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I’ve written elsewhere about my aversion to large fruit. But bigness in food isn’t always bad. The scale of food is an under–considered topic, except in discussions of portion size which somehow trend towards comparing cooked meat to a stack of playing cards. Certainly the heaping piles of largely processed calories served up at most restaurants is large-scale food gone wrong. But when my mother returned from a bus trip in Switzerland with two gifts for me, a cuckoo clock and a ½ kilo Swiss chocolate bar, I can tell you which one delighted my ten-year-old self.
Likewise, I was recently at the Hannaford while we were in Maine and found a bag of giant marshmallows, Campfire Giant Roasters to be specific. Certain confections are more fun when they’re big (though I might have to draw the line at a six-foot donut). I imagined a fist-sized marshmallow weighing down my s’mores stick, its size relative to me making me feel, however hokey it might be, like a kid again. But I didn’t buy them. We already had a bag of perfectly good standard-issue marshmallows at home. Adults have far too much impulse control.
But I did make this tower of a cake from Stonewall Kitchen. And it was so much better than I expected. Because the thing about out-sized sweets is that they often appeal more to the eyes than to the taste buds. Which is sometimes fine, like that flavorless but fantastical face-sized rainbow lollipop your parents got you just that once. The one you licked about a dozen times before leaving it blithely on the kitchen counter where it would later be pried off with a dirty dinner knife, leaving a sizable scar that remains to this day (sorry dad). Despite the fact that even a thin slice of this cake resembles a door wedge, it is delicious. It’s not overly sweet and the mortar holding this construction together, the creamy filling, is light and rich at the same time.
I followed the recipe exactly except for the bit about measuring out ¾ cups of the whipped cream. I just used all the cream I’d whipped and dolloped in a bit of sour cream for good measure. I also used store-brand jam, though Stonewall products are generally terrific. The cake looks best served immediately but it did taste great the next day, even after a five hour ride (on ice) to Boston. And it could easily be tweaked for our peach season here in the south by subbing in peach jam and peaches for the filling.
Babies change time. Not just because early on they scoff at simple distinctions like “day” and “night.” The first few months are like having a job that requires your absolute attention at random increments twenty-four hours a day. So you learn to fit things into the shifting margins of free time. Sudden thirty minute nap? Time to prep dinner. Unexpected ten minutes of contentment in the crib? Time to catch up on email or make a phone call. You get the picture. It’s a difficult adjustment; I’m finding it much easier the second time around. This might be why I found myself baking a red velvet cake with a two week old. (It might also have had to do with my wonderful mother-in-law still being here helping out and a visit from a red-velvet-cake loving best friend). To some this might sound crazy. Not, perhaps, as crazy as making boudin blanc with a seven week old and without an electric meat grinder or sausage stuffer. Screaming infant, meat-filled pastry bag, lamb intestines. Rookie mistake. We’ve not tried making our own sausage since, though we might venture again now that my husband bought me the grinder attachment for our KitchenAid (what woman wouldn’t want to come home after childbirth to a gift like that?).
So, the cake. I love red velvet cake. It’s southern for sure. And there really is no good reason to make it red. It’s basically just a very tender mildly chocolatey layer cake. One pet peeve I have, though, is that people persist in icing it with cream cheese frosting. No, no and NO. Red velvet cake needs boiled icing. Made right it is, as my buttercream-hating husband said on tasting it, a revelation. Lighter than buttercream and with a delicious dairy sweetness. I’d been wanting to make my grandmother’s recipe, recently unearthed from my mother’s recipe file, for a long while. But a cake needs a crowd. And a baby brings one. So it seemed the perfect thing to make while we had a full house after the baby was born.
There is a great bakery in my hometown that makes a red velvet cake put over-the-top by a schmear of chocolate ganache between the cake layers. I used a whipped ganache recipe from The Cake Bible, but any ganache that’s spreadable would work. Credit for the decorating idea goes to the folks at Baked. These pictures aren’t great, but they’ll do.
Boiled Icing
Prep 1st and let cool in fridge. Cook until thick:
1 c. milk
5 T. flour
Beat with mixer until creamy:
1 c. butter, softened
1 c. 10x sugar
1 t. vanilla
pinch of salt
Add cooled milk mixture slowly until smooth.
Cake
2 eggs, room temperature
1 ½ c. sugar
1 ½ oz. red food coloring
1 T vinegar
2 ½ c. flour
1 t. vanilla
2 T. cocoa
1 t. soda
1 t. salt
½ c. shortening or butter (you could sub the appropriate amount of butter)
1 c. buttermilk, room temperature (set aside 1 T)
1. Pre-heat oven to 350. Grease two 9″ cake pans and line the bottoms with parchment.
2. In a medium bowl, cream shortening, salt and sugar until light.
3. Add eggs. Beat 1 minute.
4. Blend in food coloring and cocoa.
5. In a small bowl, combine vanilla and buttermilk.
6. Add to shortening mixture alternately with flour.
7. Add vinegar and soda to remaining T of buttermilk. Gently mix into rest of ingredients.
8. Bake in two 9” layers for 25-30 min.
Optional: Your favorite spreadable ganache to use between cake layers.
We’ve been putting up with a lot lately. Incessant heat ergo constant AC, the plights and gripes that attend any move to a new place, and the slowly-revealed quirks of a new house. Things we’ll eventually stop noticing but which are annoying now. Mostly, though, my family has been putting up with me. The best euphemism for my moods might be “mercurial.” Other less charitable terms might include bitchy, short-fused, grumpy or misanthropic. Blame the hormones, blame the heat. It doesn’t matter. I’ve been a pain.
But last weekend we shifted the frame. Instead of putting up with me we put things up. In this case, dilly beans. I’d never made pickles before. This summer’s real pickle project was supposed to be watermelon rind. But these are much easier and can be tackled in part of a morning with little prep or clean-up. Plus they are ready to eat the next day. There are plenty of good recipes online. We used black peppercorns, red pepper, and fresh dill in ours and they came out really well. We served them on a cheese tray last night and managed to finish off a whole jar. And our beans came from a new find here in Tallahassee—Tomato Land. It’s a wonderful farmstand/ gourmet deli where you can get a fabulous BLT on homemade wheat bread for $4 and great produce for cheap as well. It’s a welcome refuge from the Publix. Publix does not sell lime trees… Tomato Land does. But our baby steps towards large-scale citrus production are for another post.
“I think my mom’s a little pregnant.” Fateful words uttered by my mother when she was nine. Her parents had some points of friction in their marriage. Nana was always wont to say, solemnly, that she was part of a mixed marriage. Catholic and Lutheran. This twentieth century bridging of the schism had two major structural problems. First, Fridays. In the words of my nana’s mid-century East Coast ethnic prejudice, Catholics are “mackerel snappers” which means we eat fish on Fridays. She hated to be told what to do, especially in the kitchen. So, despite the fact that she was a wonderful cook, somehow broiled frozen “squarefish” or tuna casserole were the only dishes that made it to the dinner table on Fridays. Second, birth control. My grandfather didn’t believe in it. When she got pregnant with her third child family lore has it that nana didn’t talk to him for six months. And they certainly didn’t share the news with the kids. Mom was on her own and her naïve assessment, made to an inquiring neighbor, did not please her parents.
In fact, this inadvertent misstep may be second only to one that happened a year or two later. Mom was sitting on the couch reading a comic book she’d borrowed from a boy in the neighborhood while her parents had a “discussion” at the dining room table. During the course of their exchange she heard an unfamiliar word. Her bespectacled, slightly plump, studious self jotted in the margin of that comic book “Look up ‘F*CK.’” Unfortunately, her admirably inquisitive bit of marginalia was discovered by the parents of the boy who’d lent her the book. And in at least their second bout of 1950s parental projection, my grandparents meted out a harsh sentence. She could attest, I think, that Dial soap could keep one’s mouth fresh far longer than 24 hours.
Being a little bit pregnant is how I think of things during those first twelve weeks when the news is still under wraps. So I’ve been a little bit pregnant. And a lot sick. In woolly-damp Florida heat. Not cooking, eating endless variations on simple carbohydrates, and pondering how I could possibly make it through the first trimester. Hence my lack of enthusiasm for a blog whose mission has predictably slipped toward stories about food. And feeling pregnant casts me back to a very difficult time; the end of the first trimester of my first pregnancy coincided almost to the day with my mother’s terminal cancer diagnosis.
My body and I are slowly becoming simpatico again. Not too much cooking but more eating. I’ve lately been enjoying these wonderful sweet olive oil tortas. A friend gave me some last year. I had always meant to ask where she got them and just plum forgot. They’ve since turned up at a few specialty grocery stores, including our local co-op, New Leaf. A package isn’t cheap, but it’s totally worth it. Lightly flavored with sesame and anise and crusted over the top with sugar, they’re ideal for sensitive tummies, or just for days too hot for anything more substantial. Plus they come smartly wrapped in wax paper so you don’t even need to dirty your fingers. Or, in theory, so you can eat half and save the rest. Not that I’ve ever tried that.
Any southerner or person with aspirations of southern culinary credibility (like yours truly) knows about fried green tomatoes. Fewer people seem to know about fried red tomatoes. I’ve had the rare good fortune to know both. Maryland has absolutely excellent red tomatoes, especially in the tidewater areas. My Nana, an Annapolitan, used to make a wonderful summer meal of fried red tomatoes and corn fritters. They are so easy it’s almost criminal. The results are a peppery sweet, salty combination of buttery flour coating the savory but fruity warmth of a just-cooked slice of tomato. Serve them alongside golden-sweet corn fritters and you’ve pretty much got summer on a plate. We use the fritter recipe from the JOC. I think many recipes would work. The key is to grate the corn on a box grater so that you use only the inside of the kernels.
These tomatoes are best fried in cast iron. Since red tomatoes are much wetter and less firm than their green counterparts the coating won’t uniformly crisp and the more meaty tasting red tomato benefits from the flavors that inhere in a well-seasoned pan. The Lodge brand makes a very good pre-seasoned cast iron pan that is reasonably priced. You can also find good deals on collectible cast iron if you’re the type who enjoys flea markets or auctions. Friends once gave me my most cherished skillet, a #8 Griswold. It is lighter in weight and darker then my other skillets and cooks with very even heat. Plus it’s so well-seasoned that fried eggs slip easily across its surface.
Fried Red Tomatoes (serves 4 generously)
2 large, very ripe and in-season tomatoes
About ½ c. flour seasoned well with salt and pepper
Butter for frying (about 3- 4 T.)
1. Cut the tomatoes into thick (3/4 in.) slices.
2. Melt butter until sizzling in a cast iron skillet.
3. Place the seasoned flour on a plate or in a shallow pan.
4. Dredge each tomato slice in the flour to coat both sides and place in the hot butter.
5. Fry until browned on both sides. Serve immediately.
Green tomatoes are another story entirely. Citrusy and firm, they benefit from a bit more toothsome coating. One of our favorite brunch spots in Charleston, Poogan’s Porch, makes a bang-up BLT with fried green tomatoes and goat cheese. Or just eat them as a side dish with any meal. In my experience, you don’t need any complicated battering measures to achieve an excellent fried green tomato. These are easy enough for a weeknight supper.
Fried Green Tomatoes (serves 4 generously)
2 large green tomatoes
½ c. cornmeal (not stone ground)
Coarse salt
Hot sauce (we like Frank’s Red Hot—I think Tabasco is too hot for these)
Vegetable oil (about 3-4 T.)
1. Cut the tomatoes into 1/3 inch slices; lay them out on a tray and sprinkle one side well with salt.
2. Splash each slice with a drop or two of hot sauce.
3. Heat the oil in a nonstick skillet until a small drop of water sizzles in it.
4. Dredge each tomato slice in the cornmeal and place in frying pan.
5. Fry until slices are well browned on each side.
Note: If you need to work in batches, I like to place the finished slices on a wire cooling rack so that the bottom coating doesn’t get soggy (as it does if you use a paper towel).
We have been chalking up some miles on the car and tallying quite a few interstate crossings, visiting family and friends up and down the east coast before we head south. I plan to cling to the cool northeast by sharing a few Maine-ish recipes once we’re settled in the Sunshine State.
During the summer of 1976 my family went, as they always did, downy o’, hon. I.e. “down to the ocean,” i.e. to Ocean City Maryland. This is no rarefied beach hideaway. It’s straight up kitsch, with a boardwalk featuring Thrashers French Fries, bins of saltwater taffy, fresh squeezed lemonade, sundry tchotchke shops, a wax museum and, of course, a roller coaster. You can still find some of the more dilapidated small condos that lined the beach in the ‘70s, but now it’s mostly big hotels. The beach is dredged which means the waves throw you right up on the sand. But it’s fun all the same. Our family usually stays on the Bay side of the island since it’s cheaper and quieter.
There are few things more maddening than having someone gripe at you about what you’re cooking or how you’re cooking it. I had a boyfriend who once used to come up to me as I was cooking x or y dish and say “Oh, you’re going to do it that way?” That has become a phrase we use in our house to mean “Butt out—you’ll eat what I cook you!” But honestly we rarely use it since we’re both usually so grateful to be cooked for we don’t really care about the particulars.
On this 1976 beach trip, which was the occasion of my first birthday, both my nana (herself a great cook, but one who felt all things must be done “according to Hoyle”) and my dad (whose signature dish remains “Eggs Velveeta,” which should give some sense of his utter lack of culinary credibility) were giving my mom a hard time about how she was fixing the potatoes for that evening’s meal. Who knows if she’d had one to many Natty Bohs, but she took those potatoes and threw them right over the deck and into the Bay. Voilà, Chesapeake Bay Potatoes. This story somehow came to be told to illustrate my mom’s temper, but I’ve always sided with her. Chesapeake Bay Potatoes may be my favorite of her recipes.
If you look closely you’ll see that they’re eating potato chips.
My dad is a man who likes shrimp. He also has the adorable quirk of not being able to pronounce the word—it always comes out as “srimp.” Despite many dinnertime clinics with his English teacher wife and English major daughter, he still ends up one H short. Pronunciation aside, my father loves shrimp so much that my mother once got him a pottery dish designed especially to hold his shrimp and cocktail sauce appetizer (he also has his own pottery brie baker, but our family’s obsession with nibbles and snacks is a subject for another entry). We had peel and eat shrimp with homemade cocktail sauce, (sometimes homemade) fries, and salad for dinner pretty frequently. We also loved to go get shrimp, fries and beers at Cross Street Market. The long market served all sorts of good things.
Utz Potato Chips sold small single bags of chips scooped warm out of the stall window. There were nameless (to me, at least) bakeries with the usual butter cookies topped with almost chalky, but oddly delicious, chocolate frosting. Not to mention produce stands and places selling sparkly trinkets of all kinds. And, of course, there was the iconic Cross Street cheese guy. I’m sure his stall had a better name, and in fact I’ve visited their outpost at the Baltimore Farmer’s Market. But this man no longer works there—I think he sold the place and retired. But he was tall, with a red face, extremely blond hair and an (at least to me) encyclopedic knowledge of cheese. Plus he was liberal about giving tastes to this cheese-loving kid. Beyond the cheese man was the fish market and beyond it, Nick’s Seafood.
I won’t claim to be a die-hard or a downtown insider, but we loved to go to Nick’s before it became the fratty happy hour destination for Federal Hill’s young professionals. Nick wore a bucket cap pierced with fish hooks. He’d shuck your oysters straight from ice-filled coolers under the bar and serve up quarts of cheap beer in open white tupperwares that barely held their shape when full. At an adjacent counter a woman used a counter-mounted potato slicer to make hand-cut fries. And, of course, they served steamed shrimp well seasoned with the only thing shrimp should be seasoned with—Old Bay.
My mother steamed shrimp one way and one way only: she’d dump a can of cheap beer into a pot, get it boiling, set in a steamer basket that fit the pot, dump in her shrimp, sprinkle them liberally with Old Bay, put on the top and let them cook until their tails curled and they were completely pink.
Now that I’m married to a Sandlapper, I’ve had to make room for some other takes on shrimp. One of my favorites is the Low Country Boil, which we’ve hybridized with my mom’s steamed shrimp method. It’s basically a hardier take on our family staple—adding in corn on the cob, smoky sausage, and red potatoes. The key is to get all the different ingredients done but not mushy. And, despite what any Low Country resident might say, to not boil the shrimp. In this version, the other ingredients make a platform on which the shrimp can steam and won’t get mushy.
Low Country Boil (serves 6-8)
2 t. olive oil (if using turkey kielbasa)
1 package kielbasa
12 small red potatoes (about 1.5 inches, or larger ones cut in half)
1 onion, sliced
1-2 cans cheap beer
2 bay leaves
2.5 pounds large shrimp (preferably domestic)
4 ears of corn, shucked and each ear cut into two or three pieces
2-3 t. of Old Bay or more
1. Cut the sausage into 1-2 inch chunks and sauté in the bottom of a large pot (8 qt.) until browned. Remove to a bowl.
2. Sauté the onion in the juices from the sausage. Pour in one beer and add the potatoes and bay leaves.
3. Put the lid on and simmer for 7 minutes, until potatoes are barely becoming tender.
4. Add the corn and mix with potatoes. Simmer about 3 minutes.
5. Stir in the sausage.
6. Scatter the raw shrimp (peels on!) on top of the corn, potatoes, and sausage. Add more beer if necessary (you should have an inch or two of liquid in the bottom of the pot).
7. Sprinkle with Old Bay. Put the lid on and steam about 5 more minutes, or until the shrimp are pink and their tails are curled. Watch carefully so they don’t overcook.
8. The finished dish looks impressive, so I like to carry the pot straight to the table and serve family style with a green salad on the side (be sure to fish out the bay leaves).
Dundalk is a town in Ireland. It’s also an industrial area of Southeast Baltimore. It’s in the county but feels like the city, at least to me since as a kid I usually arrived there from downtown via the Harbor Tunnel so the city never really ended. My dad’s best friend worked for Dundalk’s long-defunct branch of Bethlehem Steel Company, my high school boyfriend’s dad worked at the Lever Brothers factory, and my mom taught night classes at Dundalk Community College. I could be conflating memories, but I think we also used to hunt shark’s teeth at Sparrow’s Point once Beth Steel shut down. So this part of Baltimore was a big part of our lives.
Somehow, in our family the word “Dundalk” also came to refer to anything overly or unexpectedly large. My seven-year-old self might have said “Wow, the mosquito bite on my ankle is the size of Dundalk!” Or my Dad still might exclaim “That steak is the size of Dundalk!” Good, bad, indifferent, if it was big it was the size of Dundalk.
Which strangely brings me to a dessert not prevalent in this ironically small hamlet: banana pudding. That concoction heaped in gelatinous yellowy mounds on salad bars far further south of the Mason-Dixon than Baltimore. A box of Nilla Wafers, some vanilla pudding, bananas and Cool Whip. Why even give it a mention? Because made properly it is divine. The pudding is infused with banana, the bananas and cookies still have integrity—it’s basically an American version of trifle, heavy on the custard.
For my husband’s graduation party I made a banana pudding the size of Dundalk. Really, it was huge. Big enough to have leftovers after a party for more than thirty people. Unfortunately its creamy expanse wasn’t captured on film but conjure, if you can, the largest Pyrex lasagna pan you can think of and that’s about the size of it. Our almost-two-year-old son could easily have taken a banana pudding bath.
It’s a terrific casual dessert for a crowd—easy to assemble and universally enjoyed. No one wants to admit to liking something so seemingly low-brow, but by the end of the night the pan is empty, guests are surreptitiously scraping the sides of the pan with a spoon or finger, or they’re clamoring to take the leftovers home.
A few simple tricks give this buffet mainstay a bit more integrity. First, use cook-and-serve pudding. No need to make your own (though you certainly could) but do not use instant. It’s horrible stuff. And make said pudding with whole milk, two percent if you must, but no skim (also horrible stuff). Second, assemble the dish while the pudding’s still hot. This helps all the flavors to come together. And finally, top with real whipped cream. Once whipped, the cream will last a good 48 hours, longer than your pudding is likely to. So much better than Cool Whip.
Dundalk Banana Pudding (serves about 20)
3 quart shallow baking dish
3 large boxes of cook-and-serve banana pudding prepared according to package directions
8-10 medium bananas, fairly ripe (a bit of brown on the skin, but still firm—you want that good banana flavor)
2 boxes vanilla wafers (generic are fine)
1 pint heavy whipping cream
Powdered sugar
1. While hot, spread some pudding in the bottom of the dish. Top with vanilla wafers and slices of banana. Repeat layers, ending with a smooth layer of pudding. Refrigerate until chilled.
2. Whip the cream, sweetening to your taste (since the pudding is so sweet, I usually just use about 2 T of powdered sugar). Spread over cooled pudding. Garnish with any remaining wafers. Keep refrigerated until ready to serve.
Crock pots of mac and cheese and baked beans plus vases of flowers from our neighbor’s yard, all staged for party set-up.
We are servants of the GPS. Without the preprogrammed detour to the Sweetgrass Dairy in Thomasville, GA we took on our first trip to Tallahassee (subject of a future post, once I get to try their chevre—it wasn’t available when we last visited because the goats were “kidding,” funny thing about goats) our route last weekend took us through much more upscale terrain. Though fortunately it still wended past the Salt Lick Sausage Store (another future post, once I get to try their sausage). As alienated as I felt on that first drive down, it was equally bewildering to have these first impressions of the landscape so completely revised by changing one road. We just go where “Jane” tells us to and see what “Jane” lets us see, apparently.
Now we’re back, a dissertation’s been defended and filed, I’ve got employment for the fall, and we have a nice little place to live. It’s both a downhill slide and an uphill battle to get to our move this July. The slide involves an ever-increasing entertaining schedule including a graduation party in a couple of weeks.
Catering. This is a word I love and a service I covet. As in, “When are the catering people showing up?” or “Oh, we’re having it catered.” But as with so many indulgences we long for in the abstract, having a party catered always loses its appeal once I consider the cost and hassle of arranging it. So incrementally I end up making just about everything. I’ve been looking for ways to streamline our upcoming shindig, which will include carry-in main dishes– Jinx’s Pit-Stop BBQ, Wayside Fried Chicken and my father-in-law’s soon-to-be-famous ribs. I’ll make pimento cheese, seven layer dip, crock pot mac and cheese, baked beans, cucumber salad, banana pudding and strawberry shortcake. We’ll wash it all down with wine from White Hall and Star Hill beer. And we’ll sop up the bbq sauce with mayonnaise muffins. Yup, you heard right.
* UPDATE: Check this article on White Lily Flour in the New York Times.
Self-rising flour is a kitchen shortcut I tend to forget about, but I’ve lately started keeping a bag of it in the fridge. It’s great for making many things quickly, including Nigella’s Sticky Toffee Pudding and these muffins. I have a great biscuit recipe. It’s relatively quick and universally enjoyed. But I know my limits and making biscuits for forty is beyond them. These mayonnaise muffins are a great substitute. Some will cringe at the name, but consider: mayonnaise is nothing more than fat and eggs, the seemingly missing stars on this ingredient line-up. So you’re able to make a very serviceable biscuit stand-in with, count them, THREE ingredients. They’re not so good that you’ll fall out in a swoon or want to slap your mama, but they get the job done and are prettily puffed and brown.
I’ve recently been introduced to Duke’s Mayonnaise, which is made in Richmond, VA. I compared it to my Kroger store brand and it’s far creamier. I used light mayo in this recipe since that’s what I had, but regular would probably yield a richer muffin. You could also get fancy and brush the tops of the hot muffins with melted butter, but why bother?
Mayonnaise Muffins
Preheat oven to 400. (Note: Biscuit type breads need a hot oven, what’s called a “rising oven,” which triggers a high rise. For more dense biscuits which cook a bit longer recipes will often instruct you to turn down the heat after the first 5-10 minutes.)
Grease a 12- cup muffin tin.
Combine:
2 c. self-rising flour
1 c. milk
4 T mayo
Fill tins and bake 10 minutes.
Objects are sometimes the easy part: giving away clothes, divvying up jewelry, nick-knacks, dishes. More difficult are the layers of correspondence, personal and professional; the notes; the bills; and in my case, because my mom was a writer, piles of journals, manuscripts, letters of acceptance and rejection, and books, books, books. My mother disposed of many of her journals when she first got sick, an act that pains me now though at the time I felt powerless to intervene in her efforts to keep parts of her life closed. We’ve been painstakingly through her writing and her library, sifting and sorting, leaving it for a while, sifting and sorting again. Each time something new surfaces. What to do with all this paper has become increasingly urgent as we organize ourselves to move.
One of the more unexpectedly perplexing layers of my mother’s legacy in print has been her recipes. What to do with her writing seemed clear. But her chaotic binder of clippings is just so typical of her that it’s impossible break down and file. It’s organized at the core, frugal, made from a rough, blue-woven, three-ring binder originally owned by a long-ago student named Scott Joh which he probably left in her classroom at the end of some year. Ruled paper divided with homemade paper tabs and filled with clippings and handwritten recipes. But it was never updated, so over time glue broke down, clippings got stuffed in the back, recipes written on paper lunch bags and napkins found their way in.
It’s such an anthology of the past forty years, her tastes, the tastes of the times, her hopes for our family- the Christmas Tree Bread she dutifully clipped but never made; the adventurous dishes pasted in even though she knew my father would complain if she made them; page upon page of impossibly meager fad diets.
And this isn’t even to mention the recipes, Mother’s Day cards, and random scraps stuffed in her Joy of Cooking, which I’ve finally had the heart to remove so I can use the cookbook more easily. I love her old Joy, the pages that are especially stained from use—recipes for chicken every which way, pie crusts, bread, cookies and drop biscuits, all on paper mottled a tobacco brown. If I close my eyes and flip through I can feel the pages she used.
My mom and I both prefer the original Joy, though copies of both sit on the shelf and there are good recipes in the new (the French hot chocolate is especially delicious). But the old version is so winningly fashioned, with its entirely pragmatic illustrations of a delicate booted foot ruthlessly pinning down a squirrel as dainty gloved hands tug off the animal’s hide like a too-small t-shirt. The old Joy, matching the washed-out blue binder, were constant companions in my mother’s kitchen (also blue); they sat on the counter together, her most reached-for references.
Most of the recipes my mom clipped or copied from friends aren’t ones I’d make: 70s fare like Lemon Lush, Surfside Salmon Loaf, Shrimp Imperial Casserole, Broccoli Spread. And I certainly don’t intend to go on the Great Weight-Loss Diet, or the 3-Week Spa Diet, or even the Fast Results Diet, though the Snackers’ Diet is tempting. But I can’t bear to throw a scrap away. So I’ll type or file the clippings I might use and may even post a few here. The rest will be kept as-is, crammed and crumpled as they have been for years.
A first pass produced my mother’s no-fail quiche recipe, newspaper unknown (but probably the Baltimore Sun). For a crust I use Julia Child’s pie crust recipe, found in Mastering the Art of French Cooking Vol. II . You won’t find a better all-purpose crust, and her method is genius. This quiche is quick and easy, the custard is light and moist. It lends itself to infinite variations.
La Quiche (verbatim from the clipping)
Roll out the crust. Line quiche mold or 9 inch pie plate, brush with white of an egg and prick it well. Partially cook shell by baking 425 degrees 5 minutes. Meanwhile scald to hasten cooking time: 2 cups of cold milk or cream. Cool slightly then pour into 3 whole eggs already beaten with ¼ t. salt, 1/8 t. white pepper and a dash of nutmeg. Continue beating a few seconds more. Sprinkle the bottom of the cooled pie shell with ¾ c. grated Swiss cheese. Pour custard mixture over it. Bake 35-40 minutes until top is golden brown at 375 degrees. Serve warm with a tossed green salad.
My Notes: Scald milk by heating it in a saucepan over medium heat until small bubbles form around the edges; I always use milk, never cream; you can add any additional meats or veggies you like, though be sure veggies aren’t too wet (i.e. drain spinach thoroughly) or your quiche will be soggy.
The Tally 