Pieathlon the Third: Chocolate "Pie"

Guess what today is!

I was really excited about this. After all, last year we at A Book of Cookrye got rhubarb and strawberries. Granted, the year before we got an utter travesty of food, but that was a thrilling, frightening adventure. This year's recipe is perfectly timed, for we at A Book of Cookrye have been eating way too much spaghetti and brownies! And what should we receive this year to make but a lovely, slimming dessert from our friendly friends at Weight Watchers?
This recipe comes to us courtesy of Surly over at Vintage Recipe Cards, who sends it with this note:

I'm a horrible person. We know that.  Which is why I will not apologize for this submission.

This recipe looks relatively innocent. What could she have to not apologize for when sending it? It kinda looks like frozen pudding with some blobs of Cool Whip dumped on top. How bad could it be?

Chocolate "Pie"  2 slices enriched white bread toasted and made into crumbs 1 envelope unflavored gelatin Artificial sweetener to equal 6 teaspoons for sugar, divided 1/4 teaspoon salt, divided 2 medium eggs, separated 2 cups skim milk 1 tablespoon chocolate extract 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract 1/2 teaspoon imitation butter flavoring Green and red food coloring  Press crumbs on bottom and sides of 8-inch pie pan. Bake at 350°F, 10 minutes, until browned. Cool. Combine gelatin, sweetener to equal 4 teaspoons of sugar, and 1/8 teaspoon salt in saucepan. Beat yolks slightly; mix with milk. Add yolk mixture to gelatin mixture. Cook over low heat stirring constantly, until gelatin is dissolved. Remove from heat. Stir in extracts, butter flavoring, and food coloring to make mixture chocolate brown. Cool, stirring occasionally. Spoon into crust. Chill until set. Beat egg whites until frothy. Add remaining sweetener and remaining salt. Beat until mixture stands in peaks. Spoon on pie in 4 equal mounds. Broil until meringue is lightly browned. Serve at once or well chilled. Divide evenly. Makes 2 servings. (Weight Watchers® Members: Supplement as required.)  Copyright © Weight Watchers International, Inc. 1974. All rights reserved. Printed in U.S.A.

Thank you, Surly of Vintage Recipe Cards. I hope your Transparent Pie that you get to make is every bit as divoon as I know this is going to be! Meanwhile, I sent an awesome vintage fish pie recipe from Pan Am Airlines which Bittersweet Susie gets to make. And in return, I get Weight Watchers.
For the record, I did in fact make this with two friends. I did not go into this alone. However, no one else was willing to taste this thing. Let's have a look at the beginnings of this recipe: the crust. Take a good look at these perfectly innocent pieces of toast because that's the last time this recipe's going to look any good.

The recipe tells us we are to make the toast into crumbs. As anyone who's eaten toast knows, the inside of it remains soft and therefore unsuited to crumbification. This is because no one likes starting their day with utterly desiccated bread rocks. However, since we had perfect toast, this was the best we could do when attempting to pulverize it.

Behold our utter failure of attempted breadcrumbs. It's at this point that someone pointed out that we ought to veer off-recipe and add a third bread slice since it might cover the taste of the pie.

Now, at this point we're supposed to bring out a lot of fake sugar. We at A Book of Cookrye, being cheap, would like to thank our friendly local gas station for their generous donation toward making this alleged pie.

To anyone working for Community Coffee: I know you're dying to work out a sponsorship deal, so feel free to contact!

All right, while the bread shards are in the oven, let's get down to the gelatinized business.

You know, I have to register surprise at who brought this recipe into perspective. When I first got my assignment, I looked at it and thought "Oh dear God no...". Then Our Mom of Cookrye saw it and thought I had been dealt a great injustice. It took one of my friends to read the recipe and point out that all we're doing is making sugar free Jello. Granted, we're doing it from scratch instead of just buying a packet and using milk instead of water, but maybe they didn't have sugar free Jello in the 70's. Besides, if you don't think about what went into it, the pot looks like a perfectly normal custard in the making.

Meanwhile, the bread in its requisite baking time had hardened to the point where an aspiring cook could actually turn it into bread crumbs. However, the recipe doesn't say to further pulverize it, so in the spirit of "whatever, this will probably be terrible anyway," we left them gloriously intact. If you squint your eyes and use the extra-strong beer goggles, it kind of looks like terrazzo. That's right, the best thing we can say about this pie so far is it looks fit for stepping on.

Meanwhile, the food coloring was bleeding all over the pie filling. Now, you may notice that this pie calls for chocolate extract rather than cocoa powder or melted chocolate. Does anyone ever use chocolate extract? The last time I ever saw a bottle of chocolate extract, it was lurking in the kitchen cabinets under a thick dust layer- and that was when I was in high school. Once my devious friends and I decided underage drinking was awesome because all those DARE people in high school told us not to, and furthermore that most extract is somewhere between 30-50% alcohol and they don't card you at the register, that bottle and a few of the larger bottles of bulk vanilla were expended in the name of teenage rebellion. (For the record, adding it to Diet Coke is no worse than your overpriced well whiskey. Also, we never drove.)
Anyway, we couldn't find the stuff anywhere. We looked online and found the only store selling it nearby was Sur La Table, which we remember as being one of the places to outfit your kitchen you'll never use back in the 90's. They charged over $8 a bottle. Driving to different groceries was such a drawn-out and futile endeavor that we took to calling all the stores within a reasonable drive- nothing. We wondered if we could somehow combine vodka and cocoa powder to fake it, so we looked up how to make our own chocolate extract. What should come up but someone saying how to make the very thing! However, I gave up as soon as I saw one of the requisite ingredients was "crushed raw cacao nibs." We ended up going to a hoity-toity grocery store and spending $5 on one dinky little bottle in the name of a crappy pie. 

The red food coloring is bleeding all over the pie.

At this point, we reach what I thought was the funniest part of this whole recipe. We're supposed to dump in red and green coloring to turn this pie a "rich chocolate brown." Don't ask me why we ended up with this charming shade of blue-ish purple that is perfect for bathroom tile.

Further attempts to turn this brown ended up with... well, an even better shade of bathroom tile. Seriously, this is a color I would want to gaze upon while experiencing sweet relief and feeling the gentle breeze from a window that needed opening.

All right, let's dump this gelatinized mess into the pan of violated bread and see how it sets!

This pan of... stuff sat in the freezer for 45 minutes, followed by two hours in the refrigerator when it started icing over before it actually congealed. After two hours didn't set it (it didn't even get kind of syrupy like gelatin is supposed to on its way to turning gelatinous), we said "fuck it" and decided to plate it. I gotta say, the sarcasm quotes in the recipe name turned really useful when we served up a "plated" "slice" of chocolate "pie."

Pictured: a "plated" "slice" of Chocolate "Pie."

You may be expecting at this point some horrified notes about how utterly dreadful this tasted, but actually... it wasn't too terribly bad. It wasn't at all good, but it wasn't utterly disgusting. More than anything, it tasted like toast and artificial sweetener. Yep, the toasted bread flavor seeped into the "pie" in its extended refrigeration time and overpowered the various extracts. Given a lot of people put a packet of fake sugar on their toast, it's not too terribly odd a flavor combination, though having it in liquid form was very strange. Don't get me wrong, the most anyone ate of this was a tiny spoonful, but it was not the horror I expected it to be either.
I think that was the point of most diet dessert recipes. They were a pain in the ass to make, came out a funny color, tasted bland with unnerving chemical undertones, and made you the dieter decide you didn't really need dessert anyway.
Thank you for joining us for another edition of the Pieathlon! Be sure to see what everyone else made!

Yinzerella at Dinner is Served 1972 made Peanut and Beer Pie (She also organized the Pieathlon!)
Poppy at Grannie Pantries made Lemon Meringue Pie
Kelly at Velveteen Lounge Kitsch-en made Heidenische Kuchen (Heathen Cake)
Gregg at Recipes4Rebels made Fluellen's Pie
Taryn at Retro Food for Modern Times made Lemon Potato Pie
Silver Screen Suppers made Crème de Cacao Pie
Battenburgbelle made Fatty Arbuckle's Delight
John the Hedonizer at The Food and Wine Hedonist made Fidgety Pie
Bittersweet Susie made Star Gazy Pie (This is the recipe I sent!)
Ruth at Mid-Century Menu made Brandy Apple Pie
Surly at Vintage Recipe Cards made Transparent Pie
Erica at Retro Recipe Attempts made Mai Tai Pie

Second-Stab Saturday: Pudding-Egg Nog French Toast

When last we saw the blackberry pudding, it had nearly ruined a shirt and had taken on an afterlife on the counter. We might have thrown it away, but anyone who's been broke as long as we will feel thus about wasting food:

We decided that since this pudding was like bread, we would make French toast of it. And so, we got out our Louisiana charity cookbook because, and we say this lovingly (and as people who've been decamped in the south for some time), if there's any unhealthy food, the south knows how to make it better.
Case in point:

The Cotton Country Collection, 1972

This is one of the few recipes in this book that doesn't have Mrs. Some Husband's Name under it. Reading through the book, one gets the impression that such anonymous recipes are for things that no one submitted but the Committee (always capitalized) felt should not be left out of a printed and bound compendium of the local food. ("We've got five Heavenly Hash Cakes and nine Hush Puppies but no one sent in Poor Knights?")

The pudding, which looks more dead than sliced.

French toast growing up was always just bread soaked in eggs and milk (though we've discovered blenderized bananas work as well). No one added spices and such, and we didn't bring breadcrumb coatings into the business.
So, let's have a look at what we're about to soak these things in!

You should know that while I have been given to being a lot more generous with spices than recipe writers say I should, these are measured out exactly as specified.

Beaten as uniform as it was going to get.

We were curious, what did this sugared, spiced, egged milk stuff taste like? The answer? Egg nog! Yep, this tasted exactly like those cartons that contain what tastes like melted ice cream repackaged and sold at Christmas.

Almost ready for its time overnight...

And so, we dumped the egg nog on the alleged pudding (I still don't know if puddings are supposed to look like that) and attempted to sleep.

In theory, this will be a wonderful breakfast.

The next day, the egg stuff had gotten unnervingly syrupy. One would logically surmise that all the surplus liquid had soaked into the bread, but it still looked like it was going rancid.

Most people faced with semi-gelatinous green egg nog with brown "bread" floating in it would either put it down the sink disposer or bury it. However, we exhumed some bread crumbs from something that was fried in the name of Easter and did this.

These were so mushy that they barely survived being turned over (presumably the overnight soaking was for rock-hard stale bread). The finished product looks a lot like chicken-fried steak, doesn't it?

Wait, it's missing something. Now we have chicken-fried steak with syrup on top.

As for the result? Blackberry pudding apparently strongly resists being modified- if you closed your eyes, you would never know it had been repurposed as French toast. It was just the pudding with a crispy crust added. Maybe if you used plain bread, you could tell it spent the night marinating in egg nog.

Cinnamon Pie: or, Pride goeth before failure

You know, sometimes I think to myself "I'm getting really good at resurrecting old, vague recipes. I can look at one and figure out exactly what someone back in 1852 would have known to do when trying to make something out of this list of ingredients and maybe one sentence of instruction." And of course, that is when I prove myself wrong. Today, we at A Book of Cookrye present... cinnamon pie!

The [Los Angeles] Times Cook Book, no. 2, ca.1905

I found this recipe when I was looking for something to do with fruit. It's on the same page as the seriously delicious Cream of Strawberry pie. At first I thought, "Well, that might be interesting. Cinnamon is delicious, after all. Why not make a whole pie out of it?" We then noted the last line of the recipe: "Filling for two pies." That sold us! This pie is so delicious that you can't just make one!

CINNAMON PIE. Mrs. C.C. Norton, 1407 Girard street, Los Angeles, Cal.--(Original.) Sift together seven tablespoons of sugar, two level tablespoons of flour, four teaspoons of ground cinnamon and a pinch of salt. Stir into this four cupfuls of sweet milk, butter size of egg* and two eggs beaten well. (Filling for two pies.)  *Since I had to crack an egg open anyway, I measured its contents before mixing them in. "Butter the size of an egg" is about a quarter cup, give or take. The [Los Angeles] Times Cook Book, no. 2, ca.1905

As a side note, every recipe withholds the contributor's first name in favor of initials that may or may not be her husband's, but gives her address. I hope I'm not the only one who is inclined to look the houses up on Google Street View to see if they're still standing.

This recipe starts out like nearly every custard pie I ever made. Fine, so there are no instructions, but the ingredients look nearly the same. And, to our delight, this recipe uses a lot of cinnamon. Look at that massive cinnamon lump in there!

Most recipes with cinnamon use about a teaspoon or so. This recipe tells us to use two really big spoons of cinnamon (well, the original says four spoons but we're only making one pie), which turned the pie-to-be a promising dark brown.

We then dumped in the pint of milk that one would use for one pie. It looked really pretty, kind of like a cinnamon terrazzo in a mixing bowl.

However, it didn't look nearly so tempting once we mixed it all. This recipe uses so much milk that the whole thing turned a disappointingly pale, un-cinnamon-y shade of cream. You may wonder what it tasted like at this point, now that we had added everything the recipe told us to add. If you ever drank the milk you had poured on your Cinnamon Toast Crunch, you can probably get a good idea.

And here is where the pie goes wrong: We did this.

I'm not referring to the only semi-successful attempt at crust crimping- the problem is that the pie is already in it. I've baked a lot of pies like this, and figured this pie would go into the oven until it set. Sure, it was a lot runnier than a lot of other things I've baked, but I've seen unlikelier things turn out right. Then it did this in the oven.

That's not bumps rising in the pie. It is boiling. You may ask why we didn't pull it out long before, but even at this point it had not set. When probed with a probing implement, it was just as runny as when it went into the oven. Maybe it was done when the bubbles died down?

As seen above, this pie had scars from boiling in the oven and the crust was a bit well-done. I tried to convince myself that the pie looked so old-fashioned and homemade because it had burns on it, but do you see those white flecks there? The ones that look like the egg is now scrambled? Would you like to examine them more closely?

Sure enough, when we cut the pie we got this.

There are pies that are meant to separate into layers in baking (usually it's cream cheese or something that floats to the top), but somehow I doubt this is one of them. Maybe there's someone out there wants an omelet embedded in their dessert, but I'm going to hazard the guess that this recipe was meant to be cooked on the stove instead. I did try a piece of the pie, and it tasted like it should have been good. Therefore, this recipe will likely be attempted again.
So remember, sometimes you have a faulty recipe, other times it just might be you! Either that, or try to sell people on a pie-cum-sweetened quiche.

Twice-Fried French Fries!: or, A Book of Cookrye salutes Fanny Cradock

Have I ever mentioned how much I like Fanny Cradock? In all her overdressed, drag-queen makeup, suspiciously deep smoker's voice splendor, Fanny Cradock and her ever-disapproving ways are a spectacle I am so glad is preserved for posterity and available on YouTube. I feel an odd connection with the drag queen who terrified everyone in the kitchen with her and then produced some very questionable food with excessive amounts of food coloring. I even send her likeness to friends without warning.

I don't hear from this person so much these days.

Today, we at A Book of Cookrye would like to delve into the recipes of Her Not-So-Serene Highness, Fanny Cradock! Also, we are going to prevent the waste of these potatoes.

Sure, they were kind of soft, sprouting new plants, and about a week from turning to mush, but no one who's near-perpetually broke would throw them out. When faced with throwing out food, we at A Book of Cookrye indignantly say...

It occurs to me that Coco is wearing less makeup than someone who was (allegedly) not a drag queen.

What might we be making of these potatoes, you ask? We could have mashed them, we could have made latkes, we could have just baked them. But we at A Book of Cookrye decided to FRY THAT SHIT! There's not a thing in the world that frying doesn't make edible.

The relevant part of the video's at 9:57, but you should watch the whole thing.

French Fries Potatoes Oil for frying Salt, pepper Cut potatoes into strips (you can leave the skins on unless you dislike it). Immerse the cut potato pieces in water as you go- it keeps them from going rancid when exposed to air (cut potatoes in water will keep a day or two in the refrigerator). Heat the oil until a few bubbles come out of a raw potato immersed in it. Fry the potatoes until tender, but don't let them brown. Let the oil reheat a minute or two between batches or else your potatoes will be soggier with each successive batch. At this point, you can refrigerate the potatoes for later. When you want fresh fries, heat the oil until it almost smokes and a piece of raw potato held in it sends out a lot of bubbles very fast. Fry the potatoes to a deep golden color. Take them up and toss in salt and pepper immediately. Source: Fanny Cradock for the UK Gas Council, "Kitchen Magic" (1963 film)

In this lovely piece of British history, Fanny Cradock appears in some beleaguered, inexperienced housewife's dream. Her husband's been nagging her for her terrible cooking (quick semantic question: if a man with a nagging wife is henpecked, is she cockpecked?). When she randomly faints in the living room, Fanny Cradock appears like the nagging kitchen fairy to make her feel guilty every time she doesn't know how to make anything. Look at Fanny's reaction to our heroine when she doesn't know how to fry potatoes the Fanny Cradock-approved way.

Incidentally, when I described the film as "some lady in fancy dresses appearing appearing in a dream to disapprove at some woman's terrible cooking," an acquaintance said "That sounds very British."

Jesus, Fanny! You don't just have her embarrassed for not knowing how to fry potatoes, she's bracing for when you grab that ornamental cactus in the background and perforate her face!
And just what does Fanny Cradock say we should do when frying potatoes? Fry them twice!

We're not having really thick-cut fries with the skins left on because we're too lazy, it's because we think they're better that way. That's our story and we're sticking to it.

It was easy to cut the potatoes up, especially since we decided to forget about peeling them or cutting them into tiny slivers. However, we had difficulty finding sufficient vessels to store the cut pieces in.

This is a lot more potato than anticipated.

An involved discussion occurred in Marcus' kitchen- did we really want to fry all of these? Like, all of them? The answer, of course, was a resounding yes!

Testing the oil just like Fanny would.

At this point, we must say that even though (based on the test we did with a raw potato) we had the oil just as hot as Fanny Cradock and her unfortunate housewife pupil did in the film, these potatoes were not nearly done in the four and a half minutes Fanny said it'd take. Granted, the film is set in a dream where everything works out better than our dismal reality, but these had to fry for about ten minutes.

Such a long frying time doesn't seem so bad at first, but check out the size of the pot we're frying them in. See how small it is? We had a lot of batches that needed to fry for ten minutes each.

Tender all through, not brown at all. Fanny Cradock might approve. Also, we really hope they're supposed to be this soggy.

All right, now it's time to do the second, crisping fry! Fanny Cradock may have had two oil vats side by side, but the most oil Marcus and I came up with was three quarters of a bottle and a small saucepan. Therefore, we and the fries had to wait while the oil heated up.

I now have tiny burns on my hand and the oil's ready to go.

Did Fanny Cradock have leather hands? We got grease spatters all over ours while holding that fricken potato piece in there! We then realized that while just dropping the potatoes into the oil and fishing them out with tongs may have worked just fine when the oil wasn't so hot, we would probably get grease burns all over our fingers from not having a frying basket with a very long handle. Did we really want fries that badly?

Yes we did.

In Fanny's kitchen dreams, the fries took a minute and a half to turn really brown. And indeed, the fries were nice and crisp on the outside in ninety seconds- you could hear them knocking into each other. But we at A Book of Cookrye wanted them really fricken brown, just like Fanny Cradock did on TV.

As a side note, we dubbed the salt and pepper we promiscuously put on these "fairy dust."

First, what does Marcus think? Did we successfully turn some near-rancid potatoes into a successful (if not heart-attack inducing) delicious avoidance of waste?

Both of us were considering the fact that we made these ourselves rather than getting drive-thru.

Considering...

Hoping that's a pepper granule he's looking at...

APPROVES!

REALLY approves!

On that enthusiastic note, I tried them for myself. Would all that time I spent waiting to put another handful of potato sticks into the frying pot be worth it?

Yes it would!

REALLY would! Do this yourself!

These were still good after they'd gone cold. When we asked ourselves if we'd learned anything, Marcus said "Creepy old British ladies are awesome!"
We at A Book of Cookrye would like to salute Fanny Cradock! May her disapproving gaze be ever upon us!