The continuing saga of the crust of pie

Because of the Thanksgiving holiday, our schedule was thrown off a little and instead of making the banana cream pie and accompanying crust yesterday, my idea was to delay banana cream until next week and instead make the pie crust for the pumpkin pie tonight and then bake the pie in the morning. (I bought a pie crust at the grocery store as a backup in case mine was a complete failure) Prior to this year I had always made the pumpkin pie recipe with a store bought crust. When I pulled the recipe out this evening, I realized that what it actually says is "Fill pie plate that has been lined with pastry". Lined with pastry sounds like the crust is not baked first. So I pulled out all the pie crust recipes in the box, and found that the crusts for the cream pies always give instructions to bake the crust first, but the strawberry pie crust is described as a pastry dough and is not cooked until the filling is in. There is no specific crust for the pumpkin pie, but due to her use of the word 'pastry' in both the pumpkin and strawberry pie recipes, that is the one I'm going to go with. Which means that I won't be making it till tomorrow morning.

Still being a little intimidated by the whole process, especially the 'cutting in' of the lard, I grabbed the Better Homes cookbook and took a look at a book on a hook... No, wait, that's the Nook! (Sorry, I couldn't resist. And for those of you who are now thinking I have completely lost my mind, that was a quote from Dr. Seuss' One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish.) Anyway, Better Homes says to use a pastry blender (which I don't have) to cut the lard into the flour until the pieces are the size of small peas. I'm sure I can manage that with a knife. Then I read their "pastry know how" section, which says, oh so helpfully, "Measure accurately. Too much flour makes pastry tough, too much shortening makes pastry greasy and too much water makes pastry tough and soggy." Wonderful! What a confidence builder when I am using recipes that almost always call for "1 to 1 1/2 cups flour" or "1/2 to 1 cup lard". Measure accurately? Easy for them to say.

As a fail safe measure, I have decided that since the pumpkin pie recipe actually makes enough filling for two pies, I will make one in the store bought crust, and one with my attempt at crust. That way, if I fail and wind up with tough or greasy or soggy crust, we'll still have dessert.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Pie Crust Paranoia!

This week, probably Tuesday, we will be making pie, and the recipes for pie crust are intimidating. First of all, she has different crusts for different types of pie. And I don't mean graham cracker crusts as opposed to 'regular' pie crusts. These are all variations on a theme. Some are made with lard, others with shortening. The lard is kneaded in, the shortening cut in. Ice water for lard, but just water for shortening. More salt or less. There are no instructions about how long to cook the crust. She basically says "put it in a hot oven till it's done." AAAAAGH! I feel like I need to decipher 60 year old, "been cookin' since the day I was born" cooking code, and no one gave me the decoder ring.

My grandmother made great pie crusts from scratch and I know she used lard. They were light and flaky and the best tasting things on the planet. I have visions of mine coming out as something hard enough to break teeth. Are nightmares about cooking common? It's just dessert, after all. Right?

Mixed Results

When we left off on Wednesday, I was debating what to do about the whole lard issue. Then my friend Anna sent me a message reminding me that there is indeed a place in New York where real, non-hydrogenated, must be refrigerated lard can be found. Schaller & Weber, of course! This is a German grocery located on the Upper East Side. Being a West-sider now, I usually only go to the East Side when museums are involved, but a trip to Schaller & Weber is worth it, even without the lard. Word to the wise, however, do not go there if you are hungry! The mountains of German chocolate scream at you from the shelves and it takes incredible willpower not to scoop it all into a basket and run for the check out. I managed to escape with two pounds of lard and one bar of Milka. Then it was back to the West Side on the cross town bus at rush hour, a trip into Zabar's to buy cake pans, and finally a stop into Fairway to buy cocoa for the cake. As I was going into Fairway I gave my Mom a call, because when reading the Devil's Food Cake recipe earlier in the day, I noticed that what I first thought was 3/4 cups of cocoa was actually written 3-4 cups... I thumbed through the other recipes, and my anonymous author was always very consistent, writing 3/4 with a slash, not a dash. And there are other of her recipes that call for 2-3 cups of sugar and it's clear that she means 2 to 3 cups. Now, I'm no great cook, as I said before, but 3 to 4 cups of cocoa? That seemed like a lot for one cake. Especially considering that it only called for 1 1/2 cups of sugar. I've made brownies from scratch with cocoa and it takes a lot of sugar to sweeten that stuff up! Which is why I called my mom, and she nearly fell on the floor laughing to think of putting 3 to 4 cups of cocoa in one cake, and so with most of the clientele in Fairway wondering what was so funny (my Mom's laughter is contagious, so I was wiping tears from my eyes once I found the aisle with the cocoa) the decision was made to go with 3/4 cup and hope for the best.

This morning everything was ready and it was time to bake. During a last minute read-through, I realized the recipe also called for sour milk, so a quick phone chain from my Mom to my Aunt Delores confirmed that adding a bit of vinegar to whole milk would do the trick. Mixing the ingredients was pretty straightforward - even my son Ben got into it, as you see in the photo, mostly because this recipe involved chocolate and the promise of licking the fork and/or bowl once the cake was in the oven. Two of the rather vague instructions, including "bake in layers" and "bake in a hot oven" had been interpreted before we began, and so we baked the cake in two pans and set the oven at 375, and all went well. The cake smelled good, looked good and took exactly 21 minutes to bake. And then we made the frosting...

Because we had two egg whites left over from the cake, we searched through our box and found a recipe for "Star Icing", which required two egg whites and seemed to fit the bill nicely. The ingredients were simple and it should have taken only about 15 minutes to make, but after 40 minutes the icing was still as thin as soup, and spreading it on the cake was out of the question. So I added cornstarch. LOTS of cornstarch. Then I re-heated it. Stirred it for a few more minutes. Got completely exasperated and put it in the freezer, and after 5 minutes of deep chill, it had thickened enough to keep some of it on top of the cake rather than all pooling at the sides (although from the picture you can see that there was still a substantial amount of pooling). I have no idea what went wrong. The recipe called for the ingredients to be stirred over boiling water (like in a double boiler), and as far as I can tell, I did everything right. So in the hopes that someone else can figure this out, the Star Icing recipe is written as follows:

Star Icing
Put 1 1/2 cups sugar, 1/2 cup water, 1/8 tsp. salt, 2 unbeaten egg whites to cook over boiling water. Beat constantly 7 minutes while icing is cooking. Remove from hot water. Add 1/2 teaspoon vanilla. Beat until thick enough to spread. Frost cake.

I'd love to know if anyone can do this and have it thicken enough to spread. If you can, please comment and let me know the trick! Mine, without the cornstarch, was definitely not a spread but a pour.

Despite the troubles with the icing, Maya and I liked the taste of it better than the cake. I'm not much of a cake person, and this one was a bit dry for my taste, and Maya's as well. Ben loved it, however, (it was chocolate, after all) and it got a good review this afternoon from our friends who we forced to try it. If we could get the icing right, I'd make it again and use sour cream instead of sour milk...

But before that, there is a banana cream pie in our future!

The Search for Lard

Today we went looking for lard. Our next recipe calls for it, and rather than wimp out and use butter, we decided to try and find the real thing. Not Crisco or the other shortenings that are nothing more than tubs of hydrogenated oil and that can sit on the shelf for years, literally, without going bad. Something about that really makes me want to avoid putting it in my body. They say that the only thing that would survive a nuclear holocaust are the cockroaches; my guess would be that they'd not only survive, they'd wind up getting fat on all the Crisco shortening sitting around, still as 'fresh' as the day it was made.

So we wanted lard. Lard, in case you don't know, is made from rendered pork fat. It got something of a bad rap starting in the 1960's due to its' having a decent amount of saturated fat, though not as much as butter. So of course the 'experts' replaced it with chemically altered vegetable shortening - hydrogenated oil - which as it turns out is much worse for you than a little lard ever thought of being. (Ok, so the 40% saturated fat isn't great, but it also has 45% monounsaturated, or 'good' fat. This according to food writer and lard afficionado Corby Krummer)

Still, try going into most supermarkets and asking if they sell lard. In the first supermarket the manager looked at us as if we'd just asked for fried cow dung. At the second, the first guy I asked, who worked behind the meat counter, just let his jaw drop open and then looked very concerned, as though I was planning to use it to harm the two young children smiling and standing innocently next to me. (my kids, not someone else's). Finally a young Hispanic man smiled and gave me an enthusiastic 'Yes'! while pointing across the aisle at the packaged meats. And there it was: LARD

At first I could hardly believe my luck. We scored on the second try! But then I picked up the package and read "Lard 40% - Hydrogenated Lard 60% Needs no refrigeration". Well, crap. I debated for a minute and then bought it anyway. I figured some lard was better than none, and anyway, we might not find anything else. Back home, I went on line (thank god for Google! What did we do before the internet when we wanted to research something?), and looked for lard. There was a lot of information about it, and a great article by Pete Wells written for Food & Wine about how he wound up making his own lard (uh-oh) after reading a Times Op-Ed piece by the above-mentioned Corby Krummer in which Krummer extolled its' use in baking and frying above all other forms of shortening. Pete Wells couldn't find real lard anywhere, and apparently he is not alone. There are a ton of websites with instructions on how to render your own lard, and none on where to buy it already rendered and non-hydrogenated. So this leaves me in a conundrum. Despite my deciding to purchase it, I REALLY don't want to use hydrogenated lard, but rendering my own lard in my tiny New York City kitchen (not to mention procuring the fat to do it) is out of the question.

Any suggestions out there? We bake on Friday, so the decision will need to be made. I'll keep you posted!

Maca Yeast

I'm taking a step back with this post, because after we finished the 'Delicious Rolls', I started wondering about Maca Yeast. Specifically I wondered if it still exists and is there any difference between it and the Fleischmann's fast rising yeast we used in the recipe? I went on line to search. As far as I can tell, Maca yeast is no longer made (although there is someone with the last name Maca who is a yeast and fermentation scientist with MillerCoors - could he be descended from a family of yeast-makers?). I did find an amazing pdf file of the Inwood Herald dated January 25, 1945 which featured an ad for Maca Yeast. The photo you see here was at the top of the ad, and then followed three or four paragraphs of copy, extolling the features of this yeast that did not need to be refrigerated, was in pellet form and was quick-rising! So it was pretty much like the Fleischmann's yeast we buy today. The best thing about the Maca ad, however, was that there was a postscript. I tried to photograph it, but the type was too small. What it said was "Since Maca is serving the Armed Forces, your grocer might not always have it. If he doesn't, ask for Yeast Foam, your faithful standby..." Of course! It was 1945 and everyone and everything was focused on the war effort. For some reason reading that gave me chills, and I felt as though I had stumbled on a bit of treasure.

As far as my project goes, this helps me date my box of recipes. The oldest reference I could find for Maca Yeast, which was made by the Northwestern Yeast Company in Chicago, IL, was in 1937. I could find no record of when it stopped being produced, or any history of the Northwestern Yeast Company. If anyone out there knows more, I'd love to hear about it. In any case, based on the information I have, I'm guessing the recipes date from the 1940's.

Oh, and I was asked why I didn't include the recipe for rolls in the last post. I've chosen not to put the recipes on line just yet, but if anyone out there is interested, I'm happy to send it to you via email.

Delicious Rolls

The rolls are done and they are, indeed, delicious! We were able to follow the recipe more or less exactly. She wrote to use Maca yeast, which I've never heard of and our store doesn't carry, so we used Fleischmann's instead, and it worked just fine. Yeast is yeast, as far as I know. The mixing of the dough, kneading, rising, all went perfectly, and then we got to the part where you have to do something with the dough before you cook it. She says "shape into rolls" and I had a moment of panic. How do you shape rolls? So I turned to the Better Homes cookbook for pointers on how to shape rolls, and Maya chose the Parker House option. The dough was very elastic and rolling it out was a challenge, as it had the tendency to spring back and be way too thick, but we got it done. Our rolls are far from symmetrical, but they taste great. The photo shows Maya holding the first batch out of the oven. She was a great helper.

Our next recipe is going to be Devil's Food Cake. But there is one obstacle we'll need to overcome first: lard. The recipe calls for lard, so we go in search of it tomorrow...

The Idea

First and foremost, everyone should no that I am no cook. I do not love to pick out ingredients or find it cathartic to spend my time in the kitchen, creating wonderful dishes for my family to enjoy. To me cooking has always been something of a necessary evil, and I've never found joy spending lots of time preparing food that will be eaten in minutes, leaving me only with dishes and maybe leftovers to store.

So why, you may ask, am I writing a cooking blog? The answer to that is that this blog is not really so much about cooking, although that will be the activity written about, but about history; the history of some old handwritten recipes. My history with these recipes began when I was in college in the late 80's. I needed a recipe box in which to keep notecards for papers I was writing for my classes. (Pre-laptop days, people!) Over my winter break I was working as a waittress in Bloomington Indiana, and attended a flea market held on the town square. As luck would have it I found the perfect recipe box. It was wooden and had character. I picked it up and opened it, expecting it to be empty. Instead I saw that it was already filled with index cards, all of which contained recipes written in longhand. I shuffled through them in amazement. These were someone's grandmother's recipes, was what I thought. How could anyone part with them? I bought the box but never used it for the purpose I had originally intended. 20 years later, it has survived many phases of my life, and is about to enter a new one. Before now, I confess, I had only made one of the recipes in the box; the pumpkin pie recipe. Let me tell you it is the best pumpkin pie I've ever eaten, and I make it each year on Thanksgiving. But since, as I said, I am no cook, the other recipes have languished away in the box all these years, unused.

I recently told the story of my discovery of the box to a friend and she said, "Hey, that would make a great book! You could have photos of the recipe cards on one side and the recipe typed up with your comments on the other." And I thought, "What a great idea!" (thank you Kimberly!) My next thought was that if I did indeed intend to produce a book with these recipes, it might be a good thing to have made them all at least once. I mentioned the idea of this project to my daughter Maya, and she was on board immediately. And so we begin. In some ways, making the dishes detailed on the cards is like treasure hunting. Some of her (that long-lost grandmother's) instructions are kind of vague - at least to someone who is not a cook. Several of the cards give the instruction to 'bake in a moderate oven', with no specific temperature or time given. And then there are the ingredients. Lard factors in some of the recipes, and shortening in many others. (I called my Mom to see if there was any difference, and what someone in her Mom's day would have used for shortening, if not lard. She said unsalted butter). Our goal is to use the ingredients exactly as they are given if possible. We'll see how that goes!

Tomorrow we make her Dinner Rolls. I feel pretty confident about this one, as the one thing I do enjoy making, and make pretty well, is bread. Until tomorrow....