Ramblings and webcomics from LeEMS
A fruit cake with every furniture purchase
From a Christian Howard’s Furniture add in the Henderson daily dispatch. (Henderson, N.C.), 16 Dec. 1937. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn91068401/1937-12-16/ed-1/seq-3/>
You can find amazing and terrible things in old newspapers. You can find old newspapers on Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. at the Library of Congress. Join me there. Whole days will pass before you know it.
I may have told a fair few people already, but I have a growing obsession with fruit cake. It all started when I went looking for my mother’s recipe for fruit cake and did not find anything that sounded right in all of the papers she left me. So, I started trying out different recipes to see if I could get close to what I remember. I made two different types of fruitcake last year. I have made two different types already this year, and plan to make one more because, of course, I have found/altered a recipe I now call ‘my’ fruitcake. Then I got an inspired idea to make a zine all about fruitcake: its history, its variations, etc. It is a rabbit hole I may never dig myself out of.
While I continue work on this zine that may end up becoming a full fledged book by volume of material alone, I thought I’d share this choice variation from the Brer Rabbit’s Modern Recipes for the Modern Cook (1940 Brer Rabbit Molasses).
This is far from the only recipe I found relying on salt pork. I also found a few mince meat recipes with salt pork. One with ground beef. I know the salt pork fat is standing in for shortening and is why the fruit cake can be made with so few eggs. But….I really don’t know what else to say.
Resurrection pie – a pie made of scraps or leavings (1891 American Slang Dictionary by James Maitland)
My imagination fails me; I have no idea if this is genius or diabolical. I have not tried it myself. Thoughts?
I am one of many people who have fallen into the sometimes colorful and sometimes frightening world of vintage cookbooks. I have purchased lots of these ‘pamphlets’ online and spent hours pouring through them. Sometimes I find something novel that I want to try. Sometimes I find a good idea that I fold into my cooking repertoire. And sometimes I guffaw in humor and astonishment at what women before me were told to feed to their families.
My wonderful husband got me a box lot for Christmas one year that kept me busy for quite some time. In it, was The General Foods Kitchens Cookbook designed and produced by Stahley Thompson Associates. © 1959 Random House, Inc.: New York. There was some genuine weirdness in this book, so I thought I would share.
First off, how is it that foods always look strangely inedible? That casserole on the left seems as though it is put together with normal ingredients, and yet, none of them have melded or melted in a way that you would expect from a prepared dish. Same goes for the open face sandwiches on the right. The photos here, and in so many other cookbooks, remind me of the plastic food that is sometimes used as window display in Japanese restaurants. While there is nothing obviously wrong with it, it still does not seem edible.
Center: remember when you are cooking, crafting, darning, doing laundry, washing the dog, or scrubbing the floors, SMILE! And, pass it on to your daughters.
Wait, what?
In addition to daily meal ideas, there is some instruction for the housewife trying to do many things on a tight schedule. This section of the book resulted in the most strange and entertaining illustrations. For example: drop that revolver in your hot pot!
Hand salad, little lady
This illustration is just surreal. Why is the cook so tiny? Or, is it that that salad is really big? And, why is there an enormous arm and hand erupting from it as if the hand’s owner were sucked into the salad quick sand?
Being astonished and amused by the pictures, illustrations, and the never-ending barrage of molded (aka gelatin) salads is one of the understood pleasures of vintage cookbooks. So much so, that you will find plenty of books just poking fun at pictures without really paying attention to the underlying recipes, culture, or women the books were written about, within, and for. A rare standout, which I absolutely loved reading, is American Advertising Cookbooks: How Corporations Taught Us to Love Bananas, Spam, and Jell-O by Christina Ward.
If you ever wonder why we eat what we eat, why grocery chains sell us what they do, and why our habits of food consumption are sometimes lazy, wasteful, and strange, then Christina Ward’s book is for you. It dissects the cultural, political, and commercial drives that made some foods a staple in grocery stores, like pineapples and bananas, while other foods are not. With plenty of illustrations from the original publications, it puts a new spin on understanding them by pointing out the religious, racist, and prejudiced imagery they included to firmly ground them in the society to whom they were selling.
I have decided that Australia is the best place on the planet to find inventive utensils. It all began with a Kick Starter campaign for the ButterUp. For those of you who keep actual butter in their fridge and not spreadable margarine, you are familiar with the bread destroying inflexibility of the chilled substance. Many of you may have moved on to French butter keepers. If you are a Floridian, you may have tried French butter keepers and found our humid, fertile environment too mold rich for this method. You face a dilemma.
After the ButterUp, what flatware collection is complete without a spork? I tend to make a lot of chili and stew in Fall which are both too meaty and chunky for spoons and too liquidy for non spoons. A spork seemed like the best solution, but my initial searching found only camping utensils and collapsible picnic ware. I wanted a table top edition, something that could fit in with the rest of my flatware. I found Splayd Utensils.
Some people say that the spork was invented by General MacArthur while he was in the pacific (“Spork’s Weird History” on Salon), others trace the roots of the spork to icecream forks and runcible spoons. Whatever the true past of the spork, the splayd was invented in 1940 by Bill MacArthur (explanation for the General MacArthur myth?), who apparently wanted to save ladies and their tea dresses from balancing plates, forks, and knives at outdoor barbeques. Splayd Utensils are a beautiful step in the evolution of the spork. The straight edges aid in cutting without being sharp or dangerous when using the utensil like a spoon. The bowl is a little shallow for good liquid retention, but it does the job. I found a used set that, like the picture, has a very angular design. New Splayd Utensils are a bit curvier and can be ordered from Australia.
Last, but not least, and, I suppose, not really a utensil is the Memobottle. This is another Kick Starter that I found answered a very specific question: how to properly organize a bag that carries your files, your laptop, paper, tablet, etc., things that are all flat and rectangular, with a water bottle as well? The answer is to make the bottle flat and rectangular. I know there are many of you who never encounter this problem, who do not attend academic conferences or corporate business retreats. You may not need this, but everyone else, all you paper pushers, should seriously check it out when Memobottle is finally made available for purchase online.
I mentioned before about making things on toast for dinner. The distraction of looking for a house meant I only made two such meals before the mold came. Obviously, it’s been a while since that happened; I’ve been keeping this post in my drafts while buying, packing and moving. Yes. I have a house! And pretty soon, this blog will be replete with fix-its and design finishes…once I have a computer set up at home.
Anyway, back to the food. My husband and I love the taste of this meal, but I hate to cook it since simmering tomato sauce is so messy. If you are game, I suggest you try it: poached eggs in tomato sauce on toast. Here, with a side of steamed and buttered mustard greens.
I don’t really have a recipe for this. Just fill a pot with enough tomato sauce to poach the eggs. Add whatever seasoning you want. Drop eggs in simmering sauce and keep simmering until they are as hard as you like them. Ladle them on to toast and voila, you have a decadent tasting dinner.
I recently came across the blog Table Matters and it got me thinking about old timey meals like those in my copy of Fanny Farmer’s cookbook, and meals that may be common place elsewhere but not where I live.
Then we got this bread that was REALLY awesome and decided that we would have to have some meals on toast. This is the first: my take on Welsh Rarebit, beef and goat cheese gravy sauce with some cheddar sprinkles and a side of cabbage slaw. It looks kind of blah, but it was awesome!
Ingredients: beef stock from stewing beef earlier in the week, goat cheese, a little flour (for thickening) and parsley all in the pot for the gravy, and toasted bread to put it on. Ingredients for the slaw: chopped cabbage, mayonnaise, lemon juice, salt, pepper, mustard.
Bread Bowl Spinach and Artichoke dip
Ingredients: creamed spinach (I get the frozen-steam-in-bag-kind), a jar of artichoke hearts, feta or goat cheese, mozzarella shreds, and a nice, round, unsliced loaf of bread.
Instructions: 1.) cook/heat/nuke creamed spinach if it is frozen, then mix creamed spinach, artichoke hearts, and cheeses. 2.) cut the center out of the bread so that it creates a bowl. 3.) place bread bowl on cookie sheet and surround with the torn to chip sized innards of the bowl. 4.) fill bowl with dip mixture. 5.) bake at 400 for about a half hour, then remove the bread pieces and put the bowl back in the oven. 6.) bake another 15 to 20 minutes, arrange in an aesthetically pleasing manner and enjoy!
Mini Quiches
Ingredients: eggs, shredded cheese, steamed and pulverized broccoli, flour, butter, water.
Instructions: 1.) make some pie crust dough: this is really easy and usually requires mixing together a little less butter than flour and a trickling of water to hold it all together. You don’t even have to worry too much about the texture and consistency on something this small. 2.) push pie crust dough into a mini muffin pan (yup, don’t roll it out at all, just use your fingers–I told you it was easy). 3.) mix together steamed/pulverized broccoli, eggs, and shredded cheese. I used 2 eggs for an entire mini muffin pan (see previous sentence on small portion consistency). 4.) spoon mixture into pie crust dough lined mini muffin divots. 5.) bake at 350 or 400 until they firm up and brown a bit (estimate 20 to 30 min.).
Release tip: I typically use a lot of butter in my pie dough and so do not worry about greasing the muffin pan. If you are worried about sticking, you can use the butter stick paper to lightly grease the pan. To get all the little quiches out, fit foil over the top of the pan after it cools a little. Hold edges firmly and flip the whole thing over on the counter, then un-crimp the foil and lift the pan off the freed and un-dented quiches.
As I was drawing out my little appetizers, I noticed how alike they all look. At least they look alike in black and white line art. But then, many appetizers share the key characteristic of being finger foods. They are bite sized and usually do not require any type of serving/dining wear. They are like little pill capsules of food, and this is why (I say) all my pictures look alike.
On with the recipe: Mini Potato Halves. Ingredients: I like to get the net bag of mini Yukon Gold potatoes, but any mini potato will do. You will also need sour cream, shredded cheese, bacon and chives.
Instructions: 1.) empty the little potatoes into a big pot with some water and boil until manage-ably soft. 2.) let cool enough to handle. 3.) slice in half and spoon out a good portion of the innards (put aside in a bowl); line hollowed halves on a foil lined cookie tray; water your plants with the potato water. 4.) add an entire small potato or two to the separated innards, combine with sour cream, shredded cheese, bacon bits, and chives; mash all into paste. 5.) spoon or pipe paste into hollowed halves and top with bacon piece. 6.) bake at 350 until edges are brown (I estimate 30 min.).
I am back in the kitchen again. Should it feel so good to cook?
I am not sure whether this looks as bubbly and fabulous as it was, but here ’tis. Turkey patty and pearled couscous on a bed of baby watercress with goat cheese crumbles. I made the couscous with a bit of lemon and black pepper. Whole thing was sehr gut.
Here we will answer the age old question: what can you possibly mix with J&B? There are plenty of suggestions in bar books, but none have really flown in my household. When taking on a Giallo marathon we were stuck, once again, with finding a drink to make out of the famously Giallo J&B. We came up with:
GINGER FINGER
A finger, by the way is when you have your hand wrapped about the bottom of a rocks glass so that your fingers make measurement lines up the side of the glass. This drink also works with Becherovka – a crazy bitter slavic drink that also doesn’t taste good mixed with anything.
I said I would probably talk some more about White Trash Cooking by Ernest Matthew Mickler and now I’m gonna. Here is the LEETTA I was talking about before. Some time ago I was contacted by another LeEtta who was researching the origins of the name. You know, there aren’t many of us, but there are enough to wonder where the name came from (I was named after my Great Grandmother, whom I never knew).
Anyway, White Trash Cooking by Ernest Matthew Mickler has more to recommend itself than just another LEETTA. And if you know anything about the populating of the Appalachias then you’ll recognize the blend of truly southern and something Scottish in the recipes. A few that I want to try right off: Peggy’s Pig Eggs, Butts’ Gator Tail (though I have no idea where I’d get my hands on one), and Dirty Rice.
White Trash Cooking was republished for a 25 year anniversary printing, which is good because the out of print copy seems to have been in demand. Amazon’s got a healthy preview available for you to peruse – that’s what the links are for.
