“It is utterly insufficient (to eat pie only twice a week), as anyone who knows the secret of our strength as a nation and the foundation of our industrial supremacy must admit. Pie is the American synonym of prosperity, and its varying contents the calendar of the changing seasons. Pie is the food of the heroic. No pie-eating people can ever be permanently vanquished.” 1902 New York Times editorial
Category Archives: Cooking
The Real McSoy
Went to the local sushi place for lunch. Not bad but not good either. We’re having sushi overload out here in the heartland.
Toro Sushi
I saw a film once about the Japanese approach to sushi, and it said that sushi aficionados
do not dredge the piece in soy sauce rice side down — that’s an insult to the flavor of the sushi, but fish side down.
Filed under Cooking, Jean Zimmerman
Brown Paper Packages Tied Up With Strings
I have always loved the idea of the favorite. Everyone has a favorite flavor (vanilla or chocolate is one of the first distinctions we’re asked to make as children) or a favorite color, sometimes a favorite book or song or poem. It’s the most simple, basic way we define ourselves.
I especially like the favorite birthday cake, because it is longstanding and personal and sentimental. Will you please make me my favorite birthday cake this year?
I joined my old friend to celebrate her birthday and her mother made her longtime request: angel food cake with a custard filling and warm chocolate sauce poured over the top.
Basically an improved Boston Cream Pie. This piece has tumbled over slightly but you can see how luscious it is.
In my family we have a favorite, too: Strawberry Cake. It comes from my Tennessee grandmother’s collection of recipes, and visually and taste-wise is a shock to the senses.
Secret Ingredient: Jello
Strawberry Cake
One package white cake mix
One tablespoon flour
One package strawberry gelatin
Three-fourths cup vegetable oil
One half cup water
One half cup frozen strawberries, thawed til mushy
Mix cake mix, flour and jello. Add oil, water and strawberries. Lastly, add one at a time four eggs, beating after each addition.
Divide batter into two nine inch pans, well greased and floured. Bake at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes
For the icing, blend one-fourth pound butter (or margarine, in my grandmother’s recipe), one box confectioners sugar and one half cup thawed, mashed up strawberries.
Some of your guests will demand seconds. Others will run away from the table. Your teeth will ache and you will fall over with sugar shock. It is the most artificial looking cake in the world, and the most delicious.
That is, if it’s your favorite.
Filed under Cooking, Jean Zimmerman
Young Pullets with Dressing and Buffalo Tongues
Would you care for some sugar-cured herring? Stewed potatoes? The place to go in in 1880 would be the United States Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York.
You could get some redhead ducks and charlotte bengalienne at Delmonico’s if you were there in 1885 for the Annual Dinner of the New York Free Trade Club.
At the Ladies Festival Banquet, catered by William Tufts, quail on toast was the order of the day. You’d have to be a member of the Baptist Social Union of Boston.
Sweetbread pate, anyone?
Downtown Association, 1890
This most wonderful trove of 9,567 restaurant menus will transport you to another place and time. The kitchen’s always open at the New York Public Library, just click here.
For some reason, “cardinal punch” is a constant. But not all of the feasts offer “DeBrie.”
Filed under Cooking, History, Jean Zimmerman
Pie Every Day
Wayne Thiebaud’s Pies
“No New York wife knows her husband until she has studied him in an Automat.” –America Eats, the book that is a compendium of articles written for the unpublished WPA guide on food across the country.
If I was not going to invent a time machine already, I would do it now so that I could spend nickels on the automat’s “piping-hot corned beef hash, made of honest lean beef and never too sharply flavored,” its “little pots of slow-baked beans,” its “beloved cinnamon bun.” And of course, its pie.
Filed under Art, Cooking, Jean Zimmerman
America Eats
Reading a book that consists of the unedited manuscript of a WPA guide called America Eats, an in-depth description of the varied cuisines of the country as they existed in the 1930s. The Food of a Younger Land: The Northeast Eats is fascinating, ranging as it does from a discussion of a “C.O. Cocktail” — castor oil in soda served at a drug store, to a description of Vermont, where maple sugaring is so much a part of peoples’ lives that “sugaring off” became an expression. A person might close some transaction by saying, “Well, Ed, it’s about time we sugar that off.”
Filed under Cooking, History, Jean Zimmerman
Jean Zimmerman 