I have a confession: I meant to post this in the peak of fall. I missed that by quite a bit, but let’s be honest: there is never a bad time for apple fritters. This is something that deserves to be enjoyed year-round.

These apple fritters are not one of my great-grandma’s recipes, but are from The Cook’s Own Book, an 1832 recipe book credited simply to “A Boston Housekeeper.” At this point, I’m starting to amass quite the collection of vintage cookbooks. I ain’t mad about it.

Initial thoughts on the recipe

Stew some apples cut small, together with a little water, sugar, lemon-peel, and cinnamon; when soft, add a little white wine, the juice of half a lemon, and a bit of fresh butter; when cold, mix them with a batter, as for Tunbridge puffs, or enclose them in puff paste. Fry, and serve them with sifted loaf sugar over them.

The Cook’s Own Book, A Boston Housekeeper, 1832

Ok, so this recipe ended up being a bit of a matryoshka doll. There’s a need for another recipe within the recipe. Thankfully, there’s also a recipe for Tunbridge puffs in the book. In case you’re wondering it’s in alphabetical order, so these two recipes were not particularly close to each other, so much page flipping had to be done.

TUNBRIDGE PUFFS. Put into a nicely-tinned saucepan a pint of milk, and when it boils, stir in as much flour as will make it a thick batter; add three well-beaten eggs, and two or three drops of oil of cinnamon, or any other seasoning; dust a large flat plate with flour, with a spoon throw ion it the batter, in the form of balls or fritters, and drop them into boiling clarified drippings or lard. Serve them with pounded loaf sugar strewed over. The batter may be made into a pudding, adding with the eggs an ounce of salt butter. Boil and serve it with a sweet sauce.

The Cook’s Own Book, A Boston Housekeeper, 1832

Can we take a moment, as a quick aside, to point out how for some reason these recipes are written like one long run-on sentence? As I read them, it kind of makes me feel like I can’t pause to understand them, but must instead keep rushing forward.

Anyway.

As I have come to learn is fairly standard for these types of recipes, there are no measurements. Which means my favorite thing, completely winging it and hoping it turns out all right.

Trying it out

Thankfully, while these recipes left me hanging with measurements, the instructions were pretty clear and easy to follow.

I began by cutting up two apples and combining them with water, sugar, cinnamon, lemon peel, butter, and white wine over the stove on medium heat until they were softened. As the apples cooled, I made the batter. I didn’t have any “oil of cinnamon” on hand (can one even buy that for cooking anymore? Or is it just sold as an essential oil?), so I used regular ol’ ground cinnamon instead. As far as I can tell, this worked just fine.

One thing to note: initially, 2 cups of flour were plenty for the batter. However, after I added the apples I needed to ad another 3/4 cup to bring it back to it’s former consistency. I probably wouldn’t have needed to add so much had I drained the apples, but I liked the idea of some of that apple-stewing liquid getting into the batter. It could only help the flavor, as far as I’m concerned.

When it comes to deep frying things I’m somewhat of a rookie. The internet told me to try and keep the oil at around 350, so with a candy thermometer I did my best to monitor and stay within that range. I dropped spoonfuls of the batter inelegantly into the oil, and turned them to make sure they were golden on both sides. Is there a prettier way to do this? I don’t know; maybe. But no one expects apple fritters to be beautiful, right? After taking them out and letting them drain on a paper towel, I dusted them with powdered sugar. And voila! They were done.

The verdict:

You guys. These were so good. It’s so far my favorite historical recipe I’ve ever made. The one “flaw” might be that mine were a little underdone in the middle. I’m sure that could be fixed by dropping batter into the oil in smaller amounts. However, I honestly didn’t mind — yes, I have always been one of those “eat the batter” types. Anyway, that’s more user error with the cooking method rather than anything wrong with the recipe. The fritters themselves had a wonderfully balanced flavor. Just the right amount of sweetness, with a hint of tartness from the apples. This is one of those rare instances where I’m giving the recipe a glowing 5/5.

For my next project from Cora’s cookbook, I decided to tackle another pie, and settled rather quickly on her “chocolate pie” recipe. A creamy chocolate pie is rich and simple. Feels like classic Americana to me. Not to mention, it doesn’t require any obscure ingredients, just some basic things I was likely to already have at the apartment.

Initial thoughts on the recipe

Look, I love me an obscure, enigmatic historical recipe. I really do. But sometimes, it’s refreshing to look at one and think, “Ok, I could totally do that.” And hey, this one even has instructions rather than just a list of ingredients. I do wonder what “sweet milk” is…is there sugar added? My biggest hang-up (and admittedly also my favorite part) is “piece of butter half the size of an egg.” I mean, who knows what kind of eggs Great-Grandma Cora was getting on her farm compared to the factory farm eggs available at modern grocery stores. So I guess in true “history re-eats” fashion, I’m gonna wing it (insert shrug emoji here).

Trying it out

This recipe actually involved a lot less “trying” than the others, since it has steps laid out. It’s a straightforward stove-top filling that you cool and top with egg whites. There were only a couple elements that didn’t feel so straightforward.

One was the whole “sweet milk” mystery. It’s not a thing you see in modern recipes, aside from “sweetened condensed milk.” I did consider condensed milk, since I think it was around at the time the recipe was written. But a google search revealed the answer: “sweet milk” was an old-fashioned way to refer to whole milk. I don’t get it, but that’s all right.

Now as for the butter half the size of an egg, I just went ahead and guessed about two tablespoons. The pie turned out fine, so I think this was accurate enough.

Surprisingly, the thing that gave me the most trouble was whipping up the egg whites and sugar to make the meringue topping. The recipe calls for the white of one egg, but frankly it barely covered the pie. Two seems more reasonable.

However, the filling itself was also shallower than I expected. Afterward, I double checked and realized my pie pan is 9.5″, which I guess is bigger than the standard 9″. That might be part of my problem. Unfortunately because it was so shallow, the edge of the crust cracked when I took it out (which explains why it looks a little flat in the picture). At least that doesn’t affect the taste.

The verdict:

This one is a winner. I truly believe you can’t go wrong with chocolate pie. It’s rich and creamy with a nice depth of flavor — what more could you want? It satisfied all my expectations for it. Except, maybe, that it wasn’t particularly thick. Next time I’ll either increase the proportions or use a smaller pie tin. Overall though, I loved this recipe and give it a 5/5.

When I sat down to figure out what I’d make next, I realized I hadn’t yet dipped into the “puddings” section of great-grandma Cora’s recipes. As I scanned them to see what I had ingredients for, “favorite pudding” jumped out at me. I mean, if it’s the favorite, it’s gotta be a good place to start, right?

Initial thoughts on the recipe

Nothing struck me as too terribly weird about this recipe, which is a plus. It made it easy to assume I would like it.

I did get a laugh out of the suggestion to serve it with “liquid sauce.” Real specific there, eh? Also, I have to admit I’m not familiar with any non-liquid sauces (seriously, if you are, please enlighten me). Based on the relative simplicity of flavors in this recipe, I figured something creamy could be a good compliment.

Trying it out

So based on the fact that you bake it, I assumed that this is more like the British definition of pudding rather than the kind we usually think of here in the US. I have zero experience with this kind of pudding, and the recipe doesn’t have instructions for baking, so that’s where a lot of the adventure came in.

And let me be honest…I don’t think I did the most amazing job. I kind of forgot that you don’t test the doneness of a pudding the same way you would a cake, so I kept cooking it until a toothpick inserted into the center came out clean. For a pudding, other recipes I read pretty much rely on visual cues, such as a golden color and a puffed-up texture, or cook until the center is firm. I’m pretty sure I ended up overcooking it, but it certainly wasn’t ruined.

Now about the sauce: I thought it would be fun to try one of Cora’s sauce recipes just for accuracy’s sake. I saw she had a recipe for cream sauce, so I decided to give that a try. Here’s the weird part: there’s no cream in this cream sauce. It’s just water, sugar, butter, a little flour, and then a seasoning of choice (vanilla, brandy, nutmeg, chocolate, or wine). I thought maybe this would turn creamy when cooked over a stove? But no. If there was a magic to this cream sauce, I missed it.

Now that’s not to say the sauce was a failure. I had flavored it with vanilla extract, and overall it was a nice caramel-like sauce. A pretty good fit for the dish, actually — just not creamy.

The verdict:

Look, there were some trials and tribulations with this pudding, but overall it was a success. The flavor is subtle and simple. It would be a great fit for fall, considering the nutmeg and apple are the stars of the show.

It also lends itself well to a variety of sauces. I still stand by my original thought that a cream sauce would be good. Maybe a bourbon cream, like what would be served with a bread pudding. But the caramel sauce also worked well, and I’d recommend it! Just don’t go into it expecting cream.

So, is this deserving of the title “favorite pudding?” Well, I realize now the flaw in my original thinking: having not had the other puddings, I guess I can’t say for sure if it’s better than the others. But I can tell you that it’s pretty tasty. For me, I’d give it a solid 4/5.

This is a fun one. For Christmas I was gifted a reprint of The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse, which was originally published in 1765. It’s actually a super extensive cookbook with all sorts of recipes. After a quick page-through I decided the first thing I had to make was this almond hedgehog. Because obviously.

Initial thoughts on the recipe

To make hedge-hog.

TAKE two quarts of sweet blanched almonds, beat them well in a mortar, with a little canary and orange-flower water, to keep them from oiling. Make them into a stiff paste, then beat in the yolks of twelve eggs, leave out five of the whites, put to it a pint of cream, sweeten it with sugar, put in half a pound of sweet butter melted, set it on a furnace or slow fire, and keep continually stirring till it is stiff enough to be made into the form of a hedge hog, then stick it full of blanched almonds slit and stuck up like the bristles of a hedge-hog, then put it into a dish. Take a pint of cream and the yolks of four eggs beat up, and mix with the cream: sweeten to your palate, and keep them stirring over a slow fire all the time till it is hot, then pour it into your dish round the hedge-hog; let it stand till it is cold, and serve it up.

Or you may make a fine hartshorn jelly, and pour into the dish, which will look very pretty. You may eat wine and sugar with it, or eat it without.

Or cold cream sweetened, with a glass of white wine in it and the juice of a Seville orange, and pour into the dish. It will be pretty for change.

This is a pretty side-dish at a second course, or in the middle for supper, or in a grand dessert. Plump two currants for the eyes.

The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, Hannah Glasse, 1765

Honestly when I first saw the recipe I thought it was going to be about cooking hedgehogs. Like you know, the animals.

In my defense, this book has honest-to-goodness recipes for pigeons, and the title of the recipe as it is written is simply “to make hedgehog.” So I mean, come on. It wasn’t too far of a leap.

Once I was actually read the ingredients it called for, I was relieved to find that even in the 18th century, eating hedgehogs wasn’t commonplace.

Once that misunderstanding was out of the way, this recipe sounded pretty charming. Apparently, making food into cute shapes has been a thing for a long time!

Trying it out

First things first, this recipe calls for 2 quarts of almonds and twelve eggs. I don’t know what kind of fancy people were making this a few centuries ago, but have you seen the price of almonds? Given that I wasn’t hosting a party and I didn’t even know what this almond hedgehog tasted like, we were going to have to decrease this a bit. I ended up halving the recipe, which was more than plenty!

Another interesting ingredient in this recipe was “canary.” I imagined this recipe wasn’t actually calling for a songbird, so it was off to the internet. From what I could find, canary was the common term for a wine from the Canary Islands, usually white. My local liquor store didn’t have any Canary Islands wines, so I settled for a white wine from Spain.

My fiance and I started out beating the almonds in a mortar and pestle for fun, but I can tell you right now that it is a highly inefficient method (although maybe that’s also because my mortar and pestle is smaller, meant more for spices than for large quantities of almonds). So we did one cup’s worth of the almonds in a mortar and pestle, moistened with wine and orange-flower water, and the remaining 3 cups we ground up in the blender with the additional liquid.

Because we just added the wine and orange-flower water in increments as we pulverized the almonds, it’s hard to say exactly how much was used. I’d say it was about 1/3 of the wine bottle and 1/3 of the 10 oz orange blossom water.

Now on to cooking. I cooked this in a saucepan over medium/low heat. I didn’t really know what texture we were going for other than “able to be formed into shapes.” Once the mixture was fairly doughy and pulled away from the sides I removed it from the heat.

Decorating the hedgehog was the fun part. I bought slivered almonds instead of slicing all of them because I don’t hate myself and it took long enough with pre-sliced almonds. I forgot to soak the dried currants in water to plump them up, but I think even dried they work fine.

The recipe offers several options for the sauce, but I went with the first one (egg yolks, cream, and sugar) because it used ingredients I already had at home.

The verdict:

For me, this dish is more about the fun than the taste. It’s cute! As for what it tastes like, it’s basically a somewhat perfume-y almond paste. It’s not bad, though for my personal preference I probably could have made it a bit sweeter.

I struggle to come up with a similar modern dessert I could equate it to. It’s thicker than a pudding, and denser than a cake — not to mention there’s no flour. It’s kind of like if you took a thick almond paste and made it a dessert.

As for the sauce, I’m glad I went with the first one. It’s simple and creamy, which is a nice offset to the slight grittiness of the homemade almond paste. The cream also helps to balance out the airy perfume flavor the orange blossom lends.

Overall, this was an interesting dive into 18th century flavors and terms. I think our ancestors had more whimsy with food than we give them credit for! That said, while this was enjoyable enough, there are plenty of desserts I think I’d rather eat, so I’d rate this a pretty solid 3 out of 5.

Let me know if you try this out! I’m curious to see how everyone’s interpretation of an “almond hedgehog” might turn out.

At this point I’m sure my phone knows about this little project I’m doing, because it’s started showing me videos of depression era cooking as social media ads/suggested content. I mean, I know these kinds of recipes are having a bit of a renaissance right now anyway due to the pandemic, but it feels a bit targeted if I do say so myself.

Take Exhibit A, this water pie. I saw a sponsored video where someone made water pie, and was instantly intrigued.

A dessert where the main ingredient is water? I don’t know if it sounds particularly good, but for the sake of experimentation, sign me up.

Initial thoughts on the recipe

The main substance of these pies, regardless of the recipe you use, is water. I mean. Need I say more?

I don’t know about you but water doesn’t really strike me as an ideal pie filling. How does this even work? Of course there are a few other ingredients, but still. I’m definitely impressed by the ingenuity of our ancestors.

Trying it out

Many of the recipes I could find were basically variations of Southern Plate’s water pie. Some of the others online were wildly different with completely different ingredient ratios and methods. I’m guessing it’s because water pie is one of those things everyone had their own recipe for — it’s not like they were printing “depression cookbooks” that everyone then bought.

Given the lack of consistency across recipes, I kind of frankensteined one while relying heavily on Southern Plate. I liked how this recipe from Grit included some spices to jazz up the flavor. Meanwhile Southern Plate had clearer instructions and a more impressive water-to-everything-else ratio, which felt more in the spirit of depression cooking. If we’re going to try old recipes here, might as well try the most challenging or mind-boggling of them!

Originally, water pies were a way to use up leftover pie crust so as not to waste any ingredients. I don’t have extra pie crusts hanging around, so I used my great-grandmother’s pie crust recipe.

Putting this together wasn’t too bad. The instructions to not stir were hard for me to follow, so I’ll admit I did a little swirling. But I left the pats of butter set on top of it all as instructed.

Thankfully the Southern Plate recipe included oven temperature and cooking time, so there was no guesswork in that arena this time around.

The verdict:

Okay, this is actually really good. I didn’t have much issue eating through the rest of it. It has sort of a custard-like texture– definitely soft but not nearly as liquid-y as I would have thought given the main ingredient is, you know, water.

It tastes sort of like apple pie filling, just without the apple — which I’m sure is in large part due to the cinnamon and nutmeg.

Mine ended up with a section that just had, like, solidified butter on the top. Honestly, I think I took it out of the oven a little bit before it technically had set to the degree it was supposed to. But everything firmed up in the fridge, and the solidified butter layer could be removed in one hunk, so ultimately it was all fine. However, I’m taking this as a lesson that maybe I need to be a little more strict with leaving it in the oven longer if parts of it are still looking really liquid-y.

Either way, water was honestly so tasty, I’d make it again. 4/5, no joke.

No, you didn’t read the title wrong. This is a chocolate cake that features potatoes as a main ingredient. In my great-grandma Cora’s recipe book, it’s actually just titled “Potato Cake,” but I figured that was a little misleading for a couple of reasons: 1. chocolate plays heavily into the flavor profile here; and 2. “potato cake” kept getting confused with “potato pancake” here in my household when I said I’d be making it, and let me clarify that those two things are not at all the same.

Initial thoughts on the recipe

When I first saw this, I thought it would be another sort of “hard times” cake — you know, ingredients are in short supply, so let’s use some mashed potatoes to help fill in the gaps!

But no. That is not this recipe.

In fact, I was trying to make this for a week before I kept rediscovering the ingredient list and realizing there was something else in the cake I forgot and needed to buy before I could make it. Like cocoa powder (which is what I’m assuming “chocolate dry” means). And then it includes pretty much all the typical dessert spices — cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and clove. I had to make sure I had all those on hand just in case. And then to top it off, I almost forgot about the cup of chopped nuts. Thankfully, the recipe doesn’t specify what kind of nuts, so the leftover slivered almonds I had in my cupboard would suffice.

And can we talk about the fact that the potato doesn’t replace some other ingredient like eggs or butter or flour? That’s what I thought this was going to be all about.

To be fair though, I suppose this piqued my interest even more than before, since I couldn’t really figure out what this cake is supposed to be about.

Trying it out

As I was making this recipe, one thing that stood out to me was that the batter is thick. Once everything except the whites and the nuts were added– I decided to add those last based on how these kinds of things generally go — it almost felt like cookie dough, not cake batter. >insert doubt here<

The egg whites helped to moisten things a little more, but this still wasn’t like many cake batters I’ve worked with before. Speaking of the egg whites, this recipe separated them from the yolks and said they should be beaten. While there were no further instructions on just how beaten they should be, I went with the tried and true concept of beating them until soft peaks formed.

Another fun thing about this recipe is that there are no instructions on how to bake it. Even though “quick oven,” “moderate oven,” and the like are fairly vague, it’s still something to work with.

I scoured the internet for 19th century potato cakes to see if someone else had made a similar recipe and wrote down cooking time and oven temperature. Unsurprisingly, nothing was really an exact match. The closest I found was this recipe from Juls’ Kitchen. On closer inspection, though, the recipes have enough differences that I’m not sure they could be easily swapped. In any case, the cooking time and temperature was guessed on that one as well, so I might as well just wing it.

I set the oven to 350 and decided to check on the cake after 25 minutes. It looked like it needed another 15 minutes…then another…then some more time. By the time it passed the toothpick test, it had been about an hour. There may be a better way to do this, but here’s my conclusion: 350 for 1 hour worked.

As for serving, I wasn’t sure exactly how this cake’s texture would end up or how rich it would taste, so I started by sprinkling some powdered sugar over the top. That’s how it’s pictured here. But after tasting it and further considering, this is pretty much like a regular cake and benefits from frosting.

The more you know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The verdict:

So here’s the tea: I think if you make this, you should make a big batch of mashed potatoes and reserve a cup for the cake. Because it feels a little sad to make mashed potatoes just for a cake when mashed potatoes on their own are so good. I would recommend using leftover mashed potatoes, if such a thing is even possible in your household.

Now on to the taste. Honestly, it’s pretty good! Definitely unique. Because of the mix of chocolate and all the spices, it honestly reminds me a bit of German Lebkuchen, a gingerbread-type cookie that often is coated in chocolate. It’s kind of a chocolate spice cake.

It’s definitely dense, though still a texture that benefits from the addition of frosting. I also don’t really think the addition of nuts was entirely necessary, but then again that’s usually my opinion of nuts in baked goods so your mileage may vary.

If I’m going purely on taste, I’d give this about a 4/5. It’s good cake! But honestly I think you could just put the same spices in a much simpler chocolate cake recipe and probably have the same outcome.

Have you made a similar kind of potato cake recipe? Or are you giving this a shot? Let me know in the comments!

I need to start with with a caveat: I am by no means a pie crust expert. Usually if I’m making a pie, I just get a pre-made crust from the store (I know, the horror).

So I can’t say for sure what makes a great pie crust vs. a mediocre one.

But if this recipe is indeed my great-grandmother Cora’s as we suspect it is, I’m inclined to trust it. She made more pies than I think most of us will ever make in our lifetime without being a professional of some kind.

We found a written record from a family friend that knew them near the turn of the century who noted that there were always pies on the table. She had hungry farm hands to feed, and pies were a great way to pack in some calories real quick! Apparently one year she decided to keep track just for fun, and she counted 1,200 pies made in a single year. And here I thought I baked a lot.

Initial thoughts on the recipe

Thankfully, there’s really not too much to unpack here. It’s a straightforward recipe, the meaning of which hasn’t really been obscured by time as much as some of the others can be. While I don’t have much experience with making pie crusts from scratch, there isn’t anything that’s particularly intimidating in this recipe.

Trying it out

Ok, there’s only one bit of the recipe that caused some hesitation: “1/2 cup of butter and lard or drippings mixed.” I’m guessing drippings would be the grease left over from cooking meat. And I can tell you right now, unless I’m making a meat pie I don’t exactly want essence of bacon in my pie crust. Maybe I’m totally wrong on this– if you use drippings in your pie crust and swear by it, let me know.

Either way, I didn’t have drippings OR lard on hand, just butter. So this was just gonna be an all-butter pie crust. My brief internet research told me that the fats in pie crust contribute to the texture in different ways. If you try this one yourself, here’s some things to know about how the fat you choose affects your pie crust (for a more detailed dive, check out this post on pie fats at Food 52):

• Lard: makes a flaky pie crust and is more flavorful than shortening
• Shortening: one of the best choices for flaky texture because of its high melting point, but not particularly flavorful
• Butter: have to be careful when handling in order to get flaky layers, but adds lots of flavor and browns better than other pie fats
• Oil: because it’s liquid, oil won’t give a flaky crust, but is good for denser crusts that won’t get soggy used in custard pies
• Mix and Match: many a baker’s preferred method, and evidently Cora’s too, this allows you to pick and choose ingredients for flavor and texture

I wasn’t sure exactly what Cora meant by “rub into flour;” since you don’t really want to melt the butter here, I went with the tried-and-true method of cutting in cold butter with a pastry blender.

The recipe was rather vague about the amount of water that goes into it. As little as possible is great and all, but then I started getting anxiety about exactly how much I had to put in to wet the dough. Like, is this too much? Overall, I think I put in somewhere between 1/4 – 1/2 cup of cold water. I wanted the elements to adhere to one another, but just barely.

I also tried out a fun new way to roll out the crust. Because these are #quarantinetimes and flour is apparently a scarce resource out in the grocery stores, I didn’t want to use any more than necessary. So instead, I rolled out the dough between two pieces of parchment paper. This also was handy for transporting the crust to the pie plate.

The verdict:

This one’s a keeper! It produced a buttery, golden pie crust. It held it’s structure really well, and I could actually see the flaky layers of the crust after it baked.

Again, I’m no pie crust expert, but to my novice tastes I would consider this a 5/5.

I will add the caveat that, due to availability of supplies, I didn’t make this exactly as the recipe stated, but I think the result was still in keeping with the general goal.

Behold: the strangest muffins I have ever made.

No really. These are weird.

That doesn’t mean bad, but they’re definitely not exactly what you expect when you think “muffin.”

Now that I’ve made them, I think I understand why they were categorized with bread in my great-grandma’s cookbook.

Initial thoughts on the recipe

The recipe is simple. Like, reaaaallly simple. As I looked at the ingredients, I started to realize — I don’t know if I’ve ever had just a plain muffin. The closest would maybe be a bran muffin, but even then, there’s a little something extra to give it that flavor.

These muffins, meanwhile, don’t even have vanilla in them.

Maybe that’s a testament to how sweet our modern muffins have become in comparison. Either way, I was a little skeptical, but hopeful. This could maybe be a good base recipe for plain muffins that could be doctored up in a bunch of different ways.

That’s not the only thing that stood out to me about this recipe, though. There’s also only a teaspoon of butter. I don’t think I’ve ever baked anything with that little butter — it’s usually a tablespoon, at least. Just in case, I double checked the original recipe and yep, it says teaspoon, clear as day. Okay then.

Regardless of my skepticism, the name of the game here is to go full speed ahead and give it a try!

Trying it out

There weren’t any instructions involved in this recipe, pretty much just a list of ingredients. But that’s fine, baked goods tend to follow a pretty standard format of: combine dry ingredients, then add the wet, then stir it all together. I felt pretty confident about my ability to carry that out.

The recipe as written — aka, before modern ovens — calls for a quick oven. I guessed that would mean a pretty hot oven. I found a table from the blog Erren’s Kitchen that said a quick oven would be 400F. That checks out, too; most muffin recipes I found online called for an oven set to 400.

I ran into another little snag when I realized that I only have a mini muffin tin on hand. Maybe a former roommate accidentally packed up my muffin tin when they moved out? Clearly, I don’t make muffins or cupcakes enough to have noticed before now. Since these are quarantine times and we aren’t rushing to the store for muffin tins anytime soon, I decided to roll with it. Mini muffins are basically the same thing, just a shorter cooking time. which, hey, that means I get to try these muffins sooner.

Now on to actually making these muffins. Y’all, I’ll be honest, this “batter” weirded me out. In case you hadn’t yet realized, modern muffins are pretty much cupcakes without the frosting. So I expected a fairly runny batter like one would make for cakes.

But no, these muffins are very different, and the consistency was much more akin to a very sticky dough. This felt almost like making bread. Right around here is when I started to worry that I messed something up. Nope, all ingredients were correct and in the right proportion. This is just how they turn out, I guess.

I popped ’em in the oven for 10 minutes, then gave them another 2 when they didn’t look browned enough. After that, they passed the “poke them and make sure the stick comes up clean” test, so they were done.

The verdict:

Um.

I wanted to have nicer things to say about these. They’re not exactly bad, but they are certainly different. They’re rather…eggy. And in all honesty, they taste like soft, slightly sweet bread.

Which I guess isn’t actually a bad thing, it’s just so far removed from how I expect even a plain muffin to taste and feel that it’s pretty jarring. I’m still not convinced I didn’t mess these up somehow — were my eggs bad and that somehow changed the texture? Based on the consistency of the batter, I’m pretty sure using a regular muffin tin instead of the mini muffin tin wouldn’t have made too much of a difference either way.

If I had to rate these, I’d give them a 2.5 / 5. The taste and texture isn’t really too bad, it’s just nothing special, and certainly not what I’d consider the norm for a muffin. And hey, they rose up pretty nicely, so there’s that.

If you make these, let me know how they turn out — I’m curious if they’ll work better for someone else. If I made these again, I think I’d add some chocolate chips. They could also be good with a coffee-cake type streusel topping sprinkled over the dough before baking.

What are “Scottish Fancies?” Turns out they’re a type of drop cookie. They’re not particularly fancy, and I’d wager they aren’t Scottish either.

As an added bonus, they are also gluten-free if that’s a dietary restriction of yours!

Initial thoughts on the recipe

Okay, this one isn’t too weird. It’s an oat cookie recipe with nothing particularly out of place, so I can’t imagine it being inedible or anything unless I manage to mess it up bad. I do think it’s unusual that there is no flour, and I’m wondering how the texture will turn out.

The recipe concludes by instructing the reader to bake “in moderate oven until delicately browned.” Here’s where some of the guesswork comes in working with a historical recipe. What exactly is a moderate oven… 350? And there’s no cooking time…great-grandma Cora was clearly expecting people to know how to bake cookies without having to spell out the details!

Trying it out

Ok, this recipe isn’t exactly rocket science. For the most part it’s extremely simple and straight forward. The biggest mystery I needed to solve was the cooking temperature and time.

Everyone’s fave, Wikipedia, defines a moderate oven as a range of 350-375 °F. So basically, your average baking temperature.

Interestingly enough, all the recipes I could find online (which, to be fair, is not many) that did include an oven temperature said to set it to 325.

Since the original recipe is vague on the cooking directions to begin with, I took my cue from recipes like this one from Ana Penelope and cooked the Scottish Fancies at 325 for about 20 minutes.

In a departure from her write-up, however, I like these cookies best when they’re left slightly rounded like coconut macaroons, rather than flattened out. That may be because, quite simply, I like chewy oat things.

As an aside, I had to make these cookies twice. No, not because they’re that good (although yes, they’re definitely good enough to repeat). I had to remake them because when I transcribed the recipe, I made a small but critical error: instead of 1 and 1/4 cups of oats, I noted just 1/4 cup.

That cup’s worth of oats makes allll the difference when it comes to these being actual cookies instead of some sort of caramelized slab on the cookie sheet.

The verdict:

My reaction to these cookies is as simple as the recipe: I like ’em!

They’re buttery, chewy, and unobtrusively sweet. There’s just a touch of saltiness that gives it a perfect/sweet salty balance. This is the kind of dessert you would give to people who aren’t big fans of sweets.

That said, my rating is 4/5.

If you give these a try, let me know what you think!

I don’t know how to categorize this orange rice. Is it a side dish? Dessert? In my great-grandma’s handwritten recipe book, she put this under the sparse “vegetables” section. While I understand that likely reflects their lack of access to fresh vegetables, by our modern sensibilities that’s just not how we would define it. I’m going to call it a side dish with a hefty dose of shrugging accompanying that decision. This is a dish that defies categorization.

Initial thoughts on the recipe

I’ll admit, I was completely baffled by this recipe. Aside from the fact that it was likely just a way to get calories in meager times, I really just wondered how they thought to combine orange with rice. Like, am I overreacting here, or is this bizarre?

Then I realized that I enjoy having mangoes and sticky rice as dessert when I eat Thai food, so the idea of sweet, fruity rice isn’t exactly uncharted territory. Also rice pudding is a thing, so again, not actually that weird. Maybe it’s just the “vegetable” categorization that’s weirding me out.

Trying it out

In the search for something comparable, I’ll admit I googled “orange rice 19th century.” Unsurprisingly, nothing relevant came up. This seems to be an invention bred out of necessity, rather than a reflection of the food trends of the time.

The recipe is scant on details for the orange sauce. It simply says to “have ready sauce made from the juice of 2 oranges and sugar to taste.”

This kind of thing is both the joy and the challenge of historical recipes — sometimes, you have to figure out how to fill in the gaps.

Because the sauce contains only 2 ingredients, it’s pretty similar to your basic simple syrup that you cook and reduce. The part I was most unsure of was how much sugar to include. After consulting the internet and a few key recipes, I came to the conclusion that about 1/4 cup of sugar should do the trick. Now that I’ve tasted the dish, I think that still stands. Any more would likely be too sweet.

As for the kind of rice to use, I’m not sure that it matters — at least, not in the spirit of the dish. It seems to me like a meal to get nutrients from what you have on hand, so the exact variety of rice or oranges wasn’t relevant information. I made this while isolating during the COVID-19 lockdown and have been limiting trips to the grocery store, so I used what I had on hand: jasmine rice. I’m curious how much of a difference other kinds of rice would — or wouldn’t — make.

The verdict:

I’ve tried this rice several ways (this recipe makes about 4 decent “side dish” size servings), and I think it works in all of them.

As a standalone dish, this rice tastes simply like sweetened, sticky rice with just a hint of citrus. That very slight orange taste makes it an interesting — though not necessarily accurate — accompaniment to Chinese food (I used it to spread out some leftover takeout). I’ve also eaten it warmed up with some sweetened condensed milk poured over the top as a mild dessert; I think that was my favorite way of all. Since the addition of sweetened condensed milk is not exactly accurate to the recipe as it was written, I’m omitting that from the official recipe card.

Overall, I’d say I liked it…but I wouldn’t say I love it. I’d give it a 3.5/5.

If you try this dish, I’d love to know your thoughts. How would you categorize it? What did you eat alongside it?