Mimsy Were the Borogoves

How long could you hold your hand in this oven?

TDLR: If all you came here for was to quickly choose a temperature equivalent to “quiet oven”, try 325° to 350°.

One of the problems we run into when trying to use cookbooks from the 1800s and earlier is how completely different their environment was from ours. They make assumptions about what the reader is familiar with that are often for all practical purposes a complete inversion over our own experience.

In A Centennial Meal I provided an 1876 cornbread recipe, but I modified the recipe to be baked. The original recipe…

…involves steaming the cornbread rather than baking it, which is likely to be an entirely different texture! It would also be more work and not something I’d want to do in July in Texas. It highlights a big difference between today and 1876: it was probably easier in some cases to boil bread then than it was to start up the oven, get it to the right point in the oven’s cooling process, and bake.

Stoves in the past required fire. It required starting a fire and then managing a fire. You can see something similar in the instructions for making tapioca custard in Mrs. Winslow’s Domestic Receipt Book for 1876. Instead of cooking the tapioca for several minutes, her French Tapioca Custard soaks it in cold water for five hours. The latter takes a lot more time and planning, but it also doesn’t require starting a fire and getting it just right.

Similarly, you almost never see the phrase “room temperature” in older recipes. Everything’s already at room temperature, or close to it. The difficulty with butter or milk isn’t softening it or souring it. The difficulty is keeping it firm or “sweet”. Older recipes call for sweet milk because sweet milk is difficult. By default, butter is soft. By default, milk goes sour.

This leads to other things that older recipe authors don’t mention, such as not telling the reader how much salt to add. The problem for a nineteenth century dish is not making sure there’s enough salt. It’s making sure there isn’t too much. Salt is in everything. In the absence of refrigeration, salt is one of the most common preservatives. It’s in everything from butter to meat to vegetables. The cook already knew they had to remove salt, not add it.

42 Tested Recipes for Stoy Soy Flour (PDF File, 5.3 MB), from 1943, is different from the alternative grain cookbooks I have from the fifties. Cooking with Wholegrains (1951) and El Molino Best (1953) were part of the whole grain movement among whole grain mills. Stoy Soy Flour appears at first glance to be just another soybean product from A. E. Staley Mfg. Co. But A. E. Staley is not the same kind of mill as El Molino Mills and especially not the the same kind as the Orton’s Vermont Country Store.

As an example of how much Staley differed from whole grains producers, they would later become pioneers in the introduction of high fructose corn syrup to other producers such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi. That’s a far cry from El Molino Mills, who appear to have excised any mention of syrup from their ingredients!

A. E. Staley was a bulk food processor from about 1906 through the late eighties. As far as I can tell, they only marketed soy flour during World War II. If this pamphlet can be used as a guide, they did it specifically to provide a non-rationed protein alternative to meat, milk, eggs, and cheese during World War II.

Soy Flour is one of the world’s five great protein foods. Meat, milk, eggs and cheese are the other four. Wartime needs, due to military and lend-lease requirements, are taking large quantities of these common protein foods. Therefore, STOY is meeting a great need for a new source of protein in the diet.

Staley left the soy flour business after the war ended. It remained popular in the whole grains movement well into the 21st century but today even specialty flour companies such as Bob’s Red Mill have stopped making it. Soy flour is often one of the many legume-based flours available from Indian grocers. That’s where I get it.

Evaporated milk mayonnaise whisks easily and quickly.

I generally dislike mayonnaise, and usually try to avoid it. I also tend to avoid even good recipes that use mayonnaise, because it means I’m going to have a jar of mayonnaise sitting in the refrigerator for several months and probably over a year, unused. That means that I almost always only have egg salad sandwiches and chicken salad sandwiches, two of my favorites, when I’m eating out.

National Sandwich Day is on Friday, and this year’s National Sandwich Day post will fix that problem.

Most mayonnaise recipes call for eggs. Even the one-egg versions make more mayonnaise than I need or want. What ends up happening is that when I do make a recipe that calls for mayonnaise, I start making other recipes that call for mayonnaise until I run out.

So when I saw this recipe for mayonnaise in Mary Lee Taylor’s Tempting Low Cost Meals, I was intrigued. Unlike most mayonnaise recipes, there is nothing indivisible in this one. That, in fact, is the point of the book: the subtitle is “for 2 or 4 or 6” and most recipes include a variation for two people, for four people, and for six people. The recipes are meant specifically to make great meals with little to no leftovers.

It’s a fascinating book.

Most of the time, the difference between the two or three variations is that the book does all of the math for you. In this recipe, simply double or triple the amounts for the four- or six-person version. There are minor variations, but I suspect they’re just to make the measurements easier rather than because of any changes made necessary by the change in quantity. For example, it calls for ¼ teaspoon pepper instead of 3⁄16 teaspoons in the six-person version, and it calls for ⅓ cup evaporated milk instead of six tablespoons in the four-person version¹.

This cover, and the back cover, are a large part of why I decided to do print reproductions.

I’ve added a new section to The Padgett Sunday Supper Club explicitly listing all of my print cookbooks in one place. Mainly this is to help you avoid excess shipping charges from Lulu if you enjoy reproductions of old cookbooks. All of the vintage reproductions, and most of the custom cookbooks, are available on Lulu.com.

If I wrote the book, it will be on both Amazon and Lulu. Reproductions will only be on Lulu. While Amazon does apparently allow books without the submitter’s name on the cover, they will also delay such books with questions. Navigating that sort of bureaucratic hassle is something I try to avoid.

Further, Amazon requires a bar code on the cover and I want to keep the cover reproductions clean. Some of them are quite beautiful. My first true reproduction is The Horsford Cook Book that I featured in A Centennial Meal for the Sestercentennial. It’s a wonderful book with some wonderful recipes. It’s the reason I decided to try printing reproductions. It’s not just that the recipes are great recipes, but the front and back cover are beautiful. At six inches by nine, I’ve published it larger than the original’s 3-⅝ inches by 5-½. If you enjoy putting such things on your walls, you may want to separate the cardstock cover and use the front and back as posters.

Since publishing reproductions via Lulu seems to work well I’ll be doing it with several other books I intend to feature in the future.

After posting A Centennial Meal back in June, I’ve made one more recipe from the Horsford book. I had six egg yolks left over from some Italian pudding and decided to try out a couple of gold cakes. I made the gold cake from Horsford and another gold cake from the 1926 Rumford Recipes for Cake and Cookie Making sliding cookbook.

“I remembered something my dad told me,” Doucette said. “He had a cooking show on NBC television for years… he knew the business. He said to me, ‘Be yourself, and nobody else. Don’t be an imitator; be a creator.’ Those words always stuck with me.”—Eddie Doucette III

In February I chatted for a few hours with sportscaster Eddie Doucette about his father the chef, whose recipes I’ve collected in Tempt Them with Tastier Foods.

“I think most people don’t remember Eddie Doucette the cook,” his son said toward the end of our talk.

Most people if they remember anything with the name Doucette it would be because of my more recent time in the media. It’s a shame, that someone like him who was truly a legend in his profession, that there’s not much notoriety for him today.

That certainly seems to be the case. The 1985 Chicago Celebrity Cookbook by Ann Gerber doesn’t include any mention of Eddie Doucette. Nor does Mike Douglas’s 1969 The Mike Douglas Cookbook, even though by then Eddie had made several appearances on the show.

When I first ran across the name, it was atop a few pages of recipes a viewer had typed up from his Chicago-area television show, Eddie Doucette’s Home Cooking.

He had savoir faire, that ability to make you want to sit up and move closer to the TV, grab a paper and pencil and start writing it down.

Despite the title of the show being typed across the top of the documents, the eBay seller I bought them from thought it was from an old defunct restaurant—probably because that’s the only food-related hit that came up in an Internet search on Eddie’s name.

New England

The earliest reference to Chef Eddie Doucette that I can find is the 1940 census for Felchville-Natick (JPEG Image, 1.0 MB), Massachusetts. His occupation is listed as “Chef” at a “private school”. He has a wife Teresa, and a son Edward. The Doucettes are 26, 24, and 2 years old, respectively. He’s working year-round (52 weeks a year) and full-time (48 hours a week). He makes $2,080 annually. They’re living on 7 Atherton Street in Natick.

Except for the Date Sticks the recipes aren’t impressive (so far). But the presentation is fascinating.

I have no idea how recipe-based advertising campaigns were designed in the heyday of promotional recipe books at the beginning of the twentieth century. One of the best such recipes I’ve seen is a Dromedary/Hills Brothers recipe for maple coconut candies, which I’ll be talking about later when I get to some of those cookbooks. It was one of three recipes in an ad for their Dromedary Fresh Keeping Cocoanut, a coconut-in-a-can product.¹ It’s an amazing candy, and yet I’ve never seen it in any of the contemporary Dromedary cookbooks. Did they have separate recipes for their ads? If so, how would they choose which goes in a book and which in an ad? Would they use their best recipes in the ads or in the cookbooks?

Presumably, they had their own ideas about advertising. And, like oven terminology their ideas were different than ours in profound ways. One of the most fascinating relics of the era are these two sliding recipe cards from the Rumford Company. Recipes for Cake and Cookie Making is from 1926, and Recipes for Biscuits, Muffins, Rolls, Etc. doesn’t have a copyright date but, judging from the code, is from 1929.

Three different kinds of potato chip cookies: sandies, brown sugar, and chocolate chip.

National Potato Day is Monday. You might think that I would eventually run out of unique ways to highlight potatoes on their special day. That is the retrograde thinking of someone who does not appreciate the wonders of potatoes. If you feel that way, you might as well stop reading now!

This year I have a very unique cookie from the seventies, made with a very different potato chip than they would have been made with then. Back in the seventies and even early eighties, these would have been made with everyday thin potato chips, such as Lay’s or an off-brand, or, perhaps, to use up the dregs of a Charles Chips can before the next can arrived. By the time you got to the bottom of the can, they were pre-crushed, perfect for baking!

One of the amazing potato innovations over my lifetime has been the slow takeover of the potato chip industry by kettle-style chips. They’re better all around: crunchier, greasier, and more flavorful. I don’t know specifically when they first started appearing, but I do remember the first time I had a real kettle-style chip. It was in Los Angeles in 1990, on one of the side streets connecting Hollywood and Sunset. The chips were “Krunchers! Jalapeño Chips”, cooked in peanut oil. They had just a faint flavor of peanuts to go along with the jalapeños, something that Borden, sadly, viewed as a flaw and corrected soon after.

I always wondered where these chips were going… (Ezrawolfe, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

When I tell people that I want to stop acquiring more cookbooks and start using the ones I already have, this is one of the things I mean: researching weird cooking through the ages. About a year ago last April, I was looking over the clearance rack at one of the grocery stores I frequent, probably Big Lots!, and I came across a bunch of kettle-style jalapeño potato chips for $0.62. It reminded me that I’ve been wanting to try one of the ostensibly stranger cookie recipes that I see regularly in community cookbooks, potato chip cookies.

It occurred to me that if potato chip cookies are good, jalapeño potato chip cookies would be even better.

Why did I write A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book (PDF File, 10.0 MB) (also available in print on Amazon^• and on Lulu)? This is not why: a few years ago, a friend told me after a particularly great vintage dish I’d made for game night, that:

“You should write a cookbook.”

“Would you really want a cookbook filled with other people’s recipes?”

“Yes.”

This was, of course, a clamor of one, and did not result in my writing a cookbook. It only provided the working title—Other People’s Recipes—and that only after I’d come up with a focus for the book.

It may not be obvious browsing through the recipes, but this is a very focused and specific book.

Despite the fact that I enjoy finding obscure cooking pamphlets and making them public again, I have never had any desire to write my own cookbook. My focus was in scanning these old cookbooks so that they’re available for anyone to download and enjoy.

But I did have one habit that allowed me to share my favorite recipes for making while traveling. When I found a recipe that I particularly wanted to remember while visiting friends and family, I would photograph the recipe and keep the photograph on my phone and tablet. This meant not only that I’d be able to make it while traveling, but that when a particularly popular dish elicited requests for the recipe, I was able to easily share it.