote all her introductory articles and gave her recipes in a crisp, home-economics-teacher style. Similarly, her recipes often seem to come out of an early-1900s domestic science textbook. Each page begins with a short article and a few recipes Mrs. Wilson thinks we need this week. The rest of the page is given to answering reader's questions. All of the reader questions are written in a flattering tone, opening with "My dear Mrs. Wilson," which according to basic secretarial practice is the standard salutation for informal correspondence. 

All of Mrs. Wilson's answers are bluntly terse (but in a ladylike way). She also does not repeat recipes, ever. Whenever someone writes in asking for a recipe that she published, she tells them to go to the newspaper office and have someone pull the relevant backissue for them. Have a look at how she knocks out four questions in one short paragraph.

At least Dear Abby reprints the pecan pie recipe every year.

Take a look at how politely she prepared one hopeful reader for disappointment.

Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, June 23 1919, page 14

 

I love how quickly we collectively ditched the cooking fireplace as soon as the kitchen stove hit the mass market. Only two generations earlier, fellow Philadelphian Miss Leslie's best-selling cookbooks taught how to cook everything on a fireplace. By the time Mrs. Wilson had a newspaper contract, she apparently couldn't even say something like "If your kitchen still has that old-fashioned thing your grandmother used..." By 1919, we already had electric stoves. 

Indeed, even the curt Mrs. Wilson praised the modern electric "fireless cooker" as enthusiastically as I endorse the dishwasher. "Fireless cookers" were considered the most modern way to cook in the early 1900s. They were sort of the forerunners of the countertop slow cooker. Fireless cookers were airtight boxes that were so insulated as to barely need any heat (say, a single oil lamp) to slowly cook food over several hours. To people used to cooking over blazing coal stoves or wood fireplaces, fireless cookers must have been a welcome change.

For our first attempt at one of Mrs. Wilson's recipes, we're making potato bread! Ms. H.L.S., the person who wrote in to request the recipe, says that "The bread itself was snow white and fine; delicious as any white mountain cake I have ever tasted. Indeed, we all preferred it to the cake," which is a bold claim. We had to find out. At the beginning of the recipe, you're supposed to mash your own potatoes and then force them through a sieve to eliminate absolutely all the lumps. We at A Book of Cookrye have an easier way to make perfectly smooth mashed potatoes:

I don't think Mrs. Wilson would object to using instant potato flakes instead of boiling and sieving the spuds for ourselves. In the preface of her cookbook (which you can download and read for free here), she writes that "economical, palatable food is within your reach if you will discard the ideas and methods of long ago. Remember, you would not prefer to ride in a horse car, as a means of conveyance, so why use the recipes of those days?"

Perfectly smooth, without resorting to a sieve.

Speaking of moving our cooking techniques out of the horsedrawn days, we did the milk-heating and shortening-melting business without even touching the stove! As previously discussed, the microwave can do so many things in the kitchen if you just let it.

We needed to cool the milk back down lest the yeast get cooked before it can raise the bread. In the pre-dishwasher days (which I am so glad are behind me), I would have done the milk-scalding in the same big bowl I would use for the whole bread recipe. But since it is nearly no extra effort to place an additional cup with the other dirty dishes in the machine, I could scald the milk in its own little container and then pour it into a stone-cold mixing bowl. After thirty seconds of swishing the milk in the bowl, we were ready to, as the kids apparently say, get this bread.

At this stage, this recipe looked a lot like Elizabeth's Rolls. Both of them start off with a thin, gravy-like batter that involves mashed potatoes and yeast. The recipes diverge at this point, where Mrs. Wilson tells us to add all of the flour at once instead of adding only a small part of the flour and letting the yeast have a feast before adding the rest.

At this point, we are directed to knead this dough for fifteen minutes. That is a long time to spend working dough. At first I thought it was a mistype of 5 minutes. However, while someone in the Evening Ledger's typesetting department may have absent-mindedly grabbed two numerals out of a type drawer, I doubt they would have picked up and set all the letters required to spell the word "fifteen" without realizing the mistake. Therefore, I kneaded the dough for fifteen minutes as directed. The dough felt so right while kneading. It was warm, wonderfully soft, supple, and--- well, it felt like a big hug for my hands. Towards the end of the fifteen minutes, the dough actually got springy and snappy in a way that boded very well for the recipe. This is only our first recipe from Ask Mrs. Wilson, and so far, her directions are correct down to the last tick of the clock.

After kneading, we are directed to let the bread rise for three hours. I didn't think we would need such a long time because of our newfound method of heating up the oven with a pot of boiled water. (Obviously, people have been using this method for a long time, but it took me until last year to find out about it for myself.) But after 45 minutes, the dough looked resolutely unchanged, with barely a suggestion of puffiness. Even though it looked like I had just wasted time and flour, I figured it couldn't hurt to just leave the dough where I parked it.

Indeed, after three hours, the bread dough decided spring to yeasty life! I have to again give Mrs. Wilson credit: so far her recipe works and her times are correct. This doesn't always happen. We've long learned that just because a recipe is in print doesn't mean that it will work. But behold how much this bread decided to rise while I wasn't looking!

Mrs. Wilson directs us to punch or knead the dough down and then return it to its cozy leavening nest for another hour. When I punched the dough down, it felt so dang nice in my hands- it was soft and yet still springy from the extra-long kneading. I've never had bread dough that felt so satisfying to handle. I had my doubts that it would rise again in one hour when last time it needed thrice that. But sure enough, our bread was marvelously airy in exactly the time Mrs. Wilson specified. It seemed less like risen bread dough and more like a delicate foam.

At this point, Mrs. Wilson's recipe gets less precise than it had been heretofore. She just says "mold into loaves and then place in well-greased pans." How many loaves should we be making? How big should they be? Does she mean freestanding loaves that you bake on flat metal sheets, or do we need loaf pans to keep the bread from turning into a flat dough puddle? If one reads the sentence slowly, one notices that she says to place IN pans, not ON them. I figured that no one bakes things IN a flat cookie sheet, so I got out a loaf pan.

While the bread is rising, I would like to make a short point about how much I love dishwashers. I've often mentioned that I hate pre-rinsing dishes and refuse to ever do it. This brings us to the aftermath of this recipe, which was piled up in the sink. As anyone who makes bread knows, you have a gummy, hard, paste-like residue on the bowl that requires hard scouring to get off. However, I just put the bowl upside-down on the dishwasher rack looking like this:

You may think I found cooked-on dough clumps after the dishwasher finished its cycle, but the bowl cameo out perfect and spotless. As I have often said, Life is too wonderful to spend it doing the dishwasher's work for it. It's a dishWASHER, not a dish-BAPTIZER. Don't rinse and scrub the dishes before putting them in the machine. It will get them clean while you do literally anything else.

Let us now return to the recipe! Mrs. Wilson's rising times are extraordinarily accurate. I can't put microbes on tight schedule, but apparently Mrs. Wilson can. At this point, I just trusted the former personal cuisiniere to Queen Victoria, set a timer for 45 minutes, and left it. Indeed, the bread had risen to the perfect height and was ready to bake after 45 minutes.

Those of you keeping track will note that the bread had been rising for almost 5 hours at this point. Obviously the long rising time wasn't a bother- it's not like I spent 5 hours working away. However, others in the house had minor objections to how long the bread spent minding its own yeast business. Someone said "You know what I hate about bread? It smells so good but you can't have it yet!"

Fortunately for everyone in the house, the bread was done long before Mrs. Wilson claimed it would be. I don't blame her for the incorrect timing since I left the pan of dough in the oven while it heated up instead of removing it for preheating purposes. After the making the house smell so good for half the day, everyone was ready to cut into this barely after removing it from the oven.

I should note that when I tried to cut it into thin slices, the bread did not let that happen. (Maybe I need a freshly sharpened bread knife.) 

However, when you cut it into slices that almost qualify for Texas Toast, which incidentally I did not first encounter in Texas.

The crust on this crackled when I cut it. The inside was so beautifully fluffy. This tastes like what you hope for when someone says they're bringing homemade bread. If you want to make homemade bread that tastes like you've been baking for years but you haven't, definitely give this recipe a go! At first, I expressed the thought that I should have put the bread dough in a muffin pan instead of making a loaf that would go stale before we ate it all. My attempt at practicality was defeated with one sharp question: "But how could we make sandwiches with it?"

And while this bread is so delicious that you could just stand over the cutting board and eat it as you slice more off, it also makes delicious sandwiches. It also made the best grilled cheese I've had in a long time. 

We will definitely be revisiting this bread recipe- and perhaps often. The long time it spends rising doesn't bother me because I don't even need to stay in the house! This is easily the best white bread I've made aside from Elizabeth's rolls. Which, come to think of it, both of them contain mashed potatoes. Maybe every truly great bread needs spuds.

Baked Tomato Omelet: It's got layers!

Sometimes it's so hard to imagine how a recipe would come out that you just have to make it.

Baked Tomato Omelet 6 eggs, separated 2 cups milk 1 tbsp butter 1 tbsp flour ¾ cup canned tomato soup Pinch of salt Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9" round pan. Warm the milk and melt the butter in it. Or, put the butter and milk in a large bowl or cup. Microwave them, stirring after every 20 seconds, until the butter melts. Be sure that the bowl has a lot of empty space in case the milk boils up. Beat the egg yolks in a large bowl, then whisk in the flour. Add salt. Slowly pour in the milk mixture, whisking hard the whole time. Beat the egg whites almost until stiff. They should rise up in peaks, but not quite hold a point. Fold them into everything else. Then gently stir in the soup. Pour into the pan and bake 20 minutes. It should puff up and rise up a lot. If it doesn't, bake it longer. Serve immediately. Note: We suggest dividing the mixture into individual-sized baking dishes instead of baking it in one big pan and slicing it up. Also, we recommend lightly sprinkling the top with salt before baking. Mrs. John Morton, 4468 Salmon St, Philadelphia PA, Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, October 4 1935, p 12

I've taken to making omelets a lot lately. It's oddly satisfying when it goes right, and you get a good batch of scrambled eggs if the omelet goes awry. Like many people, I only know of one way to make omelets, and it involves the stovetop.

Incidentally, this omelet is made as Fanny Cradock does. She added "little flecks of butter" to the eggs, which are supposed to melt after the eggs begin to set. In theory, this creates "layers of golden cushion." In reality, I couldn't tell the difference when I made another one without the butter inclusions. But if it wasn't for watching Fanny Cradock videos, I wouldn't know how to make eggs do this.

Anyway, I've never heard of baking an omelet before. At first I imagined that one pours the beaten eggs onto a pan and slides it into the oven, much like if one were to bake pancakes instead of making them in a frying pan. But Mrs. John Morton's directions looked a lot more complicated. We decided that a pleasantly chilly evening is a good time to expand my omelet knowledge.

As I was whisking the flour into the yolks, I was thinking "Why isn't this in a double boiler?" It feels like we should be making a stovetop custard, except Mrs. John Morton has us baking it instead. 

The floured egg yolks took on a whimsically bright tone of yellow after we got the flour in. It looks like I could use this mixture to paint a nursery.

Meanwhile, our milk was ready. I think the microwave is seriously underrated for a lot of scorch-prone cooking tasks like scalding milk, and I am very surprised that so few people realize how much easier cooking gets when you're not constantly doing your rubber-spatula best on a saucepan over a low flame. 

We've swung all the way to the opposite of where microwaves started when they entered the home. At first, they were going to replace that outdated "conventional oven," and manufacturers gamely tried to prove that you could ditch the big oven and microwave everything you would have baked. As someone who likes recreationally going to thrift shops (sometimes they're like museums where you're actually allowed to touch everything), I've seen a lot of glossy hardcover microwave cookbooks. All of them are published by microwave manufacturers, all of them claim you can use the microwave to make everything from grilled salmon to a layer cake with custard filling, and all of them are tellingly pristine-looking, with nary an errant splat. Obviously, no amount of mouth-watering color photographs could make the microwave replace the stove.

Later, we collectively realized that while microwaves were honestly rather bad for most cooking, they were absolutely wonderful at reheating leftovers and TV dinners. As those are the most unglamorous things anyone does in the kitchen (even stirring a packet of Kool-Aid gets more respect), the microwave became something that everyone had but you were supposed to be embarrassed about using. I've seen a lot of older houses where the kitchen has an outlet over a closet shelf or in the most hidden corner of the room, so that the microwave could be easily concealed when company came over.

All of this to say, we generally think of microwaves as a means of reheating, but I think they're far better than the stove for things like heating up anything that loves to scorch on the bottom of a pot. Unless you leave milk the microwave for so long that it boils over and goes dry, it simply cannot burn. Also, we only had to make room in the dishwasher for an extra cup, not a saucepan.

Well, I spent longer writing about scalding milk in the microwave than I actually spent scalding it in the microwave-- though not as long as if I'd done it on the stove. At any rate, we slowly poured the milk into the egg yolks, whisking furiously as we went. This is the first time I've tempered egg yolks without someone else slowly pouring in the hot liquid. Like the first time I jump-started a car without someone else to help clip on the cables, it was daunting at first but went perfectly fine. You just have to pour a small splash of hot milk in at a time, and immediately stir as hard as you for a few seconds. After we had all the milk mixed in, we had so much froth that it looked like we might not need to bother beating the egg whites stiff at all. 

I have to note that this recipe goes together very quickly in this millennium, where an electric mixer can be had for the price of two frozen dinners and the milk can be scalded in less time than you need to steep a pot of tea. I'm sure that even if you're using a hand-cranked eggbeater and a saucepan, you could still make one of these pretty quickly (though either way, you have to wash a lot of bowls after).

In Mrs. John Morton's time, this mixer would have cost as much as a car engine.

I thought when we folded the egg whites into the rest of our ingredients, we would have a uniform, well-aerated mixture. Instead, we didn't have enough egg foam to completely mix with everything. The bubbles kept floating to the top. So it looks like this "baked omelet" is more of a multilayered sponge pudding.

In addition to being really cheap even with pandemic prices, you can get this thing put together really quickly if you lay out all your ingredients and bowls at the beginning. Only six minutes after separating the eggs, we were ready to stir in the tomato soup and bake this. 

Speaking of tomato soup, this recipe doesn't use much of it. The original recipe uses only half a can of it. Since we cut it down to a third (two eggs seemed like a much better serving size), that means we're only using a sixth of a can of tomato soup in this. Because I didn't want to waste the rest of it, I discovered that tomato soup is really good drizzled over anything baked with cheddar cheese on top.

As you can see, our tomato omelet isn't tomato-colored at all. It doesn't even contain enough tomato to turn it a slight pink. But never mind those quibbles, it's time to bake!

After 20 minutes, it looked like really puffy bread and smelled rather nice. Who would have guessed you can make something so pretty with eggs, milk, and a can of soup?

When I pulled it out of the oven, the top layer had practically extruded out of the baking dish.

To Mrs. John Morton's credit, this was golden and perfect-looking after baking exactly 20 minutes as specified. But you should know that she wasn't kidding when she wrote to "serve immediately." That big golden puff-cloud barely lasted long enough to snap a photograph. In less than two minutes, it had deflated dramatically. But when we cut into it, we found a custard that had set so perfectly that even the strictest home economics teacher would approve. It was almost but not quite like a gelatin. I haven't made a baked custard that came out so perfectly in a long time.

I did not expect the tomato to separate out into a pink layer on the bottom, but it's very pretty to look at.

As for the taste, this is basically a plain quiche in fancy clothes. I thought it needed a lot more tomato. It tasted like perfectly nice scrambled eggs. I liked it, but I also felt misled. Mrs. John Morton and the Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange promised me tomatoes, and instead we got barely a hint of them. But with that said, this was pretty good. And because I always like an excuse to wield an electric mixer, I've made this a few times when the oven was already heated up for something else. 

I will end with a quick note on baking times. If the foam hasn't made a dramatic rise, the custard is still nothing but a hot runny mess. I took this out of the oven at 20 minutes precisely, even though the top was puffy but not yet a massive airy cloud. The custard underneath was as watery as when I put it in the oven.

But if you find your baked omelet isn't firmed up yet, you can just pop it back into the oven and it'll be fine. Wait until it almost looks like the puffy top layer has practically extruded from the pan, and your omelet will be perfect.

Autumn Vegetable Melts: or, Extravagant oven use

When no one's around to complain about the smell, it's time for onions!

I know that the note above the recipe seems hilariously snooty. "If you can't get Humble bread, search out a wood-oven-baked, naturally leavened olive loaf from a local baker." But for context, this recipe was part of a feature of local food-related businesses. They used this sandwich recipe to spotlight a bakery on Prince Edward Island. You should also know that we don't have anyone running wood-fired ovens on a semi-industrial scale here, so we purchased rye bread from the supermarket.

Autumn Vegetable Melts 1 small eggplant 1 medium zucchini 1 large red bell pepper 1 large yellow bell pepper (or just use two bell peppers of the same color) 2 to 3 tbsp (30-45 mL) olive oil* 4 large, thin slices of red onion 2 unpeeled garlic cloves ½ c (⅛ liter) packed arugula, finely chopped ¼ c (6 cL) mayonnaise 4 slices rye bread† 8 oz (25 dag) sliced mozzarella, or 2 cups (5 dL) shredded mozzarella Heat oven to 450°F/230°C. Line two large baking sheets with foil.‡ Cut eggplant crosswise into ¼" (½ cm) slices. Cut the zucchini lengthwise into 8 slices, also about ¼" or ½ cm thick. Arrange eggplant, zucchini, and bell peppers on baking sheets in a single layer, spritzing both sides with cooking spray. Separate the onion slices into rings, spritz both sides with cooking spray also. Season everything with salt and pepper. Keep the vegetables sorted instead of mixing them on the pan. They'll be done at different times, and you'll want to easily remove some of them while leaving the rest to bake longer. Rub the garlic cloves with oil and place on one of the baking sheets. Roast vegetables for about 30 minutes, rotating the pans about halfway through the baking time. Start checking them for doneness a lot earlier than you think. Remove vegetables from the pans as they're done, and let them cool slightly. Leave the oven on. While the vegetables are baking, lightly toast the bread if desired. Squeeze the garlic cloves out their skins into a small bowl. Mash with a fork. Stir in the arugula and mayonnaise, then season with salt and pepper to taste. Set aside 8 slices of cheese (or 15 dL shredded). To assemble, spread one side of each bread slice with the arugula mayonnaise. Layer about one third of the vegetables on the bread. Add one half of the remaining cheese. Repeat these layers, ending with the vegetables. Top with the reserved cheese. Bake 5-10 minutes, or until vegetables are hot and the cheese is bubbling. If desired, broil for 1-2 minutes to brown the tops. Serve with a knife and fork. *or cold-pressed seed oil †or rye-olive bread if you want to strictly follow the original ‡The original recipe tells you to line the pans with parchment paper. Don't do this unless you like playing with fire. Source: Food and Drink, autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

I was drawn to this recipe for two reasons. One, I've been trying to add more vegetables to my daily food without being punitively healthy, and two, it looked pretty simple to make. As you can see, we don't have to spend a lot of time cutting vegetables into tiny square-shaped pieces. Heck, we don't have to tediously peel anything.

And so, with everything ready, we checked our recipe and heated the oven to a far hotter temperature than I ever feel safe using. Purely for a safety check, I decided to see how hot this oven goes. It kind of reassured me that the oven is theoretically capable of keeping itself together a hundred degrees hotter than we're about to use it. Maybe I'm being paranoid, but I didn't want to burn the house down with Canadian food.

Speaking of housefires, we are instructed to heat the oven to 450° and then line the pans with paper. Anyone who stayed awake during English literature class can tell you the temperature at which paper spontaneously ignites:

Ray Bradbury is literally the only reason we didn't set the oven on fire. Maybe Canadian recipe writers wouldn't recognize this impending act of culinary arson because they use Celsius over there. After all, Ray Bradbury didn't write a famous novel called Celsius 232.7.

Having put the vegetables on aluminum foil (not paper!) and started baking them, let's get to the arugula mayonnaise. This is the first time I have ever purchased arugula unless you count mixed greens.  I always thought these leaves were dandelion greens.

I remember arugula having quite a moment as the target of food ire. Arugula held the same place of food spite that quiche did in the 1980s and that soy would take in the 2010s. Arugula was alleged to be the food of sissies, of people who went to health food stores, of weirdos who wanted to ban fried chicken, and those icky icky hipsters with their bicycles and their man-buns. 

The term "fragile masculinity" hadn't entered public consciousness yet, but men who suffered from it went into passionate man-fits at the mere mention of arugula on a restaurant menu. Later on, tofu would relieve arugula of its burden as the food of people who hate mayonnaise and all that's right with America. Anyway, since we've collectively moved on from bashing arugula-eaters for destroying all that is good and deep-fried, arugula now sits unremarkably among the salad greens.

After paying for an entire box of out-of-date hipster-bait, I can tell you that... arugula tastes like diluted watercress dipped in dirt. I was not thrilled about having to find ways to eat an entire 8-ounce tub of arugula and like it. Granted, most salad greens aren't particularly delightful on their own, hence the practice of slathering them with gobs of dressing and then piling on cheese.

On top of being stuck with a half-pound of salad greens that I had just discovered I don't like, the recipe tells us to mix our arugula with mayonnaise. And I have to tell you that the slimy mayo and the bitter salad greens..... somehow taste really good together. Somehow their flavors add up beautifully. It's like spinach-and-cheese only more so. Suddenly I understand why older recipes call mayonnaise "salad dressing." I am not kidding when I say I would smear this arugula-mayo on cold sandwiches all the dang time. Next time you get a tub of mixed salad greens, fish out the arugula leaves, chop them, and mix them with salted and peppered mayo. It's that good.

In case you think I'm overstating how much I liked the arugula mayo, I later made another batch (this time I didn't bother roasting the garlic) and put it on noodles. It's like pesto, except all your Italian friends would faint.

Back to our Canadian sandwiches. Things started to smell good in only two minutes. We weren't even done snipping the arugula into tiny pieces yet, and certainly hadn't mixed in the mayonnaise. First, the kitchen smelled wonderfully like vegetables. Then the odor of pepper hid everything else. I got a huge fright when a great plume of smoke coming out of the oven vent, as if it was the chimney over a merrily burning fireplace. Then, to my great relief, I realized it was steam instead.

Sooner than expected, the garlic was ready to remove. As promised in the directions, you can just squeeze it out of the peel. The garlic had turned into a sticky paste.

I don't think this recipe was originally meant for the home. It's almost absurd to fire up the oven this hot just for two pans of vegetables. The directions make more sense if you imagine a restaurant where the cooks simply slide a pan of vegetables between the pizzas. Furthermore, baking the garlic then mashing it would be a great choice if you had a large batch of them, but feels a bit silly when it's just one person at home.

I couldn't stop being nervous about running the oven at such a high temperature. I don't know why I get nervous about setting the oven this hot for baking. After all, the oven gets a lot hotter when it cleans itself, and I have often started a cleaning cycle and then left the house all afternoon.

I expected to find the vegetables nearly done after just ten minutes, but at that point they looked like they were only beginning to cook- even though they smelled like they were already done. However, and I blame the recipe for only giving a half-sentence mention of this, the vegetables were not all fully cooked at the same time. When the bell peppers were perfect, the onions were unsalvageable. I'm sorry Canada, I guess your recipes are too complex for someone who went to school in the US. 

Nothing but greasy charcoal here!

We had to cut up another onion and bake it all by itself. Even though we didn't burn it, the onion shrank a lot.

Well, we didn't burn down the house cooking zucchini.

Don't those half-burnt vegetables look Instagram-ready? 

While we're on the subject of near-incinerated plants, I should note that if your kitchen doesn't have a ducted vent, you will live with the smell of vegetables for a few days. The smell drifted all over the house, and remained in little pockets long after the general draftiness had taken most of it away. Long after the rest of the house was odor-free, I went upstairs and found that it smelled like someone had set up a grill in the bathroom. For the next day or so, I would be doing random things and walk right into a little corner of the house that still smelled powerfully like roasted vegetables.

At this point, we were almost ready for assembly. I'll just point out that so far we have spent almost half an hour... on sandwiches. The recipe's easy enough, but I always thought you slapped together sandwiches in thirty seconds or less... and toasted them if you feel a bit fancy. 

Speaking of, we are directed to toast the bread. As if we didn't heat up the kitchen enough keeping the oven high enough to almost singe the Teflon off the pan, we now drag the countertop appliances into the war against the air conditioning. Also, between the bread factory, our toaster, and the oven after we have these sandwiches put together, we're going to end up with thrice-baked bread.

To the recipe writers' credit, we're supposed to make this in the autumn-- in Canada. I'm sure this would cozy up a kitchen very nicely instead of make one reach for a fan. Anyway, toasting the bread hardened it a lot. Should sliced bread be able to rock back and forth?

They don't call it "shit on a shingle" for nothing.

The bread wasn't the only thing roasted to a hard crisp. Some of the eggplant slices were doing a passable imitation of potato chips.

All right, it's finally time to stack our supper together! We start with our delightful tooth-threatening rye toast.

We then apply our unexpectedly-delicious arugula mayonnaise. As aforesaid, if you take nothing else from this recipe, give the arugula mayo a try. After that, we mound on the onions like a heap of spaghetti.

Oh delicious onions. I love you so.

As we stacked the vegetables on, things got precarious. I almost had to get out toothpicks.

We also had some surplus eggplant slices that we simply could not stack onto these things. I don't fault the recipe for this, since it specifies "one small eggplant" in the ingredient list before I halved everything. However, this meant we had to figure out what to do with them to prevent waste.

I ended up baking them a few nights later with spaghetti sauce and cheese on top. I only note this because eggplant Parmigiana confused everyone else in the house. "So it's a lasagna with eggplants in it? Why would you do that? We have lasagna noodles in the cabinet right there!" I got a similar response when I made 1970s-style moussaka. No one wanted to share the eggplant Parmigiana with me, even though it had cheese on top.

Moving back to the sandwiches, the oven heat took longer than I thought to penetrate them to the center. You'd think a blazing-hot oven would cook our dinner near-instantly, but we had to wait for these things to warm up.

While the centers of these vegetable mounds may have required a lot of time to get hot, the cheese shreds got crispy and browned before they had time to melt. 

The recipe says to serve this with "grilled meat or poultry on the side," and as it happens we had leftover chicken. Since this recipe comes from Canada, I put the leg and thigh on the plate in one piece as so many places in Canada do.

American chicken doesn't require so much use of a knife and fork.

It's like I'm in the beautiful north again! After this lovely feast, I just wanted to put on my babushka and my warmest coat and rent ice skates on the Rideau Canal.

Did you think I was kidding about the babushka?

I've noticed that a lot of vegetable recipes in this magazine involve baking your plant matter in a near-searing oven. And if it's chilly out, I definitely recommend it. It's hard to find a reason not to like roasted vegetables with cheese on top.

The leftovers microwaved better than I thought they would. True, the cheese wasn't so nice and crispy as it was the first time, but you could definitely make a surplus of these and put the extras away for another day.

 In conclusion, these take a lot longer than a sandwich should- but aside from having a slice of bread underneath them, they're not really sandwiches anyway. They are, however, really lovely. It turns out that baking vegetables in a superheated oven seems to make them a lot more delicious than boiling ever could. And once you add melted, crispy-golden cheese, these are far better than anyone who ever heard a grim "eat your vegetables" could ever believe. Next time it's cold out, I definitely recommend stacking vegetables on rye bread because it's delicious.