Onion Soufflé

It's been nearly a year and I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, Faithful Reader. I'll try to do better this time around for you.

All cooked and ready to eat

I have a confession, Faithful Reader: I've never tried making a soufflé. My impression is that they are persnickety. And I've never eaten one so I have no idea what it's supposed to taste like. But I'm not going to let either of these things deter me. I'm intrigued by an onion soufflé I came across in Fannie Farmer's What to Have for Dinner so let's try making it.

Ingredients needed

The directions start off a bit vague: boil onions, rub through a sieve to get 1 1/4 cup onion pulp. This evidently takes about 2-3 medium onions. I boiled 3 onions and now have extra onion pulp which I have no idea what to do with. (Suggestions welcome!) But other than the onion amount, the ingredient list was detailed enough to.

Onion Soufflé:
(Adapted from Fannie Farmer's What to Have for Dinner, 1905 edition)

Ingredients:
2-3 medium onions
4 T butter
4 T flour
1/3 cup cream
3 eggs, separated

Instructions:
1. Heat a medium saucepan full of salted water to boiling.
2. Peel and slice into thick rounds 2 to 3 medium onions. Boil onions until soft. Reserve cooking liquid.
3. Puree onions in food processor until pureed.
4. Melt butter in medium sauce pan, add flour and cook until pale brown.
5. Pour in 1/3 cup cooking water, cream, and onion puree. Stir.
7. Stir in egg yolks.
8. Beat egg whites until stiff.
9. Fold whites into onion mixture.
10. Turn into buttered dish and bake at 350 F for 25 minutes. (N.B. My oven runs cold and it took 50 minutes for me.)
11. Serve immediately.

A texture I like and cannot describe.

Results:
It's good. Texture-wise: sorta like really fluffy scrambled eggs but with a nice onion-y flavor. Or as I told Beta Taster, "it's a bit like grits but without the grain." And serves about 3 to 4 people. Also, soufflés are not as persnickety as I imagined. In fact, it was a bit of a let down. I'd braced myself for a difficult recipe and instead found something well within my cooking capabilities. I'm sure there's a life lesson in here somewhere. Probably about facing down things that you think are intimidating. Thanks for tuning in.

Pudding!!!

Oh, squee! It's here! My pudding mold! It's so cute! I can't wait to use it! I feel so properly Dickensian. Truth be told, I'm not fond of Dickens. But Agatha Christie, whose work I am fond of, wrote a short story about Hercule Poirot called "The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding." It's quite worth the read; a cute little story about English Christmas traditions, with midnight Mass, Christmas dinner (complete with pudding), playing in the snow... Right, I've gotten sidetracked (as usual).

Pudding mold.

I'm going to make a steamed pudding and it's going to be pudding-y. Well not pudding, as in the custardy dessert. Hmm, actually I'm not sure what this will be like. Judging from  my Boston brown bread, it'll be, um, cake-y? Perhaps I should lower my expectations and hope for edible? Besides what sort of pudding should I make? Plum pudding? Figgie pudding? Perhaps I should play it safe(r) and go with a chocolate pudding?

A soft dough.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Meh, I should stop dithering and look at recipes.

Dough rolled out.

Cranberry pudding! I admit I'm choosing this one because the Beta Taster found some cranberries that have been sitting in the freezer for nearly a year. Perhaps I ought to do something with them. Besides I hate seeing food go to waste. (They've been in the freezer so they're still good, right?<Pause, while I go try one.> Tastes ok to me. Onward!)

Pudding rolled up.

As usual, we going to have to scale back on the recipe. I got a baby mold that only holds 2 cups. So scaling will be pretty drastic. The recipe starts with a quart of flour or 4 cups. Perhaps I'll try one-eighth-ing the recipe. Let's see what happens.

Steaming.

Cranberry Pudding
(Adapted from The Sweet Home Cook Book, date unknown)
Serves 2-3

1/2 cup flour
1/8 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
1/4 cup milk
1/2 cup cranberries
~1 tablespoon sugar

1. Sift together first 3 ingredients.
2. Add milk to make soft dough.
3. Roll out to a thin oblong.
4. Sprinkle with cranberries and sugar. Roll up like a cinnamon roll.
5. Place in well greased mold.
6. Steam 1 1/2 hours.

Cranberry pudding.

Results: Well, hmm. It tastes a bit like a biscuit with cranberries. It's good though. And now I want to make another. It may need more cranberries next time. Also, it tasted a bit bread-like. I may have gotten too much flour in the dough when I was rolling it out since I didn't want it to stick to the counter. Perhaps I should have simply stirred in the cranberries and foregone the rolling out of the dough. I'll do that next time. The Beta Taster wasn't too impressed. He said it's a bit bland. But I had no trouble eating it.

Finished product.

Brandy Snaps

Hello again, faithful reader.  I managed to get a cold and spent the past week either sleeping or working, but now that I'm better... Let's continue playing with desserts. Cookies this time, now that our heat wave has snapped. At least, I think they'll be cookies. Or cookie-like. Or perhaps not at all cookie-esque.

Brandy snaps!

These brandy snaps have no leavening so they won't rise but otherwise the recipe looks cookie-ish. Also, no brandy. I'm not sure why they're called brandy snaps then. Should one eat them while drinking brandy? And there is plenty of molasses and ginger. Do ginger snaps taste good with brandy? Alas, no brandy in the pantry. It's up to you, Faithful Reader, to let me know.

They don't require many ingredients.

Brandy Snaps
(adapted from Fannie Farmer's What to Have for Dinner, 1905 edition)

1/4 c molasses
2 1/2 T butter
1/2 c flour, scant
1/3 c sugar
2 1/4 t ground ginger

1. Preheat oven to 350 (or whatever your definition is of a moderate oven) and line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper.
2. Mix flour, sugar, and ginger together in a bowl.
3. Place molasses in a small saucepan and bring to just below a boil.
4. Add butter, stir until melted.
5. Stir in dry ingredients.
6. Drop by spoonfuls onto cookie sheets 3 inches apart. (about 1 tablespoon makes a cookie about 2 1/2 to 3 inches in diameter.)
7. Bake 9 to 10 minutes.
8. Let cool on sheet.

Brandy snap dough.

Results: I made lace cookies! I've never tried making them before. These're good, especially if you like ginger. They're also a bit buttery. Next time, I'll cut down on the butter, perhaps to 1 1/2 tablespoons. And of course, I halved the recipe. The next day they have a sort of candy/crunchy consistency, which I like. Yield = 18 3-inch cookies.

Peach Cream

My calendar informs me that it is fall. But the weather is awfully hot today. So I'll consult my recipes for something that doesn't involve the use of the oven or stove. And of course, since we had our greens last time, we can now move on to dessert. (Yay!)

Peach cream.

According to Fannie Farmer, Peach Cream is to be served for company and formal dinners. The recipe doesn't look particularly fussy, so I'm downgrading it to serve whenever I feel like. And I feel that today, a hot day in early October, is its day in the sun, metaphorically speaking, although you could eat this in the sunshine, if you so wished.

Peach puree.

But I did make several changes. First off, we're halving this. Next, I'm supposed to rub a can of peaches through a sieve. I'm going to use my food processor instead. While I'm not quite up on my history of kitchen appliances, I suspect the purpose of rubbing things through sieves is to make a puree and using my food processor is quicker and easier. Also of note, I'm assuming can sizes haven't changed (about 15 ounces or so).

Peach puree with lemon juice, sugar, and wine.

Last major change, I'm not using the sherry called for. I'm substituting a semi-sweet white wine because the sherry I have is old and cheap and tastes a little off. Besides I've never managed to acquire a taste for it and I don't want it in my peach cream. (I can't believe people willingly drank it.)

Peach Cream
(modified from Fannie Farmer's What to Have for Dinner, 1905)

1/2 can peaches with syrup
1/2 cup sugar
juice from 1 lemon
1/4 cup semi-sweet white wine
1 cup cream
dash salt

1. Puree peaches with syrup in food processor, place puree in bowl.
2. Add sugar, lemon juice, and wine, stirring occasionally until sugar is dissolved, about 15 minutes.
3. Place in freezer and "freeze to a mush." This takes about 1 1/2 to 2 hours, stirring occasionally.
4. Whip cream.
5. Add cream and salt to peach mixture. Stir.
6. Freeze, stirring occasionally, until desired consistency.

About ready to freeze.

Results: I think I made peach sherbet and it's delicious. The Beta Taster won't get much of this. The whole process went smoothly but made a lot of dishes. (The food processor for the peaches and the stand mixer for the cream. OK, not that many dishes, but I'm feeling lazy.) I'm glad I substituted wine for the sherry. The wine flavor was subtle but agreed well with peaches. For the second freezing, at an hour and a half, the consistency was about that of half melted ice cream and that was where I thought it best. But not being able to eat all of it, I let it keep freezing and by 4 hours, it was pretty well frozen but still scoop-able. In case you're wondering, there are 4 to 6 servings in this.

French Dressing

You might have noticed a trend while following my blog, faithful reader. You might think the only foods I like are desserts and meats and perhaps carbohydrates. While I do enjoy all those things, especially dessert, I also like fruits and vegetables. I prefer my fruits and vegetables fresh or steamed or roasted to crisp-tender (if vegetables, I'm fairly sure I'm not enthusiastic about a steamed plum nor a roasted banana). But I confess I've been avoiding the cooked vegetables after reading how long I should boil them (30 minutes for green beans, e.g.). They read more like vegetable mush with butter. But I am willing to try a salad dressing since the lettuce won't be boiled into submission.

Ingredients needed.

French salad dressing is usually a reddish color usually tasting a bit like tomatoes and on the sweet side. Wikipedia informs me that Worcestershire sauce and paprika are also key ingredients. This recipe is more of an oil and vinegar mixture with a little bit of onion juice. And I served it on a bed of iceberg lettuce (because it was on hand) with a red bell pepper (which I grew in my garden) because iceberg is a bit bland on its own. The recipe was vague on the type of vinegar to use so I used red wine vinegar. Also it calls for onion juice. I'm guessing you get onion juice by microplaning an onion and using that. Even if that's not how to get onion juice, that's what I'm going to do.

French Dressing ala 1905.

French Dressing
(adapted from Fannie Farmer's What to Have for Dinner, 1905)

1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
1 tablespoons vinegar
2 tablespoons olive oil
drop onion juice

1. Whisk all ingredients together and serve on lettuce.

Results: Not too bad. Mostly it tasted like salty oil and vinegar. Next time I'll cut back on the salt but add more onion since I didn't notice any onion flavor. I'll also cut back on the olive oil; it felt a bit oily. Also, it certainly wasn't the French dressing you see in the grocery store.

Yum.

What I really like about trying these recipes is that they challenge my notion of what-ever-it-is I'm making. Most of the time, the texture and/or flavor is different from what I expect based on modern recipes. And it's fascinating to observe how tastes have changed. The idea of French dressing bring to mind a certain expectation which may or may not be similar to the expectation it raised a century ago.

Mulled Milk

Pronunciation matters.

Beta Taster: "Why would they include invalid [in' val id] recipes?"
Me: "I think they mean invalid [in vəl' id] recipes, you know, what they used to call sick people."
Beta Taster: "Ah. I was wondering why they had included recipes that don't work."

A simple, four ingredient recipe.

Sorry it's been a while, faithful reader. This one caught my eye for two reasons. Reason the first: I wanted to try an invalid recipe. I wanted to see what people 100 years ago thought how health-promoting foods should taste like (and it's likely different that what we think of when we think of health food). Reason the second: Mulled Milk. I/you/we all have heard of mulled wine or mulled cider, the warming winter beverage; but what about mulled milk? You say you haven't heard of it either? Ok. Let's try it.

Boiling the milk and cinnamon.

Mulled Milk
(recipe adapted from Marion Neil's How to Cook in Casserole Dishes, 1912)

1 cup milk, separated
2 teaspoons, scant, sugar
1 egg yolk
1/2 inch cinnamon stick

1. Boil milk, less 1 1/2 tablespoons, and cinnamon for 4 minutes. Remove cinnamon.
2. Mix sugar and egg yolk together with reserved milk.
3. Add hot milk to egg mixture, stir over heat a few minutes until it begins to thicken (but don't boil)
4. Strain and drink while hot.

Mulled milk.

Results: Too bad you're supposed to be sick to drink this. It tastes somewhere between egg nog and custard, but hot, and with a hint of cinnamon. Texture-wise: it's about as thick as a milkshake. I can see this being good for a sore throat and the flavors are pretty pedestrian, exactly what I like when I have a cold. The only downside to this drink is that after drinking it, I'm thirsty. Perhaps what I need is another.

Ham Toast

Well, since the unappetizing-sounding Cold Ham and Meat Croquettes were good, let's push our luck and try the prior entry, something called Ham Toast. (Ham Toast, in my mind, evokes head cheese, a truly unappetizing concept.) But a brief glance through the ingredients tells me it contains no ingredients I refuse to eat (bugs, brains, viscera, and raw celery). Matter of fact, it looks like ham and egg('s yolk) on toast, which I'm perfectly willing to eat.

Bread, pepper, egg, ham, cream, and butter (not shown) needed.

One problem I run into frequently is how much of any ingredient to use. The amounts of cream and pepper called for here is "a little." I figure for the amount of food being made, a little pepper in this case means a dash. A little cream is perhaps a teaspoon. Truly, I'm just making this up and hoping to recreate these recipes properly, but it is certainly fun to play around in the kitchen. (Beta Taster though wishes it would result in fewer dishes for him.)

Ready for cooking.

Ham Toast
(attempted, and likely modified, from Sweet Home Cook Book)

1 tablespoons finely chopped ham
1 egg yolk
1 teaspoon cream
dash pepper
1 slice buttered toast

1. Mix all but toast together and place in cold skillet.
2. Heat over medium heat
3. Spread over toast
4. Eat while hot.

Results: Since it should be abundantly obvious I don't quite know what I'm doing, I guessed and cooked the egg to about as done as it would be for an over medium fried egg, then I spread it about on my toast like it was a jam. And ate it. It was tasty. Quite rich, of course, what with cream and egg yolk and no white to spread out the richness.  The ham was a nice salty counterpoint to the the richness of the egg and added pepper. When I make it again, I'll likely just use the whole egg though. Since I didn't want to just throw out the white, I scrambled it and had it alongside my ham toast. And scrambled egg whites are awfully boring.

Ham toast.

Beta Taster: "Well, that's something..." Since he's not particularly fond of eggs he added hot sauce to it and politely said he'd stick to granola in the future but he's glad he tried it.