Savory Stew: It lives up to the name!

A surprising amount of recipes from the Depression have proven good enough to keep in the kitchen.

Savory Stew 3 tbsp bacon fat 3 tbsp chopped celery 2 tbsp chopped onion ½ cup chopped carrots ½ cup cooked rice* ½ cup peas, fresh or frozen 1 can (16 oz, or the nearest size to it) diced tomatoes, undrained ⅔ tsp salt (or to taste) Chili powder and other seasonings to taste Melt bacon fat in a small, heavy-bottomed saucepan. Add celery and onion. Cook over medium heat until they are browned. (If you don't have a heavy-bottomed saucepan, do this in a small frying pan. Then tip everything into a saucepan.) While the celery and onion are cooking, place the carrots in a microwave-safe container with a spoonful of water. Set the lid loosely on the container. Microwave the carrots 45 seconds at a time until they are fork-tender. When the celery and onions are ready, add the carrots and all remaining ingredients. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to a simmer. Place a lid on the pot and let simmer undisturbed for 20 minutes. Add remaining ingredients, and bring to a boil. If desired, sprinkle shredded cheddar cheese on top when serving. *If you don't have leftover rice, use 8 teaspoons of raw white rice and ⅓ cup water. There's no need to change the recipe directions. Just add them to the pot with everything else. Adapted from "Helping the Homemaker," Fort Worth [Texas] Star-Telegram morning edition, October 28 1933, page 5

"Helping the Homemaker," Fort Worth [Texas] Star-Telegram morning edition, October 28 1933, page 5

Actually, that image came out just a little too blurry to read some of the numbers in the ingredient list. And so, I went to the local library. Through the magic of library database access, I found the recipe in a different newspaper. (As we previously discovered, "Helping the Homemaker" was a syndicated column.) This scan is also blurry, but it's nevertheless easier to read the ingredient amounts.

Abilene [Texas] Daily Reporter, October 27 1933, page 7

Since we went to the library for today's recipe, this is the perfect time for a word from the author of Coraline, American Gods, the Sandman comics, Good Omens (co-written with Terry Pratchett), and other works that have become popular Netflix series:

Let's get back to savory stew. The first thing I noticed: This recipe doesn't make a lot of it. These days, most people I know make soup in large quantities, even if they live alone. But we should keep in mind that in 1933, relatively few people had a refrigerator to put a vat of soup in. Although people cooked food ahead of time in those days, the available appliances at the time didn't allow for "meal prep" as we know it. 

It's true that you could buy an electric refrigerator in 1933. But if you had the money for one, you were probably so wealthy that you could hire servants and never personally enter the kitchen. Many people in the 1930s had iceboxes, which were more affordable but weren't exactly suited for loading with planned leftovers. Given these limitations, our friends at "Helping the Homemaker" were a bit more helpful to the home cooks of 1933 than it may seem to our 21st-century eyes.

This recipe has us cooking the onions and celery in bacon grease. Because the last few years have inspired some Depression-grade cooking habits in our own kitchen, we actually had bacon grease on hand. In addition to saving beef fat, I have been carefully pouring bacon grease into little containers and putting them in the refrigerator for quite some time. It was nice to live in the pre-pandemic times when I could carelessly throw all that fat away. But while things have been on heading downhill for a while now, at least I have discovered that onions cooked in bacon fat are delicious.

This recipe doesn't use a lot of onions or celery. But it uses a lot of bacon fat. I wasn't planning on deep-frying our chopped onions, but "Helping the Homemaker" had other ideas.

The recipe directs us to "brown celery and onions." I left the pan to mind its own spattery business while I got the rest of supper into the oven. That may have been a mistake, because I accidentally let the onions go past browned and right into taco-platter territory.

To round out the ingredients, "Helping the Homemaker" calls for a smattering of cooked vegetables and a little cooked rice. But as much as I love trying the foods of other times, I did not want to thoroughly cook the vegetables and then put them into a pot to slowly boil for another twenty minutes. We already know what happens to vegetables that get boiled for almost an hour. We also already know that Helping the Homemaker's recipes sometimes had good ingredients listed above bad instructions.

The ingredient list may say that all the vegetables should be cooked before beginning the recipe, but don't think "Helping the Homemaker" meant for us to get out multiple small pots and separately cook all these vegetables before putting them into the stewpot. Instead, I think we're meant to put a smattering of leftover vegetables into the pot, and also add the extra rice that no one ate last night.

I didn't have any leftover vegetables sitting in the refrigerator, so I went with the fresh or frozen ones instead. Because I'm convinced that this recipe is meant for leftovers, I figured that the vegetables would have been seasoned when I first served them. And so, I figured a generous shake of chili powder would not go amiss. 

I also didn't have leftover cooked rice, so I added enough raw rice and water to theoretically add up to the correct amount after the stew was ready. It occurred to me that perhaps cooking leftover rice for another 20 minutes (as directed in the original recipe) might be intended to soften the rice until it breaks down and thickens the whole stew instead of merely floating in it. But then I figured that this wasn't a recipe worth getting pedantic over.

I briefly considered that 20 minutes might be too long a cooking time for the peas. If I was really obsessed with having every ingredient in its finest state, I might have waited until the stew was nearly done to add them. Then I decided that I wasn't in the mood to put excessive effort into this recipe. And so, I dumped everything in the pot all at once, clapped on the lid, and called it done.

Assuming one has the leftover vegetables on hand, "Helping the Homemaker" really lives up to its name with this recipe. After browning a little bit of celery and onion (the small amounts used in the recipe mean you can frugally save the rest of the onion for another day), you just put your leftover vegetables into a pot, add a can of tomatoes, and let it all sit on a hot stove for a while. Personally, I would only let the pot simmer for a few minutes if the vegetables were already cooked, rather than the full twenty minutes that the recipe demands.

For such a simple recipe, this was unexpectedly satisfying. Unfortunately, the carrots weren't quite done, but that is my fault and not the recipe's. The ingredients clearly specified "½ cup cooked carrots," and I arrogantly thought I knew better than the recipe professionals. (I corrected my mistake when writing out the recipe directions.) 

In serving this, I added something that may have been an extravagance in this recipe was first printed: shredded cheese.

I liked this stew. But unlike a lot of stew recipes, this isn't really a complete meal in a pot. It's more of a side dish. However, it's a really good side dish. The flavor reminded me of Uncle Joe's Minestrone, which we got out of that Italian cookbook and still make on a semi-regular basis. Given the very similar ingredient lists, the resemblance shouldn't be a surprise. 

In short, we at A Book of Cookrye recommend this recipe. Like most things we've made from "Helping the Homemaker," it is easy, cheap, low-effort, and a lot better than the starting ingredients suggest.

Poppyseed Cake: or, Have you been to the library lately?

Happy National Library Week!

Poppyseed Cake 2 tbsp lemon rind 1 cup sugar ½ cup (4 oz) cream cheese, softened ⅙ cup (8 tsp, or ⅓ of a stick) butter or stick margarine, softened ⅛ tsp salt 1 tsp baking powder 2 large eggs 1 tsp vanilla 3 tbsp poppyseeds 1⅓ cups flour Heat oven to 325°. Grease an 8" square pan. Mix the lemon rind and sugar. Pinch them between your fingers so that the rind gets sanded against the sugar. This helps release the lemon flavor. Do this until the sugar is yellow and smells very lemony. Add the butter, cream cheese, salt, and baking powder. Cream until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each. Add the vanilla at the same time as one of the eggs. Mix in the poppyseeds, beat well. Add the flour, and stir just until mixed. Pour into the pan. Bake 25-30 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. Frost the cake if desired, but it is very good uniced.        Icing: 2 tbsp cream cheese, softened 2 or 3 tbsp butter, softened* Pinch salt ¼ tsp lemon extract 1 egg white† Powdered sugar Wait until cake is completely cooled before making the icing. Beat cream cheese, butter, salt, lemon extract, egg white, and about ¾ cup powdered sugar until very smooth. Gradually add powdered sugar, beating well, until the icing is thick enough to hold a shape and spreads easily. *You can just use the remainder of the butter stick that's leftover from the cake. †If you are worried about raw egg whites in the icing, you can either use pasteurized-in-the-shell eggs, or you can use 2 tablespoons of carton egg whites. As always when using carton egg whites, shake the carton immediately before measuring. Adapted from Cooking Light

This year, National Library Week started off with the astronomical wonder of a lifetime. The moon and stars above give honor to public libraries, and so should we. Have you been to your local library lately?

As more and more people have noted, libraries are one of the last remaining places where no one expects you to spend money! In the past few decades, they have become community centers (and purveyors of eclipse glasses as of April 8, 2024) as well as places to get books. You should check your library's social media pages if you haven't. You will likely be surprised at all the events they're hosting- and almost all of them are free!

Speaking of events at the local library, I would be remiss not to share this:

I'm not the first person to say this: We do not deserve librarians.

And of course, libraries are the best place to find a librarian. When you can't find the answer to a question after hours of failed internet searching, a librarian will find it in half an instant. This brings us to why we salute libraries today.

My mother used to subscribe to Cooking Light magazine, and a lot of recipes from various issues made regular appearances on our dinner table. She cancelled her subscription when they went upscale with their recipes. Our house was on a Better Homes And Gardens budget, but Cooking Light started catering to the Real Simple crowd. Apparently upscale diet recipes weren't as popular as affordable ones, because Cooking Light quietly folded in 2018.

All of this brings us to today's recipe. The magazine had a feature where they'd take a reader-submitted recipe and cut the calories. One month, they reworked someone's grandmother's poppyseed cake. We clipped the recipe and made it many times. It tasted ever-so-slightly different than any other poppyseed cake I've ever had. Unfortunately, when I recently wanted to make it again, I found out that we no longer have the recipe. Mom got rid of a lot of cookbooks and food magazines she doesn't use anymore, including all of her back issues of Cooking Light.

No amount of trawling the internet produced the poppyseed cake. The magazine's website has long fallen off the internet. While there are a few Cooking Light recipes floating around online, the poppyseed cake is not among them. I tried finding the recipe on the Internet Archive's copy of Cooking Light's website, but that was futile. I added poppyseeds and lemon extract to Mrs. Wilson's one-egg cake, which was very delicious (seriously, you should try it) but just not the same.

And so, I contacted the local library. I could have gone in-person, but the weather was too unpleasant to traverse a parking lot. So, from the climate-controlled comfort of the sofa, I went to the library's website, found their chat link, and asked if they could find the recipe for this poppyseed cake I had not made in ages. The first line of my note was "Hello! I'm requesting a bit of librarian sleuthing." The library had closed a few hours prior, but I figured that my message would wait until the next day.

Only half an hour later, a reply came through: "Thank you and we love a good challenge. I've got the information needed and we'll get to work to see what we can find." Only fifteen minutes after that, I received a scan of the magazine page bearing the poppyseed cake recipe! Never underestimate librarians, especially if they are monitoring the reference chat after hours.

Source: Cooking Light magazine

You may think it's a little hard to read the numbers in the ingredient amounts- particularly the fractions. But because librarians think of everything, they sent a higher-resolution scan of just the recipe.

 

After only a short glance at the recipe, I found out what made this poppyseed cake so different from any other I've ever tasted. It uses half butter and half cream cheese in the batter. This meant that after making the cake, we would have a partial brick of cream cheese in the freezer waiting for us to find a use for it. But my desire for poppyseed cake would not be stopped by the menace of small edible ingredients accumulating in the back of the freezer.

I may be veering off the recipe directions, but one cookbook writer recommended that you sand your lemon rind against the sugar by pinching the two ingredients together with your fingers until the sugar is yellow. This releases the lemon flavor a lot better than if you merely stirred it in. I've done it ever since.

I've since found that if you don't mind the extra dishes, you can simply drop the lemon rind and a few spoons of the sugar into an electric coffee grinder and get the same happy result. I didn't think I would ever have a use for an electric coffee grinder. I certainly would never have actually bought one-- not even at thrift-store prices. But since this one turned up in the cabinets, I've found it to be unexpectedly useful.

Anyway, we had creamed the butter and sugar, cracked in the first egg, and were ready to turn on the mixer when we realized we had forgotten to add the cream cheese.

I had tried to be organized and prepared with this recipe. I had all the ingredients measured out and waiting in a tidy row on the counter (or so I thought). I even remembered to set out the butter earlier in the day to soften, which practically never happens. However, I forgot to soften the cream cheese.

Fortunately, we had not ruined the recipe. We had merely caused our own slight inconvenience. But although the egg was already in the mixing bowl, I knew that if I beat it in before adding the cream cheese, I would end up with hard white cheese-clumps floating in an eggy sugar sludge. But with only a minor sacrifice of dignity, I could simply pour the egg back out of the mixing bowl with minimal mess.

The Mixmaster made short work of the refrigerator-hard cream cheese, and soon we had a mixing bowl full of what looked and tasted like a delicious whipped cheesecake.

Having actually remembered to add all our ingredients, we could finally proceed to the eggs as if we had gotten the recipe right the first time. The batter looked promisingly pretty.

I remembered this recipe using a massive heap of poppyseeds, and my memory did not lie. I've seen a lot of disappointing poppyseed cupcakes (or are they poppyseed muffins?) that barely contain enough poppyseeds to speckle them, but this recipe tells us to dump them into our batter with glorious abandon.

The batter was wonderfully thick, so much so that I feared that I had accidentally added too much flour. But the pan was prepared and the batter was mixed, so we could do nothing but get it into the oven and hope for the best. As a measuring note, the original recipe uses three eggs and I reduced it to two. Reducing all of the other ingredients by one third resulted in some perfect and tidy amounts. I didn't have to mutter to myself "What's one twelfth of a cup, anyway?"

I didn't get the batter perfectly smooth in the pan, but I should have. As we found out when we used cream cheese instead of butter in a cake, the batter simply will not spread. It holds its shape better than the stiffest of cookie dough. Those of you trying this at home (which you should) will want to do a better job of leveling off the batter than I did.

Now, I always liked this cake uniced. I distinctly remember deliberately choosing to omit the icing every time I made it. However, because I wanted to express appreciation for repairing the Mixmaster again, I asked the person who'd helped me get it back together if he wanted the cake frosted or bare. "I'd like icing on top."

I appreciate how the original recipe uses the entire brick of cream cheese. What doesn't go into the cake goes into the icing on top of it. However, I didn't want to have a heavy schmear of icing on this cake. (As aforementioned, I didn't want to ice it at all. But sometimes we must give into the demands of the adoring public.) This is why the icing in my typed recipe is different from the original one in the magazine.

I used the icing from my great-grandmother's cake, replacing half the butter with cream cheese. Since that icing uses so little butter, it comes out like a light doughnut glaze that happens to be able to hold a shape. I think it's so much better than heavy, over-rich buttercream. I think the icing works because it uses an egg white instead of milk or water. If I am right, the protein from the egg helps the icing keep its shape. I've seen people demonstrate how adding liquids to buttercream turns it into an irreparably runny mess by ruining the fat-sugar ratio (and also personally encountered the results), but they always use water or milk. They never use egg whites. As you can see, this icing holds its shape beautifully without containing enough butter to glue itself together.

And here is the beautiful cake, returned to my kitchen after far too long a deprivation. As soon as I tasted it, I was like "Yep! There it is! The recipe I've wanted back all this time!"

People rarely mention removing the cake from the pan, but I have to point out how easily this cake lifted right out. It didn't threaten to break apart or cling. Sometimes you need a spatula to support the whole slice as you raise it out of the pan, but for this cake you could practically pinch a slice on the sides and pluck it out.

In conclusion, this cake is absolutely delicious. It's so dense, and at the same time so wonderfully soft. The amount of lemon rind is just right. You owe it to yourself to try it. Though as aforementioned, I think it's better uniced. All those lovely delicate flavors in the cake come through a lot better when there's no icing on top.

Fresh Apple Cookies: or, Tantalization leads to misfortune

It's been a while since a recipe went straight into the trash.

Fresh Apple Cookies ½ cup shortening 1½ cups firmly packed brown sugar ½ tsp salt ½ tsp nutmeg 1 tsp cloves 1 tsp cinnamon 1 tsp baking soda 1 egg 2 cups sifted flour 1 cup finely chopped unpeeled apples 1 cup raisins 1 cup chopped pecans, if desired ¼ cup milk Vanilla spread: 2½ tbsp (7½ tsp) milk 1½ cup powdered sugar 1 tbsp butter ⅛ tsp salt ¼ tsp vanilla Heat oven to 400°. Have greased cookie sheets ready. Cream together the first eight ingredients, beating well. Then add the flour. When all is mixed, stir in the apples, raisins, pecans, and milk. Drop by the teaspoon onto the baking sheet. Bake 12-15 minutes. While the cookies are baking, make the vanilla spread. In a small microwave-safe bowl, heat milk until steamy. Add the butter, stir until melted. Add remaining ingredients, and beat until creamy. If you have a large glass measuring cup, it is better than a bowl for making the icing. The pour-spout makes it so much easier to put onto the cookies. Spread the icing onto the cookies while hot. Source: Mrs. John Stevens; Metarie, Lousisiana; The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

I saw the recipe name and was intrigued. Apples don't seem very strange in cookies, but I have never seen anyone use them. Also of note, this recipe uses equal amounts of apples and raisins. With a hopeful heart, I wondered if this was a plate-free version of sticky apple man-bait.

To Mrs. John Stevens' credit, this recipe comes together pretty quickly. After you've dumped the first round of ingredients into the bowl, you're halfway done.

Also, this spiced dough tasted fantastic. Mrs. John Stevens doesn't use many spices, but she uses a lot of each one. Our cookies already tasted like apple pie before we added the apples.

Upon adding the flour, things got unnervingly crumbly in the mixing bowl. But we are next directed to add a small bit of milk, which I figured would make everything right with our cookie dough. It did.

I liked how quick this recipe went. After a pleasantly short time, we were already adding our apples. Mrs. John Stevens expressly tells us not to bother peeling them first, which only made me like her more.

And so, only a few minutes after we first chopped the apples and set them aside, we had the first batch of cookies onto the pan and ready to bake. I should note that the apples kept falling out of my little dough plops as I got them onto the pan. It is never a good sign when your cookies can't hold onto their own ingredients. But I thought that all would be well after baking them.

While our cookies baked, Mrs. John Stevens tells us to make the vanilla spread. The recipe looked a lot like our dearly beloved cinnamon icing, except without the cinnamon and a bit thicker. Just like our cinnamon icing, we are directed to put it onto the cookies while they're hot. 

Upon opening the oven, I immediately regretted the expense of using real vanilla in the icing. I can't say that I've never been so glad I halved a recipe. However, I've never been so unexpectedly glad I halved a recipe. I was very excited about these cookies right up to the moment they were done baking.

First of all, Mrs. John Stevens baked these far too long. Also, these were hopelessly runny in the oven. I had already scooped batch no. 2 onto the pan. But after seeing our first batch come out like single-serving cow turds, I smushed the second batch back into the bowl and worked more flour into them. I don't know how much, but we're not talking "just a spoonful to make things right." Mrs. John Stevens' ingredient amounts were grossly (interpret that word any way you like) inaccurate.

While our heavily-corrected second batch of cookies baked, I tasted one of the less-burnt cookies to see if they were any good. And... they were fine(ish), but you couldn't tell the apples were in them. They tasted intensely of raisins. Imagine oatmeal-raisin cookies, but without the oatmeal. 

This is the first time the title ingredient of a recipe has made absolutely no difference. We've made a few recipes where the title ingredient ruined it (lest we forget the pepper cake), but this is the first time we've encountered a recipe ingredient where the title ingredient was pointless.

Someone else came into the kitchen, stared at the cookie-shaped failures, and was naturally curious about what they were supposed to be. When I explained that they were supposed to be apple cookies, he said "I assure you I smell no apples." He did not stick around long enough to taste one.

I rarely tip an entire pan of cookies directly into the trash. I've even put subpar cookies into a food processor so that they could be salvaged into a crumb crust. But Mrs. John Stevens' cookies were more suited for the city dump than anyone's kitchen.

During all this disappointment, our second batch of cookies was steadily baking. I pulled them out of the oven a lot earlier than Mrs. John Stevens claimed I should. They looked acceptably better than the first cookies, but were already a little burnt.

As you look at the near-blackened spots on these cookies, keep in mind that I removed them from the oven early.

If I hadn't already made the "vanilla spread," I wouldn't have iced these cookies. The icing didn't make them look any better. I don't mind unphotogenic cookies, but a bit of ugliness certainly makes me feel worse when they taste bad.

I cannot recommend this recipe. But as it happily happens, we have recently made cookies that are everything Mrs. John Stevens' fresh apple cookies wish they could be: fruit cookies. If you either replace the dates with raisins (or omit the dates since the recipe already has raisins), you will succeed where the fresh apple cookies failed. 

And maybe you can add apples too. I have no idea if they made a difference or not. It's interesting that in both the fresh apple cookies and the fruit cookies, the title ingredient is relatively downplayed. But in the fruit cookies, the fruit actually makes a difference.

Seven-Ingredient Cake: or, This is not a pudding

Today's pudding is actually a cake.

Seven-Ingredient Cake 1 cup syrup* 2 eggs 4 tbsp butter or shortening ½ cup sour milk, buttermilk, or sour cream 1 tsp baking soda 2 cups flour 1 cup raisins Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9" square cake pan. Place the first six ingredients into a mixing bowl. Beat until well-mixed with a whisk or electric mixer. Then stir in raisins. If desired, you can add spices like cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, mace, etc. Pour into the pan and bake 20-30 minutes, or until the center springs back when lightly pressed with a fingertip, or a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. This is delicious as-is. Or, you can top it with fruit custard or vanilla sauce. *Not sure what syrup the recipe calls for. I used cane syrup since the store near me sells it. Source: "Ask Mrs. Wilson," Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, March 4 1919, page 14

"Ask Mrs. Wilson," Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, March 4 1919, page 14

Today on A Book of Cookrye, we are trying out Mrs. Wilson's seven-ingredient pudding! You may recall when we made her potato bread (which was so good that we have since given it away as appreciation gifts). On the day Mrs. Wilson ran that recipe in the newspaper, she gave a recipe for what she called a "seven-pudding" directly underneath it.

The only hard part of this recipe was figuring out what Mrs. Wilson meant by "sirup" in the ingredient list. At first I ruled out corn syrup as too new for this recipe, but Wikipedia tells me that 1) corn syrup goes back a lot further than I thought and 2) the Karo people spent obscene amounts of money advertising their product as a wartime sugar substitute. So the home cooks of 1919 would have at least heard of the stuff. 

But after our previous experiences baking with corn syrup, I had absolutely no desire to use it again. Instead I bought a jar of cane syrup, which was a bit pricier than I wanted. For those who've never heard of it, cane syrup is basically sugarcane juice that has been boiled a lot. (Basically, they make it the same way as maple syrup, but start with a different plant sap.) It tasted like milder molasses.

Having resolved the syrup-purchasing conundrum, the rest of the recipe seemed pretty easy: pile everything into a bowl and insert a whisk.

After just a minute or two of beating, we had what looked like a really good cake batter. Mrs. Wilson writes that "spices may be added if desired," and I decided to justify my recent purchase of a canister of mace by adding some to today's cake. The mace added a really nice, subtle flavor that almost made me feel like it was worth buying.

As we prepared to stir in the raisins and bake, I realized I had forgotten a certain crucial ingredient:

Our cake (or pudding, if we believe the recipe title) batter looked just a little better after getting all of the ingredients into it. Now that we had added the forgotten egg, it was ready to get beraisined and enter the baking pan.

We have encountered a fair number of recipes that don't quite match what the title calls them. The so-called banana dessert bars were a (very good) cake. The crocus carrot cake was a pie and also a disappointment. The butter finger dessert bars were actually a pecan pie with coconut in it. And today's recipe is called a "pudding" is in fact a cake.

I've noticed that every time we've made a boiled pudding, it came out like a bag of cake. So my totally unfounded (because I am too lazy to look it up) theory is that eventually people started putting their pudding mixture into baking pans instead of faffing about with a pudding bag and a massive pot. I think the name "pudding" persisted for a while because it was the same batter that the old-style boiled puddings were made of. (Or at least I think it's the same batter that boiled puddings were made of.)

Mrs. Wilson's seven-ingredient "pudding" tasted astonishingly like our unexpected favorite, the war cake. And unlike the war cake, you don't have to wait for the batter to cool off overnight. 

It is what you hope for when people say something is "old-fashioned." If you're making the recipe in its original amounts, I'd suggest baking it in a loaf pan and telling everyone it's a pound cake. It's a lot better than it should have been. So far, Mrs. Wilson has not put a dud of a recipe in our kitchen. This cake will be made again.

Potato Custards: or, Sometimes the mundane things are the strangest

Ever wished your mashed potatoes had more dignity?

Potato Custards ½ cup mashed potatoes* ½ cup milk 1 egg ½ tsp salt 1 pinch mace Heat oven to 350°. Grease five or six individual custard cups. Or, coat a cupcake pan with cooking spray. Thoroughly whisk everything together. Or, if using fresh potatoes that still have a few lumps in them after mashing, drop all the ingredients into a blender and let it run until everything is perfectly smooth. Pour into the prepared pans, filling them about two-thirds full. Bake until they are firm and puff up, about 15-20 minutes. Serve warm. *Instant mashed potatoes are fine. Source: Ask Mrs. Wilson, Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, July 7 1919, page 12

This comes to us from Ask Mrs. Wilson, who gently yet firmly taught the Philadelphia newsreading public how to cook things the domestic-science-approved way. But Mrs. Wilson did not pretend that everyone with a copy of the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger had bottomless grocery budgets. Only a few months before today's column, Mrs. Wilson ran a recipe for a one-egg cake in response to a spike in egg prices. Today, Mrs. Wilson ran an entire recipe of exclusively potato recipes for the benefit of those of us on a tight budget.

Ask Mrs. Wilson, Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, July 7 1919, page 12

However, the first line of her article about potatoes hasn't aged as well as the recipes: "This nutritious tuber is said to have saved the Irish people from famine...."

Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, July 7 1919, page 12

Mrs. Wilson may have an incomplete understanding of then-recent history, but she treads on sounder footing further down the page when she says "Boiling potatoes in their jackets will cause the potato to lose about 2 percent of its nutritive value, while peeling before cooking causes a loss of 14 percent." In other words, Mrs. Wilson endorses our practice of finger-picking the skins off of cooked potatoes instead of spending long irksome hours with a potato peeler. She confirms this in her directions for edible potato cups (for containing salads): "Boil medium-sized potatoes in their jackets. Cool and then peel."

All of this brings us to today's recipe: potato custards. It was the only unusual recipe on the entire page. While some of the other recipes are a little different than today (the potatoes au gratin uses white gravy instead of cheese sauce), the custard recipe was the only one that I literally couldn't imagine what it tasted like. Therefore I had to make it.

Mrs. Wilson directs us to mash the potatoes and force them through a sieve. This ensures that are mashed potatoes are perfectly smooth. But we at A Book of Cookrye had a much easier way to ensure spud perfection: use a box of instant flakes.

After you have either mashed or reconstituted your potatoes, the recipe is pretty simple: add the rest of the ingredients and get out a whisk. That little smattering of brown powder floating on top of our mixture is the only expensive part of this recipe: a pinch of mace. 

We haven't used mace for anything since the snow muffins, and the canister had long since disappeared. Much of it got used up when I said "I'm not using this anyway" and added it to cinnamon toast. I considered substituting nutmeg for mace since we already have it (nutmeg and mace come from the same plant), but decided that I should probably do this recipe correctly. This involved purchasing and paying for a (small!) shaker of mace.

Recipes like this make me wish stores had dispense-it-yourself spices, the same way a lot of them let you bag and price your own peanuts. It would be very helpful for those of us who want a single teaspoon of a spice we will never use again.

After a quick stir, our potato custards looked like an unusually pale cake batter.

I decided to bake the custards in miniature pie pans because it seemed cute. I also noticed at this point that there was no sugar in these custards. While I am no stranger to savory custards, the omission seemed odd. And so, I sweetened one of the custards and baked the other exactly as written. (The sugary spud custard was bad. So we don't need to mention it again.)

I have to credit Mrs. Wilson with this: every single one of her recipes I've tried has worked. Whether the potato custards were any good remained to be seen, but they behaved perfectly in the oven. Like our pumpkin tarts, they even puffed into nicely-shaped domes when they were done. Apparently ingredients are never unruly when Mrs. Wilson is in charge. 

These were the most formal mashed potatoes I've ever made. They had the exact texture of a really good cheesecake, but they tasted like mashed potatoes. It was like we subjected a cheesecake to a flavor transplant. The mace was an unexpectedly good addition. If you take nothing else from this recipe, try adding a pinch of mace to your mashed potatoes. 

If you have ever wished your mashed potatoes were more presentational and dignified, this is the recipe for you. No more must your mashed potatoes be sloppily presented in whatever splattered shape they landed on the plate. 

Today's potato custards seemed typical of Mrs. Wilson's recipes: fancier-looking than than I would have ever bothered with, but without adding any extra ingredients to the grocery list (aside from the mace, which will probably follow me from spice shelf to spice shelf until the end of time). In full disclosure, I definitely noticed the absence of butter in these, so you may want to add a bit to the recipe. But with that said, this is not a bad way to serve mashed potatoes.