Bygone Food and Recipes

"Hindus"

2012-04-27T11:41:00.002-04:00

Me: "Look, there's a recipe for cookies called Hindus."

E.: "That's not racist or anything."

There's no use sugar coating it. Someone named these cookies "Hindus" because they contain both chocolate and molasses and are, if you will, dark-complexioned cookies.

Oh the hilarity.

The recipe comes from the Rumford Common Sense Cook Book, compiled by Lily Haxworth Wallace. The 64-page book is undated, but various folks on the web think that it was published in about 1930. Based in Rumford, Rhode Island, the Rumford Chemical Works produced the cookbook in order to promote its Rumford Baking Power.

(The Clabber Girl Corporation continues to make Rumford Baking Powder, although not in Rhode Island. Before I get a disgruntled note from the Clabber Girl and her legal team, let's make it clear that there is absolutely no reason to think that the company promotes racist cookie recipes or endorses any racist uses for baking powder today.)

If this book does in fact date to 1930, it might be that the "Hindus" are reflective of 1920s-era American attitudes towards people from India. Not only was the Indian independence movement in the news, so too was U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind, a 1923 Supreme Court decision that excluded Indians from U.S. citizenship due to reasons of race.

Historically, U.S. citizenship had a lot to do with race. The 1790 Naturalization Act limited U.S. citizenship to free, white persons. The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hildalgo not only ended the Mexican-American War, it also declared that Mexicans could be U.S. citizens. That was true even if by the early twentieth century many "Anglos" in the Southwest tried to get around the fact that Mexican-Americans were not just citizens but also legally white. The Fourteenth Amendment rendered Americans of African descent U.S. citizens. The 1870 Naturalization Act allowed African aliens to become citizens. Yet it also opened the possibility that all Asians could be excluded from U.S. citizenship. Later, in 1882, the U.S. Congress barred all but a small segment of the Chinese from entering the United States, and it renewed that restriction in 1892 and 1902. Not until 1943 were Chinese persons allowed to apply for U.S. citizenship.

If you're wondering, Native Americans did not receive full U.S. citizenship rights until 1924.

But if in 1923 blacks, whites, and Mexicans were eligible for U.S. citizenship, and the Chinese ineligible, what did that mean for Asians from places such as India? Were they barred from becoming naturalized citizens?

In 1923, Bhagat Singh Thind, a Punjabi Sikh who lived in Oregon, put that question to a test. He didn't challenge the racism underlying citizenship law. Instead, Thind claimed that he was eligibile for U.S. citizenship because he was, indeed, white. He was white, because he was from Northern India, a region settled by "Aryans." If he was "Aryan," Thind argued, he was white and, therefore, eligible for U.S. citizenship. The Supreme Court disagreed: Asian Indians were neither white nor permitted to become U.S. citizens.

Is it a coincidence that less than a decade after the Thind decision there appeared a recipe for dark-colored, decidedly non-white cookies called "Hindus"?

I'm not shocked to find that one of my great-grandmother's old cookbooks has a racist recipe. What surprises me is that the author correctly spelled Hindus. You'd think she would have gone with "Hindoos," which is far more derogatory. It's almost as though she was trying not to be racist.

Was she? We could also imagine that, while the cookies are racist because they are a play on skin color, they were inspired by the Indian independence movement of the 1920s. Gandhi, a Hindu, gained world-wide fame in the 1920s for his commitment to non-violence and his leadership in the fight to end British rule in India.

These are some very serious cookies.

But not everything in the 1920s was so sternly different from today. The Rumford Common Sense Cook Book contains other, humorous, non-racist gems. For example, it would be a terrible shame if I fail to make the Corn Flake Cookies.

Then there is the fantastic advice on school lunches. What kid wouldn't want mashed baked beans with mayonnaise or chili sauce? Of course, I used to eat chow mein sandwiches, so what do I know? I certainly was unaware that: "Boys like plain folding lunch boxes, girls prefer daintiness of equipment."

Feel free to study this page yourselves.

For the record, I assume that the Spanish Meat Loaf is racism-free. It contains pimientos, which are Spanish. That one's legit. Although, only someone lacking common sense would ask for this meatloaf in Spain.

Even if these recipes are probably not something you'd likely Google in preparation for your next meal, they might be worth trying. The "Hindus" were delicious. No, they were the best cookies I've ever made.

The batter was light and fluffy. Forget about baking, I could have served it in a tall glass and called it dessert. It was like a fine mousse. So, seeing as I'm not going to serve "Hindus" to my friends, I've decided to change the name from "Hindus" to Mousse Melts.

E. agreed with me. "That's far less racist," he said.

Less? I was going for not racist at all.

Grumpkies, Galumpkis, Gowumpkies, Gołąbki, or Something Like That

2012-04-21T09:31:00.000-04:00

What is this recipe called? My great-grandmother wrote it and she or one of her daughters tucked it within the pages of her 1908 Lowney's Cook Book. I think it is or it is supposed to be Grumpkies. Maybe Gumpkies. Something like that.

A while back, I posted this recipe to my facebook page in hopes that someone would know of it. Susan, a childhood friend who now makes beautiful cakes for a living, recognized it as galumpkis. She wrote that her sister often makes them.

At that point, I figured my great-grandmother just couldn't spell galumpkis. But after talking to my mother, I think she was trying to spell grumpkies. Maybe.

In February, I was sitting in a car at a traffic light with my mother when she mentioned that she's had really good "grumpkies" at Patti's Pierogies, a restaurant in Fall River, Massachusetts.

"Grumpkies?" I asked my mother.

"Grumpkies," she said. "It's hamburg wrapped in cabbage."

"I thought it was galumpkis."

She gave me a puzzled look.

"I say grumpkies," she informed me. (She hates it when she suspects that I'm challenging her Taunton accent.)

"I think I have your grandmother's recipe for grumpkies."

"Oh, yes, my grandmother made great grumpkies."

Mystery solved. If my mother calls it grumpkies, then my great-grandmother probably did the same. But then I did a little more digging.

The newspaper article in the link on Patti's indicates that the staff there pronounces it gowumpky or gowumpkies. Is my great-grandmother's recipe supposed to be titled gumpkies? It looks kind of like gumpkies. Maybe I need a Polish language class.

However you say it, after seeing this video about Patti's pierogies, I think I need to make a trip to Fall River. This restaurant looks like a lot of fun. Mom's been holding out on me.

Some of you might know galumpkis or grumpkies in the Polish form, gołąbki. You can find recipes for galumpkies or gołąbki on the internet, including ones from celebrity chefs Tyler Florence (who also can't pronounce the dish) and (Fall River's own) Emeril Lagasse.

Grumpkies is a bit more obscure, or it least that's how it looks from a Google search. I found that at least two people have posted their recipes for grumpkies. I don't know if this word is specific to the Northeast, but my mother is clearly not the only one who uses it. A woman named Cara writing on the web posted her recipe on facebook and discovered that her friends had the same names and more for these little pockets of cabbage, beef, and rice.

Whether you say galumpkis, grumpkies, gowumpkies, or gołąbki, I think we're all talking about basically the same dish.

Then I wondered how my Irish-American great-grandmother came to make "great grumpkies."

From what I could piece together from my mother, it has something to do with the Polish population of Taunton, Massachusetts. As a kid my mother had lots of Polish classmates and ate grumpkies at their homes after school quite often. She wasn't the only one with Polish pals. I don't know if my great-grandmother had Polish friends, but her daughter, my great-aunt, used to attend the "quick mass" at Our Lady of the Holy Rosary Church on Bay St. in Taunton, which had loyal Polish-American parishioners. She also loved Holy Rosary's annual Polish festival with the wonderful food made by the Polish-American women of the parish. Grumpkies was one of their dishes.

Perhaps my great-grandmother was inspired by these women to make grumpkies for her own family. Holy Rosary is not far from what was my great-grandmother's more Irish-American parish, St. Mary's, located near Broadway in St. Mary's Square. So, perhaps she visited the festival. Or, maybe her daughter went to the festival and begged her mother to make grumpkies. It could have been that some of the older women making food at the festival were my great-grandmother's friends, as members of both parishes probably lived in the overlapping neighborhoods around Broadway and Bay Street. Hard to say, but I think the short distance between St. Mary's Church and Holy Rosary had something to do with her acquiring this recipe.

The festival used to take place at a pavilion in "Cabbage Hill," which later became the site of the former Pepper Pot restaurant. Cabbage Hill was the name of the Polish neighborhood, but my mother remembers that the wooded area around the pavilion was called Cabbage Hill and that members of Holy Rosary and others would gather there to polka and to eat Polish food during the festival.

It's really nice to be able to put this recipe into some local contexts. It also reminds me of something that I recently learned about how people from the South Coast region of Massachusetts, including myself, talk about ground beef. I recently picked up a great cookbook by Brooke Dojny called New England Home Cooking. It references a May 1997 South Coast Insider article that notes South Coasters' tendencies to refer to ground beef not as "hamburger" but as "hamburg." My great-grandmother did the same in the recipe. Not all of Taunton is part of the South Coast, but close enough.

I'd never thought about it before, but I rarely use the word hamburger. "I'll have a hamburg." "Pick up some hamburg for dinner." My mother and I speak the same language after all.

Pass the pierogies, folks, because I haven't even wrapped the hamburg in cabbage yet. This post's a long one.

So, I after I made the rice, I started by prepping the cabbage head. I parboiled it, cooled it, and peeled off leaves one by one. Then it was time to cut pieces of salt pork and to create the hamburg, rice, onion, and egg mixture.

With everything ready, I filled each leaf with about a quarter cup or so of the hamburg mixture and a piece of salt pork. (The salt pork in the photo is probably twice larger than necessary.) I folded the leaf over the mixture, making sure to tuck in the bits of leaf from the sides.

All told I put about 19 pieces in the oven.

The results were excellent. Next time, however, I will cover the dish in the oven with foil to prevent the leaves from drying out. I was surprised that I didn't have to add pepper or another spice. The salt pork was enough.

We ate out little cabbage pockets with sour cream, although most have them with a tomato sauce. My great-grandmother really did make great grumpkies . . . or galumpkis, or gowumpkies, or gołąbki. Something like that.

Brownies

2012-04-17T14:55:00.000-04:00

Among the family recipes that I have gathered is one for brownies included in a note written to my Great-Aunt Barbara.

46 Oak Street
Taunton, Mass.
June 24th

Dear Barbara -
Congratulations and all that sort of thing! I hope you will have the best of summers.
I can not thank you for being such a trump the day of the fashion show! Please let this "baseline" help me.

Sincerely,
Martha Foster

(over)

Baseline? Maybe that's a play on baste line? Fashion show humor. You had to be there. (Or maybe someone out there can transcribe that line better than I did.)

Thanks to good ol' retro-stalker (ancestry.com), I was able to determine that Martha Foster lived at 46 Oak Street in 1933 and 1934, when Barbara was fifteen or sixteen years old. Born in New Hampshire in 1902, Martha Foster worked as a teacher at Taunton High School. In 1938 she married her colleague, Walter Bowman, and thereafter she was known as Martha F. Bowman. The couple lived in Taunton and finally settled in or near Mattapoisett, Massachusetts.

I doubt that Barbara and Martha were close friends. Martha Foster was born about 16 years before my great-aunt. Barbara attended St. Mary's, not Taunton High, so it's unlikely that the two had a student-teacher relationship either. Nevertheless, even as a teenager Barbara was probably a godsend at a fashion show. She was always at her sewing machine.

It's just a nice little thank-you note and someone in the family probably saved it for the sake of keeping the recipe. Maybe Martha's brownies were the culinary hit of the show, and Barbara just had to make them herself. My great-aunt was a wonderful cook.

Well, the fashion show may be long over, but we can still judge the recipe. The brownies are chewy and moist and not too difficult to make. They're a little sweet though. Maybe baking chocolate has a bit more sugar now.

You'll need a small pan. Keep in mind that it was the 1930s. Waste not, want not and all that sort of thing.

Irish Date Bread

2012-03-03T13:24:00.009-05:00

I found this recipe in my great-aunt's desk, which, it turns out, is another treasure trove of recipes clipped from newspapers or cobbled together from friends. It's not in my great-aunt's handwriting, so I assume someone gave it to her.

This one's a puzzler. There is nothing inherently Irish about this recipe. Dates? Ireland? Turkey or Israel, maybe, but not Ireland.

The ingredients do not resemble that of either Irish or Irish-American soda bread, so it's not an offshoot of those cousin concoctions. Irish-American soda bread, scone-like and full of raisins and caraway seeds, is nothing like the very bread-like Irish soda bread. The Irish-American version, to state the obvious, is an American adaptation. Both are quite good and I make loaves and loaves of both versions around St. Patrick's Day. This bread is like neither of them.

But what's the fun in being Irish-American if you can't call all that you do "Irish"? My mother labels everything from an angry outburst ("He really got my 'Irish' up") to someone's tendency to keep family secrets ("That's the 'Irish' in him, you know") to a child's inability to keep said family secrets ("He has the 'Irish' whisper") as "Irish."

If someone thinks that a date-nut bread can be "Irish," who am I to question?

And so, in the spirit of adaption and benign ethno-centrism, I trust that somewhere in time or in some Irish-American's imagination this recipe was most Irish.

The first part of the recipe is very, very sweet. If you've ever been to Ireland you know that the Irish are a people with a sweet tooth. So, sure, it's Irish! I boiled the sugar, dates, water, and butter, and I could have eaten that mixture on its own. But I showed enough restraint to proceed with the recipe.

All in all, it turned out great. Who couldn't use another Irish recipe? I get a little tired of being the fifth person to bring an Irish soda bread to the St. Patrick's Day celebration. It's also always nice to have something new to eat when I watch Darby O'Gill and the Little People and that crazy, endless donnybrook scene from The Quiet Man. Or, if you're a bit classier than I am, maybe you just need something to nibble on after church. However you celebrate, try this recipe if you're looking for something different to make for March 17th.

If people ask you if the bread is Irish, just say, "Sure. It said so on the internet, so it must be true." Say it with a funny accent.

I won't tell. That's the Irish in me, you know.

Hermits

2012-02-29T14:02:00.000-05:00

I grew up eating hermits all the time, because my father really likes them. No one else I knew ever ate these spiced raisin cookies though. They're still around, but they are by no means something that I see everyday. This recipe was one of the many my great-aunt collected or received from friends. Perhaps a friend named Helen Alexander gave it to her.

They're simple treats, and yet it seems that no one really has them figured out. Many believe that hermits probably originated in the New England region. One interested blogger out of Boston named Lady Gouda thinks of them as bars rather than as cookies. I can see that. Another notes that they were especially popular during the Great Depression. That makes sense, since molasses would have been cheaper than sugar.

My father didn't grow up during the Depression, but both of his parents served as social workers helping people to make it through that hard time in the city of Fall River, Massachusetts. I may not know where hermits come from exactly, but I do know that my grandfather introduced them to my father.

Or maybe their living in New England predisposed them to this molasses cookie. According to the authors of America's Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking, beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing through the first decades of the twentieth century, New England cooks overwhelming preferred molasses to sugar regardless of costs. Sensing that Yankee identity and New England's influence in the nation were waning, female cooks and cookbook writers looked to molasses and its historical ties to New England as a means to managing the blows to their identity. Perhaps molasses helped to foster the popularity of hermits in region.

I guess the Yankee identity crisis had subsided by the time my great aunt received this recipe, because it does not contain molasses. The hermits that my father and I have enjoyed were much darker in color than than the ones that I made from my great aunt's recipe. That's probably due to the lack of molasses and to the fact that I only had light brown sugar on hand.

Most recipes for hermits require molasses, and some, but not all, list brown sugar as an ingredient. So, this recipe is unique or unusual in that it calls only for brown sugar. Coffee is also not a standard ingredient, but there are many hermits recipes out there, including one that claims to be Pennsylvania Dutch in origin, that use coffee.

New England. Pennsylvania. No one knows where these simple, little cookies or bars began.

Nevertheless, the person who penned "delicious" on the recipe before putting it through the ditto machine was right. These hermits are really good. They may not have molasses, but even with the first bite there was no mistaking Helen Alexander's recipe for anything other than hermits.

And who was Helen Alexander? Well, what I know about her makes my knowledge of hermits look encyclopedic.

The Lost (Doughnuts)

2012-02-22T10:05:00.018-05:00

I had been looking forward to making these doughnuts, although the thought of figuring out how to fry them seemed very daunting. Inexperience + boiling oil = fear. That's an easy recipe.

Just when I got the guts to do it, I noticed that this recipe for doughnuts does not include flour. Is it even possible to make flourless donuts? Even if you don't use flour, surely there has got to be something to hold the batter together. The lack of an egg or two on that front seems problematic as well.

I read this recipe and I envision a big milky ball of sugar with a bit of butter. It just can't be right.

Perhaps my great-grandmother thought flour and eggs were such obvious ingredients that she didn't need to write them down.

It's at times like this that I want to break out the photo albums and label every grammar school friend, fourth cousin, and step-uncle just so that 75 years from now some grandchild or great-grandchild of mine isn't cursing me for assuming that what I know will be immediately intelligible to those around long after I am gone.

On that note, I present these pictures of people who were so obvious to my great-grandmother that she didn't bother to write down their names.

We'll call these folks The Flour:

And these, The Eggs:

Volunteer to Transcribe Menus for the New York Public Library

2011-08-09T09:18:00.003-04:00

I've been on a long hiatus of late, but I've not stopped thinking about bygone food.

The New York Public Library is looking for volunteers to transcribe thousands of historical restaurant menus. The team intends to digitize the menus as well, but older handwriting styles and fanciful typefaces make it difficult for those conducting research in the collection--historians, novelists, and everyday people who want to know about old menus--to search the texts for key terms.

Sign on. Think of all the menus you'll get to see.

Cocke 'n Kettle

2011-01-05T10:09:00.065-05:00

Some are trapped in the '70s, but it takes a lot of talent to embody both the 1970s and the 1770s. The old Cocke 'n Kettle restaurant in Uxbridge, Massachusetts managed to keep its feet in both of those decades.

A fixture in the Blackstone Valley for almost forty years, the Cocke 'n Kettle closed in 2008. Before that happened, however, people came for the famous popovers and the plentiful hors d'ouevres in the cocktail lounge.

You might say that the Cocke 'n Kettle attracted an older, less-than-hip clientele. My fondest memory of the restaurant is watching my great-aunt dance in the lounge at her sister's seventy-fifth birthday party in 1995. That was the only time in my life I ever indulged in a Southern Comfort Manhattan, a drink that you did not (and do not) see among the 21-34 year-old set in greater Providence or Boston.

Yet I prefer to think that the fans of the Cocke 'n Kettle simply appreciated being treated well. The hors d'ourvres in the lounge or the corn fritters at the dinner table were signs that the restaurant respected its patrons and wanted them to leave satisfied and happy. The Sampsons really looked upon customers as welcome guests in their home.

The interior of the Cocke 'n Kettle reinforced that feeling. In many ways the Cocke 'n Kettle was like an actual home. Part of the restaurant was a colonial-era mansion. Visitors took advantage of dining in all the house's various and distinctive rooms.

But people didn't come just to eat in an old farm building. The decor of the Cocke 'n Kettle, which constituted a much appreciated and very specific kind of colonial revival, reinforced new ideas about what it meant to go out to eat. The Cocke 'n Kettle did not re-create the building's past so much as it exemplified an early-1970s interpretation of how to celebrate the colonial period while accommodating the social mores of a society that was becoming increasingly less formal.

In the rooms of the Cocke 'n Kettle you saw two revolutions: the American Revolution and the social revolution of the 1960s/1970s. The dark woods and studded leather chairs spoke to what the owners imagined to be the more rustic or simpler ideals of the colonial and Revolutionary periods. Yet those same wood beams and chairs also provided patrons with a homey feel that allowed them a special night out that was neither stuffy nor overly formal. In harkening to the image of an older New England, the Cocke 'n Kettle created an atmosphere that facilitated the easy yet tasteful socializing that men and women desired in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I've no doubt in my mind that the combined effects of low lighting, dark leather, and British plaid in the lounge gave many the necessary courage to meet new friends or to chat up potential dates. (The short skirts sported by the young waitresses probably didn't hurt either. Today, you just don't find such "clean cut little beavers" eager "to add to your gourmet entertainment." Well, not in a place you could bring your parents anyway.)

The decor and the menu never really changed. I like to think that faithful customers appreciated that they could return to this little reminder of the sense of social change or freedom they were feeling when the Sampson family established the Cocke 'n Kettle in 1971.

I am fortunate to have a flyer that was probably printed around the time the restaurant opened as the Cocke 'n Kettle. Actually, I have two copies. My grandmother and my great-aunt, for whatever reason, both saved them. I hope the photos from the flyer help to illustrate my point.

Election Day Cake (by way of New England Folklore)

2010-11-03T08:08:00.005-04:00

I must make Election Day Cake. Thank you New England Folklore for sharing the recipe and the story behind the cake. Readers, please check out the post.

Apple Knobby Cake

2010-10-10T17:19:00.031-04:00

Last weekend we went apple picking at Thompson's Orchard in New Gloucester, Maine and wound up with forty pounds of Cortlands and McIntoshes. I've been trying to figure out how we let that happen. In my defense, I only had one cider doughnut at Thompson's, which should speak to the fact that I have some capacity for self control. I just don't know what forty pounds of apples in two bags feels like. Thompson's is also unique for passing out pronged, lacrosse-stick-like apple pickers. That made it much easier to get many, many apples from the high branches.

Yeah, I'll blame a pronged lacrosse stick.

As one with forty pounds of apples is want to do, I have spent a lot time eating apples, incorporating apples into oatmeal, juicing apples, inquiring about how to make hard cider, making applesauce, thinking about what kind of apple pie to make, and, finally, baking Aunt Harriet's recipe for Apple Knobby Cake.

This cake was apparently once, or maybe still is, popular. I had never heard of it before and I expect that I'm perhaps in the minority. I have found versions of the recipe on the web. The Boston Globe printed a story with a similar recipe as recently as 2008. The Brattleboro Reformer out of Brattleboro, Vermont ran a story on Apple Knobby Cake just a little over a week ago. You can even have it in the dining hall at the University of Massachusettts, Amherst. It looks like a New England food and, perhaps, has origins in England.

I guess it turns out that not all of my great-grandmother's or great-aunt's recipes are thoroughly bygone.

I'm a bit stumped as to the cake's exact origins though. None of the digging I've done online or in books has turned up much of anything. Surely if so many people still eat it, maybe one person might be able to enlighten me as to where or when this cake began.

Aunt Harriet probably got this recipe in the 1970s or 1980s. My scanned copy is not great, but the original definitely went through a ditto machine and I haven't had the pleasure of smelling ditto-machine ink since I was in elementary school. (It turns out that it took a lot of alcohol to make those copies, which may explain why all my elementary-school classmates were just a little addicted to ditto.) Maybe a school-teacher friend passed it along to Harriet. I'll have to do a bit more snooping if I've ever to know.

What I do know is that this cake is really simple to make and that it's wonderfully moist and sweet with a crispy, cookie-like crust. I've made it twice now and will probably make it one more time. Do peel the apples and don't forget to add the vanilla.

A photo of the Apple Knobby Cake right before it went into the oven.

A small fraction of our apple haul.

Baked Apple Knobby Cake cooling on the table.

Ginger Creams

2010-09-18T12:51:00.014-04:00

I love making a hit with men! But who knew I could do that with so little sugar or shortening?

This recipe (click on the image to enlarge it) comes from a World War II-era Betty Crocker flier that I found along with the 1908 Lowney’s Cookbook. The small celebration of how little sugar and shortening it takes to make these cookies likely stemmed from the 1942 Food Rationing Program. Sugar rationing began in 1943, which probably means this recipe was published in that year or in 1944.

Butter rationing must have had practical results when it came to sending cookies to distant lands. Less butter in a cookie makes it ideal for shipping overseas. The more fat there is in a baked good, the more quickly it hardens. These pillowy ginger creams, with only one quarter of a cup (!) of butter across four-dozen cookies, likely arrived in the hands of soldiers in Europe or the Pacific still light and fluffy.

Send these to someone you know in the military. Make a hit with men and women! Or, do what I did. I sent them to my old office and made a hit with dieters.

Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins

2010-08-16T11:05:00.043-04:00

The story of the demise of Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins is no secret. The company that is now Macy's bought Jordan Marsh, Jordan Marsh became Macy's, and the experience of going to Downtown Crossing in Boston for a shoe sale and a sugar-encrusted blueberry muffin at the flagship store was no more.

Yet that's not the story I want to focus on here. Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins were bigger than Downtown Crossing. Even if you could get the recipe at the department store, many of the muffins were consumed in the suburbs or in distant towns. They were gobbled up not just in Jordan Marsh stores but also at social gatherings where one woman brought other women the muffins fresh out of her own oven.

I always thought of Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins as indicative of how female social networks operated.

But that's over now and the internet, not Macy's, is to blame.

I cannot help but recognize the irony in posting my Great-Aunt Harriet's prized Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins recipe on the internet. Before the web you had to really fight for this recipe. You had to gain the confidence of the woman who baked the muffins and brought them to your workplace. You needed to suck up to your friend's muffin-toting future mother-in-law as women gathered round for terribly silly games and a little bridal-shower breakfasting.

To possess the recipe for Jordan Marsh Muffins was once a sign that you had made it in certain social circles. Far more than a piece of paper in a recipe box, it said you had unique charms and a master's degree in flattery.

But who needs to demonstrate social cunning when the internet just gives away your ticket to having the best muffins at so-and-so's baby shower?

I remember being instructed never to share this recipe with anyone. Now I'm posting it among the hundreds of other Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins recipes on the web. Not only is Jordan Marsh gone, so too is any reason to beg your sister or cajole a secretary for the muffin recipe.

At least the muffins I baked this morning tasted as good as I remembered.

Indian Pudding(s)

2010-07-30T10:05:00.036-04:00

"Indian pudding?" my incredulous mother asked me.

"Yes, Indian pudding. You've heard of it," I insisted. "They serve it at Durgin-Park."

"Oh, of course, Indian pudding."

Indian pudding is one of those traditional New England dishes that you never see save for at Durgin-Park, where tourists eat more New England fare in one sitting than the average New Englander eats in a lifetime.

I have to admit that until this week I had never so much as seen Indian pudding. All the more reason for me to try making the Indian pudding recipe I found stashed away in my great-grandmother's cookbook. I was, however, somewhat surprised to see that the list of ingredients contained tapioca. That didn't seem right to me. So, I found a recipe for Durgin-Park's version of Indian pudding, located in the Boston Globe Cookbook, 4th edition. I discovered that its Indian pudding not only contained no tapioca but also required a lot more cornmeal. A full cup of it in comparison to 2 tablespoons.

Suddenly Indian pudding with tapioca wasn't looking so good to me.

You have to think that Indian pudding with less "Indian" wouldn't work. (It's called Indian pudding because of the cornmeal. British colonists applied the term "Indian corn" to that which we in North American call corn to distinguish Native Americans' corn from corn found in Britain, which described anything from wheat to flour. That British corn is not to be confused with the British fungal concoction called "quorn," which is pronounced like corn and, while I was studying abroad in England, resulted in a dining experience so confusing that it made the old "Who's-on-first" routine seem as simple as a power-point presentation.)

Mrs. Ralph Foss, or Anna as her friends knew her, was born in Canada around 1890 and emigrated to the United States in 1908. Her husband was a physician in Peabody, Massachusetts. Why she preferred tapioca I do not know. I thought that perhaps she submitted the recipe during a corn shortage or a tapioca surplus. Yet without knowing when she offered her Indian pudding recipe to a newspaper, I had no luck determining if my theory panned out. Perhaps she just liked tapioca. Or, she knew tapioca can stand up to hours of cooking time and figured she'd see how it would do in an Indian pudding.

Whatever her reasoning, tapioca in Indian pudding works. In fact, save for the Foss version's tasting not as strong of molasses and being a tad more moist than Durgin-Park's Indian pudding, I couldn't find much difference between them.

The Durkin-Park recipe also came sans ginger or cinnamon. I have since learned that adding such spices, or dried fruit for that matter, to Indian pudding is not all that strange. Thanks to a fabulous book called America's Founding Food: the Story of New England Cooking, I now know that there are many, many, many versions of Indian pudding. All or most seem to contain molasses, the kitchen staple that until recently sat in the back of my cupboard for years and years without so much as a pity glance from me.

Anna Foss's Indian pudding with tapioca (yeah, hard to believe the folks at Martha Stewart Living Magazine aren't knocking down my door with offers to be their food photographer)

The Durgin-Park/Boston Globe Cookbook Indian pudding (let the record show that someone other than myself took this photo)

Moxie

2010-07-14T10:51:00.001-04:00

There is something terribly wrong about my including a post on Moxie in a blog on bygone food. In my world Moxie is anything but bygone. If it were socially acceptable to drink Moxie for breakfast, I would. If soda in any form--let alone an especially delicious one made of gentian root--did not induce obesity, I would drink Moxie and nothing but Moxie.

That said, I've lived outside of New England and know that most Americans have never heard of it. Who am I kidding? I lot of New Englanders don't know of Moxie or, worse, turn their noses up at it because it doesn't taste like pure sugar.

Invented in 1876 as a cure-all tonic by homeopathic physician Dr. Augustin Thompson of Union, Maine, by 1885 Moxie was on its way to becoming a nationally-known soda. Yet in the 1930s the producers of Moxie backed away from their popular advertising campaigns and the soda's regard began to wane.

At least the sensible people of Maine knew enough to make it the official state soft drink.

One of my smaller goals in life is to turn people on to Moxie. Anyone who visits me from outside of New England has to at least taste it. Anyone who claims not to like it or who derides it as medicinal must try it three times before I stop badgering them.

Recently, Fox 25 News out of Boston named Moxie the best soda in New England. Don't think I won't be including that in my Moxie arsenal.

I vividly remember my first Moxie experience. My grandfather and I were walking down an aisle at a Trucchi's supermarket when I saw this bright orange bottle of soda that featured a man pointing his finger at me. How could I not stop? To my shock, my grandfather (a Coca-Cola man, I thought) agreed to buy the bottle. He seemed unusually excited, telling me how he drank it as a kid in the 1920s and how his father, a native of Nova Scotia, loved the stuff.

I have to admit that Moxie was a little too much for my pre-K palete. But I kept trying it and kept trying it until, finally, I was in love. When I moved back to New England a few years ago, one of the first things I purchased was a bottle of Moxie.

This past weekend I made it to the tail end of the Moxie Festival in Lisbon Falls, Maine. Sadly, I cannot report much on what happened there, but, while shopping for t-shirts, Moxie ice cream, and Moxie at Kennebec's, I overheard that at least 450 people attended. I've also read reports of an annual attendance of 40,000.

Hopped up on Moxie ice cream mixed with Moxie, we noticed some wonderful sights as we departed Lisbon Falls. I melted when I saw three kids laughing and sipping Moxie on a white front porch. The Jesus-Is-Our-Savior-Moxie-Is-Our-Flavor sign at St. Matthew's Church almost made me choke (with laughter) on my Moxie. Then there was a local bank's electronic proclamation that it was closed for the duration of the Moxie Festival.

Lisbon Falls, Maine. Where everyone has their priorities straight.

On a side note, later that evening one of the bright orange Moxie t-shirts we bought at Kennebec's alerted a distracted, cell phone-addled driver that our car was right in her path despite not being in her designated lane. Seeing our Moxie, she quickly swerved and avoided plowing into us. It's safe to say that a Moxie t-shirt saved our lives.

How can anyone not like this stuff?

A Walnut-Size of Butter

2010-06-12T15:46:00.001-04:00

A “walnut-size of butter” is a great phrase, but what the heck does it mean?

Making my great-grandmother’s recipes has necessitated that I do a little research on cooking terms. For instance, what’s a yeast cake? That refers to a compressed yeast cake. I don’t know where I might find one, but through a little digging I learned that a yeast cake is the equivalent of one tablespoon of the dry yeast that I buy at the grocery store.

Thanks to Helen in Oregon, I now know that a walnut-size of butter is equal to roughly two tablespoons. (A “hen’s egg of butter” is three to four tablespoons.)

Helen gave me two articles, both entitled “On Using Very Old Recipes,” written by Carla Emery and originally published in the September and October 1972 issues of Organic Gardening and Farming. I also include the scanned copies of the articles with this post. They explain all sorts of terms we no longer use. Assuming that not much has changed in the recipe department between 1972 and 2010, some may find these definitions helpful. (Click to enlarge.)

“Entire wheat flour” is simply whole-wheat flour. Who knew?

A recipe calling for yeast “by the teacup” means that you need liquid yeast. If you do not have that you can use dry yeast. “For up to six cups of flour use one tablespoon dry yeast; from six to eleven cups of flour, use two tablespoons; and from eleven cups to twenty-six cups, three tablespoons. Then fill the ‘teacup’ with water to keep your liquid quantity right.” (September 1972, p. 90)

Admittedly, I do not know what that last part means. Do I add the teacup of water to the yeast and flour? Or, do I simply fill a teacup with water and leave it next to the flour-yeast mixture in some act of kitchen voodoo?

At any rate, a pound of molasses is not sixteen ounces. It's twelve.

Rightly or wrongly, I use the terms “powdered sugar” and “confectioner’s sugar” interchangeably, but that’s not going to do. “ ‘Powdered sugar’ in old recipe books meant a grade of fineness between granulated and confectioner’s sugar. Granulated sugar had a weight of two cups per pound; powdered of two and two-thirds cups per pound; and confectioner’s of three and one-half cups per pound.” (October 1972, p. 87)

A “dessertspoon” is equal to two teaspoons. A “teacup” is one-half cup, while a “wineglass” is one-fourth cup. Something called a “gill” is one-half cup. (So, I guess a teacup is equivalent to a gill, and a wineglass is one half a gill.)

A “cup” is not the same as today’s (or 1972’s) cup. It’s actually one-fifth smaller. This I already knew to be true, because I compared my great-grandmother’s Swan’s Down Flour measuring cup with my measuring cup and quickly figured out that my cup was not her cup.

I wish her flour-sifter were not so rusty, because it works better than mine. Her eggbeater can still do the job too.

Lightening Cake

2010-05-21T09:03:00.002-04:00

The past few months have been busy ones for me, so I have not had much time to devote to cooking. My great-aunt, the woman who made it possible for me to see all these recipes, also passed away last month at age 89. At some point I will delve into the many mimeographed recipes she acquired, by my estimation, around the office where she was an executive secretary. For today, though, I chose an easy recipe--the second recipe of the three below--just to get myself blogging again.

Well, I say easy, but my great-grandmother's instructions are not always so simple to decipher. Lightening Cake (yes, it probably should be spelled Lightning Cake, but it's a three-syllable word to some in southern New England) supposedly got its name because it is quick as lighting to make. The cake should take 20-30 minutes in the oven. I, however, chose to bake it as a loaf cake rather than a layer cake, so I let it stay in the oven for 50 minutes at 350 degrees.

By my reading of the recipe, it seems as though you first mix together the sugar, flour, and baking soda. Then, you melt your butter and add two beaten eggs to it followed by a cup of milk. Finally, you add the liquid ingredients to the dry and put the resulting batter into a cake pan or two.

I like how my great-grandmother made it explicit that the baker should "fill cup with milk" as though that were not inherently obvious. I hope she meant this phrase to mean add one cup of milk. But who knows.

I treated myself to a slice not long after I took the cake out of the oven. Experiencing the simple taste of good butter and sugar blended together sent my mind back to all the bad grocery-store-bought and package-mix cakes I suffered as a child. Lightening Cake is by far the best everyday cake that I have even eaten. Had we only kept this recipe alive I might have saved my taste buds so much indignity.

The Old Grist Mill Tavern (and Johnny Cakes)

2010-02-26T08:34:00.001-05:00

Seeing that so many of you enjoyed my post about johnny cakes with its mention of the Old Grist Mill Tavern in Seekonk, Massachusetts, I hope some of you find interest in these images from an Old Grist Mill Tavern menu dated January 21, 1953. The menu's cover features a sign detailing the restaurant's johnny cakes, while the menu itself notes that johnny cakes were offered as a side and as an entree with sausages. You should be able to enlarge at least some of the images by clicking on them.

The above two images, a view of the waterfall from the interior of the restaurant and two illustrations of the mill depicting how it looked in 1745 and 1950, are found on the front of the menu's cover.

This sign, seen here in an illustration located on the inside of the menu's cover, stood outside the Old Grist Mill Tavern.

Below, we have images from the menu itself.

Johnny Cakes (and The OId Grist Mill Tavern)

2010-02-20T14:23:00.004-05:00

I don’t know when, but at some point I acquired this postcard from the The Old Grist Mill Tavern in Seekonk, Massachusetts. It originally belonged to my Aunt Harriet. That much I know.

I have had quite a few meals at the Grist Mill, but never, despite the declaration on the back of the postcard, have I ever had a johnny cake there. “ ‘Home of the Johnny Cake,’ ” it reads in quotation marks as if to imply that any customer might have uttered the phrase upon hearing the words Grist Mill. Yet if you look at the Grist Mill’s present menu, there are no johnny cakes to be found.

So much for the Grist Mill’s claim to fame.

I have no intention of boycotting the Grist Mill for not keeping true to some assertion a former owner made in the late 1950s or early 1960s, when the postcard was probably printed. I don’t even know if the Grist Mill ground corn when it was in operation as an actual grist mill in the eighteenth century.

The card simply reminds me that I don’t see johnny cakes, supposedly a mainstay of New England cooking since the colonial period, too often anymore.

In December I was in Rhode Island and decided to pick up a box of Kenyon’s white corn meal so that I could remind myself of just what a johnny cake tastes like. Now, normally I’m skeptical of buying pre-mixed flours or meals, because I can just purchase corn meal or flour in bulk and save myself a lot of money. I know how to make pancakes, for instance, and it’s not so difficult that I need to buy the ingredients pre-mixed. But, seeing as Rhode Island’s economy is in the toilet, I thought I’d do my part to help out both a Rhode Island grocery store and the folks at Kenyon’s Corn Meal Company in Usquepaugh, R.I.

Since then I’ve been reading up on johnny cakes and, among other things, found that Kenyon’s packaged white corn meal is really stone ground, while most corn meal is made using steel blades. This means that Kenyon’s corn meal is not only more nutritious than others, but that it also has a distinctive taste and finer texture.

It’s a good thing, or so Martha Stewart Living tells me.

Strangely, in Rhode Island, by law it should be spelled jonny cakes, not johnny cakes. (So, in a state where native speakers add an h to the end of any word ending in r, you’re supposed to drop the h in the middle of this one particular word. Up to speed?) In that respect, opening a box of Kenyon’s corn meal for johnny cakes could be considered a revolutionary act.

Someone might want to alert the Rhode Island Tea Party about this.

I recently made johnny cakes for breakfast, following the recipe on the box of Kenyon’s corn meal. Judging from the company's website, the cakes I made were in South County style, as opposed to Newport style, which requires milk rather than boiled water. You can make them any way you like. Mine came out about a quarter of an inch thick, crispy on the outside, and soft on the inside. We had them with eggs and a bit of maple syrup. They were quite good. I plan to make another batch whenever I get around to cooking some sort of seafood with a cream sauce.

I like a food that works for both breakfast and supper.

Johnny cakes also remind me of a certain passage in Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana’s 1840 account of how he, a Boston Brahmin and Harvard undergraduate, spent two years as a lowly sailor. Dana’s description of the way his brutal "down-east johnny-cake" captain, a Mainer I presume, reacted to the demands of the crew reads as follows:

“Well, what the d---l do you want now?” Whereupon we stated our grievances as respectfully as we could; but he broke in upon us, saying that we were getting fat and lazy, didn’t have enough to do, and it was that which made us find fault. This provoked us, and we began to give word for word. This would never answer. He clenched his fist, stamped and swore, and ordered us all forward, saying, with oaths enough interspersed to send the words home, “Away with you! go forward every one of you! I’ll haze you! I’ll work you up. You don’t have enough to do! If you a’n’t careful, I’ll make a hell of heaven! . . . You’ve mistaken your man! I’m Frank Thompson, all the way from ‘down east.’ I’ve been through the mill, ground, and bolted, and come out a regular-built, down-east johnny-cake, when it’s hot, d----d good; but when it’s cold, d----d sour and indigestible; -- and you’ll find me so!”

It probably goes without saying, but I made sure my Rhode Island johnny cakes were piping hot when we ate them.

Brown Bread

2010-02-15T14:10:00.003-05:00

I can make bread in a can!

In December I posted an unnamed recipe that turned out to be my great-grandmother’s recipe for brown bread. That receipt, as she would have called it, did not explain how the brown bread ought to be cooked, but right before I began making it myself I scanned a few on-line recipes for brown bread and was reminded that in New England it is traditionally made in a can.

I knew this, but not having cooked in a can before I must have forgotten that part.

To be honest, the thought of cooking bread in a can was a bit daunting, if not also absurd.

Then I recalled my mother’s cousins’ making some references over the years to their grandmother’s cooking something in a coffee can. It had to be the brown bread, I figured, and so I began looking for something akin to a coffee can in which to cook my bread. Since I buy my coffee in the form of beans in bulk, I opted for a tin can that once held 28 oz. of tomatoes. When I make the bread again I’ll use two cans, as I had just a little overflow of bread after it rose.

Basically, you mix the ingredients and pour them into a buttered tin can. Then you find yourself a larger pot, securely cover the top of the open can with tin foil (I tied dental floss around the foil to keep it from shifting), place the can in the pot on top of some kind of platform (don’t just let the can rest on the bottom of the pot), and fill the pot with enough water to cover half the can. Bring to a boil and let it run for two-and-a-half to three hours (yes, that long), adding extra water if necessary. When it’s done, let the can cool and extract the bread. It will be in the shape of the can mold and very moist from the steam.

I made the brown bread with baked beans and hot dogs, because that is how my great-grandmother made it every Saturday for the mid-day meal. My mom was very disappointed when she learned that I didn’t season the hot dogs with celery salt (who knew?). I guess I missed that detail of Saturday dinner over the years. At any rate, my great-grandmother made this every Saturday and one of her three daughters, Barbara, continued the tradition with her Friday night meals using canned beans and canned bread. B&M continues to sell brown bread in a can if you need a quick fix.

According to my mother, her grandmother also served her brown bread with cod cakes, so brown bread is apparently quite a versatile side.

Mom remembers this, she said, because she hated the smell of the cod in the kitchen. Nevertheless, on many Fridays mom and her Aunt Harriet would also go to Leonard’s Restaurant in Taunton, Massachusetts for cod fish cakes and carrots.

The joys of Lent and fish on Friday could not be more understated.

When my great-grandmother and her daughter Harriet lived on the second floor of a two-story house on Bradford Street in Taunton, she would steam the brown bread and two unmarried women on the first floor, the O’Brien sisters, would make the baked beans. (I assume this helped to even out the molasses purchases, as both baked beans and the brown bread, in particular, require a lot of molasses. Not to mention the fact that baked beans take something like five hours to cook. A little shared labor surely went a long way.) Every Saturday, after confession at St. Mary’s, they would bring the two dishes together for Saturday lunch. My mother and her cousins also joined in this weekly ritual.

After my great-grandmother passed away, the O’Brien sisters continued to make baked beans for Harriet. (They also apparently locked Hat out of the house if she, a woman in her thirties, stayed out past midnight. That must have added something a little stronger than molasses to Saturday dinner.)

I saved a slice of the brown bread for my mother and she said it was just like what her grandmother made. “It has that tang,” she said in reference to the pronounced molasses flavor.

The Rocky Point Shore Dinner Hall

2010-01-31T17:53:00.001-05:00

Blame it on the cold weather, but all day my thoughts kept returning to memories of eating clam cakes and red chowder in the Shore Dinner Hall at Rocky Point Park. Located on Narragansett Bay in Warwick, Rhode Island, the park opened in 1847 and closed in 1996. The Shore Dinner Hall served its last clam cake in 2000. (Check out the film “You Must Be This Tall” for more on the history of Rocky Point Park.)

Apparently my grandfather, a labor reporter for the Providence Journal-Bulletin, was quite the shore-dinner connoisseur. He used to take my dad to Rocky Point for clam cakes and chowder and Dad, in turn, took me and my brother. This usually occurred around the Fourth of July, when my father's childhood and college friends, with their children and spouses, annually reunited in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

I must have inherited this penchant for the shore dinner, as I remember the Rocky Point Shore Dinner Hall with its seemingly endless rows of tables, watermelon, and salty, battered clam cakes better than I do the Corkscrew or the Freefall or the House of Horrors (well, my eyes were probably unnecessarily closed for much of that last one).

Around 1989 or so I picked up the above postcard of the Shore Dinner Hall, complete with a description of the menu on its backside:

With the park and the dinner hall long gone, I will have to make “Famous Rocky Point Clam Chowder” for myself.

ROCKY POINT-STYLE CHOWDER

1/2 pound ground or finely diced salt pork
1 pound onions, cut in medium dice
1 gallon clam juice
1 pound potatoes, diced
Salt, pepper to taste
1 tablespoon paprika
2 cups canned tomato puree
1 1/2 quarts chopped quahogs
Water as needed
Pilot crackers, crumbled

Heat salt pork until the fat melts. Add onions; cook over gentle heat until very soft. Add clam juice, potatoes, seasonings, tomato puree and a little water.

Simmer until potatoes are soft, then add quahogs. Heat and taste for seasoning. Add water if needed.

It is best to use old, not new potatoes, because they thicken the chowder somewhat with their starch. Crush some pilot crackers and stir them into the chowder to thicken it further near the end of cooking. Makes 20 eight-ounce servings.

Note that the above recipe, located with others in a 1997 Providence Journal-Bulletin article, suggests that you make the chowder with pilot crackers. But like Famous Rocky Point Clam Chowder that, too, is a bygone food unless you make it yourself. (Nabisco discontinued Crown Pilot Crackers despite a concerted effort against this move by residents of Chebeague Island, Maine. But that’s another story.)

The Recipe with No Name

2009-12-22T07:01:00.000-05:00

Joyeux NyQuil! 'Tis the season when I follow a strict schedule of sleep, cough, repeat.

To safeguard the health of others, I have steered clear of the kitchen.

Yet in my moments of mental clarity I have been thinking of what I call "The Recipe with No Name." Graham flour, cornmeal, molasses. Is it brown bread? May some kind soul help me solve this mystery.

Hot Milk Cake

2009-12-07T12:32:00.007-05:00

A few weeks ago, I tried to make my great-grandmother’s recipe for Hot Milk Cake. I failed miserably. It looked wonderful coming out of the oven, but it sank into a light-yellow gelatinous form resembling something like lemon curd trapped inside of a cake’s deflated body.

In retrospect, I probably baked it a few minutes too few and improperly sifted the flour. This time, just to be sure, I beat the eggs longer until they were really fluffy and made certain to sift the first half-cup of flour with the baking powder. I put the mixture in the oven at 350 degrees for about thirty minutes and got a cake that I think my great-grandmother would recognize.

The cake should be baked in a round tin or pan, which I left behind at my mother’s over Thanksgiving. Next time, I will make it round and I might also add a filling, as Hot Milk Cake usually had one in the middle between two layers.

Just thankful to get the cake to what I imagined to be right, I accompanied it with a honey glaze made by bringing to a boil a quarter-cup of honey, two tablespoons of sugar, and one tablespoon of butter.

Both my father’s maternal grandmother and Alice, my mother’s maternal grandmother, made Hot Milk Cake. That’s not terribly surprising. Hot Milk Cake was very popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when both women came of age. Home cooks considered it an “everyday cake,” which seemed strange to me after first attempting to make it given how horribly I failed. How can something be an “everyday cake” if it is this hard to make? Yet if you know what you’re doing, which they probably did, it’s not difficult. The cake is sweet, but not too sweet, and it’s definitely not rich, rendering it something that people could conceivably eat everyday.

Recipes for Hot Milk Cake can be found in many late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century cookbooks written by middle- or upper-class women who deemed themselves experienced cooks with a mission to instruct working-class women, who they supposed inexperienced in the kitchen, on how to run a proper household. The Lowney’s Cook Book, in which I found this recipe inserted, was intended to encourage women to use Lowney’s flour, but it also purported to help the unseasoned or working-class cook to gain the skills to run something akin to a middle-class home.

Alice's recipe for Hot Milk Cake, I discovered, is almost identical to one that can be found in The Cook Book by Jane Rush, published in 1918. Rush, the president of the Massachusetts Auxiliary to the Navy Relief Society, prided herself on writing easy-to-read recipes. She was therefore perfectly suited to compose a cookbook for the “inexperienced cooks” who might have trouble intuiting the under-detailed recipes usually found in cookbooks (much like those in the Lowney’s Cook Book). Rush admitted that such recipes had ruined her efforts in the past, but she was no working-class, green cook. Not only did she know how to render recipes intelligible, her domestic servants, a sign of her wealth, encouraged her to write the cookbook.

I have no idea if Alice read Rush’s cookbook. Yet given how detailed her recipe for Hot Milk Cake is in contrast to some of the others written down by her and how similar it is to Rush’s version, my guess is that she penned this recipe at a point in her life when she was familiar with reading the more-detailed cookbooks written, like Rush’s, around World War I and later. In other words, this was probably not a recipe she inherited from her mother.

By 1918 my great-grandmother was thirty years old and recently married with an infant daughter. Until her wedding she worked outside the home. Once married she tended to the household; her husband, Ned, had a good job in a rivet factory. The recipe as my great-grandmother wrote it spoke to how middle-class, domestic ideals expressed in cookbooks informed her life as a working-class mother and housewife.

The Great Chow Mein Famine of ‘09

2009-11-29T10:46:00.005-05:00

When I was a student at South School in Somerset, Massachusetts, we engaged in a daily ritual that we imagined common to children across the United States. In the lunch line, we placed on our trays a plastic knife and spork, a carton of coffee milk, a giant sticky roll for dessert and, if we were lucky, a chow mein sandwich.

The woman working the line would give you a styrofoam tray with distinct sections (only on chow-mein-sandwich day were we treated to styrofoam) filled with brown sauce, two slices of white bread, and a brown wax-paper bag full of crispy fried noodles.

Chow-mein-sandwich day was the most important day of the week. I preferred to axe the gravy and the white bread and just eat the noodles out of the bag. But I can still remember the grin on the face of one of my classmates, a sweet kid named Tony who spoke English with a slight Portuguese accent, as he gently rushed his chow mein sandwich to his seat in the cafegymatorium.

What chicken tikka masala is to London or bagels are to New York City, the chow mein sandwich is to greater Fall River.

Yet for much of 2009 the world, or the world that is southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, has been deprived of chow mein sandwiches.

In June fire struck the Oriental Chow Mein Company, founded by Frederick Wong. For decades, this Fall River business has supplied local schools, restaurants, and stores with its distinctive, crunchy chow mein noodles. As of mid November the Wong family, which still owns the company, was trying to re-open at the same time that it warded off incessant phone calls with demands for noodles. Since the 1930s the sandwich has been listed on the menus of both Chinese and American restaurants and the Oriental Chow Mein Company has been and remains the region’s sole noodle distributor.

Could chow mein sandwiches become a bygone food?

If you have missed Emeril Lagasse’s expressions of love for chow mein sandwiches or did not grow up with him in Fall River, you might not know what a chow mein sandwich looks like or how to make one yourself. It’s not pretty, but it is tasty. Basically, it consists of crispy fried noodles covered in a brown sauce, which likely contains pork and only sometimes celery and other vegetables, placed on a hamburger roll or between two slices of square white bread. You may order it unstrained, with celery and other vegetables, or strained, without celery and other vegetables.

You can also, or once could, make it at home with the packaged version that the Oriental Chow Mein Company has distributed to grocery stores. Coveted boxes of Hoo-Mee Chow Mein are rumored to be selling for upwards of fifty dollars each since the fire.

The box, while reproduced until recently, is obviously of an earlier era; it contains a message explaining that Hoo-Mee Chow Mein is best made by housewives. Perhaps this marketing strategy helped to bring what was once an “exotic” food served outside the home into local kitchens.

But why chow mein sandwiches and why Fall River?

Fall River was once booming with textile factories and immigrants from Ireland, England, and Quebec to fill them. The story goes that chow mein sandwiches took off during the Great Depression of the 1930s, because a sandwich was cheaper to buy than a full portion of chow mein. Order a sandwich and you purchased less chow mein, but you at least had the bread to fill you.

The Depression hit Fall River hard and it never really recovered. I do not know if it can withstand the loss of chow mein sandwiches.

The chow mein sandwiches made possible by the Oriental Chow Mein Company are a testament to southeastern Massachusetts’ unique population and immigration history. Chinese-immigrant cooks, no matter where they settled, tailored their foods to the pre-existing culinary propensities of customers. The brown sauce of the chow mein sandwich reflects the tastes of Fall River’s established Yankee, Irish, and English populations of the 1920s and 1930s. The sauce and its contents are cooked for a long period of time or boiled, producing soft vegetables. Given the popularity of boiled foods in New England and among British and Irish immigrants, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chinese-American cooks like those in the Wong family probably tailored the sauce to their expectations. This, I venture, helps to explain why the soupy sandwich took off in Fall River in particular.

It remains beloved by many, including those of French-Canadian descent.

I would love to know what exactly happened when someone first asked a Chinese-American cook (Frederick Wong?) for a chow mein sandwich. Or did the cook take the initiative in first offering it to customers?

Most of all, I wonder, was that moment strained or unstrained?

Scotch Raised Bread

2009-11-22T19:59:00.001-05:00

To quote my childhood friend Tootie Ramsey: “We are in trou-ble!”

With Thanksgiving approaching, I see no need to do a huge shopping trip for the week. So, for dinner I figured we could have minestrone soup that I put in the freezer a few weeks ago. Why not contrast it with the Scotch Raised Bread, I thought. I found the recipe for that within a newspaper clipping placed in the pages of the 1908 Lowney’s Cook Book. Mrs. Edna T. Jackson says it goes well with beans, and I had cans of baked beans in the cupboard to use if the soup did not thaw in time for dinner.

This recipe appeals to a seasoned baker, which I am not. I had yeast, but I did not have a yeast cake. I hoped that one yeast cake is the equivalent of 2 and 1/4 teaspoons of yeast. I was very skeptical that ¼ cup of water would be enough for all of the dry ingredients. Then again, I thought, one cup of molasses might make up for the dearth of water. And I knew neither what constitutes “enough bread flour to the thickness of regular white bread sponge” nor how to finish that sponge in the “usual way.” I was aware, however, that a sponge could take many hours to rise. At the very least, I figured, the recipe would make copious use of the jar of molasses that sits like a wallflower in my pantry.

Not knowing exactly how to proceed, I decided to just see what happens and hope that I do not wind up like Lucy Ricardo with more bread coming out of the oven than I have apartment.

I also turned to ancestry.com (or, Retro-Stalker, as I like to call it) to do a little searching on Mrs. Edna T. Jackson of The Willows in Centre Harbor, New Hampshire. Judging from the image of a woman on the reverse of the instructions, I suspected that my great-grandmother clipped this recipe in the 1930s. The 1930 census told me that Mrs. Edna T. Jackson and her husband George lived at 54 Main Street in Centre Harbor with an English-speaking, Canadian-born housekeeper named Mary A. Allen. George was a New Hampshire native, but Edna was born in New Brunswick, Canada around 1878. The census also described her as the “manager” of a “boarding house,” which I imagine was called The Willows.

Perhaps Edna T. Jackson served Scotch Raised Bread to guests or residents at The Willows. It is also conceivable that she brought this recipe with her from New Brunswick, as various Scotch breads are popular in the Canadian Maritimes. I cannot find another recipe called “Scotch Raised Bread,” but I have found references on the web to Scotch Oatmeal Bread. Mrs. Jackson, or whoever named this bread, probably called it a raised bread to distinguish it from Scotch shortbread, which is also popular in Atlantic Canada.

Back to the baking, to the molasses and oats mixture I added raisins and a little shy of 4 cups of sifted flour, which I kneaded in my Kitchen Aid. (This is not 1930 and I do not have the requisite board.) Basically, I put in as much flour as I thought the wet ingredients could handle. The dough turned out to be a lovely caramel color. After I let it sit for the first rising (one and a half hours—until it doubled in size), I noticed that Mrs. Jackson tells us to put the dough into “pans” for the second rising. How many pans? I went with two, as that is all I have. I allowed 30 minutes for the second rising, although I cannot say much of anything happened in that interim. I baked the bread at 400 degrees for 30 minutes, not really knowing what to do on that front either.

To my surprise, the recipe worked—or worked well enough. Both of the loaves burned on the bottom, so I baked them at far too high a temperature. But they tasted fine with the molasses flavor very pronounced.

Served it with the baked beans for a change.

Welsh Rarebit

2009-11-21T18:14:00.001-05:00

I feel cheated. I've eaten melted cheese on bread, but this was so much better. Much folklore exists as to why this dish is called rarebit and not rabbit, with most explanations positing that Welsh poverty forced that subset of the population of Britain to substitute meat with cheese.

Perhaps they simply realized that this tastes much better than rabbit.

As you can see, there's very little instruction in the recipe. This one is actually quite detailed in comparison to others written down by Great-Grandmother Alice. Basically, I melted everything in a pyrex bowl over a pot of boiling water.

In case you can't read the original, above, here is is again:
1/2 lb. cheese[,] 2 eggs, speck of cayenne[,] 1 tablespoon butter[,] 1/2 teaspoon of salt, teaspoon of mustard[,] 1/2 cup milk[.] [B]reak cheese in small pieces and put it and other ingredients into a saucepan over boiling water stir until the cheese melts serve on toast[.]