Apple pie

Sometimes you get old recipes right the first time: you decipher the flowery language, you make the right substitutions, you determine the correct proportions. And sometimes, well, you don't.

This is a story of when I got it wrong.

We begin in apple season. I've been buying apples nonstop at the farmers' market every Saturday, and sometimes my friend asks me to pick up her farm share for the week and I wind up with a dozen more apples besides. A few weeks ago, I found myself with more apples than I knew what to do with. So I decided to make a pie. Easy, right?

I turn to my newest cookbook, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by Mrs. Hannah Glasse, originally published in 1747 and updated in 1805. Hot off the presses! Verbatim, here is what she tells me about how to make apple pie:

"Make a good puff paste crust, lay some round the sides of the dish, pare and quarter apples, and take out the cores, lay a row of apples [t]hick, throw in half the sugar you design for your pie, mince a little lemon peel fine, throw over, and squeeze a little lemon over them, then a few cloves, here and there one, then the rest of your apples, and the rest of your sugar. You must sweeten to your palate, and squeeze a little more lemon. Boil the peeling of the apples and the cores in some fair water, with a blade of mace, till it is very good; strain it, and boil the syrup with a little sugar, till there is but very little and good, pour it into your pie, put on your upper-crust and bake it. You may put in a little quince or marmalade, if you please."

This raises several--okay, many--questions. First, I need to find that puff paste recipe. Second, how many apples? What kind? I suppose I can wing the seasonings, but really, how much sugar should I design for my pie? (And why on earth is this recipe so poetic?)

The recipe for puff paste is no help:

"Take a quarter of a peck of flour, rub in a pound of butter very fine, make it up in a light paste with cold water, just stiff enough to work it up; then roll it out about as thick as a crown-piece, put a layer of butter all over, sprinkle on a little flour, double it up and roll it out again; double it, and roll it out seven or eight times; then it is fit for all sorts of pies and tarts that require a puff-paste."

Upon doing a bit of research, I discover that a quarter of a peck of flour is 2 dry quarts of flour, or 8 cups. This tells me several things: First, this will make WAY more puff paste than I possibly need for one pie. Second, this is probably because most women make a lot of pies and tarts at once (on baking day, for example), unlike our silly modern methods of making one pie at a time when we want it. Third, I need to know how thick a crown-piece is.

Happily, I have some help in the form of Fresh from the Past, a collection of modernized recipes from 18th-century London. The book contains recipes very similar to Mrs. Glasse's puff paste and apple pie, so I set to a makeshift sort of preparation, combining and substituting where I see fit. For example, I design 1/4 cup and 2/3 cup sugar for my pie (divided for that layered effect) as recommended by the modern book. The most troubling part is where I make a syrup of the apple peels, water, and sugar. Most likely this is meant to extract some of the pectin to help the pie gel, but my syrup winds up more watery than pectin-y. Nevertheless, I pour it over the apples, cover the whole thing with a top crust, and bake. Thanks to the mace and cloves, the pie smells heavenly.

And it tastes heavenly, too. The problem? The watery syrup turns the whole dish into pie soup. It never gels, perhaps too because I used a mixture of sweet and tart apples rather than sticking entirely to tart Granny Smiths.

Josh makes a lot of fun of the pie, and I vow to redeem myself later with a new pie. (It's semi-successful.) And I settle down to enjoy the tasty pie soup served over Greek yogurt, which I highly recommend should this happen to you.

Himmel torte

We just returned from a week in Maine with Josh's family. A gorgeous lake house near the town of Casco served as our home base, and we spent the week swimming, kayaking, reading, and playing games. The men-folk cooked almost every meal on the grill, while the women-folk engaged in some serious salad-making and baking. I even hauled out The "Settlement" Cook Book to make a belated birthday cake. (Yes, I packed it. No, you shouldn't be surprised.)

That week is still on my mind, for the sense of utter relaxation it gave me and for the cooler weather we left behind. And also for the cake I baked. You see, it was kind of a disaster, and I'm still trying to figure out what went wrong.

This was one of those recipes that was devilishly hard to interpret, thanks to its sheer lack of specificity. With the frosting, for example, the only instructions were: "One pint thick sour cream, vanilla, two tablespoons cornstarch and sugar mixed. Boil." How much vanilla? Do you combine one tablespoon each of cornstarch and sugar, or two each? There were no reassuring comments from the cookbook writer, either, telling me not to worry when my cake batter was barely spreadable. As a modern cook, it's frustrating to encounter old recipes that assume you know everything.

So I made some of it up, crowd-sourced interpretations for some of the stranger instructions, and hoped for the best. The resulting cake (ambitiously titled "Himmel torte," or "heaven torte") was flaky and crumbly, but the jam helped hold some of it together. Once frosted, you could hardly tell this cake was a disaster. And once served, it was pretty darn tasty.

I might redo this cake at some point in the future, but for now I'll leave you with the recipe I cobbled together. Try it if you want--it actually turned out okay.


Himmel Torte
(adapted from The "Settlement" Cook Book)

for the cake:
1 1/2 cups unsalted butter (3 sticks), softened
4 tbsp sugar
2 eggs + 2 egg yolks
4 cups flour
grated rind of 1 orange

for the frosting:
about 2 tbsp cinnamon sugar
about 3/4 cup raspberry jam
1 pint sour cream
1 tsp vanilla
1 tbsp flour or cornstarch
2 tbsp sugar
2 egg whites

to make the cake:
Preheat the oven to 350 F. Grease two round 8 x 8 cake pans and set aside.

Cream the butter and sugar together in a large bowl until light and fluffy. Add the eggs and yolks, one at a time, stirring well after each addition. Add the orange rind and flour, mixing gently until just blended. (Use your hands if you have to, and I won't tell.) Spread in the prepared pans and bake at 350 F until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, about 20-30 minutes. Cool on a wire rack.

to make the frosting:
In a medium pan over a medium flame, heat the sour cream, vanilla, flour, and sugar until bubbling. Mix in the egg whites until well-blended and remove from heat. Let cool and move to the refrigerator to set, about 1 hour.

Once the cakes have cooled, turn one layer out onto a large plate. Sprinkle the top with the cinnamon sugar and spread evenly with the raspberry jam. Turn the second layer out on top of the jam. Spread the cooled sour cream frosting on top and sides and serve.

Dining at Downton: How to serve plum pudding

We had a relatively quiet Christmas here in Ohio, seeing family and telling funny stories and going for long, snowy walks and eating good food. As per tradition, we served plum pudding for dessert on Christmas night, along with a lot of other treats (frosted cookies, red velvet cake, petit fours...). We don't mess around with dessert.

As I mentioned a few days ago, the serving of plum pudding is half the fun. Once you've steamed the pudding so it's nice and hot (2 hours at 350 degrees, back in the mold and the double boiler you set up to cook it the first time), you turn the pudding out into a heat-resistant dish. Heat up a little brandy on the stove, pour it evenly over the pudding, and hold a lit match close to the pudding. The fumes from the brandy should pick the flame right up and set the whole pudding alight. In a darkened room with all the family sitting around a candle-lit table, there's nothing quite like it: blue flames dancing around the dish, creating a magical feeling.

Unfortunately, our evening did not go exactly according to plan.

The brandy we ended up using was just too old, so the flames died out almost immediately. Here is the only picture we could get of bringing the pudding to the table--if you look closely, you might see the blue flames as they dwindled to nothing.

That doesn't mean the pudding wasn't delicious, though! The days it spent ripening in the cold did it good, and the pudding was light and fruity with a citrusy zing. It had a tender, spongy crumb that contrasted well with dabs of rich hard sauce.

If you celebrated the holidays this December, I hope you enjoyed equally delicious food and fun company. (I also hope that your projects went a little more according to plan than mine!)

Previously:

How to make plum pudding

How to steam plum pudding

To make ice cream

It's been a busy summer, one full of transitions: family milestones, a move ten minutes down the road, exotic travel, a new school. This week I've been focusing on that last one, a new school, as we get ready for classes to start next week. There's a new commute to learn, a new curriculum to design, new/old books to dig out of storage in the school's makeshift building. I'm excited, but as you well know, I also have a hard time dealing with transitions. Especially when these transitions come with challenges.

Luckily the big challenges seem to be reserved to the new home so far (like major water pipes bursting at 7 at night because the city of Providence is doing construction work on our street). Normally this would be a minor annoyance. But when the past three months have felt like one massive bundle of changes, it turns into a big frustration. Like, crying-worthy (don't worry, I didn't cry over the loss of water pressure....but I thought about it).

Even cooking, my old standby, has been hit with the new house challenge bug. A few days ago I decided to try out an ice cream maker given to us by Josh's grandmother. I'd recently gotten a copy of Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home and was dying to try out at least half of the recipes straight away. What better time to try out the ice cream maker?

Jeni's t-shirt, Jeni's cookbook, Jeni's ice cream

Hah. Well. A better time may have been once things settled down and I didn't feel like crying at the drop of a hat. As it turns out, ice cream making is a little trickier than the manual makes it sound.

First, some background: Jeni Britton Bauer founded Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams in Columbus, OH, after years of experimenting with homemade ice cream. Her business has grown to 9 shops in Ohio and 2 in Tennessee, and just last summer I discovered that one of those shops happened to be in my hometown. With flavors like Salty Caramel, Queen City Cayenne (spicy chocolate), and Lemon and Blueberries, it was like a revelation. I went basically every day I was home that summer.

And now there's a cookbook! I ambitiously decided to make her Sweet Corn and Black Raspberry ice cream instead of continuing to unpack in the new apartment (YOU tell me which one sounds like more fun). And I quickly discovered that when you haven't used an ice cream maker with a frozen canister before, that canister has to be frozen for a full 24 hours before you use it. Otherwise your beautiful, creamy mixture scented with corn will refuse to freeze. It will instead be slightly thicker than when you started, and you'll have to stick it in the back of the freezer to force it to harden, and it will turn icy after a few days.

Again, I thought about crying.

However, the ice cream was delicious. And this setback mostly made me want to try again (with a different flavor, of course). And because I'm me, it also sent me on a hunt to discover how the Victorians made ice cream.

No one is surprised by this turn of events.

According to The "Settlement" Cook Book, making ice cream was rather more of an endeavor in the days before freezers and electricity. While references to ice cream go back to the days of ancient China and Persia, it wasn't until the late19th century that regular Americans were introduced to ice cream sodas. Ice cream sodas and sundaes continued to be rare treats until refrigeration became much more common in the early 20th century. So while there's a whole chapter on ice cream and frozen desserts in The "Settlement" Cook Book, these recipes would probably be reserved for special occasions.

1843 vintage

And with good reason. First you had to make your own freezing mixture (Kander recommends three parts ice to one part rock salt), then place a can with the cream mixture inside the bucket that held the freezing mixture (so the cold surrounded the ice cream). After adjusting the amount of ice (it's a very careful procedure), you turned the crank steadily, letting the mixture rest periodically, until it was frozen. After that you had to make a different freezing mixture (four parts ice to one part rock salt), replace the old with the new, and let the whole thing sit for a few hours until ready to serve. Oh, and the ice cream maker should be covered "with carpet or newspaper." (For insulation?)

The whole thing sounded even riper for disaster than my own electric maker. Imagine churning ice cream by hand for half an hour! And chipping ice to pack the ice cream in! And not having a freezer!

After I read that, I felt both better about my predicament (it's not so hard to make ice cream nowadays, I can always try again) and worse (it's not so hard to make ice cream nowadays, so why couldn't I do it?). But my cooking spirit remains indomitable. And I will conquer the ice cream maker before school starts.

Cheese biscuits

Yesterday Josh and I had a simple night in. Cooking dinner, watching the latest New Girl episode, talking about our days. As part of our goal to become more mindful, healthful eaters, Josh made a delicious vegetarian chili, chock-full of sauteed veggies, onions, and spicy peppers, ladled over brown rice.

Before he started cooking, I thought about what else we could add to the meal to round it out (my brain is full of terms like this ever since I started obsessively reading Bon Appetit and Cooking Light). I'd been eyeing a cheese biscuit recipe in the Williamsburg cookbook, and that seemed like the perfect accompaniment.

Hah.

All went well as I mixed the dough. It's a simple recipe, flour and salt and butter and cheese. I love cheese, friends. It makes everything better. Someday I'll have to give you my rapturous ode to cheese (when I'm feeling more positive about it). But then it came time to cut the biscuits for baking.

Why yes, that is one half of a tea ball infuser sitting right next to the cut biscuits. What's that, you say? They're the same size? I must have cut the biscuits with a tea infuser?

Sigh. It's true.

See, back in ye olde colonial Williamsburg, "biscuits" meant "crackers." Or "biscuits," too; it was one of those catch-all terms. This lovely recipe, which put me in mind of fluffy, substantial cheese biscuits in the style of Joy the Baker, actually tells you to make them cracker-sized. So I did. With my tea infuser.

These "biscuits" cook up nice and crispy, with a subtle cheesy bite. But they're just the same size as quarters or buttons, and when you prick them with a fork before baking, they kind of start to resemble banana chips. Or buttons.

(I called them "cheese buttons" in the privacy of my kitchen.)

So, Josh and I turned to another recipe I messed up in the past: vegan quinoa cornbread. Last time we tried it we were also making soup with barley, and I may or may not have mistaken the barley for quinoa. And made barley cornbread. This time I was determined to get it right! If we couldn't have fluffy cheese biscuits (though they did make a wonderful pre-dinner snack), we would have fluffy vegan cornbread.

And let me tell you, friends, we did.


Cheese Buttons
(adapted from The Williamsburg Art of Cookery)

1 cup flour
1/3 cup butter, cubed
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup grated cheese (I used cheddar and leftover asiago)
1-2 tbsp cold water, as needed

Preheat the oven to 350 F.

Whisk the flour and salt together until combined. With your fingers, rub the cubed butter into the flour mixture until it resembles cornmeal. Add the cheese, and mix it into a stiff dough. If needed, add one tbsp of water at a time until the dough comes together.

On a flat, floured surface, roll out the dough to a 1/2-inch thickness, and cut with very small pastry/cookie cutter (your tea infuser, if you have one, makes a very nice-sized cracker). Arrange the crackers on an ungreased cookie sheet and prick with the end of a fork. If you like, prick crosswise so the crackers resemble buttons. Bake for 12-15 minutes, or until the bottoms of the crackers are just beginning to turn golden brown.

the care of rooms

My apartment is located in a grand old house, the kind with high ceilings and ornate trim and bay windows. It's beautiful. I love coming home every afternoon, because I feel warm and cozy within the elegant architecture. There's something comforting about living in a beautiful place.

However, there's also something dusty about living in an old place. Cleaning--something I hate to do at the best of times--really has to be done once a week to keep the apartment looking spiffy. Most of the time I'm too busy to care about sweeping and dusting all the hidden corners. (Of course, when friends come to visit, that's another story.)

Recently, though, I was forced to face my least favorite chore. Last Friday I discovered that some moths had been having a grand old time with a few sweaters stored over the summer. Tragedy! It seems as though cedar chips actually stop working when they're a few years old, and I should have replaced them or sanded them or sprayed them with cedar oil to keep the moths away. But it was too late now, and I had to deal with the consequences.

I won't go into the details of my cleaning frenzy, except to say that my dry cleaners have never been so happy to see me, and that it is awfully difficult to find cleaning solutions that don't destroy the environment. Luckily the damage wasn't too severe, and my apartment is now (hopefully) moth-free.

Because I'm a nerd, though, my thoughts turned to history. When I interned at a living history museum, we watched clips from 1900 House, a fascinating documentary that follows an ordinary British family that lives in a period-accurate Victorian brownstone for three months. One of the first things the wife and mother discovers is that cleaning the house is never done and takes forever. So she hires a maid, who happily takes to the bizarre cleaning methods of the turn of the century. I remembered some entertaining clips in which the maid has to take apart all the beds in order to rid them of bedbugs.

Over the course of my long evening of domestic endeavor, I started wondering how a Victorian woman would rid her house of moths. Would she scald all her clothes in hot water and dry them in the sun? Would she use some form of poisonous naphthalene?* Would she turn to some other cancer-causing cleaning solution?

my 21st-century arsenal

I turned to that pillar of domestic wisdom, Catharine E. Beecher. Beecher was an advocate of women's education and domestic tranquility. In her book The American Woman's Home, which she co-wrote with her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine described methods of designing and caring for a home that were far more modern than the 1869 publication date would suggest. Her recommendations for ridding clothes of moths were surprisingly innocuous:

"Airing clothes does not destroy moths, but laying them in a hot sun does. If articles be tightly sewed up in linen when laid away, and fine tobacco put about them, it is a sure protection."

Granted, Beecher was far ahead of her time. Just for kicks, I looked up another domestic advice book, Maria Parloa's Miss Parloa's Young Housekeeper. Parloa takes an entirely different tack:

"Soiled carpets and garments may be cleaned by sponging with naphtha. Buffalo bugs and moths can be destroyed with it. For stuffed furniture use naphtha freely. Put the article on the piazza and pour the fluid into it, being sure that every part is saturated. After a day or two, repeat the process, and I think you will find that both worms and eggs are destroyed."

Pour the fluid into it? Saturate the garment? What was she trying to do, suffocate her readers with the fumes? She does note that one should always keep the room well-aerated and not light any fires for a few days, however.

Lesson learned? Unless you're a follower of Catharine E. Beecher's wisdom, you'd probably hasten your family to an early death by trying to rid the house of moths. Man, do I love the modern age.

* the primary ingredient of old mothballs. Or, the ingredient that gives them that pungent smell.

new year, new disaster (or, steak and kidney pie)

I'll confess: I kind of have a thing for Britain.

Pubs, pints, high tea, scones, royals, BBC period dramas (anyone watching Downton Abbey this Sunday?), Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, the British Invasion, Tea & Sympathy...the list goes on. My sister and I have a whole separate mode of communication involving quotations from our favorite pieces of British media.

this lovely pub is actually in San Francisco, but, you know

So I naturally thought that something as British as, say, steak and kidney pie would of course be delicious.

Then I met the beef kidney.

It smelled...shall we say...like what the streets of New York smell like in the morning. Where homeless men have peed.

I think that's when I should have chucked the whole plan out the window.

But I was feeling stubborn, and slightly foolhardy, so I went ahead and made the pie. Essentially, you wash the kidney in cold salted water, then chop it up and dredge the pieces in flour. Then do the same for a piece of steak (much nicer), and saute the meat with some onions until brown. Simmer in water for an hour, thicken the sauce with flour, and pour into a pie dish. Cover with a pie crust and bake until the crust is brown and the sauce bubbly. And your apartment smells like a slightly nicer version of what I mentioned above.

However, the pie did look appetizing. So I cut myself a small slice and tentatively tried a bite.

I couldn't even swallow it.

This was an unmitigated disaster, my friends. Being British does not automatically make a pie delicious. I did look up a steak and kidney pie recipe in the Joy of Cooking afterwards. There I learned that beef kidneys should be soaked in cold salted water for at least 2 hours before cooking to wash away most of the "strong flavor," which may have been where my recipe went awry. Maybe the 18th-century Virginians didn't care so much about "strong flavor"?

It's not a promising way to start off the new year, but it is an interesting one. And let us say no more about that.