Month: May 2023

Cooking Techniques · The Vintage Kitchen

Sue Makes Creamy Salad Dressing

VintageJenny

Welcome to Lesson 26 in When Sue Began to Cook. We’re halfway to the end! If you’re just joining us, a click on the linked book title will take you to Lesson 1 so you can follow along with the story. This week Sue makes Creamy Salad Dressing.

Although it contains egg yolks, this is a cooked recipe. Thus, it’s safe to make in the US with store bought eggs. They do not have to be pasteurized.

Salad dressings in the Twenties came in to main flavors: French, which was a very tart vinaigrette (not the red sweet French we know today) and cooked creamy salad dressing like this. I’m usually putting the salads together last thing before dinner, so I whip up a Twenties French dressing and call it a day. This salad dressing is cooked and refrigerated, and then thinned as it is used with cream or milk or unsweetened whipped cream.

Here’s a peek into Sue’s weekly kitchen diary:

Sue’s Diary from Creamy Salad Dressing Saturday

Another warm beautiful day that makes us think of picnics. And picnics, Mother says, mean salads and sandwiches. And salads and sandwiches mean salad dressing. So Ruth Ann and I have been learning how to make it.

A little jar of salad dressing makes a good present, Mother thinks. Ever since she said it, Ruth Ann has been trying hard to thihnk of someone to give her little jar to. I’m afraid Mrs. Rancher will get it in the end, after all. Just at present, though, Ruth Ann is considering whether a lovely little gift of salad dressing mightn’t inspire the McCarthy’s to make some of their own later. I doubt it. We’ve been cleaning house for a week and they haven’t shown any signs of beginning on their house yet. So I’m afraid a good example doesn’t mean much to them.

Speaking of gifts, Mother has just given Ruth Ann a funny one! A little bundle of paper straws to drink milk through. Ruth Ann doesn’t like milk, and never would drink it till Mother had her try it over here through a straw. And she didn’t mind that one bit. As Mother is very anxious to have Ruth Ann grow strong and fat before her Mother comes home, she has given her the straws to use at every meal. Won’t Aunt Ruth be pleased!

Print Recipe

Creamy Salad Dressing

from When Sue Began to Cook, 1924.
Course: Dinner, Luncheon, Salad
Cuisine: American
Keyword: Bettina’s Best Recipes, picnic, Ruth Ann, salad, Twenties recipes, When Sue Began to Cook

Equipment

  • 1 Double boiler

Ingredients

  • 3 tbsp sugar
  • 3 tbsp flour
  • 1 tsp salt
  • ½ tsp dry mustard
  • ¼ tsp paprika
  • 2 egg yolks beaten thoroughly. *Note* This is a cooked dressing recipe. It is safe to use yolks from the fridge.
  • ⅓ cup vinegar
  • ⅔ cup water
  • 1 tbsp butter

Instructions

  • Mother had us each measure the sugar, flour, salt, and mustard very carefully into the top of the double boiler. Then we mixed it all thoroughly with a spoon.
  • We each put our two egg yolks (Mother used the whites for the tops of two lemon pies) in a bowl and beat them up. Then we added the vinegar and water and kept on beating for a minute.
  • Then we poured the mixture slowly into the flour mixture, stirring with a spoon all the time as we added it. (I mean of course that we stirred the mixture in the top of the double boiler.)
  • When it was all added, we beat it for a minute with the egg beater and then put it over the fire. Of course, we made sure we had plenty of water in the lower part.
  • Mother had us each leave our Dover egg beater in the salad dressing, and as it cooked we gave it a good beating every few minutes.
  • It took only about ten minutes for the dressing to cook; when it was done it was as thick as thick, creamy custard. Just before we took it off the stove we added the butter. That makes it smoother.
  • Ruth Ann and I each poured our dressing into a nice clean little fruit jar that we had first moistened on the inside with cold water. Mother says this keeps the dressing from sticking to the jar. After the dressing was cool, we put the lids on our jars and put our dressing away in the ice box. Ruth Ann is going to take hers home tonight. Mother says salad dressing like this will keep for months if it's stored in a cold place. Before you use it on salad the first thing to do is mix it (just the part you are going to use, of course) with thin or whipped cream.
Cooking Techniques · The Vintage Kitchen

Sue Makes Escalloped Potatoes

VintageJenny

Welcome to Lesson 25 of When Sue Began to Cook. If you’re new, click the book link to be transported to Lesson 1, where the adventure begins, and we meet Sue, her friend Ruth Ann, and Sue’s mother Bettina, Twenties homemaker extraordinaire. This week Sue makes Escalloped Potatoes under her mother’s guidance.

Scalloped Potatoes, or Escalloped Potatoes, are a U.S. tradition. The Henry Ford Museum posts a recipe from 1898 here. Escalloped potatoes are warm, filling, and cheap. They contain vegetables and dairy, two items on every Twenties cook’s daily list.

And then there are the pimientos. The Twenties cook put pimientos in everything. They provided color and just a bit of extra nutrition. When Sue makes Escalloped Potatoes during her Saturday cooking lesson, she puts pimientos in the recipe. Feel free to leave them out if you like. I probably will.

Let’s see what Sue has to say about making Escalloped Potatoes on this Saturday morning.

Sue’s Diary Entry for Escalloped Potatoes

This has been a cold raw Saturday for May, so Mother said it was just the day for Escalloped Potatoes. “We’ll use up the old ones I have on hand. New potatoes taste better than old ones in the Spring.”

Escalloped Potatoes sound hard, but are really very easy to make. Of course it isn’t easy to slice raw potatoes very thin, but I’m sure this lesson did us a lot of good. The little vegetable knife must be sharp!

Oh, I mustn’t forget to write something else down. We used only a part of the canned pimientos and Mother had us pur the rest in a little bowl and cover them carefully with cold water. She told us that pimientos would keep a long time if you renewed the water every day. Lots of houskeepers don’t know that, and their pimientos get mouldy very soon and have to bre thrown away.

Next week we are going to begin house cleaning if the weather is pleasant. And Ruth Ann is so excited over it that she has begged Mother to let her help every night after school. She says there isn’t anything so much fun as putting drawers in order. I’m afraid I can think of lots of things more pleasant than that, but then, it will help to have Ruth Ann here taking an interest in things. But Mother says we will have our cooking lesson next Saturday just the same. Not even house cleaning shall interfere with that!

Print Recipe

Escalloped Potatoes

from When Sue Began to Cook, 1924.
Course: Side Dish
Cuisine: American
Keyword: Bettina’s Best Recipes, potatoes, Twenties recipes, vegetarian, When Sue Began to Cook

Ingredients

  • 3 cups raw potatoes peeled and sliced very thin
  • 3 tbsp flour
  • 1½ tsp salt
  • ⅓ tsp paprika
  • ¼ tsp celery salt [you may want to reduce salt by ¼ tsp]
  • 2 tbsp pimientos cut very fine with kitchen scissors
  • 2 cups milk
  • 3 tbsp butter melted

Instructions

  • We peeled the potatoes and then sliced them very thin, just as thin as we could.
  • Then Mother had us each mix our potatoes, flour, salt, paprika, celery salt, and pimientos very carefully and empty them into buttered baking dishes.
  • Then we poured the milk and the butter over the top and baked the potatoes in a moderate oven for fifty minutes.
    Note: Moderate oven = 375 degrees F.
Cooking Techniques · The Vintage Kitchen

Sue Makes Salmon Loaf

VintageJenny

In Lesson 24 of When Sue Began to Cook, Sue makes Salmon Loaf. Canned salmon provided a way for the landlocked portions of the United States to provide fish. Along with tuna, salmon was used in baked loaves like this one, casseroles, aspics, salads, and sometimes sandwiches.

This is Lesson 24 from the book When Sue Began to Cook, 1924. It was one of the cooking storybooks in the Bettina’s Best Recipes series. If you’re new to these lessons, click the linked book title in the previous paragraph to see Lesson 1 and follow the story from the beginning.

As always, Sue has much to say about her Saturday cooking lesson in her kitchen diary.

Sue’s Diary for Salmon Loaf

I certainly do have a good joke on Mother! She is always talking about saving dishes and telling us how good cooks simply things.

Well, after we had mixed up our salmon loaves just as she told us to, and had written everything down in our notebooks, I said to her, “Why didn’t you have us break the eggs in the mixing bowl first and then add the other things? That would have saved a dish!”

Mother looked surprised for a minute, and then she laughed. “Well, you’re surely right about that, Sue! That would have been simpler and easier, after all.”

I tell you, I’m going to think about the dishes. Ruth Ann and I have to wash our own (we wouldn’t be really learning to cook if we didn’t do that, Mother says.) Sometimes it takes us a long time to get them clean. We try to remember to fill each cooking pan with cold water right away and let it soak till we can get at it. That makes a world of difference.

This is a warm, lovely, “open-window” May day, and we thought our salmon loaves would be best cold. So I’m saving mine for dinner tonight. We’ll cut it in thin slices and garnish it with lemon and parsely. Ruth Ann has taken hers home with her.

Print Recipe

Salmon Loaf

from When Sue Began to Cook, 1924.
Course: Dinner, Luncheon
Cuisine: American
Keyword: Bettina’s Best Recipes, fish, meat loaf, Ruth Ann, salmon, Sue, When Sue Began to Cook

Ingredients

  • 1½ cups salmon flaked with a silver fork. We took out the bones and pieces of skin.
  • 2 cups soft bread crumbs
  • 1 tsp salt
  • ¼ tsp pepper
  • ¼ tsp celery salt
  • 1 cup milk
  • 2 eggs beaten
  • 1 tbsp butter melted

Instructions

  • Mother says to write in our notebooks in big black letters: Never Leave Salmon in an Open Can. Just as soon as we get the can opened, we must empty the salmon out in a dish, because many people have been poisoned by letting the air get into the salmon and the tin.
  • After each of us had pur our salmon in a mixing bowl, Mother had us separate it in pieces with a silver fork.
  • Then we measured out the soft bread broken into crumbs, and added it to the salmon in the bowl. We also added the salt, pepper, celery salt, milk and beaten eggs.
  • Mother had us mix it all up together with the silver fork. Then she had us each butter a small loaf cake pan and pour the salmon mixture into it.
  • We shaped it up like a little loaf and poured the melted butter over the top.
  • Then we baked the two loaves for thirty minutes in a moderate oven. After they were done, we let them stand for five minutes and then we carefully helped them out onto two platters. They looked very brown and crusty and good.
    Note: Moderate oven = 375 degrees F.

Notes

Sue and Ruth Ann are each making a full recipe, hence two loaves in the oven. This recipe makes one salmon loaf.
Cooking Techniques · The Vintage Kitchen

Sue’s Baking Powder Biscuits

VintageJenny

In this installment of Sue and Ruth Ann’s cooking lessons, Sue’s Baking Powder Biscuits take center stage. I find it interesting that When Sue Began to Cook waits until nearly the middle of the book to introduce biscuits. In many beginning cookbooks it appears as the first recipe that a young cook learns. It was that important to the vintage kitchen.

Hardly a week went by without seeing fresh biscuits on the table. Biscuits with butter appeared with dinner. Biscuits with jam appeared at breakfast, luncheon, and teatime. The recipe at the end of this post makes it easy for you to make Sue’s Baking Powder Biscuits, too.

This is Lesson 23 of When Sue Began to Cook, a cookbook from 1924 in the Bettina’s Best Recipes series. If you’re new to the series, click on the link to visit Lesson 1. This book contains a story along with the cooking lessons and you don’t want to miss anything!

Sue’s Diary from Biscuit Saturday

I really think this was the most interesting cooking lesson we’ve had yet!

Mother has often told us that it is very important to a cook to know how to make good baking-powder biscuits, because you use the recipe in so many ways. For meat pie, for instance, and strawberry shortcake, and those good little “roll-em-ups” that Grandmother makes. And oh, lots of other things. So I can tell you we were excited when Mother said we might try baking powder biscuits today.

I supposed biscuits would be very hard to do! But they weren’t, not one bit. They were easy. And it was such fun to see the fat brown little biskittens coming out of the oven looking for all the world like Mother’s own!

Mother says most people work too hard over them and handle them too much. And the main thing to remember is to handle them just as little as possible. And never, never use a rolling pin!

We ate up all of Ruth Ann’s as well as mine for lunch. And Ruth Ann said she was going straight home and make some more at her Grandmother’s for dinner, just for practice. (I hope she won’t learn to make such perfect ones that she’ll get ‘way ahead of me.)

Print Recipe

Sue’s Baking Powder Biscuits

from When Sue Began to Cook, 1924.
Course: Bread, Breakfast
Cuisine: American
Keyword: Bettina’s Best Recipes, Ruth Ann, Twenties recipes, When Sue Began to Cook

Ingredients

  • 2 cups flour
  • 4 tsp baking powder
  • ½ tsp salt
  • 3 tbsp lard
  • ⅔ cup milk

Instructions

  • Mother had Ruth Ann and me each measure out our flour and our baking powder and our salt into a flour sifter and put it through twice.
  • Then we each emptied the mixture into our own mixing bowl. Then we measured the lard very carefully in on top of the flour mixture.
  • Then we each took our funny little spatula and cut the lard right into the flour. (Mother showed us how.) It took quite a while, but when it was all flaky and nicely mixed, we added the milk slowly and went on mixing with the knife.
  • After the milk was all mixed in, Mother had us press the mixture softly into kind of a little ball of dough, not handling it much, and lift it out onto the mixing board that we had sprinkled with a little flour.
  • We each patted our dough ball down with our fingers into a shape about half an inch thick. Then we each took a biscuit cutter, dipped it in a little flour, and cut out biscuits with it.
  • Ruth Ann and I each had about fourteen biscuits. We each lifted these into a pie pan, (no, we didn't flour or butter it) and baked them in a moderately hot oven for from twelve to fifteen minutes.
    Note: Moderate oven = 375 degrees F.