Retro Food Experiments

Golden Bruffins Pt. 3: Eating the Bruffin

2011-09-29T14:54:00.000-07:00

What's another great thing about Tillamook Golden Bruffins? Not only are they quick to prepare, they don't take very long to bake. We put the Bruffins in an oven pre-heated to 425 degrees and twenty minutes later pulled out success! We checked the Bruffins by using the toothpick test to make sure they were done all the way through, then pulled them out and allowed them to cool. This was probably the quickest Retro Food Experiment, but how would they taste? How would pineapple, banana, and cheddar cheese taste jumbled together in a muffin?

They tasted great! Yes, this is also probably the tastiest Retro Food Experiment we've ever done. Everyone who tried the Bruffins enjoyed them, and they had a surprisingly subtle yet hearty and sweet taste to them that make them a perfect breakfast snack.

Beckie Sue was glad her mixing for today was at an end, and found the Bruffins particularly tasty. We thanked Beckie Sue for sharing her skills and techniques with us today, and we were all glad to settle down to a nice plate a warm, tasty Golden Bruffins. It's a lot nicer than settling down to a horrifying plate of tongue mousse...

Golden Bruffins Pt. 2 : The Joy of Mixing

2011-09-23T16:52:00.000-07:00

Making Tillamook Golden Bruffins is a rather complicated process, so it's important that you pay very close attention during this difficult part of the process...

Tricky

Step 1: Dump cheese into the biscuit mix and mix. Mixing at this stage can be difficult with just the cheese and biscuit mix, and Beckie Sue experienced some unpleasant hand cramps. We had to hurry on to the next step before she was crippled for life.

Step 2: Stir in other ingredients. (See, I told you you this was tricky...)

We decided to stir in the milk next to give Beckie Sue's crippled hand some relief. Once the milk was added the mixing process was a lot smoother, and Beckie Sue was a lot less irritable.

Squeezing

Our next step was the banana mashing. As we mentioned in our previous post, Beckie Sue discovered the best way to do this is to grasp the bananas firmly in each hand and squeeze first, then peel them into a bowl. We then used a fork to finish mashing the bananas thoroughly before adding them to the mixture.

After the addition of the mashed banana, that's when the mixing magic continues. At this point Beckie Sue had to switch hands, as her one hand had become all but useless.

What's next? The egg! Yes, things get a little livelier with the addition of the egg. But not much. More mixing follows.

At this point Beckie Sue's hands were all both useless. Really, I thought she'd hold up better than this. She needed a smoke break.

Mixing!

Loose!

Back to mixing, Beckie Sue! The last step is to add the crushed canned pineapple. At this point the mixture will still be thicker than you'd expect a standard muffin mixture to be, so the pineapple really loosened things up.

Now that we're done with the Bruffin mix, it's time to pour it into a generously greased muffin pan. Beckie Sue was an excellent muffin pan greaser, and we were soon able to start pouring the mix into the cups.

Tune in next week for the exciting conclusion of the Golden Bruffin Saga....

Local Flavor: Tillamook Golden 'Bruffins' Pt. 1 Ingredients

2011-09-15T17:13:00.000-07:00

Today we're livening things up in the kitchen; don't worry, there won't be any whale poop, cow tongue, or dog food involved. Today we're going to be making an old local recipe from a Tillamook Cheese ad. Tillamook cheese has been a local staple in the Pacific Northwest for decades, and today we're going to be making Tillamook 'Golden Bruffins.' What's a bruffin? According to Urban Dictionary, a 'bruffin' is a hermaphrodite, or something a hermaphrodite eats. We're not making hermaphrodites today, and I don't know if they eat 'Golden Bruffins' or not, but they should! We imagine 'bruffin' is probably some sort of variant of 'muffin', perhaps 'breakfast muffin.' We don't really know, but they taste a heck of a lot better than anchovy balls.

Scandalous

Also today Lydia had to prepare for a 7-Up cocktail party, so we were left without a housewife until we stumbled across Beckie Sue. Beckie Sue is the scandalous single mother who lives down the street, but despite her suspicious past and trampy ways, we needed her help. Being a single mother, Beckie Sue knows that 'Golden Bruffins' are a quick and nutritious way to feed her multiple illegitimate children in the morning.

So what do you need to make your own 'Golden Bruffins'? The first ingredient according to the original Tillamook cheese ad is 'biscuit mix.' Back in the day, this could have meant anything. In this day and age, we decided it meant Bisquick. I thought it was odd that pre-made biscuit mix was part of the recipe, but I guess they wanted to give desperate mothers like Beckie Sue a quick and easy way to enjoy Tillamook cheese.

The second ingredient is Tillamook grated cheese (but it doesn't say what kind. Perhaps they only had one kind back then, but now we have about a billion varieties, from colby jack to special reserve extra sharp cheddar. We chose medium cheddar.)

You will also need 1 egg.

You also need 1 cup of mashed bananas, which we discovered required four small bananas mashed with a fork. It's easier if you grasp the banana first and squeeze it in your hand to loosen it up. Beckie Sue was particularly good at this.

Amazing

Next you'll need 1 cup of undrained crushed pineapple in a can. This was quite easy to find, and all it requires is a can opener and a measuring cup.

The last ingredient is milk. This is also pretty easy to find, but comes in different types. We went with 2%.

To Be Continued...

Old Tillamook Cheese Ads

2011-09-10T10:55:00.000-07:00

While touring the Tillamook Cheese Factory in Tillamook, OR, we found these great old ads and they have inspired me...

Under Construction!

2011-08-25T12:49:00.000-07:00

I've been reorganizing and remodeling Retro Food Experiments and have come up with a great new plan. There will be a new Retro Food Experiment up soon. In the meantime, I thought I would post one of my favorite pictures from Good Housekeeping's 1958 Casserole Book:

Creation #5: Anchovy Balls and Tongue Mousse: YuckFest 2011

2011-04-01T15:55:00.000-07:00

Not thrilled

As you can see, Lydia was not thrilled by our recent Retro Food Experiment. Apparently nothing livens up a party like anchovy balls! Maybe they had stronger gag reflexes in the '50's, because they weren't so much livening things as making us want to throw up. I think they would still have been frightening even if we had followed the recipe properly.

To make anchovy balls, you need anchovy paste, hard-boiled eggs, dry mustard, some other seasoning, chopped onions and green peppers, and 1/4 cup of parsely. Since funding for this experiment was slim, I decided all we really needed was the anchovy paste and we'd make it up from there. This turned out to be a mistake.

The first step was to mash the anchovy paste with the hard-boiled eggs. This was a fragrant beginning to the day, as anchovy paste has a strong and unpleasant smell and eggs don't smell that great either. Lydia was gagging already as she tried to mash the two together. Anchovy paste is also visually appalling, especially when squeezed out of a tube.

The more ingredients we added to it, the less appealing it became. We had no mustard or parsley, so we added some chipotle seasoning and
a 1/4 cup of basil instead of parsley.

It took on the texture and consistency of loose cat poop and probably smelled similar. We also realized that there was no way what we had mixed together was going to shape into balls. In an effort to make
the mixture thicker we added crumbled crackers. Didn't help. We then added flour. Still didn't help. Annoyed and tired of the smell, we decided to just slop them onto a plate into ball-like blobs and stick toothpicks into them anyway. We weren't excited to try them.

Getting them off the plate was a challenge as well. These soft, sticky blobs of fishy nastiness don't even fall when the plate is held up vertically and were almost impossible to get off the plate and into the mouth using only the toothpick. We tried for a little while and then I just used my fingers. I immediately regretted putting that anchovy ball in my mouth. I'm pretty open-minded, I enjoy sea-food, and I enjoy anchovies on my pizza. This did not prepare me for the frightening blast of salty fish atrocity that assaulted my tongue. I was stunned. How did people eat these? Were they served only at parties because you had to be drunk to enjoy them?

Anchovy balls should not be served at parties. Ever. They should be placed in the wild for animals to lick, or used to grout tile. They should not be consumed by anyone trying to have a good time, no matter how many cocktails you've had. If you serve these at a party your guests will run away and hate you forever. That being said, let's move on to our next delicacy, Tongue Mousse!

I know that people still cook regularly with cow tongue, but I never have. I had no idea what I was doing, and did not realize how expensive cow tongue is. Really, who knew cow tongue was so unreasonably priced? All I knew was that I needed two cups of ground tongue. We weren't sure how we were going to grind it. Perhaps if we had gone to the butcher we could have gotten the tongue already ground, but we went to Winco and bought a whole cow tongue. Everyone there thought we were weird and they had no interest in grinding it for us. Can you believe it? Also, cows have enormous tongues. Why do cows need all that tongue? I mean, look at that thing. It's huge.

Our first order of business was to cook the tongue. We decided to chop it into chunks and boil it on the stove. It was extremely gross to touch, it feels just like you'd expect it to, and was tough to saw through. We managed to get it into chunks and dropped into a pot of water to boil. That's when the magic happens!

Boiling tongue does some rather interesting things. For one thing, the aroma seemed to change from awful, to kind of good, to awful again. Also, all the tough or weird parts of the tongue separate and remove themselves from the main meat. We weren't sure if we were supposed to peel it or not, but it became obvious as the top parts hardened and turned white which parts we should remove. Then we had to turn it into ground tongue. Lydia suggested the blender, and while the thought of sticking chunks of cow tongue into the blender was kind of gross I agreed we had little choice. It blended a lot better than we expected.

While Lydia was grinding the meat I decided to prepare the gelatin. Since for the Tongue Mousse I only had an ingredients list and not a full recipe, I decided to use my new-found aspic skills to make my own recipe. I knew the gelatin was made with beef stock, but I decided the gelatin probably needed to be soften first, like when we made the ham and cheese loaf. I sprinkled gelatin onto cold water to let it soften (then was horrified when my photographer decided to stick her fingers in it), then prepared the beef stock to pour in.

Once the gelatin was dissolved I added the mayonnaise, seasoning, and chopped onions, then put the gelatin in the freezer to gel up a bit. Really, I'm turning into the aspic master at this point. When the tongue was good and ground, and the gelatin had gelled up nicely, we mixed the meat in and were ready to pour this foul-looking sludge into the mold.

There was no way we were waiting hours for this gelatin to set. The whole house smelled like fish balls and tongue, and at this point we'd rather just get this over and done with. We stuck the mold in the freezer and waited until we felt it was set enough. We'd done this enough times now we felt a little more comfortable taking short-cuts. There was a little concern when we used our warm water technique to loosen the gelatin from the mold and the gelatin didn't come out. We ended up having to submerge the mold in warm water three times before we finally got it out of the mold, but it came out beautifully. Frankly, it was probably our most successful-looking mold to date.

We didn't have any extravagant garnish planned out for this aspic, so Lydia decided the dried tip of the cooked cow tongue would make a lovely centerpiece.

Tongue Mousse does not have a bad flavor. The bad part about it is that it's basically cold meat Jell-O, and that makes it kind of weird and unappetizing. Flavor-wise, though, I thought it wasn't bad. I don't think Lydia agreed.

Photographs by *Tiare*

Creation #4: Deviled Hash: Feeding the Children Dog Food

2011-03-04T10:17:00.000-08:00

We had some special help for this retro food creation, my lovely guest model Betty Lou and photography provided by Tiare and Michal.

Today we decided to make Deviled Hash. Our original intent was to make Eggplant Parmigiano Americano, because of its ridiculous name and the fact that it looks like a casserole dish of cow pies floating in mud. However, when we went to the grocery store we were dismayed to discover that they had no eggplants. None. We even had a sales associate go look in the back and there were none to be found. It was shocking. I really felt like I was in the '50's, before genetically modified mutant food made all produce available no matter what time of year it is.

So. Sadly disappointed by a freak absence of eggplant our next idea was to make Deviled Hash, even though Michal had already started defrosting the hamburger required for the Eggplant Parmigiano Americano. We decided to just mix the corned beef hash the recipe calls for with the hamburger meat, hopefully improving the overall taste. We already had chili sauce leftover from the shrimp chili mold and some cheese, so all we needed to buy was the corn beef hash (at the end of the aisle hiding on the bottom shelf by the chili), eggs, and 'light cream'. However, we couldn't find any light cream so we went with half and half.

Our first step was making the deviled eggs. The only thing about this hash that makes it 'deviled' hash would be the deviled eggs, so they were an important step. According to Betty Lou, deviled eggs required mayo, mustard, salt, pepper, and pickle juice. We went with Miracle Whip because it's far superior to mayo despite Betty Lou's insistence that it was sacrilege, but otherwise went with Betty Lou's recipe. We took an unusually long time to make the deviled eggs, and made quite a mess in the process, but we finally finished and put them in the fridge until we needed them.

The next step was to mix the meat. The ground beef was dumped into a bowl and mixed together with the two cans of corned beef hash. Corned beef hash, for those who are unfamiliar, pretty much looks and smells like lumpy dog food. Betty Lou, being the trooper she is, volunteered to mix the meat.

Next we melted some butter and poured it into the bottom of our casserole dish. And, unfortunately, with three of us taking pictures and moving around in the kitchen, we completely forgot to add the cheese. I didn't even remember until probably 5 hours after the fact. I don't think it would have improved the recipe, but I suppose anything's possible. Instead of adding the cheese, we moved ahead and dumped the meat into the casserole dish.

We then pour the light cream (or half and half in this instance) over the top of the meat, and then pour the chili sauce over the top of that. Once this is done and the oven has been pre-heated to 400 degrees, it's time to pop the casserole in the oven and go out for a smoke break!

The smoke break is always the most important part of a retro housewife's day. She wanted a cocktail to go with it, but it wasn't even 5:00pm yet! Besides, we couldn't have her getting liquored up before we were finished. You can't cook if you're passed out!

Once our smoke break was finished and 30 minutes had gone by, it was time to take the casserole out of the oven. It was especially bubbly and greasy. Betty Lou placed the deviled eggs on top of the casserole, and then the oven was put on broil so that we could brown the eggs. The eggs didn't exactly brown evenly, so we ended up with a few blackened on the ends, but they were otherwise ok.

The final result looked like bubbling juicy dog food with deviled eggs on top. While Betty Lou looked terrific, the deviled hash did not look remotely appetizing to me at all. Unfortunately, for scientific purposes we would have to eat it.

So it tasted about as good as it looked. It was rather flavorless, and corned beef hash is just never going to be good no matter what you do to it. I have to say I pity the children of the '50's whose mothers served this mess to them. Betty Lou would only eat one bite, but Michal and I managed a small plate full. The leftovers will probably end up as actual dog food, as I doubt anyone will want to finish it, but we did take some to Betty Lou's boyfriend. He turned out to be the only person who genuinely like the hash, so I suppose even though we left out a key ingredient, got the eggs a little toastier than they were supposed to be, and made something that most people wouldn't eat on a dare, we can consider it a success because one person at least enjoyed our efforts.

Creation #3: Tuna Lima Bake: Hearty Food for Poor People!

2011-02-23T14:34:00.000-08:00

Are you poor, hungry, and suffering through a cold, bleak winter? Then flip open Good Housekeeping's Casserole Book from 1958 and try out the Tuna Lima Bake! Warm, hearty, and healthy, the Tuna Lima Bake may look like something scraped off the bottom of a ship, but it's the perfect way to feed cold hungry poor people in a hurry!

At around $12.00 for the ingredients (and probably less depending on what you have in your cupboard), the Tuna Lima Bake is our cheapest retro food experiment so far. It's also the easiest.

The first step is to mix cream of celery soup, a bag of frozen lima beans (thawed), and some canned tuna in a bowl. Once it's thoroughly mixed, it's time to pour the goop into a casserole dish. Good Housekeeping suggests: "Casseroles will be easier to clean if, before filling them, you grease them lightly with shortening or salad oil applied with waxed paper or a pastry brush." We didn't have shortening, or 'salad oil' or waxed paper or pastry brushes, so we just poured some vegetable oil in the bottom and swirled it around a bit. Then Lydia poured the mixture into the casserole dish.

The next step is optional, and was another tip from Good Housekeeping: "Try varying the toppings on your casserole dishes. Here are some suggestions: corn flakes, crackers, corn or potato chips, in gay designs or as crumbs." We didn't know any gay designs, so we just crumbled some Maui Sweet Onion chips across the top. Yes, this probably wasn't the most authentic topping to choose, but it was the first thing we saw when we opened the cupboard and it sounded yummy.

Our next step involves white bread and cheese. Once again, the recipe calls for American processed cheese, but I wanted real cheese and we already had real cheese without having to buy it, so that decided that. We did go with the white bread, though. It has to be toasted and then cut in half diagonally making triangles. You then cut some triangles of cheese to place on the triangles of toast, and then you can place them across the top of the casserole. Now it's ready for the oven.

The casserole takes about 45 minutes to bake. We were a little worried about the toast and cheese. We weren't sure how you could bake toast and cheese for 45 minutes without it blackening into charcoal, but it actually turned out amazing. The toast gets quite brown and hard, but the cheese gets all thick and melty, a truly delicious combination.

This casserole turned out to be wonderful. It was a nice warm and filling casserole, perfect for a cold winter night, and we both had two helpings. While the cheesy bread on top was probably the best part, the casserole was a nice, cheap way to have a good hearty meal when you're broke and cold.

Creation #2: Ham and Cheese Loaf (It's Not Going To Be Pretty)

2011-02-15T16:44:00.000-08:00

First off, I should probably mention my new model. I was thinking that it would add a little pizazz to my blog if I had a nice retro housewife model in my pictures. I discovered, though, that there's no way to convince a young woman to come to my house and let me take pictures of her that doesn't make me sound like a creep, so Michal came up with the solution. Let me introduce to you Lydia, my new retro housewife for my blog (at least until I get a new volunteer).

That being said, let's move on to today's creation. We decided on the ham and cheese loaf, another culinary gem from the Gel-Cookery Recipe Book, produced in the 1950's by the Knox Gelatin Company. I chose this one because it particularly grossed me out. Bits of ham and shreds of cheese suspended in unflavored gelatin with chunks of celery just did not sound appetizing to me at all, so I knew it would be a fun recipe to try.


Sprinkling gelatin over cold water

This gelatin recipe is a bit different from the last because for this recipe I had to soften the gelatin first. This is done by sprinkling the gelatin over some cold water and allowing it to (yep, you guessed it) soften. After the gelatin has softened and I had heated some water, I could pour the hot water into the softened gelatin and begin dissolving it. Since I was a little too fixated on making sure every last bit of gelatin was dissolved last time when we made the shrimp chili mold, I decided that Lydia could have the honor of dissolving the gelatin. Once it was completely dissolved, we could add some vinegar and salt, and put it in the freezer to chill. Once again, it needed to chill to unbeaten egg-white consistency before adding the remaining ingredients.


Lydia gets distracted

These included diced ham, shredded cheese, and diced celery. I discovered when I began trying to slice my ham that I had bought a pre-sliced ham. This is why it's always important to read the labels when buying ingredients. It didn't make much difference as far as the final result was concerned, but it is annoying to try and chop ham into perfect cubes when you've sliced it the wrong way than it was already sliced and everything just kind of falls apart on the cutting board. I noticed by this point that Lydia was getting a little distracted while we waited for the gelatin to chill, so I put her on celery duty while I measured out the correct amount of shredded cheese. The original recipe calls for American processed cheese (shredded) but I couldn't imagine how one even began to shred processed cheese, so I just got a bag of shredded cheddar.


'It's fine the way it is!'

We lost track of time, which can happen when you're cooking and trying to slice pre-sliced ham, so when I took the gelatin out of the freezer it was less like unbeaten egg whites and more like cold congealed mucus with lumps. I was disappointed, as this was the second time I had done this today. The first time I had just dumped it down the sink and had Lydia do it, but this time neither one of us felt like spending all afternoon making and re-making gelatin, so we decided to go with what we had.

The ham, cheese, and celery were all mixed into the gelatin, and then it was time to put it into the mold. For this recipe I decided to go with my round decorative antique copper mold with the fruit on top. You wouldn't be able to see the fruit design imprinted on clear gelatin, but this seemed like the mold for the job.

We would place the mold into the refrigerator and let it chill for at least 3 hours. Lydia was not thrilled about waiting 3 hours, but it had to be done. I had learned an important lesson last time about letting the mold chill properly and I was going to make sure I did.

This bring us to the garnish. They say that the elderly are supposed to be the voice of experience and wisdom, but obviously I found the one elderly person that wasn't. The old bat at the grocery store was wrong, everyone agreed that the white mystery balls in the picture were pearl onions, and now I was in trouble because I hadn't purchased pearl onions. I had purchased mayonnaise. Yes, some part of my brain thought it might actually be possible to form perfectly smooth balls out of mayonnaise. I'm here to tell you that it's not.

In fact, it's not possible to form mayonnaise into anything other than mayonnaise, although Lydia did have a good time trying. The best she could do was a pointy blob of mayonnaise, smeared all over a slice of tomato by the time she was done. This wouldn't work. Our next thought was cream cheese, and this turned out to be an inspired idea. Not only is cream cheese easily rolled into balls, when you're ready to eat all you have to do is spread it across the tomato and add some ham and cheese loaf.

When it was almost time to pull out the mold, we put several lettuce leaves down on the platter we would use for display, and then placed the tomato slices on each side. On top of the tomatoes were placed one cream cheese ball and a sprig of parsley. When it was time, we would just place the loaf onto the garnish. But first, we had to get it out of the mold...

Last time we had no idea what we were doing and made quite a mess of trying to get the gelatin out of the mold. This time we had learned from experience (and Googling), and felt confidant we knew what to do. I placed the mold into some warm water, and we then counted out 30 seconds while my roommate Mary stared at us like we were idiots. After 30 seconds I pulled the mold out, put a plate over it, and flipped it over. The loaf immediately slid out of the mold! It was an amazing triumph. We then slid the loaf onto the garnish, and I added one last touch: A toothpick upon with I had speared two olives stuck in the middle of the loaf.

My final words on the matter would have to be cold and slimy. While I think this would be an excellent summer dish, when it's hot and no one feels like using the oven, and you want something cool and light, then this would be the perfect dish. Otherwise, it's a cold slimy blob with bits of ham, cheese, and celery in it. While the tomato and cream cheese did add to its overall appeal, for the most part I wasn't impressed. Maybe I'll try it again in the summer and see what I think.

Mystery Balls

2011-02-11T12:15:00.000-08:00

The culinary atrocity you see before is not vomit shaped into a brick and beautifully garnished, it is in fact my next retro food experiment, the Ham and Cheese Loaf. However, I haven't quite got that far. Since in this instance I have a picture to go by I wanted to garnish it as close to the way it's garnished here. This led to my current dilemma.

As you can see, there seems to be lettuce in the front and back of the loaf, and then on each side we have slice of tomato, with a sprig of parsley, and....what? What is that? What is that slimy white ball on top of that tomato? Upon closer examination, my first theory was that they were pearl onions. This theory was shot down by a random 80-year-old woman I was bothering in the grocery store yesterday, who told me there was no way that those were pearl onions. She seemed quite adamant about that, although what she thought they were instead she wasn't so clear on.
"Perhaps they're hard-boiled egg halves."

Yeah, maybe hard-boiled quail eggs, because chicken eggs don't come that small. So much for the pearl onion theory. The next person I asked was the older woman who worked at the grocery deli, and she didn't know either, but her guess was yellow cherry tomatoes. I didn't think that they would be that shiny, and why would you garnish tomatoes with smaller tomatoes?

I got a more likely theory from the gal at Peet's coffee, who said it had to be balls of mayonnaise. Of course! They're shiny like mayonnaise and would be the right color. But how did they get the mayonnaise into such perfect round balls? Coffee girl suggested they used a melon-baller, but I would think the mayonnaise would just partially stick to the melon-baller and just plop a mess onto the tomato. Hmmm....

Using my great technological skills I was able to zoom in and produce this image, clearly showing and indicating the white balls in question. Are they perfectly sculpted balls of mayonnaise? Are they tomatoes garnished with smaller tomatoes? Are they tiny alien life-forms that attach themselves to garnishes to feed on their unsuspecting victims??

The next question that I'm usually asked when I interrupt a random stranger's day to ask them about garnish is, "Well, what does it say in the recipe?" Do people really believe that I would go to all the effort of asking a total stranger their opinion on the matter if it clearly said in the recipe what they were? All the recipe says is 'unmold on salad greens and serve with salad dressing,' which I believe translates to, "dump on lettuce and serve with mayonnaise.' That supports the mayonnaise theory.

With any luck Michal and I will be attempting to make the Ham and Cheese Loaf soon, but until then does anybody else have any theories about what those slimy white balls might be?

Creation #1: Shrimp Chili Mold a.k.a 'Whale Poop'

2011-02-09T23:02:00.001-08:00

My inspiration for this blog was a book I discovered at my local library, The Gallery of Regrettable Food. This was a entertaining look at some of the more interesting culinary creations of the 50's and 60's, culled from a variety of old cookbooks. While I was horrified by a lot of these concoctions and amused by all of them, I wished the book included all the recipes. Sure, some of the recipes were in there, but for the most part they weren't because that wasn't the point of the book. Of course, being the strange person that I am, I felt determined to find some of these old cookbooks for myself so that I could actually make these dishes and horrify my friends and family with my efforts. Who wouldn't?

Last week I took a tour of some of my local area antiques stores (which were fantastic). After a lot of digging through every ridiculous thing that could possibly be considered an antique I started finding some treasures. Among them, several wonderful jelly molds, including three old but solid copper molds and a rather plain round mold. I also found a whole stack of old booklets for all kinds of frightening recipes. I decided my friend and unwilling guinea pig Michal and I would make something right away, and we decided on Shrimp Chili Mold, from a booklet called 'Gel-Cookery Recipe Book.'

Shrimp Chili Mold was picked because it sounded particularly repellent. Its ingredients included shrimp (fully-cooked fresh or canned), chili sauce, lemon juice, pickle relish, and gelatin. Yummy.

Also, I decided that we would also make some egg-and-olive penguins. These adorable little garnishes were apparently all the rage in the '50's, and when I saw them I had to make them.

At the grocery store we were particularly delighted to discover that Knox brand unflavored gelatin, which the recipe called for, was still the unflavored gelatin of choice today. The rest of the ingredients were fairly easy to find, but then we had to decide about the shrimp. Should we go with real shrimp or canned? Which would be cheaper? We considered the canned shrimp for awhile. I didn't even know there was such a thing as canned shrimp, but I was sure it would add character to the recipe. Unfortunately, canned shrimp is surprisingly expensive, especially considering the quality of the product, and it was cheaper to go with a bag of frozen shrimp from the seafood department.

Once we were in the kitchen with our purchases, I set Michal to work hard-boiling some eggs and defrosting the shrimp while I began mixing the dry ingredients for the mold. The dry ingredients would be 1 envelope of Knox unflavored gelatin, salt, more sugar than I would have reasonably expected, and cayenne pepper (which is expensive, especially when you only need a dash). Once these were mixed thoroughly I could add hot water to the mixture, stirring until the gelatin was completely dissolved. I have always been a little worried about dissolving gelatin. I think this stems from an early teenage attempt to make Jell-O that went horribly wrong because of undissolved gelatin. Anyway, I was very determined to dissolve the hell out of that gelatin.

As I mixed gelatin, Michal mixed me up some chili sauce and lemon juice, and then turned his attention back to the eggs. He had finished hard-boiling them and was now peeling them.

When I felt as though the gelatin was quite dissolved it was time to pour in the chili sauce/lemon juice mix, creating a rather unappetizing blood-like mixture in the bottom of the bowl. This was then to be put into the fridge to chill until it was the consistency of 'unbeaten egg whites.' This would give me time to help with the construction of the penguins.

With the penguins I had no instructions, I just knew it involved eggs, olives, and toothpicks. How hard could that be? Not very. An olive is speared into the top of the egg to form the head of the penguin, and then half olives are speared into the sides of the egg for wings or flippers or whatever penguins have. The beak is usually pimiento and the feet could be anything. Michal creatively decided to use cheese for both.

Bits of cheese were cut into little triangles for the feet and a little triangle for the beak, and with that our penguins were complete. I'm not sure why we needed to make three, but it probably was because they were just so darn cute.

Throughout this process I checked on the gelatin mixture on a very regular basis. I wanted to make sure that I didn't remove it until it was absolutely the consistency of unbeaten egg whites and nothing more or less, because I was sure the success or failure of this recipe would depend on it. The mixture tended to gel from the outside first so it would get a gooey ring around it but be pretty much liquid otherwise. After awhile, though, it slowly started getting to that perfect snot-like texture it needed to be, and it was time to add the shrimp. I poured in the shrimp and mixed them in as evenly as possible, then poured the whole frightening mess into the jelly mold chosen for this experiment, a round decorative copper one that I thought might be too big, but I think it was an excellent choice (or would have been had this not been such an interesting learning experience). Once it was in the mold, I smoothed over the top, making sure the shrimp were evenly distributed and none were sticking out, and put the whole thing in the freezer. I was at Michal's house, using his kitchen, and really didn't feel like being there all night, even if it was in the interest of science. We felt putting it in the freezer would expedite the matter.

Doesn't that look delicious?

Now we had to wait. Ideally, a good three hours of firming (or even more ideally overnight) would have been best, but like I said, I had better things to do that evening. Besides, what were we supposed to do with ourselves while we were waiting for gelatin to set? Play with our penguins?

That was, however, to be our first step towards disaster. Or at least less than perfection. However, this was my first attempt at making anything gelatin-related, and it was to be a learning experience. I was sure perfection would come in time.

I checked on the mold several times and finally decided that it was firm enough to be done. It could have been a lot firmer, but I figured it would be close enough for the purposes of our experiment. This is where we ran into snag #1: How to get the gelatin out of the mold. We seemed to think it would just slide right out onto the plate, and we were disappointed to discover that this wasn't the case. We placed a plate on top of the mold and flipped it over, setting it on the counter, and slowly lifted the mold. Nothing came out. Hmmm...

This is when I made the terrible decision to try helping it along with a rubber spatula. All this essentially did was ruin the lovely design that would have appeared on the sides of the mold and effectively make the whole thing smaller. It also didn't make the gelatin move at all.

Michal, always ready to surprise me, said he thought he once heard something about putting it in warm water to loosen the gelatin. This sounded like an excellent idea, and we tried it at once. While it floated around in the sink of hot water we chatted and cleaned up a little bit, losing track of time. When we decided we'd given enough time to really loosen up we pulled the mold out of the sink to discover that the hot water had helped to further melt my already less-than-firm gelatin into a rather soggy mess. We decided to put it back into the freezer for awhile to firm it back up.

While we waited for it to chill again, we went online to Google the correct way to loosen a gelatin from it's mold. Michal basically had the right idea, but was fuzzy on the details. The water has to be warm, but not too warm, and we're only supposed to put it in the water for about 30 seconds. Good to know. See? It was a learning experience.

A little while later we decided it was at least as firm as it had been before we melted it, so it was time to loosen that gelatin. This time we did it properly, following the directions online, and it still turned a bit soupy. At this point, however, I was getting tired and ready to be done, so we decided to proceed. I effectively removed what was left of our gelatin ring and slid it onto a plate. That's when I realized for presentation it needed to be on the romaine leaves we had specifically bought for this purpose. Annoyed, I quickly arrange some leaves onto a cutting board and Michal took over the tricky task of getting the gelatin ring from the plate onto the lettuce without breaking the ring and ruining the whole thing once and for all. i couldn't even watch I was so sure it was doomed, but somehow he managed. Our last part of the job was to arrange the penguins, and at last we had our complete presentation of our completed Shrimp Chili Mold:

While it had turned out runnier and smaller than it should have, I now knew how to do it properly and could perfect it in the future. I would let it set for the full time allotment or overnight, I would make sure to remove the gelatin from the mold properly, and I would make sure I had prepared a proper spot for it to go once removed from the mold. For my first time, I thought our Shrimp Chili Mold looked magnificent. Michal thought it looked like 'whale poop.'

It was now for the second part of our experiment: the taste test!

Michal, being the brave little guinea pig that he is, was first to try our creation. Here he is, all ready to try his first bite of Shrimp Chili Mold. This would be his last smile for the evening.

To be fair, Michal is not especially fond of shrimp, and I'm not sure why he agreed this would be a good recipe to start with. The whole process revolted him with the exception of the penguins, which he was especially fond of making.

I was starting to get grossed out just watching him begin to eat it. The expressions on his face just seemed to get worse and worse...

I think we can safely say that Michal did not enjoy this particular dish. At all. What's peculiar about the situation is that after that first bite he continued to eat what was on his plate. He had found it absolutely disgusting, and yet for some inexplicable reason he continued to eat it.

Then it was my turn!
And believe it or not I thought it was pretty good. While making it and then when eating it, it was obvious that this was really just shrimp cocktail all mixed up together and held together with gelatin, and that's exactly what it tasted it like. In fact, it was surprisingly flavorful and tasty. While Michal may not agree, I think this was actually a very good dish that I would probably make again, not only to horrify friends and family members, but to also enjoy the wonderful and tasty dish that is the Shrimp Chili Mold. I think it would be especially good served with crackers.