Food That Inveigles

This recipe is called salad, and yet it is not. Retro cookbooks liked to use the term “salad” pretty loosely.

It reminds me of the canned baked apples of the late 1960s. They were pinkish red and very, very water-logged (or perhaps syrup-logged, which was how one felt after eating one). Lots of weird things got canned back then.  A culinary Scylla and Charybdis: either be named Salad, or get stuck in a Can.

This comes from the Guardian Service Tested Recipes (ca 1955), which featured the Guardian line of pots, pans and dishes. You could use these items to make a salad in, you see. Mold it in a saucepan, unmold it on the “Round Tray or Griddle Broiler.”  Remember to turn that Griddle Broiler off, though.

CINNAMON APPLE SALAD

6 eating apples
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
1 pkg . cinnamon candies
Red vegetable coloring (abt 1/4 tsp)

Place sugar, water and cinnamon candies in unit [the Guardian Casserole-Tureen, see above, with bonus checkmark from previous owner], put unit over medium heat until candies are dissolved. Add vegetable coloring to give a bright red color.

Meanwhile, core apples, pare leaving on 1/4 of the skin down at the blossom end. Place in syrup, cover unit, reduce heat to low. Turn apples upside down after 7-10 minutes. When barely tender, remove apples to a cake rack. Turn heat up to medium, cook syrup in uncovered unit until very thick. Brush syrup on apples with a pastry brush or pour over them with spoon.

Chill. Place apples on lettuce. Split each one in sections from top, part way down sides. Spread sections open. Fill center of apples with cottage cheese or cream cheese, put through a pastry tube. Sprinkle cheese with grated orange or lemon rind.

The chapter subtitle claims that Guardian salads “Will Inveigle the Family Into Their Full Vitamin Quota.” Unmold them and then step back! These salads aren’t just “crisp, firm and tasty” – they badger the diners! Inveigle literally means to lure through flattery. I don’t think I want the salad course to do that.

I don’t think these apples are going to do much inveigling though. They will be exhausted after all that cooking and basting and being colored an unnatural shade of red. I don’t recall the canned baked apples having much to say about my vitamin quota – full or not.

 

Retro Blueberry Ice

A surprising find for the Retro Recipe Challenge, over at Dispensing Happiness. The idea was to find and make a recipe published before your mother was born; in my case, that meant poring over the handful of pre-1924 cookbooks in my collection and seeing what I could find.

Originally I was going to bake something, as that is something I am better at than traditional main courses (and I tremble to think what might happen if I attempted a gelatin mold). But the cakes I liked all seemed so – so heavy, so wintery. And it has been so warm here in Ontario, we are all quite excited about this. Wearing T shirts, getting reacquainted with ice-free sidewalks, opening windows. So I was looking for something light.

When I saw this recipe for blueberry ice I had to make it. Summery, strangely contemporary – and yet, and yet!  Definitely pre-1924! It is from the Cook Book of Left Overs (1911), by Helen Carroll Clarke (former Instructor of Cookery, the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York) and Phoebe Deyo Rulon (Former Instructor in Invalid Cookery and Dietician, Bellevue Hospital, New York City).

Helen and Phoebe recommend this ice for using up stewed blueberries, should you be troubled by a surfeit of them. But I think that you could substitute any stewed, fresh or frozen fruit.

I left out the egg white since raw egg white is not a good idea these days. And I used frozen blueberries, to which I gave a cursory stew, just to keep to the recipe (except for the egg white). I also left the whole berries in, but it would be just as good without them. Up to you, really. Here’s the original recipe:

 The gelatin in the recipe really makes the texture better – unlike previous ices I’ve made, it scooped well even when frozen solid, and I didn’t have to keep taking it out of the freezer and beating it to break down the ice crystals. It’s a lovely color, and tastes deeply of blueberries. Here’s a picture of it. I put it in the sugar bowl of my grandmother’s tea set, circa 1895: