A Couple of Family Recipes Specific to the Wood Cookstove: Laundry Soap and Boiled Potatoes

Back in 2010, one of my distant cousins on my mom's side of the family decided to put together a cookbook of the recipes from my Great-Grandma Ruth's family.  Grandma Ruth was the second of nine children, and she came from a family who knew their way around a kitchen.

The cookbook was a grand idea, and I find myself going to it for several family recipes.  While I was searching for the recipe for Aunt Tod's Lemon Filling to spread between the layers of a sponge cake I baked yesterday in the Margin Gem, I ran across a couple of treasures that I'd like to document here.  Both of these recipes have specific instructions for how to use the wood cookstove to accomplish the desired result, and they both come with stories that give today's reader some insight into what life used to be like in rural southwest Iowa in the first half of the twentieth century.

The first recipe is for laundry soap and comes from a book that my Great-Great Aunt "Tod" had.  It reads as follows:

4 pounds grease or cracklings

1 can lye

2 quarts water

Mix.  Let stand on back of stove, preferably the reservoir, from one morning until the next.  Stir in a tea kettle of hot water or until the consistency of honey.  Pour into a mold.  Let cool and cut into bars.

Aunt Tod's daughter remembers her mother making homemade soap in a big iron cooking pot over a fire outdoors.  That would have been as late as the 1940s or early 50s.

The second recipe comes with the following story written by my grandpa's first cousin:

"A three-ring recipe book was given to Mom for a shower gift by friends of hers.  Guests were to write recipes in it, and it was presented to her.  I have the book now, and I often read this page and laugh over it.  I wonder if the shower guests did too.  Date was June 19, 1930."

I can just see a group of farmwives in their best cotton summer dresses and with their bobbed hair done in waves gathering together to celebrate Aunt Martha's upcoming wedding.  A delicious homemade cake waited to be cut and placed on the hostess's best china while the women laughed at jokes about a bride's lumpy potatoes or her not knowing how to boil water.

The following is what was handwritten on the page, complete with the errors still present:

Boiled potatoes

        will serve nine

     Go to your potatoe [sic] patch or basement and get thirty five large potatoes and wash in water.

     Now get a basket of cobs and kerosene over a few of them, before you put them in the range.  put in the kitchen range.  Get a match and light the fire.  First being sure that your drafts are open, as the fire may go out if they are closed.  Now go to the pump or windmill and get a bucket of water.  Fill the teakettle and put over the fire.  Close the drafts.

     Next peel your potatoes, being sure to get all the eyes, unless Art [her fiancé] likes eye soup for dinner. Wash the peeled potatoes and pour off water.  By this time it will be eleven-fifteen.  It is now time to pour the water which has reached the boiling stage, on the potatoes.  Salt to taste but don't burn your tongue.  Remove from fire when done.  They will be sure to please the hungry better half.

Notice the mention of the ever-present teakettle in both of these recipes. These bits of history are reminders of the hard work that filled the "good old days."  Speaking of that, Nancy and I are headed out to the wood splitter, so I'll sign off for this afternoon!

Mrs. Wilbur Heckman's Dumplings

The following recipe is one I copied out of the Anita, Iowa, Centennial Cookbook.  This is a very old-fashioned recipe with a very old-fashioned flavor.  It is too warm for soup, and we have used all of our home-grown potatoes, so I made them the "artificial potatoes" way in the lower half of the recipe.

This is the way the recipe appeared in the cookbook:

Grandma (Mrs. Wilbur) Heckman's Dumplings

(Copied just as she wrote it to her granddaughter)

I used one egg and 1/2 cup of milk, a pinch of salt, about a cup of flour with one teaspoon baking powder, stir good, have your soup broth deep enough to an inch or more above other ingredients and boiling.  Now drop by teaspoonful but have your spoon dipped first in hot broth.  Place lid on for five minutes, or until they look done, or porous on top.  But, don't peek at them until 5 minutes are up.  When we were short of potatoes in the spring, I would feed the family by doubling the recipe, have several inches of salted water boiling and drop by tablespoons in water, let cook, then take those out onto a platter and drop more in.  I would have butter browning with bread crumbs and onions and cover each layer of dumplings with that.

Mighty good!  The boys (she had seven sons) called them artificial potatoes--easy and filling.

Vesta Bailey Duensing

Here is what the dumpling batter looks like when it is all mixed up.  I put perhaps an extra tablespoon of flour in them.

I browned onions and bread crumbs in butter just like she suggested.  If I make these again, I'm going to forego the bread crumbs. They were unnecessary and added kind of a sandy texture to the outside of the dumplings.

I couldn't take a photograph and spoon the dumplings into the boiling water, so you'll have to settle for a picture of what they looked like when I removed the lid after the five minutes of boiling time had elapsed.

I scooped them into a frying pan of hot browned butter and then added the browned onions and bread crumbs.

Once again, Marjorie the Margin Gem is 
desperately in need of a bath!  Poor girl.  She's
always getting her picture snapped when she's
not at her best.

The dumplings were faintly like boiled potatoes, and they certainly weren't bad.  I ate them with a lettuce and cabbage salad and hamburgers that I had canned last summer on the Hayes-Custer.

In these days of heightened awareness about carbohydrate consumption, I don't suppose these will enjoy renewed popularity.  However, back in the day when farming involved constant physical labor, you can see where these little balls of energy would be welcome on the noon dinner plate if the potato bin was empty.

Vintage Recipe: Chocolate Drop Cookies

Valentine's Day was one of Meme's (pronounced with long "e" sounds) favorite holidays.  I mention her in the biographical information on the left because she was largely responsible for my early fascination with woodburning cookstoves.  Meme was a great-great-aunt on my mother's side, and as she had no children of her own, she was very close to our family.  She and I spent a lot of time together--much of it baking--and she would continually reminisce about cooking on a woodburning cookstove.

The 1920s Monarch range which had been her family's second wood cookstove rested in the washhouse on the farm where my cousin makes his home now.  Fortunately, it had been removed from the beautiful farmhouse in 1948 because the house burned to the ground in 1962.  As that farmstead with the gaping basements used to be a favorite picnic spot for us, I would always go into the washhouse and take a look at that beautiful stove.  I can remember one time when all of my mother's family, including Meme, had a cleanup day at the "other place," and my uncle convinced Meme to give us a little tutorial about how she used to cook on that great range.

On our farm a row of cedar trees used to separate the two houses, the southernmost four standing in a perfect square, and I can remember that when I was five, I drew plans in red crayon for a summer kitchen to be built using those four cedars as the corners.  My idea was that the Monarch range could be moved to our place.  I can remember pitching the idea to Granny, who listened with amusement but obviously had no intention of making these dreams a reality.  

So, during those early years I had to be content just pretending to cook on a woodburning cookstove while playing with the toy cookstove that Meme had in the spare bedroom of her apartment.  You can see an identical toy at this post: The Stove That Started It All.  I suppose that I was in junior high or early high school when Meme began to realize that my desire to cook on a real woodburning cookstove was more than just a passing fancy.  I remember that we were in her apartment kitchen watching a pot on the back burner of her Hotpoint electric stove when she started back-pedaling on her romanticism of the woodburning range.

"Oh, you don't really want an old cookstove," I recall her saying.  I protested, and she said, "You have to haul all the fuel in and the ashes out, and then there are some days where maybe it rains and then you can't get the fire to go at all." (My grandfather later explained the set up of the kitchen chimney in the house that burned, and I'm not at all surprised that they had trouble getting a fire lit on rainy days.  I've never had such a problem.)  However, her years of waxing poetic about the woodburning cookstove had made their mark.

If Meme were alive today, she would shake her head and be a little embarrassed to think that she had anything to do with my affinity for wood cookstoves.  But the reality is that her influence on me was and is far greater than just that.  I won't take the time and space to talk further about all of that here, but I will say that one of the areas of influence Meme had was on my chocolate preferences.  Meme was a chocolate aficionado, even though I'm sure she'd never heard the word.  Meme loved chocolate.  Her favorite gifts at Valentine's Day were roses and a box of Russell Stover candies.  Among her meager belongings at the end of her life were further evidence of her love affair with chocolate.  She had used large See's chocolate boxes for storage of various articles, and at the end of this post you will see a vintage Mrs. Steven's candy tin that she used as a cookie can for decades.

Meme was funny about her chocolate, though.  While I never knew her to discriminate between dark or milk chocolate when it came to those many boxes of Russell Stover's, in her own cooking she halved the chocolate in her recipes.  Perhaps this was from motives of economy, I don't know.  Whatever the reason, after a steady diet of lightly chocolated sweets all through my youth, I'm not a fan of dark chocolate, and I prefer baked goods that have had their chocolate content reduced too.  As I write this, it just now dawns on me that perhaps this is the reason I'm not a chocolate cake fan.

The recipe that I'll eventually get around to sharing with you in this post is one of those where Meme always reduced the chocolate.  Sometime in the 1920s, Meme left the farm to attend Iowa State College (later renamed Iowa State University) in Ames, Iowa.  She was nearly thirty years old at the time, and I imagine that after the great romance of her life had dissolved due to religious differences, she thought she ought to be prepared to support herself with a career.  Meme spent only a year at Iowa State and then transferred to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she completed her Bachelors in dietetics.  

During my own time at ISU, I had an American history class in the auditorium in MacKay Hall, which is the headquarters of the College of Family and Consumer Sciences, and I often wondered which rooms Meme would have spent most of her time in seventy years before I got there.  I could imagine her as one of the women in the historic pictures of cooking classes in that building, standing in stiffly starched aprons over ancient gas hotplates.  I knew about her time at Iowa State because in her kitchen she still had two stacks of recipes that bore the Iowa State College labels.  These stacks were bound by elastic bands from panty hose, but one of the recipes was never with the rest; it was the recipe for Chocolate Drop Cookies.  I have Meme's box of recipes now, so you can see the card in the picture below.  It is hard for me to believe that it is nearly 100 years old today.  Don't try to read the recipe the way it's written because she never followed this, even though you can see that she looked at the recipe many times!

Meme completed the four-year dietetics course in three years, and due to the stress of doing so she suffered what was then called a "nervous breakdown."  She returned to the farm to recover, and events conspired to keep her there until 1947 when she left to make room for my newlywed maternal grandparents.  I'd be willing to bet that several batches of these cookies were baked in that old Monarch wood cookstove in the twenty years between her return from college and her move to Council Bluffs.  I KNOW that oceans of these cookies came out of the oven on the bright new General Electric Airliner range that she had for the thirty years that she lived on Grace Street in the Bluffs, and another large number of them were baked in the aforementioned Hotpoint in her subsequent apartment.  These were truly one of her favorites.

Honestly, they're one of mine too, but I discovered that I hadn't made them since before Nancy and I were married, so it was high time that I introduce her to them!  One last note before we get to the directions: when I spent my two years at Iowa State University in the mid-1990s, I lived in the dorms, and these cookies were still on the menu of the food service system.  You can't imagine how excited I was to see them.  They were served two on a plate, and I knew immediately what they were and was surprised that seventy years later ISU was still using their recipe.  However, when I took my first bite, I was so disappointed.  They didn't taste anything like Meme's because they followed the recipe and used the full amount of chocolate.  They bordered on bitter, in my opinion, but I ate them anyway.

To make these the way Meme did, here is what you'll need:

1 oz. Bakers' unsweetened chocolate

1 cup light brown sugar (the lighter the better)

1/2 cup butter, very soft but not melted

1 egg

1/2 tsp. soda

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. vanilla

1/2 cup milk

1 1/2 c. + 2 Tbsp. sifted flour

Here is what you do:

1.  Build your fire so that you will have a moderate oven.

2. Over the coolest part of the cooktop, melt the ounce of unsweetened chocolate.  (Does anyone else miss the individually wrapped one-ounce squares as much as I do?  I have a terrible time getting the new solid bars to break right along the lines.)

The chocolate melting in Meme's old Mirro saucepan
on the far right side of the Margin Gem.

3. While the chocolate is melting, cream the brown sugar and butter.

 

The soft butter and the light brown sugar
being creamed by Meme's 1950 Sunbeam
Mixmaster.  You can tell already that this
recipe doesn't make a large number of cookies.

4. Add the melted chocolate to the sugar and butter mixture.

5. Beat in the egg.  You'll have to scrape the bowl carefully to make sure that any chocolate that stuck to the bottom of the bowl is thoroughly incorporated.

6. Add the baking soda, baking powder, and vanilla.

The measuring spoon you see here was
also Meme's.

7. Add the flour and the milk alternately.

The two measuring cups and the plate
in this picture belonged to Meme.  The
plate is part of a set of Homer Laughlin
Eggshell Theme from the 1940s.

8. Mix all just until well blended.  The dough will feel much more like thick cake batter than cookie dough.

9. Drop by heaping teaspoonfuls onto a lightly greased cookie sheet.  Make sure the cookie sheet is only lightly greased.  You can see in the first picture below that I was too generous with the Crisco.  That is why in the second picture two of the cookies have slid into their neighbors once they were exposed to the heat of the oven.

This is Meme's cookie sheet.  She'd be
so embarrassed if she knew how
"seasoned" I've let it become.

Photographing fire is so difficult!  I wish you could
really see what kind of a fire it takes to keep a
moderate oven.

10. Now, baking these is a little tricky because you can't tell by looking at a chocolate cookie just how brown it is becoming.  Instead, you've got to poke these with your finger.  They are done when they have spread out flat and feel like they have just begun to form a slight crust on the top.  They are overbaked if they feel like they will be crispy.  This should take anywhere from 8-12 minutes depending on how hot your oven is running.  Remember that the end product here is more like a little flat cake than what we usually think of when we think of a chewy or crispy cookie.

11. Remove the cookies from the pan and put them on paper toweling on the countertop to cool.  You'll ruin them if you put them on a cooling rack.  Trust me on this one!

12. Once the cookies are baked, it is time to make the frosting.  If you looked at the recipe above, you know that it came with a frosting recipe, but that was never what Meme did.  Instead, in a small bowl, she would put about three tablespoons of butter, a teaspoon of vanilla, and perhaps a tablespoon or so of Hershey's cocoa.  Add two or three tablespoons of water and stir.

A little more cocoa than I wanted jumped out of
the jar when I poured it in, so my frosting was a
little darker than Meme's.  Oh, and you guessed
it: this is Meme's bowl too.

13. Beat in sufficient powdered sugar to make a thick but spreadable frosting.  Frost the top of each cookie, and don't be too stingy.

Now, you could eat these at this point, but try not to.  Yes, I know that is much easier for me to say than it will be to do!

14. Pack the cookies into an airtight container, using waxed paper to separate the layers so that the frosting doesn't glue them all together.  Let these sit with the lid on overnight.  The next day they will be at their peak, and what a peak it is!

This is the vintage Mrs. Stevens' Candies tin that
Meme always put these cookies in.  It was her widest
tin, so the cookies didn't have to be stacked high,
which would mash them.

Grandma Marian told me once that Meme used to get the lightest brown sugar that she could, and these cookies would have a reddish cast when you bit into them.  I didn't have very light brown sugar, but the batch that you see here did have a slight reddish cast inside them.  If someone can explain that to me, I'd appreciate it.

These were a huge hit with my resident picky eater, and they really aren't difficult to make.  I don't know why it has taken me over seventeen years to make these for Nancy, but I'm not planning on waiting that long again!

Vintage Recipe: Auntie Freda Sieck's Sour Cream Sugar Cookies

This post was requested by one of The Ivers Girls.  The Ivers Girls grew up as neighbors to my maternal grandparents, but to call them simply neighbors or family friends doesn't begin to describe the relationship that our two families share.  For well over fifty years, our lives have intertwined in so many ways that I'm not even able to number them all.  Over that half century, many, many recipes have been exchanged between the two families, so when the youngest of The Ivers Girls mentioned to me earlier this fall that she wished she had my grandma Marian's sugar cookie recipe, I was surprised.

"You mean Grandma never gave that to you?" I asked.

"Whenever I asked about it, all Marian would say was that there was 'nothing special in it,'" she responded.

This is very surprising to me because my Grandma was not one to keep any recipe a secret, especially one like this that she used so frequently.  When I was young, these cookies would show up about once per month from October to April.  In October, they were cut in the shapes of pumpkins and leaves and were frosted with orange tinted icing.  Come November, they appeared in the shapes of turkeys with orange or brown frosting.  Of course, in December they were cut in all sorts of Christmas shapes, and the frosting would be white, pink, and pastel green.  (Grandma didn't believe in darkly colored frosting; she said that you shouldn't have to taste the color.)  In late December, Grandma would make another batch and cut them all into bells to "ring in the new year."  These always had white frosting and usually a cinnamon candy for the clapper.  In February, they appeared as pink frosted hearts; in March, green-frosted shamrocks.  Finally, in April dozens of eggs, crosses, and churches would be cut out.

My mother's favorite story about these cookies is from the Christmas season that was most likely my freshman year of high school.  She had just returned to teaching full-time, and we were extremely busy with activities, too.  Mom had mixed a batch of these and put the dough to chill on our enclosed north porch, which often serves as a walk-in cooler in the winter months.  She always covered the mixer bowl with a luncheon plate, making it easy to access.  As we kids walked in and out of the kitchen door, it was too easy to just lift the plate and grab a bite of cookie dough.  None of that batch of dough actually made it to the oven.  While I would feel terribly irresponsible if I recommended eating cookie dough with raw eggs and flour in it, I will admit that this dough is really good!

My grandma actually sold these cookies for a short time in the 1990s, and while most people associate this recipe with her, she got the recipe from her paternal aunt, and she forever referred to them as Auntie Freda's Sour Cream Cookies--hence the title of this post.  

So, without further ado, here is the big "secret."  Here are the ingredients:

2 cups sugar

1 cup shortening

2 eggs

1 cup sour cream (commercial or country, but not too sour if using country)

1 tsp. soda

2 tsp. vanilla

dash salt

4 1/2 - 5 1/2 cups flour (or more)

And here is the method:

Cream the shortening and sugar.

Beat in the eggs.

Add the sour cream.

Stir in the soda, salt, and vanilla.

Beat well and then begin adding the flour a cup at a time.

Add the flour a cup at a time until you have a dough that 
is not quite stiff enough to roll.  I had just a tad extra sour
cream in this batch because I wanted to finish out the
container, and I had to put in six cups of flour to get the
dough to the right consistency.

Chill the dough for at least two hours; overnight is better.

Now, here is the first real "secret" to getting these to turn out like Grandma Marian's.  When you roll these cookies out, you can choose what you like best.  My mom likes to roll them wafer thin because she likes them thin and crispy.  If you want a really thick cookie, these will work for that too.  However, Grandma always rolled them out to about a quarter of an inch, maybe less.

The next secret to getting them just like Grandma's is in the baking.  These need to be baked in a moderate oven, but here again, the length of time they are baked depends on your personal preference.  Mom likes them best when they are brown all over.  They are good that way, too, but just be aware that the flavor is completely different than if you bake them just until the edges begin to show that they are turning a light brown.  Grandma was adamant about this.  I can still see her standing at her wall oven watching these cookies like a hawk.  As soon as the first hint of brownness began to appear at the edges, she whipped them out of the oven.  Depending on the heat of your oven, eight minutes may even be too long for these cookies to bake.

A word to my fellow wood cookstove users about baking cookies in a woodburning cookstove:

Remember that when you are baking cookies, you'll need to build your fire a little hotter than what you ordinarily would for the desired baking temperature.  Basically, if you need a 350ºF oven, build your fire in whatever way would give you a 375ºF oven.  The reason for this is that with cookie baking, you will be opening the oven door far more frequently than you would if you were baking a pie or a cake, for example, and a wood cookstove oven doesn't recover its heat as quickly as a modern one does.

A sheet of sour cream sugar cookies in the oven of
the Margin Gem cookstove.

Once the cookies have baked, immediately remove them from the cookie sheet to either a cooling rack for crispier cookies or a paper towel-covered countertop for a softer cookie.  You can tell what my preference is by looking below.

Grandma would say that the top and the third cookies
in the stack nearest the bottom of the photograph are baked too long.

The last and biggest secret to getting these cookies to taste exactly like Grandma's is in the frosting.  She would always just mix up a buttercream icing with powdered sugar, butter, water, and vanilla, BUT she would also add just a hint of almond flavoring--not so much that you would be able to immediately identify it, but enough that you can definitely taste it.  This little dab of almond flavoring really sets these cookies off.

Once the frosting has set enough to handle, pack these cookies into airtight containers, putting waxed paper between the layers to prevent the frosting from gluing them all together.  The frosting will soften the cookies over the next few hours, and the end product is deliciously addictive.

I wish I could give you an estimated yield, but I had put this dough out on the aforementioned north porch and did a poor job of resisting the temptation to snitch from it here and there.  Keep in mind, though, that with 5 1/2 cups of flour, this recipe makes a lot of cookies.  Enjoy!

Vintage Recipe: Grandma Ruth's Escalloped Corn

Well, Marjorie the Margin Gem's complete Thanksgiving meal count is now officially two.  Last year, I blogged about the first entire Thanksgiving meal that was cooked on her.  This year, because of Covid-19 gathering size restrictions, Nancy and I elected to celebrate Thanksgiving at home.  Nancy's parents had elected to do the same, and since we were going to cook a full dinner anyway, we called them when the meal was ready.  We plated enough for them and slid it all into the back of their van so they could take it home to eat.  Thus, we cooked Thanksgiving dinner for only four people so we didn't have to use the stovetop oven like last year.  Though you can't see all four dishes in the oven, here is a shot of the cookstove with all of the food ready:

The Margin Gem with all of the hot dishes for Thanksgiving Dinner ready.
From the top left, our 10 lb. turkey and the roaster bottom full of gravy. On
the stovetop is the kettle of mashed potatoes.  In the oven, the top rack holds
the dressing in the front with the sweet potato souffle' behind it.  The bottom
oven rack holds the green bean casserole, and behind that is the escalloped
corn.  (The Magnalite pan on the reservoir is empty.)

The recipe that I want to share today is for my great-grandma Ruth's escalloped corn.  This is a very simple and economical old-fashioned dish that has been a staple on my family's dinner tables since my grandfather was a boy.  I'm sure my great-grandmother originally made this in her woodburning cookstove, and it cooks beautifully in mine every time, too.  What's also nice is that it seems to bake equally well on the floor of the oven or up on the middle rack, making it particularly easy to cook with other things in the oven at the same time. 

For a single batch, start by beating two eggs. 

To the eggs, add 2 Tablespoons of sugar, a 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and a dash of pepper.

Then beat in 3/4 cup of saltine cracker crumbs, 1/2 cup milk, and 1/2 cup cream.

Lastly, add one can of cream style corn.  Mix well and pour into a greased casserole dish.

Bake in a moderate oven for 30 - 45 minutes.  During the last ten minutes of baking, sprinkle buttered cracker crumbs over the top.

Hints and Remarks:

• If you don't want to spring for the cream, you can omit it and increase the milk to 3/4 c.  The texture of the final product won't be quite so fluffy, but you won't notice any difference in the flavor.
• The reason for the huge range in baking time is because how long this needs to bake is dependent on upon the depth of the corn in the dish you chose to use--the deeper the corn, the longer the baking time will need to be.
• You can tell that this is done baking when the whole thing is slightly mounded in the center and it doesn't jiggle anymore when you shake the pan.
• If you crush one sleeve of saltine crackers, you will have the perfect amount for the 3/4 c. in the corn as well as the buttered crumbs on the top.
• If you want to reduce the carbs in this recipe, feel free to omit the crumbs on the top.  You will never miss them.  
• This recipe serves about six.  If you double it, it fits well in a 9x13 dish.

And here is the recipe in a little more accessible form:

2 eggs

2 T. sugar

1/2 tsp. salt

dash pepper

3/4 c. saltine cracker crumbs

1/2 c. milk

1/2 c. cream

1 15 oz. can cream style corn

Bake 30-45 minutes at 350ºF in greased casserole dish, sprinkling buttered

cracker crumbs on the top during the last ten minutes.

Hope you all had a Happy Thanksgiving!

Vintage Recipe: Never Fail Sour Cream Cake

One of the things I've been doing during the Covid-19 stay-at-home time is trying recipes from my entirely-too-large collection of cookbooks and recipe boxes.  In our daily meals, I've tried not to duplicate dishes very often.  At one point, Nancy actually asked, "Couldn't we just have tried-and-true foods during this time?"  We've had a lot of that too, but I'm having a great time experimenting.  Several times, I've found recipes that are excellent, but there have been some not-so-good ones too.

A recipe that I'm really pleased with comes from my 1926 West Pottawattamie County Farm Bureau Women's Cookbook.  Longtime blog readers will remember me mentioning this cookbook before in this post. I've been making sure that we have always had some kind of home-baked sweet on hand during our extended stay-at-home time.  Neither of us needs the extra calories, but if a nice homemade cookie or piece of cake isn't available, we have a bad habit of eating even worse things in order to satisfy the sweet tooth we both have.

I'm excited to bring you this recipe because it has truly lived up to its name, and it is simple and fast but also quite flexible.  For those readers who are off-grid, it's very easy to mix this cake by hand, and it's made of things that are readily found in most kitchens.  The only thing that some people may not always have on hand is the sour cream.  However, that is a staple in our refrigerator. 

This recipe was contributed to the cookbook by a Mrs. Belle Sharp, and she attached this note: "This is an excellent cake recipe for a busy farmer's wife who wants a hurry-up cake."

Here are the required ingredients:

1 egg
1 cup sugar
1 cup sour cream
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
flavoring to taste
1 1/2 cups flour

The procedure is as follows:

a) Beat the egg.

b) Beat in the sugar.

I beat the egg and the sugar together until they are what my
great-grandmother called "lemon-colored."  It doesn't take long.

c) Beat in the sour cream.

d) Add the remaining dry ingredients and the flavoring.  Beating for only a little while after the flour has been added.

I used cake flour (a tad more than 1 1/2 cups) instead of all-purpose for this plain yellow cake version, and I added about a 1/2 tsp. vanilla, a 1/2 teaspoon lemon flavoring, and a 1/2 tsp. almond extract.  I know that sounds like an odd combination, but that is what my great-grandma Ruth used to flavor yellow cakes, and, trust me, it is surprisingly delicious.

e) There were no instructions on how large a cake pan to use, but judging from the amount of batter I had, I greased a 9" square baking tin, and it was perfect.

Now, the pictures that you see here are actually of the second time that I baked this cake, and it so happened that this was during the week that my brother's Ward's Economy Cookstove was here in our summer kitchen in early June.  Thus, you see it baking in that stove in the pictures below.

There were no instructions for how long to bake this cake, but cake baking is pretty straightforward stuff.  If you blow up the picture above, you can see that the oven thermometer is registering 350ºF.  A moderate oven until the cake tested done did the job beautifully.

I frosted this one with a white buttercream icing that was flavored with vanilla and almond.

For the Spice Cake Version:

The original directions on this recipe say, "If wanted, add 1/2 cup raisins, 1/2 teaspoon each cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg."  I confessed above that the pictures you just saw were of the second time I baked this cake.  The first time I baked it, I added the raisins and spices, and then I frosted it with browned butter frosting.  I should confess that I didn't add a whole half teaspoon of cloves; it was more like a quarter teaspoon.  My Grandma Marian taught me to be cautious about cloves because they are so powerful.  The cake was very good, but I took no pictures.

I used all purpose flour in this version of the cake, and the texture was nearly identical to the yellow cake version above that was actually made second.  This cake was baked in the Margin Gem back in May.

To Make a Chocolate Cake:

With two successes under my belt, I thought, "You know, I bet this could be made as a chocolate cake."  I was right!  I reduced the flour to 1 and 1/4 cups (plus a little more since I used cake flour) and added a 1/4 cup unsweetened baking cocoa.  I still put a little vanilla flavoring in, too.  Frosted with a little chocolate frosting, it was superb.

The cocoa and the flour going into the chocolate
version of the cake.

The chocolate version was baked out in the Hayes-Custer
cookstove in the summer kitchen.

The finished chocolate cake.

Now, each of the three cakes listed above were good.  They were all eaten with no problems and no complaints, and we shared them with others, too.  To be completely honest, though, I felt like their texture was just slightly chewy.

As I was preparing to write this post back in June, I was reflecting on the age of the recipe and figured that especially with the note that was attached to it about being a great recipe for "a busy farmwife," this was probably originally made with "country" sour cream.  "Country" sour cream is an old-timey cookbook term which denoted cream which had soured naturally.  It is an entirely different product from "commercial" sour cream, which is the cultured dairy product that is sold in the plastic tubs.  The Kitchen Klatter Cookbook that I have frequently mentioned on this blog is always careful to denote which kind of sour cream is used in its recipes, for example.

During the ten-plus years that I kept a family cow (How I wish my dairy cow had freshened this year!), it seemed like I could never keep up with the churning, and I always had "country" sour cream in the fridge.  Truthfully, I am embarrassed by the amount of sour cream I just plain threw out during those years.  I figured farmwives in the 1920s would have been much more likely to have "country" sour cream and decided to try it.

Well, I had to wait a long time before my pasteurized, store-bought cream soured.  I know I could have hastened the process with some vinegar, but I wanted to hold out for the naturally occurring product.  It was well worth the wait!  Again, I apologize for the lack of pictures--you'll just have to take my word for it--but this cake was perfect in volume and texture.  It was not a bit chewy but was exactly what we all think of when we hear the word "cake."  I attribute this to the higher fat content of "country" sour cream.

What was strange about it, though, was that each time I opened the cellophane that covered it, I got a definite whiff of "country" sour cream.  I could never taste that, though.  I only mention it because I know it may turn some people off.  If that is the case, I would recommend making the spice cake or chocolate versions.  If you have cream that has soured, this cake is a perfect way to keep from wasting it.

You can see that this recipe has truly never failed in the four different times and different ways (and three different cookstoves) I have made it.  It is extremely easy to mix, is made with common ingredients, and comes together quickly.  Try it, and I know you'll want to add it to your recipe box. 

Update 10/3/20:

I've now made this cake two more times and wanted to add that souring heavy whipping cream with a little lemon juice has worked very well, too.  The last two times, I've made the spice cake version, and I really like the combination of 1/2 tsp. cinnamon, 1/2 tsp. nutmeg, and 1/4 tsp. ground cloves.  This is perfect with browned butter frosting.

Vintage Recipe: Prune Soup

This recipe is...well...this recipe is...different.  But I really like it!  Don't let the name fool you; this is a "dessert soup" and a rare gem indeed.

I copied this recipe from the Anita, Iowa, Centennial Cookbook over a year ago and finally got around to trying it last week.  The recipe caught my eye because I love raisins--a point I've mentioned before.  I even like raisins in gravy!  And prunes?  Hmmm.  Prunes are just overgrown, slimy raisins, right?  That's what I tell myself, at least.

I'm game to try anything that I think might be good once, so I made this after our Sunday dinner a couple weekends ago.  I found it in the section of the cookbook dedicated to historic recipes, and it was labeled as a Swedish dish.  The recipe was contributed by Mrs. Nolan Stockham who put the following note with it. 

"Anyone whoever ate a meal in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Osen was probably offered this dish.  Mrs. Osen kept it on hand constantly."

I don't have a drop of Swedish blood in me, but if prune soup and their meatballs are representative examples of traditional Swedish cooking, I'm interested in learning more!

Here is what you'll need:

water
1/3 cup large pearl tapioca
1 lb. prunes

1 lb. seedless raisins

1 1/2 cups sugar
1 Tablespoon vinegar or lemon juice
dash salt
1 tsp. vanilla

First, soak the pearl tapioca in water overnight.  My personal practice when a recipe calls for soaking pearl tapioca overnight is to actually soak it longer than that.  I have a strong dislike of tapioca pearls that are crunchy in the center.  I put the pearls in a quart jar and filled it nearly to the top with water.

The pearl tapioca after it had soaked in water for over 12 hours.

The next day, cover the prunes and raisins with water and cook until soft.  The fire from cooking our noon dinner out on the Hayes-Custer in the summer kitchen had nearly died, so I added a couple of small split pieces of wood and put the kettle of prunes, raisins, and water directly over the firebox.  In this picture, I tried to capture the flames, but I find it very difficult to photograph fire.

Astute observers will note that the front lid over the firebox was not a part of the original photos of the Hayes-Custer in this post.  It is one of those that has three concentric lids all in one and was purchased at the antique store in Corley, Iowa.  It fits both the Qualified Range and the Hayes-Custer, so I'm excited to have it.

After the prunes and raisins have had time to simmer and plump up--which only takes a few minutes-- the next step is to add the soaked tapioca, sugar, vinegar or lemon juice, salt and vanilla.  Because I was cooking this out in the summer kitchen, I combined them all in a bowl in the pantry first.  Also, I used lemon juice rather than vinegar because I don't like the combination of vinegar and raisins.

All of the ingredients now mixed together in the pot on the stove.

Cook, stirring frequently, until tapioca is done.  It will begin to look mostly transparent, and the soup itself will have begun to thicken.  It took about fifteen minutes over a low fire.

The prune soup simmering nicely over a low fire right over the firebox.

Remove from the fire.

The freshly-made prune soup cooling on the counter in the summer kitchen.

Cool and serve with whipped cream.

A sauce dish of the finished prune soup.  It's oh-so-GOOD!

Some notes:

This soup is very sweet.  I did not sweeten the whipped cream, and I was very glad that I had not.  I am going to reduce the sugar next time by at least a fourth cup and see what happens.

My preference would be to make this with two pounds of raisins and omit the prunes altogether.  I'll have to rename it, of course.

To all of my prepper readers, in my opinion, this is a great recipe to have on hand for a disaster.  All of the ingredients are extremely shelf stable, and it didn't take much fuel at all to prepare it.  It would also be easy to cut in half or to double without any adverse effects.  I wouldn't necessarily call it economical, however.

Even though Nancy said "Prunes will not cross my lips," this was a hit with my mom and Phyllis, the lady who helps us with our market baking on Mondays, so I'm not the only one who thinks it's good.