As we broke our fast with Tall Papa's grandmother's pancakes, I began to mull over the various recipes we enjoy that have been handed down within the family or that come with a story behind them. His grandmother was born in the 1880s and doubtless learned her pancake recipe as a girl, yet here we are, enjoying them more than a century later.
Edible heirlooms are doubly delightful: they connect us to our past, and they need no dusting. If you would enjoy hearing some of the stories behind our edible heirlooms, traipse across the orange croissant.
Pancakes
- 1/2 cup whole wheat flour (fresh ground is best)
- 1/4 cup bran
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp NaCl
- 1 cup buttermilk
- 1 tablespoon butter or oil
- 1 egg
Mix dry ingredients
Add wet ingredients and mix only until combined. Don’t over stir. Let rest for half an hour to an hour if using bran.
Heat griddle (drops of water should dance. Sorry can’t be more precise.)
Spoon onto griddle and cook until noticeably browned but not burnt.
This is essentially the recipe used by Tall Papa's grandmother except she only used white flour instead of a mixture of whole wheat and bran.
Popovers
Pre-Heat oven to 450◦F.
- 1 cup milk
- 2 eggs
- 1 cup (or 150 gm) Gold Medal all-purpose flour
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
Generously grease 6-cup popover pan with shortening (not needed if you have a non-stick popover pan). Place pan in oven 5 minutes to heat.
Meanwhile, place milk in 1-cup microwavable measuring cup. Microwave uncovered on High 40 to 50 seconds or until warm.
Beat eggs well in medium bowl or one quart measuring cup with fork or wire whisk. Stir in flour, milk and salt with fork or wire whisk just until smooth (do not overbeat).
Fill popover pan cups half full. Bake 20 minutes at 450◦ F.
DO NOT OPEN THE OVEN DURING THIS TIME.
Reduce oven temperature to 350◦F. Bake 10 to 20 minutes longer or until deep golden brown (10 minutes is enough in our oven). Immediately remove from pan. Pierce with a knife to release steam.
Serve warm.
Makes 6 popovers
All-purpose flour is important because it has a moderate amount of gluten. Neither bread flour or cake flour are as well suited.
These popovers hark back to the popovers my best friend's mother served us for breakfast in the 1950s. Her mother had learned it during her girlhood in Canada. The microwave modification just saves time.
Cry Babies
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 cup dark molasses
- 2 cubes soft butter or margarine
- 1 cup strong coffee or buttermilk (really either
one!)
- 2 eggs
- 2 tsp. soda
- 1 tsp. cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp. each ginger and nutmeg
- 1 tsp. vinegar
- 4 cups flour
Cream butter and sugar together until smooth. Add eggs and mix until smooth. Add molasses, then coffee or buttermilk and vinegar. Sift dry ingredients together and add slowly to the wet mixture.
Drop spoonfuls on a pan and bake at 375 ◦F. Frost the cookies while still warm with powdered sugar frosting.
Powdered Sugar Frosting:
- Whole one pound package of powdered sugar (sifted)
- 1 generous TBS butter or margarine - 1 tsp. vanilla
- Dash of salt
- Enough milk to spread, not too thin
Cream the butter or margarine with vanilla and a little milk and sugar until smooth. Continue to add sugar and milk slowly until you have used the entire box of sugar.
Note for high altitude (~7000 ft):
- decrease baking soda 25%
- increase temperature to 395◦F
- decrease sugar by 2 TBS (1/8 of total sugar) - increase coffee/buttermilk by 6 oz per recipe
A number of references for “cry baby” cookies can be found on the web; in 2004 there were about 100 hits on a google search for “cry( )baby cookies” while “snickerdoodle cookies” yielded 6200. Some recipes for cry baby cookies include such aberrant ingredients as nuts, coconut, or raisins. The common constituents seems to be molasses, coffee and ginger. Frosting is included in some recipes but is not common. Chocolate frosting is part of a few recipes. The name apparently came out of New England from the 19th century.
This recipe dates back to at the very latest the early 1940s since it was used by both sisters Mathilda and Esther, grandmother and great aunt of Tall Papa. Esther's daughter claims that her grandmother Sophie Johnson made them which could put the recipe back to before the 1920s.
Clubhouse sandwiches
Makes: 25 sandwiches.
Ingredients:
- 3 lb meat from a leftover cooked Thanksgiving turkey
- 3 lb bacon (after cooking, about 1 lb 9 oz)
- 2 lb tomatoes cut into thin slices
- 18 oz mayonnaise
- 3 - 24 oz loaves white bread, sandwich sliced (very important!)
- 1 head iceberg letttuce
- Celery salt
- Toothpicks
- Fold top sandwich bags for any leftovers
Have assistants toast bread while you assemble sandwiches. Arrange all ingredients in an ergometrically efficient layout.
Spread a thin layer of mayonnaise on a slice of toast. Cover this layer with bacon. Cover bacon with tomato slices.
Apply a thin layer of mayonnaise to another slice of toast and place on top of the tomato slices. This middle slice of toast can be one of the loaf’s heels; no one will notice. Apply more mayonnaise and then a layer of turkey.
Sprinkle turkey with celery salt. Add a layer of lettuce and then cover with another toast with mayonnaise. Skewer the sandwich with two toothpicks and slice the sandwich on the diagonal between the toothpicks.
Repeat 25 times.
Allow at least 1 1/2 hr for assembly.
Serve with tomato soup. Watch out for the toothpicks!
This sandwich was first eaten by Tall Papa's family in the 1950s at the City of Paris department store restaurant in San Francisco. The City of Paris operated in San Francisco from 1851 until it closed in 1972. They visited this restaurant for lunch during their annual day after Thanksgiving trip to San Francisco for Christmas shopping.
Sandwiches appear to lose some visual aesthetic appeal upon storage but actually improve in flavor. It is therefore important to store properly in the refrigerator. Tall Papa's mother used waxed paper to wrap the leftover sandwiches. Plastic sandwich bags of the fold top variety are an excellent substitute for waxed paper.
Most persons who have eaten this sandwich would agree that three slices of toast are necessary.
From the James Beard Foundation website:
One of Jim’s favorite sandwiches of all time. To make this venerable classic, Beard instructed the assembler to spread crisp toast (white bread only please!) with homemade mayonnaise, top it with freshly cooked, sliced chicken breast, bacon, peeled, ripe tomatoes, and iceberg lettuce. Although a triple-decker sandwich is the norm today, Beard con- sidered the third slice of toast a “horror” and suggested in American Cookery that the responsible party be condemned “to eat three-deckers three times a day the rest of his life.”
Various sources say the sandwich (alternately called a Clubhouse) was created in the kitchens of private men’s clubs, in the club cars of American passenger trains, or at the
Saratoga Club, a turn-of-the-century casino in upstate New York. Whatever its origins, the sandwich was well established by 1941 when America’s Cookbook gave a detailed recipe (and six variations) specifying that the lettuce extend beyond the toast’s edge and that the sandwich be served while the toast is toasty.
America’s Cookbook, 1938, The Home Institute of the New York Herald Tribune, Forward by Emily Post, Scribners, New York, Publisher
Hollandaise Sauce
Using my mother's "rule of threes" to remember this recipe, it comes out
- 3/2 sticks of butter
- 3 egg yolks
- 3/2 T of lemon juice
In the top of a double boiler over gently simmering water, stir together the lemon juice and egg yolks. Add the butter, a half stick at a time, cut into cubes, stirring continuously. When all the butter is incorporated and the sauce has thickened remove from heat. It will sit quite nicely until needed; if the meal is greatly delayed and it starts to thicken more than you want, put it back over warm water and stir. If any is left over, it keeps well in the frig and only needs gentle warming before serving.
This is a remarkably robust Hollandaise recipe. I have made it in an aluminum sauce pan over an electric burner by being unusually vigilant; in a double boiler it is serenity itself. The sauce is delicious on salmon, asparagus and other foods but it is the soul of eggs benedict, my mother's favorite breakfast for special occasions. This recipe came from the Herald Tribune Cookbook published during World War II.