It's 1925

Today, we delve slightly into the life of Colette.  Although best known as the writer of Gigi, Cherie and the Claudine novels, she led an interesting and varied life and still carried in her heart the life she'd known as a country girl in Burgundy.  As a child, she shared her first glass of wine with her father ( "reddish-brown Muscat de Frontignan, sent from his natal south of France") and as an adult, made her own.  This is a little variation called Vin d'Orange, and I have been wanting to try it for years.  As winter is fast approaching, I thought the time to make it was perfect, although I do hate the wait and may not be able to resist temptation.

"Into four litres of dry, golden Cavalaire wine, I pour one liter of good, honest Armagnac brandy, and my friends promptly cry out.  'What a massacre!  Such a sterling brandy sacrificed to undrinkable ratafia!'  While they are still howling, I drown four sliced oranges, a freshly picked lemon, a stick of silvery vanilla, and six hundred grams of sugar cane.  All this goes into a potbellied glass jar, corked and sealed, to macerate for fifty days.  Then all I have to do is filter and bottle the result.  Is it good, you ask?  Just come home at the end of a hard, late-winter afternoon lashed with rain and hail.  You are shivering.  You feel your forehead, you wipe your nose, you look at your tongue, and finally whimper, 'I don't know what's the matter with me...'  I know what's the matter.  You need a little glass of Vin d'Oranges."  ... Colette

It's 1957

1957 was an amazing year, a time where everything in pop culture was right on the verge of "THE FUTURE".

(Just imagine that phrase yelled dramatically through an echoing megaphone by some Ed Wood-esque announcer.)

This was the year Bobby Soxers stopped mewling at Pat Boone and started screaming at Elvis Presley.    Gunfight at the OK Corral and Old Yeller were still playing at the Bijou, but so were Nights of Cabiria and Wild Strawberries.  The Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, The Cat in the Hat finally found a publisher, and in October, to America's horror, the Soviets launch Sputnik.  The Space Race begins, with the bad guys far, far ahead.


As America scrambles to catch up, the Soviets race at breakneck speed to top their original feat and stay in the lead.  It takes America another three months to get a satellite into orbit.  It took the Soviets one.  And this one was both technically superior and morally ambiguous...an experiment that still gets people's blood boiling today.

Laika.

Laika was a tiny two-year old stray found on the streets of Moscow.  Laika and two other strays were rounded up specifically because of their "stray" status.  Stray dogs would be more hardened to suffering.  Laika and her two comrades were specially trained to stay immobile for days on end (up to 20) in progressively smaller and smaller cages and to eat a special, gel-based dog food.  The dog food had two purposes:  to be able to go up into space without floating all over the capsule, and to easily deliver a final, euthanizing dose of medicine when her oxygen finally gave out, because Laika was never coming back.  The rushed show of Soviet power was a Khrushchev-mandated launch that would commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.  In the less than 30 days deadline given, there was no possible way to invent and perfect  a retrieval system that could bring her back alive, and everyone knew it.  Laika, who "won" the contest on account of her calm and friendly personality, was given a special treat just before the launch.  One of the scientists in her charge brought her home for an afternoon of play with his children.  Later, he would sadly give his reason why:  "I wanted to do something nice for her.  She had so little time left to live."

Hunkered down in her tiny capsule, heart racing, Laika became the first animal to orbit the Earth on November 3rd, 1957.  Several orbits later, she also became the first to die there when her capsule overheated.  While she had several days worth of food, and had even eaten the first serving while in space, the humanely planned final meal was never needed.

Laikas body and her rocket disintegrated upon reentry several months later.

Back in America, reports of the space dog were met with a mix of humor and revulsion.  Reporters joked about "Muttnik", but people were infuriated that the heartless commies had deliberately let a little dog suffer and die in space, a feeling that still resonates today as new people discover the story of her sacrifice.  America wouldn't get a satellite in space for another 2 months, and wouldn't be able to launch an animal at all until December of 1958, more than a year after Laika's historic launch.

In 1964, Laika was immortalized in the massive Soviet memorial, The Conquerors Of Space, where her perky little face looks bravely forward to the future.

In 2008, Laika got her very own monument, a beautiful three-dimensional statue of her, curly tail and all, sitting atop her rocket, as if just waiting for a petting.  A picture of the new monument, as well as a doggie space suit like the one she wore, can be found here.  But that's not all...

Laika's story is a sad one, and a well-known one, one that can't be changed.  But in 2011, artist Nick Abadzis created several happy alternative endings to the story.  Nick had previously created the 2007 graphic novel, Laika, which introduced the historic dog to a new audience before breaking their hearts.  No one likes the way Laika's story ended, least of all Nick, so he created better ones. My favorite is ending number one, where Laika is ejected from her rocket and gently parachutes down where her adoring trainer is tearfully waiting for her, at coordinates secretly given to her by a Soviet official.

Further reading:

The micro site for Nick Abadis graphic novel, Laika, can be found here.  In it, you can find stories about his inspiration, artwork and interviews.  An of course, you can always buy it from Amazon.

And just to go out on a happy note, here are Laika's alternative endings again.

It's 1776! And it's time for your supper, Master Washington.

Still on the Colonial kick!

I've found several books on cooking and recipes from Colonial times but they all seem...mmm, well...a bit Wolfgang Pucked. I'm not looking for modern interpretations of original recipes, I'm looking for what great-great-great grandmother cooked for her husband on Saturday, or what they had at the middle-class taverns I would have been able to afford had I been there. I guess I just don't want to be too fancy.

One of the best recipe sites for what I wanted was for the Claude Moore Colonial Farm , which touts itself as "The world of an 18th century family living on a small, low-income farm just prior to the Revolutionary War." Sounds like my kind of place.

Their list of recipes sounds delicious and unusual. They have a recipe for Onion Pie, which I've never ever heard of, adapted from Recipes from the Raleigh Tavern Bake Shop, so even though the recipe is still a reflection of an original, I thought I'd start there. Doubtless the colonists had no access to Crisco for their pie crusts, but since Lard is sold like porn now - the grocer keeps it hidden behind a counter, you have to ask for it with a great deal of guilt and shame, and you feel everyone staring at you as you purchase it - I thought it best to just use what I have on hand.

Onion Pie

The Crust
3 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 Cup shortening (can include up to 1/4 cup butter)
1 egg
1/2 cup ice water

Mix flour and salt. Cut in the shortening with knives or pastry cutter until it's mealy. Add the beaten egg and 1/4 cup ice water. Add remaining water to make a soft pasty. Chill well, divinde in half, then roll each half out on a floured surface to no more than 1/8"

(I certainly made it thicker than that, it was so crumbly there was no way it would hold that thin a roll.)

The Filling
1/2 pound apple
1/2 pound potato
1/2 pound onion
6 eggs (I used two and it came out fine)
1/2 pound butter (again, I used only one stick and it was fine)
1/4 tsp each: Nutmeg, Pepper, Salt, Mace.

Cut the apple, onion and potato into very thin slices (This makes it cook faster). Lay half the pastry in the pan and cover with half the butter, sliced into pats. beat the eggs. Combine separately the nutmeg, salt, pepper and mace. Add layers of apple, onion and potatoes to pie shell, putting beaten egg and spices between each layer, until pie is filled. Spread the left-over butter on top and cover with remaining crust. Cut slits in the top to allow for steam, then bake at 350 for 1 to 1 1/2 hours until golden brown. Let cool and serve.

The only part I had trouble with was the crust. I just couldn't roll it out thin enough without destroying it, since it's so very crumbly. Eventually I made it double thick, but it still wouldn't roll off the pin and onto the pie pan. It cracked in half and I had to sort of mash it together to make the top crust. You can sort of see the Frankenstein scar as I pop it in the oven, but it baked up well and like most pies, the crust was probably the best part. And don't be worried about those 1/2 pound measurements. That equated to one apple, one onion, and one potato, hardly a killer at the store.



This was a VERY filled pie. A word about the slicing: slice everything thin. Make small pieces so it all cooks together and you wind up with a soft, savory filling rather than a crunchy one. You won't have any trouble with the apples or the onions at any size, but what fun it is to bite down into a hot, raw potato. You don't want a while pie made of that. I sliced everything thin and what a dream it was.



The pie was savory and quite yummy but I couldn't help feeling that it was a little bland by itself. What did it need? More salt? Perhaps a bit of gravy ladeled over the top, like mashed potatoes? That probably would have been what the Colonials used but eventually I figured out that a little Goulden's Spicy Brown mustard, added as a dipping sauce, improved the flavor greatly. So much so that next time I think I will try to add the mustard to the egg/spice mixture and see how that goes.

The crust, as I said, came out perfect, even though it was rolled too think. That may even be a good thing: there was more yummy crust to eat. The filling was subtle. You'd think an apple added to the mix would really throw it off but the flavors blended well.

The pie lasted a few days because it was REALLY filling. I think I liked it better hot, but a cold slice with mustard was an equally delicious lunch.


Now, on to breakfast the next morning!

Johnnycakes! Wow, nothing could be simpler than Johnnycakes, that new-world pancake made with cornmeal. I remember reading about George Washington when I was a child, maybe 9 or 10, and how he ate Johnnycakes with butter for breakfast just about every morning. I wanted to know what they were like and made a recipe to find out. I guess I've been doing this even longer than I thought I had! Again, many thanks to the Claude Moore Colonial Farm for the recipe, but it's so simple I can do it from memory.

1 cup corn meal
1/2 cup hot water
pinch of salt.

Ooooh, tough, huh? The colonials probably had a constant pot of water going, but I just put a half a cup of water in the microwave for a minute and then dumped in the cornmeal and salt. Mix it, mix it, mix it, til it forms a bit of a ball, then leave it alone for about a half hour. You can do this right before you make your morning coffee, and it will be done setting by the time you finish your first cup. Form it into patties like sausage, I prefer mine a bit thin to retain crispiness, and fry in butter on both sides, about 2 or 3 minutes, on medium heat. Serve warm with butter and honey. And ooooh, are they ever heaven! This is everything you need in a breakfast. It's filling, not much fat, a good shot of protein, tasty, and it's fun in the mouth. I've tried adding an egg to the mix to make it more pancake-like but I really do prefer these slightly crunchy griddlecakes to the soft variety. Plus, oddly enough, the egg-spiked batter seems to take LONGER to cook. Go figure.

So, let's grind up some coffee, fry up some Johnnycakes, and start our Saturday with a Shot Heard 'Round The World!




Further Reading:

Did I mention the Claude Moore Colonial Farm? Well I'm mentioning it AGAIN so there! The links above take you straight to the recipes, but this one here will take you to the home page so you can see what other things they're doing, like the tobacco harvest and a Colonial Wedding that I would just love to see. Their recipes look very simple as well, perfect for beginners. They have a recipe for rock candy I'm just dying to try. A lot of people made it as kids, but not me. I'm not even sure I've ever TASTED any, so as soon as the weather cools down enough I'm going to try it.

Buzzle.com had a great article on Colonial Cooking, including some cookie recipes that you just know are going to show up here. How can you go wrong with brown sugar and vanilla? Again, as soon as it's cool, Colonial Soup will make an appearance.

Moving up the ladder in fussiness is Colonial Williamsburg, but they ARE the authority so it's best to listen to what they have to say. Their recipes are also authentic and delicious, but a bit too fancy for me. For right now that is. Their cookbook, The Colonial Williamsburg Tavern Cookbook is just divine.

It's 1776!

(An Aside: This is fun. I never took stock in painted portraits of people, because I never thought they looked like ANYONE. The features or the proportions or even the clothing just looks so wrong that even if the living subject was standing right in front of me, I wouldn't know who it was. Until I saw this portrait. This is George Washington's Mother. See the resemblance?)



Last week I attended Old Fort MacArthur Days at San Pedro. I've never even heard of it before, but I was promised WWII and Spanish American War re-creators, so I was determined to go. I've been trying to get good information off the internet about my grandfather's company during the Span-Am War with no luck, so I thought I could hit up the guys who live it, figuring they would have some good knowledge that I haven't seen yet. And of course, you know how I am about to 40s, so I just had to go say hello to "the boys".

Well right off the bat, Morgan's Riflemen just blew everyone else away.

The 4th of July had just passed and it had caught my attention. Like so many other people, I had caught the Cliff Notes version of the war in school and look at it (as most do, I suppose) as something so categorically WON as to be an inevitability. Well of COURSE we were going to win, right? But this time I started getting curious as to WHY we went to war. It couldn't be just because "a bunch of rich landowners didn't want to pay taxes anymore', as an acquaintance so annoyingly put it. So I started looking into it and was disagreeably surprised at how little I knew. For instance, call me part of the TV generation, but I always thought Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett were contemporaries. Maybe it was because they both had such a strong resemblance to Fess Parker.

So, I wandered over to the Revolutionary-looking guys and hung around for a while. The British Fusiliers were busy filming something, so none of them were even remotely interested in talking to me, although I did watch two men making bullets, and that was pretty nifty.



But ooohhh, then I saw Morgan's Riflemen. Talk about a great period in history, these were the first sharpshooters who came out of the hills and joined up right at the beginning of the war. Just about everyone fought with the Brown Bess but the Riflemen had the much more accurate Rifle and could pick off the enemy with astonishing skill. They also have a very distinctive look with their fringed shirts and leather leggings. I went up and started talking to them and didn't stop for several hours. They were SOOO friendly and answered all my questions with excellent information, but most impressive of all was how deeply they got into it! They were an amazingly self-sufficient unit, each man carrying his own sleeping, cooking and shooting gear with an efficiency that I can only aspire to. The tall fellow I spoke to the most, Mike, said he takes his gear (including his period gun) on his hunting and camping excursions so he can really live the lifestyle. Apparently a lot of them do. I got handlw a couple of rifles, a Brown Bess and a blunderbuss. I'm sure they could tell by the way I held them so gingerly that I was a beginner, but thank heavens they didn't laugh at me. They showed me their cast iron pans and how to field clean them, showed me how to chop a perpendicular notch in a hill so you don't roll off in your sleep. The womenfolk of the camp showed me how they cooked all their food over a small fire in dutch ovens, and how they used just about every piece. Scraps from last night's roasted chicken were today's chicken soup. They get so into it that I'm not even sure they used the porta-potties set up nearby to do their business. I fell so in love with the company that I came back the next day and spoke to them for another chunk of the afternoon. Unfortunately I was so entranced that I didn't realize until I was driving home that I hadn't taken a single picture.

D'oh!

They'll be setting up camp again in October, so I'll have to stop by and say hello and take pictures then.

I can't describe how amazed I was at how self-contained the riflemen were. I would love to be that secure with my skills, especially in economic times where it seems inevitable that people thrown out of their houses and running out of unemployment checks will probably have to move onto the street. To be able to shoot your own food and travel freely with such a small pack seems impossible to my stove/oven/microwave mindset. I really think the Riflemen should take tenderfoots out on sort of an Historical Survivalist Boot Camp. You know, in their spare time. To fund their corp. Of course.

Further reading:

Ever since I got home I've been consuming literature about the revolution, the most important of which is The Declaration of Independence. Of course everybody knows about it, but when was the last time you read it? If nothing else, just read the list of grievances. It delineates all the reasons the Americans felt like the red headed stepchildren of England, and why it felt like the King was happy to take our money and the fruits of our labor, and in return, give us troops to stay in our houses, eat our food, and murder us with impunity if we protested. On the other hand, if any of us killed a soldier and the ensuing trial found us not guilty, the king would try us again until he got the outcome he wanted.

1776 is the modern definitive tome about the war, and it comes in an illustrated version as well, which is good for me because I can only take so many wordy descriptions before they all bleed together. Having portraits of the main players and diagrams of the weapons they used (unless you know off hand how to tell a musket from a rifle) is VERY helpful. The only thing that I'm not crazy about is that it starts you right at the day England declared war against the colonies, but doesn't touch so much on the issues that actually caused the war. It assumes you already know about The Boston Tea party and the French and Indian War. (Yeah yeah, I'm sure you know about the Boston Tea party, but tell me, who led it and why was this the straw that broke the camel's back? And who fought in the French and Indian War? If you guessed it was the French against the Indians, you're wrong.)

The Revolutionary Soldier: 1775 - 1783 , though technically a juvenile book, is an EXCELLENT resource for beginners as it it a completely illustrated book so you can SEE what the clothes and equipment were like. See all the things the soldiers made out of bullets in their down time, like fishing weights and buttons. Seeing it makes you appreciate how ingenious they were with what they had.

It's 1950!

It's been about 100 degrees here the past few days, and it doesn't cool down enough to cook until late at night. Even then, we're talking about the high 80s inside the house (my a/c is on the fritz, just in time for the heatwave). So, I haven't really been in the mood to get all hot and sweaty and blast the house with even more hot air just as it's cooling down. Still, my friend Martha of Gram's Recipe Box posted this old recipe for Chicken Paprika, and it just sounded so good I had to have it!

It SOUNDS like a wartime variation of a peacetime recipe, because of the call for "fat" instead of something more specific like lard, butter or oil, and because of the scant amount of sour cream used. Sour cream was fairly easy to get, just leave your cream out by mistake, it'll happen. Waste not, want not. In other recipes I've seen for sour cream based sauces, you use a cup or more. So, even though Martha says the recipe is from around 1950, I suspect it's actually a bit older and it just took a while for anyone to write it down.

It also sounds Hungarian. I can just see Cuddles Sakall cooking it up for a dinner party and shaking his jowls in glee.

I don't have a whole chicken, and there's only one of me tonight (no family), so I halved the recipe and made one huge chicken breast as an audition for my recipe book.



I started out by frying the onions in a small amount of bacon fat, maybe a 1/2 teaspoon, then browning the chicken as directed. I must say here, you can't get a better smell in your kitchen that onions and bacon, it's just heavenly. I thought about adding more oil to the pan for the chicken, but apparently it didn't need any more. The chicken browned up quickly and didn't stick to the pan at all.

When I flipped over the chicken, I noticed some of the onions were starting to burn. I checked the recipe and it says that after you brown the chicken, you cover it, put the flame on low and let it cook for 40 minutes. I was afraid my onions wouldn't be able to survive that long, so I took them out of the pan. I added them again toward the end of the cooking.



The original notations claim that this would be good served over noodles or rice, but I don't know if it makes that much "gravy". The gravy was very thick and there was just enough to spoon onto the chicken, but certainly not enough to get noodles or rice wet. Maybe if you stretch it with a bit of broth, it will make a nice, soupy gravy, but not this time.

THE RESULT!
The chicken was moist and savory and, oddly enough, sweet. I can't imagine why it should taste sweet, I didn't put any sugar in it. Maybe it was the paprika? Does paprika turn sweet when you warm it up? Maybe the onions caramelized just so? I don't know, but the taste was delicious. The paprika and the bacon fat were so aromatic together that the onions seemed almost like an afterthought. After the first swallow, though, it's the sweet/onion flavor that lingers in the mouth.

I also had my first ripe tomato of the year for a garnish. It ripened up just in time, so I plucked it from the vine and sacrificed it to my dinner plate, and it made a lovely accompaniment, echoing the slight sweetness in the sauce. Ahhhh!



Delicious!

Thank you, Martha, for the recipe!

It's 1915! And strawberry season.

I had visitors over the weekend, and introduced one of them to the magic that is a Farmer's Market. She'd never been to one before and was slow to taste-test the samples. I think because she saw me eating them while the vendor was busy helping someone else, she assumed I was "stealing" them the way you have to do at the supermarket when you're not sure the grapes are ripe. I let her know that yes, not only is it okay for you to help yourself to samples, the vendors WANT you to. Help yourself to as many varieties as you like, then buy the best ones. They're all convinced they have the best, and they want you to know it, hence the samples. By the end of the morning, many free samples later, she was a convert.

Among the samples we tried were some REALLY beautiful, dark, sweet strawberries. They were the best at the market so I bought three trays of them, with visions of our little girls eating strawberries and cream for breakfast the next day.

Well, tough luck for me they decided to beat traffic on the way home by leaving that evening and driving through the night, so now I have all these wonderful strawberries and no family to cook for. I can't eat three trays of strawberries all by myself! Hmmm, what to do, what to do...



I've got it! That recipe for Strawberry Bavarian Cream has been rattling around in my head for a while. I am forever in search of fancy jello molds at Goodwill and antique stores, and while I haven't yet found a fluted jello mold like the one in the picture, I do have an old panna cotta mold that will do in a pinch! I've certainly got the strawberries for it! Really, the only thing I had to go out and buy was the cream. I don't keep it on hand because I'd drink it out of the carton like milk and look like the Michelin Man by now.


I mashed the strawberries one at a time through a sieve with a spoon because I didn't want to go to all the trouble of cleaning out my food processor when I was done. It has a million parts and they all catch little bits of food when I use it. It takes forever to clean it, it's really quite annoying. Well, next time I'll use the food processor. It's worth it. I've found a new way to measure "forever" since that's how long it took to mash all the strawberries into as fine a pulp as I needed.

I followed all the instructions, poured it into my panna cotta pan, and waited til morning...





Ahhhh, the finished product! Isn't it lovely? It cuts like harvest pie, or the lightest key lime you've ever had. I often wish I had a better camera on my phone, but no camera can tell you how it tasted. The texture is fluffy with just a little graininess because of the seeds and pulp. I'm sure if I had strained it all out it would be smooth, like cool whip, but this way is better because you can tell it had fresh ingredients, no one just mixed whipped cream and jello together and poured it in a bowl. It has a marvelous perfume, because I used farmers market strawberries that had just been picked that morning, rather than store bought berries that had been shipped last week. I can't emphasize enough the difference fresh ingredients make. One day I hope to be able to grow alpine berries -the highly perfumed, tiny progenitors of modern strawberries - and use them in this recipe.





Next time I won't bother with adding sliced berries to the mold. You can't see them and they take away from the soft, fluffy texture. It's a little work, to be sure, and you will mess up a few extra dishes, but oh, it's soooo delicious. I just wish I had a few little girls to share it with today. Ah well. I'll just have to eat it all myself. Poor me.

It's Saturday night, 1944...

Rations, day 2! I have to tell you that these recipes are extremely filling. This is the fourth meal I've had and I really feel like I could go out and do hard, physical labor for several hours without feeling hunger pangs. Try doing that with your Lean Cuisine meatloaf-ette.

Breakfast and lunch were the same as yesterday, no need to repost pictures. I have mixed feelings as to the fate of my lunch filling. I got two servings out of it before my husband decided he really liked it and ate the whole thing with crackers.

Now, on to dinner!



You'll notice that not only does dinner look pretty tasty, the picture is much clearer too. That's because I had someone else take it. Hubby has the iPhone with the much, MUCH better camera, so that's why today's offering looks so good.

Tonight's dinner was Kidney Bean Vegetable Loaf, recipe circa 1944, Health for Victory's Meal Planning Guide, and it wasn't bad at all! In fact it was very good, with lots of good old fashioned onion and tomato taste. If I had a gripe about it, it would be that it didn't set right and came out like hot, thick paste instead of a loaf. Next time I might put in more bread crumbs or let it sit in the oven a little longer. Here's the original recipe:

Kidney Bean Vegetable Loaf

2 c. cooked kidney beans
3/4 c. cooked, diced carrots
2 tbsp. chopped onion
3/4 c. diced celery
3/4 c. canned tomatoes
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/2 c. dry bread crumbs
3/4 c. kidney bean stock

Chop or mash beans fine. Mix all ingredients thouroughly and pack into a greased loaf pan. Bake. Unmold on a hot platter. Mushroom or tomato sauce may be served over the loaf, if desired. Bake for 45 minutes in preheated 350* oven. Serves 6.

Yes it really does jump around like that, giving two bake orders. It's supposed to be served with Harvard beets, Golden salad made with oranges, raisins and french dressing, oatmeal bread, butter and baked custard for dessert. The Harvard beets would have been delicious with the meat lof but I didn't have beets of any kind, so leftover steamed carrots (the ones that went into the loaf) played stand in. Potatoes stood in for bread. Luckily I didn't make the custard because I'm stuffed. I would have been locked in an all-night staredown with it while I tried to convince myself to pack it down on top of such a big meal.

The tomato sauce is a favorite of mine. You can make it by mixing a half teaspoon of Worcestershire and a dash of hot sauce into a half cup of ketchup. Or of course, you can whip up your own.

Dieters and vegans will be happy to know that the only fat/animal products in this dish were the oil in the pan and the butter on the potatoes. Homefronters will be happy to know that it sucks up very few of your ration points.

See you tomorrow!

It's a Friday in 1944, and today I ate...

Today started out pretty well. I got up earlier than usual and had a cup of coffee and a slice of toast with peanut butter before I went out on my run. It was also before I remembered that I was supposed to be following rations today. Oops. It wasn't all that big a drop though, since part of this breakfast was supposed to include toast and jam, so I guess I can pretend that I ran out of jam and had to use peanut butter. I'm not at all sure about the scarcity of peanut butter during wartime, but then again, there IS a recipe for peanut butter and bacon sandwich filling in my ration cookbook. Not sure how hungry I'd have to be to try that one. There are just some things that only Elvis should eat. For everything else, there's me.


I'm going to call this my White Breakfast. That's oatmeal made with water and sprinkled with top milk and currants. You can't see it but there's also cinnamon and brown sugar in it. I think you all know a hard boiled egg when you see one, so I don't have much to describe there, and that was my second cup of coffee for the day. As teensy as this meal looks, it did the job of filling me up and giving me enough energy for several hours, so I can't complain. It was a beautiful day today, another sunny mid-70s California winter, and I decided to enjoy my breakfast outside at my bistro table, watching the neighborhood come to life, which is always a good way to spend the morning.




I started getting hungry again about 2 pm, and made it even worse by absent-mindedly flipping through old food magazines. So I went home to make lunch, when really what I wanted to do was swing by a fast food joint and eat my lunch on the way to my next errand, but I didn't. I'm so proud of myself.

The last time I got the hankering to make ration food I made a great little sandwich spread out of cheese, soybeans and salad dressing, which sounds disgusting but turned out REALLY well. So well that I was very eager to try the sandwich filling next to it in the same cookbook, a filling made from soybeans and carrots, which actually sounds like it would be tastier. I like soybeans, I like carrots, and with a little mayo thrown in it soulds like it might actually make a pretty good salad or something, so much better-sounding than soybeans and cheese. But alas, this filling was nowhere near as tasty as the other. I think it needs more salt or maybe a shot of salad dressing to tang it up abit. But rules are rules, and rationing is tight, so I can't waste it. I'm going to have to eat it, but it's not going to be on my list of things to make again. It's not SO bad, it's not disgusting, just boring. But next time I'm definitely going with the cheese and soybean spread, or maybe the bacon and cream cheese.

The apple was tasty, and the two cookies are Almond cookies. Strangely enough, you do get to eat cookies with this rationing business, just not a great many of them.

Now here's the weird thing: I'M NOT HUNGRY. I was going to make dinner, but I'm just not hungry enough to eat it, and it's 9 pm. I mean, just look at this stuff! This doesn't look ike it would be enough to sustain me for one meal if I lumped it all together, but it kept me going ALL DAY! Maybe this is a quirk, maybe this is just one of those days where you don't get hungry, as rare as those days are. So perhaps tomorrow I'll be hungrier since I skipped dinner tonight, I don't know. Tune in tomorrow!

It's 1944! And rationing is tight.

I cleaned out my refrigerator a few days ago and was surprised (in a bad way) at all the food I had to throw out because I forgot it was in there. I forgot an artichoke! How did that happen, I love artichokes! So, I'm going to try an experiment. I'm going to try rations for a week. Since this is my first time I'm going to do lots of things wrong, I'll bet, but I went through my ration cookbooks and picked out recipes for breakfast lunch and dinner for a week. I stuck to things featuring ingredients I already have on hand, and I tried to make my grocery list very small. I'm working with what I have on hand. Leftovers from one night's dinner will go into the next day's lunch to stretch, and I'll try not to throw anything out. I am going to try to use it all.

I spent $58 dollars today on things I didn't have, like nuts and soybeans. If I run out of something else, like flour or sugar, I guess I'll just have to make do.

Tomorrow's breakfast will be oatmeal with dried fruit, coffee with milk and an egg. For lunch I'll try the carrot filling (seen on another post) on my sandwich, and for dinner I plan on making Kidney bean loaf. I'll make bread in the morning and hope it lasts through the week.

Wish me luck!

It's 1942! And I'm hacking up the Victory Garden for winter.

The winter garden is coming along nicely! Just a few weeks ago I'd let it go all to hell, and due to my laziness, I can see I'm going to have a hard time eradicating all the Oxalis that's made itself at home in my garden. I used to eat the stuff when I was a kid. My friends and I all called it sourgrass, and we'd pick a flower, put the stem in our mouth and chew to release the sour juice. It wasn't until years later I learned that the lovely sour taste was oxalic acid. A toxin.


That lush greenery in the middle of the picture is the oxalis. Not so long ago, the entire yard looked like that, all four quadrants of the garden were just FILLED with the stuff. I couldn't poison it - that's a TERRIBLE idea when you're just about to plant vegetables - and I couldn't just whack off the tops with a weed whacker. That would leave the roots and bulbs belowground to regenerate. So I had to deal with it the long, slow tedious route. I had to pull it all out by hand.

After the first few handfuls, I noticed that only the tops were breaking away, so I sprinkled the area with water and let it soak in for a few minutes, then started plucking them again. This time not only did it go much faster, but the entire root came out with every pluck. Only about 10% of the plants broke off at the top, so I'll still have to go back every week and yank any newbies that have grown in, but that's 90% less work than I'd have to do otherwise, so I'm fine with that.

From this angle you can see some of the pepper plants that are still producing, even though they're starting to look scrawny. They go from left to right, straight through the middle of the picture. The brown thingys against the fence are the remaining summer cornstalks that I have to throw out.

After I'd plucked out all the weeds, I raked up the debris, then went back over and yanked out any strays I might have missed the first time around. I added roughly an inch of compost all over my area and tilled the snot out of it, until the earth was nice and fluffy down to about a foot deep. I used to do this part of the work with a pickaxe and hoe, but I finally splurged this year and bought the smallest tiller I could afford. It cost me $200 and it's paid me back in vegetables and the cost of aspirin ever since. Its paid for itself. I highly recommend using one. So anyway, I tilled it all up (that's why it looks so dark and rich in the picture) and ran my furrows. I planted one long row of multicolored beets along the outside edge, followed by a slightly shorter line of multicolored carrots on the inside. In a week I'll add another line of carrots (I'm trying successive plantings this year) , a line of Parsnips, and a new mystery plant called Salsify. It looks like a skinny white carrot but tastes like oysters when you roast it. There's a black verson and a white version, and right now I'm just trying to decide which one I want to try.

To the left of the dark wedge is the onion patch. I already have reds and yellows growing there, but I left just enough room at the outside for two more rows of Leeks and shallots.

On the right of the wedge is the cabbage patch. I only seem to have enough room for red cabbage this year, but maybe I'll pop in a green cabbage seed if a red doesn't make it. A friend from Hunary just gave me her wonderful recipe for sweet red cabbage. My mouth is just watering thinking about it! I can't wait until I can sacrifice one of these cabbages to my pot!

Directly across the point of this dark wedge of soil is where I'll be growing another heirloom oddity, Romanesco Broccoli. It looks beautiful, doesn't it?
All those marvelous little turrets and spirals, and it's lovely apple-green color. I'm sure it would be wonderful steamed and dipped in gravy, or stir-fried. There are lots of recipes I'd like to try. But most of all I think it will look mysterious and exotic in the garden.


Park Seeds, The Victory Seed Company, and Botanical Interests all sell high-quality heirloom and organic seeds. Renee's Seeds have always been a favorite because I'm a very indecisive person. I want five different kinds of peppers or beets in my garden, but I don't want to buy five different packets of seeds. Renees sells wonderful mixed seeds in a single packet, all color coded so you don't pay for five and yet wind up with only two in your garden anyway. Botanical Interests does the same thing but now to the degree that Renee's does.

It's 1944, and I'm hungry!

...As I'm sure my counterpart was in 1944 after a long day at the factory getting metal shavings down the back of her neck. A few days ago I made a batch of corn chowder from a recipe in one of my rationing cookbooks, but as I was flipping through it I thought the sandwich fillings sounded equal parts bizarre and intriguing. In the spirit of rationing, I'm trying to make do with what already have in the house, since years ago no matter what you wanted, it was tough to get, even if you had the proper number of ration stamps.

I have some cheese, plus salad dressing, plus some green peppers still growing on the leftover plants in my garden, so I settled on cheese filling for my experiment tonight. You can see it at the top middle of the page above. I've accidentally cut off the top of the recipe, but the name of the recipe is the only thing missing. The ingredients begin with cheese and end with Worcestershire sauce. If you're trying this at home, don't accidentally add carrots or Tabasco just because I was too lazy to rescan my page. Those belong to another recipe.

Soybeans are pretty easy to get these days, but I'm not certain how they were packaged in 1944 when this recipe came out. They might have been dried like pinto beans, and cooked in hot water to reconstitute them, or they might have been fresh green edamame pods. I haven't seen advertisements either way, but I have a can of coked soybeans in my pantry, so I figured that would split the difference. In the future, I'll probably work to keep fresh-frozen edamame around the house, since they'd add a good flavor to whatever I put them in.

I cut the cheese into slices to facilitate chopping, then bundled up everything in my food pocessor and pulsed it a few times until everything was even.




My camera gives everything a green tint, so this sandwich filling was just about the color of pimento spread in real life, and a nice thick texture.


Again, forgive the green tint on the pictures, it was a very tasty-looking orange in real life.

And the verdict? It was surprisingly good! I used Thousand Island dressing, and TI plus cheddar cheese is always good on salads, so I guess it should have come as no surprise that this spread would come out so well. The green peppers gave it just the tiniest tang and the soybeans gave a little bit of a crunch to it. I'd say I have enough for four sandwiches, maybe six if I spread it thin. I already ate one sandwich before I wrote this, and I think I'll go back and eat another. In a day or two when I run out, I'll try its neighbor on the right: Carrot Filling.

It's 2009!

Oh, Lovely, lovely loaf! How tasty you are with butter!

A short break from my time travels today.

A few days ago I read an article about a book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. I love making bread, but yeah, it takes a long time and I'm not too crazy about that part. The article, in Mother Earth News, stated that all you have to do is make dough, keep it in the fridge, and then whenever you want bread you just break off a chunk, shape it, let it rise once and bake for 30 minutes. In this way you can have hot, fresh bread in less about two hours, you never have to knead, and the cost is amazingly low. This appealed to my Rationing mindset, so even thought the technique was not in use during wartime, it SHOULD have been. I had to give it a try.

My first experinemt was the basic bread: Flour, yeast, water, salt. That's it. No sugar, no kneading. I baked up a batch and put the rest of the dough in the fridge for later. My first loaf was so golden and beautiful that my husband and I ate it al at once that same night. Luckily, I could shape another loaf and have a second helping within two hours of the first. And there is still abunch left in my fridge for later! For an investment of six cups of flour, I'll be getting at least 5 loaves of bread. And THAT is GREAT!


Mother Earth News is an invaluable magazine for those brave people who want to go to the next level of retro and actually try their hand at living the lifestyle that gramma (or great-gramma) lived. It's also handy for people who are tring to become more self-sufficient, or those who are becoming disillusioned with modern life. There are always articles on organic gardening, raising various kinds of livestock, cooking, and making things like barns or rainbarrels. For the moderns, there are articles on how to put up solar panels and windmills so you can finally tell the power company to shove it. Give it a peek, I think you'll like it.

Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day and its new sibling, Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day, can be purchased at Amazon.com , and you can also visit their website and see what they're experimenting with today.

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*