Archive for the 'desserts' Category

Appetite City: Baked Alaska

Published on October 6, 2011 in 19th century, alaska, desserts, ice cream and new york. 0 Comments

Appetite City: Fine Dining. My demo starts at 12:35

Ok. So mine is maybe not the prettiest Baked Alaska. And sometimes, I show my colors as still being a young cook. Like when I dump my carefully crafted dessert all over the floor. Oh well–at least I’m honest about it.

The history of how Baked Alaska came to be is a little loosey goosey, as origin stories for the most famous dishes tend to be. We do know that at the turn of the 19th century, scientists discovered the insulatory properties of egg whites. Cooks seized on this idea, and began creating Baked Alaska-like dishes in the first half of the 19th century. But Chef Charles Ranhofer, the gifted head of the Delmonico’s kitchen, seems to be the one that perfected and popularized it. Allegedly, it was served at a dinner celebrating the purchase of Alaska in 1867, and the popularity of this fantastic new dish sky-rocketed over the next century, peaking sometime in the 1950s.

Making a good, old-fashioned “Alaska, Florida” has a hella lot steps, and the end result doesn’t taste that great. It was waaaay super sweet. I think this is one of those instances when you should look up a modern version of the old classic. The dessert is worth cooking up in a simpler form: the combination of hot meringue and cold ice cream seems like magic and will really impress your friends.

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Alaska, Florida (Baked Alaska)

From the Epicurian, published 1893.
And Martha Stewart Living.Small yellow cakes
Apricot marmalade
4 bananas
1 qt heavy cream
1 ¼ lb sugar
½ vanilla bean
6 egg whites
1 tsp cream of tarter

1. Cake base: Make your favorite yellow cake recipe in advance, baking it in cupcake tins or ramekins, depending on the size of your ice cream molds. Remove the cakes from the tins, level the tops, then cut a depression into the center of each cake. Fill depression with apricot marmalade.

2. To Make Banana Ice Cream: Mash 4 banana to a pulp; Mix with 1 pt heavy cream and ½ lb sugar. Stir until the sugar is dissolved. Put into an ice cream maker until frozen soft. Pour, or scoop, into a conical ice cream mold until mold is halfway full. Freeze until frozen hard.

3. To Make Vanilla Ice Cream: Infuse ½ a vanilla bean in ¼ cup milk by gently heating on a stove top burner. Combine with 1 pt heavy cream and ¼ lb sugar; stir until sugar in dissolved. Freeze in an ice cream maker until frozen soft.

4. When banana ice cream is hard, remove from freezer and pour vanilla ice cream over top, until the mold is filled. Return to freezer and freeze until hard.

5. To make meringue: Combine egg whites, remaining sugar, and cream of tartar in the heatproof bowl of electric mixer, and place over a saucepan filled with water. Heat over stove-top like a double boiler, whisking constantly until the sugar has dissolved and the egg whites are warm to the touch, 3 to 3 1/2 minutes. Transfer bowl to electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, and whip starting on low speed and gradually increasing to high until stiff, glossy peaks form, about 10 minutes.

6. Preheat oven to 500 degrees. Unmold ice cream, and place on top of cake. Fill a pastry bag with meringue; encase ice cream and cake in meringue

7. Bake in a 500 degree oven for 2 minutes. Serve immediately

***

Be sure to watch the episode to see me demo the whole thing, from start to finish!

Events: Bake for a Good Cause?

Published on September 28, 2011 in baking, desserts and events. 2 Comments

The City Reliquary, a charming little museum in Brooklyn, is hosting a bake sale benefit. Care to bake and donate some love? It’s worth it; I donated historic baked goodies two years ago, and it literally launched my career. This author of this blog post and the director of this video both encountered my treats for the first time at this bake sale. Countless other connections have been made, just because I delivered a few cookies to help a great museum.

Details below.

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I wanted to let all of you know about a really fun event to benefit the City Reliquary Museum.

It’s called the Havemeyer Sugar Sweets Festival, a bake sale, baking competition and celebration of baked goods.

When? Saturday, Oct 15 from 10am to 4pm
Where? The City Reliquary, located at 370 Metropolitan Avenue (between Havemeyer and Roebling)

Um, What? The City Reliquary is an all-volunteer museum that celebrates everyday New Yorkers and everyday New York history. The Reliquary hosts rotating exhibitions by local artists, historians and schoolkids; weekly events; education programs; and annual block parties. The Reliquary also collects utterly unique bits of New York history. http://www.cityreliquary.org/

How Can I Help?

1. Donate Baked Goods!

We are looking for bakers and sweets-makers (you!) to donate their fresh-baked yummies to the Festival.

Cookies, cupcakes, brownies, bars, tarts, quick breads…any fresh baked treat is welcome. All proceeds will go toward the City Reliquary.
2. Enter The Best Baked Goods competition!

Are you the city’s best home baker? Strut your stuff! We will be determining the:

Best Cookie
Best Brownie/bar
Best Cupcake
Most New York baked good

A team of professional bakers will judge your treats. We will award great prizes to all winners. Please be sure to bring enough treats to enter the competition and to sell.

3. Come and pig out!. There will be plenty of treats to try!

Questions? Please contact Jeff Tancil at jtancil@yahoo.com

Going Vegan Day 5: A Vegan Feast!

Published on September 20, 2011 in 20th century, desserts, dinner party, vegan, vegetables and vegetarian. 2 Comments

Nut Roast!

I kept breakfast and lunch simple today: oatmeal with soy milk in the morning; almond butter on coconut bread with banana slices for lunch. The coconut bread was really tasty, and also a throwback to the 1910 cookbook.

Cocoanut Bread – 1 lb. whole wheat flour, 1 lb. white flour, ½ lb. cocoanut meal, some cane sugar.

I used 1 cup of cane sugar for this recipe, and the coconut shreds I used were also sweetened. I also added 1 tsp of baking powder. The bread was delicious!

In the evening, I opened my doors to 13 guests ready to given veganism a try. Some were seasoned vegan veterans, some were hardened omnivores. The Menu:

First Course
Autumn Salad
Shaved Cabbage, Grated Beets and Apples, Mint, Lemon Juice and Toasted Walnuts.

Second Course
Semolina Soup
with Mizuna greens

Third Course
Pine Nut Roast
with Sauteed Spinach and Spaghetti Squash

Fourth Course
Continental Tart
Coconut Bread with Homemade Blackberry and Blueberry Lime Jam
or Malt Syrup

The first course was another salad recommended in Henderson’s 1945 book. It was light, refreshing, and delicious. The second course was the Semolina Soup I made earlier this week, flavored with Marmite. Everyone was bowled over by the soup, and wanted the recipe to make it at home. I passed around the Marmite jar for everyone to ogle.

The third course was Nut Roast, adapted from the 1910 recipe I made earlier this week, with some adjustments according to Henderson’s 1945 recipe. Henderson gives several suggestions as to how her basic recipe can be served; I roasted mine in individual portions, and served it on top of spinach and spaghetti squash.

When I mixed this recipe, I simply put a bowl on top of my kitchen scale. I dumped the ingredients in one at a time and weighed as I went along. Below, is my adapted version of the recipe. I used dried herbs from my mother’s garden.

***
Nut Roast

8 oz pine nuts, coarsely chopped if large.
8 oz bread crumbs
1 large onion, chopped
4 medium tomatoes, skinned and pulverized.
2 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp oregano
1 tsp basil
1 tsp sage
2 tsp parsley
1 tsp salt
1 tsp fresh ground pepper

1. Use hands to mix all ingredients, added a little water or vegetable stock if there is not enough liquid. Press into a pie plate or individual ramekins. Bake at 375 degrees for 20 minutes, or until the top is browned.

***

The nut roasts, cooked in individual star-shaped ramekins, delighted my guests. For the vegans, it was the first time they had ever had a nut roast, and were excited to try it. One guest, who went to school in Scotland, informed us that nut roasts are still a common vegetarian option, at least in her school cafeteria.

And for dessert, I served an apple Continental Tart, also from Henderson’s book.

Continental Tart!

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Continental Tart

For the Crust:

5 oz. whole wheat flour
5 oz. breadcrumbs
5 oz Soy baking butter substitute
5 oz brown sugar
2 oz ground almonds (I ran almonds in my food processor until coarsely ground)
Lemon Juice

For the Filling:

6 medium baking apples
1/2 cup mixed, dried fruit
1/2 cup apple cider
1-2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp fresh ground nutmeg.

1. Combine all ingredients in a bowl, adding enough lemon juice to make a dough. Leave overnight in the refrigerator, then press into the bottom and sides of a round cake or pie pan. Bake at 375 degrees for 15-20 minutes, until crust is puffy and brown.

2. In the meantime, pare and core apples, and slice them into 1/4 wide slices. Cook, covered, over medium heat with spices, fruit and cider until tender. Pour into baked crust and set aside.

3. 15 minutes before serving, place tart in the oven at 375 degrees for 10 minutes. Allow to cool 5 minutes; cut and serve.

***

The tart was also a big hit, provoking inquiries about the contents of the crust. Margarine, I discovered, is not vegan! It has whey in it! So be sure to use a soy spread (or butter, if it doesn’t matter to you.)

We had a second dessert of slices of coconut bread, spread with some of my mother’s homemade jam (Blueberry Lime and Blackberry) or dribbles of malt syrup, which the vegans had never heard of before and were very enthusiastic about.

Our dinner table conversation turned to the origins of veganism, as well as why people do or don’t go vegan today. ”It’s not cheap,” a vegan friend admitted. ”It can be very expensive to choose vegan products.” We went on the discuss that a lot of the methods that allow the cheap production of food are also the methods that can be deemed unethical, like caged hen production of eggs. I pointed out that perhaps it was a policy change that was needed: “We’d all like to be buying cruelty free, hormone free milk, but I don’t think anyone in my neighborhood could afford it.”

“We don’t need to drink as much milk as we consume,” he answered. He suggested consuming less of a better quality, but that “…It can be different if we’re talking about trying to feed your family of four.”

The conversation danced around a variety of topics, but focused on the food, and ideals, at hand. There was a discussion about the “preachiness” and “pushiness” associated with veganism. A dear friend and long-time vegan attended, who was the inspiration for the entire experiment. He piqued my interest in vegan cuisine without ever pressing upon me the ideals behind veganism; he let me start asking those questions myself, and I admire him for it. He amicable joked about the outspokenness of the vegan movement : “How do you know the vegan at a dinner party? Don’t worry, he’ll tell you.”

We talked about the difficulties of finding vegan products: for example, learned that filtered wine is not vegan; it uses isinglass, an extract from the swim bladders of fishes. Animal products appear in the most unlikely of places.

And most of all, we talked about how delicious the food was. Everyone who attended, vegan, vegetarian, or omnivore all agreed the dishes were excellent, and asked for recipes for each one. All said they would make these foods again, just for the pleasure of them. And then my friend Emily rose to give a toast:

“Lohman,” she said, raising a glass of vegan wine high, “Every time I get invited over for dinner, I’m always worried. It’s always like, ‘come eat my beaver’ or my bear or my vegan food or whatever. And I always think ‘Eeee…Well, at least the company will be good.’ But then I come, and the food is always, always delicious. You have an amazing talent for making bizarre foods taste amazing.”

We cheersed, and spent the rest of the evening guzzling bottles of wine. The next day, my boyfriend and I broke our vegan fast in the evening with sloppy joes and chocolate chip cookies.

There is a lot of debate, and a lot of passion, surrounding the topic of veganism. I’ve enjoyed this past week, but I would not adopt veganism forever. My line of work is food and I feel I would never want to limit myself in regards to what I can and cannot eat. Additionally, I do believe an ethical, omnivorous diet is possible. I will continue to respect and admire my vegan friends, and this project has inspired other to try out veganism: my friends Sharon and Kathy are going vegan this week, you can follow their adventures here.

I think I’m going to leave it at that, but I’m really curious to hear from you, dear readers: What do you think of veganism?

The Gallery: Coffee Puffets; Delmonico’s Pudding

Published on March 4, 2011 in 19th century, 20th century, desserts and gallery. 2 Comments

A few pages from the beginning of the journal, where Annie S. Bush wrote her recipes.

History Dish Mondays: Strawberry Cakes

Published on August 3, 2010 in desserts, fruit and Uncategorized. 2 Comments

The possible origin point of the strawberry shortcake.

I work on Saturdays and my morning path to mass transit takes me past the Roosevelt Island Greenmarket. It’s run by a friendly Mennonite family, which is a sight for sore eyes for this Midwestern girl. And it’s always stocked with the freshest, most delicious produce I have ever had.

Recently, the pints of bright red, sunshine-grown strawberries have been screaming at me to take them home. So I handed over my dollars and bought them – because I wanted to try this recipe for Strawberry Cakes.

This recipe comes from Eliza Leslie’s 1847 cookbook The Lady’s Receipt Book. It’s the oldest recipe I’ve found that resembles modern day strawberry shortcake: biscuits layered with mashed strawberries and topped with frosting.

This recipe contains some lovely bits of prose: ”Rub with your hands the butter into the flour, til the whole is crumbled fine…Knead the dough til it quits your hands, and leaves them clean.” It’s a beautifully written recipe, although the paragraph form renders it a bit impractical.

I was intrigued by how this recipe treated the fresh strawberries: “Have ready a sufficient qauntity of ripe strawberries, mashed and made very sweet with powdered white sugar…the strawberries, not being cooked, will retain all their natural flavor.”

Cutting out the biscuits/cookies.

When I prepped the dough, it came together very quickly; it was easy and kinda fun. But I did notice that there was no leavining in the recipe: no baking power or yeast to make it rise! After I cut the biscuits and baked them, they came out of the oven looking very much as they had gone in: flat. I was worried they would be too dense and the berry sandwich would not work at all. I thought that if you tried to take a bite, the berries would moosh out all over.

But here’s where I was surprised: instead of being rock hard, the biscuits were buttery and crumbly. Both in taste and texture, they resembled short bread cookies; which makes a lot of sense of of the name “strawberry short cake.” It’s interesting that we’ve replaced these buttery disks with pound cake, angel food cakes, or a fluffy biscuit.

The cookie crumbled and mixed with the berries and frosting. I ate my short cake sandwich moments after spreading it with strawberries and frosting it. I was worried that the strawberry juice would make the cookies mushy and gross. I was wrong again: when berries soak into the shortbread rounds, it makes for an even happier marriage of fruit and cake. Try for yourself:

***
Strawberry Cakes
From The Lady’s Receipt Book by Eliza Leslie Philadelphia: Carey And Hart, 1847.

4 Cups Flour
4 Sticks Butter
2 Large Eggs (or 3 Medium Eggs)
3 Tablespoons White Sugar
Super Fine Sugar (to taste)
1 Pint Strawberries

1. Preheat over to 450 degrees. Rub butter into the flour with your hands, much as you would when making pie crust, until it crumbles.

2. Beat egg until light in color, then whisk in sugar.

3. Add egg to butter and flour, and knead with your hands in the bowl. When the dough forms a ball, remove from bowl and place on a floured surface. Continue kneading until dough is springy and keeps its shape. If dough is too dry and crumbly, add a little cold water.

4. Roll out dough on a floured surface into a “rather thick sheet.” I rolled mine about 1/2 inch thick. Cut with a tumbler or a biscuit cutter dipped in flour. Place on a butterd, non-stick, or parchment lined baking sheet.

5. Bake for 20 minutes, until golden brown.

6. In the meantime, sort out a few lovely strawberries to adorn the top of the cakes. Mash the remaining strawberries with super fine sugar to taste. The amount will very depending on the sweetness of the berries. I used about a 1/4 cup of sugar.

7. When the shortcakes are cool, split them (I did not do this step, I just made cookie sandwiches) and spread the center with mashed strawberries. Spread the top and sides with a royal icing. Adorn with a whole, ripe strawberry.

A Revolutionary Menu: Apple Pan-Dowdy

Published on July 2, 2010 in apples, desserts and history dish mondays. 2 Comments

The origins of Apple Pan Dowdy are shrouded in mystery. Undoubtedly related to crumbles, slumps, and crisps, the recipe I decided to feature in my Edible Queens article comes from a cookbook published at the same time as the 1964 World’s Fair, The American Heritage Cookbook. However, the first time I’ve been able to find the dessert in print is in Miss Corson’s Practical American Cookery, published in 1886. Her version is a much juicier than the ’64 recipe, a juice the soaks into the pie crust top and begs to be licked off the plate. After I devoured the dessert, I poured this juice from the bottom of the baking dish and cooked it down into a syrup which I served atop vanilla ice cream. Oh god so good!

The temperature is going to be pushing 100 here in NYC on Independence Day, so I know that last thing you want to do is heat up your oven and bake. In fact, I doubt the legitimacy of this dish as an 18th century July Fourth favorite–considering not only the summer heat, but why would you use last year’s old nasty apples to bake when so much fresh fruit abounds in July? However, this recipe is a great way to use up extra pie crust. Pieces of crust are strewn across the top, then “dowdied” by pushing them into the baking apples; the crust absorbs the juices and becomes soft and biscuit-like. And it is delicious; so if you have air conditioning, I say bake away.

***
Apple Pan-Dowdy
From Miss Corson’s Practical American Cookery by Juliet Corson, 1886.

5 large baking apples
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. salt
1 lb light brown sugar (about 1 1/2 cups)
1 c. cider
1 nine-inch pie crust, store bought or homemade

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

2. Mix together sugar, cinnamon, and salt. Peel and core apples and cut in to ¼ inch thick slices; mix with lemon juice to prevent browning. Toss with the sugar and spices and pile into the baking dish. Pour cider over apple mixture.

3. Cover apples with pie crust by weaving together wide strips, or by simply scattering torn pieces of crust over the top. Bake at 400 degrees for one hour. Serve hot or cold with a dollop of whipped cream.

Origin of a Dish: The Jell-O Mold

Published on June 21, 2010 in 20th century, desserts and origin of a dish. 2 Comments

Thu Tran, the host of Food Party was a guest judge in 2009 at a Jell-O mold competition in Gowanus–she’s set to host this year’s competition. In this video, Thu guides us through the wonderful, strange world of Jell-O jewelry, a Jell-O gyroscope, and even Jell-O boobs. Behold the wonders of Jell-O!

Summertime always makes me think of Jell-O. Whether it’s the cubes of cold fruity flavors I remember from my youth, or the idea of 1950s housewives laboring over molded lime Jell-O salads. And I’m not the only one; this Saturday, you can head down to the Gowanus Studio Space and experience one of the most unique art and design competitions you’ll ever see, visualized via Jell-O (learn more here). You can see some of the entrants in last year’s competition in the video above.

In my life, I’ve only eaten Jell-o in the simplest of forms; perhaps that’s why I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of a Jell-O mold. In the modern era, the idea of suspending any vegetable (or meat, for that matter) in gelatin strikes one as horrifying. And yet, for a good fifty years of modern history, cookbooks churned out reams and reams of Jell-O recipes. Were these recipes just as bad as they sound? Or are they revolutionary culinary secrets, lost to time and history, just waiting to be uncovered?

This week, I intend to find out.

For the next five days, I’ll be digging through my Jell-O ephemera to bring you the best and the worst of what that jiggly gel has to offer. But before we embark, let’s start with a brief history of gelatin.

***

Gelatin dishes have been around for a long time: for centuries, sweet and savory jellies were crafted from Isinglass, which comes from the swim bladders of sturgeons, or by creating gelatin from boiling some combination of calve’s feet, bone marrow, ligaments and intestinal tissue. It was a luxury food, time consuming and complicated to prepare, it required hours of cooking, molding, and then access to cool temperatures to set. It was a dish designed to show of the skill of one’s servants.

A revolution in gelatin occurred at the hands of Peter Cooper. Cooper, founder of New York’s Cooper Union college, was a gifted inventor. Cooper created a boxed, powdered gelatin in 1845. Previously, commercially available gelatin could be bought only in sheet form, but the sheets “…had to be clarified by boiling with egg whites and shells and dripped through a jelly bag before they could be turned into shimmering molds. (Jell-O website)” With Cooper’s new invention, one could just add hot water. The boxed product soon became an ingredient in many household recipes.

The next step came in 1897: Pearle Wait and his wife May come up with the idea of adding fruit flavors and sugar to the boxed gelatin, created an instant dessert they dubbed Jell-O. They had little commercial success, and sold the company to a friend with the incredible name of Orator Woodword. Woodword, too, had little commercial success–until he had a major conceptual breakthrough: “At the time, basically all dishes were prepared from basic ingredients; homemakers did not know what to do with a food that was almost ready to serve and needed no recipes. So Woodward gave them recipes. (The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink, 2004)” In 1904, Jell-O distributed its first recipes booklets, creating a dessert revolution. And it is here that we will begin our Jell-O journey–at the beginning. Be prepared to unearth some culinary treasures courtesy of “America’s Most Famous Dessert.”

The First Jell-O Recipe booklet, dated 1904. This image is from Months of Edible Celebrations, who also provides the provenance for this booklet.

Silver & Ash: Look at All Those Wieners!

Published on June 18, 2010 in 20th century, beef, beer, desserts, entrees, events and silver and ash. 2 Comments

Silver & Ash, the interactive edible art piece I presented with singer/songwriter Clare Burson, went off without a hitch last week. We were SOLD OUT, and I am pleased to say the food was very well received; and in the coming months, I’m continuing to work on the dishes to make them even more delicious and interesting. We’re bringing this event back to New York this September, and we *may* be bringing it to the West Coast (possibly with a 19th Century Pub Crawl in San Francisco as well!) Stay tuned, and in the meantime, here are a few images to wet your appetite.

Look at all those wieners! The second course of Silver & Ash is modeled after a favorite dish from Wiemar Germany. The dish features all-beer wieners from Schaller & Weber, a butcher's shop founded in 1937 in New York's German community of Yorkville. Braised in beer from the world's oldest brewery (the Weihenstephan brewery near Munich), these wieners were served alongside a hot potato salad.

The dining room of the Henry Street Settlement. The tables are set and ready for guests.

The kitchen, behind the scenes at Silver & Ash, the staff is hard at work preparing a delicious meal.

Sold-out seats packed with 30 guests. Clare takes the mic and begins to perform, weaving stories with music from her upcoming album, Silver & Ash.

Clare takes the stage to tell it like it is.

For the third course, we served a dish that Clare's mother closely associates with her childhood: frozen chicken pot pies. I decided to serve the pies in vintage packaging; in this photo, server Sarah Litvin presents a box o' pie to bemused Edible Brooklyn editor Rachel Wharton. As the guests begins to dig in to their pot pies, the room was filled with reminiscences: "I had these all the time when I was little!" "I remember when my parents went out, they would leave chicken pot pies for us for dinner." It was so funny to hear that so many people had a visceral memory associated with chicken pot pie--and that a few bites of warm, flaky pie crust could bring it all back.

The final course is laid out and ready to be served: it's comprised of thick slices of Helga's Homemade Almond Pound Cake. Helga is Clare's grandmother, and she prepares this not-too-dense, not-too-sweet poundcake for all of her grandchildren. Helga stashes the baked cakes in the freezer, where her family knows they can always find a frosted slice. I topped the poundcake wtih a port wine cherry compote, because Helga loved eating cherries when she was growing up--she and her friends would hang them from thier ears like earrings, and pretend to be grown up and sophistaced. After the show, Clare's family told me I had gotten the pound cake just right--and that was the best compliment of all.

Snapshot: Boston Cooler

Published on June 3, 2010 in desserts, ice cream and snapshot. 3 Comments

I just back from a road trip to Dearborn, MI; I have friends that live there, and they introduced me to a local “historic foodway” (their words) called the Boston Cooler. The Cooler is an ice cream float made specifically with vanilla ice cream and Vernors ginger ale.

“The now-familiar “Boston Cooler” of ginger ale and ice cream was cited in the 1920 Cleveland (OH) Plain Dealer, described as ‘well known’ and a ‘favorite of the golf links.’ Vernors ginger ale was first made in Detroit in the mid-1800s and is one of America’s oldest soft drinks. Detroit’s Boston Boulevard is near Vernors, and it is claimed that this is the origin of the ‘Boston’ in ‘Boston Cooler.’(The Big Apple)”

Despite the Cleveland connection, I had never heard of a Boston Cooler until my recent venture into Michigan, where it is still popular. And still damn tasty.

History Dish Mondays: A Cake Bakes in Queens

Published on May 4, 2010 in 19th century, desserts and history dish mondays. 2 Comments

Puff Cake, a la Mrs. Osborn.

Today is a very special HDM, because I am collaborating with the lovely Susan LaRosa of a Cake Bakes in Brookyln. Susan focuses on early 20^thcentury cakes and she plans to make several hundred of them from handwritten recipes reclaimed from flea markets in Ohio.

I love the way Susan brings these recipes to life. Because they are handwritten, each recipe has its own individual character. They seem to speak about the woman who sat down and penned them 75 years ago or more.

Susan and I decided to trade, and bake cakes from each other’s collections. I loaned her a cookbook published in the 1880s which has pages of handwritten cake recipes attached in the back (like ”Altogether Cake“). Susan gave me a stack of her own materials to pick from, but I knew right away which one I wanted: Mrs. Osborn’s Cakes of Quality.

The book is brittle and crumbling; the pages within are individually typed and simply bound. The book was sent to housewives across the country who wrote in and requested Mrs. Osborn’s advice. Who was she? We don’t really know. Her writing seems to indicate she was a woman left without means who turned to baking to support herself. Susan calls her the “Patron Saint of Cakes,” and wrote this post about what she knows about Mrs. O and what she’s trying to find out about this mystery woman.

The introduction to Mrs. O’s book declares: ”If you follow my directions, you simply cannot fail. You’ll earn the admiration–perhaps the envy, in some cases–of your neighbors. None of them will be able to make cake which will equal yours.” Her writing has an air of letting you in on a great secret–and Mrs. Osborn’s cake making techniques are wildly different. She has you put the cake into a cold oven– a cold oven!! Mrs. Osborn suggests: “Try Puff Cake first. This is a fine cake and very easy to make. This will acquaint you with my system and then you will be ready to make Angel, Klondike, and the others.” Who was I to disagree? Puff Cake it is.

***

Puff Cake
From Mrs. Osborne’s Cakes of Quality, by Mrs. Grace Osborne, 1919.

I have a confession: despite my mother constantly admonishing my sloppy measurements as a child, I’ve grown into a sloppy baker. Baking does take a certain understanding of chemistry, yes; but not until watching Top Chef did I realize outsiders saw it as a secret alchemical art form. I find baking as easy as cooking: it allows for some improvisation and (thankfully) there is some margin for mistakes.

But Mrs. Osborn threatened me to “…Do exactly as I tell you,” and I did. I sifted and sifted and leveled my measuring cup with a knife—a practice I’ve not kept up since leaving the watching eye of my mother. The cake mixed well, but I was nervous about trying Mrs. O’s baking techniques. I have no idea how she monitored her baking temperature so exactly– even using a thermometer. It seems like it would be an hour and a quarter of constant fussing to get the temperature just right. I decided to bump my temperature up at the end of each 15 minutes and see what happened.

I ended up pulling the cake out of the oven fifteen minutes early. After it cooled, I cut it and saw it had gotten a little dark on the bottom–not burned, just browned. My roommate and I tried a slice: “Tastes like cake,” he said. It was exactly what I had been thinking.

The cake was very fluffy from the beaten egg whites and had a butteryness that angel food cakes lack. The browned bottom tasted oddly like a pretzel at first; then, the next day, it tasted downright bitter. The cake will be disposed of.

Although I’ve had a bit of a disaster with Mrs. O’s baking methods, I’m still tempted to try another cake from her book. But at the moment, I’m not inspiring any cake-envy.