Block Gingerbread, Mixed Peel, and Christmas Pudding: Ancient Treats Happy in Our Kitchen

Winter descended with a will last weekend, after a shot across the bow around Thanksgiving, when we had a fine dusting of snow to grace the festivities. This second bout was more an attempt at a broadside of sleet and ice. Thankfully most of it overshot us, although I hear that Virginia and points north were hit fairly roundly. We had just enough to slickify the roads and confine us indoors most of the time.

So we spent part of the weekend in the kitchen, cooking citrus peels, preparing a Christmas pudding batter, and making block gingerbread. At this juncture I am all about the block gingerbread: it's fascinating, and the more I test, the more interesting it becomes.

Christopher enjoys cooking very much and is getting to the point where I am turning over measurements to him, and he is learning to handle a wooden spoon stoveside. It's a joy to see him absorb his new skills, and to watch his face when he tastes the work of his mind and hands.

Christopher stirs the peel candying in the saucepan.

Noah, by contrast, thinks of it as advanced play with Mama's tools. My back turned for a moment, and Noah piled the flour bin, all the cookie cutters, and bowls onto the kitchen scale in a rickety pile to see what it might weigh, and what might happen next. Yep, he's an adventure in the kitchen, but unless he is rolling and patting and "testing" dough, he's not over-interested, so tribulations were thankfully few, because he trotted off to his Tinkertoys.

Sunday afternoon saw three productions. First we made mixed candied orange and lemon peel. Wonderful, and the syrup left over? Oh-my-goodness-I-am-hoarding-this-essence-of-citrus-grove-to-sweeten-my-tea-and-no-I-don't-want-to-share. If you get a chance, do make it. It's easy, you get to have orange fruit salad afterwards, and everything gets used except the seeds. What's not to love? Christopher said it was fantastico.

Mixed peel cooking.

The peel Christopher and I made to go into a traditional Christmas pudding, one of Isabella Beeton's recipes. I used Fashion-Era's copy of the recipe, from the 1928 version of the cookbook, though substituting butter for suet, which I do not care for. There is quite literally more than a pound of fruit in this recipe, and so it makes multiple puddings. Good. We have one for next weekend's Christmas tea, and one for our own delectation. Curte was somewhat anxious about this, as he stepped into the kitchen at one point and asked point-blank. The house was smelling very good.

The peel also went into the gingerbread, and the house still smells good, because I am still experimenting with it.

Yes, I cook on the floor and use my legs as a bowl vise.
Why do you ask?

Block Gingerbread, an Old, Old Treat Perfect for This Season

Lastly and most enticingly, we made what's known as block gingerbread. The unleavened gingerbread I made is far from bread; but more like very hard, very spicy cookies, the kind you dip in wine or coffee, and is a treat with hundreds of years of history behind it. Consisting of nothing more than flour, butter, spices, sugar, molasses, and if wanted, dried fruits*, the dough is pressed into squares with molded patterns on top, and baked in an extremely slow oven until -- well, ours are chewy crisp, but I imagine they should become quite hard. No leavening, not even eggs, in this recipe and earlier ones**. It was baked commercially and sold all over England, but the spicing and shapes remind me strongly of Europe, too, so I'd imagine similar breads were popular there.

A gingerbread cake with a cup of tea make for a civilized evening.
Yes, the tea is decaffeinated. Sigh.

I'd read about this block gingerbread in Ivan Day's mesmerizing Food History Jottings blog, and had determined to make it. This was our first opportunity.

*Even older recipes were based on nuts like almonds, or breadcrumbs.
**As time went on bakers started to use leaveners, like vinegar mixed with the molasses, or various leaveners like hartshorn and later baking soda, etc., until gingerbread turned into a fluffy sort of cake or quick bread.

The gingerbread cakes look like they will keep well, because there's really little to spoil***, and they taste divine: gingery, deeply complex with cardamom, coriander, mace, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and more ginger, what England calls mixed spice. The only thing to get used to is the consistency, since today's soft or easily-snapped-crispy they are not.

They are perfect companions for coffee, or hot chocolate, or wine, and nuts and other after-dinner sweetmeats. Oranges, dates, that sort of thing. Besides, they're very pretty to look at. While not tasting or being at all like them, these gingerbread cakes remind me of beeswax, candles, port, and good Stilton.

***Indeed, Ivan Day transcribes one recipe, for almond-based gingerbread, that directs the maker to bake the gingerbreads hard, and they would keep "all the year".

If you're wanting to recall the 17th century, or the Georgian, Regency, or Victorian eras all in one iconic morsel, why not try them? The only thing you'll want to prettify them is some sort of mold...a butter mold or spingerle mold will do, and I am just itching to sculpt my own in clay. Lacking a mold, you could try them just flat, cut with a cookie cutter. Oh, and you'll need time to bake them. They take hours in the oven, and of course you want to be there while they dry...for it's really drying more than baking.

Granted, our first batch is less than shapely: I got antsy, and after they'd baked an hour and seemed soft as ever, turned the oven *way* up to 250. D'oh...the dough softened and the features of the molded designs began to dissolve. Down went the temperature again to 200 for another hour and a half and they could have stayed in longer. I let them dry overnight before packing the cakes into an airtight tin.

Batch no. 1: Our ladies and gentlemen are dissolving into history, and the fish are melting. Still, you can tell they are designs of some sort.

Ivan Day's recipe, straight from Frederick Vine's Saleable Shop Goods (London, 1898) is commercial-sized. Have you 8 pounds of flour ready? Not being so obsessed that I wanted to eat gingerbread until Lent, I took the recipe down to 1/8th size.

Here it is. I go by weight, as being more accurate, but you could try the American measures, although they are rounded off and very wobbly, because pounds and ounces are measures of mass, while cups and teaspoons are measures of volume, and the two don't compare well.

Rich Block Gingerbread, 1/8th recipe

1 pound all-purpose flour (about 3 1/3 cups)
.18 pound butter (just shy of a half cup)
.18 pound sugar (just shy of half a cup)
.25 pound mixed peel (about 2/3 cup) (optional) (orange and lemon peel is what I used, super-finely chopped)
.25 ounce ginger (about 1/2 tablespoon, more or less)
.18 ounce mixed spice (about 1 tsp)*
dark molasses, enough to create a dough

*Mixed spice: Mix up one part each of allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, coriander, and two parts mace. Your "parts" could be tablespoons or teaspoons, just so the proportions are retained. From BBC Good Foods.

Please note: I added more spice this time. Commercial makers would have been careful of costs. I wanted a truly strong result, to remind me of the oh-so-powerful Pfeffernuesse I knew in Germany.

Method

In a nice deep bowl, work the flour into the butter until it's entirely incorporated: no lurking butter bits, please. I used my very cold hands to mix everything. Work in the sugar, peel, and spices. Hand work again.

Now, bit by bit, pour in enough dark molasses to make a stiff dough. I suspect I used more than a half a cup, but how much you will use will depend on how damp the weather is, and the properties of your flour. Again, I used my hands, because I could feel the dough coming together into a ball, and getting soft enough that I knew it would both roll and take a pattern from a mold.

If you have made pie crust before, your hands will know when the dough is getting to be moldable. Unlike pie crust, there is less butter here -- the dough is not "short" and fatty -- and of course the cookies will dry hard, so you can work this dough a bit.

If you haven't made pie crust, here's what you might look for. I am no expert on this recipe, but I do know doughs pretty well. You want the dough to hold its shape in your hand. It should not want to crack and crumble, a sign that it's too dry. Nor should it be sticky from too much molasses. If it's sticky it will stick to the mold, not peel out.

Now, the original recipe says to let it sit a bit. What's a bit? I left it an hour, baked a first batch and left the remainder overnight. Further reading of Food History Jottings and Ivan Day's website confirmed what I suspected, that this dough can sit and mature, the spices becoming ever more mingled and deep.

Now it's time to press the gingerbread onto the blocks. This is what the original directions called for. You don't roll out the dough and attempt to press the gingerbread molds down on top. No. Instead, you roll the dough onto the gingerbread blocks, and cut away the excess, like so:

Lightly floured molds, rolling pin and gingerbread all ready.

Rolling the gingerbread down onto the mold.

Approximate thickness I made my gingerbread blocks.

I guessed on the thickness, and spent a deal of time examining Ivan Day's productions on both his blog and his site.

Cut around the edge of the mold. Slowly peel the bread block off of the mold.

Cutting the gingerbread block to shape.

Peeling the gingerbread block from the mold.

Carefully transfer the cake to a barely greased cookie tray, or better yet, a tray covered with a Silpat.

"Dock" the gingerbread cake: poke holes in the top to deter any puffs. Mine didn't puff at all: there was nothing for the molasses to react to, such as baking soda. Commercial gingerbread makers used to have a special tool for docking, but I used a fork.

Docking the gingerbread blocks with a fork.

Bake in a cool, that is, 200 degree Fahrenheit oven, until the gingerbread is rather hard, though chewy inside. I am guessing on the eventual hardness of the result. Ivan Day says nothing about this, but his oldest recipe transcriptions speak of the cakes being baked hard. This took me three hours on the second batch. After a day or two the cakes become harder. How long the hardening goes on, I don't know...to really keep long they'd have to be dry as bricks.

Remove the gingerbread cakes from the tray. Brush with a glaze of mixed water and powdered sugar, not much, just enough to shine the surface a bit. This is my guesstimate of what Frederick Vine's "Bun Wash" might be. What a title... Put the cakes onto a cookie rack to dry thoroughly overnight.

Finished gingerbread cakes. Oh look! The lady on the right must be Bruenhilde: see her floury, horned helmet?

Pack in an airtight tin. See how long they last!

Next time I am going to add a bit of fruit vinegar to the molasses, and let it cause some rising, then let the sponge age in the refrigerator for a few days before baking it. We'll see what changes this makes to the results.

So Where's That Blasted Gauze Cap?

It's coming along, it really is! As the project progressed, I found myself more interested in testing to see how the sewing process, and the results, would change depending on what seams I used. Why might an 18th century seamstress choose a particular seam? Next post will explain a great deal more, and who knows, it may show a finished cap.

Deutscher Pfannkuchen: A Gentle Dinner Treat for A Warm Evening

Last evening it was almost seventy degrees outside, and the neighbors were sitting under torches, chatting and watching the flames in their firepit. It was so balmy and cozy in the evening darkness that I thought to make a candlelit dinner equally gentle. So it was out with Great Aunt Alice's No. 8 cast-iron frying pan, a good hot oven, a quick stir of the ingredients, and the result into the oven to puff and scent the air. Ah, Deutscher Pfannkuchen, or German pancake, a light dish a bit like fallen soufflé -- but really, it's light! -- that's wonderful served with applesauce, some other fresh fruit, a little bread and a bit of cheese.

The boys arrived home from Mamaw's and Papaw's at the farm, and I had the candles lit and everything waiting. It was a good dinner. Herewith, the recipe, as dictated to me by my son, Christopher, here on the sofa with me the afternoon following:

Deutscher Pfannkuchen

Beat three eggs with three tablespoons flour, 1 tablespoon sugar, and 6 tablespoons milk. Pour the batter into a large, generously butter skillet and bake it in a hot over, 425 degrees F, for 8 minutes. Reduce the heat to moderately hot, 375 degrees F, and bake it for 8 minutes longer, or until the pancake puffs up above the side of the pan and turns a delicate brown.

Place the pancake on a platter, sprinkle it with the juice of 1/2 lemon, three tablespoons sugar, 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon, and one 1/4 cup melted butter. Roll the pancake and dust it with powdered sugar.

Serve at once with applesauce if desired.

From one of my favorite cookbooks, Gourmet's Old Vienna Cookbook: Viennese Memoir. By Lillian Langseth-Christiansen. New York: 1959.

I did not roll up the pancake, but served it in pie-shaped slices, plus I omitted the butter and the powdered sugar.

Also, one winner has yet to contact me so I can send her the giveaway. Laura, please see

Winners! Big, Fun Double Giveaway.

Wafers, Oblaten, Oublies: Whatever Their Name, They're Delicious

A just-finished wafer.

It has been raining, and raining, and raining. It will continue to rain, rain, rain, for the largest part of another week. The last time I knew that the sun had shone brightly here was June 21, the day we left to visit family at the beach. By the morning of June 22, the thunder was crashing and water coming in torrents, and for all that trip, we made our beach outings and excursions between rains, and one time during a rain. That outing was spent entirely in the surf, where you could forget that anything was falling from the sky, since you were well and continuously splashed already.

It poured, on and off, the entire trip home to Kentucky. At one point, in North Carolina, bless their drenched hearts, my husband's phone made a series of high-pitched beeps, and it took us awhile to understand that it was his phone that was making the noise. He picked it up, to find a flash flood warning spread across the screen. He'd never seen one of those come in before. I've learned in the days since that NC has had more than its share of mudslides, pitched-over trees, washed-out roads, and floods.

Our state, so far, has just had plain, solid rain and a few downpours, and it has soaked into the soil, although a cast-iron manhole cover on Fontaine Road did burst up and wash down the street a few days ago, through the force of storm water trying to find a way out. It left a satisfactory pond with onlookers for about half an hour. I drove up to it, decided not to risk flooding my car, and took another route.

The ground is saturated now, and there is standing water in every low spot. This makes small boys happy, so we have two pairs of shoes under a fan in the basement, post-pond sloshing. If we get any more rain, we will join the misery of our neighboring states.

Where Are the Wafers?

You didn't read this far without wondering where in the Sam Hill the wafers come in. If you're a parent and suspecting, you're right, they came out of my need to occupy those two small boys. They've played reasonably happily for days, and every time there's been a glimmer of pale sun, or the rain isn't that wet, out we go, parents and children alike, to run and release pent-up energy. Hence the soaked shoes...

Anywhoo, I bethought myself of English biscuits, the barely sweetened, stamped type. If you keep up with Ivan Day's Food History Jottings, or the Ship's Bisket video from the 18th century bread series, courtesy Jas Townsend (such fun!), you'll have read about them. Have been wanting to try them out, and have some German gingerbread stamps, a gift from my sister in Wien, just begging to be used. Out came the computer to look up a useful recipe.


Selection of biscuits and wafers, from "Some
Regency Biscuits", in
Ivan Day's blog, Food History Jottings.

My boys saw the picture here, commented on the rolled wafers, and whoops! We took a sudden detour. Bye-bye biscuits, I have a wafer iron I've never used and those wafers sure look good. Today's the day! Now, off to find a recipe again.

After another short detour to watch (twice) a video about how Pirouline wafers are made in the factory, which the boys loved but made those wafers forever taste of factory to me -- a 100,000 made in an hour! -- we found the perfect recipe in Victoria Rumble's The Historic Foodie, another favorite blog of mine.

Wafers: Not Quite a Waffle offers us their history -- ladies in wimples and knights in armor munched them! -- and a solid, usable-sans-research-and-testing recipe.

Ivan Day offers recipes too, but he never "redacts" them to 21st century terms, saying in one post that the original recipes therein are quite clear. Sad to say, where I will search out filament silk and good linen thread for a garment, and spend hours handsewing a hem, and can fit in odd moments, cooking falls under the tyranny of tummies, tempers, and time, and in the company of family and their needs.

Therefore, thank you and bless you, practical Mrs. Rumble, because you have provided me with a recipe we can use right off the block, with joy and excitement. The tastes of centuries past were in our mouths today, and my my, were they delicious.  (Yes, yes, wafers are still made in small pockets here, and in Europe, but they're not everyday sorts of things for most of us anymore.)

Wafer-Making: Right on the Gas Flames!

Joy and excitement? But of course: these used to be cooked over embers, and today they were cooked over a bright-blue gas flame. Any small child is going to be excited about that, you know. Parents may gulp -- I did -- but we practice safety, and they followed the rules, and no accidents occurred, thank Heaven.

Victoria Rumble's recipe is not for a batter, but a dough. Better and better, no splats and splots, or dashes to the sink after being splashed with hot batter.

It mixes up easily, this dough, rests and gets chilly for 30 minutes, and is ready to go.

It's also easy to modify: the original was flavored with orange water and the zests of two oranges. Neither on hand, I used rosewater, a common flavoring in the past, and fresh-ground coriander, which is citrusy. It smelled realllly good. Rosy, said Christopher.

My iron dates, I guess, to the 1920s or 30s. I base this only on the brightly painted red wooden grips on the handles, the very classicizing Greek lyre pattern in the stamp (so 20s -- they did classical as well as Deco), and the aluminum of the iron itself. If I'm wrong, please let me know.

All we did was to grease it well, heat it a few minutes on top of the stove's gas flame, open it, and put in a roll of dough. A roll, because this is not a round iron, as so many are. Then, let it toast inside the iron.

A roll of wafer dough on the iron, ready to toast.

At first, it took about two minutes to toast a wafer, with a flip about halfway through, but as the iron heated up, it toasted wafers in about a minute.
Boys just love to squish the dough flat in the iron, and hold it over the heat. It's very elemental. I love to carry the iron to the cooling rack, flip the iron open and upside down, and watch the wafer slide out, pale fawn colored and oh! so fragrant. For awhile afterwards, the entire house, upstairs and downstairs, was just barely scented with the delicate odor of baked butter and flour, vanilla and rose. Entrancing, elegant, hunger-making!

Wafers, ready to nibble. The wafer's color on each side depends on how long it's toasted.

And beautiful. Try one of these, crisp, not heavily sweet, fragrant, with tea, coffee, whipped cream, or a glass of wine.

If you have or can find a wafer iron, do try making them. If it will sit flat, an iron could be used on an electric stove, and if it's steel, even a magnetic stove, and of course, there's the grill or hibachi or open fire. I suspect you could even use a tortilla press, although that might be a bit bulky, and there are no crispy ups-and-downs from the stamped pattern on a wafer made that way.

By the way, if you're planning an historically inspired tea, dinner or collation, variations of these little treats are appropriate from the Middle Ages right on through the present. I just may serve these at our next Georgian or Regency tea.

Before I Leave You...

Proof that it didn't rain at the beach the entire time, anyway. Here we all are on the Southport Ferry, heading in a stiff breeze towards that little town and some good homemade ice cream. Note the sunshine!

Happy munching!

Exploding 18th Century Food...and Even Shaped Like a Cannonball

No, this is not Zombie-related, but it will be
explosive.

Now that I have your attention :}

This blog is all about experiments. So are other blogs. Usually the experiments aren't the source of explosions, or of giggles, but in the case of Madame Berg's recent experiments with a stuffed 18th century cabbage and boiled hamburgers, dated ditto, you will find both. What a howl!

Perhaps I was punch-drunk after a busy two weeks last evening, but on reading this on the mobile device thingie after lights out last night, I kept falling into giggle fits. The fits kept little Christopher awake and in laughing fits too, because he thought it was funny that Mama was laughing so hard. Poor Curte and Noah: they missed the joke, being asleep already.

Have fun, and happy weekend!

Addendum

I have not forgotten the voile dress. It just lacks the last bit of frill and time for a photo shoot. We have family here this weekend so time is not available.

A Side Trip into Food History

Do you dream of baking a pudding in a cast iron pan or roasting a goose over hot coals? Do you see in your mind's eye a tall, white-frosted cake scattered with candied violets? So do I.

So have I, in fact, for many years. Long ago I wrote a master's thesis about cooking and eating habits among a group of people in Atlanta, Georgia. Historians give that branchlet of research the name "foodways", among other monikers. Back then it seems most of us relied on written resources to learn about what how people prepared food, how they ate it, and why.

Photo: screen capture of the Bites of Food History blog.

You can't eat paper, though, nor smell a dish through paper, nor know how your arms and hands feel when you have hefted a pot from coals, or tested the temperature of an unreliable gas oven, or kneaded a dough with your fingers.

So I am happy to see that food history has gone concrete and that historians, professional or amateur, are testing the foodways of days long past with their eyes and arms and fingers and tastebuds. Here are two blogs that I find particularly fun and useful. There are many more out there. Do you have favorites you would like to share?

Bites of Food History
Historian Susan McLellan Plaisted's experiments in cheesemaking, brining, baking, ice cream making, chocolate making from cacao seeds (yes, that's right), roasting on a string...

The Old Foodie
"Every weekday I give you a short story on a food history topic, always including a historic recipe, and sometimes a historic menu. And how much fun is that!" From food writer Janet Clarkson.

Photo: screen capture of The Old Foodie blog.

Happy tasting!

Split Seconds: A Cookie with Warm Memories

Split Seconds are simplicity itself to make. Do not let the title fool you into thinking that they're "partly homemade" baked things. No, these are butter cookies dotted on top with your favorite jam or preserve and they are delicious in the way only butter cookies can be.

Because my husband and I have a bet on that we will leave desserts alone for an entire six months (I make exceptions for ladies' teas and Easter), today I wave goodbye to baking and sweets for awhile by baking these cookies, and filling the house with a favorite aroma and even nicer memories.

Cooking Collections of Memory

Back in the 1980s I started what became a series of recipe collections, each contained in a bound artist's sketch book, on nice thick paper. Each book was filled over several years and each reflects, by accident, my favorite dishes and menus during that time. Because many of the recipes are accompanied by notes, the results are also an imperfect history: old beaux, sisters, friends, dinners and parties get their time, and later there is a recounting of the evening my husband and I became engaged, and a long account written during September 11.

What I wrote about this recipe, back in book number 1: known oddly enough as Second Cookbook, 1987:

One of my earliest cookie memories. Mom used to make these pretty often, and sometimes I think I can remember her first kitchen, or the one in the first house she and Daddy ever owned. it had red counters, and lots of windows, and red and white checked curtains. One of the counters was like a bar and you could sit on one side, the breakfast nook side, and watch mom cook -- especially I remember helping her bake (i.e., eat dough, pat it or cut it out or lick batter from spoons). [Today's note: I wrote this in the eighties, when being a child wasn't so far back. Now that kitchen, circa 1963-1968, would be a spot I would ooh over as a friendly retro kitchen, with those handmade cafe curtains and linoleum -- Mom, correct me if I am wrong! -- counters with aluminum edging, and half-windowed back door out into a sunny yard with flower beds, and a white picket fence that closed with a chain and cannon-ball weight.]

Now, you can make these into long ropes which you cut into bars, or you can make them into little rounds. Red jam is best -- it looks like rubies.

Mom made them while we lived in Germany, too (when I was around five or six years old).

The cookies, attributed to a Mrs. Karen M. Fellows, come from "Fun-Filled Butter Cookie Cookbook", by Pillsbury.

The Recipe

[Note: My cooking notes are in brackets. The rest is in Mom's words.]

Bake at 350 degree F for 125-20 min.
Makes about 4 dozen cookies.

Sift together

2 c flour [all-purpose white flour; I use unbleached local flour from Wiesenberger Mills]
1/2 tsp baking powder (double acting) [note that this recipe dates to a time when single-acting powder was commonly on store shelves, too]
2/3 cups sugar

Blend in

3/4 cups soft butter
1 unbeaten egg
2 tsp vanilla

to make a dough.

Place on a greased cookie sheet, either in long rolls [which you have rolled in your hands like play dough] or in little flattened rounds.

Make a depression 1/4-1/3" deep, either in the rounds, or [down] the middle of the rolls. Fill depressions with red jam or jelly. Strawberry, or especially rasberry, is best. [Since then I have used other types of jam and today, in fact, I am using a peach jam from Renfro Valley, Kentucky.]

Bake until light golden brown. [Again, about 15-20 minutes, but watch carefully, because butter makes cookies that are a light golden brown move to dark burned brown in what seems like a heartbeat.]

While warm, if in bars [Mom probably meant to write "long rolls"], cut [cookies] into squares. [We always cut them into narrow oblongs, so that they are not so big.]

This evening I will add pictures!

Black Walnuts: The Harvest and the Cake

It's that time of year: black walnuts are littering the Kentucky Bluegrass. The last few trips out to my in-laws, I've passed patches of roadside where hundreds of nuts lie waiting, and out at the farm, Erma and I have examined their walnut trees. Most are heavy with nuts, and we've started to collect them from the ground. Every once in awhile one of the tots comes up, crying "Ba! Ba!" not for sheep, but for "ball", and presenting me with a walnut, which in its husk is, in fact, shaped very much like a tiny basketball and even has that bumpy surface.

When she was a girl, Erma and her sisters used to lay their finds on the road to their farm so that when the car drove over them, the thick husks, spicy with a green, peppery scent we both love, would break open. This past week we found quite a few husked that way in the little track that leads to the garden; Robert's and Ann's truck must have done the job when they loaded up vegetables. For the rest, I made do by stamping on them with my sneaker.

Photo: our black walnut tree

Walnut-loving, patient Kentuckians all over are gathering up black walnuts and soldiering through the difficult process of extracting the delicious, rich, fragrant meats from the shells. A labor of love it really is, too...the husks stain and the shells are so hard that they're used in commercial abrasives.

Our family is among the group of gatherers, for besides the trees at our in-laws, we can go to the back yard to collect them, because we're blessed with a large, lovely, sinuously shaped tree that bears well most every year.

Harvesting Black Walnuts

This is a multi-step process.

Husk Removal

The nuts come in a yellow-green, thick, hard-but-fleshy husk, and you have to get that off, first. If you leave the husk on so long that it turns brown and rots, some say it will ruin the nut's flavor, although I've not found that.

Complicating factor? The husk has a juice that will stain you, your clothes, even concrete. Folks made dye of it in past years.

Photo: black walnuts hanging on our tree

If you stamp on the nuts with shoes you don't care about on a surface you don't care about, you get the husk off. So stamp away, one nut at a time.

Photo: black walnuts in their yellow-green husks

Cure the Nuts in Their Shells

I've read recently that the nut flavor is improved if you set the nuts aside for a few weeks to cure. Don't pack them too deeply or they may mold; I've read that two or three layers deep in a box is about right.

Note: I've neglected to cure the nuts with no ill effects.

Shell the Nuts

Black walnuts have unbelieveably HARD shells. I've read that soaking them before cracking them helps, but no one in my in-law's family bothers with that, to my knowledge.

Photo: a black walnut in in its famously hard, furrowed shell

A normal nutcracker will not crack a black walnut: you might just crack the cracker. Only commercial operations are able to crack more than one nut at a time, too. Regular folks are left with cracking the nuts one at a time.

Lexington and the surrounding little towns used to boast several places that would husk and maybe shell nuts you brought to them, and even buy them from you, but sadly, fewer people gather the nuts these days.

So, tools of choice in my in-laws' family? Pound the nuts on concrete with a flat iron (the cast-iron type that predate electric irons), or place the iron bottom-up in your lap, place the nut on it, and hit it with a hammer. Pick out the meats with a nut pick.

Photo: getting ready to crack a walnut. The cracker is an old window-sash weight, of cast iron; a fragment of sheet iron is the base on which the nuts are cracked.

My method? Place the nut on a piece of cast iron, take an old cast-iron window-sash weight, and, holding it horizontally, one end in each hand, strike the nut smartly. Then pick out the pieces. The interior of the shell is a tightly packed maze, so it's really hard to get whole meats.

All methods result in a certain amount of nut meat loss, and you invariably introduce bits of shell in with the nuts, but my mother-in-law says that this goes with the territory.

About two pounds of nuts will result in a cup of nut meats; it takes me an hour to crack that many. However, since you only need a cup's worth for a cake, that's okay!

Photo: the walnut, cracked. It took one blow to split the nut, and then a few lighter blows to get the meat free of the shell pieces.

Since the cracked nuts are oily, like regular walnuts, you should use them within a few weeks or so of cracking them, but you can freeze them to get them to last longer. My method is to just crack what you need, and store the rest in the basement out of the reach of squirrels and other pests. Don't put them near the furnace: if the nuts dry out too much they'll be spoiled.

Using Black Walnuts

These nuts will go in about anything that a regular walnut will go in: cakes and pies, and fudge, on top of salads, and so on. Then there's black walnut ice cream, which is hard to find commercially, but oh, so good.

The flavor of this nut is very rich, and it has a spice, a ring, an edge to it that regular walnuts do not, but the edge is not bitter. It's woodsier, maybe. The freshly cracked nuts are fragrant, too, with an elegant scent that reminds me of expensive Austrian cafes as much as it does country cooking. The scent has a similar richness that coffee does...it draws the nose.

Black Walnut Cake

Last Friday afternoon, while the tots played around me, I cracked a cup's worth of nut meats, and then Saturday morning as the sun was coming up, commenced on this cake to take out to my in-laws.

Photo: Black walnut cake

Wouldn't you know I was carrying coals to Newcastle? Saturday was also the Old Union Christian Church auction, and Erma bid on and won a butterscotch pie, cream pull candy, peanut butter rolls, multiple kinds of fudge, crabapple jelly, and grape jelly, all made by the church members. They didn't need a cake.

They got one anyway, and Erma says she loves anything with black walnuts in it, and I comfort myself with the thought that the cake will freeze well.

The recipe

1/2 cup butter
2 cups brown sugar
3 egg yolks, beaten
3 teaspoons baking powder
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup black walnuts, chopped fine
3 egg whites, stiffly beaten

Combine butter and sugar and beat until smooth. Add beaten egg yolks and mix well. Combine flour, baking powder, and salt and add to creamed mixture, alternately with milk. Add vanilla and walnuts and mix well. Fold in stiffly beaten egg whites. Bake in greased 9 to 10 inch tube pan at 350 degrees until tests done.

Recipe from Christine Gevedon
In A Taste of Tradition: A Collection of Recipes by Morgan County Sorghum Festival Committee
P.O. Box 214, West Liberty, KY 41472
Cookbooks by Morris Press: 1998.

By "tests done", they mean that a toothpick or tester inserted into the cake center will pull out cleanly. However, I'd watch the cake carefully and test several times...and at the first instant this happens, out it comes. Mine had pulled away from the sides of the pan like most cakes do when done, and was a rich brown, but maybe a little darker than it should have been, and was just a little drier than I'd like.

The result was still delicious, a fairly fine-crumbed cake with a faint vanilla flavor and strong taste of walnut, with the added bonus of small nut chunks for texture and extra flavor.

This recipe makes a sizeable cake. It doesn't need icing; I just dusted a little confectioner's sugar on it, but you might consider soaking it with bourbon over several weeks, for a keeping cake. I am going to try it, because the combination sounds irresistable.

It makes a good tea cake and very nice dessert to follow a fall dinner...the stronger flavors go well with the last of the tomatoes, with squash and pumpkin, with "soup beans" and the first of the fall stews.

Further Reading

Here are a few interesting bits about black walnuts; there's more out there and this was unscientifically gathered, so better resources may exist.

• Wikipedia essay about the tree: Juglans nigra
  
• Harvesting Black Walnuts: a how-to fact sheet from the University of Minnesota Extension
• The tree and how to harvest the nuts, in photographs: Black Walnut (Juglans nigra)
• A survey of methods to crack black walnuts: Black Walnut Crackers

The Queen's Corgi's Scones

Her dogs have excellent taste. These are served every day at the Queen's afternoon tea. Do see the recipe on Kalianne's blog, Bygone Beauty. They are going on my August treats list.

Cherry Chess Pie and Raspberry Chess Pie

We interrupt our regular programming to bring you this pleasant late-spring interlude: a segment on two unusual chess pies.

If you live below the Mason-Dixon line, you've probably eaten your share, or more than you'd like to admit, of any of a number of delicious chess pies and their relatives the transparent pie, the Jeff Davis pie, and so on. Plain chess pie, lemon chess pie, chocolate chess pie...all of them luscious, sugar-custardy, rich but not too rich.

Photo: the raspberry chess pie in preparation. The pie shell is ready, the sugar base is mixed, and the green and brown araucana eggs, size medium, will be broken and beaten in with the sugar, the custard poured into the pie shell, and the berries carefully stirred in. I needed only half the berries. Hooray! Some for cereal...

I read long ago that the term "chess pie" was a corruption of an English cheese pie dish, but chess pie contains no cheese at all. It's a mixture of sugars, flour, melted butter, well-beaten eggs, and flavorings, poured into a single-crust pie shell and baked until the custard is set and the top perhaps a tad browned.

A Cherry Chess Pie for Curte Senior's 80th Birthday

Last Sunday dawned gorgeously clear and fresh, and promised a fine Father's Day, for having a picnic and celebrating my husband's Dad's 80th birthday.

Pie cherries were in season at the Farmer's Market, I found when the twins and I visited around noon-time, and we were lucky to get some. These were small red cherries, so tart! Perfect for a pie, perfect for a gift to a gentleman who knew and enjoyed homegrown produce so very well.

I'd planned your basic deep-dish cherry pie, but on looking in an old favorite cookbook, titled The Gold Cookbook, by Master Cheff Louis P. De Gouy, an enormous tome of French and regional American cooking, dated 1947, the only cherry pie he listed was for a cherry chess pie. Not familiar with such a beast, I read it, thought it sounded mighty tasty, and proceeded to make the pie. After spattering my new shirt and the breakfast tabletop with cherry juice from stoning each cherry, of course.

The pie made up easily, baked well, set well, and traveled well out to Spindletop in the countryside for the picnic. Mighty tasty it was too, as we all agreed. Hint of tartness in the cherries, not oversweet, hint of honey, of all things, too.

Here then is the recipe, straight from The Gold Cookbook, page 945:

Cherry Chess Pie
Pit one quart of sour cherries after first washing them quickly in cold water then draining well. Mix 2 tablespoons of flour, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/3 cup honey*, a pinch of salt, and 1 1/2 tablespoons of butter or margerin (sic). Stir in 3 well-beaten eggs with a pinch of salt and add the cherries. Pour into an unbaked pie shell and bake in a hot oven (450 F.) for 12 minutes to set the pie and crust; reduce the heat to 350 F. and continue baking for 20 minutes longer, or until set. Cool and serve with a whipped cream topping.

*I used mellow sourwood honey.

The pie crust: I use my standby crust from my mother's Good Housekeeping Cookbook from the late 40s or early 50s: 2 1/4 cups sifted all-purpose flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt; cut in 3/4 cup of butter or shortening; add 4-6 tablespoons ice water bit by bit, and blend until the mixture starts following the fork around and forms a ball. Roll out and line an ungreased pie shell with it.


A Raspberry Chess Pie Variation

My raspberries are ripe! A few tastes last week of early berries made us all happy, and I expected a similar slim picking today, but was rather shocked to find the patch loaded. I did two pickings today, yielding perhaps a quart and a half. Not bad for a small patch in town.

Wanting to make something special, and not being in the mood for a tart, I went back to the chess pie theme, replacing the cherries with the raspberries, and leaving out the cinnamon.

We shall see! It should be done in a moment and tomorrow morning in fresh light I will photograph it...

Photo: the raspberry chess pie has been tasted.

...Tomorrow arrived and here are the results of the taste test: well, it's pretty good! The chess flavor and raspberry flavor are nice together, if not outstanding. However, I think a tart with a cream cheese or sour cream filling might take better advantage of the raspberry flavor.