Hamentaschen are cookies made for Purim — or really anytime you want a buttery cookie with tasty filling. Since the holiday commemorates Esther’s defeat of Haman, the cookies are (according to some traditions) shaped like Haman’s hat. Therefore, feel free to chant, “Haha, we ate your hat!” while eating. (THAT is NOT a generally accepted tradition, it’s just something my daughter started last year.) It’s likely that the pastry existed (as montashn) before the hat idea, and then one day somebody said, “Hey, these cookies look just like a hat,” and things snowballed from there.

Hamentaschen can be filled with pretty much anything sweet; apricot, raspberry, or prune jam are some of the most common. But I like to make mine with poppy seed filling, because it’s one of the few recipes that call for more than a light sprinkling.

Poppy Seed Filling
1 cup (250 ml) poppy seed
1 cup (250 ml) milk
1 oz. (30 g) butter
2 tbsp. (30 ml) honey
1 tart apple, grated

Bring poppy seed and milk to boil, add butter and honey, and boil until thick. Cool, then add grated apple.
– via jewishappleseed.org, which also has a recipe for the cookie dough

You can also make poppy seed filling for strudel, or probably any cake or cookie that would usually have a fruit jam filling. It’s probably not for everyone, but it’s worth trying.

The ingredients are pretty simple, aside from ONE WHOLE CUP of poppy seeds. (You WILL test positive for opiates if you eat this, FYI…)

One reason I like this picture is because it shows a strong contrast between how I prep ingredients (get something out, measure it, put main container away), and how Buzz preps ingredients (get everything out, measure it… take a picture). It is one of the rare areas of life in which he is more disorganized than I am.

Pouring honey onto melting butter is just pretty.

And after everything boils and congeals for a while, it begins to look kinda weird. Actually, it begins to look like various volcanic formations in central Oregon, such as the land around Lava Butte.

We had a very, very nice vacation around Bend one summer. It’s fun to trek around the rocky, lumpy, bizarre landscape, and then picture the same trip if you were a pioneer in a covered wagon and the National Park Service hadn’t gotten around to putting in sidewalks yet and you didn’t have an air-conditioned hotel to return to — it’s quite likely you would have thought you were literally in hell. (Lava Butte photograph from US Geological Survey.)

Anyway, we were talking about cookies.

To make the triangle shape, roll out the cookie dough and cut it into circles. Any diameter is fine, although smaller cookies will hold less filling. Then, fold up the three sides so there is a sort of cup around the filling, and pinch/squish the corners closed. Make sure you can see the filling through the middle.

These really are delicious cookies, whether you make them with poppy seed goo or other sweet filling of choice.

In early March, it is SUPPOSED to be something like 60 degrees; instead, we had a snow day yesterday. (It’s worth noting that a “snow day” in South Carolina simply indicates that there was a prediction for a chance of snow greater than 50%, and so the entire region panicked and closed the schools. You should see them when it actually snows. I shouldn’t laugh, but come on, folks — must you act like flurries are not a sign of the End Times?) In that spirit, I decided to go with a warm winter drink this week. Via the charming recipes of RecipeCurio.com, we bring you…

(Depending on what region of the country you’re from, this could be Hot Soda, Hot Pop, or Hot Coke.)

WINTER WARMER
HOT DR PEPPER

Clever people who enjoy something different–-devilishly different and delicious–-will welcome this exciting Winter Warmer . . . Hot Dr Pepper! Easy to prepare-–simply heat Dr Pepper in a saucepan until it steams and pour into a glass or cup over a slice of lemon. Perfect for the family or when friends drop in-–and take along a thermos of Hot Dr Pepper when enjoying outdoor activities. Hot Dr Pepper–-the distinctive Winter Warmer!

Seriously, doesn’t this read like a crazy marketing stunt? Hmmm, our sales drop off in winter months when everyone’s too cold to want a nice iced soft drink… let’s encourage them to HEAT it instead! I’ve had warm soda, and it wasn’t a taste which made me want it to be even warmer.

But I’m willing to give it a fair shot. Let’s see, how did that recipe go again… ah yes:

(1) boil Dr Pepper, and

(2) drink it.

To give other soft drinks equal opportunity to shine, I tried the same recipe with Cheerwine. It’s a local beverage (produced by the Carolina Beverage Corporation, making it just as Southern as Coca Cola) that Buzz calls a Dr Pepper knock-off, but is actually more cherry and less cola. (The company calls the flavor “unbridled deliciousness”, which is not all that descriptive.)

And the verdict? There’s a reason this idea never caught on. The kindest description I can manage is “drinkable”; I finished it, but I won’t ever make it again. Both ended up tasting like bad (albeit sweet) tea. It was quite fruity; the cola flavors of the Dr Pepper were basically gone, although it did still have a more caramel flavor than the ultra-cherry Cheerwine. If you’ve ever had Celestial Seasoning’s Red Zinger (or any raspberry-based herbal tea), then you’ve got the general idea. The lemon wedge was vital for making the drink palatable. I must admit though, it was much better than drinking warm soda — but not nearly as good as an icy cold soda. The fizziness just isn’t there after it’s been boiled!

Stick with a nice cup of cocoa for winter drinking.

Pre-children, we never used a lot of milk in our house; Buzz has always been mildly lactose intolerant, so it was only used for the occasional recipe. Now, though, the two kids get plenty of milk every day (yes, I’ve fallen for the Dairy Council’s message that MILK BUILDS BONES). The local health-and-organic grocery store has milk in actual glass bottles from a organic, no-hormone Virginia dairy. You can return the bottles for a deposit (and should, since it’s a $2 deposit), and it’s just a seriously awesome way to buy milk. The bottles are just cool.

Unfortunately, the milk occasionally has a tendency to go off before the expiration date, far more than any other brand of milk I’ve ever bought. The store is always quite nice about it and exchanges for a fresh bottle with no questions asked, and it’s (kinda) on the way home so it isn’t extremely inconvenient. Tonight, we opened a bottle that allegedly had 3 days to go, and noticed it was sour… and Buzz decided, “Hey, people used to cook with this stuff, that would make it a Retro Recipe ingredient, right?”

Well… he’s right, but I’m not feeding it to the kids until he eats it with no ill effects.

See those chunks on the glass? That’s how you know it’s, uh, “good” for this recipe, originally from The Pioneer Cook Book.

Mrs. Ethington’s Old-Fashioned Muffins
2 cups uncooked oatmeal
1 1/2 cups sour milk
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup melted shortening
1 well-beaten egg
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup flour

Pour sour milk over oatmeal; allow to stand a few hours or overnight. Combine sugar, shortening and egg; add to oatmeal mixture. Sift together remaining dry ingredients; blend. Bake in greased or paper-lined muffin tins at 400 degrees for 20 minutes. Makes 18 muffins.

After soaking up sour milk overnight, the oats had become a very solid mass. It broke up without too much trouble when stirred into the other ingredients, but it was interesting getting it out of the bowl.

The muffins themselves were good — a little on the bland side, though, so use a whole 1 teaspoon of salt instead of the 1/2 the recipe calls for. They are certainly hearty, and probably good for you with all that oatmeal goodness.

I’ll give it 24 hours before I feel really comfortable stating that the sour milk wasn’t a bad idea, though. Buttermilk would give the same tang (which wasn’t really obvious in the end product), and unspoiled milk should taste just as good — why use the spoiled stuff when there are alternatives? (Unless you happen to write a weird blog chronicling your occasional attempts to poison your family, of course, in which case go nuts.)

Goulash, like bread pudding, is a recipe that we have tried many variations with and enjoy having regularly. At its best, it requires something like half a jar of paprika with plenty of meat and onions. One of our favorites came from the Ships of the Great Lakes Cookbook (via NPR’s Kitchen Sisters), although it does require shrinking — its original intent was to feed a shipload of hungry sailors, meaning you’ll have goulash for weeks if you make the full amount. This version is from a Monarch Cook Book, via the Old-Time Brand-Name Cookbook.

I love this cookbook cover, by the way. The product (iron range) prominently displayed, complete with a man jauntily waving his cap while standing on the oven door to demonstrate its durability. (Click the pic to see him larger, in his full mustachioed glory.)

Hungarian Gulasch
1-1/2 pounds onions, chopped
2 tbsp butter
1 tbsp paprika [or many more depending on your preference]
1-1/2 pounds stew beef
1 cup canned tomatoes, diced or chunked
1 tsp vinegar [or more depending on your preference]
5 potatoes, diced
water
salt & pepper to taste

It’s really easy — first saute your onions in butter, then dump everything in a pot and let it simmer for ages. (The recipe claims 45 minutes is enough, but we usually give it a few hours.)

If you have a CrockPot, things are even simpler. Ours only recently broke (just stopped heating things one day), so we used the retro recipe as an excuse to buy a new CrockPot.

It seems I’m using the blog as an excuse for a lot of new kitchen appliance purchases. (Quick, somebody think of a recipe that will require a new fridge.)

See? I wasn’t kidding. Dump everything in the CrockPot and wait! It turns into a sweet, zesty beef stew, great for a chilly night when you want hearty and comforting food without much work.

We ended up using more paprika and vinegar than even the Old-Time Brand-Name Cookbook suggested, and its measurements were a huge step up from the pinches of paprika in the original Monarch Cook Book; those 19th century Americans really couldn’t handle any spice.

Marie Antoinette is sadly best known for wondering why the starving masses didn’t eat cake (or brioche) if they were out of bread. In that spirit, I’ve attempted to make a cake recipe which originated from an era of privation, although not famine — World War II and the days of sugar rationing.

(At this point, I’m trying to picture Eleanor Roosevelt, the best approximation of Marie Antoinette at the time, saying something ignorant about people putting up with rationing. It’s not a very plausible picture, is it?)

Sugar rationing was never nearly as bad in the US as it was in Europe; however, there were limits on what you could get, and the housewife who wanted sweets for her family needed to be creative. To help them adapt, numerous companies encouraged them that they could make cakes anyway, without one or more of the critical ingredients (butter, eggs, sugar). One long pamphlet was put out by Rumford Baking Powder (brought to the internet by RecipeCurio.com), with a very 1940′s locked sugar can on its cover and many recipes inside.

A lot of its ingredients actually strike me as cheating — the sugar is replaced with corn syrup or (in the recipe I tried) honey, so they’re not really “sugar-free” in the modern sense. But the modern definition really depends on a culture with lots of diabetics who want to eat candy and cookies without eating sugar, not on a nation which must restrict its sugar usage so Hershey’s can make chocolate bars for the troops overseas.

Rumford Honey Cake
2 cups sifted cake flour
3 teaspoons Rumford Baking Powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup shortening [I used butter]
2 egg yolks
1 cup honey
1/2 cup milk
2 egg whites
1 teaspoon vanilla

Sift together flour, Rumford Baking Powder and salt. Cream shortening until light. Beat egg yolks until lemon colored, gradually adding 1/2 cup of the honey while beating. Add the egg-honey mixture slowly to the creamed shortening, creaming while adding. Add sifted dry ingredients alternately with milk, mixing well after each addition. Beat egg whites until stiff; gradually beat in remaining 1/2 cup of honey until mixture stands in stiff peaks. Fold into cake batter until well-blended. Bake in 2 greased 9-inch layer cake pans in a moderate oven (375° F.) for 30 minutes. Cool and frost as desired.

They include the note, Any nutrition expert will tell you about honey’s qualifications as a pure natural sweetening–-and you’ll find out that it helps a cake stay fresh longer! Whatever. I’ve never had much trouble with cake sitting around until it gets stale. The one time we did end up with stale cake, I still got Buzz to eat it.

The step of folding in beaten egg whites means this wouldn’t be my first choice for making a cake from scratch. I prefer dump-n-mix recipes, that aren’t likely to be affected by a little too much stirring. But ohhhhh my, egg whites and honey are delicious together. I bet you could make little meringue cookies out of that.

The hardest part of this recipe was, sadly, due to my mixer. I expected the Totally Awesome Kitchen-Aid Mixer to never let me down, but the fact that I needed three bowls of various mixed things threw me for a loop — it only comes with one. I had to mix, transfer, clean, mix, transfer, clean, mix, transfer, clean… it was silly

These pictures are just to show you that, once again, I’ve made a baked good that strongly resembles Clayface. (But it didn’t destroy my mixer this time. HA!) The color and consistency are just uncanny.

One interesting thing is to contrast the two baked cake layers. The pan of the upper cake was greased with butter. The pan of the lower cake was greased with PAM. Notice the chunks missing from the PAM cake? Good old butter is the way to go… or maybe I just needed more PAM, who knows.

Cocoa whipped cream icing is fast to make, and a decent contrast to honey cake. Sprinkles are on top just because that’s what happens when you cook with a preschooler in the room. (We had bright pink macaroni and cheese for dinner one night, for example. These things happen.)

The flavor possibly would have been more like white-sugar cake if I’d used store-bought honey rather than some from the Farmer’s Market, which tends to be darker. But the only strongly honey bites were the first few; after that, it was not really noticeable. This would taste great with some nuts mixed in, or even turned into a fruitcake. It certainly doesn’t seem like sugar rationing would have been unbearable if the backup desserts were of this quality.

Every now and then, you’ll get a present which is incredibly well-suited to you that you didn’t even know existed previously. Such things are a rare treat; last year, I was given Old-Time Brand-Name Cookbook: Recipes, Illustrations, And Advice From The Early Kitchens Of America’s Most Trusted Food Makers. It’s a cookbook of nothing but retro recipes — and they’re all good! (Luckily, I know Buzz well enough to feel sure this wasn’t just his way of saying, “here’s a bunch of retro recipes that don’t involve jellied hot dogs, please make these.”)

My favorite part of the book was the introduction, a dozen pages describing the evolution of food, cooking, and kitchens throughout the last century. The combined forces of commercially processed food and evolving kitchen appliances (the refrigerator in particular) completely overhauled what people ate, and how meals were made. This change was also strongly correlated with the decrease of people with domestic servants (you don’t need to hire a cook to stick a TV dinner in the oven), and also an increase in options for women outside the home. And, corporate advertising began to aggressively convince the world that their products were vital to delicious, quick, and inexpensive meals for the family. There are certainly many books worth of material which could be explored, but Old-Time Brand-Name Cookbook does an excellent job of covering the topics without boring the amateur.

I also learned why gelatin dishes were so widespread, and incorporated into practically every course. We’ve all wondered what the hell could motivate someone to create Jellied Bouillon with Frankfurters — well, it was simply so they could brag about owning a refrigerator. You can’t solidify gelatin without refrigeration, and so you couldn’t serve Jellied Bouillon with Frankfurters unless you were above a certain income level. (For some of the more dubious recipes, it presumably also helped if you didn’t have any friends, because you certainly wouldn’t after you fed them THAT.) So people started jellying vegetables, meats, salads, cream, and pretty much everything in their kitchen.

All the recipes are “adapted”, often to remove brand names but in some cases to change the quantities of ingredients. The “Hungarian Gulasch (As Prepared by the Hungarian Shepherds)”, for example, calls for 1 tablespoon paprika (still fairly mild) rather than the skimpy 1/4 teaspoon of the original recipe. (The point is frequently made that early American tastebuds were not really able to handle spice at all.) Even with adjustment, you may not like a recipe; we found the Bread Pudding recipe to be somewhat lacking in pizazz, but that’s not really atypical for very basic bread pudding. Like any cookbook, you have to cook the recipes before you can really judge them.

For additional fun, the cookbook is illustrated with vintage images from recipe pamphlets throughout the ages. Occasionally this is a little odd, when a recipe for one salad is illustrated with an obviously very different salad; however, such discrepancies are rare distractions, and the vintage illustrations are mostly very entertaining. I have resolved to be on the lookout for recipe pamphlets in antique stores to get similar pictures for use on here

I would strongly recommend this for anyone interested in cooking, particularly if you have a fondness for ephemera or vintage cooking. It’s fascinating to see the evolution of America’s attitude towards and expectations from food; historical perspective with snacks included.

This is rather cheating; bread pudding, while certainly an old recipe, isn’t one that has very much fallen out of favor. But it’s my category and I will do what I like. And I like bread pudding.

I first encountered bread pudding at an upscale breakfast buffet in Cincinnati. I was only eight at the time, so my idea of “pudding” was “Jell-O, preferably chocolate” — the idea of pudding that tasted like bread wasn’t very appealing. Its appearance wasn’t inspiring, either. As an adult, I kick myself for that, because I would have adored the soft, sweet conglomeration that bread pudding truly is.

One thing Buzz observed as we cooked this was that it’s a lot like stuffing. You take dry bread crumbs (or chunks) which are otherwise inedible, mix them with spices and liquid, bake for a while; you end up with a delicious soft bread. The difference between the two dishes is that bread pudding is sweet where stuffing is savory; instead of chicken stock, you add custard.

Mix together 2 cups milk, 1/4 cup sugar, 2 eggs, 1/2 tsp vanilla, 1/4 tsp salt, and 1/2 tsp each of cinnamon and nutmeg. Cut (or tear) old bread into chunks until you have 2-3 cups worth. Challah makes this absolutely amazing, but any nice white bread will do.

Let bread chunks soak up the milk and eggs for about 10 minutes, then stir it around some more.

Bake at 350°F for 45-60 minutes, until the top is lightly browned. This is when my younger self would be underwhelmed.

Trust me — the taste is better than the unimpressive appearance! The preparation is simple, and you can create variations such as adding raisins or other fruit into the mix, because if you have fruit it cancels out all those fat and sugar calories… doesn’t it?

Feeling the pinch of the Depression? Let’s cook some more with Clara and you won’t feel so bad. I seriously love these videos.

What I found interesting about this was that I typically associate Egg Drop Soup with Chinese cooking (or, at least, Chinese restaurants). Apparently there are European versions as well, which isn’t surprising considering it is basically just soup with eggs mixed in somehow. Clara’s version, which includes Parmesan cheese, looks most like the Italian variant (stracciatella), although it’s not completely accurate.

In any case, the recipe is simple. Sauté diced potatoes and onions. Do it in a pot big enough to make soup, to save on dishes later. (Economical AND efficient!)

Add water (or broth) to cover. Boil for a while to cook the potatoes some more.

Drizzle in scrambled eggs (which will almost immediately cook), then add whole eggs to poach (which will take a few minutes to cook).

Serve over toasted bread and sprinkle with Parmesan. Ignore the fact that it looks kinda lumpy and weird, it tastes really, really good.

It’s straightforward and could easily be expanded on — add vegetable or chicken broth instead of just water, scramble the eggs with some spices (nutmeg?) before adding them, sauté some bacon with your potatoes and onions, and so on. Or, if all you can afford is a potato, onion, and egg, just do it this way Don’t forget some salt and pepper, though; with only three fairly bland ingredients, you’ll need some flavor enhancers.

I have a fair number of bookmarks of retro recipes I want to try, often from other retro-ish blogs I read. While searching through them for this week’s cooking adventure, I found this:

Sorry, readers. I’ve done one vintage meat-and-gelatin dish, and that was more than enough, even if it is the most popular post I’ve ever written. (The jellied frankfurter nightmare also called for hard-boiled eggs, though. I’d wonder if this was a trend in jellied meat salad, except that would mean I have to think about jellied meat salad, and I don’t really want to.) So enjoy the deceptively attractive picture, because this is all you’ll ever see. (Thanks, Mad Vortex.)

So instead, our first retro recipe of the new year will be Ground Beef Grand Style. (Good eating! Easy fixing!) A typical recipe-disguised-as-advertisement, it insists you use Philadelphia Cream Cheese (which is still available) and Ballard biscuit dough (which is not — well, not exactly; was bought up by Pilsbury in 1951, but the biscuits were still apparently sold under the Ballard label for some time, since this recipe is from 1963).

GROUND BEEF GRAND STYLE
1 can Ballard OvenReady Biscuits
1 1/2 pounds ground beef
1 cup chopped onion
1 package (8 oz.) Philadelphia Brand Cream Cheese
1 can (10 1/2 oz.) cream of mushroom or chicken soup
1/4 cup milk
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup catsup
1/3 cup sliced stuffed olives, if desired

Brown ground beef and onions, drain.

Combine softened cream cheese, soup, milk. Add salt, catsup, olives, ground beef. Pour into 2-quart casserole. Bake at 375°, 10 minutes.

Place Biscuits around edge of casserole; if desired, top with olive slices. Bake at 375°, 15-20 minutes until golden brown.

While fetching the camera to document this attempt, my daughter stopped to take about twenty pictures of things around the house. This is one of our cats. I think I will start an exhibition, “Random household objects and occupants, out of focus and overexposed.”

SOMEBODY brought home olives that were not stuffed, and instead were “Southwestern Olives with Herbs and Napa Valley Chardonnay”. (La-de-dah! CHARDONNAY!) The Southwestern appelation is from the jalapeños that were pickled along with the olives (and, for some weird reason, carrot slices), which gave the olives a peppery tang — they were spicier than the pickled jalapeño peppers. The Chardonnay did nothing except increase the price, but that didn’t matter because these were 50% off on closeout.

We mixed all the ingredients together with the Super Wonderful Fantabulous Mixer. Daughter poured things in. The cream cheese, milk, and mushroom soup make a very rich, creamy base for the other ingredients.

I’m not really sure why this has to be baked for 10 minutes to begin with, because it added nothing (except perhaps warmth) to the cheese-meat-olive mixute. Oh, and see that little glass bowl full of brown liquid there, next to the casserole dish? That’s the collected fat from 1.5 pounds of ground beef. Now I remember why I frequently use ground turkey (or veggie-based meat substitute)…

Except for a little running over at the edges, the casserole baked up nicely. Since we didn’t have the appropriately pimentoed olives, I am including an artist’s rendition of the dish so you know what it would have looked like. (It’s surprisingly lifelike.)

The main difference between reality (above) and advertisement (below) is that the meat-cheese mixture doesn’t appear to have been baked in the advertisement image. I guess it does look better all creamy and pale than it does baked.

But more important than artistic rendering is the flavor. (This make probably 8-10 servings, rather than the 5-6 listed in the original advertisement.) And what is the overall opinion of Ground Beef Grand Style?

Meh.

It was pretty good for the first few bites. But overall, it’s salty (do NOT add the 1 teaspoon salt), and not very flavorful. It turns out the Southwestern Olives purchase was serendipitous — at least there was SOME taste from those jalapeños. There’s too much cream cheese and not enough vegetable/meat bits. The biscuits, sitting on gooey cream cheese while cooking, were still raw on the bottom.

By the time we made it through one serving, neither Buzz nor I wanted more. Toddler Son refused to eat even a biscuit (unusually sensible of him), and showed his disapproval by throwing food on the floor. Preschooler Daughter, however, insisted it was delicious and cleaned her plate… which rather makes me wonder just what sort of crap they feed her at preschool.

Aside from bland gooey underwhelming flavor, the name is just dumb. Alternative ideas:

• Cheesy Hamburger Biscuit Pie
• Cholesterol Pie
• Ground Beef Scumpy Style
• Ground Beef Drowned In Goo
• Did The Cat Barf On My Plate Or Did You Make Ground Beef Grand Style Again

Oh well. We had fun, lots of laughs, and didn’t throw up afterwards, which is really what we hope for in these recipes. (Finding a good one is just a bonus.)

Recipe is via RecipeCurio.com, which accurately labels itself as a blog of “charming vintage recipes.”

In honor of the holiday, I am offering my clan’s recipe for egg nog. This may not be precisely the drink that was George Washington’s favorite (although he would have called it “egg flip”). However, this recipe has been in my family for sixty years at least.

6 eggs, separated
3/4 cup sugar, separated
1 pint cream
1 pint milk
3/4 cup rum
3/4 cup whiskey
nutmeg

Beat the egg whites with 1/4 cup sugar, until very stiff. Then beat together yolks, cream, milk, remaining sugar, and liquor. Fold in whites. (Rebeat the whites at the bottom of the bowl if necessary). Chill overnight, long enough for the froth to float to the top again. Serve the liquid and froth together, sprinkled with nutmeg.

When I first made this for my in-laws, they couldn’t get enough of it. It’s very popular. I offered to make it for the physics department Christmas party this year, and I was initially was given the go-ahead to do it. But later, I heard back that it probably wasn’t appropriate–not because it would have too much alcohol, but because of the raw eggs.

The alcohol is pretty significant though. Made as written, this egg not is very boozy. My grandfather liked it that way. My mother makes it a lot weaker, with just 1/2 cup of relatively low proof rum. I usually make it with the full allocation of rum and whiskey. However, this is partly a reaction to my father’s inability to simply follow the recipe. Once he decided it would be a good idea to mix the nutmeg into the liquid. It was a disaster. So as a reaction to his incessant meddling, I make the recipe exactly as my grandmother copied it down. And it’s good.