Month: November 2023

Cooking Techniques · Recipe Collections · The Vintage Kitchen

Sue Makes Pimiento Cheese Sandwiches

VintageJenny
An illustration from the Twenties that shows two young girls, one blonde and one with short dark hair, standing by a table in front of a window. Between them sits a pile of cheese sandwiches, and they are wrapping them with a napkin.
In this illustration from When Sue Began to Cook, Sue and Ruth Ann wrap their sandwiches to keep them from drying out.

For some reason, Pimiento Cheese Sandwiches were a picnic staple for families from the 1920s through the 1960s. I’ve seen many recipes for these sandwiches, but none that only used cream cheese and roasted red peppers (pimientos). that is, until now. Today Sue makes Pimiento Cheese Sandwiches along with her friend Ruth Ann. Sue and Ruth Ann are cooking their way to kitchen prowess in When Sue Began to Cook.

When Sue Began to Cook was a Twenties cookbook for kids by Louise Bennett Weaver. This is Lesson 33 in Sue’s year of 52 cooking lessons. If you’re just joining us, click the linked book title above to visit the first lesson and start at the beginning of the story (and recipes).

Sandwiches were easy and popular fare in the Twenties. Grab some white bread (or nut bread for tea sandwiches.) Spread the bread with anything handy plus a little butter and you have a feasible sandwich. Chopped nuts, celery, onion, cheese, and even little bits of roasted red peppers made their way into the Twenties sandwich.

This recipe calls for Creamy Salad Dressing, which Sue learned to make in Lesson 26. Click the link to see that recipe.

Sue and Ruth Ann make a dozen sandwiches, each of them working with twelve slices of bread. Although the recipe below calls for softened butter, Sue and Ruth Ann use butter right out of the icebox. Here’s how she explains it…

Sue’s Notes from Pimiento Cheese Sandwiches

After the cheese mixture was ready, we each cut twelve slices of bread very thin, and arranged it in pairs that matched so they could be fitted together. We softened the butter by mashing it down with a spoon. Then we spread one piece of bread of each pair with butter and the other slice with our cheese mixture. We used a silver knife for the spreading. Mother said that was best.

As soon as all the bread had been spread, we pressed the sides together to make sandwiches. Then we piled three big sandwiches on top of each other and cut them all across in half with a sharp knife to make smaller three-cornered sandwiches. Then we cut the other three in half. Then we each had twelve sandwiches. [Actually, they each had twelve half sandwiches, cut diagonally.]

When all the sandwiches were made, Mother gave us each an old clean napkin and had us dip it in cold water and then wring it out as dry as we could. Then she had us wrap up our sandwiches with it and put them away till we were ready to use them. [This is to keep the sandwiches from drying out in an age before plastics.]

Picnic time!

“We’re going on a picnic in the car tonight,” Mother said. “Yes, you too, Ruth Ann. I’ve already asked your grandmother and she says you may.”

“Goody!” I said, that being my favorite expression. “Are you going to let us get the lunch ready now? Oh, Mother, let us do it all!”

“Not all, just the sandwich part,” said Mother, laughing as she always does when I act very enthusiastic. “I want to have th whole lesson on sandwiches. Just one kind. You see, not many people know how to make very good sandwiches, and I want you girls to learn a few simple rules about sandwich making and never forget them.”

Here are some of the rules:

  • 1. Always use bread that is at least a day old, but don’t cut it until you are ready to use it.
  • 2. Cut the bread as thin as you can, but be sure the slices are very even.
  • 3. Always soften the butter by creaming it, but don’t ever melt it on the stove.
  • 4. Wrap your sandwiches in a damp (not wet) cloth till you are ready to use them.
Print Recipe

Pimiento Cheese Sandwiches

A recipe from When Sue Began to Cook, by Louise Bennett Weaver
Course: Luncheon, Picnic
Cuisine: American
Keyword: Bettina, Ruth Ann, Sue, Twenties recipes

Ingredients

  • 12 Slices white bread, cut thin
  • ⅓ cup butter, soft
  • ½ cup cream cheese
  • 2 Tbsp pimientos, cut fine
  • 2 Tbsp Creamy Salad Dressing
  • ½ tsp salt
  • ¼ tsp paprika

Instructions

  • First we put our cream cheese in a bowl and creamed it by pressing it with a spoon till it was very soft and creamy. We cut the pimientos very fine with the kitchen scissors, and put them in with the cheese. Then we added the salad dressing, salt and paprika, and stirred it all together until it was well mixed.
  • After the cheese mixture was ready we cut 12 slices of bread very thin, and arranged it in pairs that matched so they could be fitted together. Then we spread one piece of bread of each pair with butter and the other slice with the cheese mixture.
  • As soon as all the bread had been spread, we pressed the slices together to make sandwiches. Then we cut them in half to make 3-cornered sandwiches. (You are cutting the sandwich in half diagonally.)
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Sue Makes Potato Salad

VintageJenny

Lesson 32 of When Sue Began to Cook finds Ruth Ann and Sue making Potato Salad. Once the ingredients are cooked and chilled, putting together the salad requires little effort. Sue’s mother Bettina has already cooked the potatoes and the eggs and refrigerated them. Everything is ready for the girls’ lesson. If this is your first foray into When Sue Began to Cook, click the linked title to see the first cooking lesson. That’s where the story begins, as Sue and her mother Bettina concoct the idea of cooking lessons to help a grieving young friend.

As always, we peek into Sue’s notes for the day’s lessons and her plans for the finished food…

Sue’s Notes as she makes Potato Salad

Ruth Ann and I both know how to boil potatoes. We have done it lots of times lately when we weren’t having a lesson. So Mother excused us from that this morning. We used some cold ones left over from dinner last night becuase the potatoes ought to be very cold when you make potato salad out of them.

We didn’t boil the eggs ourselves, either, but it wasn’t cheating because we already knew just how and Mother said they had to be cold, too.

Fourth of July

Ruth Ann and I are a committee of two — a secret committee — to promote a Harmless Fourth of July in this neighborhood! [This particular lesson is dated June 30, so the Fourth is on Sue’s mind.]

It was all Mother’s idea in the first place. You see, Robin came home with his head full of exciting stories about the fireworks that Teddy and Clarence Patrick and Clyde and all the other boys were going to buy — big cannon crackers and everything. He wanted to take the money out of his tin bank right away and go down and buy fireworks too.

Mother managed to make him put it off for a few days while she talked to Ruth Ann and me. “Can’t you get the boys interested in a Harmless Neighborhood Fourth? A parade and a picnic lunch and a ball game and other things? We won’t have any fireworks except evening ones, and the fathers will manage those. If you girls can make it all seem really interesting, I’m sure the boys will agree.”

Well, it wasn’t a bit hard after the idea was once launched and today Ruth Ann and I have been learning to make Potato Salad. Because we’re going to make al lteh Potato Salad for the Neighborhood Picnic on the Fourth, and it must be the best salad there ever was.

Sue

Note: The recipe calls for Creamy Salad Dressing. Click the link to see that lesson.

Print Recipe

Sue Makes Potato Salad

Recipe from When Sue Began to Cook.
Course: Luncheon, Salad, Side Dish
Cuisine: American

Ingredients

  • 2 cups boiled potatoes, diced cold
  • 2 eggs, hard boiled, diced cold
  • ¼ cup sweet pickles cut up fine
  • ¼ cup celery cut up fine
  • 1 Tbsp onion cut up fine
  • 1¼ tsp salt
  • ⅓ tsp paprika (a rounded ¼ tsp is ⅓ tsp)
  • ⅔ cup Creamy Salad Dressing thinned with a little cream
  • Lettuce to put under the potato salad in a serving bowl

Instructions

  • We diced the potatoes very carefully, and we also diced the hard cooked eggs. The potatoes and the hard boiled eggs both need to be cold.
  • We cut up the celery with the kitchen scissors, and also cut the sweet pickle and the onion with them. The onion had to be snipped very fine.
  • When the food was all cut up we added the salt and paprika and mixed it in a big bowl. After it was well mixed we stirred in the salad dressing.
  • We lined a bowl with cold crisp lettuce and put our salad in it. Then we set the bowls in the icebox to keep cold until they were needed.

Notes

Note: The Creamy Salad Dressing used in this recipe is also from When Sue Began to Cook. It is from Lesson 26.
Cooking Techniques · Recipe Collections · The Vintage Kitchen

Sue Makes Sugar Cookies

VintageJenny
Sue and Ruth Ann get ready to cream butter with their “holey” spoons.

When I turned to Lesson 31, where Sue makes Sugar Cookies, I was a little surprised at how filthy the pages were. This recipe from When Sue Began to Cook was spattered with 100 year old flour stains. They sported a dot or two of grease, and even a little splash of age old vanilla extract. Apparently this is an excellent sugar cookie recipe.

This is our 31st lesson from this cookbook, and we’re a little over halfway through the year. My copy of the book was actually missing one of the earlier lessons on walnut fudge. The pages were ripped right out of the book. That must have been a sacred family recipe. If this is your first adventure with Sue and her friend Ruth Ann, click the linked book title in the first paragraph to be transported back to the beginning. A whole story goes along with these cooking lessons and you don’t want to miss any of it.

Last week Sue and Ruth Ann learned how to make a sponge cake and fold egg whites into a batter. This week they cream fat and sugar together. And Sue has lots to say about it…

Sue’s Notes from Sugar Cookies Day

“You may each get out one of the yellow mixing bowls,” Mother said, “and one of the holey spoons.” Ruth Ann and I were both glad because we knew that meant “creaming,” and we like to cream things.

We have a porcelain topped table at our house. It’s just the thing to roll cookies on. Mother had us sprinkle some flour on the clean table so the cookies wouldn’t stick. Then she had us take up half the dough in our hands and roll it together. (Of course, we washed our hands just before we began to make the cookies.) Then we put the dough on the floured table top.

Next we dusted the rolling pin with flour. Mother showed us how to roll out the dough as evenly as possible till it was about an eighth of an inch thick. Then we took the cooky cutter, dipped it into the flour and cut the cookies out. We really took several cooky cutters before we were through. We made our cookies in the shape of stars, ducks, and hearts.)

After we had cut out all the cookies we could, there was still some dough left. Mother had us make a ball of it and roll it out again and cut out some more cookies.

The Neighborhood Cookies

We made “neighborhood cookies” today, and at the time I write this, there isn’t a single one left!

There has been a regular epidemic of painting and yard cleaning in this neighborhood lately. I wrote about the McCarthy’s sudden interest in window washing. Well, after that was all finished they began to paint their house. It was so much fun with everybody standing around and giving advice that Robin and Teddy began to tease to paint something too. Of course, they are much littler than Clarence Patrick and Clyde. So Mother bought them some paint and let them paint the back fence between our yard and Teddy’s.

So today Ruth Ann and I announced that after our cooking lesson we would treat every real “neighborhood worker” to cookies. Everybody, that is, who had spent the whole morning in painting or gardening. Or cleaning up a back yard. Or doing something useful outdoors. It was a wonderful day for work and our cookies melted away like snowballs in August, as Father says. But it was worth it! This is getting to be the cleanest, neatest, shiniest, paintiest neighborhood in town!

Sue

And that is how Sue made Sugar Cookies during her Saturday cooking class.

Note: While I correct most of Sue’s atrocious spelling, her spelling of cookie as cooky, when talking about only one, is correct through the 1950s.

Print Recipe

Sugar Cookies

From When Sue Began to Cook, by Louise Bennett Weaver
Course: Dessert, Snack, Tea time
Cuisine: American
Keyword: baking, Bettina, cookies, dessert, Ruth Ann, Sue, teatime

Ingredients

  • ½ cup lard Any solid shortening should work here
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 4 Tbsp water
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 2⅓ cups flour
  • ¼ tsp salt
  • ½ tsp powdered nutmeg
  • 2 tsp baking powder

Instructions

  • Measure out the lard into a bowl, and cream it with a wooden spoon (mash it down over and over) until it is very soft. The cookbook suggests using a spoon with a hole in the middle if you have one. Then add the sugar slowly, creaming all the time, until it is all added and well mixed.
  • Break the eggs into a smaller bowl, and add the water and vanilla. Beath this egg mixture up all together with a Dover egg beater and then add it to the sugar mixture. Beat it all up very had with the same spoon until it is well mixed.
  • Now take the dry ingredients and mix them up together, and then stir them into the wet mixture. (Or you can use a sifter, if you have one, and sift the dry ingredients over the bowl.)
  • Roll out until about one-eighth inch thick, and then cut out with a cutter dipped in flour. Grease a cookie sheet and bake in a moderate oven (350-375℉) for fifteen minutes.
Cooking Techniques · Recipe Collections · The Vintage Kitchen

Sue Makes Sun Drops

VintageJenny

Welcome to Lesson 30 of When Sue Began to Cook. We’re working our way through a year’s worth of cooking lessons from the children’s cook book by Louise Bennett Weaver. If this is your first time tuning in, click the book title link to visit Lesson 1. This week Sue makes Sun Drops with her friend Ruth Ann.

Never heard of Sun Drops? Not a surprise. I’ve been reading Twenties recipes for years and this is the first time I’ve heard of them as well. Basically, Sun Drops are cupcakes made with a sponge cake batter. A cake sponge is made from eggs that are separated, with the stiffly beaten egg whites folded in last to give them volume. Many cake recipes from the 1910s through the 1930s were sponge recipes, simply because they required few ingredients, no expensive fats (like butter), and they looked and tasted great when they appeared at the table.

In today’s lesson, Sue learns how to create a cake flour substitute at home instead of buying a box of Swan’s Down. Ingredient storage space was at a premium in Twenties households. So anything that could be whipped up easily as a substitute was welcome, compared to yet another open box. As usual, Sue (or rather, her mother Bettina) has some opinions about the day’s activities:

Sue’s Sun Drops Diary

The Sun Drops looked so good we could hardly wait to try them.

A good sponge cake recipe is a useful thing for a housekeeper to have, Mother says. And she also says that she likes this particular one so much better than any other that this is the only one she uses any more. It doesn’t have to be baked in muffin pans. Very often she makes it in a square cake pan lined with waxed paper. When it’s baked that way, it takes about twenty-five minutes in a moderate oven instead of twenty. [Note: A moderate oven is 350 – 375ºF.]

Sometimes we have sponge cake like this, cut in squares and served with whipped cream, for dessert. Father loves it that way.

Mother says some pleasant day Ruth Ann and I may have a porch party and serve Sun Drops and lemonade for refreshments. They’re fine for an afternoon party or tea, Mother says.

Ruth Ann and I are feeling like grownup cooks today. We’ve learned to make sponge cake!

Sue

Print Recipe

Sun Drops

Sponge cake cupcakes from When Sue Began to Cook, by Louise Bennett Weaver
Course: Dessert, Tea time
Cuisine: American
Keyword: Bettina, cake, Ruth Ann, sponge, Sue

Ingredients

  • 4 eggs
  • 3 Tbsp cold water
  • 1 tsp lemon extract
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 7/8 cup all purpose flour (a full cup minus two tablespoons)
  • 2 Tbsp cornstarch
  • 1½ tsp baking powder
  • ⅛ tsp salt

Instructions

  • We took four eggs and separate them. We put the yolks into one bowl and the whites in another. Then we beat the egg yolks until they are light and lemon colored. We measured the cold water and lemon extract into the egg yolks, and then added sugar little by little, stirring all the time until it was all added.
  • Then we measured out one cup of flour. We took two tablespoons of the flour from the cup. This left exactly 7/8 of a cup. Mother had us add the cornstarch and put it in the cup with the flour. This makes a level cup again. [Note: What you are doing here is making cake flour from regular all purpose flour. This is a great process to memorize, because Twenties recipes used a lot of cake flour!]
  • Then we measured out the baking powder and the salt and carefully piled them on top of the flour and cornstarch. We sifted the flour, cornstarch, salt, and baking soda right into the egg yolk mixture. Then we stirred it up very gently but thoroughly.
  • Next we beat up the egg whites until they were very stiff. After they were stiff we let them stand in the bowl for one minute. We emptied the egg whites into the other things and folded them in with a knife. They ought not to be beaten in, but they have to be mixed, so folding them over and over gently with the flat side of a knife is the best way.
  • We greased a muffin pan and then added a little flour to each compartment and shook it around so the pans would be both greased and floured. Then we dropped cake batter in the little compartments with a spoon, filling them about two-thirds full. We had already lighted the oven and it was warm. We baked the little sun drops in a moderate oven (350℉) for about twenty minutes. When they were dont they were a lovely golden brown color.
  • Mother told us not to take them out of the pans right away, but to let them stand for five minutes to cool. Then we helped them out very gently.