Letter from Milwaukee: Hot Dog Aspic

Garrett Bredeson, a young philosopher and generally
wonderful man who keeps it regular in the great state of Wisconsin, recently stumbled across a real find for American culinary history: Mettja Roate's The New Hamburger and Hot Dog Cookbook. Not surprisingly-- I mean, the man gets paid to think-- Garrett wasn't content with idle reading, and put Mrs. Roate's recipes to the test. He e-mailed me such a fantastic account of his project that I asked him if I could cut and paste it here. Ever generous, he agreed. And so, with great thanks and deep admiration, I bring you Forgotten Pie's first-ever Letter From Our Correspondent. ---MP

So check it out. I was pretty much just kickin' it this one day--you know, boogie chillin', kickin' it cold-style. But just kickin' it. Mindin' my own goddamn business. I'm at the bookstore, the regular one. Well no sooner do I get to just maintaining my own regular shit, than I stumble across this book, and I thought of you. You see it's this cookbook, from a little while ago, and it struck me that perhaps it well expressed the essence of a time and a place. Mettja Roate lived, according to the dust jacket, in Milwaukee, WI (a city which perhaps you will recall) with her husband. As of the mid-1970s, Mrs. Roate had composed a number of cookbooks, including the two published in this compendium, The New Hamburger and Hot Dog Cookbook. It was the title and blatant ambition of the latter volume (i.e., The New Hot Dog Cookbook ; first published 1968) that really caught my eye. It is, of course, a collection of well over 250 hot dog recipes. But just as the sheer multitude of Luther's 95 theses belied a simple appeal lying beneath the verbal barrage, so too is it with hot dogs in the world of Mrs. Roate. Woven throughout her book is a sustained assault on the pretensions of unprocessed meats. Make no mistake, however. It is not merely the shortcomings of traditional meats that ultimately recommend the hot dog. To be sure, the hot dog is economic and efficient. But before we can properly hear Mrs. Roate's call, we must wrest the sibling divinities Economy and Efficiency from their entanglement in the tired discourse of need. What an aristocratic prejudice has arbitrarily and derisively labeled "cutting corners" can and ought to be reconceived as rounding them off in accordance with the unbroken circle of Culinary Reason itself. What The New Hot Dog Cookbook suggests is that we allow these rational gods of the postwar kitchen to flower forth, for once, into their own most proper sphere. Only there, freed from the coercive dominion of steaks and chops, can we truly learn to partake of their succulent blossom with the defiant shamelessness befitting the dignity of our modern self-consciousness. No, the hot dog is no bastard meatchild of crass necessity; it is, rather, a tasty avatar of Superabundance itself.

But it is Mrs. Roate who says it all most profoundly in her characteristic prose: athletic, terse, and yet strategically indulgent. In her "Introduction" she playfully notes that "no one in America needs an introduction" to that distinctive "seasoned ground meat held captive in a casing." Doubtless this is due to the incontrovertible fact that in this country "we consume 80 wieners yearly per person on the average." And yet Mrs. Roate realizes that familiarity itself can be a barrier to a subtle understanding of the sausage. And so she recounts in detail the steps by which meat packers imbue the hot dog with its "succulent flavor" and "wonderful appetizing color", which we know so well and cherish so fervently. Automation in the meat-measurement process guarantees the uniformity of the sausages. The sausages are rushed to our local grocer: "Rest assured," she soothes us, "that when you buy that package of wieners in your market, you are buying thoroughly cooked meat without a fraction of an ounce of waste." Mrs. Roate extends her helpful advice to the selection of hot dogs: "When you find a nationally known or regional brand that is to your complete liking, stay with it to avoid disappointment." By the end of the introduction, the main themes that guide her exhortation have become clear: "Wieners are made from only the purest ground lean meat. They are delicately seasoned and delicately smoked. Above all, wieners are always fully cooked before they reach your shopping cart making them a truly time-saving, economical, delicious source of protein and energy for your family." In her most succinct formulation, whose tone is well-earned: "Hail to the Hot Dog!"

Throughout the chapters of the book, Mrs. Roate sustains her plea for hot dog supremacy by appealing once again to their "ruddy, inviting color" that conceals "nary a speck of waste". "Active" children, she tells us, have an "innate love of hot dogs", and why wouldn't they?--considering the "delicate flavor" and "total meat content" of the special sausage. When one looks at cooking with "cold logic", one can hardly avoid the rational appeal of the hot dog. Consider, if you will, Mrs. Roate's argument for the primacy of hot dog main dishes: "Hot dogs, made of pure, lean meat contain the same proteins as steaks, chops, and roasts. Isn't it good economy to substitute the economical, tasty hot dog for these more expensive cuts? If you want good, nourishing meals for your family, plan them around hot dog main dishes. Hot dogs offer you triple savings. First of all, they take less cooking time than any other meat on the market because they have been completely cooked before you buy them. Secondly, hot dogs are loaded with pure economy when you compare their price to the other cuts of meat on your butcher's counter. Thirdly, there is not a speck of waste to a hot dog. You are getting all meat--no bones, no thick fat, no inedible gristle. You are purchasing pure, waste-free meat for your precious food dollar. Hot dogs are great--especially when they form the main dish of your family's meal." And after staring us down with her undeniable logic, she utilizes her considerable talents in the art of prose to go in for the emotional kill. At times she recalls the fierce yet beautiful rhythm of the hot dog factory itself: "You will find," she tells us, "that when hot dogs are united with dough, they turn into wonderful budget stretchers and even greater flavor abettors."

As you can plainly see, Megan, I could hardly restrain myself from doing my own small, humble part to help recreate Mrs. Roate's forgotten dream. One recipe which, to my mind, especially embodied the ideals of Mrs. Roate was her take on the time-honored "Hot Dog Aspic".

The recipe:

HOT DOG ASPIC

1 T unflavored gelatin
1/4 c cold water
1 1/2 c hot beef bouillon or stock
10 hot dogs
1/2 c celery, diced
1/4 c parsley, chopped
5 hard-boiled eggs, chilled & peeled
shredded lettuce

Soften the gelatin in the 1/4 c cold water. Dissolve the softened gelatin in the hot beef stock. Stir well until all of the gelatin granules are dissolved.

Cut the hot dogs in half and stand them on end, cut side down, in a 10" circular tube mold. Sprinkle the diced celery and the parsley over the bottom of the mold.

Cut the hard-boiled eggs lengthwise and place them around the center "tube" of the mold. Pour the gelatin mixture carefully into the mold.

Place in the refrigerator for at least 4 hours. Unmold on a bed of shredded lettuce. Serve in generous slices. Serves 6.

Well actually, as you can see, it's really a piece of cake. Getting the cut hot dogs to stand in an aesthetically pleasing formation was one of my initial worries, but actually the chopped celery allowed itself to be positioned in such a way so as to avoid the most egregious cases of the almost inevitable wiener-lean. One word of caution: In my case, I needed more stock/gelatin mixture than the recipe originally called for, in order to really fill the mold out in an acceptable fashion. The more severe problem I ran into, which, I suspect, is a partial function of the one just mentioned, is that even a 5 hour cooling time turned out to be not quite sufficient, as within 10 min. of the unmolding one of the sides of the aspic began to discoagulate in a mildly unsettling manner. But as for the steely-hearted dinner guests--myself, Pityfest, and Farciaga--even this setback could not dull our appetite. Farciaga went so far as to indicate that the mold-salad was "actually kind of tasty" "in its own way", "not that bad" though the "parsley really overpowers" the hot dogs (understandable due to the delicate flavor of the latter). With Farciaga's judgment on the parsley I had to concur. But, in addition, I am slightly ashamed to admit that my palate was not yet developed enough to be able to appreciate the idiosyncratic texture of the dish, which, due to the aforementioned difficulties, ended up somewhere in the range of just barely undercooked egg whites. But despite this handicap I was able to join Farciaga in reporting that it was "not that bad", although in retrospect I can see that my conscience was perhaps not as good with regard to this particular claim as was his. Even for Pityfest (who at first politely declined the treat, stating soon after the initial unmolding that, after all, he "felt actually rather full"--and persisted in his thinly veiled disingenuousness for quite some time, until at last even he succumbed to the vision of well-balanced nourishment promised by the salad's ruddy, inviting color) the experience was far from unpleasurable. Despite an initial reflex-reaction (hardly constitutive of a considered critique of any dish) which resulted in the escape of an amount of vomit so small as to be hardly worth mentioning, Pityfest himself later, though falling short of an outright declaration of coincidence, confirmed that said reflex was "almost certainly" the effect of "still being hungover from last night," rather than the direct effect of anything he ate, let alone the aspic in question.

--Garrett Bredeson

Martha Washington's Gooseberry Cream

Martha Washington’s Gooseberry Cream isn’t exactly Martha Washington’s. The recipe appears in a manuscript that her first husband's family, the Custises, handed down and amended for generations. By the time Martha married George in 1759, many of the dishes this collection describes—like pudding perfumed with ambergris and carp cooked in its own blood—were relics of a Jacobean, or even an Elizabethan, past. But as Karen Hess, the food historian who annotated Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery for its publication by Columbia University Press, reminds us, fruit creams were still quite popular in Martha’s time, even in her kitchen. (Or perhaps—and here’s another reason it’s hard to think of these recipes as just Martha’s—I should say Hercules’s Kitchen. The Washington family's talented slave cook fled to freedom in 1797.)

Fruit creams appear in British and American cookbooks well into the late nineteenth century, when they had begun to be known as “fools”—a name that comes from the French fouler, to mash. Fruit is boiled and pounded to a pulp before being cooked with eggs and cream as a custard or, as in this recipe, folded into cream.

To Make Goosbery or [Apple] Creame

Take goosberries or apples & scald them very tender, then put them in a little hearb sive, or cullendar & bruise them with ye back of a spoone; & the pulp yt season with rosewater & sugar. yn mix some good cream with it and make of it what thicknes you please, & soe serve it up.[sic]

The Custis family recipe doesn’t call for whipping the cream, but most nineteenth and twentieth century recipes do, so I decided to take advantage of modern technology and turn on those beaters. I also cooked the fruit with the sugar to avoid the pesky appearance of undissolved grains. I used about a pint of gooseberries, but once I had cooked them and forced them through a sieve, I only had enough pulp for two small servings. So if you do plan to try this one at home, be sure to make allowances for how much mass you lose without the skin and seeds. It’s certainly worth trying—tart, light, and the palest of green, a last touch of summer as the days start to get cold.

MILK BISCUITS FOR AMERICA!

In September of 1850, The Literary World greeted the publication of Hannah Bouvier’s The National Cook Book with overblown rapture. “Object of sublime contemplation!” began the reviewer. “She has by no means aspired to the fame of authorship only, or strained after democratic dollars solely; her motives have been patriotic. It is certainly,” he repeated, “a matter of sublime contemplation to consider the possibility of every kitchen nailing to its mantel-piece... a National Cook Book!”

For most of the year, the nation had seemed to teeter on the brink of dissolution, with bitter fights over whether Western territories would be slave or free states. When President Fillmore finally signed the Compromise of 1850 into law late that September, poise was only temporary. Congressional debates continued to rage, and the Fugitive Slave Act fueled a new wave of abolitionist fervor that tipped the country closer and closer to Civil War.

Still, Mrs. Bouvier made her appeal to a unified sense of national pride, noting, in her preface, that “Nearly all the receipts in this book are purely American.” The reviewer for The Literary World—with a little more fervor and a lot more ridicule—backs up her claims,

There is one topic upon which unanimity stands like a well balanced universe on the point of a cambric needle—that topic the Cookery question…. Free-soilers eat their puddings, into which has been dropped the best of crystallized Louisiana sugar; slavery propagandists wipe their fevered brows in ecstasy, over the pure ounce of Wenham lake ice which cools their grateful claret.

He continued:

Imagine 1,000,000 families over all the land at breakfast some morning, upon the product of recipe No. 351 (milk biscuits) or half a million more economical families satisfying hunger with the net results of recipe No. 345 (Indian pone). Or suppose every family from the Aristook to the Sacramento, upon the Fourth of July, spreading for dessert La Fayette biscuits or Washington marmalade, in delicate and loyal tribute of respect to dead but not forgotten greatness; and you will have an idea of the results our “Practical Housewife” is aiming at in her “National Cook Book.”

Well, I thought, why not? Tomorrow’s the Fourth of July, and while The National Cook Book doesn’t actually have recipes for Lafayette biscuits or Washington marmalade—just a dense confection called Federal Cake—I might as well do my part. And so, for breakfast, for America, I’ll be eating milk biscuits.

In case you want to join me, here’s Miss Bouvier’s recipe:

Milk Biscuits

One quarter of a pound of butter,
One quart of milk,
One gill of yeast,
As much flour as will form the dough,
A little salt.

Sift flour into the milk so as to form a very thick batter, and add the yeast, this is called a sponge. This should be done in the evening; in the morning cut up the butter, and set it near the fire where it will dissolve but not get hot; pour the melted butter into the spong; then stir in enough flour to form a dough, knead it well and stand it away to rise. As soon as it is perfectly light, butter your tins, make out the dough in small cakes, and let them rise. When they are light bake them in a very quick oven, take them out, wash the tops over with water and send them to the table hot.

I’m not sure how faithful my results are, because I had to doctor the recipe a good deal. First off, I cut in half, using two cups of whole milk and nearly two cups of bread flour for the sponge. I’m not sure what kind of yeast Mrs. Peterson would have been using—a starter, or the then-popular Brewer’s yeast? According to Virginia Mescher‘s helpful article on nineteenth-century measurements, a gill translates to about eight tablespoons—entirely too much yeast if, like me, you’re using instant, so I cut down to two teaspoons. Instead of letting the sponge rest overnight, I followed a more normal procedure for pain de mie, waiting about an hour for the sponge to bubble up nicely. Then I sprinkled about 1 and 1/2 teaspoons of salt over it and kneaded in just enough flour for a wet, airy dough. The result was more dinner roll than what I think of as a biscuit—predictably soft, warm, and white. Objects of sublime contemplation these aren't, but maybe that would change if the whole nation was eating them at once.

Frigidaire’s Delightfully Dainty Frozen Fruit Salad

When GM published this slim little volume of Frigidaire Recipes in 1928, Americans were just beginning to accept electric refrigerators as necessary equipment for a thoroughly modern kitchen. Frigidaire quickly became the most popular brand, and boasted a “high standard of convenience and economy,” thoroughly tested by its resident home economist, Miss Verna L. Miller.

The description of Miss Miller’s experimental kitchen is a little vague—apparently she used both a “recording thermometer and other thermometers” along with “instruments to determine current consumption and other vital points.” The photographs look sweetly futuristic—everything’s bright white, accompanied by captions like “A Group of Scientific Instruments Used.”

Domestic science wasn’t the only selling point—Frigidaire Recipes devotes page after page to “Delightful Frozen Dainties.” Ice creams, sherbets, and parfaits can bring a “a new joy in entertaining.” and salads—the rallying cause of home economists nationwide—take center stage as both main course and dessert.

Frozen Fruit Salad falls into either category. Frigidaire’s recipe is the earliest I’ve found, happily lacking the mayo and cream cheese that bind together many later incarnations. Not that this is terribly different from its 1950s offspring: canned fruit, sugary dressing, and whipped cream are stirred together, poured into a mold, and frozen. In a bread pan, which is all I had handy, this becomes a kind of Technicolor terrine, perfect—the authors tell us—for “an evening or afternoon, bridge or card party.”

I really wanted to like this salad. I’d had one once before, probably twenty years ago, somewhere in Memphis with my grandmother, and remember being overjoyed that such a combination was possible—like eating sherbet for lunch! But as I probably could have predicted, if I’d been completely honest with myself, canned fruit tends to taste less like comfort and more like—well, can. I used canned apricots and pineapple, along with some maraschino cherries, and while the whole thing looked weirdly magnificent, it had a decidedly tinny aftertaste.

Still, in case you want to do your own experiments at home—I’d recommend fresh fruit and a less cloying dressing—here are Miss Miller’s guidelines.

Frozen Fruit Salad

One medium sized can of fruit salad. Cut very fine, add two-thirds cup of either honey dressing or fruit dressing with two-thirds cup XX cream.
Add fruit dressing to fruit mixture, then fold in whipped cream. Pour into Frigidaire tray and allow to freeze. Set Cold Control in fourth or fifth position for freezing. Block out and serve either on lettuce leaf or plate covered with doily. This needs no garnishing.
Many variations of this salad can be made by using different fruit combinations. Either of the fruit salad dressings can be used.



Fruit Salad Dressing No. 1

2 Egg yolks
2 Tablespoons sugar
Juice of 2 lemons
1 Tablespoon flour
1/2 Cup strained honey or maple syrup
1/2 Cup whipped cream

Mix honey, flour, sugar and cook in double broiler for 10 minutes. Add lemon juice and beaten egg yolks slowly and cook for 5 minutes stirring constantly. Remove from fire and cool. This can be kept in Frigidaire in glass jar indefinitely. Add whipped cream to salad dressing before serving.

Osa Johnson's Bran Cracklin' Bread

In 1917, Osa and Martin Johnson, a down-to-earth couple from Kansas, sailed to the South Seas. A year later, they turned their experiences into one of America’s earliest documentary films, Among the Cannibals of the South Pacific. By 1937, the Johnsons had gone to Africa five times, made fourteen feature films and thirty-seven shorts, written books and articles, and traveled the lecture circuit. They rivaled the Flahertys in popularity and critical esteem (Robert Flaherty’s 1922 Nanook of the North is generally considered the first American documentary), but most film critics today dismiss them as imperialist hacks.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I haven’t seen any of the Johnsons’ movies, but my film-historian-turned-world-traveler and generally just trusted-and-beloved-friend Laura Horak tells me that they would recycle the same footage in different movies for completely different ends. And with naive racism that probably would cause contemporary audiences even more discomfort, the Johnsons called African natives “human monkeys” or “happy, affectionate children” who they compared, with mocking intertitles, to American flappers.

But as Laura also pointed out in a paper she wrote recently, Osa herself played a different, and far more respectable, kind of American woman: the resourceful housewife, engaged in a domestic, colonizing mission. Osa always said that she traveled the globe from the simple desire to be with her husband, and she wanted to take good care of him, too. Apparently, she was a fine cook, supplementing a huge supply of canned foods with fresh game and fish that she caught herself. Whenever she and Martin were going to stay in one place for a while, she planted gardens of peas, carrots, corn, melons, squash and cucumbers. George Eastman, who traveled with the Johnsons and Blaney Percival in the 1920s, recalled, “Even Percival who says he hates the sight of a woman in camp has fallen for her, and whether she is fishing, shooting, driving a car, making bread, chili con carni, soup or spur fowl fricassee, we all think she is about perfect.”

Osa used that perfection for more than good meals. She and Martin did plenty of product placement, photographing themselves picnicking on Bisquick products and holding up cans of Maxwell House coffee in front of a row of African natives. And in numerous articles for Good Housekeeping and Ladies Home Journal, Osa shared her homey secrets with the American public, interspersing her adventure stories with tips and recipes.

In a 1937 article for Hearst International Cosmopolitan Osa described two of the “jungle dinners” that she served “to a leading merchant of America” and his two sons during their African hunting trip:

Banana Juice Cocktails
Radishes
Pygmy Green Onions
Consommé
Broiled Bream
Roasted Partridge
Asparagus
Mashed Potatoes
Corn-on-the-cob
Apple Pie with Cheese
Coffee

The next night, wrote Osa, “I showed off my ability as a can-opener cook with this menu” for a dinner that “almost serves itself.”

Cream of Mushroom Soup
Broiled Shad Roe served with black butter.
Bran Cracklin’ Bread
Spinach
Coconut Fruit Pie
Coffee

Osa’s recipe for Coconut Fruit Pie sounds very sweet and very canned, so I decided to make her Cracklin’ Bread, which provides the kind of heavy carbs explorers might crave after a long trek through the wilds. I found it pretty tasty after a normal day in the city. The recipe isn’t too unusual, but it's a nice twist on the more familiar cornmeal-based cracklin' bread. Soaking the bran in milk serves a dual purpose of softening the grain and breaking down the starches to open up more flavor, but the real flavor here is bacon, and lots of it.

Bran Cracklin’ Bread

1 1/2 cups milk
1 cup whole bran
3/4 cup sifted flour
3 1/4 teaspoon combination baking powder
1/2 cup yellow cornmeal
1/3 cup chopped cooked bacon
2 eggs, well-beaten
4 tablespoons bacon drippings
1 teaspoon salt

Pour milk over bran and let stand 5 minutes. Sift flour once, measure, add baking powder and salt, and sift again; add corn meal and bacon. Add eggs and bacon drippings to bran; then add flour mixture and beat well. Bake in greased 9 x 9 x 2-inch pan in hot oven (425* F.) 40 minutes, or until done.

Mrs. Dull's Corn Pudding

Henrietta Stanley Dull, longtime editor of the Home Economics page of the Atlanta Journal, wrote the encyclopedic Southern Cooking in 1928. The book became a classic, reprinted every few decades--most recently by the University of Georgia last fall.

But the book’s introduction traces Henrietta Dull’s history much further back, with enough information to chart a family tree spanning some three generations. Hal Stanley wants us to know that Mrs. Dull is no mere career cook--she also possesses an estimable pedigree. One of her great-grandfathers was Surveyor General of Georgia, and another fought in the Revolutionary War. Her great-uncle wrote the first history of Georgia, but Mrs. Dull’s contribution to the annals of Southern letters seems even more laudable. For, according to the poem by Lord Lytton that Mrs. Dull may have “subconsciously absorbed,”

We may live without poetry, music and art;
We may live without conscience, and live without heart;
We may live without friends, we may live without books;
But civilized men cannot live without cooks.

Now that fresh corn is back at the farmer’s market, I thought it was high time to consult Mrs. Dull for hints on a summertime classic: corn pudding. It’s an adaptable dish, and the two centuries of recipes I scanned elsewhere reveal little innovation (unless you’d classify canned corn as a great mid-century leap forward, and I wouldn’t). You can create some extra heft with bread crumbs and cheese, or you can separate the eggs and add beaten whites at the end for a dish akin to soufflé, but the simplest versions already approach perfection: sweet corn kernels suspended in a smooth, savory custard.

Mrs. Dull’s version is a fine starting point, although you should keep in mind that those 2 tablespoons of butter she lists should be melted and added toward the end of the mixing, along with the eggs and milk. I like to add a little white pepper and nutmeg, and using whole milk or half-and-half never hurts. If that sounds like too much extra fat, keep in mind that Mrs. Dull, whose other recipes include plenty of butter and cream, lived to be a hundred.

Corn Pudding

2 c corn
1 c sweet milk
2 T butter
2 t salt
2 T flour
1 T sugar
3 eggs
Red or white pepper to taste

Cut corn as usual or use left over. Add all the seasonings. beat eggs together until light, put into the mixture, pour into buttered dish and bake in a moderate oven. If it is cooked too fast, the custard or milk and egg will curdle. It should be firm, like a cup custard. Place dish with pudding into a pan of boiling water and it will cook slower. Serve in the dish in which it is cooked. By warming the milk it will cook quicker.

LEMON COOKIES MEN RAVE ABOUT!

In 1921, the Washburn-Crosby company, manufacturers of Gold Medal Flour, invented baking guru Betty Crocker. As Laura Shapiro tells us in her chatty history of 1950s cooking, Something from the Oven, Crocker was one of many “live trademarks” who could seem just as real as Joy of Cooking authoress Irma Rombauer. But Carnation’s Mary Blake, Quaker Oats’ Mary Alden, Dole’s Patricia Collier, and General Foods’ Frances Barton never attained Crocker’s popularity. Powered by a changing cast of real-life home economists, Crocker starred in successful radio and television shows and authored dozens of cookbooks. Betty Crocker never exactly existed, but in 1945, Fortune ranked her second only to Eleanor Roosevelt in the ranks of beloved American women.

I bought “Foods Men Rave About,” a Betty Crocker pamphlet promising free silverware and happy husbands, by accident--someone had wedged it, along with dozens of newspaper clippings, into a tattered Good Housekeeping Institute cookbook from 1930. "Foods Men Rave About" is only a few years older, from the era when Marjorie Husted served as Crocker’s main voice behind the curtain. Husted traveled the country giving Gold Medal cooking classes, and she would dispatch teams of high school girls to discover local women’s cooking habits. This research helped her ensure that she could provide the clearest recipes and most necessary advice possible.

“Foods Men Rave About” includes recipes for familiar treats like Lady Baltimore Cake, Chocolate Cake, and Pumpkin Pie. Betty Crocker also gives instructions for more unusual fare like “Bunch of Grapes Salad," in which pear slices are spread with cream cheese, covered with grape halves, and drizzled with French dressing. But the most outlandish creation uses pantry staples to mimic California’s natural beauty. “Golden Gate Sunset Delight,” a sponge cake filled with layers of stabilized canned pineapple, canned apricots, and raspberry jam, is topped with whipped cream and shelled pistachios.


I used some of California’s natural bounty--Meyer lemons--for a more sedate recipe. Crocker’s Lemon Cookies require a very wet batter, and the result is closer to a teacake than the dense, buttery treats most of us know best. It’s hard for me to imagine men raving about these delicate little sweets, but maybe they’d be just the thing for a ladies’ sewing circle. And they’re a good, simple component for fuller desserts: I served them with berries and bourbon whipped cream, and they make a nice sandwich for homemade preserves.

LEMON COOKIES

1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
Grated rind of 2 lemons
1 egg
2 cups GOLD MEDAL “Kitchen-Tested” Flour
1/4 c milk
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/3 c lemon juice (2 lemons)

METHOD—Cream butter, gradually add sugar and lemon rind mixed, and cream well. Add well-beaten egg with milk. Sift flour once before measuring. Sift flour, baking powder and salt and add to creamed mixture alternately with lemon juice. Chill dough several hours before rolling. Roll out thin, on cloth-covered board, (1/8 to 1/16 inch thick) and cut in rounds. Bake on lightly greased heavy pan, until edges are a delicate brown. Time—Bake 12 to 15 minutes. Temperature—400* F., moderately hot oven. Amount—About 3 dozen. Note—If you do not have a heavy cooky pan, place an extra pan under the cooky pan in oven, as these cookies burn easily.