Gingersnaps! Homemade gingersnaps!

We at A Book of Cookrye must reluctantly bid Carolina farewell. It's not returning home that stings, it's parting with the lovely friends we were visiting. But we decided to simultaneously bake a parting gift to leave behind and to make ourselves some airport snacks for the long, multilegged flight home.

Gingersnaps ¼ c butter ¼ c brown sugar ¼ c molasses ¼ tbsp (1 scant tsp) baking soda, dissolved in 2 tbsp warm water 1¾ flour 1 tsp ginger ½ tsp cinnamon ½ tsp cloves Heat oven to 400°. Grease a cookie sheet. Cream butter and sugar. Add molasses, soda-water, and spices. Add flour. Divide dough into ½ to 1 tbsp portions. Roll each into a ball. If desired, roll the balls in sugar. Place on the baking sheet. Coat the bottom of a glass with cooking spray and press each one very thin (about ⅛ inch). Bake until slightly browned around the edges. This recipe scales up and down very easily. Note: I doubled the spices and it was very good. Source: Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928 (anonymously submitted)

This is the second recipe I've ever tried for gingersnaps. The first one, which I made a few times, came from my mom's massive Betty Crocker cookbook. No matter how many times I made it, they were always really soft and chewy. But because they were really good cookies, I made them a lot. I even started making them a lot bigger than gingersnap-sized, and the big, soft spiced cookies had become one of the more popular recipes in my preteen repertoire.
Though at least once I was mildly embarrassed when giving them to someone. I'd made yet another batch of them (by now I'd just accepted that this recipe would never produce gingersnaps that actually snapped) and announced that I had made "ginger cookies." Which was technically true. I almost gotten away with it, and yhe recipients had decided they really liked them. But then, someone had to expose me by saying that the recipe was supposed to be for ginger snaps. Thus I had to deal with an endless barrage of half-baked cracks about "So you made ginger bends?"  I learned an important lesson: if you're going to try to sell people on a recipe that came out completely different than it should have, never tell anyone what you were originally trying to make.

At any rate, let's find out if this gingersnap recipe actually makes gingersnaps that snap.

You may notice that this does not look like the full quantities specified in the original recipe. And you would be right. In case this recipe turns out to be a dud, we're cutting it down to one eighth the original amount. If it comes out all right, we can make more. Though unless I for some reason feel compelled to make gingersnaps for 500, I doubt I will ever make the original amount with its one-cup-shy-of-half-a-gallon of flour.

I do find it odd that no one put her name under this recipe. You see that from time to time in these cookbooks. Maybe someone in the Committee (always capitalized) was reviewing the submissions and cried out "Good heavens! We are printing two recipes for corn pudding, but no one submitted a recipe for gingersnaps?" before inserting a recipe at the last minute.

This recipe uses a lot of molasses.

Now, anyone reading the original may think "Good gravy, that is a LOT of gingersnaps!" I mean, the recipe calls for seven cups of flour, which is only a tiny bit less than a half-gallon. That says a lot about the recipe itself. One gets the idea that either people made these in huge batches to keep on hand (after all, you never know when you'll need a cookie but not want to get out a bunch of bowls), or that people usually made them for really social times when you'd need a massive load of cookies. Fortunately, this recipe uses no eggs so you can cut it down to a tiny little batch without having to mutter "...What's one third of an egg?"

I have the unnerving feeling that cookie dough should not be able to do this.

This recipe produced some oddly tough dough. It felt almost but not quite rubbery. Usually, when cookie dough almost bounces, you have severely erred. However, I had carefully followed the instructions. Perhaps this is why the submitter did not put her name to the recipe- she didn't want to be shamed and lambasted at Club meetings every time someone tried to make the cookies. But on the bright side, the dough tasted very gingersnappy.

Generally, when cookie dough actively fights back at your attempts to shape it, your recipe has problems. And tough, almost-leathery dough tends to have this off-putting taste to it. But it was too late to stop cookie production now. The oven was preheated, the pan lined with foil, and I'd spent all this time making dough into little balls.

They didn't look at all different coming out of the oven. I'd expected them to maybe rise a little, or to spread, or to do something in the oven besides just sitting on the pan resisting all change. This made it hard to tell if they were baked or not. Eventually I figured the edges looked at least a little darker, so that's as good a sign as any to turn off the oven and admit probable defeat.

But happily, these did actually turn into gingersnaps! I would have pressed them out even thinner than I did in the above picture; they get really crunchy. Also, these are really strong cookies. A lot of crisp cookies will break and shatter if you try to take them anywhere. This is what I had to snack on between flights. Behold how intact they remained after I jammed them into a bag that had a very rough journey on an airplane through near-constant turbulence!

Not a crumb has fallen off!

If you like gingersnaps, do try these!

Lemon-Coconut Treats with only half the title ingredients: Or, Lemon squares attempt no. 2

As aforementioned, we at A Book of Cookrye had tried and failed to make lemon squares using the recipe on the back of a bag of Harris-Teeter (seriously, say that out loud, carefully enunciating each syllable, and see if it doesn't make you feel at least slightly better if you're blue) powdered sugar. But, all was not lost! The goopy failed attempt at lemon squares was still hot when I lifted it right out of the pan (this is why you always use foil!) when I mentioned I might attempt another recipe right on the spot!

Lemon-Coconut Treats     1½ c flour     1½ c brown sugar     ½ c butter or margarine Heat oven to 275°. Grease a 9"x13" pan. We really recommend lining the pan, either with parchment on the bottom, or with foil on the bottom and sides. Mix flour and sugar, then cream with the butter. Pat into pan, and bake 10 minutes. Increase oven heat to 350° when you remove the pan.     2 eggs     1 c packed brown sugar     1½ c grated coconut     1 c chopped nuts (if desired)     ½ tsp baking powder     ¼ tsp salt     ½ tsp vanilla Stir together the sugar, baking powder, salt, and flour, making sure there are no flour lumps. Mix in eggs, and beat thoroughly. Add everything else. Spread on top of the crust (you may find it easier to tilt the pan than to try to use a spoon without gouging the crust), and bake for 20 minutes at 350°.     1 c powdered sugar     1 tbsp melted butter or margarine     Juice of 1 lemon While the bars are baking, whisk together the icing ingredients. Spread over the bars while they are warm (it may be easier to just tilt the pan around until all is covered than to try to use a spatula or knife). Source: Favorite Recipes of America: Desserts, 1968 (submitter: Mrs. Robert T Brown, Sr. of Brookville, MD- blue ribbon winner of Montgomery County Fair)

You may be wondering why I would turn around and launch into a second recipe before my first and failed attempt has even gone cold (then again, if you know me you'll instead be thoroughly unsurprised). I admit that I might not have were it not for one thing in this kitchen...

Indeed, there's a dishwasher right under the counter for anyone to use! I've previously sung the praises of the automatic dishwasher, but let me tell you it is so amazing to use. Imagine measuring out all the ingredients for the recipe you're making, putting each one tidily in its own little container to await further cooking, and not having a fricken mountain of dirty tubs and bowls in the sink! We at A Book of Cookrye firmly maintain that the belief that that hand-washing dishes is better than using a machine should be as outdated as the belief that we should hand-wash all our clothes. Even science says hand-washing dishes day in and day out is terrible.
Right. Um.... back to cookies!

So that's equal amounts butter and sugar in that bowl.  I didn't notice this until I actually got this far in the recipe, but there's a lot of brown sugar in it for a lemon recipe. I've never seen brown sugar and lemon go together at all (which may show how rarely I go out in public- I'd never heard of sandwich macaroons (macarons?) which led to this accidental piece of luck). Maybe lemons and brown sugar go together in a lot of recipes and I've just never bumped into one before.

It was exactly like Play-Doh, except it tasted good when you ate it.

I was really suspicious of that baking temperature. Lemon and brown sugar may be a little bit out there and weird to my undertravelled, too-broke-to-see-what-fancy-restaurants-sell self, but I'm willing to believe that it's pretty commonplace in a bunch of places I've never been. But baking in only a 275° oven? No one ever does that! I've only seen oven temperatures that low in two places: slow-cooking massive roasts, or warming up something you cooked last night. This left me in a dilemma: Do I bake the crust at a more normal temperature and risk ruining it because I cooked it 100° hotter than the recipe should have? Or should I cook it at the bizarrely low temperature the recipe told me to, and risk serving raw lemon squares because it was a misprint and should have been 375°? We decided to stick to exactly what's on the page solely because that meant we could blame someone else for whatever happened.

For the record, this is a really thin crust layer. We at A Book of Cookrye advise that you resist excessive eating of cookie dough until you are very sure you have enough to actually cover the pan. While it went into the oven to bake (or more likely, barely warm up just a little), we went to the filling.

At this point, one of my friends came over, looked at the recipe, and said "I don't like coconut." Which explains why the title ingredient isn't in this. I was really excited at this new (well, new to me) variation on lemon bars. It has brown sugar! And coconut! Who does that? (Besides Mrs. Robert T Brown, Senior, of course.) Unfortunately, I had not actually made sure other people would like it too.

I've had so many recipes leave me with those annoying little flour clumps that refuse to break down, that nowadays I refuse to give them a chance to form. Looks like a brown sugar sandcastle, doesn't it?

Incredibly, the crust was actually kind of baked-looking when I removed it from the oven. I'd expected to remove the pan and find it contained really hot but still completely raw dough. It was just baked enough that you could get the filling on it without the two layers mixing. It occurred to me as I put this back in the oven for the second and last time that no one's mixing lemon and brown sugar (which I'd been really excited about) in this recipe. You don't get to the lemon in this recipe until you make the icing to dump on top.

Does anyone else think this looks oddly like the breakfast things in a supermarket bakery? Something about seeing the dark brown baked thing swimming under all those gobs of white icing makes me think of the cinnamon rolls and danishes that are always stale by the time I see them late in the day.

Imagine that the middle layer has coconut in it.

So, basically, the middle filling part is magically gooey, and somehow just set enough not to drip off the cookie crust. It tastes like pecan pie filling if you forgot to add the pecans. The crust, contrary to my fears, is indeed fully baked. It's crispy enough to hold the rest of this up without being too hardened to cut. It also tastes good on its own, Oddly enough, the lemon icing on top goes absolutely beautifully with it. I didn't expect that it would. Now, I personally think it would have been better with the coconut in it (it's in the recipe name, after all!), but these are delicious either way.

Lemon Squares: or, Cookies with accidental lemon syrup topping

We at A Book of Cookrye were asked to make lemon squares. We had offered to cook while visiting, and our friends knew us better than to politely refrain from asking too often. However, this necessitated a brief trip to the grocery store with the cutest name I've ever said aloud: Harris-Teeter! Seriously, say it out loud to yourself a few times. It gets more funnier every time.

Lemon Squares     2 c flour     ⅔ c powdered sugar     1 c butter, softened Heat oven to 350°. Mix butter, flour, and sugar` together until crumbly. Press into a 9x13 pan* and bake until light brown, about 18-20 minutes.     4 eggs     2 c sugar     ¼ c flour     ½ tsp baking powder     ⅓ c lemon juice     2 tbsp powdered sugar Mix all dry ingredients except powdered sugar. Beat in the eggs until thoroughly mixed. Then add lemon juice. Pour over the hot crust and bake until set, about 20 minutes. Sprinkle with powdered sugar when cooled (you can make the powdered sugar look much nicer if you just hold a sifter under your hand while you're sprinkling.) *The original claims you can do this in an ungreased pan, but I have always had rotten luck with that. Source: Harris-Teeter powdered sugar label

And so we begin, as so many recipes do here on A Book of Cookrye, with trying to soften butter in the microwave without melting it.

This recipe looks really similar to another recipe we've run on A Book of Cookrye: Lemon loves! Now, you might think that I'd make the recipe I've used before. After all, I am making this for friends. In their kitchen, while they can see every time I mess up. But, in my defense, this came off a Harris-Teeter sugar bag! Surely the good people at Harris-Teeter wouldn't run a bad recipe, right? (Yes, I am using any excuse I can get to say Harris-Teeter as much as possible.)

That's an awful lot of Harris-Teeter store-brand flour, isn't it? It completely covers the Harris-Teeter butter and the Harris-Teeter powdered sugar. Did I mention that I only ever buy store-brand unless there's a damn good reason not to, and that goes double when all the bags and boxes say Harris-Teeter on the front? However, I was mildly worried that this would be a really dry bottom layer to these lemon squares even though I followed the measurements on the Harris-Teeter bag.
Well, while that's in the oven, let's whisk the filling together!

I know lemony things tend to use a lot of sugar, but that still is a huge mountain of it towering over those two eggs!

However, this recipe uses a lot of lemon juice compared to most other lemony recipes I've seen which usually will use one or two spoons, not basically two lemons' worth in one pan. It tasted like really strong lemonade. Meanwhile, the crust had finished its time in the oven and looked thoroughly desiccated.

Seeing the dry, nearly-crumbly crust did not give me the highest of hopes for the Harris-Teeter recipe. Nevertheless, I dumped on the lemon filling and hoped for the best. When the timer dinged, the lemon squares were gorgeously browned on top, but cutting into them revealed that all was not right in the recipe.

What makes this worse is that it tasted like it was supposed to be really good. The lemony stuff was deliriously tart, and the cookie crust on the bottom was really delicious. Also, the filling sitting on top of the crust soaked into it just enough to make it non-crumbly, but it was still nice and crisp. Maybe if I had a little more nerve I could try to pass these off as lemon-glazed cookies. However, no one believes you did something on purpose when they hear you muttering variations on the word "fuck" while holding a knife.
But I'm willing to cop to this failure probably being my fault. These things tend to happen when I'm cooking in front of other people, especially when halving/doubling recipes. Specifically, I think I forgot to cut the lemon juice in half, even though I remembered to halve everything else. Better luck next time, me!

Cookies from a Slovakian stranger!

Sometimes when you're far from home, the recipes you make come from even farther away. One of my friends received this recipe from an online friend in Slovakia:

Hearts with Pink Fluff     Cookies: 1 c + 2 tbsp butter, softened 1 c + 1 tbsp powdered sugar 1 tbsp rum or rum extract 1 tsp vanilla 1 egg 1½ c flour (bread or all-purpose) 1 tsp baking powder 1 pinch salt     Icing: 1 egg white 2 tbsp powdered sugar 3 tbsp lime juice ⅔ c raspberry jam (set aside 2 tbsp) Mix butter and sugar. Add rum, vanilla, and egg. Beat smooth. Add flour, baking powder, and salt. Mix well. Cover and chill for about an hour. When ready to make the dough into cookies, heat oven to 350°. Grease a baking sheet or line it with parchment. Roll out the dough until half an inch thick. Cut out hearts and put on the pan. They will expand a bit more than most other shortbread-ish cookies, so be sure to leave each one a little bit of extra space. Bake 10-12 minutes.     To make the icing: Warm 2 tbsp of jam just enough to make it a bit thinner, then mix it with the lime juice. Whip the egg white to stiff peaks. Sprinkle the powdered sugar over it and beat it in. Then fold in the jam and lime juice. Put the meringue and the remaining jam in separate bags and pipe decoratively onto the cookies. Source: Friend of a friend

First of all, isn't punctuating every other sentence with a smiling face adorable? Second, I must say I find the mixing of metric and tablespoons to be very amusing in light of having seen a lot of bitter nerd rage spewed in online forums over metric vs customary. Fortunately, a kitchen scale was at hand! You can see it under the measuring cup, because I was writing down the cup measurements in case I want to make this recipe without one.

Interestingly, my friends do not have a canister of salt like most of us do. So, we're using the fancy pink stuff instead. Don't tell anyone, but even though it looks prettier sprinkled over things I can't taste the difference.

But what really marks this recipe as non-American to me is the use of liquor as a flavoring. Perhaps we in America haven't recovered from all the Demon Rum speeches that culminated in Prohibition, but I rarely see any recipes that use any form of alcohol as flavoring unless it is the main flavor. Or at least, I don't see alcohol used on equal footing with other flavoring extracts in realistic cookbooks. You see the odd teaspoon of brandy or tablespoon of whiskey (whisky?) in a handful of recipes in those coffee-table volumes of food porn (you know, the ones on the stand at Williams-Sonoma), but people tend to purchase those books more to admire the photographs than to cook out of (a pattern interestingly described in this 2010 celebrity cookbook review). You do see the wine, beer, and liquors used right alongside seasonings and extracts in American recipes up until the temperance brigade gained popularity. Apparently other countries (or at least, some person in Slovakia who sent a friend in Carolina this recipe) don't have the same alcohol-related hangups, otherwise we wouldn't be adding a spoonful of rum to raspberry-lime cookies.

Absent any rum, brandy was used instead.

To my minor annoyance, my friends have no printer (which seems to be getting more commonplace these days), and therefore we were looking at this text off of a smartphone. I know a lot of people do that, but I personally get very annoyed after I keep having to read a recipe off a screen the size of an index card without accidentally tapping the wrong spot with my floury hand and making the phone close the recipe and do something completely random. So I decided I would measure out everything all at once and thus not have to constantly re-check what the phone said.

My first mistake was dumping all the first things in the bowl. Whoever typed this out just said to mix them. I should have realized that people giving recipes to friends often skip obvious directions if they know the recipient doesn't need to be told every step. Of course, we didn't mix anything so much as end up with butter lumps swimming in random stuff.
Fortunately, we could switch to a whisk and bash things to-- if not completely mixed, at least nearly so.

Looks like yellow cottage cheese, doesn't it?

I wasn't at all worried at the sight of this. You see, I hadn't added the egg yet, so there was nothing to force all these things to stay mixed. Therefore, presumably, so long as we didn't have any large chunks of stuff floating around in there, it would all mix right together--- right?

Very right! Furthermore, this tasted fantastic! The slight hint of rum (well, brandy but we can pretend) added a nice subtle taste to the vanilla. Let's roll, cut, and turn these into tasty cookies! I thought I had seen a stash of cookie cutters in the very back corner of one of the cabinets. However, dragging it out from the depths showed it to actually be a lot of various craft supplies, none of which would work for cutting cookies. And so, a shotglass was brought into service instead. We could have used a regular glass, but they were all so big that we would have only gotten 7 or 8 cookies out of this whole batch of dough.

For those trying this at home, a shotglass cuts out adorably dainty-sized cookies. They come out small enough to be cute, but still big enough not to disappoint when you eat them. However, since you're cutting out such little cookies, the dough doesn't have enough weight to fall out of the cutter on its own. Since you obviously can't push it out (at least not without cutting off the bottom of the glass), you should have a can of cooking spray on hand to spritz inside the glass every so often. Even then, they will be kind of fussy to get out of the glass.

Aren't they cute and puffy? We almost didn't get to ice any. A lot of the cookies mysteriously vanished while we were waiting for them to cool off. Just as well, it turns out one egg white doesn't make an awful lot of icing. Which is just as well by me, since this isn't a huge batch of cookies.

Once we added the sugar, the egg whites stood up very nicely. Given that my friends have no cookie cutters, I was not surprised that they also have no icing-bag tips. (It's like I own any myself.) No matter, we could easily put this in a little bag with the corner snipped off.

Here, we at A Book of Cookrye want to recommend actually reading the recipe perhaps more than once before you make it. I didn't realize you're only supposed to put 2 spoons of the raspberry jam into the meringue, and instead dumped in all of it. Adding that much jam removed all chance of the fluffy stuff standing up in jaunty peaks.

Giving up on the whole piping business, we just sorta dropped the stuff off a spoon onto the cookies. It mostly stayed where we wanted it to, and actually managed to accidentally look cute. Also, the icing lasted a bit longer than you might think-- if you kept the cookies in the refrigerator, the jam re-hardened and kept it from deflating and drying out.

As for the taste? These are really good! The raspberry-lime icing is really fruity, and the cookies have a nice subtle sweetness and interesting flavor. Rolling out the dough really thick like the recipe said was a good choice. The cookies didn't dry out in the middle, but stayed delicate and fluffy as the recipe name promised. Do try these!

Beaten Biscuits: or, Extremely vigorous use of expensive power tools

Today, we at A Book of Cookrye present a visit to someone else's Carolina kitchen! As aforementioned, we somehow made it through airport security and thus flew out to visit friends. What should we see tucked away in the kitchen in its own little cabinet, sitting under its very own little (quilted!) jacket, but....

Indeed, while I am using an extremely old stand mixer (which you can see here), the lovely people I am visiting own that standby of people with more spare kitchen money than I have: a KitchenAid mixer.
I'm somewhat surprised at how long KitchenAids have been display appliances. Other brands have gone in and out of style, but for whatever reason KitchenAids have held remained essential display pieces for any trophy kitchen long after people stopped putting Cuisinart food processors or Jenn-Air stoves under spotlights for guests to admire.
At any rate, the pocket on the mixer's little jacket held the whisk and the dough hook, so we at A Book of Cookrye decided to see if this thing runs well enough to make one feel less bad about how much it costs. And so, we decided to make...

Kentucky Beaten Biscuits 2 c flour 3 tbsp butter or shortening 1 tsp salt Milk or water Heat oven to 350°. Mix flour and salt. Mix with butter, adding just enough milk or water to make a stiff dough. Knead for a very long time. If doing this with a mixer (and unless you really love hand-working bread, you should), set it to a higher speed than you usually would for kneading- so the dough really gets thwacked and flung around in the bowl. The dough will toughen, then get soft and slack again. The dough should also form blisters when you work it. Believe it or not, it is possible to overwork the dough, so as soon as you have a pretty good amount of air bubbles forming, stop the machine. Roll out thin and cut*. To prevent the dough from sticking, generously coat it, the rolling pin, and your rolling surface with cooking spray. Pierce each biscuit three times with a fork. Bake til nice and golden. The inside should not be doughy at all when you break one in half. *It honestly would have been a lot easier to roll it into balls and pat each one flat. Source: Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928 (submitter: Mrs. L Simpson)

It is very fitting that we should make such a southern thing while en voyage to the deep South. If you do an internet search for "beaten biscuit," you will find lots of articles calling it one of the oldest and most ancestral of Southern foods. A lot of articles talk about how they went out of style because the dough was so much work (like, over an hour of kneading) to make. But now that we have electricity in nearly ever home, are these something that we should bring back into the kitchen?
Mostly, I wanted to test-drive the KitchenAid. We have the commercial model in cooking class, but this is the first time I've ever encountered the home version. And what better way to test it than by using a recipe usually written with violent instructions?

You see, the "beaten" in the name "beaten biscuit" is apparently no exaggeration. You know how if you overwork bread dough, it becomes tough? It turns out that if you overwork it enough, it gives up and goes slack again. If you're doing it by hand, you'll have extremely tired arms by the time you're done kneading it.
Various articles picturesquely described folding it and whacking it with axe handles or similar lethal household objects. But we at A Book of Cookrye were not about to wear ourselves out in the name of cooking when we could just turn on an expensive device and let electricity do the hard work for us.

To speed things up, and because all the articles romantically described people flinging and thwacking the bread dough about, we turned the mixer speed up a lot higher than anyone usually should when attempting bread. Did you know that if an electric mixer wants to, it can walk all over the counter? As the dough slapped and whapped around in the bowl, the mixer started a moderately-paced journey across the countertop. Had it not shown an almost suicidal desire to drift toward the counter's edge, I might have let wander just to see where it wanted to go. Instead, I ended up spending about 30 minutes (really, I was checking the clock) holding the wayward machine in one place while the vibrations went from the mixer to the counter up my arm and then rattled my skull.
The dough ended up oddly creamy and spongy. I have never seen biscuit dough look like this before. It almost looks like cake batter, if cake batter could hold a shape instead of just pouring out.

Imagine if you will an unusually soft Silly Putty. It even managed to go lighter in color than before we started the motor. Also, you can see the blisters that the original recipe said we should be looking for.

The recipe said to roll the dough out and cut, presumably in circles. Which a lot of people do, but I never liked how often you end up having to reroll the dough over and over again to make biscuits out of the scraps. So when no teacher is standing over me reminding me that I am terrible at presentation, I usually just cut biscuits into squares. They're not as cute, but you have all of your dough cut in one go.

 However, this dough was really floppy, and almost gooey. It was not the easiest thing to lift and put on the pan. Incidentally, I wondered if I hadn't rolled them too thin- they looked more like crackers than biscuits. So with batch #2, I stacked them two dough-pieces high to see if semi-thick biscuits were better than really thin ones.

\

My beaten biscuits look like weird sea creatures swimming on the foil! Maybe I shouldn't have tried to roll and cut them. These are the most badly freehanded attempts at bread I have perpetrated in a long time.

As you can see, they actually have little layers and tiny air bubbles in them! However, these took a long time to actually finish baking. The center was gummy and doughy a lot for a longer than a one-eighth inch piece of dough in the oven should be.

Now, we can surmise why biscuits that take multiple hours of work to make disappeared from kitchens. But I would advance the theory that they stayed out of style long after electric mixers became commonplace because, honestly, they're basically just really sturdy crackers. They're pretty good crackers, but announcing you made homemade crackers doesn't get quite the same happy reaction as homemade bread.
So, if you love making little cracker canapés but get annoyed that the crackers always break and crumble, this recipe is for you. Otherwise.... well, imagine choosing between a plate of fluffy biscuits and a plate of these.

A Book of Cookrye flees the state

We at A Book of Cookrye have been meaning to visit friends out in Carolina, and have been obsessively watching airlines for discounts. We found a 50% off sale, and so...

Let's hear it for tiny plastic cups of Diet Coke!

To Carolina!

Applesauce Cake: or, Tasting the 20s

You will never believe what I somehow got my hands on!

Yes indeed, the 1920s cookbook I scanned a lot of pages out of from my library's Special Collections turned up for sale online! What's more, it was priced like a used book and not like an antique, so I could actually afford it! There was just one teeny little problem...

I'm surprised that my copy was falling apart while the library's copy remained intact. Theirs is covered in pencil notes, handwritten recipes, recipes cut out of newspapers and tucked in the pages, and other signs that someone cooked out of it a lot before it landed in an archive. This copy has no sign at all that anyone ever so much as opened it on a kitchen counter, so why is mine the one that's falling apart? Maybe the library had to give their copy surgery a few times too.
But, all was not lost! I used to work in a library, so I am very familiar with the existence of library book mending departments. Several phone calls to various universities later, a very nice person agreed to fix it for me at no charge. Do you know how much book repairs usually cost? It's both 1) a very skilled trade, and 2) an increasingly rare one. The only thing I had to do was spend a long time waiting to get the book back, because they were going to have to do it when the library had relatively few books in line to get fixed.
I gotta say, it's so nice to be able to flip through the book whenever I want, without worrying that the library will want it back soon. I notice little things like this, which I'd never have seen if I was worried about having to imminently hand it back:

Why doesn't this recipe have someone's name under it? You just know anyone who thought to send in a recipe for sausage spuds to a serious fundraising endeavor was fun to be around.

But we're not making meat-stuffed potatoes today. We're flipping to my favorite part of any cookbook: The desserts! And we are making....

Small Applesauce Cake 1 c hot applesauce 1 c sugar 1½ c flour 1 tsp soda, dissolved in ⅓ c water ½ c raisins ½ c walnuts* ½ c coconut 1 tsp cloves A little nutmeg Heat oven to 350°. Grease a round or square cake pan. Mix applesauce and sugar, then add the spices. Add the flour in three additions, alternating with the water which you add in two. A whisk will work better than a spoon for getting out flour lumps. Stir in the coconut and raisins. Pour into the pan and bake until done, about 20-30 minutes. *Never liked walnuts in cake. So these stayed right out. Source: The Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928 (contributor: Mrs. Belle S.  Brown)

Substituting applesauce  for butter in cake and cookie recipes has been making the diet-advice rounds for a while now, but I don't think it was something people did to try to make desserts less fattening in 1928. Therefore, one can assume that we're using applesauce instead of butter in this cake for the flavor, and not because it is supposedly more slimming. In theory, Mrs. Belle S Brown (one of the few married women in this book who gets her own first name printed) made this cake because she wanted a cake that tasted like apples, and not because she was trying to lose weight without completely sacrificing cake.
Actually, a lot of people apparently liked applesauce cake at the time.  Kind of like how modern-day community cookbooks usually have multiple recipes for banana bread or for lasagna, the desserts chapter of this book has a lot of applesauce cake recipes. At any rate, it seemed a promising sign that the cake would come out really well.

Note the recipe book in the back, which is no longer falling apart.

We happened to have this strawberry-applesauce in the refrigerator that kinda got forgotten, so that's why applesauce is so pink. Also, the applesauce-sugar residue that stuck to the measuring cup tasted absurdly good.

I don't know why the applesauce had to be hot, but it wasn't too much extra effort to pop the bowl in the microwave.

As happens a lot in community cookbooks, there are literally no instructions. (Could be worse, some recipes in this book don't list all the ingredients for some reason. Maybe the missing things would have been obvious to anyone cooking in 1928.) But we at A Book of Cookrye haven't made it halfway through an associate's degree in cooking without learning a few things about cake mixing.

And so, we figured we'd do the method where you cream the butter (here replaced with applesauce) and sugar, then alternately add your milk (here replaced with water and baking soda) and flour. It worked all right until we added the first splash of soda-water. Please note 1) the lovely pink color of the batter and 2) how low in the bowl it is. There isn't even enough batter to completely cover the business end of the spoon. Now have a look below.

Yep, the batter fizzed up almost like those baking soda-vinegar volcanoes we all did. And it turned a really ugly, nasty shade of gray. The fact that the batter apparently did all its rising in the bowl made me worry about how this cake would come out of the oven. If I stirred all the bubbles out of it getting the rest of the flour and stuff in, would it stay flat the whole time it baked?
I wasn't worried about the color (mainly because I figured once your cake goes to gray, it will stay there so you may as well embrace it), though I did kinda hope the spices might dye it at least a little bit brown.

And now we add the last two things! I was actually oddly excited about putting in coconut in this. Apple and coconut seem like they'd go really well together (assuming you like coconut).

That is one ugly cake, isn't it? The coconut is not doing it any favors. It looks like either little white bugs or like the batter was really lumpy and I baked it anyway.  At least it turned a decent shade of brown on top.

The cake did at least get a little bit color to it in the oven. The coconut still likes little lumps of something that shouldn't be in there, though. Also, despite my fears, it did in fact rise like a cake should.

As for the taste? It's really dense like gingerbread, and marvelously apple-y. You can just leave the coconut out. You can't taste it, and all it does is get stuck in your teeth. However, it is really good. I'm planning to make this again, only using a lot more spices. Since it is dense like gingerbread, and kind of tastes like it already, we may as well not try to pretend it's a cake.
Also, this got a lot better after aging about two days. I had it in my locker so I could have a snack between written tests, and it got a lot better toward the end of finals week.