Take Two Calf's Feet

From Dishes Mother Used to Make, 1941

TAKE TWO CALF’S FEET

by Terri Griffith

(This essay originally appeared in Connotation Press)

Like art, pornography, and love, everyone knows the meaning of the term “from scratch.” And just like these other words, when pressed, the definition is as hard to wrangle. The term is contextual, shifting meaning depending on who says it and when. I’m an adept cook, but I’ve never made puff pastry. I don’t know anyone who has. Even The Barefoot Contessa uses frozen, but I’m certain someone out there has a French grandmother who would rather starve than pull a box of frozen dough from her freezer. You can often find a big copper pot on my stovetop simmering chicken stock. I make salad dressing. I soak beans.

The meaning of “from scratch” was perfectly clear to me until one day when I was browsing the Culinary Arts Institute cookbooklet Dishes Mother Used to Make (1941). I wasn’t reading, just paging through looking at pictures. There was a photo of what I at first thought was dessert—star-shaped, gelatinous. The caption read: “This pretty mold of nourishing calf’s foot jelly is made by the same recipe as the one mother carried when she visited the sick.” It then became clear that I was looking at aspic. The revelation came not from the ingredient list or attendant photo, but somewhere in the middle of the directions when I realized that the calf’s foot in “Calf’s Foot Jelly” was the source of the gelatin. It was stupid not to understand this immediately; earlier cooks would have.

But I’m not an earlier cook. To me, gelatin in its virgin state comes from a small orange package of Knox or if I’m lucky, a professional cook’s box of gelatin sheets. I should know better. Still, I find it difficult to imagine the average contemporary home cook rendering gelatin “from scratch.” Then again, what recipe from the last hundred years would have us boiling calf’s feet? Effectively, a box of Knox is from scratch, in that it is the least processed version of the ingredient available.

In the I Love Lucy episode (1952) entitled “Pioneer Women,” after figuring out that Lucy has washed more than 200,000 dishes in the ten years since her marriage to Ricky, Lucy and Ethel decide they want automatic dishwashers:

Ricky (to Fred): Isn’t it amazing how spoiled modern women are?

Lucy: Spoiled?

Ricky: Yes, spoiled. You think you got to do a little work and you’re hysterical.

Lucy: A little work!

Ricky: Why honey, this is the electric age. All you have to do is flip a “swish.”

Lucy (to Ethel): We flip a “swish.”

Ricky: Your grandmother didn’t have none of these modern electrical conveniences and they not only washed the dishes, they swept the floor, and churned the butter, and baked the bread…they made their own clothes.

Lucy: Sure and where are those women today? (pause) They’re dead!

So Lucy and Ethel bet Ricky and Fred that they can all live as people did in their grandmothers’ time. They choose the date 1900 as the cut off and if the women can keep to the “Gay 90s” then they can have the money for dishwashers. Although their conversation is framed around the idea of technology, the show comes down to a parsing the concept of “from scratch.”

You don’t even have to watch this episode to know what happens—Lucy and Ethel spend the rest of the show trying to make bread and butter. As you’ve probably guessed, they were unsuccessful. Lucy is unfamiliar with bread making and relies solely on a cookbook to guide her. At one point she describes to Ethel what kneading is. Precisely because she has no idea what she’s doing, she finds that she’s used thirteen cakes of yeast instead of three.

            It is Fred’s grandmother who churned butter, so we know from this that she must have lived somewhere rural with access to large quantities of cream. Making butter from store-bought cream doesn’t make good economic sense. As Ethel says sarcastically of the half or so pound of butter she has just churned, “Imagine, all that butter and it only cost me twenty three dollars and seventy-five cents.” And that was in 1952.

            Ricky’s bread-baking grandmother lives in Cuba, and as he mentions on another episode that his family are farmers. This is a significant difference not in era, but in culture. Lucy and Ethel live in New York City, in apartments. They are show people: the Mertzs, retired vaudevillians, and Ricky Richardo, a bandleader. In later episodes, the Richardos own their own nightclub. Both the Mertzs and the Richardos are childless, at least in this episode. Even in 1900 it seems unlikely that these women would have baked bread, much less churned butter. Neighborhood markets were abundant, bakeries close, fresh dairy delivered daily. Judging by Lucy’s complete lack of knowledge about bread making, no woman in her family ever baked a loaf of bread anywhere in her vicinity. For women like Lucy and Ethel, meals comprised of fresh bread from the bakery and milk-man delivered butter were from scratch.

On the Food Network show Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee (2003), our hostess schools us in the assembly method of cooking. Her website states: “Sandra Lee’s trademark 70/30 Semi-Homemade philosophy combines 70% ready-made products with 30% fresh, giving everyone the confidence to create food that looks and tastes from scratch.” For Sandra Lee the definition of  “from scratch” is rather generous. Lee asks us to reassemble food that has arrived in her kitchen already in varying states of readiness. The “homemade” in Semi-Homemade Cooking often does not point to what serious cooks would refer to as “from scratch” ingredients. In her recipe for “Mexican-Style Macaroni and Cheese,” Lee has the cook combine boxed macaroni and cheese with “Mexican” seasoning, finally topping the whole thing with packaged, pre-shredded Mexican cheese blend. In this recipe, I can only imagine that the fresh ingredient would be the cheese.

But to be fair to Lee, it is not food that purports to be healthy or nutritious. Lee is selling something else. She is selling love. We can see this from the cocktails and tablescapes she constructs each week. The subtext of every episode of Semi-Homemade Cooking is, If you take these ingredients and fabricate them into something recognizable as food, you will demonstrate to your family how much you love them. In this way, Sandra Lee’s recipes, however misguided we may think them, are successful.

Famed cookbook author and former owner of The Barefoot Contessa gourmet food store from which she takes her nickname, Ina Garten makes a living cooking mostly from scratch and showing us how to as well. Her cookbooks are slick and appealing. Hardcover, with big, beautiful pictures, of healthful, lovingly prepared dishes. Although Barefoot in Paris is one of my favorite cookbooks and contains recipes for “French Lentil Sausage Soup” and “Palmiers,” it also contains recipes for things like “Roasted Beets,” which is simply…well, roasted beets. In her other cookbooks you can find similar recipes for “Roasted Winter Vegetables” and “Roasted Carrots.” These are fine recipes and suggest things like the addition of thyme or a splash of vinegar, but they are essentially recipes for dishes that don’t need recipes. These are simple foods, which is exactly the point Garten is trying to make—That wholesome ingredients and simple preparation are all that are needed to create an outstanding meal. Even in the picture of the humble roasted carrots, the carrots are seductive and slick with olive oil. The photo is pornographic in its detail and explicit availability, the shards of fresh cracked pepper and grains of kosher salt large enough to see.

            Like Lee, Garten is a contemporary cook. She does not expect her readers to make puff pastry, nor does she expect us to make our own mayonnaise, though she does recommend specific brands. Whether this is intended or not, this recommendation of store-bought products reminds home cooks that we are not making every element of this dish from scratch. What she does is strip away the layers of processed food that we have grown so used to eating that they have become nearly invisible. This has the effect of throwing the few remaining processed items into stark relief against their elemental brethren: carrots, beets, a whole roast chicken.

            How do we define what is from scratch and what is processed? Is flour processed? Cheese? Sausage? Canned chickpeas? Organic free-range chicken stock? Unprocessed sausage is just meat and where’s the fun in that? And what’s the difference between the bag of pre-shredded, “Mexican” flavored cheese blend, and a ball of goat’s milk cheese from my local natural cheesemonger?

This cultural move to deconstruct food into recognizable components is central to both The Slow Food and Localvore movements. But we see this idea reflected in the general consumer market as well. In a Tostitos ad, a woman (played by a youthful Meghan Markle) who is shopping for her upcoming party is perusing the chip isle while her thoughts run as a voiceover. She thinks about chips and how much she doesn’t like one of the potential party guests. The ad ends with her looking at a brown, natural looking bag of corn chips, which contains thirteen ingredients. She then picks up a bag of Tostitos and the voiceover says, “White corn, vegetable oil, salt. Yeah, three ingredients is good.” Suddenly these Tostitos Scoops are recontextualized as wholesome solely because they are simple, made of ingredients we can all understand. In the 1990s “white corn, vegetable oil, salt” would have read as a list of foods to avoid.

            I am sure there are those who mill their own grain, as I am sure there are those who make puff pastry from scratch, still for most people a bag of flour is an elemental ingredient. It’s our renewed desire to know what we are eating—where it comes from, the quality of ingredients, how it was produced—that makes a short ingredient list a selling point. Whether or not home cooks will return to rendering gelatin from hooves has yet to be seen. But with the ways things are going, it seems likely.

WORKS REFERENCED:

Berolzheimer, Ruth. ed. Dishes Mother Used To Make. Chicago: Culinary Arts Institute, 1941. Print

Garten, Ina. Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2008. Print

—The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1999. Print

—Barefoot Contessa Family Style.  New York: Clarkson Potter, 2002. Print

—Barefoot in Paris. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2004. Print

“I Love Lucy.” The Museum of Broadcast Communications. Web. 11 Feb. 2010.            .

“Knox Gelatine.” Kraft Food. Web. 12 Feb. 2010. .

“Pioneer Women.” I Love Lucy: The Complete First Season. Original Air Date, 31 Mar. 1952. Paramount, 2005. DVD.

Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee. The Food Network. Web. 12 Mar. 2011            http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/sandra-lee/mexican-style-macaroni-and cheeserecipe/index.html.

“Unwanted Guests.” Goodby Silverstein & Partners. Web. 18 Mar. 2012.

http://www.goodbysilverstein.com/#/work/tostitos_dips_and_chips_unwanted_guests_broadcast.

Scalloped Potatoes

You know what's good? Potatoes are good. I mean, they are so yummy it's hard to even fathom it. I recently made Scalloped Potatoes from pretty much my favorite of the Culinary Arts Institute cookbooklets, 250 Ways of Serving Potatoes. You might remember a similar dish that my friend Stephanie made for The Culinary Arts Institute dinner party back in 2009. This is not the same recipe, but from the same chapter of the same book. I reread her suggestions before I started this one. But really, it's potatoes and butter. How bad can it be?

SCALLOPED POTATOES
6 medium potatoes
salt and pepper
2 tablespoons flour
4 tablespoons butter
milk

Pare potatoes and cut into thin slices. Place in a greased baking dish in 3 layers 1 inch deep, sprinkling each layer with salt, pepper and flour and dotting with butter. Add milk until it cane be seen between slices of potato, cover and bake in moderate oven (350 F) until potatoes are tender when pierced with a fork, 1 to 1 1/4 hours. Remove cover for the last 15 minutes to brown. Serve from baking dish. Serves 6.

I fancied-up the top so it would look Frenchified. But if there's one thing I have learned about CAI recipes is that the potatoes always cook longer than it says. I'm pretty sure this isn't the sort of thing where people in the past liked their potatoes toothier either. It's something else that I just can't put my finger on. Perhaps oven temp? Maybe I should have cooked it at 375. One thing I did account for was the use of the word "milk." Nowadays, we have all kinds of milk. I assumed they meant whole milk, which I didn't have, so instead I used half two percent and the remainder half and half, which is a common substitution. It ended up baking nearly two hours, but I'd planned for that. All in all, this was an easy recipe and the potatoes were crazy good. Even better the next day. We had it warmed up with a salad for lunch. I'd certainly make this again.

Pin Feathers

I used to hate chicken—all chickens, including actual pecky chickens, and I especially hated poultry, the eatin’ kind. My only experiences with chicken involved meat that was stringy, dry, and dusty. All of that changed when I moved to Rogers Park and started ordering the whole roasted take-out chicken from El Llano. Sadly, it burned to the ground and I was forced to learn to make chicken myself. Don’t worry, though, they have another location.

America’s Test Kitchen is great place to start for almost any new cooking skill. After many attempts, I mastered their roasted chicken recipe, and can knock a Purdue extra-meaty roasting chicken out of the ballpark. But I’ve got to tell you, a big, fat, giant chicken takes a long time to cook and it makes every meal feel like Thanksgiving. A whole roasted chicken is feels a little limiting.

Then about three months ago, I moved to the advanced stuff—Jacques and Julia Cook at Home. Jacques likes to splay his chicken. This has a couple of benefits. First, it cooks in about half the time. Second, it makes the chicken seem WAY less formal. It’s easy to dress up or down. The knife skills needed for this are just at the outer edge of my ability, so I always make sure to watch Jacques do it right before I attack the backbone. Usually, I watch it two or three times to work up the courage to chop the joint off it’s little drumstick. Practice is helping. A cleaver might help more. I think the next step is to try boning an entire chicken.

In The Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook, there’s a handy little boning how-to. Step 1 includes cutting the head off your chicken. My chickens only come beheaded. ALL of the recipes in the poultry section have you start by pulling and singeing pinfeathers. I get the feeling that chickens used to come barely dead. The pictures are great, but I’m not sure they’re that instructive. The last steps show you how to stuff and tie your now de-boned chicken. Makes me want to try it.

Peanut-Butter Nut Bread

There are a million reasons I shouldn't eat bread. Okay, maybe twenty-five and one or two others, but sometimes I just get a taste for coffee cake. I really love waking up on a Saturday morning, making a pot of coffee or two and sitting down to a hot, sweet piece of coffee cake soaked in butter. In a pinch muffins will do, but coffee cake is a real treat. This weekend I made "Peanut-Butter Nut Bread" from 250 Breads, Biscuits and Rolls (1953). While it doesn't explicitly say coffee cake, it only takes a quick peek at this recipe to divine the intention: sugary, nutty bread.

"Peanut-Butter Nut Bread" has two cups of flour and one cup of brown sugar, making for a sweet, molasses-colored bread. But the real charm is the topping. Made from brown sugar, butter, and nuts spread in the bottom of the pan, these simple ingredients turn to a carameley, gooey, topping when the pan is inverted. Yum! The batter was so wet, I was sure the thing would never set, but sure enough 60 minutes later, coffee cake as tasty and homestyle as any hipster bruncheon place.

The caption reads: "Youngsters sing with all their might. Hooray! It's peanut-butter bread tonite." You bet they'd sing. A cup of sugar is enough to make any child sing!

The Chinese Cook Book

A while back my dear friend Stephanie gave me a cookbooklet that belonged to her aunt Gingie, The Chinese Cook Book (1936). When she handed it to me, I was surprised to find that I didn't recognize it. It clearly says "culinary arts tested" on the front and on the back it says "Culinary Arts Press, America's Largest Cook Book Publisher," located in Reading, PA. Frank Daniels on his cookbook website says that this is a precursor to The Culinary Arts Institute books I know and love.

There are lots of interesting recipes. It took me forever to figure out what "Chinese Sauce" was, but then I read the introduction and it says that is soya sauce. Duh. It's an old cookbook so all of the recipes are written in paragraph-long narratives. One that struck me was CHINESE PINEAPPLE SALAD: Boil one pound bean sprouts in pineapple juice. Cover with mayonnaise dressing, flavored with Chinese sauce. Sprinkle with chopped nut meats and garnish with sliced kumquats or crushed pineapple. (Doesn't sound too authentic to me.)

This evening I made radish salad. It looked pretty tasty.

RADISH SALAD: Wash and trim with care one dozen fresh radishes: do not peel, but cut in half. Lay the halves face downward on a clean table or board and lightly crush each piece with the flat side of a knife or some other heavy instrument. Make a sauce of one-half teaspoon of vinegar, one-half teaspoon of sugar, one-half teaspoon of soya sauce, and one-half teaspoon of olive oil. Place the halves face downward in the sauce, and let them remain thus 15 minutes before serving.

Although this sounded easy, I found myself stuck at a particular part of the recipe. After I'd cut all the radishes, I pressed down on one with the side of the blade to crush the radish. It didn't crush. I got a bigger knife. It didn't crush. I pounded it with the butt end of a good sized chopping knife. It didn't crush. I chose not to crush the radishes. They tasted pretty good. Nothing spectacular. Usually I serve my radishes on a bed of coarse salt. And if you didn't notice by my profile picture, I prefer them to look like rodents.

Semi-Homemade Cakes! (1 of 4)

A few months back I wrote an essay about Sandra Lee and the atrocity of her semi-homemade holiday cakes. Well my charming friend Andrew, himself a lover of the "assembly" approach to cooking, agreed to join me for a day of the Sandra Lee method. We made all three cakes: Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and the Heirloom Noel. As we did with the Culinary Arts Institute Party, we invited our loved ones to join us. At this point I think these people might eat anything.

It took all day to make the cakes. They were unbelievably expensive and time consuming. To tell you the truth, as we were putting the finishing touches on the final cake I was a little curt. In the picture you can see my eyes are blood shot. Andrew ate a lot of frosting and got a kind of sick. It was a friendship building experience. Serena was a real trouper fabricating a 3D Star of David out of wire and ball garland. The whole thing would have tasted better, been faster, and cheaper if we'd made them from scratch.

When it was all over and the cakes were done, I felt unbelievably proud. But I felt sad, too. Writing about Sandra Lee and thinking about her stupid tablescapes and crappity crap dinners had brought me to this idea of simplicity and communion with friends and family. The cakes, one of which was inedible, were so wasteful, so costly and I was ashamed to be so privileged to make food as a joke.

But then our friends came. Lara and Dominic, Nick and Andrew, Serena and me. We had a good time, ate cake, drank wine, and all was right with the world.

Potatoes: Steaphanie Crain

EASY BREEZY BACON…AND POTATO. That didn’t suck.

I chose the 250 Ways of Serving Potatoes (1940) cookbook because I love potatoes, I love that there was an entire cookbook devoted to it, and I thought this book held my best chance to quickly find a recipe that was easy and goof-proof. I was wrong.

Housewives in the 1950’s took their potatoes seriously. The booklet is divided into more categories (with sufficient recipes for each category to warrant their own category) than I consciously knew existed for potatoes. Baked, boiled, soups/chowders, creamed and scalloped, mashed, fried, salads, sweet potatoes listed separately…these ladies knew their potatoes. And now I know how American families could have potatoes with every meal.

I quickly dismissed all potatoes sweet and anything that involved multiple steps, such as fried potato cups filled with hotdogs. And then I landed on the Potato with Bacon recipe and looked no further. How can you possibly make a potato better? Bacon.

The ingredient list was very common:

1 lb. of bacon
6 medium potatoes
2 tbs. flour
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. pepper
2 cups milk

I assumed that the bacon measurements were for cooked weight. Since I don’t have a kitchen scale, and am a firm believer that more bacon always makes things more better, I cooked an entire one pound package, after trimming the most visible fat and dicing the remaining bacon (which was kind of difficult but made me feel chef-y).

I also assumed that they didn’t mean skim or soy milk, so I used full-fat milk, and I tripled the pepper amount.

I layered the sliced potatoes, topped with the flour, salt and pepper and the bacon, repeated the layers, and poured milk over the whole thing.

It looked disgusting:
My greatest fear was that it would come out of the oven as nothing more than clumps of raw flour with bits of greasy bacon gristle-studded potatoes floating in curdled milk.

I popped it into a moderate oven (thankfully, they defined “moderate” as 350º), covered, for 45 minutes. When I took the pan out to uncover for the remaining 15 minutes in a desperate attempt to brown the top and make it look a little less like something they serve at Shady Pines retirement home on Wednesday nights, I was saddened to see that a milky skin had formed on the top of the potatoes, and there was a LOT of milk still swishing around. Happily, though, it looked like the flour islands had melted and incorporated themselves into the dish. Things were looking up for this dish!

And then down. The top didn’t brown, but the potatoes were soft, and I didn’t want to add insult to injury and overcook them. So I took them to the party with the attitude that this was an exercise in culinary experimentation, and not all experiments succeed. Clearly.

The potatoes were served about an hour into the party, and I am thrilled to report that they didn’t suck! They had been warming in the oven, and I’m not sure if it was the extra heat that thickened the milk into a sauce, or if it was just the resting period. The potatoes were tender, the bacon was semi-crunchy, and the milk sauce was a nice consistency. I was surprised that the dish was more sweet than savory, and if I made it again, I would up the salt and pepper. And maybe add some cheese.

I was told the potatoes were great the next day for breakfast, which made me very happy. And validated my earlier hypothesis that 1950’s housewives really knew their potatoes.

(editor's note: This was so fantastic the next morning, you can't even know. A big ole' platefull and a cup 0' joe. Awsome.)

Vegetable: Terri Griffith

When trying any new recipe a cook can expect a failure or two. So throwing a potluck where every single person was trying a new recipe, I figured I'd better err on the side of caution an make an extra dish just so that no one went away hungry. Well imagine my embarrassment that my dish was the one that tanked. It looked pretty cute, but was a total failure—or should I say gross.

I selected “Carrot Ring” from the Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook (1965). It looked simple enough (it was) and appealing. The recipe was really straightforward calling for 2 cups cooked carrots, onion, salt pepper, 3 eggs and 1 cup milk. Bake all this together and fill with peas. How great is that? Two vegetables in one dish. But it was gross. It came out like scrambled eggs with carrots in it. Yuck! The picture that accompanied the recipe looked kind of good. After considering each ingredient and step, I think I know what went wrong. Perhaps it was the interpretation of the phrase “cooked carrots.” The carrots in the picture look WAY mushier. I even cooked my carrot ring and extra 20 minutes and they still were too firm.

If I had to reinterpret this recipe I would write, Cook carrots to a paste. That should do it.

Soup: Martha Bayne

Picking one soup from 250 Delicious Soup Recipes (1950) was thoroughly overwhelming. So I went about it scientifically. Too expensive? Cut. Sorry, Creole Bouillabaise, which needed not only a pound of fresh shrimp but also two pounds of snapper.

I was also feeling tired and lazy so anything too complicated was out as well. This eliminated intriguing contenders like Mock Turtle Soup (“Cover calf’s head with cold water …”).

But, despite my sloth, I felt duty bound to at least try to cook something. This inconvenient surge of work ethic knocked out the entire section on Jiffy Soups, which offers a conceptual framework for proportionally blending various cans of condensed soups to create new and exciting taste sensations such as Cream of Corn and Mushroom, and the discreetly named Triangle (“1 can condensed tomato soup, 1 can condensed bean-with-bacon soup, 3 cans water”).*

Lastly, I wanted it to have a shot at being vaguely edible. I remain to this day strangely drawn to Ripe Olive Soup but I didn’t think it would be very hospitable to inflict it on a bunch of strangers. So, after a brief flirtation with something jelled and chilled – which just seemed like it would be classy – I settled on Tuna and Tomato Bisque.

I like tuna, I like tomatoes. They go together well in a nice nicoise salad. Why not a soup? Also: they both come in cans, and see above in re. laziness.

Here is the recipe:

Tuna and Tomato Bisque

1 (7-ounce) can tuna
2 tablespoons minced parsely
1/4 cup diced onion
1 cup cooked tomatoes
2 cups water
4 tablespoons butter
4 tablespoons flour
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
dash cayenne
3 cups milk

Shred tuna, add oil from tuna, parsley, onion, tomatoes and water. Heat to boiling and simmer 20 minutes. Strain. Blend butter, flour, salt and cayenne’ add milk, gradually stirring constantly and cook until smooth and thickened. Add tuna mixture, blend and serve at once. Serves 4.

I doubled the recipe and ballparked the quantities, with two 5-ounce cans of Bumblebee Solid White Albacore Tuna in Oil and one 28-ounce can of Dominick’s-brand Organic Whole Peeled Tomatoes.

I drained off the oil from the fish and ran into trouble right off the bat. Am I supposed to add the fish to the soup base? What is this “tuna mixture” mentioned at the end of the recipe? The tuna? ” Mixed with … other tuna?

Anyway. I wound up just throwing the oil in with the tomatoes, onion, and parsley and alliteratively decanting the tuna into a Tupperware to take up to Terri’s. Then I gave the cans to the cat. He was psyched.

Simmered oil, tomatoes, onion, and parsley for 20 minutes – it actually smelled pretty good – and then strained it. I don’t have a chinois so I just pushed it through a colander.

This resulted in a lovely clear tomato bouillon.








And some tomato/onion/parsley mash.








Whisked in the butter, flour, salt, and cayenne, and then the milk. After blending in six cups of a possible eight it was a very pale pink, so I just stopped there. Which was probably good because it wound up having a very “subtle” flavor. Any more dairy and it would have been just Milk Soup With Tomato Essence.

Anyhow. That was basically it. Once I got to Terri and Serena’s I heated it back up and then mixed in the reserved tuna “mixture, “garnished the bowls with parsley, and served.

I also made some cayenne croutons to accompany the soup. Actually, they were supposed to be these elaborate bits of toasted bread sculpture involving cutting bread into doughnut sized rings, and cutting some more bread into long fingers and then threading the whole ring-and-spear unit together and garnishing each bowl with one. But that quickly proved too much work, not to mention a massive waste of perfectly good bread. So I just cut the bread into toast points, dipped them in butter, dusted them with salt and cayenne, and then promptly burned them in the oven.

Whoops.

I brought them along anyway and everyone seemed to think the charred, peppery bread added a certain textural something, but maybe they were just being nice.

Would I make Tuna and Tomato Bisque again? Probably not. It wasn’t bad but it was, as I said, quite milky. By which I mean, “bland.”

But now, at least, I can say that I’ve tried tuna soup.


*Why “Triangle”? Is this meant to evoke some illicit three-way between the tomato, the bean, and the bacon?

Culinary Arts Institute Dinner

On Saturday, Serena and I hosted an entire dinner party cooked from the Culinary Arts Institute cook books. Each of our guests selected a recipe for this prescriptive potluck and will blog about their experiences. Over the course of the next week or so, I will post the entries for each course.

MENU:
Canapés—Andrew Breen and Nicholas Hayes
Crudités—Serena Worthington and Terri Griffith
Soup—Martha Bayne
Salad—Andrew Breen and Nicholas Hayes
Rolls—Serena Worthington
Vegetable—Terri Griffith
Potato—Stephanie Crain
Meat—Terri Griffith
Desserts—Dominic Molon and Lara Hayes

Some of the recipes were a great success, some not so successful. But it was a fun night all around. I hope you enjoy the forthcoming posts and perhaps try some recipes yourself.

250 Fish and SeaFood Recipes

Last time I was at La Frescasita they were having a big sale on tilapia fillets. I bought a bunch and popped them in the freezer figuring that there was always something to do with white fish. When I first received 250 Fish and SeaFood Recipes (1940) I thought I would never end up cooking from it. (note: The 1970s edition is called 200 Ways to Serve Fish and Sea Food, but the title page reads 200 Different Fish and Sea Food Recipes. I think it's funny how they played loosey goosey with the titles.) First of all the recipes are all things like "take 24 fresh oysters," then it has you shuck them and bake into some kind of crazy casserole. Hailing from the Pacific Northwest, this kind of seafood adulteration is really a sin. I think no matter how long I live in the Midwest I will never abandon this basic tenet of preparing seafood. But for the sake of this project and the uninspiring frozen tilapia, I turned to The Culinary Arts Institute.

Right off the bat there were a couple of acceptable fish recipes. I chose "Baked Fish Fillets." The recipe was simple and I had all that was needed.

Baked Fish Fillets

1 pound fish fillets
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon salt
Fine dry bread crumbs
1 tablespoon oil or melted butter

Cut fillets into serving pieces. Combine milk and salt. Dip fish into milk, then into crumbs being sure fish is completely covered with crumbs. Place in greased baking dish or on oven proof platter, sprinkle with oil and brown quickly in very hot oven (500F.) 10 to 20 minutes. Do not add water. Serve with Almond Butter Sauce, melted butter, Maitre d'Hotel Butter or Lemon Butter. Serves 2

I followed the recipe closely and it turned out well. Since I didn't have any bread crumbs, I made some from pita that I had in the freezer and topped it with butter. If I were to make this recipe again, which I will, I would definitely season the bread crumbs. I am unsure whether or not packaged bread crumbs were popular in 1940. Maybe they were expecting my bread crumbs to already be seasoned. Anyway, it was good. I made "Tartare Sauce" from the final page. It was good as well. I served the fish and tartare sauce with a packaged mushroom risotto with peas and a green salad.

250 Delectable Desserts

One of the fascinating things about the cookbooks from The Culinary Arts Institute is the way they (Ruth Berolzheimer) recycle their material. Nowhere is this more obvious than with 250 Delectable Desserts. The oldest edition I have is from 1940. This two-color cover was standard with the books from the 40s. Honestly, I have no idea what this dessert is on the cover--especially the little rounds, possibly bacon, or those little soy disc things that come with vegetarian udon. The strange thing about this book is that when you open the cover the title page reads, 250 Tempting Desserts. If you're re-packaging material, it seems easy to understand how this kind of mistake could happen. What's less easy to understand is how this "typo" happened on the 1949 and 1950 editions, which were similarly titled 250 Delectable Dessert Recipes. The dessert pictured on this 1950 edition also seems impenetrable to me. I think it might be baked apples. The title page of 150 Delectable Dessert Recipes (1971) reads correctly. I assume this happened when they culled their “best” 150 recipes and had to change the title page anyway.

Despite the cover or the title, all of the editions of the 250 Dessert variety are EXACTLY the same on the inside. The 1970s versions, the smaller 150 Desserts, use the same recipes, same pictures, same font. The only difference is pagination, and of course the missing 100 recipes. This really makes me wonder about the content of these books. If the 70s editions are simply selections of the 50s editions, which are reprints of the 40s editions, then just what is the source for the 40s editions? How old are these recipes anyway? Is this why they are so strange?

250 Delicious Soup Recipes

Monday was the last day of school and when I got home I was so tired and cold, that I needed a remedy. Even though the supermercado is only two blocks away, I just couldn't face the walk. So I turned to 250 Delicious Soup Recipes (1950) to help me out. On the train home I had been mentally running through the contents of the refrigerator and remembered that I still had all that half and half and also some mushrooms. Cream of Mushroom soup has always been a favorite of mine, but I have never made it from scratch. In one of the old Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple movies she gives a recipe for mushroom soup. Something like: mushrooms, stock, flour, cream, bit of salt. At the time I remember thinking, Is that all there is to it?

In 250 Delicious Soup Recipes, they give two different versions. The regular kind and "Chef's Cream of Mushroom Soup." Of course I picked the chef's version. I followed the recipe pretty faithfully except that I used half and half. I was fresh out of veal stock so used chicken. The only thing I would do differently next time is to start with a roux and then add the mushrooms. The mushrooms released so much liquid that it made browning the flour difficult.

250 Ways to Make Candy

Serena and I had a happy cooking morning, listening to NPR and making candy. From 250 Ways to Make Candy (1950) I selected "Inexpensive Milk Caramels." I made it mostly with half and half because both Serena and I came home with half and half and now we have like a gallon of it. We finished the caramels with gray sea salt, a suggestion made by Serena not 250 Ways to Make Candy.

Unlike some of the other Culinary Arts Institute recipes I have tried, this one ROCKED! It was great, though difficult to cut. I'm a really big caramel fan and occasionally splurge on the artisinal caramels from Whole Foods. I can't remember their name, but they are made here in Chicago and come in a small white box. Mine don't rival their creamy, gentle goodness, but mine turned out well anyway. Candy making is fun although I'm not quite as excited when it comes to eating it.

Meat Muffins

The "Meat Muffins" were a complete success! The recipe was easy and I followed it exactly. There was, however, a bit of hesitation at the glaze. It called for half a cup of ketchup mixed with half a cup of brown sugar to be brushed on top about mid-way through baking. In the refrigerator I have some Sweet Baby Ray's Hot 'n Spicy Barbecue Sauce, which is my absolute favorite. It would have been simple to just brush the top of those meaty little muffins with that, but I really wanted to give the recipe a go. I'm glad I did because the glaze became quite smokey and nice as the muffins cooked and the brown sugar did its magic. I used only a quarter cup of each of the brown sugar and ketchup and I'm glad I did because I had more than plenty. I would be interested in knowing what ketchup was like in the early 40s, if it was made with corn syrup or sugar. It seems to me that this glaze would be just as good or better if made with tomato paste.

The picture on the right does not accompany any particular recipe, but is a serving suggestion from 250 Ways to Prepare Meat (1969). It reads, "Sausage, ground pork, lamb or beef can be shaped many interesting ways." Why yes, yes they can.

This evening I will be making "Meat Muffins" which can be found on page 36 of The Ground Meat Cookbook (see previous post). There are no specific serving suggestions, though earlier in 250 Ways of Serving Potatoes (1941) I saw a mention of "French Potato Balls" but there was no recipe. There was a picture which mentioned using a melon baller, which sounds like a great idea to me. Since they will be so little, I'm just going to cook them in a pan.

Here are two versions 250 Ways of Serving Potatoes (1941). The only difference is the cover. Both are dated 1941, but it is obvious that the blue one is the older of the two. Also, it is numbered 13 while the color photo cover is 113. Curious.

204 Intriguiging Ground Meat Recipes

Yesterday through Coudal Partners Serena found this great site where someone has posted the full text of The Ground Meat Cookbook (1954). I haven't seen this book before so you know how excited I was to read it. The resolution is pretty good, so it is possible to work from it. As you can see by the cover, it's a stunner.

The books I have are all from the 1940s or the 1970s, but this is from the 1950s series. Although I've seen the covers, I've never looked inside. The contents are spectacular and there are some differences between this and the ones I own. First, there is playful use of illustration and color. For example, the charming illustration of lambs in swimsuits at the beach atop the recipe for "Frosted Lamb Loaf." At first I thought they were poodles, but why would there be poodles at the beach? Another of the illustrations depicts a tarted up row of dancing pearl onions adorning the recipe for "Liver Dumplings."

The thing that is noticeably missing is the name of Ruth Berolzheimer. This seems odd to me because the two series I have 40s and 70s both have her name on it. So I am wondering if when the original series of the 40s was re-worked, they simply kept her name since it was she who compiled the recipes in the first place. Up until now, I thought that her tenure at Culinary Arts Institute was un-interrupted throughout that period.

Please try a recipe or two and let me know how it turns out.
http://www.meatbook.com/index.html

Holiday Cheese Log

I planned to use the Amy Sedaris Cheese Ball recipe that I cut from an issue of BUST Magazine. She republished it in a slightly different form in I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence (2006). There it's called "Lil' Smokey Cheese Ball." This recipe is by far the best basic cheese ball recipe I've ever used. You can make lots of changes and it still turns out great.

Amy Sedaris's Cheese Ball
BUST Magazine, 2001

2 8oz packages cream cheese
2 cups shredded smoked gouda
1 stick unsalted butter
2 Tbs milk, cream, or 1/2 and 1/2
2 tsp A-1 Steack Sauce
2 cups crushed nuts

Allow ingredients to soften to room temperature. Beat them all together in a mixing bowl and form into a ball, or small balls to suit your needs. Roll in crushed nuts and refrigerate. Remove from refrigerator and allow to soften about 20 minutes before serving. Serve with crackers of your choice.

Armed with my shopping list, Serena and I took the bus down to Jewel because you can't buy anything but queso fresco or cheadar in our neighborhood. But when we got to Jewel there was not a single scrap of smoked gouda left! I was outraged. Was everyone making cheese balls for Thanksgiving? From our slim choices we decided to use an extra-sharp cheddar and smoked white-cheddar mix. It turned out great. The thing about this recipe is that it is so forgiving. Yummmmm.

250 Tasty Snacks

This week I have three parties. My friend Victoria's birthday, Thanksgiving at Paula and Terri's, concluding with a pie and hors d'oeuvres with Lara, Dominick, Andrew and Nicholas. As you can imagine, that's a lot of cooking. I decided to make a single dish that I can bring to multiple parties. And obviously that dish is a cheese log.

I turned immediately to 250 Tasty Snacks #1 (1970, original copyright 1965), which I knew would help me out. There was an interesting looking recipe for "Nut-Cheese Log," that used both cheddar and roquerfort, but it called for a half a cup of white wine and honestly, I just didn't trust it. So I've decided to stick with my trusty old standby.

Dinner Party

So I had some friends over for dinner tonight. All in all the meal went well. I used a lovely Polish sausage that I got at Lincolnwood Produce and I made my mashed potatoes from small, unpeeled red potatoes instead of instant (yuck!). It was a hit.

For sides, I served asparagus with pimento strips, just like The American FAMILY Cookbook suggests. I thought I would have a hard time finding pimento, but it was right there on the shelf at Lincolnwood. Of course, the store had a lot to do with it. We also had a great Ceasar Salad with a nice anchovy dressing from The Joy of Cooking.

Serena made the "Pots de Creme Chocolat" from 150 Delectable Dessert Recipes #13 (1971). She really likes to follow a recipe the first time out with a dish. They tasted pretty good, but the instructions were poor. It proved what I had been thinking all along as I read through these books--many of these recipes have not been tested.