If you’re visiting from MetaFilter… hi. I shifted over here because I got hit with a lot of traffic, really fast — more than my previous self-hosted blog could affordably handle at this time. I’m still in the process of moving a few things around, so pardon the dust.

You may remember me from Mental Hygiene — in which case, welcome back

I’ve transitioned to a different blog site and slightly different format, concentrating solely on the retro recipes. They were the most fun part of my old blog, certainly for me and also I think for my readers. And I have truly missed cooking these wacky old things and sharing the usually-hilarious results!

Last month, Recovered Recipes posted a recovered recipe that really caught my interest — Mock Salmon Roast.

Mock Salmon Roast
1 1/2 cups grated carrot
1 cup cooked rice
1/2 cup peanut butter
1 cup warm milk
1 egg
2 T oil
1 medium onion
Sage and salt to taste

Mix peanut butter with warm milk until blended. Add remaining ingredients and mix until combined. Bake at 350F for 45-60 minutes.

I was very curious to see whether peanut butter, rice, sage, and carrots would manage to come even close to tasting like salmon. I’m also curious how somebody came up with this recipe. If I’m thinking of salmon loaf, then thinking of potential replacement ingredients, “peanut butter and carrots” wouldn’t be the first that come to mind. But then I realized there wasn’t anything coming to mind. “Salmon loaf” means “salmon”, and it’s hard to shift the omnivore train of thought once it’s on the tracks.

By far the weirdest step was mixing peanut butter into warm milk. It doesn’t really smoothly blend, it just turns into tiny peanut butter globules floating in milk — mixed enough for the recipe, but odd to look at.

I almost forgot to add the rice, which would have really ruined the texture.

It definitely needs to be baked in a loaf pan (or even a small casserole dish), because prior to baking, it’s very liquid.

I admit, it’s not much to look at. It’s all squishy and flat. (I wasn’t concentrating on presentation; a bed of lettuce would drastically improve the visual aesthetic.)

But the taste is pretty good!

Vegetarian and vegan meals can be absolutely delicious. When you try to make vegetarian versions of specific meat dishes, however, things can get dicey — there are very few dishes which authentically emulate the flavor and texture of what they’re pretending to be. (Most people have tried a veggie burger once in their life, and said, “Well, well, that doesn’t taste like beef at all.”) The trick is to stop pretending that you’re eating a non-vegetarian dish. Our local health food store makes some very good meals, such as Vegan Chicken Kiev — if you take a bite of Vegan Chicken Kiev and expect it to taste exactly like a chicken cutlet filled with butter, you’ll be disappointed. Once you start thinking of it as a totally different dish (faux-chicken wrapped around some sort of rice-and-herb stuffing, then breaded), it’s delicious.

And that was the case with the Mock Salmon Loaf. It’s a healthy meal, with vegetables and protein and carbohydrates all mixed together in one convenient package. It tastes interesting (in a good way) and has a nice texture. It even looks like a pinky-orange meatloaf, just as a “real” salmon loaf does. But it doesn’t taste exactly like salmon, unless you haven’t had salmon in a very long time.

I’m going on a picnic, and I’m bringing

Apple pie with a dutch crumb topping (Miranda @ A Duck in Her Pond)

Buttermilk spice cake (Mary @ One Perfect Bite)

Chocolate cherry pie

Dilly Potato Salad (Gloria @ Cookbook Cuisine)

Election Day Cake

For the letter “E” recipe, the only things I could thing of were eggs or eggplant; I looked through my archives and found three “E” dishes which could qualify. Egg nog was eliminated because we never took a picture of it (shame, because Grandpa’s Egg Nog is quite the party drink), and egg drop soup, while delicious, savory, and inexpensive for large groups, just doesn’t feel very picnic-like. Election Day Cake, however, is a recipe that’s designed for large groups.

Election Day was originally a huge party in the US, a day when people didn’t work, but instead hung out in the town square and had picnics and various patriotic activities. Like any good picnic, it meant cooking lots of food for lots of people. So big loaf-like cakes, yeast-based fruitcakes basically, were baked for the occasion and became known as Election Day Cake. (Credit where credit’s due, I originally got the recipe and idea to make it from Historiann.) I learned quite a lot of things, including “baking powder is a wonderful invention” (yeast is a hassle!), and “your puny kitchen mixer is no match for Election Day Cake” (but I did get a new mixer out of the deal).

Whenever I try a 100+ year old recipe, I am amazed by the cooking skills of our forebears, who managed to make a huge batch of cakes with no power tools and wood-fired stoves and all sorts of inconveniences. Of course, the picnic participants will only enjoy the delightful cake and its bits of candied citron, and won’t have to bake the thing themselves. It really is delicious, and if you’re ever going to an actual Election Day party, I highly recommend making it — it’s both tasty and an excellent conversation piece.

I’m going on a picnic, and I’m bringing

Apple pie with a dutch crumb topping (Miranda @ A Duck in Her Pond)

Buttermilk spice cake (Mary @ One Perfect Bite)

Chocolate cherry pie

Dilly Potato Salad (Gloria @ Cookbook Cuisine)

Election Day Cake

Fruit Cocktail Meringue Pie

For the letter “F” recipe, I had a dish in mind that I had bookmarked a while ago. (I could probably manage almost any letter of the alphabet, including Q — my “to cook” bookmark folder has something like a hundred retro recipes, with varying levels of ewww). So on Sunday, I cheerfully pulled up the bookmark for what I had labelled as “Fruit Cocktail Meringue Pie”, and realized the recipe name was actually “Christmas Meringue Pie.”Whatever. I’m BRINGING fruit cocktail meringue pie, that’s all I know.

This recipe comes from Flickr, from a vintage advertisement unsettlingly titled, “Look what you can do with fruit cocktail and dairy foods!”

Fruit Cocktail Meringue Pie: Combine 1 envelope Knox gelatine, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/4 tsp salt in top of double boiler. Stir in 3/4 cup syrup from fruit cocktail, 2 beaten egg yolks. Cook over boiling water, stirring often, 15 minutes, till slightly thickened. Remove from heat, stir in 1 cup commercial sour cream, 2 tbsps lemon juice. Cool till thickened. Fold in 1-1/2 cup drained canned fruit cocktail. Turn into baked 9-inch pie shell. Top with Marshmallow Meringue. Sprinkle with toasted coconut. Chill 2 hours or longer.

For meringue: melt 16 marshmallows with 1 tbsp lemon juice and 1 tbsp syrup from fruit cocktail, over low heat, stirring often. Cool. Beat 2 egg whites with 1/4 tsp salt till stiff. Gradually beat in 1/4 cup sugar. Fold in marshmallow mixture.

I didn’t expect this to be complicated by just glancing over the recipe, but it turns out to require double-boiling a custard, chilling for a couple hours, melting marshmallows, and beating egg whites. Rather like Election Day Cake, there’s a lot of effort required — the question was whether it would pay off in the end.

A zabaglione is a very fussy egg-yolk custard, requiring stirring in a bowl over steam (or using a double boiler, if your kitchen is so endowed) until your arm falls off or the mixture thickens. I was rather surprised to see it showing up in a fruit cocktail pie recipe, particularly including gelatin and then being added to sour cream; it seems with thickeners like that, you wouldn’t really need to cook your egg yolk until it solidified. I suppose they did that just to put the separated eggs to full use or something.

Note my ultra-fancy, incredibly upscale double boiler. (I don’t recommend trying this if you don’t have a Pyrex bowl, though.)

Putting a tasty zabaglione in with sour cream just feels wrong somehow, but for the moment I’ll trust the recipe…

Melting marshmallows is fun. We also have a recipe for grasshopper pie which requires marshmallow melting, and it’s great to see them slowly shrinking and turning to thick goo.

After assembly, chilling, and a sprinkling of coconut, it looks really impressive.

It’s a little on the sweet side, and definitely very firm (which means it will stand up well to being in summer heat for our picnic). Overall, it’s tasty and fun. Would I want to make it again… maybe for a special occasion. (The ice cream Jell-o pie is a lot less work, albeit also a lot meltier.)

Reading through a gelatin cookbook (something published by either Jell-O or Knox, usually) is an exercise in controlling nausea. These are the people that brought you such brilliant innovations as Frankfurters in Goo, or Pie Plate Salad — not known for good taste.

I was feeling rather over-berried today — strawberries have been on sale in supermarkets, the local health food store, and the farmers market, plus Daughter went on a field trip to a local strawberry patch and brought a load home. Since I had peach-flavored Jell-O on hand, I made a peach version of this instead.

• dissolve 1 package (3 oz.) any flavor of Jell-O Gelatin in 1-3/4 cups of boiling water
• stir in 1 pint of vanilla ice cream until melted
• chill until very thick
• fold in 1 cup of drained, sweetened, sliced, fresh strawberries or 1 package (10 oz.) drained, thawed Birds Eye Strawberry Halves
• pour into 8″ crumb crust
• chill until firm
• garnish with more berries

Oddly, the recipe inventors (and/or marketing department) seems to have had little confidence in this recipe being able to stand on its own. It’s combined with an offer to send you a quarter if you send in 6 Jell-O boxes. Unfortunately, the 25 cent rebate offer expired in 1963. (Just missed it!)

Just like Pie Plate Salad, this is a “dump and mix” recipe. Simple to do.

I actually deceived myself into thinking this was even easier that it is, and dumped the jellied ice cream into the pie crust without letting it chill first. This didn’t exactly cause problems with the filling solidifying, but it did mean that I wasn’t able to fit all the mixture into the pie crust. (The excess went into an extra bowl and allowed to set there; the kids liked getting a few dollops of that for a treat over the next few days.)

This is a quick, easy, and tasty pie. I’ll certainly keep it in mind when I want to take something sweet and cold to a potluck or picnic. (The only disconcerting part is that the peach-flavored Jell-O is much more pink than orange, but it’s not distracting enough to ruin the dish — and you can always just use a different flavor of fruit.)

Advertisement originally posted on Flickr by TheDamnMushroom

Credit where credit’s due — the image is originally from jbcurio’s Flickr set. There’s lots of crazy old stuff in there.

Venturing back into the realms of probably-horrible, this week I decided to try Pie Plate Salad. It’s a pretty typical-looking example of vegetables put into gelatin, and also seems to strongly support the theory that gelatin was just a way to flaunt the fact that you could afford a refrigerator. Why else would you want mixed vegetables and lemon Jell-O in the same dish?

When shopping for ingredients, I was taken aback to actually find Veg-All on the shelves. I’d never heard of it before seeing the ad, proving I’m not an expert in canned mixed vegetable brand names. (Nobody’s perfect.)

Making this is only slightly harder than making plain lemon Jell-O… so, really really (not) hard. Mix water with Jell-O and pour in vegetables… and wait.

If you get something that looks like the Jolly Green Giant sneezed on your plate, you’ve done it right.

The most surprising thing about this recipe was not that it was disgusting — I fully expected that. But it wasn’t the Jell-O that was bad. It tasted… well, edible, if you concentrated on the carrots and corn. Unfortunately, the Veg-All brand of mixed vegetables doesn’t stop with just carrots and corn; it also has peas, green beans, lima beans, potatoes, and celery, and possibly a few other vegetables that are too traumatic for me to remember. And lima beans, bad enough on their own, are incredibly revolting when paired with sweet citrus slime. Don’t even get me started on the mushy celery.

And that’s something about vintage recipe advertising that I never really understood. After making Pie Plate Salad, I will never, ever, under any circumstances, buy Veg-All mixed vegetables, even if I’m shopping for a food drive. Claiming that Pie Plate Salad is a great use of your product is a quick way to convince me you’re a liar and possibly also dangerously insane — is that really the image you want your product to have?

Instead of telling you what I’m making this week, I’ll let a picture do the work of a thousand words:

See that can there, all the way on the right?

Yes, that’s condensed tomato soup, which can only mean we’re making… tomato soup cake! This rather disconcerting idea was suggested by Jim Dunn of Retrosnark, and seemed just edible enough to qualify for my cooking. (There are some retro recipes I will never try in a million years, such as anything with tongue or canned brains; however, I’ll always bake and eat cake.)

There are a few distinct categories of retro recipes:

1. A recipe which has been passed down through generations. Usually delicious.
2. A traditional recipe, adapted to (a) deal with a lack of ingredients (e.g. rationing), or (b) use a particular brand (e.g. CAMBELL’S condensed soup)
3. A recipe which was made up ONLY to show how versatile your product is. Usually not delicious.

I’m pretty sure the Tomato Cake falls in the third category, or maybe, if I was feeling very generous, category 2b.

Tomato Soup Cake
2 cups sifted cake flour or 1.75 cups sifted all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
3 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 cup shortening
1 can (10.5 ounces) condensed tomato soup
2 eggs

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour two 8-inch round layer pans. Sift dry ingredients together into large bowl. Add shortening and 1/2 can soup. Beat on medium speed of electric mixer for two minutes (150 strokes per minute by hand). Add remaining soup and eggs. Beat 2 minutes more, scraping bowl frequently. Pour into pans. Bake 30 to 35 minutes. Let stand in pans 10 minutes; remove and cool on rack. Frost with cream cheese frosting or use your favorite white frosting.

While I was assembling the ingredients, I found myself wondering why there wasn’t any salt listed in the recipe, and whether I should add a pinch. Then I remembered I’m using canned soup.

Eeeeeeyeah. 30% of your RDA of salt is probably plenty.

The tomato soup makes the mixing bowl look like a crime scene involving a wood chipper; once it is blended in, it turns the batter (and eventual cake) into a odd shade of orange.

Now, I wanted to be open-minded about this cake. Both Buzz and I are big fans of carrot cake, which is another odd combination of cake and vegetable. And tomatoes are a pretty sweet vegetable, so mixing them into a spice cake instead of carrot bits isn’t necessarily bad… in principle. But not even a nice cream cheese icing could really save this.

Unfortunately, condensed tomato soup tastes a lot more like ketchup than like tomatoes. (So you can also call this a ketchup cake if you’d like.) In particular, it has quite a lot of salt; this can be appealing in soup or many other dishes. But a salty cake just isn’t quite right. We split one piece of cake, which usually involves grabbing the plate back and forth and fighting over the fork; for tomato cake, it was a picture of politeness.

“No, you have a bite now.”
“No, I insist, you have a taste.”
“Here, dear, I’ve left the last bite for you.”
“Oh no, I couldn’t possibly, you go ahead.”

And so on. (Luckily, the kids both thought it was delicious — which means we won’t have to feed it to the dog.)

I owe all of you an apology; I have been sitting on this post for a little over a week, waiting for just one or two photos to be added while I messed around with thermodynamics homework instead. (Did you know you can construct your own tables of thermodynamics saturation properties even if you only know a few experimentally determined points on the curve? It’s true! Only a few nasty partial differential equations required…)

Alright, sorry — less geek, more cake!

I’m actually not the first blogger to try to make this. Looking for a retro cake recipe for Buzz’s birthday, I stumbled across a pretty cool blog: Culinary Types. T.W. Barritt has cooked a variety of vintage cake recipes, including Election Cake, Watermelon Cake (extremely cute), and Gumdrop Cake. The latter recipe originally came from The Old Foodie‘s 2008 cake week.

The Gumdrop Cake seems to have burst onto the culinary scene in America and Canada in the 1940’s, and was promoted as a novel alternative to traditional Christmas Cake. This version is from the Lilly Wallace New American Cook Book of 1946.

Gumdrop Cake.
½ cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs, beaten
2 ¼ cups flour
¼ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla
¾ cup milk
¾ cup raisins
1 pound gumdrops, black ones removed, chopped finely.

Cream butter, while adding sugar and beaten eggs. Sift flour, salt, and baking powder together over chopped candy and raisins. Dredge well. Add vanilla to milk and add flour mixture and milk, to first mixture alternately. Bake in a large greased loaf tin in a slow oven (275 to 300 degrees F) [140-150 degrees C] 1 ½ hours.

Cutting the gumdrops into little pieces is boring. I sat watching TV and using kitchen shears to cut each one into quarters, and it took almost an hour to get through a bag of gumdrops; the scissors kept getting glued up with sugar and gelatin. The result was good (teeny weeny gumdrop bits are better in the cake), but I’m not sure it was worth the time investment.

And after the gumdrop chopping, they got mixed in with flour… and I realized after the fact it would have been better to have been dropping the bits into the flour as I went, rather than mixing the big sticky mountain in all at once. Oh well, I’d already wasted that much time on cutting up gumdrops, why not waste more time dredging? (Again, the results were good… just took a while to get there.)

And then after baking for an hour and a half, I was feeling pretty impatient — and so I tried to flip the cake out onto the cooling rack without actually checking that it was cooked through.

It wasn’t.

Luckily, cake of this consistency has a pretty dense crumb, and it can handle being scraped off the counter, dumped back in the pan, and baked a while longer… it just ended up being a little lumpy on top.

This does indeed look very much like a fruitcake, with candy rather than candied fruit (unfortunately removing the option of pretending fruitcake is nutritious). And from the description, that definitely seems to be the intent. The kids absolutely love it, and Buzz likes it a lot. Personally, I find it a little TOO sweet and chewy; I think it’s the squishy gumdrop consistency that’s really not doing it for me. Plus all the preparatory work made it a very involved project, a little too much effort for the result. Next time, I’ll skip the gumdrops and just stick with candied fruit bits — something everyone in the family likes, including me.

For Buzz’s birthday cake this year, he asked for a retro recipe… and of course, I was happy to oblige. A search of various sources turned up a number of options, the most interesting of which was “Lady Goldenglow Second Mystery Cake” from my Old-Time Brand-Name Cookbook. It’s been mentioned on Kitchen Retro, which thankfully had an authentic picture.

Of course, the name Lady Goldenglow gives you no clue as to what’s in the cake. Taking a look at the ingredients, though…

1 cup unsalted butter
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
3 cups flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon pure orange extract
1-1/2 ounces baking chocolate, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 325 and butter 2 layer-cake pans.

Cream the butter until soft and light. Gradually add the sugar, beating well and stopping to scrape down the sides of the bowl at least once. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating after each addition.

Mix the flour, baking powder, and salt in a separate bowl, and add to the batter in thirds, alternating with the milk. Remove half the batter to a separate bowl. Add the orange extract to the batter remaining in the first bowl, and mix thoroughly. Add the melted chocolate and vanilla extract to the second bowl and mix well. Divide the batter between the cake pans by tablespoons: first one of the orange mixture, then one of the chocolate, and so on.

Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool on a rack.

Turns out it’s “orange and chocolate marbled cake”. Mmmmm.

Intriguingly, Lady Goldenglow has changed since the 30′s, morphing from a orange-chocolate marbled cake with orange and/or chocolate icing, to chocolate cake and icing with orange flavoring added. British chef Nigella Lawson has a recipe on her website for “Lady Goldenglow Chocolate Cake,” the most modern version I could find. (I also found a Norwegian version, but I don’t speak Norwegian so I can’t say much more about it.)

The original recipe makes a fairly standard cake, aside from the batter marbling. Separating the batter in half and adding different flavors to each isn’t that hard, and creates a very neat effect.

The frosting suggestions from Old-Time Brand-Name Cookbook differ slightly from the Kitchen Retro version; rather than orange frosting on top and chocolate-orange on the sides, it gives an orange buttercream frosting recipe and an orange whipped cream frosting recipe. We put the whipped cream between the layers, frosted the outside with buttercream, and then decorated the edges with plain chocolate (left over from some cupcakes last week).

And wow. These are, well, the icing on the cake. Both frostings are delightfully citrus-flavored, and chocolate accents on top are a wonderful contrast. (Chocolate sprinkles or, even fancier, chocolate shavings would be just as decadent.)

This is by far the best cake I have ever made, retro or not. I admit that I took more care than I usually might with a retro recipe, but the deliciousness is due to the recipe itself. If you’re looking for a cake a step above “yellow”, I definitely recommend a Lady Goldenglow. (Plus the name is a great conversation starter, as everyone tries to figure out why exactly it’s called that.)

Ah, early March — the days are warming up, you can finally ditch your heavy winter coat, and you’re looking eagerly at that grill on your back patio. Time for a tasty cookout! Throw some frankfurters on the grill, gang, it’s time to try…

That’s right, deviled hot dogs! via Do What Now? You can tell it’s delicious and edgy because it’s deviled!

OK, there’s nothing particularly devilish about the hot dogs themselves; it’s all in the homemade barbecue sauce that French’s is suggesting will be just perfect if you use as many French’s products as possible.

Deviled Hot Dogs with Frenchwise Barbecue Sauce

Slash tops of frankfurters, brown in skillet. Baste and serve with Frenchwise Sauce.

1 medium onion minced (or 1 tblsp. French’s Onion Flakes)
1 small green pepper minced (or 1 tblsp. French’s Pepper Flakes)
3/4 cup ketchup
2 tblsp. butter or margarine
2 tblsp. brown sugar
2 tblsp. French’s Prepared Mustard
1 tablespoon French’s Worcestershire Sauce
1 tsp. salt

Combine ingredients, simmer 15 min. Serves 8.

The ingredients are quite colorful, but a little scary — I really don’t expect this to turn out well.

Since I was using real vegetables instead of French’s flakes, I decided to fry them in the butter first before stirring in the other ingredients (which probably wouldn’t need much simmering to blend their flavors). Once the peppers and onions were soft I added the sugar, salt, and worshersher sauce… and wow, that is a delicious sauce all on its own, with enough sugar to make it into a neat glaze.

I regretted having to add the mustard, although it tasted pretty decent once it was stirred in.

And I really regretted adding the ketchup, which washed out all but the gentlest hint of the other flavors. This might look like mustard-based barbecue sauce from the way the advertisement is laid out, but it’s definitely a ketchup-based sauce.

I was also surprised to see that it looks EXACTLY like the blood-red bowl of goo in the advertisement.

Sadly, I thought I had taken a picture of the hot dogs slathered with sauce after cooking, but I was wrong and didn’t realize it until they were all gone. Here’s a picture of them lightly basted while in the skillet, instead…

This is surprisingly good. Don’t misunderstand, it isn’t fine dining; but it’s by far the best ketchup I’ve ever tasted. It’s sweeter and more interesting than plain ketchup, but not so spicy that kids (or average 1950′s American adult) would refuse to eat it. I definitely recommend fresh diced vegetables rather than flakes (can you even get green pepper flakes nowadays?), which adds both texture and nutritional value; cutting the ketchup down to 1/2 cup (or farther) wouldn’t hurt.

But it’s just extra-fancy ketchup. It isn’t barbecue sauce, and it sure isn’t “deviled”, which historically means a particularly hot and/or spicy dish. I’m not a huge fan of spicy food, but I feel sorry for anyone who finds the level of spice in “Frenchwise Sauce” to be devilishly high.