Incredible that I forgot lemon bars

My daughter wants the recipe for lemon bars. There is only one recipe, of course, my own. I thought it would be the work of a moment to rummage among the 600+ posts I had to upload overnight, into Pluot, when poor old At First Glass went kaphut at the loss of the domain name. And yet lo! Search though I might, it seems I forgot to import "At First Glass turns four -- and bakes those classic lemon bars," which first swam into our ken on New Year's Day, 2012.  

Now we might think lemon bars are too ordinary to be worthy of discussion. Who has not learned to make them in a long-ago junior high school home ec. class? Who has not enjoyed them at dozens of Fourth of July picnics and PTA bake sales ever afterward? Here we are, on At First Glass's fourth anniversary, mucking about with (appropriately enough, to be sure) preschool-level treats while grander blogs are fishing ("crabbing") for their own Dungeness crabs, making green lentil soup with curried brown butter, or serving up orange-clove chocolate chip pancakes with coffee-clove syrup.

Yet I submit them, for a variety of reasons. They are simplicity itself. They are a delight to prepare, requiring the use of only one mixing bowl, which can do double duty for the preparation of both crust and filling. There is no need to fuss with softening or creaming butter, nor with greasing a baking pan. Made with fresh squeezed lemon juice, they are the most scrumptious morsels imaginable -- as with so many delicious things, it is their great buttery richness which satisfies you and prevents you from devouring the entire plateful.

And why else? Once upon a time, I made these for some evening PTA function. They lay, all anonymous and humble and ready for any hand to choose among them. People milled about in the blaringly lit, crowded gymnasium, mothers, fathers, grandparents, children. Preschoolers. I happened to be standing chatting with someone, when I saw a woman pick a lemon bar, take a bite of it, pause, and then throw it in the closest garbage can.

Witnessing that, I could only guess that this poor soul had never tasted good, properly made lemon bars before. Are they available in a box mix? Probably. Was that all she knew? Perhaps. It must have been the intense, unaccustomed flavor that put her off -- or perhaps she didn't like lemon and didn't realize until too late what these were. But how could anyone not know? Had she missed that day in Mrs. Pemberton's home ec. class? Is her name legion? All the more reason for me to do my small part today in getting the word out, to dear poor souls everywhere, about this great, commonplace, origins-lost-in-the-mists-of-culinary-prehistory cookie bar.

Lemon bars

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Have ready two 8 x 8 x 2 baking pans, ungreased.

Mix together in a large bowl:
2 and 2/3 cups flour 
1/2 cup sugar

Work in with your fingers until the mixture is moist and crumbly:
1 cup (2 sticks) butter


Divide the dough in half simply by taking it up in fistfuls and putting it alternately in the two pans. Pat the dough down and bake each pan 15 to 20 minutes. Remove from oven.

While the dough is baking, mix in the same mixing bowl
4 eggs
1 and 1/2 cups sugar
4 Tablespoons flour
6 Tablespoons fresh squeezed lemon juice 

Pour the filling over the partially baked crusts. Return to the oven and finish baking for 18 to 20 minutes, until the bars shrink away from the sides of the pan and the edges toast just a little. Let them cool before sprinkling with powdered sugar.



Postscript: do we dare mess with such beauty? Years ago, as Chicago Baking Examiner, I shoehorned this recipe into Examiner.com's random "Vodka month" theme by suggesting a vodka icing to replace the dusting of powdered sugar the bars usually receive. A plain sweet icing starts with 3 Tablespoons of hot water in a bowl, to which about 2 and 1/2 cups powdered sugar is added; you beat the mixture until it reaches a good consistency for spreading or drizzling. Any liquid may be substituted for the hot water, depending on the flavors in the baked treat you plan to glaze. And so, -- vodka with lemon? Or gin .... 

Oatmeal cookies! Opera! Margaret Thatcher!

Dear things, my fatheads, we have discussed rather serious topics lately and it has been ages since we simply baked some cookies. Let's do that. If you combine two recipes from Betty Crocker's Ultimate Cookie Book  (1992), namely "Ultimate Oatmeal Cookies" and "Old-fashioned Rum Raisin Cookies," you very cleverly get Oatmeal Cookies with Rum-Soaked Raisins. Start by simmering 1 cup raisins in a combination of 1/4 cup rum and 1/2 cup water for 20 minutes, until they absorb all liquid. As they simmer, you may prepare everything else.

And by the way, just one thing. You know how I have the greatest fascination with, and respect for, sopranos. A few nights ago I discovered another, Edita Gruberova, whom you may see in the documentary The Art of Belcanto. (This is not the same documentary from the mid '80s about June Anderson, called The Passion of BelCanto.) Watch the sixty-two-year-old, swathed in blue veils and crowned with a blue crown, climb the steps up to the stage to deliver herself of "Casta diva" from Norma. Then, toward the end of the program, watch her in a business suit and pearls sing some role -- the subtitles did not make this clear, though a bit of research turns up Donizetti's Roberto Devereux  -- which the director says he wanted her to interpret as though "she were a sort of Margaret Thatcher character." I understood the words "Margaret Thatcher" even without subtitles. The suit, pearls, and titian-blonde wig did the rest.

In one scene, probably at the opera's climax, the diva in mid-aria reaches up and peels off her wig while keeping a ghastly expression on her face. Another maestro, in his interview, exults on how masterful and shocking the scene is. I don't doubt it, and I salute the diva. My question is this: "a Margaret Thatcher-like" character? No, I should say the character is Margaret Thatcher: if this is just one scene, then I think we can be sure that for the rest of the opera also, by gesture and word and deed, this character is understood to be all evil, corruption, danger, and viciousness, and yet all inner sickness, terror, and failure too. Why Thatcher? Assuming for the Donizetti we must keep to an "English court" setting, why not, oh -- the Vogue offices of Anna Wintour?  Imaginative opera directors could do something sacredly provocative with that, don't you think?

But no. Margaret Thatcher is a much plumper target. Even though she died at the age of 87 in 2013 and had been out of office for almost a quarter-century by then. All right, be fair. When this opera was staged in 2005, she was only 79 and had only been out of office for fifteen years. Why does it so deeply satisfy artistic orthodoxy to portray her, still, as something the knowing can shudder at, and yet happily pity? For how many more European generations will the costume of business suit, pearls, and backswept titian wig signify moral nightmare?

"The left hates her -- because she thrashed them," one of our sources says.

Continue with recipe.

Betty Crocker's Ultimate Oatmeal Cookie with Rum-Soaked Raisins

Have your rum-soaked raisins ready.
Preheat the oven to 375 F. In a large bowl, mix:

2/3 cup sugar
2/3 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup vegetable shortening
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs

Stir in

3 cups quick-cooking or old fashioned oats
1 cup flour
the rum-soaked raisins

Drop dough by rounded tablespoonfuls about 2 inches apart onto an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 9 to 11 minutes. Remove immediately from sheet and cool on racks.

Pillsbury's "Simply From Scratch" Apple Cream Cheese coffeecake (1981)

My notes were very brief. 

quite a project
baking pamphlet, picked up in a thrift store
cardamom $14 a jar

Let me give you the recipe first, so that you may begin to judge what a project it was. You are going to make three things, a cake, a filling, and a topping, so you will need three good sized bowls just for a start. (What luck that we happen to be reading Bee Wilson's Consider the Fork (2012), whose first chapter, "Pots and Pans," delves into the history of why we have so much duplicate stuff in our kitchens). You will also need two cups of peeled and chopped apples, plus two sticks of butter and an 8 ounce package of cream cheese set out beforehand, to come to room temperature.

Pillsbury's "Simply From Scratch" [that's the baking pamphlet,1981] Apple Cream Cheese coffeecake  

First, grease and lightly flour a 13 x 9 inch baking pan. Then, for the cake, combine:

3 cups flour
1 cup sugar
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 and 1/3 cups milk
2/3 cup butter, softened  (yes, you will work softened butter into an already thick and milk-moistened dough)
2 teaspoons vanilla
3 eggs

Spoon the batter into the prepared pan.

Next, make the filling. 

one 8 ounce package cream cheese, softened
2 cups chopped apples
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon cardamom (this is the delicacy that costs $13.99 a jar)
1 Tablespoon flour
2 Tablespoons butter, softened 

Combine all the ingredients in a large bowl, and spoon the mix over the cake batter. Use a rubber spatula to gently swirl the apples partly into the batter.

Now is a good time to preheat the oven to 375 F.

Finally, make the topping. Mix together:

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 Tablespoon sugar
1/2 cup chopped nuts

Sprinkle over the cake. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes, until golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. "If desired, top with whipped cream."    

It is most scrumptious, but I must ask whether one teaspoonful out of the $14 purchase of cardamom made that much difference in the end. I am inclined to think not. The gunmetal gray powder once had a distinct lemon fragrance in the jar, a fragrance which seemed to lose itself amid the cream cheese, the apples, and the butter. Nutmeg might have been more to the point.

Besides, some time has passed since I made this cake. When I opened the jar again to smell whatever was left -- almost all of it -- the first words that came to my mind were model airplane paint. My brother used to make very nice model airplanes, painting and gluing with utmost care. I have not smelled that paint since I was maybe twelve years old. Not for nothing do we hear assurances that the sense of smell is the most evocative of all. I threw out the jar of cardamom.

Still, I'd like briefly to discuss its marvels, for apparently it has them. There is no better way to enjoy them vicariously than to quote the strong lovely prose of Sylvia Windle Humphrey, whose A Matter of Taste (1965) is our spice-and-herb bible. She says: 

Cardamom (Elettaria cardamom maton) ... a jewel of a spice, it is the second most expensive spice in the world (saffron comes first), so dear because every delicate little seed pod has to be snipped off the plant by hand with scissors. The yield is low, too, only about 250 pounds per acre. It is native to India, but most of our supply now comes from Guatemala. [Mrs. Humphrey seems to be still right about this last, even fifty years later.]

Cardamom, a clean flowery-spicy breath sweetener, is put up by nature in handy little-fingernail-sized, bleached-white capsules, each containing ten to twelve pungent black seeds, easy to fit into pocket or purse. As a member of the ginger family it has some of the properties, but not the taste, of that invaluable plant. It is sweeter than ginger, with less edge, yet has authority. Like ginger, it awakens the whole tongue, making it, in moderation, a good ingredient in a spice blend which is to be used to bring out the flavor of main dishes. Like ginger it belongs with fresh melon. Like ginger, it is good for the stomach.

Cardamom is most familiar in sweets. Fine Danish pastries and coffee cakes are frequently seasoned with cardamom, both in the dough and in the filling. In all the Scandinavian countries it has been both a favorite seasoning and flavor ever since Viking sailors first carried it home from the markets in Constantinople more than 1,500 years ago. In Norway, the Christmas season reeks of cardamom, and the Swedes consume fifty times more cardamom per capita than does the United States. 

She goes on to rhapsodize about its "clean warmth," "floral perfume," etc. I begin to think that perhaps there never was very much authentically going on in my jar of cardamom, even perhaps that I can't source the real thing because I don't know any Vikings. We will have to let our Apple Cream Cheese Coffeecake do the work of reeking-of-Christmas on its own.

Gourmet's pumpkin apple bread

My intentions were to find a fancier version of Beer and Jalapeno Cheese Bread, if such a thing could exist; a co-worker had given me an excellent loaf of the bread, and I had found what seems to be the only recipe for it, repeated many times over on all the cooking sites of the internet. Nevertheless I wondered whether some professional had perhaps improved the recipe with additions of some glorious cheese, or some glorious heirloom jalapeno or fine expensive beer.

Thumbing through the index of my trusted paper-and-binding Gourmet cook book brought me no closer to what I wanted. Perhaps beer bread is beer bread. But something else caught my eye there. "Bread, pumpkin apple," sounded very nice.

It is very nice. Gourmet (2004) credits the recipe to Rebecca's Gourmet Bakery in Cary, North Carolina. 

For the topping:

1 Tbsp. flour
5 Tbsp. sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 Tbsp. butter, softened

Blend together flour, sugar, cinnamon, and butter in a small bowl with your fingertips until the mixture resembles coarse meal.

For the bread:

3 cups flour
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 and 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 tsp. freshly grated nutmeg
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/4 tsp. ground allspice
1 (15 ounce) can solid pack pumpkin
3/4 cup vegetable oil
2 and 1/4 cups sugar
4 large eggs, lightly beaten
2 granny smith apples, peeled, cored, chopped*

*Query, can we steep them, or perhaps even flame them in the Calvados we just bought?

Butter 2 9 x 5 inch loaf pans. Preheat the oven to 350 F.

Sift together the flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and allspice in a bowl. Whisk together pumpkin, oil, sugar, and eggs in another bowl. Add the flour/spice mixture to the egg/pumpkin mixture, combining well. Fold in the apples.

Divide the batter between the two buttered loaf pans. Sprinkle half of topping evenly over each loaf. Bake until a wooden skewer inserted into the middle of the loaf comes out clean, about 50 minutes to an hour.

Cool the loaves in their pans for about 45 minutes, then turn out onto racks and cool completely.

Little luscious treats like this are so very right in fall, with its abundance of harvest goods that go right into the bakery oven and the long-cooking stewpot. Pumpkins and apples here, nuts, cranberries, squashes, spices, and cream everywhere. We must do a little study of Halloween, you know, and find out why all its foods are treats and tibits -- but why no one sits down to a formal Halloween dinner. It seems to have something to do with the prehistoric Celts.  

Shaker lemon bread

Now my fatheads, you mustn't imagine I have abandoned you. It's just that tearing up the carpet exposes one, not only to all that wood-floor craftsmanship circa 1893, but to unexpected necessities. One mops a lot, and rearranges furniture, and goes shopping for little things that have been on a "to do" list for ages, but never taken care of actually. For example I am looking forward to getting my first "Brown Betty" teapot in a few days. And then if one has to go out and buy a new router for the old exhausted computer, why, there's a day spent hooking up machinery and telephoning the Geek Squad for assistance. What luck that a new computer arrived in the mail, a hand me down from (wait for it) the ex-husband's ex-girlfriend's young son. (Thereby hangs a tale.) If only one could get the kid's picture off the home screen. It's a Mac. They were all artsy and everything.

So I haven't abandoned you. And you may have some lemon bread.

From The Best of Shaker Cooking, 1970.

1/2 cup shortening
1 and 1/2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1 and 1/2 cups sifted flour
1 and 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup chopped nuts (optional)
Grated rind, and the juice, of one lemon

Preheat oven to 350 F. Beat together shortening and 1 cup of the sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each. Sift the dry ingredients together and add alternately with milk to the sugar mixture, beating well after each addition. Add nuts and lemon rind.

Turn batter into greased 8 and 1/2 inch bread pan. Bake 50 to 60 minutes. Blend remaining sugar and the lemon juice. Pour over bread as soon as it comes from oven. Makes 1 loaf.

In which we "take the cake"

Brief notes, my fatheads. The Josh sauvignon blanc is very good, not as powerfully grassy as our delicious New Zealand sauvignon blancs, but good. Retail, about $13.

Next, Aristophanes. And why not? Get a load of this.

EURIPIDES: He could sit in the assembly with all the women, and speak in my defence, if necessary.
MNESILOCHUS: What, openly? Or in disguise?
EURIPIDES: Disguised. Dressed up in women's clothes.
MNESILOCHUS: What a magnificent idea! That's really up to your best standard. For downright cunning, we take the cake, I must say.

This is from Aristophanes' The Poet and The Women, better known to Luciaphils -- lovers of E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia novels, circa 1939 -- and perhaps to the world as the Thesmophoriazusae, or "the women celebrating the Thesmophoria." The festival was one of those strange ancient ones in which women gathered to dance, praise a god or goddess, freak out, and maybe kill random animals or men. Luciaphils remember that Lucia reads the play and quotes it briefly in The Worshipful Lucia, when she is being superb about Mapp's "wind-egg" baby. My fatheads, you simply must read the books.

Anyway, we are much struck, aren't we? by Aristophanes saying, 2,500 years ago, that something "takes the cake." The translator of our 1964 Penguin classics edition, David Barrett, adds a simple footnote. He says, "The phrase is a literal translation from the Greek. Perhaps the only phrase from Aristophanes to have found its way into English."

Now how extraordinary. Or, "absolutely too straordinario," as Lucia would put it. What cake? -- a Greek cake? Made of what? Were there really occasions or ceremonies in ancient Greece when cakes were prizes, and so the image of being awarded one would be vivid in the language, and pass untouched to us?

Yes, it seems so, but you must dig a little to find out more. If you consult your dictionary under "cake" or "take," because sometimes dictionaries unpack idioms you know, -- or if you consult your Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (Sir Paul Harvey, 1937 -- gad, how old my books are, but at least they are free of political correctness) under "Aristophanes," you find no asseverations that "take the cake" came straight into our language from the Thesmophoriazusae. Modern foolers-about with the Internet who notice the expression do a bit of digging of their own, and all seem to quote and re-quote two bits of information regarding it: one, that it comes originally from Aristophanes yes, but from another play of his called The Knights ("if you surpass him in impudence the cake is ours"); and two, that it also derives from 19th century southern American "cake-walking" dances popular among plantation slaves. These cake walks seem to have been exciting, intensely competitive, demanding country dances, in which finely dressed couples strutted and pranced on a strictly demarcated floor, and were judged for their grace and synchronization of movement. The winners took home a cake, sometimes presented by the visiting white master. Everybody who mentions the cake walk seems to tack on one more American source for our take-the-cake phrase, a sentence from an 1847 story about horse racing ("the winning horse take [sic] the cakes"). All seem to agree generally that "take the cake," even if birthed by a Greek comic master poet in antiquity, is mostly an Americanism.   

I use the term "foolers about with the Internet" to distinguish those who have uncovered these two items, from we who go deeper and are therefore -- I decree it -- researchers. Wondrous Google books will let you find two more things. It will let you have a look at The Thesmophoriazusae of Aristophanes, published by Benjamin Bickley Rogers, MA, in 1904. Mr. Rogers doesn't even bother translating the play into English. It was a scholarly era, his publisher was Oxford: he intends you to read in Greek, he proffering notes, mostly about Greek usage but that is all. At their proper place his notes tell us "a πνραμους" -- transliterated, this I think is pnramous?-- "was a cake of which the principal ingredients were parched wheat and boiled honey, and which is specially known as the prize awarded to the man who in an all-night drinking bout, with all his companions asleep around him, kept awake till sunrise...." Query, then who awarded the cake? Ah, perhaps that is the point. You took it ... Mr. Rogers does allow Aristophanes borrowed the phrase from his own Knights. When wondrous Google books also lets you peek at A Dictionary of Cliches: a Word-Lover's Guide to 4,000 Overused Phrases, by Christine Ammer, you find there the drinking-bout cake and θεζμοφοριαζουςαι, the Thesmophoriazusae, again. We painstakingly type out Greek letters here because we think Lucia would happily and loftily do so. Typeit is as wondrous as anything else online. I wish it had more than 1,100 likes on Facebook.

So should we conclude that both foolers-about and researchers are right about the origins of "take the cake," and that it comes from Aristophanes, after "a strange lapse" of millenia, via the American south? Or is it possible that two civilizations thousands of years apart happened to coin an identical idiom, because both sometimes gave cakes as prizes?

And we would perhaps like to know how to make this antique cake. Alas, it seems we are fated only to learn that its ingredients were the parched wheat and honey. We should remember that parching means to dry out through exposure to heat, not -- as we might intuit -- to parboil. The purpose is to slough off indigestible husks from wheat kernels. James Augustus St. John, in his History of the Manners and Customs of Ancient Greece, Volume 3 (London, 1842) calls the mysterious Greek cake "the Chaerine," and the all-night festival the "Panuchia." In her chapter on baking Madeleine Kamman in The New Making of a Cook tells us that parched cereals, perhaps eaten out of the hand like nuts or in time crushed, mixed with water, and drunk, represented mankind's earliest steps on the road to bread making. For that matter it was also the road to beer.

This leads us back to drink, and to that photo above of the nice Josh sauvignon blanc, and our asseveration that we were going to just do "brief notes." We intended to unpack other topics of interest but we got -- like a suitcase? -- carried away. Here is a new beer for you, to sip while you ponder whether or not to finish reading The Poet and the Women. Very strange. At the end there is a character called simply a Scythian, whom the translator makes to talk like Chico Marx, in non-stop "I break-a you face" style. Perhaps Scythians were the roughneck immigrants of ancient Athens.

Round Barn Brewery Kolsch style ale. Sweet, fresh, not too bitter, and from Michigan. Retail, about $10 for a 6 pack. 

(Wine and) snickerdoodles, snow and watercolors, and ....

The gentleman friend was rather crabby. He was due to leave for the tropics the next day, a prospect which should have thrilled him. "Going home," "back to my people," he calls it. Maybe. Only it's not much of a thrill or a vacation when a man has to launch himself at the problems of recovering the estate, whilst convicted criminals have just used their right of appeal to, perhaps, finger a family friend in the outrage. Then he must fire bad lawyers and hire better ones, even as he bleeds money. Will it all prove so very worthwhile, just to get that hacienda away from winter weather?

Maybe. As I drove home though the snowy woods, admiring the views, I thought "I must learn to paint watercolors." Watercolors, so I have read and so I have been instructed in art appreciation classes, require much training and discipline on the part of the artist. ("And yet they're the first paints we give children," a professor long ago huffed.) One opens the little tray, picks up a brush, wets it, and then tries to layer on washes of color judiciously enough to let plenty of white paper show through any scene, thus giving the style "its characteristic sparkle." I saw lots of sparkling white as I drove, which made me think that, done up as a watercolor, this would be easy. I saw a wash of very pale, translucent blue sky layered over with delicate stipples of rich brown -- that's the snow-covered branches of bushes and trees -- going back forever to a wintry-white vanishing point. The long firm streaks of brownish-black crowding the foreground would be the trunks of trees half slathered in snow and shadow, marshalled against the declining late-afternoon sun. All the rest of the space would be judiciously exposed watercolor-white paper. At the bottom of the picture plane would lay shadows. They are a challenge. Are shadows on the snow blue, or blue-ish, or the most faint and palest of all purples? Or are they grey? Could we, the artist, take a bit of artistic license, and touch on a frail and lovely pink that wasn't really there, but that often seems to be there in a winter sunset or a winter cloud?

But we intend to bake snickerdoodles. We venture from friends to snow to watercolors to snickerdoodles because, -- well, the friend does art, too, and doesn't like snow and had never heard of, or tasted, a snickerdoodle until we at Pluot baked them for him. And these cookies have to do with wine, which closes the circle of our blog-interest nicely. Don't you think?

Snickerdoodles of course are those rich butter cookies whose variations always include a generous teaspoon of cinnamon. Of their strange name, the Betty Crocker Ultimate Cookie Book says only that it has "amused people for centuries.” According to the American Heritage Cookbook (1965), “New England cooks had a penchant for giving odd names to their dishes ... snickerdoodles come from a tradition of this sort that includes Graham Jakes, Jolly Boys, Brambles, Tangle Breeches, and Kinkawoodles.” Every cookery source on God's clean earth, in print or on line since 1965, quotes this asseveration, so it must be true. However, the recipe for Snickerdoodles which American Heritage then offers includes nuts, currants, and raisins. If you have ever eaten glorious, real, plain Snickerdoodles, I feel sure you will agree all that clutter is not necessary and is close to being an abomination

My version of snickerdoodles, from a junior high school home ec. class by way of the Betty Crocker cookbook I should think, calls for cream of tartar and baking soda as the leavening agents. This may be a hint as to the recipe’s age. Before the invention of baking powder, cooks would have used baking soda to raise this "small cake." But baking soda needs an acid to work with, to create the carbon dioxide bubbles that lift a batter.

Many acids will do the trick; which is why recipes calling for baking soda may also call for lemon or orange juice. But cream of tartar, another acid, serves even better, being flavorless and conveniently available as a dry powder. Mixing two parts cream of tartar to one part baking soda creates what old-fashioned cooks would have called a single-acting baking powder, that is, a leavening which works as soon as a batter is moistened. A baked good made this way must go in the oven as soon as possible, to capture the bubbling and rising that is already going on. Recipes calling for baking soda and a simple liquid acid like orange juice should warn you of this.

When in the early1800s some bright soul had the idea of adding corn starch to a single-acting baking powder, he found himself with a ready-made leavening which could act twice. The corn starch kept the other two powders dry enough to permit them to raise a batter when it was moistened, and again when it went into the hot oven. To this day our commercial baking powders, dependable and convenient, their soda and acid all in one, are still labeled -- mysteriously, for most of us -- “double acting.”

Cream of tartar itself is, or once was, a byproduct of wine making. Tartaric acid (ah-ha), naturally present in grapes, collects on the inside of old wine barrels. When scraped off and mixed with potassium hydroxide, it creates a usable salt, potassium bitartrate or cream of tartar. If you have ever seen strange, harmless crystals clinging to a cork, or floating in a wine bottle, you have seen a wine's tartrates precipitating out. They especially cling to a cork when a wine has been abruptly chilled. The nice people at Wikipedia tell us that these are also called "wine diamonds," a very pretty term. Almost as cute as snickerdoodles.

Now you may bake. And after that, paint. We'll see what stories he brings home from the tropics.

Snickerdoodles 

Have ready: ½ cup butter, softened; 3/4 cup sugar; 1 egg

Mix in a bowl: 1 and ½ cups flour, 1 teaspoon cream of tartar, ½ teaspoon baking soda, 1/8 teaspoon salt

Mix in a separate bowl: 4 Tablespoons sugar, 2 teaspoons cinnamon

Preheat the oven to 400. Cream together the butter and sugar until light, and then add the egg. Mix thoroughly, and add the dry flour mixture. Combine well, and shape the dough into balls. Roll them in the cinnamon sugar mixture, and bake on ungreased cookie sheets 8-10 minutes. Makes about 30-35 cookies.

 

Retro hot fudge water pudding

It's strange to see a revolution take place in Kiev, to see the central square of a city burn and to know that citizens have been killed by their government's snipers. Strange to see an arrested former prime minister released from prison, and to know a current dictator has tried to flee the capital but has apparently been stopped. We look at the photo of the priest standing amid the smoke with what looks like a knight's shield on his back. Below it we joke that he is a "level 4 cleric," or "came to preach Jesus and whip ass and he's all out of Jesus." Here are people, strangely, who have made and lived through something that the revolutionists in Paris did, two hundred years ago; something like what our own founding fathers did, too. See the photos of them massing tensely a few days ago, they all in their thrown-together clothes and hats and helmets looking like something out of a Bruegel painting. The survivors will talk about these days all their lives. In his book The Closing of the American Mind (1987) Allan Bloom once wrote that the three most transcendent moments in the human experience are the creative process, consummated love, and victory in a just war.

Below, obviously the plate is prettier than the piece of Retro Hot Fudge Water Pudding. I thought we might need something to snack on while we're reading about Kiev, and, well, I still had the picture.
 

We get this recipe from Gold Medal Jubilee Select Recipes 1880-1955, the same little pamphlet that gave us the Buttermilk Spice Cake of a few days ago. I've called it Hot Fudge Water Pudding to draw attention to the last ingredient required, which is one and three-quarters cups of hot water, poured right on the batter before it goes into the oven. It's the kind of recipe twist that just shrieks, "try me!"

The pamphlet groups this pudding into the chapter "Popular recipes of 1940-1950," and explains that, being a sort of chocolate upside-down cake, it may constitute the original upside down cake of any variety. "In the old days," the authors say, "women poured heavy molasses in the bottom of the pan" to make the cake. Pouring hot water over a brown sugar topping mimics molasses.

The cake is by no means gorgeous to look at, but it's fun to put together and not too sweet.

Hot fudge water pudding

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Set out a 9 x 9 x 2 baking pan. In a bowl, mix:

• 1 cup flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 2 Tablespoons cocoa

Stir in:

• 1/2 cup milk
• 2 Tablespoons butter, melted

Blend in 1 cup chopped nuts. Spread in the pan (the batter is thick). In another bowl, mix:

• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/4 cup cocoa

Sprinkle this mixture over the batter in the pan. Then, pour over the batter 1 and 3/4 cups hot water. Bake 45 minutes. The cake mixture will rise to the top and the chocolate sauce will sink to the bottom. Serve warm, with or without whipped cream.

 

Retro buttermilk spice cake, 1955

A retro cake for retro people, and what could be nicer? Please enjoy also the lovely advertisements reproduced below, from about the same era. It seems there was once a company called Textron, which made fabric for parachutes and then for ladies' underthings. Could both have been silk? This lady looks as though, while rocking in her quaint little winter-birdhouse chair, she is contemplating getting up and having a piece of cake.

The recipe comes from the Gold Medal Flour Jubilee Select Recipes booklet, published in 1955. It's specifically from the chapter titled "Popular recipes of 1920-1930 brought up to date." If you don't happen to have buttermilk on hand, you'll start with a lemon or a bottle of vinegar: use 1 Tbsp. of either lemon juice or vinegar to sour 1 cup of whole milk. Let the milk sit out at room temperature while you prepare the cake.

Buttermilk spice cake

• 2 cups plus 2 Tbsp flour
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 3/4 tsp baking soda
• 3/4 tsp ground cloves
• 3/4 tsp ground cinnamon
• 3/4 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup "soft shortening (such as Spry, Swift'ning)" -- I used equal parts butter and vegetable shortening
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 3 eggs

Preheat the oven to 350 F, and butter and flour two 9-inch cake pans. Mix in a bowl the flour, sugar, salt, leavenings, and spices. Add the brown sugar and mix in well, breaking up any lumps. Mix in the shortening and then the buttermilk or soured milk, beating well with an electric beater. Add the eggs, beating well again. Pour into the prepared pans and bake for about 35 to 40 minutes. Cool the cakes on racks and then frost and fill as desired.

For the frosting, I used the recipe for Quick Cream Icing on the next page of the Gold Medal booklet. Blend 1 and 1/2 cups sifted powdered sugar, 1/2 tsp vanilla, and 2 Tbsp cream or milk to make a thin icing. Spread it between the layers. Then, make another batch of the icing to drizzle over the top of the cake, or perhaps just dust the top with sifted powdered sugar.

 

 Image source, Ad Library from eBay.

Chocolate cake and underage cashiers

The most beautiful little package of potential pleasure the kitchen has to offer: the square of unsweetened Baker's chocolate.

We are lucky enough to have two winter birthdays in our house, one in late November and one in late December. Traditionally, the dessert of choice after birthday dinner is chocolate cake with creamy chocolate frosting, from Marion Cunningham's revision of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook (1986). As she says, this is "a fine-grained, tender cake -- ice water is its secret." Don't be tempted to think that ice water makes a weak or flavorless cake. It is delicious, and not bloatingly rich.

After buttering and flouring two round cake pans, you melt 2 squares of chocolate in a heavy small pan (be careful and remember how quickly chocolate can scorch). Set the chocolate aside to cool, and then cream one stick (1/4 cup) of room-temperature butter, and slowly beat into it 1 and 1/2 cups sugar. The butter-sugar mix takes on a feathery consistency at the end.


Then, mix in 2 eggs and 2 teaspoons vanilla. And why is it that the young cashiers at the local supermarket, who may not even scan a bottle of wine through their register, are allowed to scan a bottle of vanilla extract, which is 35 percent alcohol? It used to be that the customer herself could scan just this one product on the clerk's behalf, wine, but as of this winter, the store has changed both its computer system and, apparently, the rigor of its adherence to inane state liquor laws. Now any cashier under 21 must summon a manager to physically move the bottle of wine past the little electronic eye and so tot up as a sale. While everybody waits, fuming or not. Innocent, seductive vanilla, more potent in its tiny flat brown bottle than any three average wines, is deemed not to be the hazard to fragile young morals that its proof ought to make it.

But we digress.



After the vanilla and eggs are thoroughly mixed in to the butter/sugar, add the cooled chocolate. It always seems, to this chocolate lover, that I am leaving spoonfuls of it in the pan, but it all seems to come out all right.


Meanwhile, you will have mixed 2 cups of cake flour, 1 and 1/2 teaspoons of baking soda, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt in a separate bowl. The use of cake flour does make a difference. Add the flour mix to the batter, and blend.


Now you will add 1 cup of ice water. Mix it in.


Pour the batter into the two pans, and bake the cakes for 25 minutes in a preheated 350 F oven.


While the cakes are baking, address yourself to making Creamy Chocolate Frosting. This is simple. Put 2 more squares of baking chocolate into a heavy small pan, along with 1 cup of sugar and 3 Tablespoons cornstarch. Stir into this 1 cup of boiling water.


Cook and stir until the chocolate melts, the sugar and cornstarch dissolve, and everything becomes smooth and thick. This takes about five minutes. If you make a mistake and your cornstarch turns lumpy, you can always pour the frosting through a fine strainer into a bowl and save the day that way. After the frosting is smooth, add 1 Tablespoon butter, 1 teaspoon of that intoxicating vanilla, and a pinch of salt.


Mix thoroughly, and allow to cool.


When the cake is done, a toothpick inserted in its center will come out clean. And when the cake and the frosting are cool, it will be time to create your birthday masterpiece.


When I used to watch my mother make cakes as a little girl, I remember being disappointed at the rule that one always frosts between the two layers first, and then the sides; I thought of course we want all that delicious frosting plopped right on top right now, don't we? No, we do not. Frosting the middle and sides glues the cake together and hides what tend to be the ugliest parts, the crisp, floury sides.
Then you may frost the top.



And then you may eat, after you sing Happy Birthday. Tea and coffee are fair companions to this, but the best drink of all beside it is, of course, nice cold milk. Whole milk full of fat, please. So appropriate for the youngsters. They are safe anyway because all the alcohol in the vanilla has cooked away. We haven't invited the liquor control commissioners ....

French breakfast puffs

... reminding us that it's not all about dinner, and food and wine pairings. Your day, after all, starts with breakfast -- add a mimosa, if it's the weekend -- and these muffins will start you off very very happily.



The recipe comes from my seventh-grade Home Economics class, courtesty of Mrs. Pemberton, a sweet little old lady who taught "home ec." back in the days when, well -- sweet little old ladies still taught home ec. We begin with 1/3 cup butter, at room temperature, creamed together with 1/2 cup sugar. Then add 1 egg and blend.



Then add the 1 and 1/2 cups flour, 1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, and 1/2 teaspoon salt that you have mixed in a separate bowl. Once that is blended into the butter mixture, finish off the batter by adding 1/2 teaspoon vanilla and 1/2 cup of milk. Beat batter well. It will be stiff enough to hold the wooden spoon upright.



Then fill greased muffin tins, or paper muffin cups, about 2/3 full. Bake for 20-25 minutes in a preheated 350 F oven.



As soon as they are done, take them out of the pan and roll the tops first in a shallow bowl of 1/4 cup melted butter, and then in a second shallow bowl holding a mix of 1/4 sugar and 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon.

This recipe is supposed to make 12-18 muffins; I must be doing something wrong because I find the batter is so rich it only makes nine. And by the way, if you find you cannot fill all your muffin tins with batter, fill each empty section with a quarter inch or so of water before putting the pan in the oven. I recall reading somewhere that you should do this, both to prevent the pan from warping and to make up for the humidity lost when a baked-goods recipe does not produce the volume you expected. Is it really necessary? Who knows? I do it. And in what sense are these French Breakfast Puffs really French? Who knows? It makes them sound as good as they taste.



They are just heavenly. Under Mrs. Pemberton's direction a class full of seventh-grade girls could prepare and bake these, and clean up, in a forty-minute period. Since you are not rushing off to math or science afterward, you may find you can be a bit more leisurely about it. Perhaps you'll have time to mix up that nice mimosa.

Spicy peach "bread"

Among all At First Glass' posts, this was the whopper of whoppers as far as page views were concerned -- close to 5,000 I think. It's all because the Pillsbury people found it and featured it on their blog for one day.

Much more like a peach cake. As Madeleine Kamman sniffs -- and she rarely sniffs, but here I think she does -- in the great New Making of a Cook, "Coming as I do from Europe, I have always had a lot of trouble understanding why quick breads, which contain so much sugar, can be called breads. For me and pretty much all Europeans, they are a heavier form of cake, truly cakes not breads."

Note, a "heavier form of cake." And she is probably right. Perhaps the simple and unexciting reason our quick breads are so called is because we bake them in loaf pans, and so they come out looking breadish.

What follows is a recipe for a spiced peach nut (bread) cake, heavy indeed with sugar, fruit, and eggs, and not anything that our Madeleine is responsible for. It's from the Pillsbury company's "Simply From Scratch -- Volume 3" booklet, published in 1981. I'm glad to report it calls unabashedly for canned peaches (and their syrup), which are so easy to work with and tasty too. I went so far as to choose canned chopped peaches, which were easier still. They were "the bomb," isn't that the word?




Spicy peach cake

• 2 cups flour
• 2/3 c sugar
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 to 1/2 tsp ground cloves (I threw caution to the winds and added the same amount of cinnamon and nutmeg)
• 2 Tbsp butter, melted
• 2 eggs
• 1 (16 oz. can) peaches, spiced if desired, drained and chopped, syrup reserved
• 1/2 cup chopped nuts

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Grease and flour a 9 x 5 or and 8 x 4 inch loaf pan. (Aha.)

In a large bowl combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, baking soda, spices, butter, eggs, peaches and 1/2 cup reserved syrup. Beat well. Stir in nuts.




Pour into the prepared pan, and bake for 40 t0 50 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center of the loaf comes out clean. Remove from pan, and cool completely.

In a small bowl, combine the glaze ingredients:

• 1/2 cup powdered sugar
• 3 to 4 tsp reserved syrup

Drizzle over the cake.



Notice the glaze is rather thin, and the finished cake, as good as it is, not the most attractive-looking thing in the world. Perhaps another reason why we call such confections by the humble name of bread?

When retro goes wrong: "Sarah Bernhardts"

To love retro cooking is to be unable to resist a recipe for "Sarah Bernhardts," from the cookbook Saucepans and the Single Girl (1965), written by the wonderfully retro-named Jinx Kragen and Judy Perry. This was the cookbook that called to mind images of the newly independent, post-college Jinx and Judy strutting around the big city in their pencil skirts, high heels, and beehive hairdos, buying groceries and liquor after work for their smart weekend dinner party. "Happiness is a very dry martini," they announce in their introduction ("or, why we bothered"). Later, they would move on to marriage and motherhood, and a new cookbook, How to Keep Him (After You've Caught Him) -- which is where we got the idea for those nice rum-soaked fudge brownies.

Saucepans and the Single Girl is among the treasures available in the cookbook collection at the Chicago Public Library's main branch on State Street (fourth floor, call letters beginning with TX, should you happen to be toddling around town in your heels and pencil skirt). These Sarah Bernhardts struck me as pleasingly, encouragingly easy to make, and so I persevered despite the little warning bell in my head clanging away, telling me that Sarah Bernhardts, somehow, should not be easy.

Nor should they necessarily include a bucketful of oats. This retro recipe didn't go wrong, exactly. It's just odd. For Jinx and Judy's version, combine 4 cups of old fashioned oats with 2 cups of brown sugar. Add 1/2 pound (2 sticks) of butter, melted, and 2 Tbsp., that's Tablespoons, vanilla (I replaced one of them with 1 Tbsp. of brandy, and still found the cookies incredibly sweet).

Fill muffin tins half full with this batter. Cook 15 minutes in a preheated 350 F oven, and when they are done, cool the little cakes in the pans completely. They must solidify or else they will fall apart on a cookie rack.

This recipe is almost the same as that for old-fashioned lace cookies, except that lace cookies at least include some milk to cut the sweetness and some flour to hold the dough together. And these "Sarah Bernhardts" are totally unlike those that other cookbooks claim to teach. The true Sarah Bernhardt -- although who's to say? -- seems to be a complex confection of almond-flavored cookie topped with a chocolate cream filling, and then drizzled with a chocolate coating. Martha Stewart can instruct you in the real thing, if you are so undaunted. I suspect Jinx and Judy would have been content with these little butter-sugar-oat chews, perhaps washed down with some sort of chic little potable.

Toffee-coffee-chocolate chip bars

I do bake, as my little hint on the sidebar brags [this was ages ago, of course], at Examiner dot com, but some baked goods are so simple and delicious that I'd like to share them as enthusiastically as possible. Besides, discussing Toffee-coffee-chocolate chip bars gives me a chance both to explore the etymology of some basic food words, and to ponder the joys of wine with dessert. Last weekend, we finished up our grilled-outdoors dinner with toasted marshmallows and sauvignon blanc, and it was delicious.

These bars come from Good Cookies Plain and Fancy, by Annette Laslett Ross and Jean Adams Disney, published by Doubleday in 1963. It's one of those straight-from-another-universe cookbooks which presumes that "busy mothers" nevertheless bake and want to bake and are proud of baking well. "Cookies that will go to school," the authors warn in one chapter opening, "should be the keep-fresh kind (for busy mothers may find once a week as often as they'll have time to bake.)" The little unpunctuated hints at the head of each recipe also bespeak a quainter time -- creamy good, little folks' treat -- though thankfully they are fully spelled out. Usages like rich 'n' chewy always annoy me.

"Coffee flavored," announces the subheading for these simply titled Toffee Bars. As I had leftover coffee sitting handy when this recipe caught my eye, I was further intrigued.

The recipe begins with the greasing of a 9 inch square pan and the preheating of the oven to 350 F. Then, you will melt 1/4 cup of butter in a heavy pot, and stir 1 cup of brown sugar into it until it is dissolved.



This, cooked brown sugar and butter, would seem to be toffee, a British variation of the word taffy, whose etymology is otherwise unknown. If I understand my dictionary correctly, it is not to be confused with caramel, burnt (white) sugar, a word which comes to us from Latin via French, and apparently simply means sugar cane (canna mellis). And what is the difference between the sugars? Brown sugar contains molasses, itself a product of sugar cane refining, either residual or added back to white sugar. White sugar is free of it. In recipes brown sugar is always measured packed, as you see above.

Cool the sugar and butter mix, and then add to it 1 egg. In a separate bowl, combine 1 cup of flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, and 1/4 teaspoon salt. Add this to the butter mix alternately with 1 teaspoon of vanilla and 1/4 cup of strong, cold coffee. Blend well, and then stir in 1/2 cup nuts, if desired, or as I did, 1 cup of chocolate chips.



Bake about 30 minutes.



Not too sweet, with those chocolate chips sunk delectably to the bottom of the pan, these bars would be good of course with tea or coffee or milk. But wine with dessert, not some special choice but whatever wine you had with dinner, can also be excellent and much more interesting.

It's funny. In one of her books, M.F.K. Fisher specifically lists red wine with chocolate as an archetypical abomination. And yet it is just this combination which seems to have become all the rage these days in newspaper articles and at wine shop tastings (we staffed one ourselves, back in the day). She explains, or rather she doesn't bother to explain:

"... ten million men rush every noontime for their ham-on-white and their cherry coke. ....It might be good if you could go to them, quietly, and say, "Please, sir, stop a minute and listen to me. Can you imagine eating bananas and Limburger cheese together? ... Ah! It is horrible? Then how about mutton chops with shrimp sauce? And try herring soup with strawberry jam, or chocolate with red wine" (from "Pity the blind in palate," Serve it Forth).

With a bit of experimentation I've found that I kind of like pinot noir with apple pie, or a jammy shiraz with pecan pie squares, and I did enjoy that sauvignon blanc, all crisp and white, with toasted marshmallows. I fancy champagne or prosecco would be very nice with, say, strawberry shortcake and whipped cream. And with these toffee coffee chocolate chip bars?



I'm still thinking. WWMFKD?

Brown sugar brownies

In keeping with my developing theory that wine is the best accompaniment to desserts, of which more later (wine or dessert? both), here are Brown Sugar Brownies. The recipe is handwritten on an index card, the front of the card in my grandmother's handwriting, the back in my mother's handwriting. Nana being an expert baker, I can only imagine the scene. Mom asked her mother for the recipe for those nice brown sugar brownies, and Nana wrote down the ingredients and either forgot the rest, or assumed that anyone would know how to make brownies from a list like that.

So, you will need (from the front of the card):
1 cup packed brown sugar; 1 stick soft butter; 2 eggs; 2 squares unsweetened chocolate; 1/2 cup flour; 1 cup chopped walnuts.

There, doesn't that tell you everything?

From the back of the card:
Preheat the oven to 325 F, and grease a 9 x 9 square pan. Cream the butter and brown sugar together until fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time.



Beat in the melted chocolate, and then mix in the flour. Stir in the nuts.





Pour into the pan and bake for 25 to 30 minutes. Cool in pan.

They are a nice dessert for those who don't like sweets to be too sweet, and they might go well, as I am beginning to think all desserts do, with whatever wine you drank with dinner. My recent dessert and wine pairings have included pinot noir and apple pie, syrah and pecan pie bars, and yes, sauvignon blanc with roasted marshmallows. Now, years ago M.F.K. Fisher warned us that chocolate and red wine specifically was an abomination (see her essay "Pity the blind in palate," from Serve it Forth). So these brownies may present a wine pairing problem. Perhaps, when in doubt ...



...champagne? Nana would have said ice cream, but that's just her.

Norma Shearer's apple shortbread meringue, updated with Pama

This may take a few minutes.

Last week I learned about a recipe contest sponsored by the good people making Pama, the pomegranate liqueur (the packaging alone is lovely). To enter this contest -- and anyone can do so -- you must create an original appetizer, entree, or dessert featuring at least 3 Tablespoons of Pama, and submit the recipe to the company's Facebook page by November 15th. The grand prize is a trip for two to the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Colorado, next June.

What does this have to do with Norma Shearer? Not much, but I'll make it fit.

Occasionally I like to take the train downtown and visit the Chicago Public Library, to have a look at the cookbook section on the fourth floor. I pluck from the shelves the oldest and oddest books I can find, and copy down recipes from authors with names like Jinx Kragen (Saucepans and the Single Girl, 1965), or books firmly titled Food For Men (by Glenn Quilty, 1954).

On my last excursion to the library, I caught sight of a thin black book spine squeezed in among all the others, its lettering all worn away from the passing years. I took it out and found I had in my hands something called What Actors Eat When They Eat!, published in 1939. It's a substantial collection of recipes ostensibly offered up by the big Hollywood stars of the day, including one of the biggest, Norma Shearer. Of course, what the book also is, is a genuine production of the old Hollywood studio system, whereby the public's adored favorites were made by their employers to behave themselves, dress appropriately when out, make pictures as assigned, get married and/or have their names used to sell cookbooks as needed, and otherwise carry on more or less like extremely glamorous civil servants who knew on which side their bread was buttered. All in all, not a bad system, and I'll bet they enjoyed more true privacy than their poor, liberated, paparazzi-harassed professional descendants do now.

At any rate, on Norma Shearer's page we find, beneath her well coiffed and bejeweled studio photograph, two desserts, one for "Chocolate Antoinette" and one for "Porcupine Dessert with Vanilla Sauce." Chocolate Antoinette is not very interesting, simply a good chocolate pudding covered in a meringue. The "Antoinette," of course, refers to her movie Marie Antoinette, released in 1939. All the recipes in the book pertain somehow either to the stars' roles or to their backgrounds or tastes, real or perceived. Clark Gable submits a manly "Hunter's Breakfast," Merle Oberon something suitably exotic. And so on.

Miss Shearer's second proffered dish, the Porcupine Dessert, is a little more intriguing, and it's this which is going to lead us eventually to our pomegranate liqueur contest. Porcupine Dessert is essentially a simple shortbread crust, such as you would bake to go beneath a lemon bar or a date bar recipe, piled with a stewed apple-raisin-and-sherry filling, and then topped again with a meringue. To render the whole thing a "porcupine," the instructions say to cover the meringue with precisely arranged slivered almonds to represent the animal's spines, and then add two raisins for the eyes, finishing with grated pistachios to represent the grass he is sitting on. The resulting mental picture strikes me as ghastly and unnecessary. Besides, what was the connection between Norma Shearer and porcupines? Could it have been some sort of reference to her birth in Canada? -- albeit Montreal hardly qualifies as a wilderness outpost overrun with porcupines.

I have summarized the recipe loosely, but not much more loosely than it is in the book. The authors gave "Chocolate Antoinette" the full treatment, with measurements and proper directions; "Porcupine dessert" is thrown off in the casual way of really old cookbooks, which make assumption that the reader understands this:

Bottom: One cup flour, one-half cup butter, one-fourth cup sugar. Mix well together and bake. Filling: Apples, raisins, citron, sherry, and sugar. Cook long and slowly. The filling is piled high on the bottom crust, covered with meringue and long pieces of almonds ....

And that's it.

I think -- and here comes our entry, with trepidation, into the pomegranate liqueur contest -- I would replace the sherry with Pama, or PAMA as it apparently should be called, and perhaps mix the apples with more fruits. Berries and dates might be nice. After assembly, the meringue topping should be briefly browned in the oven.

And that's it. The question is, would this constitute, as the contest rules insist, an original creation? What Actors Eat When They Eat! is almost, almost out of copyright, and anyway the Porcupine thing is not a recipe as we accept them now. This may require deep thinking.

And who was Norma Shearer, actually? One of my favorites, to begin with. She was a bit like the Demi Moore of her day. A very big star and a big moneymaker, pretty in a sort of determined, angular way, half of a high-powered Hollywood marriage, and a terrific onscreen weeper. In 1938, when Gone With The Wind was about to go into production, she was for a while considered the absolute shoe-in for the part of Scarlett O'Hara. But rumor had it that the very character was going to be rescripted to fit her, and her weepiness. In a private letter, author Margaret Mitchell acknowledged this as a jaw-dropping development which would "thereby [make Scarlett] a poor put-upon creature instead of a hellion." The public, too, was not enthusiastic about Norma Shearer for this role, and in the summer of 1938 she graciously withdrew from consideration for the part -- or her studio made her do so, or made her be gracious about it, or some combination of those circumstances. Or so it seems. She may have been powerful enough in her own right by then to make her own decisions and write her own announcements. She said, according to the Hollywood papers, "I have decided that I should not play Scarlett. I am convinced that the majority of fans who think I should not play this kind of character on the screen are right. I appreciate tremendously the interest they have shown." For the quotes here, consult Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With The Wind" Letters, 1936-1949, edited by Richard Harwell and published by Macmillan in 1976.

And for a taste of Miss Shearer's poor put-upon screen work -- a rather harsh judgment, I think -- watch The Women, Marie Antoinette, Romeo and Juliet, Idiot's Delight, or The Divorcee. There were many more, but I'm not sure how easy it will be to find gems like The Stealers (1920) or He Who Gets Slapped (1924). Better, perhaps, to spend the time baking porcupines.

Treat yourself: chocolate glazed rum fudge brownies (from three cookbooks!)

Betty Crocker's Ultimate Cookie Book (1992) is the main source for this Ultimate Brownie. I chose the recipe because it calls for no less than 5 squares of baker's chocolate,



plus the addition of chocolate chips to the batter. Lacking chocolate chips just this one day -- I promise I'll have them next time -- I opted to add a sprinkling of rum to the finished pan, an idea taken from Jinx Kragen and Judy Perry's fun 1969 The How to Keep Him (After You've Caught Him) cookbook. This book leaped out and shouted "Buy me!" from the shelves of the local thrift store, because on one of my cookbook research trips to the Chicago Public Library a few months ago, I had found and copied down some recipes from the gals' previous effort, Saucepans and the Single Girl (1964). Browsing through that book, I could just imagine the two of them toddling around the big city in pencil skirts, careful coiffures, and high heeled pumps, buying groceries and liquor for a chic weekend dinner party brimming over with eligible bachelors. With How to Keep Him, they had evidently picked their bachelors and become wives and moms -- and no-nonsense ones at that. You want Rum Fudge Brownies? Sprinkle some rum over a pan of store-bought, box-mix brownies. You're done, and Jinx and Judy are free to go on psychoanalyzing Your Mate: "Western men have long been fascinated by the shy, gentle women of the Orient. It's no wonder, really, that Japanese women are so desirable. A well bred Japanese girl is trained from childhood in modesty and service ...." Therefore, make sukiyaki. This is from the chapter called "Rekindling the Flame."

Dim memories do stir, here, of a time somewhere about the Johnson and Nixon years when some suburban rendering of sukiyaki was fashionable. Still, Jinx and Judy's rum fudge angle is a little easier to adopt. And, as we're treating ourselves, why not cover our brownies with a chocolate glaze, from Marion Cunningham's Fannie Farmer Cookbook?

It was an adventurous afternoon.

Chocolate glazed rum fudge ultimate brownies (from three cookbooks)

For the brownies:

• 5 squares baker's chocolate
• 2/3 cup butter (10 and 2/3 Tbsp)
• 1 and 3/4 cups sugar
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 3 eggs
• 1 cup flour
• 1 cup chopped nuts
• 1 cup chocolate chips

Melt the butter and the 5 squares baker's chocolate over low heat in a small saucepan. When completely melted, remove from heat.

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Butter a 9 x 9 x 2 pan.

Mix the sugar, vanilla, and eggs in a large bowl.



Beat in the chocolate mixture and combine well.



Beat in the flour until just blended, and then add the nuts and chocolate chips, if using.

Spread the batter in the pan.



Bake 40 to 45 minutes, or just until brownies begin to pull away from the sides of the pan. Cool completely.



While they are baking, make a free form Chocolate glaze (this is based on two frosting recipes from The Fannie Farmer Cookbook).

• 1 square baker's chocolate
• 2 Tbsp butter
• 1/2 cup sugar
• about 1/4 cup milk
• about 1 tsp cornstarch
• a dash vanilla (less than 1/4 tsp)

Melt the chocolate and butter in a small saucepan (you can use the same one you started the brownies with). Add the sugar and blend. The mixture will be grainy, so add the milk and blend; then add the cornstarch a little at a time, and cook until the glaze is the consistency you want. Finish by adding the vanilla. Remove from heat.



Sprinkle 2 Tbsp rum over the finished brownies. Cut into squares and place them on a platter. Plop, smooth, and/or dribble the glaze over them, depending on how thick you made it.

Eat. Share. (No really.)

M.F.K. Fisher took it as blindingly obvious that no one in his right mind would think of pairing chocolate with red wine -- which is precisely the pairing that is considered wonderful and fashionable now. By the same token, most wine writers say that of course one never drinks a fine dry sparkling wine, least of all a champagne, with sweet desserts, but I see no reason not to. Why not a refreshing light prosecco with these brownies? Or, if we must venture into red wine territory, why not a briny, raisin-y tawny port?

Treat yourself.