The latest from Twitter: @Peace_Coffee plays cupid with “Caffeinate Your Cutie,” @triplerockmpls is serving @surlybrewing Mild at $3.50 a pint, @bittercube celebrates the long-anticipated opening of Eat Street Social, and @Masu_NE will feature a suggestive little Valentine’s Day roll through Tuesday.
Katie Cannon / Heavy Table
Not many things get the shaft this time of year, but amid good deeds and glittering lights, the fruitcake cowers in a corner. Banished from our good graces yet kept around for ridicule and sport (the Great Fruitcake Toss, anyone?), this poor heavy loaf has had more than its share of hardships.
And yet, fruitcake wasn’t created by some Frankenstein baker to scare naughty children on Christmas morning. In fact, it was once the ultimate edible symbol of decadence and bounty. The first fruitcakes appeared in ancient Egypt and, just like gold and jewels, were buried with the dead to sweeten the afterlife. If your tomb was stocked with fruitcake, you were kind of a big deal.
In 16th century Europe, when fresh fruit was scarce in winter and refrigeration was a far-off dream, British explorers brought home booty in the form of exotic preserved fruits that would last and last. To celebrate, they stuffed as many as they could into buttery cakes to serve with afternoon tea. Hence the glowing mosaic of citron (a sort of gnarly-looking lemon with an aromatic peel) and those red and green cherries that haunt our visions of holiday fruitcakes.
But just a few centuries later, fruitcake began to fall from favor. Deemed “sinfully rich,” it was pulled from dining room tables in several parts of Europe during the 18th century, beginning its long and shameful exile to the icebox. Then Johnny Carson was all: “The worst gift is fruitcake. There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other,” and the whole thing went to hell.
Katie Cannon / Heavy Table
Since then, fruitcake has enjoyed loads of scorn and little culinary appreciation. Even as large fruitcake operations opened up in monasteries (like the excellent Abbey Cake made in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula) and orders continued to pour in (Assumption Abbey in Missouri ships about 25,000 a year), for many it remains just a holiday joke. But like an aged cheese or wine, fruitcake needs only a little time in the shadows to grow stronger. In addition, most recipes insist that the fruitcake be seasoned with spirits over the course of several months to deepen its flavor.
Now is as good a time as any to update our opinions on fruitcake, especially considering the food world’s recent turn toward a more whole and conscious way of eating. And how can we deny the merits of a Christmas loaf that refuses to get lost in time, even if it’s relegated to life as a doorstop? As with any comestible, good ingredients are key, and there’s no shortage of local markets and quality dried fruits that can be baked into any number of delightful variations on this celebration cake. Rather than a chewy, weighty mass of jellies and flatlining sweetness, think of fruitcake as a moist, complex quick bread to rival your go-to banana or zucchini version, a boozy black hole of your favorite festive spices and deep, dark flavors. Continue reading In Praise of Fruitcake »
by James Norton on April 2, 2010
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
The recipes don’t initially look like much, that’s for sure.
Food Will Win the War (written by Rae Katherine Eighmey and published this year by the Minnesota Historical Society Press) is a tightly focused volume focused on World War I-era food conservation in Minnesota from 1917-1918. As such, its recipes are neither modern nor luxurious. They use household and garden staples such as onions and stale bread, spurn luxuries such as refined sugar and beef and emphasize the consumption of greens, dairy products, and alternative grains. Whatever “sexy” means in the context of household recipes, these are the opposite.
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
And yet: with their combination of the familiar and the antique, they’re also intriguing. With titles like Scalloped Cheese, Apple Catsup, and Macaroni and Peanuts, they’re both exotic and familiar.
I’ll be doing a proper review of Food Will Win the War for an upcoming edition of Gastronomica, but in the meantime, the Heavy Table test kitchen took a crack at some of the book’s more intriguing vintage edibles. The goal: to taste nearly 100-year old recipes concocted for an era of wartime scarcity, and to see whether they might still hold up. One thing’s for sure — the ethic that drives these recipes has much in common with the newfangled locavore / home garden / anti-fat and anti-refined sugar ethos of many modern eaters.
Sour Milk Maple Syrup Pie
Sour Milk Maple Syrup Pie is a triumph of bad marketing over good food. Here is what we’ll be calling this pie when it’s introduced at picnics and dinner functions down the road: Maple Meringue Pie.
There, that’s better.
The theory of this pie is to replace white sugar with maple syrup and make a tasty, luxe-looking dessert using extremely common and inexpensive household staples.
In the process of making this with some last minute home-soured milk, we managed to produce a broken, slightly chunky looking, extremely liquid filling that seemed destined to not set up, and taste awful. Lo and behold, it turned out well, the filling light but solid, and the meringue beautifully browned.
The flavor is a tug of war between the tang of buttermilk, the assertive zip of lemon, and the mellow sweetness of maple syrup. While clearly dessert, it’s not an overly sweet dish, and very much resembles a good lemon meringue pie with the overall volume turned down and a distinct maple finish to the flavor. It’s a serious pie for grown-ups.
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
The meringue, when cooled, has a tendency to weep maple syrup (top) — it’s beautiful and exotic, two adjectives that would’ve seemed like unlikely matches for this homely-looking dish.
Sour Milk Maple Syrup Pie
Meringue:
2 egg whites
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
Pie:
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1/4 cup cold water
1 cup buttermilk, sour milk, or sour cream
3/4 cup maple syrup
2 beaten egg yolks
1 lemon, juice and grated rind
1 tablespoon melted butter
Baked 9-inch pie crust
Continue reading The World War I-Era Cooking of Food Will Win the War »
The Grande Dame Julia Child, who passed away in 2004 just shy of her 93rd birthday, would be 98 tomorrow. In honor of her birthday, here is an adaptation of Child’s Tomates à la Provençale recipe, as published in a spiral bound cookbook Julia Child at the San Francisco Museum of Art, Tour of Dining Decor 1965, by the Women’s Board of the San Francisco Museum of Art. The book was a collaboration with the decorators for “Dining with the Collector” at the Museum and “Settings for Imaginative Cooking” at Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco.
Lori Writer / Heavy Table
Neither French, nor a chef, Child was at the time the host of The French Chef , a television cooking show created by Child and produced and broadcast by WGBH in Boston, Massachusetts, from February 11, 1963 to 1973. One of the first cooking shows on television, the show grew out of some special presentations Child had done based on the book Mastering the Art of French Cooking, of which she was a co-author.
Adam Sward / Heavy Table
Child has been credited for introducing French cooking to the United States at a time when it was considered expensive restaurant fare, not suitable for home cooking. Child, portrayed by actress Meryl Streep, is also the subject of the recently-released movie Julie & Julia.
The recipe also appears Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
The entire luncheon menu submitted by Child:
Coquilles St. Jacques à la Parisienne (scallops and mushrooms in white wine sauce)
Tomates à la Provençale (herb-stuffed tomatoes to serve with sautéed scallops or broiled meats or fish)
Coquilles St. Jacques à la Provençale (scallops sautéed with garlic and parsley)
Tarte aux Cerises, Flambée (cherry tart flambée)
Tomates à la Provençale
Serves 4-6 as a side dish
6 tomatoes
Salt and pepper
½ c fresh breadcrumbs
3 tbsp minced green onions
4 tbsp minced green herbs
¼ c olive oil
Optional: clove of crushed garlic
- Pre-heat oven to 400° or warm broiler.
- Cut tomatoes in half crosswise.
- Gently squeeze out seeds.
- Season to taste with salt and pepper.
- In a bowl, mix breadcrumbs, salt, pepper, onions, herbs, oil and optional garlic.
- Spoon mixture into tomatoes.
- Arrange on a lightly oiled baking sheet.
- About 20 minutes before serving, bake at 400° or set under a slow broiler until heated through and top is lightly browned.
Lori Writer / Heavy Table
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
Antiquing has acquired a reputation as a silly pastime for people with too much disposable income: a way to spend far-more-than-garage sale prices for items that would have qualified as junk 50, 25, or a mere 10 years ago.
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
This isn’t entirely unfair. Stumble into the wrong shop, and you enter a land of $10 teaspoons and rickety wooden chairs that go for $200 and up. Stumble into the correct shop, however — as we did on a recent day while driving home from a trout farm — and you will be astounded by the entertaining and reasonably priced bounty available to you.
Here are six recent gastronomic finds — all priced at $5 or less — from the remarkably well-stocked and welcoming Abigail Page Antique Emporium in Hudson, WI. It’s worth noting that we left a lot of good stuff behind, so if you dig the sort of goodies listed below, darken their door and bring a 20 or two. That should be all you need.
A Kaukauna Klub Crock
“FOR APPETIZERS SALADS DESSERT etc.” says the perky little 1950s-style chef crudely stenciled onto the side of this vintage cheese spread crock. If you’re a Wisconsinite and a cheese lover, you’ve got to grudgingly acknowledge the critical role played by process cheese in the state’s industry… and the legitimately retro kitsch cheerfulness of the crock makes it a great pen holder / notecard holder / miscellaneous office junk holder. It’s local. It’s cheese. It’s awesome.
Knox On Camera Recipes: A Completely New Guide to Gel-Cookery
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
“Gel-Cookery?” you ask. “What is this… some fabulous new cooking style from the future?” No, it’s a terrible old cooking style from the past, premised on the idea that all food should be rendered in some form of gelatin mold, whether it be sweet or savory. Fruit Nectar Salad makes a certain amount of sense, but even in 1962, the Lobster Salad (recipe below) must have struck sensible gourmets as a bit of a culinary stretch. Right? Sticking lobster meat into Jell-O? This cookbook (price: $2!) also features a Tuna Mold… “Ideal for meatless meals!”
National American Legion Convention (Minnesota, 1959) Souvenir Platter
How about this: $4 for an antique platter featuring a walleye, a pheasant, the Minnesota state flower, and a bunch of cities including Fergus Falls, Montevideo, New Ulm, Owatonna, and Hibbing. Good condition. Holds up to four drinks, which can then be ferried out to your astounded and impressed BBQ guests.
This is the sort of thing that would be tempting to the serious Minnesota gastronome, if new, at $10. And yet… it was just laying on top of a pile of random old cookbooks. Priced at less than half that. Find of the day.
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
Quicker Ways to Better Eating: The Wesson Oil Cookbook
Fans of clip-art will love the treasure trove of vintage-looking stuff offered at bargain prices in the world of gastro-antiques. The Wesson Oil Cookbook (1955, priced at $1) is chock-a-block with beautiful, neatly coiffed, industrious housewives rendered in sparkly pink and black two-tone renderings, thinking up amazing new Wesson Oil-reliant menus for their husbands and families, surrounded by a cornucopia of fresh ingredients and, well, Wesson Oil.
Continue reading Gastro-Antiquing at Abigail Page in Hudson, WI »
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
Sometimes old books hold treasures.
Digging around an antique shop in St. Paul, we unearthed The Cooking of Scandinavia, a 40-year-old book in the Time / Life “Foods of the World” series.
The Cooking of Scandinavia is food writing at its finest: Clear, direct, meticulously researched, curious without being judgmental, and open to all that’s richest and most universal about the complicated human relationship with food.
Here’s a passage about the smorgasbord:
Considering the staggering numbers of herring dishes alone offered by the smorgasbord, is it any wonder that people arriving at this table for the first time often do so in trepidation? Where to begin? What to eat next? And how to end? Perhaps a smorgasbord can never be too big, but Liet, my wife, and I found ourselves overwhelmed by the one we found at Stockholm’s Operakallaren Restaurant, considered by all to be the finest in Sweden. The table was moored, like an enormous pleasure yacht, in the middle of the room, its decks crowded with no less than 60 selections.
There’s a photo that really sells the book, on page 159: A refreshing-looking lager-type liquid flows from a tap into a rounded glass, raisins floating to the top of the beverage. Two powder-sugar dusted funnel cakes sit beside the glass.
The liquid is Sima, a Finnish lemon-flavored mead. Although meads are typically made from honey, the recipe provided relies only upon white and brown sugars. Total cost to manufacture about five quarts of this sparkling, refreshing, sunshiney, and lightly alcoholic beverage: about $1.25.
The hotter the weather, the better this stuff tastes.
The funnel cakes — which, as it turns out, are a perfect counterpart to the refreshing lemon drink — are Tippaleivät, or May Day crullers.
Sima (Finnish Lemon-Flavored Mead)
Adapted from The Cooking of Scandinavia
Makes 5 quarts
Continue reading Finnish Lemon Mead and Crullers »
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