Month: November 2021

Cooking With Ida

~ Hometown Girl ~ 1 Comment

Crumbs from the Rich Man’s Table

They have a place--
Crumbs. 
Singly--they mean little. 
Part of the whole--they have the same attributes.
O crumbs from the Rich Man's Table, what are you that we have not? 
You are not air, full and free. 
You are not water, clean and pure. 
You are not sunshine. 
Often you represent foolish desire--Waste, envy, or jealousy.
Why live or think in terms of crumbs? 
The penny is a dollar's crumb. 
The crust a part of the loaf. 
The scraps part of the roast. 
The wasted gas, part of the bill. 
"Crumbs" 
They are worth thought for what they can be.
Not the Rich Man's Crumbs. 
Let me gather up my fragments 
And make them whole.

This post begins a new series within my blog titled Cooking With Ida. It is inspired by the works of cookbook author Ida Bailey Allen.

Ida was born in 1885 in Connecticut. As a young woman, she studied domestic science and nutrition in New York and Massachusetts which led to her life’s work. Considered one of the most prolific cookbook writers in American history, Ida Bailey Allen published her earliest cookbook in 1916. Throughout her lifetime she would write and publish over fifty books including her final work Best-Loved Recipes of the American People in 1973, the year she died.

Drafted by the US Food Administration during WWI, Ida became an influential educator and lecturer on nutrition and home economics. She was an active food writer and subsequently became food editor for Good Housekeeping Magazine.

In 1928, Mrs. Allen began hosting a regular daytime radio show. Her show became so popular, it was extended from a one-hour time slot to two hours. In time she branched into television becoming the first female cooking show host. Ida Bailey Allen eventually reached national celebrity status as “The Nation’s Homemaker”. Today her cookbooks are highly collectible.

Using Ida Bailey Allen’s book Cooking, Menus, Service published in 1924 as reference, I will share the recipes and procedures that were required for rural homemakers of her day to prepare a meal for their family. The poem at the top of this post is from this cookbook and accurately represents Ida’s kitchen philosophy — thrift, economy, zero waste, and good nutrition according to the science of her day. The “Crumbs…are worth thought” mindset helped Mrs. Allen guide homemakers through food shortages of WWI, the agricultural depression of the 1920s, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the food rationing during WWII.

With Thanksgiving in mind, next week Ida will coach us through preparing the turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. See you then.

Elaine

Grocery Ads — November 1921

~ Hometown Girl ~ 1 Comment
Levine Grocery Store 1920s, Minnesota

Welcome Friends!

Although rural women were very self-reliant in the 1920s there were some products that could not be produced on the farm such as sweeteners for baking. At that time bread, cakes, pies, and other desserts were considered just as important as meats, vegetables, fruits, and dairy products in acquiring the necessary daily calories for laborious farm work. This made sugar, corn syrup, molasses, and/or honey staples. Dried fruits and nuts may have been purchased either to add variety to the family’s pantry or for upcoming holiday baking. Coffee was another essential staple that could not be produced on the farm. Other advertised items would have been purchased to supplement the family’s food storage only if finances allowed.

The ads below came from rural Minnesota grocery stores in 1921. As we get closer to Thanksgiving, I will post more weekly grocery ads so we can compare prices between then and now. Happy Grocery Shopping!

Elaine

Cannon Falls Beacon, November 4, 1921
Little Falls Herald, November 4, 1921
Levang’s Weekly Newspaper, November 3, 1921
Morris Tribune, November 4, 1921

Upside Down Cake Sampler–1930s

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After baking the Upside Down Cake recipe featured in the October 1926 issue of The Farmer’s Wife (HERE), I became curious about the history of this type of cake.

In the mid-1920s, The Hawaiian Pineapple Company owned by James Dole held a recipe contest featuring pineapple. Information about the contest was publicized in popular women’s magazines and the response was almost overwhelming! Many of the submissions combined the newly available pineapple with a cake recipe to create a Pineapple Upside Down Cake. Interestingly Upside Down Cakes were not new. They had been baked for hundreds of years using seasonal or dried fruits and nuts. The combination of cake and canned pineapple was a match made in culinary heaven and is still popular today.

Pineapple Upside Down Cake–1926

I followed the recipe from The Farmer’s Wife magazine (below) as written except for replacing the lemon extract with vanilla and adding maraschino cherries inside the pineapple rings. It was delicious! The cake however was a sponge leavened with stiffly beaten egg whites. Once baked and turned out of the pan the weight of the fruit and caramel topping began at once to compress the cake. Fortunately, it didn’t completely collapse and we were able to enjoy every last crumb.

Upside Down Cake

  • ½ tsp vanilla
  • 1 cup flour
  • 1 cup sugar
  • ¼ tsp salt
  • 3 eggs (beaten separately)
  • ½ tsp lemon extract
  • 1 ½ tsp baking powder
  • 4 Tbsp cold water

Beat yolks with sugar, add water and flavoring. Sift dry ingredients and add to mixture. Beat well 5 minutes. Fold in well-beaten whites of eggs.

In an iron skillet melt four tablespoonsful butter and one cupful brown sugar. Cover bottom of skillet with slices of pineapple then pour the cake mixture over this and bake in a moderate oven for at least forty minutes. Start at 260 degrees let rise to 300 degrees.

*Other fruit can be used instead of pineapple.

So my question at this point was whether all Upside Down Cakes were sponge cakes, and I quickly found that they were not. Many were sturdier butter cakes. Below is a sampler of Upside Down Cakes from the 1930s:

The recipe for Pineapple Skillet Sponge (below) comes from the My Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book from 1930. It obviously is a sponge leavened with stiffly beaten egg whites and baking powder:

Pineapple Skillet Sponge, My Better Homes, and Gardens Cook Book 1930

The following recipe comes from a Crescent advertising booklet who were the makers of baking powder and the Mapleine flavoring called for in the recipe.

The All About Home Baking cookbook 1935 (below) demonstrates how other fruits such as prunes and apricots can be used in Upside Down Cakes:

Using the Miracle Cake recipe, a home baker could make three different cakes with the amount of batter that it makes!

Modern Meal Maker 1939 contains recipes for eight different kinds of Upside Down Cakes

A cookbook titled Modern Meal Maker from 1939 boasts menus including desserts for every day of the year. A list of the Upside Down Cake recipes it contains gives us a glimpse of just how versatile skillet cakes could be and how popular they were. Most of the combinations sound really good except for the one calling for fresh or canned grapes!

  • Ginger Apple Surprise—a seven-inch cake made with molasses, ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves “topped” with apple slices and caramel
  • Pineapple Upside Down Gingerbread—baked in an eight-inch square pan, the gingerbread has molasses, ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg with caramel and crushed pineapple
  • Grape Upside Down Ginger Cake—a butter cake with buttermilk, ginger, cinnamon and cloves with fresh or canned grapes and caramel for the “topping” to be garnished with fresh grapes and whipped cream
  • Orange Pineapple Upside Down Cake—a caramel made with brown sugar and orange juice with sliced pineapple, walnuts and stuffed dates covered over with a spice cake batter with cinnamon, cloves and buttermilk
  • Peach Butterscotch Upside Down Cake—a butterscotch sauce flavored with mace is poured over peach halves and raisins arranged in the shape of a flower in the bottom of a nine-inch pan with a sponge batter poured over
  • Pineapple Walnut Upside Down Cake—sliced pineapple, walnuts and maraschino cherry are covered with a caramel glaze and baked with a sponge cake
  • Rhubarb Upside Down Cakes—a thick rhubarb compote is spooned into the bottom of six large muffin tins then baked with a hot milk sponge cake
  • Spanish Upside Down Cakes—vanilla butter cake batter covers caramel and apricot filled muffin cups to make twelve individual Upside Down Cakes  

Upside down cakes enjoyed a resurgence in popularity during the mid-twentieth century and are now, a hundred years later, all over the internet often baked in a bundt pan for a striking presentation. Some “recipes” simply call for a prepared yellow cake mix to be baked over the fruit and caramel. I think skillet cakes will live forever.

Elaine

Halloween Yum-Yums

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Cover of The Farmer’s Wife magazine–November 1926

Welcome Friends!

As we begin a new month, I was a little perplexed with the cover of the November 1926 edition of The Farmer’s Wife magazine (see image above). It is obviously an illustration of a child’s Halloween party, but why was it used in November. After about a week’s worth of pondering, it occurred to me that All Hallows Eve (aka Halloween) is celebrated October 31st, but All Hallows Day, which is mostly forgotten in America, falls on November 1st. Similar perhaps to the reveling of New Year’s Eve compared to more sedate New Year’s Day celebrations.

This observation helped make me a little more comfortable with my (ahem) late Halloween post. Today I’m featuring an unlikely Halloween dessert found in the October 1926 issue of The Farmer’s Wife – Upside Down Cake. The article titled “Halloween Yum-Yums” reminds readers that “Everybody likes to have fun and frolic on Halloween, then sometime during the evening everyone’s thoughts turn to food.” Several menu suggestions are listed followed by recipes for the desserts. For some reason, the Upside-Down Cake caught my fancy. Never having made or even tasted one, I decided to give it a try. But before we jump into the recipe let’s review a little of the history of pineapple and upside-down cakes.

In the early twentieth century, canned pineapple was a luxury affordable only by the well-to-do. Before mechanization, processing the pineapples from farm to cans all had to be done by hand. The price for decent fresh pineapple was exorbitant when it was available as shipping fruit long distances was difficult before refrigeration technology. By the mid-1920s the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, owned by James Dole, had developed a way to efficiently peel, slice, pack and seal fresh pineapple in shelf-stable cans to be shipped to the mainland.

Hawaiian Pineapple Ad 1920s

As a way of promoting their now readily available and affordable product, the company held a recipe contest in 1925 featuring canned pineapple. A whopping 60,000 recipes were submitted with 2,500 being for Pineapple Upside-Down Cake. Interestingly, it wasn’t the upside-down cake that was new, it was the availability of pineapple. Skillet cakes, as they were called, had been around for hundreds of years. Layering bits of seasonal or dried fruit and nuts on the bottom of a cast-iron skillet or Dutch oven, then covering the fruit with cake batter, and baking in a fire or oven resulted in a relatively easy and satisfying dessert whether turned upside-down or not.

Now back to the Halloween Yum-Yums. Below is the recipe for Upside Down Cake as it was published in The Farmer’s Wife magazine in 1926:

Upside Down Cake

  • ½ tsp vanilla
  • 1 cup flour
  • 1 cup sugar
  • ¼ tsp salt
  • 3 eggs (beaten separately)
  • ½ tsp lemon extract
  • 1 ½ tsp baking powder
  • 4 Tbsp cold water

Beat yolks with sugar, add water and flavoring. Sift dry ingredients and add to mixture. Beat well 5 minutes. Fold in well-beaten whites of eggs.

In an iron skillet melt four tablespoonsful butter and one cupful brown sugar. Cover bottom of skillet with slices of pineapple then pour the cake mixture over this and bake in a moderate oven for at least forty minutes. Start at 260 degrees let rise to 300 degrees.

*Other fruit can be used instead of pineapple.

One of the first things I noticed about this recipe was the date of publication. It was obviously an early version of Pineapple Upside Down Cake. The next thing I noticed was that the cake batter contains no fat and the eggs are to be separated with the whites well beaten. This told me that the cake is a “sponge”, a more delicate cake than a “butter” cake. I followed the recipe as written except for leaving out the lemon extract and increasing the vanilla extract to one teaspoon. I also placed maraschino cherries inside the pineapple rings before pouring over the batter. I even went through the process of slowly raising the oven temperature from 260 degrees to 300 degrees in five-minute increments which was totally unnecessary according to other recipes from the same time period. With such a slow oven it took over fifty minutes to completely bake.

In the end, the cake turned out beautifully and the flavor was excellent albeit quite sweet. I would definitely make another Upside-Down Cake, not with this recipe, but one with a sturdier butter cake recipe.

I thought the notation at the end of the recipe “Other fruit can be used instead of pineapple” was very telling. That statement points directly back to earlier skillet cakes or upside-down cakes.

I am presently compiling a sampler of other early twentieth-century Upside Down Cake recipes that I discovered while researching this article. That post will be coming soon. I am also gathering November grocery ads from the 1920s so we can compare prices between then and now. Meanwhile, Happy November!

Elaine