Pumpkin Chips: or, These are worth half their weight in sugar

You know those orange things people ritualistically put on their porches every fall?

It's a strange ritual perpetrated here in the United States. Because it is fall, people almost automatically put pumpkins out on their porches every year. I don't mean jack-o-lanterns, I mean just... putting pumpkins in front of the house. Because fall. Did you know you can eat them?
Everyone of course knows about pumpkin pie and the astonishing proliferation of pumpkin spice everything, but it seems few people realize you can make it yourself using those funny orange things they deposited right outside the door.
We at A Book of Cookrye aren't going to make our own pumpkin pie, but we will bravely carry the autumn torch of sugary pumpkin-flavored things even though December is upon us with fake snow and mandatory cheer.

Miss Leslie, Directions for Cookery in its Various Branches, 1848

Pumpkin Chips 1 pumpkin for every pound of cut-up pumpkin: 1 pound (2 cups) sugar ½ c lemon juice Pare the outer skin off the pumpkin. Your vegetable peeler if you have one will prove useless, so use a paring knife. And have a knife sharpener on hand- you will need to resharpen it about halfway through. Remove the seeds and strings, then cut the pumpkin into strips about 2 to 4 inches wide. Then cut them into slivers about ⅛" thick. Weigh the pumpkin, then measure out the lemon juice and sugar (This will be a lot of lemon juice; you may want to just get a bottle instead of squeezing it yourself). Mix everything in the pot you'll be boiling it in, and let it soak overnight in the refrigerator. The next day, put it on to a moderately fast boil. You don't want it to boil too hard, but don't slowly simmer it either. When the chips are transparent, put them in jars. These are delicious put in already-baked individual tartlet shells. Source:Directions for Cookery in its Various Branches, Miss Leslie, 1848

When you read the title of Pumpkin Chips, did you imagine a sort of orange equivalent of kale chips? Well, in 1848, pumpkin chips were boiled in lemon syrup that contains literally their own weight in sugar! You thought the pumpkin spice lattes were diabetes in a caffeinated cup? Miss Leslie and her 1848 cookbook use so much sugar that even the iced pumpkin spice creations with whipped cream on top are practically health food.  Let's get on with it, shall we?

A pumpkin is maddeningly tedious to skin. For one thing, they are really big, so you're going to have a lot of square footage to peel. Furthermore, these things are hard. A vegetable peeler is useless here. And your paring knife will need resharpening at least twice per pumpkin.

Now, when I make preserves, I almost always go through the following thoughts in this order:
1. I probably should make a lot, since I won't be doing this for a long time.
2. (after getting the fruit ready to cook) This is way too much fruit! What was I thinking?
3. (after the fruit shrinks in the syrup) I'm barely going to get one tiny jar of preserves out of this! Why did I work all this time only to get a tiny teacup of preserves?
4. (upon getting the preserves into the jars) There is so much of this! What would anyone do with this much preserves?

With this in mind, and given that not-canned pumpkins are so seasonal, I decided to make chips out of not one but two whole pumpkins. The paring alone took over an hour. Incidentally, a pumpkin without its skin feels surprisingly spongy.

Is this a recipe or a cry for help?

Eventually, we reached the point where we get the pumpkin into slivers.

After carefully trying to scrape off as little rind as possible, this felt so good.

Now, normally making a recipe in large quantity doesn't make it that many times harder. Like, doubling a cake recipe and baking two of them doesn't take twice as long as if you had baked only one. However, in this recipe, we didn't have any such time-saving. You see, it takes exactly twice as long to cut up two pumpkins as it does one.

The knife is included for scale. This is a lot of pumpkin.

I have to admit, at this point I was done. I could take no more and had to call this off for the day. I thought I'd just hack the pumpkins into manageable-sized pieces and finish this project the next night. While there was no reason the pumpkin couldn't spend the night in the refrigerator, even the large gallon bags I'd had in mind for this seemed worthlessly puny in the face of all this pumpkin. However, even that hasty cutting job took longer than an hour.

If you are at home and cooking so much food you must store it in a trash bag, either you have a big party coming up, you're volunteering your kitchen for charity, or something is wrong with you. I should note that this bag was full to the top and so heavy it threatened to rip. Once I forced it to fit in the refrigerator, the shelf sagged unnervingly. I wasn't sure the support brackets would survive the night.
And so, the next day, all of this pumpkin had to be cut into slivers "about as thick as a half dollar." The whole trash bag of pumpkin. I have to think that back in Miss Leslie's day, preserves were a group effort. They had to be. Even in competent hands, this would be at least 4 hours with a knife.  If someone had to make enough preserves to last until fruit came back in season, literally all other housework would have to stop.

Meanwhile, we had to deal with step 2 of this recipe: cooking the chips.
It is a fundamental fact that the modern suburban kitchen is simply not equipped for cooking in quantities to feed a large family of 1800's farmers. Even if someone goes out and buys the sort of massive cauldron you'd need to boil all of this at once, it may not actually fit on the stove. Furthermore, rarely will anyone have the counterspace to handle such a massive undertaking.
Now, it is true that at any point I could have decided I didn't need to make chips of all the pumpkin. Even after reducing all of it to slivers, there are a lot of things you could do with cut-up pumpkin if you wanted to scale down the preserves recipe. Nevertheless, I forged daftly forward with candying all of it.
The first major problem was selecting a suitable pot. I'd hoped that the pumpkin would fit into a much smaller space once it was cut into tiny chips. While it did, two pumpkins make even the big pot your mom boils spaghetti in look puny when you try to fit them inside.
Fortunately, I have Mexican family, which means some of us make tamales! I called my sister asking if I could borrow their massive tamale pot (if you've never seen one, imagine one of the bigger metal buckets from the hardware store, but with pot handles on the sides). Unfortunately, theirs had finally rusted.
This ended up happening instead.

You may think that's a lot of sugar, and you would be right. Ever seen those massive bags of sugar and flour on the very bottom shelf at the grocery store? The ones that look like feed sacks instead of baking ingredients? Making two pumpkins' worth of chips will use up one of those. Let's pull the camera back and see what all this pumpkin and sugar ended up cooking in.

You know what the worst part of this was? If you go up to the recipe, you'll see that you're supposed to measure out the sugar and lemon juice by the weight of the pumpkin. Meaning, you're going to have to weigh the pumpkin.
Before I realized just how much pumpkin I would have on my hands, I'd planned to just take it into the grocery store and use the scales in the produce department. But those tend to have a maximum weight of 10-20 pounds. So I had to get out a bathroom scale and weigh myself- both holding the trash bag full of pumpkin and not. Some quick subtraction yielded the weight of the pumpkin (which was about 30 pounds if you're curious). But let's go back to what happened- I had to weigh myself. If you've had crippling image issues all your life, the act of stepping on a scale and looking down will forever be emotionally fraught.

Yes, that is two roasting pans, each of which is perched on two burners. There's something both delightfully old-fashioned and fiercely intimidating about using a pot that is so big. There was a third pan's worth of pumpkin still bagged in the refrigerator, but I had only two pans and four burners.
Even after an overnight soak, the soaking water tasted like concentrated lemonade with not a slight suggestion of pumpkin flavor. Nor did a pumpkin aroma exude from the pans.
But finally, after all this work, it was time to get these suckers into jars. I don't know the first thing about actual home canning. I've just heard it's reasonably straightforward to do right, but if you do it wrong you will die of botulism. So instead I decided to keep these in the refrigerator. There were... a lot. In case you don't quite realize what you're looking at, this is so many jars of pumpkin chips they do not all fit in the refrigerator door.

But you haven't seen the biggest jars yet. I'd thought these two would actually contain all the chips. But when you're cooking in such massive amounts, absolutely everything in the kitchen- from the massive stewpot to the roaster that held two turkeys in last year- starts to look ridiculously dinky compared to the massive mountain of cut-up pumpkin.

As a helpful tip, clear off absolutely all the counterspace before getting your pumpkin chips from the pot to the jars. You will need more room than you expect. Also, the syrup will get absolutely everywhere. If you have spices, plates, or figurines on the counter, you will have to rinse and wipe them one by one.
But what does one do with all the candied pumpkin chips? Miss Leslie suggests putting them in baked puff-paste shells. I brought some to share with my friends, and having not seen that the recipe suggests making tartlets, they all independently said "These would be really good in little pies!"
I didn't have the time or patience after all this, but for a Thanksgiving gathering I did smush scraps of pie crust into a cupcake pan.

Ain't they pretty?

As for the taste, they were insanely good. Pumpkin and lemon is a surprisingly delicious combination that should appear more often. I'm really glad these are good, because there are... a lot of pumpkin chips waiting in the refrigerator.
In short, this is really tasty. I actually recommend it most highly. However, do not do a whole pumpkin, and under absolutely no circumstances do two at once. Make chips out of maybe one quarter of a single pumpkin, and you'll be delighted with the results without being exhausted getting there.

Lemon Meringue Cake: or, The egg whites were sitting in the freezer anyway

Do you refuse to throw away perfectly good ingredients even if you have no idea what you'd use them for? Do you have nearly full sauce bottles lurking in your cabinets because you made a recipe that called for one tablespoon of something you haven't used since? Are there frozen scraps of this or that carefully wrapped in your freezer because you might find a use for them someday?
If so, we at A Book of Cookrye are no better than you. More than anything, we have a lot of egg whites in the freezer from making a lot of recipes that called for yolks. Of course, one can more easily find recipes for egg whites than one might find one that uses, say, asafoetida or those last meat scraps that you bagged up instead of throwing out.Today, our friends at the Dormeyer electric mixer factory have a super nifty idea for us:

All Electric-Mix Recipes Prepared Specially for your Dormeyer Mixer, 1946

Lemon Meringue Cake Lemon cake from the recipe of your choice* 2 egg whites Dash of salt ½ c sugar ¼ tsp lemon extract Bake the lemon cake in a 9x13 pan. After removing it from the oven, beat the egg whites and salt until foamy. Gradually add the sugar, beating constantly, until it stands in stiff peaks. Add the lemon extract. Spread over the cake and bake 10 minutes. *The original recipe is the Mix-Easy Two-Egg Cake with 2 tsp lemon rind added to the butter or shortening. For the record, I used this recipe instead because it calls not for 2 eggs but 5 egg whites, and I have an embarrassing number of egg whites in the refrigerator. All Electric-Mix Recipes Prepared Specially for your Dormeyer Mixer, 1946

Does a lemon meringue cake seem like a desperate reach for novelty to anyone else?  I guess there are only so many cake recipes you can come up with before you reach the end of cake. This is especially true of an advertising pamphlet, which (unlike a more serious cookbook) tends to avoid what one may call the more adventurous recipes. Having said that, our friends at the Dormeyer company decided to run some 50-odd cake recipes in their advertising pamphlet. When the you barely allow any flavors in your cake chapter that one wouldn't find in the shake machine at a drive-thru, some possibly misguided creativity will ensue.

I can just imagine the people in their desks under orders to come up with enough cake recipes to fill 20 small-print double-sided pages. Eventually someone decides to take the pie out from under a lemon meringue pie and put a cake in there instead. As a bonus, meringues are a great excuse to justify selling electric mixers because beating egg whites into shaving cream by hand sucks.

Note the deployment of foil to forestall washing.

I couldn't get over how weird it is to put meringue on a cake. In my limited cooking experience, meringue has only appeared two places: on top of pies, or made into cookies. Putting meringue on cake is utter madness. What topsy-turvy world is this?

The cake looked actually rather nice right out of the oven. It is a really enticing-looking big pan of meringue once you get over the fact that this clearly is not a pie.

 
However, as seems to often happen to meringues here at A Book of Cookrye, it sweated out little brown beads as it cooled.

Do you think they look enough like sprinkles that I could claim I did it on purpose?

Apparently whoever thought of a lemon meringue cake was afraid to really stick to the premise- that is a puny ration of meringue for a cake this size. If you look at any slice of lemon meringue pie, the meringue tends to be at least as tall as the lemon under it. But having followed the recipe instructions, this is how much meringue, er, crowned the finished creation.

That is a pathetic layer of icing, isn't it? If you ate a slice with your eyes closed, you couldn't even tell the meringue was there. I mean, it will help keep the cake from going stale the same way any icing does. So if you never really liked the taste of icing on cake but still think a bare cake looks kinda ugly, this idea is for you.

Brownie canadensis: or, Importing recipes from the back of a chocolate chip bag

Guess what happened in the clearance rack!

Happy days have truly returned to A Book of Cookrye, because that is literally two pounds of chocolate, all of which is covered in markdown stickers!
Had it been but a single bag of chocolate chips, one might have just made a batch of delicious cookies. But two pounds of chocolate deserve something special. Something divine. A recipe that I've had on file for a while now...

That's right, this recipe for brownies uses three different kinds of chocolate! Truly, a recipe like this deserves to be shared with friends, which is why we're making this with Marcus!
You may notice two subtle hints that this recipe does not originate in the United States. It uses metric measurements,whereas America only uses kilograms and milliliters for science labs and selling illegal drugs. Also, they relisted the recipe in French. In case you skipped the title, this does indeed come from the Canada! I flew there on some friends' frequent flyer points last year, and in the course of doing some baking, I saw this recipe and thought it looked insanely good. Why I didn't make it on the spot I don't know, but let us wait no longer.

Double Chocolate Brownies 1¾ c flour (425 mL) ½ c cocoa powder (125 mL) ¼ tsp baking powder (1 mL) 1 pinch salt 1 c semisweet chocolate chips (or 6 oz chopped baking chocolate) (250 mL) 1 c butter (250 mL) 1⅓ c dark (50%) chocolate chips (or 8 oz or 325 mL) 2¼ c sugar (560 mL) 5 eggs 1 tsp vanilla (5 mL) Heat oven to 350° (180°C). Grease an 8"x12" or 9"x13" (20x30cm or 23x33cm) pan. For brownies, a metal pan is better than a glass one because the glass will hold onto heat and keep baking them for a while after you take it out of the oven. Mix flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt. Melt together the butter and dark chocolate. Beat the eggs until foamy. Add the sugar and beat until thick and custard-like. Add the chocolate-butter, mixing with a rubber spatula. Stir in the flour mixture. When all is mixed, stir in half the chocolate chips. Spread in the pan. Sprinkle the remaining chocolate chips on top. Bake 25-30 minutes. Source: A bag of store-brand chocolate chips I bought in Ottawa

This recipe starts with chopping a lot of baking chocolate. I was prepared to get out the knife and delay further brownie production for at least 5 minutes, but Marcus had a better idea.

Never thought your broke friends on A Book of Cookrye would extravagantly put slabs of Ghirardelli in a food processor, did you?

I will say, this recipe involved a lot more bowls than I bargained for. But, for once that did not annoy me at all. You see, Marcus has a dishwasher! So you know what? Let's get out a plastic tub and shake the flour and cocoa until they're as mixed as they can be!

And we'll go ahead and measure out the sugar beforehand into another bowl that no one will wash by hand!

Then we'll get out not a bowl but a pot because the chocolate and butter have to melt in something. We were out of microwave-safe bowls, so we had to use the stove for this.
Finally, we get out yet another bowl (that's 4 bowls total that no one will handwash) in which all of this will eventually come together... and beat eggs into suds. I will admit that this part of the recipe is mere speculation on my part. The instructions just say "beaten eggs" which can mean anything from "just bash them around with a fork for 10-ish seconds" to "keep going until they look like beige whipped cream (as we have done in recipes like this)." A lot of the egg-heavy brownie recipes I've seen lean towards the latter, so that was the option we went with.

At this point, with all the many ingredients in their many bowls or tubs or pots, measured and ready to go, the brownies began to come gloriously together. First, we add the sugar and transform this bowl of eggs into what tasted like an unusually rich icing. You might not think a bowl of just eggs and sugar would be all that great, but this was oddly addictive.

Next, we dumped in the melted chocolate and butter, which if you can pour out a mixture like that and not taste at least a little, you have no soul. The chocolate promptly sank through the extremely whipped eggs and hid under them.

Here let me detour and sing the praises of Marcus' dishwasher. Speaking as someone who has not had a working dishwasher in the house since 2005, the dishwasher is truly a miraculous and glorious wonder. Were I making this at home, there would be a pile of dishes overtopping the sink, waiting for me to reluctantly scrub and rinse each of them, one at a time, until the all were clean. Instead, we did not have a single dish in the sink. It is so gloriously convenient to measure and prepare absolutely every ingredient you're going to use without having to hand-wash a small army of little bowls and spoons. I've rarely had the pleasure of making a recipe and having everything measured out and ready at hand. The reward for such advance planning and preparation, if you have no dishwasher, is at least half an hour of extra cleanup because having everything measured out in its own little vessel quickly builds up to a lot of dirty dishes.
We kept the dishwasher open as we proceeded through the recipe, and simply dropped every gloriously unrinsed bowl, pot, tub, spoon, fork, and knife right onto the racks. No growing heap of dirty dishes grimly awaited someone with a sponge. All we had to do is close the door on the dripping mess and press a button. If you've never experienced cooking in the presence of a dishwasher, take a bag of ingredients and go to the house of anyone you know with a who has one and try it at least once. Your entire outlook on cooking will change.

Since the chocolate sank to the bottom, it took a few seconds of stirring before the batter started to really change color. But once it did, it seemed like it would never stop darkening. With every circle  the spoon made, the batter got even browner. It seemed like stirring made the chocolate magically grow in the batter.

But, just in case the brownies did not have enough chocolate in them yet, we added even more chocolate with the flour!

Oh, all this chocolate is (not) too much. It really is. This almost made me happier than not having to hand-wash a single dish.

But maybe you're unimpressed with all the chocolate in this recipe so far. What would say if we stopped bothering with other ingredients and just dumped more chocolate right into the batter?

And so, having put an unprecedented amount of chocolate into one pan of brownies, it was time to actually bake these. And.... oh. I nearly died when I saw this gloriously thick and oozy chocolate pour into the pan.

You know what? Let's look at that just a little closer.

When your brownie batter looks like this before you smooth it over with a spoon, that is a sign of amazing things to come.

Because Marcus and I are not soulless robots, we did a deliberately terrible job of scraping the bowl. Want to know how the batter tasted?

He actually stayed like this long enough for my camera to crash, restart, and finally take the picture.

Anyone who knows how much I don't just like but believe in chocolate will be thoroughly unsurprised to know this is how much I liked it.

We were so overcome with chocolate that we forgot to do the last line of instruction in the recipe before leaving the brownies in the oven. That's right, the recipe says you're supposed to just dump even more chocolate over the brownies right before they bake.

As I took these out of the oven, I just had to wonder: if Canadians get recipes this good on their grocery labels, why is the United States the country with the obesity epidemic?

If you look past my poor spatula skills, you can see a tantalizingly dark brownie that looks utterly divine.

In a predictable twist for two friends in the kitchen at 3 in the morning waiting for a pan of brownies to cool off to the point where we don't burn ourselves trying to eat them, we passed the time by going to the nearest establishment that sold tacos 24 hours a day. One of the benefit of living in the south is the density of Mexican restaurants, many of which extend their hours all the way around the clock. The sublime joy of 3AM tacos almost makes up for the miserable traffic and awful heatwaves.
Why do I mention the late-night food jaunt? Because we ended up too full of tacos and cheese dip to eat any dessert when we got home!
But you can take my word for it that the next day, despite promising friends that they could share in the chocolate creation, all the brownies mysteriously disappeared before anyone else could eat any.

Birthday cake for a musician!

We at A Book of Cookrye are super happy for a dear friend. She is entering her second decade of life, that sweet time when you haven't yet realized that you never stop aging. And so, upon my asking what she wanted for a cake, she instantly said "Chocolate!"
She later decided she wanted not cake but brownies, stacked and iced like a layer cake. And that deep and abiding love of chocolate and brownies is how you know she is a friend of mine.

I got out the brownie recipe I found handwritten in a 1920's cookbook because it really is so good. While I usually make Betty Feezor's also-delicious brownie recipe, a birthday justified the splurge for a lot of baking chocolate. Though today's recipe makes such a small amount that it needed doubling.

This is surprisingly legible and detailed for a note-to-self recipe in the back of a cookbook.

Borrowing a lesson from the Celebration Cake, we lined the bottoms of the pans with parchment paper. It's like using wax paper, only you don't have wax melting into your hopefully-divine creations.

Check out that delicious oozy batter of chocolate divinity.

I asked someone more knowledgeable than I why you only line the bottoms of the pans and leave the sides bare. It turns out that if your cake/brownies stick to the pan, it's easier to cut around the edges than try to peel paper off the sides without taking chunks of cake with it. And indeed, the paper worked! Both pans of brownies fell right out with a satisfying whomph!

While I expected the brownies to fall apart as soon as I tried to lift and stack them, they were surprisingly sturdy. I genuinely thought they'd crumble into tiny fudgy pieces as I tried to get them in place on the plate. But as you can see, they were strong enough to withstand being carried on one hand.

And so, we tried to get these two pans of brownies to act like a layer cake. Two handy hints for anyone trying this at home: put a pretty decently thick layer of icing on the plate to more or less glue the cake in place, and have a lot of paper towels on hand for when you realize you utterly failed at keeping the icing off the plate. If you plan ahead, you can kind of forestall this whole problem by putting wax paper strips under the cake before you start slathering icing on it (which you counterintuitively pull out by the short end afterward), but I forgot to.

If you accidentally scrape the bottom of the cake bare as you wipe the plate, you can put icing in a baggie and squirt a border around the base.

And so, from one musician to another, we present... a decorated cake!

I and many other musicians will forever wonder why they decided to make the treble clef so fricken hard to draw.

For reference, that mess of dots and lines is supposed to look like this:

I sent this to another musician friend to see if the cake was legible to someone who didn't already know what it's supposed to say.

Incredibly, he could also read my icing cursive.

Indeed, that is the first line of "Happy Birthday To You," executed in icing. The notes were supposed to be purple, even if they didn't end up looking like it. The cake was just as delicious and heart-stoppingly divine as you think two layers of brownies clapped together with icing would be. However, the brownies spread a lot as they cooled, necessitating a lot of icing to make the cake have straight sides.

For those who are making a cake for someone really loves chocolate (whether it's yourself or someone else), you should definitely try making them a layer cake but with brownies instead.