It's still 1943!

I got my day off to a swinging start with The Swingin' Years. Usually I love listening to the whole thing every Saturday and Sunday, but today I woke up so late that all I heard were the last few songs on the countdown as I chugged my coffee.

But it was my favorite year, 1943! This week, five of the top ten songs were performed by Der Bingle, but the number one song was Paper Doll by the Ink Spots, and man, I found myself humming that song. All. Damned. Day.

The 1943 theme got me thinking about my poor neglected Victory Garden, so I spent the rest of the day yanking up the weeds and remnants of the summer tomatoes and tilling in compost for the winter cabbages and peas. It was sunny but there was a definite chill in the air, and the wind started picking up just after noon, blowing the fallen leaves everywhere. It was apple pie weather; stew weather. You need something chunky and warm to cast the chill out of your joints at the end of the day.

As I planned where the root vegetables were going to go, I started to get really hungry, imagining roasted parsnips or beets from my winter garden accompanying a baked chicken, or all the carrots, peas and potatoes filling up a stew. Then, as I was clearing away some forgotten corn stalks, it occurred to me that I had the making of a great stew sitting in my freezer right now! The corn crop this summer was AMAZING. What a difference planting corn in a block makes! I blanched and froze most of it, hoping to make corn bread and soups this winter. Well, no time like the present! And just a few days ago I went past a recipe for Corn Chowder in one of my ration recipe cookbooks. Gosh that sounds good! Now let me see, where was it...


Next week, if you're good, I'll make some of those bizarro sandwich fillings for you. They're really not bad, I've tried a few. But I digress!

In the spirit of true rationing, I had to make do with a few things. The first thing that went through my mind was "FOUR CUPS OF MILK! THAT'S MY WHOLE WEEKS RATIONS!" So in the spirit of making do, I used two cups of fresh milk, and enough powdered milk and water to make two more cups. The thing about powdered milk and powdered eggs is that they're awful when you use them as directed and consume them as stand-alones, but if you bury them in a recipe they are undetectable. And so it was with the stew. The milk situation turned out just right. Also I was out of onions, which has never happened before. Finding them growing out or turning to mush happens from time to time, but I can't ever remember actually being OUT of them before. Luckily I had some chopped, dried onions in the pantry, and while I certainly didn't get the same magical aroma that real onions and bacon fat would provide, the resulting flavor of the soup was quite nice.


The resulting soup was a little insipid at first. You have to use a LOT of salt to get it up to snuff, and even then I thought it smelled wonderful but still tasted a little boring. I added a teaspoon of butter smashed up with a teaspoon of flour to make a roux. That added some body and improved the taste a bit, but it was still a little boring and I was just about at capacity for the salt and pepper, I didn't want to use any more. I searched a few other recipes and found garlic powder to be a recurring ingredient, so I tried about a 1/4 teaspoon. That made it sparkle, but there was still a little something missing. It smelled wonderful but the sweetness of the corn just wasn't shining through. Aha! Sweetness! I put in a teaspoon of sugar and stirred it in. I tasted it. Oooh, yes...that's MUCH better! So for all those who just skipped to the bottom of my paragraph, follow the recipe but add some garlic salt and a little sugar to the finished product.

I don't have any crackers on hand, and I was going to make bread but I ran out of strength. Plus, the soup cooked up very fast, about a half an hour. I still have a few rolls hanging around that didn't get used up for Thanksgiving dinner, so they made an excellent garnish. Tasty too.

I wish you could taste it, it's really quite good, and it makes enough for four bowls of soup plus leftovers for another day.



Further adventures for my time travelling friends:

The Swingin' Years can be heard Saturday and Sunday Mornings from 6 to 9 am Pacific Time. If you've never heard it, it's really a treat. The host, Chuck Cecil, has been running this show for fifty years now, and he serves up each song with trivia, listener-supplied memories from letters, interviews with the Bandleaders and singers that he's conducted over the decades, and stories about the ballrooms they played in. The only commercials are station breaks and the occasional pledge breaks every month or two. It's a first-class memory trip and I don't know what I'll ever do when Chuck finally kicks the bucket.

It's 1941!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! No matter when you celebrate it...on the last Thursday of November, as tradition dictates, or on the penultimate Thursday, as FDR decreed it to be in 1939 in order to extend the Holiday shopping season and get some more money flowing into the economy as soon as possible. It was a nice idea, and it certainly worked the way it was supposed to, but just ask the simmering families what THEY thought of it. If you had one day off, and your children and cousins had another day off a week later, it was impossible to get everyone together for the Thanksgiving meal. Sports schedules had to be postponed or canceled, parades were re-routed, it was a general nightmare. Some people (and some states) split the difference and celebrated TWO Thanksgivings (oh my gosh wouldn't that be great if we had two 4-day weekends in a row? Heaven!) but most people and states picked one and tried to stick with it as best they could. After much fuss, Congress finally passed a law in 1941 stating that Thanksgiving would henceforth be ON THE FOURTH THURSDAY OF NOVEMBER, AND THAT'S IT, BUSTER! Okay maybe they didn't use those exact words but that was the spirit of the law.

In any case, Happy Thanksgiving! Save a slice of pie for me.

It's 1943! And it's starting to get chilly.

Twice a year I get a terrible itch to plant a vegetable garden. The one I plant in spring...well, that's a no-brainer. I get to plant all the things you'd typically expect to see in a Victory Garden: Corn, tomatoes, peppers, melons and herbs. The winter garden takes a little more planning. You don't want to go to all the trouble of digging up the soil, planting seeds and pulling weeds, only to have your strong little sprouts turn to mush with the first frosty night, so you have to plant only the things that can take the cold.


Luckily, most of the things you can plant in the winter are things you might actually want to EAT in the winter. Red cabbage cooking on the stove with sugar and vinegar makes a wonderful smell and an even tastier dish. Chubby little sugar snap peas cook up hot and fast, and although I haven't tried it yet, there are two recipes for pea leaf soup in my ration cookbooks. If I can save the leaves from powdery mildew this year, I might actually give it a shot. Cauliflower tastes much better broken to pieces, steamed hot and served with leftover gravy. Broccoli makes a tangy, crunchy salad with bacon and dressing, and you might think you hate Brussels Sprouts until you have them simmered in mustard sauce. And what's a stew, soup or casserole without a few root vegetables, like carrots or parsnips? Every little bit helps, you know.

Yeah I know it's a planner from 1944, but what I plant this winter will contribute to recipes like these next February. So there.

Click on the page for a larger (and much sharper) view of the recipes.

The most important thing that I've learned about winter gardening is that things get BIG, bigger than you'd expect them to, if all you have to go by is the size of the finished product at the store. The first year I planted cabbage, I figured a foot apart would be just about right, that allows for the head at the center and some extra leaves, right? Was I ever surprised when they hit up the three foot mark and started fighting it out for space. So this year I'm doing the onions a foot apart and spacing the cabbages, broccoli and cauliflower four feet apart. This sounds like I'm getting fewer cabbages out of my little plot of land, but four cabbages you can at sure beats one cabbage shaped like an S from space hogs.

So off I go, wearing a beat up and much-patched pair of pants (Make it do or do without!) and an ugly shirt I don't mind ratting up. The sun is shining, the wind is blowing, it's not too hot and it's not raining. This is perfect fall gardening weather! And when I get back in, maybe I'll make a soup out of the Butternut squash I harvested from the summer garden.

I tell ya, a little victory gardening makes a big difference in your meals! And your pocketbook.

It's 1939!

NBC radio city is one of my stops on my fantasy perfect day. I'd relive a day from some set year, start off with a vintage breakfast courtesy one of my antique cookbooks, a newspaper from the LA Times Archive (They have any day to choose from, from 1881 on) , then catch a movie I saw in the paper, or visit the site of NBC radio city with two tickets to Fibber McGee and Molly...or maybe I'll hit up the old KNX building across the street from Columbia Studios. It used to be CBS, the Columbia Broadcasting System, so various movie stars from the studio across the street would cross the crosswalk after work and put in an hour (whether they wanted to or not) recording their episode of Suspense! That's my favorite, Suspense from the war years. Absolutely the best! Always a great, twisty ending! I'd end the day by listening to an old radio show, probably Suspense, come to think of it, and partake of any advertised product that happened to still exist.

I keep thinking of things to do on my perfect day. There are things that still exist, like various movie palaces and radio stations, a few restaurants and shops. And of course I have movie magazines and women's magazines from whatever year I pick. Thank heavens for netflix! I can watch a double feature if the movies still exist. Oh it would be so much fun to roll film at the same time sixty years late! I am such a dork.

Further reading:

If you have a Los Angeles Public Library card, it will get you access to the L.A. Times Database for free. This link will take you to the database. Pop in your card number and pin and proceed to "Proquest - the Historic Los Angeles Times". Give the date you want and hit enter. Everyone else will have to go to the Proquest database or the Los Angeles Times Archive database but you'll have to pay for the privilege.

Live365 has dozens of stations that cater to the Old Time Radio fan, and OTRCAT has individual shows for purchase, but a google search will turn up many, many sites that offer mp3s of old radio shows and news broadcasts.

It's 1943!

It's the middle of the war and things could still go either way for our boys. D Day is still more than a year away, and the slog to get there will be hard. Back on the homefront, it's Decoration Day, which means a big parade down main street with lots of flag waving and patriotism, something we need right now. After the parade, we can take in a movie. Casablanca and Mrs. Miniver are playing in town, but that sounds too heavy right now. With all the boys gone overseas, the town is pretty empty and I don't want to think about what could happen to them at any time. Maybe something light, like a musical... Hello Frisco Hello is playing at the Arlington in Los Angeles, and you KNOW how I love Alice Faye. We could just take the streetcar over still get home before 10. But first, I think, some breakfast.


Thank heavens I have my collection of ration book recipes. It's the end of the month and I have next to nothing left! Tonight I'll be dining on Boiled cauliflower in gravy, but I think I might still have just a little condensed milk left for cooking. If you mix it half and half with water, it becomes milk again. It doesn't taste like fresh milk, but it's better than nothing. Now let's see...I don't have any shortening left...but I have some oil...let's see what I can whip up...
Oh hey, that'll work! The drop biscuits don't need any shortening, you can just use oil. I've got that! Let me put on some chicory coffee to perk and I'll be right back with my mixing bowls.

The thing about ration recipes is that they don't usually make all that much, and I'll admit these biscuits are a little dry, but with some margarine and homemade jam, they taste just great!

I'm out of sugar for my coffee, but I still have some sweetened condensed milk to put in it, and I've found that I actually like that better than cream and sugar. Especially with chicory coffee.

Ah, a real wartime breakfast! How lucky we are that we have SOMETHING. I don't mind scrimping and rationing if it'll help our boys get what they need to end this war any faster.

Thanks, Boys!

It's 1909! ...Or is it...um...

Everything old is new again. From the Los Angeles Times, January 5th, 1909...






And from Yahoo News today, January 5th, 2009...

Search begins for Kansas boy missing 10 years

By ROXANA HEGEMAN, Associated Press Writer Roxana Hegeman, Associated Press Writer – Mon Jan 5, 5:38 pm ET

EL DORADO, Kan. – A missing Kansas boy's adoptive parents, who failed to report his disappearance for nearly a decade, are considered "people of interest" in the case as authorities expand their search nationwide, a sheriff said Monday.

Investigators were focused on finding Adam Herrman, who was 11 when he disappeared in 1999 from a mobile home park in Towanda where he lived, Butler County Sheriff Craig Murphy said.

Authorities only recently learned he was missing, and would not say whether they believed he was still alive.

"We are working it as if it is a death — but we are not leaning one way or the other," Murphy said.

His parents, Doug and Valerie Herrman, have not been arrested or charged. Asked why, Murphy replied: "We are not ready is an honest and upfront answer."

Earlier media reports said Adam had a history of running away, but Murphy said investigators have not confirmed that. The boy was adopted by the Herrmans when he was 2 1/2 years old.

The family has cooperated with investigators, he said.

Murphy said a search of the now empty lot where the family's mobile home once stood gave investigators one answer they sought, but he did not elaborate other than to say no human remains were found.

Murphy's office did not receive a missing persons report until contacted recently by Sedgwick County's exploited and missing children's unit. He declined to say who tipped them off. It was not clear exactly when they learned of the boy's disappearance.

Investigators have not found any confirmed data on Adam's whereabouts since 1999.

Murphy asked the public for help, and issued a plea to the missing boy himself: "If Adam Herrman is alive out there — and he would see this — I would ask him to contact us immediately."

It's 1917!

The last two entries were a little dark and heavy, so I decided to lighten things up a bit with everybody's favorite summertime dessert, Gelatine. I'd use that other name but they're probably sue. Besides, I'm not really talking about THEM.




A long time ago, I bought a movie magazine from 1917. It had a cover story about Wallace Reid, a snippet of an O. Henry story enticing you to buy the rest of the collection, ("...Tansey heard a musical, soft giggle, and breathed an entrancing odour of heliotrope. A groping, light hand touched his arm, and then...") and a marvelous recipe for Ivory jelly held within the confines of an advertisement for Knox Gelatine. Better still, if you sent away for it, you could receive this marvelous little cookbook called Dainty Desserts for Dainty people.

Now I'm trained. Wallace Reid, Ivory Jelly and Heliotrope are forever fixed together in my mind, and whenever one comes along it unearths a terrible craving for the other two. The first appearance of heliotrope flowers in the spring makes me want to dig out The Birth of a Nation and watch only the part where Reid gets into a fistfight with two other men who rip his shirt off in the scuffle. Oh, my, yes it does. And if I make a batch of ivory jelly and eat it while I watch the film, I'm in heaven.

Today, however, I am trying something a little different. The color pictures in the Knox booklet always make me want to try the recipes. Nowadays, if you go ver to the Knox recipe site and look things up, you'll find fifty pages comprised of two things: Jelly and cheesecake. It seems that all the fancy - ahem, I mean dainty - desserts have been forgotten. I guess it's up to me to rescue them!

Pardon me while I tie this red sheet around my neck and climb to the top of the bookcase.

Timecat to the rescue!




Today's experiment will be Columbia Pudding! Now before you get all crazy and drooly on me, I don't have one of these highfallutin' pans. They just don't make them anymore, and the ones on ebay are just stupid expensive, there's no way I'm ever going to buy one. So I just have a little copper jelly mold pan from the sixties. That's what we have to work with today.





DARN THIS BLOG. I keep making big pictures so you can see the details and they still upload as teensy weensy pictures. Oh well, just click on them to make them bigger. I deliberately kept this whole page together so you could see some of the recipes and maybe try them out later. Anyway, the first part of the Columbia Pudding recipe involves the wine jelly that is described on this page.

At first glance, it looks equal parts interesting and nauseating, but as I cooked up it and tasted it, I was amazed. It was sangria! And not only sangria but GOOD Sangria! For some reason I expected it to taste like mulled wine, which is very much a love it or hate it thing, but I was very pleasantly surprised. After filling the bottom of my mold with the wine jelly mixture, I soaked the cut figs in the stuff for about five minutes and then stuck them to the sides of the pan as directed. It took a few tries but I found that if you hold an ice cube against the outside of the mold, just opposite where you're pressing the fig half, it's sets quickly and stays in place. Yeah yeah, I know, they look like little leeches. Never fear! After slurping up the remaining sangria the figs left behind, you won't care a bit.



The Spanish Cream part of the recipe took a bit of doing because I don't have a double boiler. I did the ol' Alton Bron trick of floating your bowl of goodies in a pan of hot water and it did the trick quite nicely. The Spanish Cream was really very tasty, but the whipped egg whites...I don't know, that was a mysterious addition to the recipe. It doesn't mention if you're supposed to add them while the stuff was hot or wait for it to cool down. I had to guess. I've heard of a dessert called Floating Island where merengues are added to hot milk pudding so they'll solidify into tiny islands. So I folded in the egg whites while the milk was still hot, but not boiling. The broke up into bazillions of tiny white balls of foam and floated on the mix. Hmmm. Okay, time to pour.















Good night, Sweet Prince!


Okay, so it's been sitting in the fridge overnight, and today is the unveiling of a treat probably not seen since The Great War! Drumroll please...





You will, of course, notice a few things...

Number one, it looks nothing like the original illustration. Being the great genius that I am, I didn't have any white wine around the house, so I used what I had on hand, which was a lovely Cabernet. What was the point in going to the store and sacrificing $20 on an experiment, sez I to myself. In retrospect, perhaps a nice, sweet Gewirtztraminer would have been the best choice from a photographic standpoint, but it will have to wait until next time. That odd little purple teardrop shaped thing in the front of the pudding is a fig. I only popped in a few. If I'd ringed the mold I'm sure it wouldn't look quite so out of place.

Number two, it doesn't have a border of cherries and whipped cream around the perimeter. This is because I thought the original illustration was a tad bit CREEPY, looking as though it had been carefully garnished with severed, manicured fingers.

Now for the real question. How does it taste?

I'd have to say the the individual flavored jellies were quite good, but put together they lost something. I think it would have been tastier if I had used grape juice instead of wine. That being said, I'm absolutely going to make the wine jelly again on it's own, pour it into individual cups and call it Sangria Gelatine. I thought that was the BEST stuff! My husband preferred the vanilla milk custard, and asked if I could just make that part later.

A word if you're going to try this at home: Double the gelatine in the recipe. I don't know if packages were larger in 1917, or stronger, or whatever, but in all the recipes I've tried from this booklet, the gelatine was a little weak and the jelly just went blaaaahhhh all over the plate when it was unmolded. Doubling the gelatine will produce a sparkling tower of dessert. I forgot to double the gelatine in this recipe, so it flattened out considerably. I also only had a shallow jello mold, so if you have a cathedral mold or something lying around the house, go ahead and use that. I used to have a nice deep bundt pad but when I started looking for it, I realized I hadn't seen it in two or three moves, which goes to show you how often I make a bundt cake.

And thus ends today's lesson on how to recreate a a tiny piece of time from scratch. I will now retire to the comfort of my squishy sofa, feed my Wallace Reid addiction (oh dear...sorry Wally) and breathe the entrancing odor of the heliotrope in bloom outside my door.

Goodnight.



Further reading for my Time Traveling Friends


A much clearer scan of Dainty Desserts for Dainty People may be found here.

My scan comes from my own copy, but if you want to flip through this book and find recipes of your own, this site not only shows it off but magnifies it beautifully.


I thought I was so original until I found this tremendous british site showing off historic recipes and their perfect recreations. But they totally cheat because they own the original antique molds, the blighters! If you have a week to spend in England and several hundred dollars, they can teach you how to do it, too. But of course you don't get to bring the molds back with you. *grumble grumble*