What a Mommy I had

Now that's a workhorse cookbook.

Hello. Happy New Year. Is the light in January harsher and more fluorescent than in December? Or is that my imagination?

Yesterday, I pulled out my copy of San Francisco a La Carte to make yet another batch of Nanaimo bars (I will link to the story when it runs, which will probably not happen until I write it) and the book almost fell apart in my hands.

Way back in 1979 my mother gave me a copy of San Francisco A La Carte and she inscribed it, as she inscribed all the cookbooks she gave me. One day I will write about those books, but not today. This post already rambles enough, as you will see.

Can you read that?

Opening the book yesterday and rereading the inscription, I was surprised to see that "Mommy" was still in play in 1979. I was 13, which is old for "Mommy." My children haven't called me "Mommy" in years.

But here's a sad/sweet/strange little story. When I was 42 and sitting at my desk one August afternoon, decades after I had last called my mother "Mommy," the phone rang. It was my mother, weeping, phoning from a doctor's office, and she said, "Jen, I have a tumor." And I cried out, "Mommy!"

That was definitely the last time.

I cooked compulsively from San Francisco A La Carte when I was 13, 14, 15. Do you think maybe I was a nerd? I just counted: I made 82 recipes from the book, including the cold peach soup and the molded cucumber mousse, and I know this because, as I've mentioned before, I write in cookbooks. My copy of San Francisco a la Carte contains 82 stilted and sometimes funny notations. Unintentionally funny.

No, rancid butter is never a good idea. 

Anyway, while ambling down memory lane, I spotted a carrot cake recipe and since Mark loves carrot cake and it was his birthday yesterday, I baked it.

And I thought I was such a good speller.

The cake was lovely, not at all "average." It was very soft, simple, and carroty and made me think we went wrong when we started putting pineapple, coconut, and walnuts into carrot cake batter, a trend I date to The Silver Palate, though I'm no culinary historian.

Isabel asked me why I would ever make a cake that I had once deemed "average." I told her I didn't know anything about carrot cake when I was 13, which clearly I didn't.

My one carrot cake wish is that it would look as odd, orange, and wonderful after it is baked as it does before.

The recipe is at the end of the post. It's really good and really easy.

Our love for The Homesick Texan continues to grow. No pictures because I've given up flash photos after dark as the results are always dismal. New Year's night I made Lisa Fain's barbecued brisket (slab of beef robustly seasoned, tightly wrapped in foil, baked for 6 hours) which I served with her coffee-chipotle barbecue sauce  (recipe here) and terrific string beans with cilantro pesto (recipe here.) I couldn't have been happier.

No, I could have been happier. The next night I made her Frito pie and I was happier. Do you all know about Frito pie? Chili poured over Fritos. I didn't grow up with this, but have eaten it on a handful of occasions, including straight out of a cut-open Frito bag. You need to make Fain's Frito pie. A non-pharmacological mood enhancer for glum January. Forget the diet, and while you're forgetting, try Fain's Dr. Pepper ribs. I'd give them 45 extra minutes in the oven to ensure melting tenderness. Recipe is here.  With the ribs I served Fain's cornbread, which is of the unsweetened Southern variety. This upset Owen, but no one else. I've never used bacon fat in cornbread before and highly recommend it as the crust positively crackled.

Yes, I have willfully forgotten the diet. I have not even told you about the nightly milk punch experiments. Milk punch = warm, alcoholic milkshake. But the new year doesn't really start for a parent until the kids go back to school and that is next week.

Carrot cake

I changed this only slightly, reducing the cinnamon, omitting lemon extract from the icing, and using parchment in the pans.

Cake

2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
4 eggs
1 cup vegetable oil
heaping 4 cups grated raw carrots (9-10)

Frosting

8 ounces softened cream cheese
4 tablespoons softened butter
2 cups powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease 3 8-inch round cake pans and line the bottoms with parchment.

2. Whisk together the the dry ingredients. Beat the eggs until frothy in another bowl, then beat in the oil. Add the dry ingredients and stir well. Stir in the carrots. Pour into the cake pans and bake for 30 minutes, or until a toothpick tests clean. Cool completely and turn out on to a cake rack.

3. Put all the frosting ingredients in a bowl and beat until thoroughly creamy and smooth. It's very easy to under-do this and end up with lumps of cream cheese, so beat hard and long.

4. Ice the cake, using just a little frosting between the layers. Frost the top and sides. I thought this might not be enough icing, but it is. I think as a culture we sometimes overfrost cakes. Serves 12-16.

My mom's apple cake

She used to make the apple cake. She also made the plate.

It has happened. I have become self-conscious about my blog. I don't know what to do about it except confess, forge ahead, and apologize in advance if I sound more stilted than usual. I'm supposed to be doing a lot of Twitter, Facebook and other squirm-inducing self promotion/book promotion, and somehow my blog has gotten mixed up with all this in my mind to ill and inhibiting effect. I've done so much cooking in the last week, had so many subjects I wanted to write about -- Marcus Samuelsson's rack of lamb (now known forever by us as hack of lamb), Nigel Slater's Tender, the tempting new cookbooks at Omnivore, cottage cheese pancakes, my day with Layne  -- and yet whenever I sit down to the computer it's like sitting down to write a college application essay.

Here goes.

Last week I decided I was going to make Smitten Kitchen's mother's apple cake, as I love recipes that come from mothers. But the very day I was going to bake that cake I got an email from my own mother's friend Ellen. She wrote:

"Jennifer - I've been thinking of Checka so much lately and when I found out I had to bring dessert to  my book club meeting, I suddenly thought of Apple Dapple Cake which is in a cookbook your mother recommended. She wrote little notes about some of the recipes and this one she said was "fantastic." I've made it before and knew it was delicious and I just finished baking it."

I remembered apple dapple cake! But like so many things associated with my mother, I spent years distancing myself, which now seems very silly and sad. If you have a mother with a powerful personality it is understandable and forgiveable if you distance yourself. Distance may be necessary if you ever want to become your own person, and I would probably do it all over again. But it still seems silly and sad, now.

I am definitely my own person now and instead of Smitten Kitchen's apple cake, I baked apple dapple cake. It is my caloric undoing, this incredible cake. It is moist and appley, which is baseline good, but what pushes it over the top is the diabolical glaze of melted butter, cream, and brown sugar that you pour over the cake and which soaks into the crumb and at the same time forms a super-sweet, brittle caramel crust. I highly recommend apple dapple cake. It has vaulted into my top ten cakes, right up there with cardamom cake and Laurie Colwin's nutmeg cake. For perspective, the Orangette/Nigel Slater plum cake I mentioned a post or two ago is merely in my top 50 cakes. I should really keep a ranked list.

The recipe is barely adapted from the San Francisco A La Carte cookbook published in 1979. The book omits an oven temperature; I went with 350, always a safe choice. You will cringe when you see how much oil and sugar the recipe calls for, but steel yourself and make it anyway.

APPLE DAPPLE CAKE

2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups neutral vegetable oil
3 large eggs
3 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt

3 cups finely diced, peeled apples
2 cups chopped pecans
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

GLAZE

1 cup brown sugar (light or dark)
1/4 pound unsalted butter
1/2 cup heavy cream

1. Preheat the oven to 350.
2. Combine sugar and oil and beat well. Add eggs one at a time.
3. . Sift dry ingredients together and stir into the egg mixture.
4.  Beat in apples, nuts and vanilla. Pour into a greased, floured tube pan (angel food cake pan) and bake for one hour or more, until a slender knife inserted in the middle comes out clean. (This is a deep cake and a toothpick doesn't reach far enough.)
5. When the cake is almost ready to come out of the oven, combine the glaze ingredients in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Let boil for 3 minutes. Reserving 1/3 cup, pour over the hot cake, still in the pan. Cool, and remove the cake from the pan. Just before serving,  pour the rest of the glaze over the cake.

Makes a lot.

On another subject, I had never heard of kiwiberries until they turned upin last week's CSA box. I hope they catch on because we loved them a lot. 

No fur, no fuzz

I persist with my aggravating CSA, because I like being surprised like this. You can't really tell from the photo, but these cute fruits are about the size of olives and they are essentially tiny kiwis, but with smooth edible skins so you can pop a whole one in your mouth, no wet, onerous peeling required. They were gone in an hour.

Eggnog pie

I got the idea for an eggnog pie from Layne, who writes one of my all-time favorite blogs and told me she was thinking of "hacking" a recipe for an eggnog custard pie. Suddenly, I couldn't get the idea of eggnog pie out of my head and had to have one for Thanksgiving. Since I'm no good at hacking recipes, I looked through a bunch of cookbooks and found this fine recipe in San Francisco A La Carte, the outstanding 1979 cookbook by the San Francisco Junior League. It isn't a custard pie, it's a boozy, superrich cream pie and if you eat more than a small slice you will feel fat and tired and sick. But it's worth it.

EGGNOG PIE

1. Bake and cool a 9-inch pie shell. The original recipe calls for a pastry crust, but I think a cookie crumb crust would be a lot better.

2. Soften 1 tsp. gelatin in 1 TBS cold water. Set aside.

3. Scald 1 cup milk in the top of a double boiler over simmering water.

4. Dissolve 2 TBS cornstarch in 1/4 cup cold water and stir into scalded milk. Then add 1/2 cup sugar, 1/4 tsp. salt, and 3 beaten egg yolks. Cook, stirring constantly, until sugar has dissolved and it's sort of thick, about 15 minutes.

5. Add softened gelatin and stir until dissolved. Add 1 TBS butter, 1 tsp. vanilla, and 1 TBS bourbon. Stir until butter melts. Cool.

6. Beat 1 cup cream until stiff, fold into filling, and pour into pie shell. Refrigerate a while to firm up. Before serving, top with freshly grated nutmeg.