Mimsy Were the Borogoves

Today is National Potato Day. Why not have some potato chips or hash browns, and top them with one or both of these easy-to-make dips/sauces? They’re great on chips, on a baked potato, or in a potato salad—or with just about any vegetable or thick stew. I also like them on toasted bread, such as Eddie Doucette’s potato bread.

I’m winding down the Semiquincentennial posts, but if you’re not, consider Thomas Jefferson’s potato pie for this potato day as well.

The Joy of Chips Dip

Servings: 8
Preparation Time: 10 minutes
Irma S. Rombauer
The Joy of Cooking (1943) (Internet Archive)

Ingredients

• 8 oz yogurt
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 tbsp butter
• ¼ tsp coarse salt
• ½ tsp smoked paprika
• 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1-2 tbsp nutritional yeast (optional)

Steps

1. Finely chop garlic.
2. Fry garlic in hot butter over medium-low heat until golden brown.
3. Pour into the yogurt and mix well.
4. Add Worcestershire, paprika, yeast, and salt, mixing well each time.

Potato chips and chip dip are a lot like hot dogs and buns: there’s always one left when the other runs out. I’m the kind of person who runs out of dip long before I empty a bag of chips. What I need is a jar of endless dip! So I was overjoyed to find that Irma Rombauer’s chip dip in The Joy of Cooking isn’t just easily-made and easily-proratable but also very flavorful.

Work to a smooth paste:
Roquefort cheese or soft cream cheese
Season it with:
Worcestershire sauce
Paprika
Spread it on:
Crispy potato chips

An October 1, 1956 ad for WNBQ in Chicago highlights “Bob Murphy, Kay Westfall and Chef Eddie Doucette” as the station’s top sellers. (Click for full ad.) (JPEG Image, 360.5 KB)

I’ve just published the third printing of Tempt Them with Tastier Foods. With this release my collection of Eddie Doucette recipes exceeds a hundred pages. It is available as a free download in PDF (PDF File, 12.5 MB) and ePub (ePub ebook file, 10.9 MB) formats, as well as in print.

The new recipes come from several sources. I continue to be notified whenever a new reference to Eddie Doucette shows up on newspapers.com. And I continue to look for references on more general searches, which, among other things, netted a couple more matchbook recipes.

I managed to find a copy of his All-American Hog Dog pamphlet. I included recipes from images of it in the second printing, but it turns out there are recipes on both sides. The new, reverse-side recipes are now included in that section of the book. They include a fascinating-looking Hot Dog Pate and a Frank ’n’ Kraut Shepherd Pie that is very similar to the Oktoberfest Sauerkraut in the original printing but with hot dogs added.

I also decided to take a look at which newspaper most of the recipes came from, and then follow their IGA advertisements all the way through the sixties and into 1971. That turned out to be The Idaho State Journal of Pocatello, Idaho. A week in the newspapers.com archives netted several new recipes from the Journal’s regular Thursday IGA ads.

The image links to the Great Anniversary Festival recipe cards (PDF File, 4.5 MB), but this particular recipe is available in A Sestercentennial Cookery.

Sarah Hoyt invited me to post something about Bi/Vi/Centennial food on According To Hoyt, and it’s now up. Please read Food for the Great Anniversary Festival there! It features a special collection of Centennial-friendly recipes just for Hoyt’s Huns, and includes recipes not in A Sestercentennial Cookery. There are also different takes on the history of some of these books and foods than I put into the break-out posts.

If you came here for the Great Anniversary Festival recipe PDF (PDF File, 4.5 MB), you can download it by way of this link (PDF File, 4.5 MB)!

I’ve also linked the other eighteenth and nineteenth century cookbooks below.

There’s even a children’s book about how much of a foodie Jefferson was.

The Fourth of July celebrates the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration was drafted by Thomas Jefferson. Why not add a couple of Jefferson’s or his family’s recipes to your celebration?

If there were a patron of American foodies, it would be Thomas Jefferson. He famously designed and possibly built his own pasta machine after enjoying pasta on an overseas trip to Italy. He is credited with introducing such varied foodie delights to America as waffles, macaroni & cheese, and vanilla pods.

His ice cream recipe from his time in France is widely copied and possibly the most common example of the foods he popularized. As reproduced by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s web site for Monticello, it is simple and likely very good, using cream, separated eggs, and sugar. It is churned using a “sabottiere”, which appears to be an early form of ice cream churn, a “sorbetière” in modern French.

And Jefferson didn’t just bring foreign foods to America. He also brought American foods to foreign lands. He considered the apples of France “vastly inferior to his prized Newtown Pippin from Virginia. So began a five-year mission to introduce his French colleagues to the great delicacies of his homeland.”

Also available in print on Amazon^• and Lulu.

Are you ready for the summer of Independence? Summer celebrations are always better with ice cream, and the no-churn recipes in The Padgett Sunday Supper Club Ice Cream Cookery^• are my personal favorites.

Since publishing my Ice Cream Cookery last year, I continue to try new ice creams alongside the old favorites. One was so impressive I’ve added it to the book. Last year for a gaming festschrift I went over some recipes given to me by Alarums and Excursions publisher Lee Gold. Her father’s Orange Cream Sherbet, made with oranges, lemons, cream, milk, and eggs, is very, very good.

This differs from the Lemon Cream Sherbet that debuted in the first edition more than in replacing some of the lemon with orange. It also replaces the gelatin with eggs, beating the yolks and whites separately. It enhances the citrus flavor by utilizing the peels of the orange and lemon as well. It is an absolutely wonderful sherbet, and would be great as the filling of an ice cream pie or cake. It’s not too shabby between two chocolate cookies as an ice cream sandwich either.

I’ve also made a minor change to the graphics. In its first edition photo, the Plombir Slivochnyi was somewhat eclipsed by a cheesecake from Tempt Them with Tastier Foods. I try to make these photos reflect how I actually use and eat the depicted foods, and I like ice cream with my cake. Even cheesecake. But I’ve now replaced the Plombir Slivochnyi photo with one that puts the ice cream up front.

“This is going to get salty.”

“A lot of recipe writers and publications… present recipes in a way that they are very difficult to read. They put up roadblocks. They over-complicate them. They try to make something into something that it isn’t.”

Glen goes on a rant about a particular style of recipe-writing that also makes me laugh. It’s all about over-complicating things in ways that literally do nothing for the recipe. This particular cookie recipe hits one of them for me. He doesn’t talk about this in the video, but he does fix it in his altered version: it calls for unsalted butter… and then adds salt. I’ve pretty much stopped keeping unsalted butter on hand because every one of them seems to do this.

It’s why I put the note in A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book about converting sodium content to salt.

If the recipe required clarifying the butter, that might make sense. But it does not. It requires browning the butter, which is the opposite of clarifying. So, this recipe calls for a 10½ tablespoons of butter (an amount worthy of Glen’s rant) and ⅜ teaspoon of fine salt (ditto).

Of the three butters I buy—the store brands at H-E-B, Randalls, and Trader Joe’s—each contains exactly 90 mg of sodium per tablespoon. That means 10½ tablespoons butter contains 2,362.5 mg of salt. This is less than a percent off of what ⅜ teaspoon is. It’s a measuring error.

You could make this cookie and it would be just fine by using normal butter and not adding salt. Literally, the author required unsalted butter and then added exactly the same amount of salt back in. Given that this is a modern trendy recipe, adding more salt not only wouldn’t hurt, it likely would make it even better.

As they say, watch the whole thing.

A beautiful and delicate Easter dessert.

This is a very simple dessert, with, technically, three ingredients: holiday bread, including stale holiday bread, candy canes, and stabilized whipped cream. And if you expect to finish the dessert in one sitting, you don’t even need to stabilize the whipped cream.

As regular readers of this blog know, I have a self-made tradition of using candy canes from my Christmas tree to make an Easter Sunday dessert. This recipe, however, did not start out as an Easter offering. When I first marked this recipe to try, after browsing through the Lakota, North Dakota, All Loved and Cherished Wonders, it was because I had a bag of pre-crushed Heath bar that I’d picked up on the discount shelf of the local grocery.

But, combined with having some makeshift Christmas bread that was about to go stale, I decided to holidize the recipe and switch out the chocolate wafers for toasted bread, and the crushed Heath bars for crushed candy canes. The original recipe ran:

Heath Bar Dessert

1 box chocolate wafers, crushed	¼ cup butter (melted)
10 Heath Bars (ground)	1 pint heavy whipping cream

Combine crumbs and melted butter. Press half of crumbs into large cake pan, cover with half of layer of Heath bars. Spread with heavy whipped cream. Sprinkle with remaining crumbs and Heath bars.

Mrs. Pat Kuball

Right off the bat you can see some problems with this recipe, problems common with vintage recipes and the assumption of unchanging product sizes. The cook book is, by my estimate, from about 1964. What was a box of chocolate wafers in 1964? How big were Heath Bars?

A wonderful pie from white potatoes instead of sweet potatoes.

Pi Day is this coming Saturday.

A few days after it, on Tuesday, is St. Patrick’s Day.

This year’s Independence Day will be the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

So why not a pie this year celebrating all three of those? I found this pie in a Horsford Baking Powder cookbook that celebrated its product’s Centennial Award from the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. That’s right: this pie was in a cookbook that took part in the centennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The book itself probably didn’t come out in 1876, though it may have—the exhibition started in May of that year, leaving lots of time for a company that published as many iterations as Rumford did to add that award to their products. But I’m guessing 1877, for reasons I go into more detail about in my 2024 lead-up to the sestercentennial.

It’s a fascinating pie and one that appears to have fallen out of favor in favor of the sweet potato pie. This is a much lighter pie than sweet potato, and it allows the spices to shine. But it still exhibits some of the flavor of potato, and, to my mind, to great effect. But I come from a long line of potato aficionados.

I considered saving this recipe for National Potato Day, one of the other handful of food days I enjoy. But that’s in August, after Independence Day, so, given that this is the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I decided to put it here.

Here’s the full recipe as it appears in the Rumford Chemical Works cookbook:

Irish Potato Pie.—One pound mashed potato, rubbed through a cullender, one-half pound butter creamed with the sugar, six eggs, whites and yolks beaten separately, one lemon squeezed into the potato while hot, one teaspoonful nutmeg, one teaspoonful mace, two cups white sugar. Mix and bake same as Sweet Potato Pie.

The “Sweet Potato Pie” appears directly above: