Behind the Recipe -- Jeri Quinzio

Sweet on Potatoes

 

The United Nations designated 2008 as the international year of the potato, and I think the humble spud deserves the salute.

The potato is and has been much maligned. Today, carb-phobic dieters consider it too fattening. In the 17th century, European elites thought it was pasty, insipid, and indigestible. It was fit for peasants, with their coarse tastes and sturdy stomachs, but not for delicate creatures like themselves, nobles believed.

Even earlier, some thought the potato was poisonous or caused leprosy. Since potatoes weren’t mentioned in the Bible, being a New World food, some Puritans wouldn’t eat them.

It’s fascinating that some of the best-known potato preparations have French names, none more iconic than French fries, since the French were so anti-potato when it was introduced to Europe. They resisted mightily until the tireless efforts of an 18th-century Frenchman named Antoine-Augustin Parmentier made the potato acceptable. Parmentier even succeeded in getting Louis XVI to wear a potato flower in his buttonhole, which helped a lot. In recognition, many potato preparations are tagged with Parmentier’s name, most famously the potato and leek soup called potage Parmentier.

 

Potato flower

Certainly the potato is one of the most versatile vegetables. We bake it, boil it, roast it, fry it, sauté it, deep fry it, steam it, and cook it buried in hot coals. Potatoes can be   mashed and topped with a pat of butter. Or they can be sliced and layered with cream and cheese and baked into a lush gratin dauphinois. We make potato pancakes, soups, salads, and of course, we love potato chips. We eat potatoes hot or cold, at breakfast, lunch, or dinner and, oddly enough, even for dessert.

I’ve had a wonderful pound cake made with potatoes. They give the cake a lighter, more delicate texture than most pound cakes but don’t take anything away from the flavor.

I’ve seen a seventeenth-century recipe for potato pudding, made with mashed potatoes, butter, eggs, sugar, and nutmeg mixed together and baked. There are 18th-century English recipes for potato and lemon cheesecakes –  actually tarts made from a mixture of mashed potato, lemon, sugar, and cream and baked. They don’t contain any cheese.

And there are potato candies. Often called Needhams, these are an old-fashioned potato and coconut candy from Maine, which is famous for its potatoes. Needhams are said to be named after an Evangelical preacher who converted a candy-maker years ago.

Whether or not that’s the case, they are easy to make and a great cooking project for kids. The taste will remind you of Mounds bars. Needhams may not be exactly what the UN had in mind as a way to recognize the potato’s contribution to world nourishment, but they do taste divine.

POTATO CANDY or NEEDHAMS

Two-thirds cup mashed potatoes, cooled
One pound confectioners’ sugar
Six ounces grated coconut
One cup semisweet chocolate chips
One teaspoon corn syrup

Grease an eight or nine inch square pan. Mix potatoes, sugar, and coconut together until nice and smooth. Spread evenly in pan.

Melt the chocolate chips in a saucepan, then add corn syrup. Let cool. Then pour over potato mixture in the pan. Chill. Cut in small squares and serve.

Breaking Eggs

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.

 

This is the first riddle many kids in many parts of the world ever solve, and a source of great fun and wonder. The egg, with its perfect form and potential for life, is magical. Innumerable riddles and rhymes, puns and proverbs have been written about it. In some literary traditions, the egg represents the origin of life, the world egg that broke and divided into two parts – heaven and earth. 

Finnish folk tales describe the yolk as the sun, the white as the moon, and the broken fragments of the shell as stars.  In Chinese tradition,  the egg is heaven, the yolk is earth.

In this lyrical English riddle, the egg is majestic, regal, an egg Fabergé might have created.

In a marble hall white as milk,
Lined with skin as soft as silk,
Within a fountain crystal-clear
A golden apple doth appear.
No doors there are to this stronghold,
Yet thieves break in to steal its gold.

The classic conundrum asks which came first, the chicken or the egg. That leads to the question of whether to have the immediate satisfaction of eating the egg, or the deferred pleasure of letting it hatch into a chicken or duck or other fowl and eating it later, as this eighteenth-century riddle suggests. To keep a nest egg, as it were.

As I was walking in a field of wheat,
I picked up something good to eat;
Neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor bone,
I kept it till it ran alone.

But eggs are more than metaphors or fables. In practical terms, they’re a terrific source of nutrition and one of the most versatile foods in the kitchen. From soft-boiled eggs to eggs Benedict, from deviled eggs to egg nogs, there are many, many ways to serve eggs. The Irish poet Thomas Moore defended the French, with only a bit of exaggeration, by asking, “Who can help loving the land that has taught us six hundred and eighty-five ways to dress eggs?”

Omelets are among the best ways to dress eggs. Made since at least the early seventeenth century, probably long before, they’re endlessly adaptable. Escoffier has nearly 80 omelet recipes.  The 1965 edition of the Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook has more than 60, including a couple of variations on egg foo yung. In The Hundred Glories of French Cooking, author Robert Courtine has a recipe for something he calls variously “Omelette Surprise Brésilienne,” “Omelette Norvégienne,” and “Omelet filled with ice cream.” However, the recipe is actually for baked Alaska, not an omelet.

Much foolishness has been written about making omelets – they’re the ultimate test of a cook’s skill, one must have a special omelet pan and and use it for nothing else, omelets’ bottoms must be as smooth as a baby’s – but actually they’re quick, easy, and if the bottom is a bit bumpy, who cares?  It’s on the bottom. No one sees it.

One thing is true, though. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.

This recipe is from eighteenth-century author Elizabeth Raffald. Vary it as you like.

TO MAKE AN OMELETTE

Put a quarter of a pound of butter into a frying pan. Break six eggs and beat them a little, strain them through a hair sieve. Put them in when your butter is hot and strew in a little shred parsley and boiled ham scraped fine with nutmeg, pepper and salt. Fry it brown on the under side. Lay it on your dish but don’t turn it, hold a hot salamander  [a metal implement that is heated and held over foodstuffs to brown them] half a minute over it to take off the raw look of the eggs. Stick curled parsley in it and serve it up. N. B. You may put in clary [ a plant in the mint family] and chives or onions if you like. – The Experienced English Housekeeper, Elizabeth Raffald, 1769.

Ice, Cubed

 

I hadn’t thought much about ice until I began doing research for my book Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making. I think most of us take ice for granted. My refrigerator pops out more ice cubes than I need in minutes. But back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, people went to great lengths to get ice. It was harvested from lakes and ponds, stored in ice houses, and bought in 25-pound or larger chunks. The ice kept an ice box cold enough to keep milk and meat fresh for a few days or even a week, depending on the heat and how often you opened the ice box doors.

However, those large chunks of ice had to be cut down to size if you wanted to do something like make ice cream or put some ice in a drink. To avoid flying ice chips, you had to wrap the ice in a coarse coffee sack or an old blanket and attack it with an axe or a mallet. The preferred size for ice cream making was roughly that of a walnut, so this was no small task.

When refrigerators went on the market, they were so different, and so expensive, that manufacturers published booklets – and even hard-cover books – explaining how to make the most of them. A 1927 GE booklet opined that the “total sum of its usefulness has not in any way been discovered.” The publications offered usage tips as well as new recipes that took advantage of the refrigerator, its miniscule freezing compartment, and its ice cube trays.

The recipes included refrigerator cookies, which were mixed, shaped into logs, and refrigerated for a couple of hours, or longer, so they’d be easy to slice neatly before baking. Refrigerator rolls were mixed ahead of time and kept in the refrigerator until it was time to bake them. Frozen salads made their debut. The less said about the salads the better. Mixing canned fruits, cream cheese, and mayonnaise together, freezing the mixture in the “QUICKUBE Tray,” and then turning individual servings onto lettuce leaves and calling them salads was never a good idea.

As for the small, uniform pieces of ice made in the Quickube trays, there were innovative uses for them, too. You’d think that after all those years of chipping ice, simply having plain cubes of ice for a scotch on the rocks would have been enough. But no. Refrigerator manufacturers suggested using ice cubes as “nests for cocktails, grapefruit, melons, or oysters.”  Foods like celery, olives, and radishes could be served atop ice cubes, whole or crushed. Ice cubes wrapped in a “fine cloth” could be used to massage the face.

Although clean, clear ice had traditionally been prized, the booklets proposed adding color to the new ice cubes with “pure food coloring.”  Or freezing maraschino cherries or lemon slices in them. Or making ice cubes with lemon juice, grape juice, or lemonade.
 
Why not get a little creative with ice cubes? Thanks to our automatic ice makers, you may have to go out and buy trays to make these. But if you want to give your drinks a little something extra, they are fun.

 DECORATED ICE CUBES

Mint leaves, watercress, and candied fruit make very delightful decorating material for ice cubes. Simply put them on the ice cubes and add just enough water to freeze into place. Decorated and garnished cubes should be frozen slowly, by leaving the Cold Control on one of the “warmer” positions. Fast freezing causes rapid expansion which destroys the desired attractiveness. – Your Frigidaire Recipes, 1938.

Economic Recovery Cake

 

Given the current economy, I’m trying to save wherever I can, and I need an occasional treat more than ever. Since this must be pretty much the way people felt during the Great Depression,  I turned to one of the few cookbooks from the era that I inherited from my mother.  Called All About Home Baking, it was published by General Foods in 1933.

The recipes are thrifty and practical, a big help then and now. It’s less expensive to make cakes or cookies than to buy them, and some of these hardly take more time. Even more important, they taste better. You can tell by the stained pages and scribbled margin notes that my family’s copy of the book has been well used.

Published during the heyday of home economics, the book is rigid in its rules and regulations. “Be orderly,” it directs. “Use good tools.” “Measure accurately.” But despite the nanny tone, the book is well loved. These days, it’s considered a collectible, so if you see a copy, grab it.

Not surprisingly, All About Home Baking is well organized. A chart at the beginning of the book lists basic recipes, descriptions, and variations. Throughout, techniques are clearly explained and pictured so that, after you’ve made one of the basic recipes a couple of times, it’s easy to make the many variations or come up with your own. For example,  The “Calumet One-egg Cake” (Calumet is the General Foods brand of baking powder)  is described as the simplest version of a butter cake. Its variations include raisin cupcakes, Boston cream pie, nut loaf cake, harvest cake, and golden spice cake.

The Busy Day Cake, described as  “Butter cake made by the jiffy-quick method,” can be turned into a Creole tier cake, an Aladdin chocolate cake, and a quick spice cake.  After those and other basics come the more advanced cakes – angel food, sponge, and jelly roll – along with their own variations. There’s a section on quick breads and pastries. Again, basic recipes lead to more complex ones. By the end of the book, you’re making “Vanity Fair Coconut Custard Pie,” “Snow-Whirl Chocolate Roll,” and “Cheese Roulettes.”

Actually this is the same way French pastry chefs learn. They perfect the technique for, say, a genoise, then vary the flavorings, fillings, and presentations until they have a repertoire of wonderful desserts based on the original. But the ingredients in All About Baking are nowhere near as expensive as those a French chef might use. The one-egg cakes uses, no surprise, just one egg and only four tablespoons of butter. The “Snow-Whirl Chocolate Roll” uses plain old “Baker’s Breakfast Cocoa,” not single-estate, 60% cocoa fat chocolate.  You’ll find all the ingredients in your local grocery store or even your own kitchen cabinets.

I made the basic one-egg cake and it turned out to be light and flavorful, good simply with a little powdered sugar sifted over it, and even better with chocolate frosting. 

Overall, the recipes are simple and inexpensive. They were perfect for a time when people had to be careful about expenses, were worried about the future, and needed a lift at the end of the day. In other words, they’re perfect for today.

 

CALUMET ONE-EGG CAKE

Two cups sifted Swans Down Cake Flour
Two teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder
One-quarter teaspoon salt
Four tablespoons butter or other shortening
One cup sugar
One egg, unbeaten
Three-quarters cup milk
One teaspoon vanilla

Sift flour once, measure, add baking powder and salt, and sift together three times. Cream butter thoroughly, add sugar gradually, creaming together until blended and light. Add egg and beat very thoroughly. Add flour, alternately with milk, a small amount at a time. Beat after each addition until smooth. Add vanilla. Bake in a greased pan, 8x8x2 inches, in moderate oven (350 degrees F.) 50 minutes. –All About Home Baking, General Foods, 1933

Maple Magic

 

 

I’ve written two books and several articles on ice cream. As you can imagine, I’ve tasted more ice creams, ices, and other frozen desserts than most. This maple parfait is one of the best I’ve ever had. And you don’t even need an ice cream freezer to make it.

The recipe comes from the book Good Things to Eat, published in 1911, and 
written by a former slave named Rufus Estes.

Born in 1857, the youngest of nine children, Estes grew up in Tennessee on the plantation of D. J. Estes, from whom he got his surname. After the Civil War, when he was just 16, Rufus Estes went to work at a Nashville restaurant. From there, he worked on Pullman railway cars and catered to the great and powerful, from President Grover Cleveland to famed pianist Ignace Paderewski. Later he worked as a private chef and traveled the world, eventually settling down as a chef at U. S.  Steel and writing his book.

He wrote that good eating was one of the pleasures of life, and said he hoped that when people made his dishes they would “with kindly feelings think from whence some of the good things emanated.” If they did, Estes went on, “the author will feel amply compensated.”

His book had recipes for many good things, from soups to soufflés, from roasts to ragouts. He sautéed thin slices of apples and onions in bacon fat and served them with pork. He baked pancake-like cakes, shaped them to resemble calla lilies, and filled them with whipped cream. His recipe for candied violets began, “Gather the required quantity of perfect sweet violets, white or blue. If possible, pick in the early morning while the dew is still on them.”

Estes knew his audience. A recipe for glazed sweet potatoes concluded with the statement –  “This way of preparing sweet potatoes pleases the Southern taste, which demands sugar added to the naturally sweet vegetable.” He introduced a raspberry ice cream sauce by writing: “If you think that a good ice cream is yet not quite fine enough, pour a raspberry sauce over each portion as served.”

Estes had more than a dozen recipes for ice creams, sherbets, and frozen parfaits, many of which are unusual. He made a black currant ice cream, molded it, and turned it out onto a platter to be garnished with crystallized cherries and angelica leaves. He suggested that his cranberry sherbet be served at Thanksgiving dinner, after the roast turkey. He made a lush “Glace des Gourmets,” vanilla ice cream enhanced with caramelized almonds, rum, and macaroons. It was served garnished with macaroons in brandy.

My favorite, though, is his simple, elegant maple parfait. When you make it, rather than packing it in ice and salt as the original recipe suggests, pour into a mold, which can be as simple as a bowl, cover it, and put in the freezer until ready to serve. Whenever I make it, I think of Rufus Eastes with extremely “kindly feelings.”

MAPLE PARFAIT

Beat four eggs slightly in a double boiler, pour in one cup of hot maple sirup, stirring all the time. Cook until thick, cool, and add one pint of thick cream beaten stiff. Pour into a mold and pack in equal parts of ice and salt. Let stand three hours. – Good Things to Eat, Rufus Estes, 1911.

Welcome

I'm Jeri  Quinzio, a freelance food history writer. On my blog, I tell the stories behind recipes of the past, from Maine's potato candy to a 19th-century cocktail that was -- shockingly -- sipped through a straw.

My new book, Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making,will be out in May, 2009 from the University of California Press. In it, I cover ice cream from its beginnings to its recent past and  include recipes for everything from Royal Ice Cream to Clam Frappé. For a preview, go to www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10659.php

Here are some reactions from early readers:

"A chilling page-turner. Jeri Quinzio scoops out a detailed and entertaining picture of my favorite dessert, from its wine-slush origins in 16th-century Italy through contemporary flavor and marketing innovations. I couldn't put it down."—Bruce Weinstein, author of The Ultimate Ice Cream Book

"Jeri Quinzio's wonderful Of Sugar and Snow is that rare pleasure—a work of scholarship and a joy to read."—Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, author of Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789

"This book is a real treat, as fun as running an ice cream store in July!"—Gus Rancatore, owner of Toscanini's Ice Cream

I've also written a recipe book called Ice Cream: The Ultimate Cold Comfort (Brick Tower Press) with original recipes for those who want to make their own ice cream and enjoy doing it.

However, I do write about things other than ice cream from time to time, as you'll see.

Hope you enjoy the blog.