Vintage recipe test: Curried Scrambled Eggs, Beurre Noir

Let's just cut to the chase: this was so good. How it's taken me this long to put curry powder in my scrambled eggs is a mystery. With chopped onion and bell pepper, plus bacon, it's a winning formula.

But the beurre noir! This was a revelation. When browned butter is drizzled over these eggs, it takes the flavors to new heights. The hint of sweetness from the caramelized milk solids is reminiscent of getting a little maple syrup from your stack of pancakes on your eggs, but more appropriate.

Bless you, Chef E.G. Stockton from La Jolla, California, for revealing this amazing Sunday morning breakfast to us.

"Your eyes will sparkle after your first mouthful of Chef Stockton's concoction, but if your palate craves more mild treatment, a slight pinch or even a few grains of curry powder will suffice," it says. No, incorrect. Do this recipe as written.

A truth: "When accompanied by hot biscuits [or an English muffin] and strawberry preserves [or huckleberry jam], this makes a breakfast long to be remembered!"

Curried Scrambled Eggs, Beurre Noir
adapted from Cooking Bold and Fearless

6 eggs
1 tsp. curry powder
1/2 tsp. salt
6 T. cream (or milk)
4 slices bacon
1 small onion, minced
1/2 green (or red) bell pepper, minced
1/4 c. butter
My 2019 addition: a few fresh cilantro leaves, for garnish

1. Fry the bacon until crisp. Drain on paper towels and set aside. When cool, chop fine. Discard excess grease but leave about 2 tsp. in the pan for frying the veggies and eggs.

2. While the bacon is frying, beat eggs until light. Dissolve curry powder and salt in milk/cream, and add to beaten eggs.

3.  With the heat now on medium, using the greasy bacon pan, fry the pepper and onion until tender and delicately browned. Add the egg and chopped bacon and reduce the heat to low. Scramble with as little stirring as possible.

4. Meanwhile, place butter in a small saucepan over medium heat. Let it melt, bubble, pop, subside and brown. It will smell nutty and heavenly. Remove from the heat and place in a bowl so as not to continue browning/blackening.

5. When the eggs are cooked to your liking, plate and drizzle a small amount of brown butter over the scramble. Top with cilantro. Serve with your biscuits and jam.

Vintage recipe test: Good Neighbor Cake

This recipe comes to you from Cooking Bold and Fearless, a 1957 Sunset Magazine publication that features recipes from "Chefs-of-the-West," predominantly male, as far as I can tell.

The Good Neighbor Cake recipe is signed by Fred Nehsmann, a writer in Lemon Grove, Calif. I tried looking him up on the internet to no avail, so I'm not sure of his credentials and why he was deemed worthy of inclusion in the "Chefs-of-the-West" group. 

A neighborhood block party provided the perfect occasion to try this out. I know it's never a good idea to test out a new recipe on guests or party-goers, but I put a lot of faith in the title. I've always loved the idea of baking something to take to a neighbor, but have been too shy to do so, so a block party provided a way to quietly set something on a table and let people try it, no pressure. I also loved the seasonal ingredient of apple at an October gathering.

The Good Neighbor Cake a basic layer cake with orange zest, and the frosting is made with egg whites and sugar, studded with apple. Otherwise, nothing terribly fancy.

While it turned out fine, a few modifications along the way probably made it better than as written, and had I been more of an expert in making layer cakes, I probably would have realized sooner that caster sugar is better for cakes and frosting, and that I overwhipped my egg whites for the batter. 

The cakes also sunk quite a bit, and I wonder if that was because of the egg whites, or because I forgot to turn on the oven ahead of time, so the pans with the batter were sitting out longer before going in the oven.

The simple frosting called for freshly grated apple, and I worried that the apple would cause the mixture to separate due to wetness, or make the cake soggy. I elected to squeeze out as much juice as possible before adding it to the frosting, and while it was still kind of a sloppy frosting, it held up okay on a cool evening (the juice was also very tasty on its own!). But I wish I'd used powdered sugar because you could feel the grit on your teeth.

Also, how do we feel about eating uncooked egg whites? I'm OK with it, but it's one of those things I probably wouldn't tell people before they eat it... that's the kind of Good Neighbor I am.

Here's the original recipe:

And my version:

Good Neighbor Cake

Adapted from Cooking Bold and Fearless

Ingredients

1/2 c. butter, room temperature

1 1/2 c. sugar

Zest of one large orange

4 eggs

2 c. sifted cake flour (i.e., sift the flour before you measure it)

4 tsp. baking powder

1/4 tsp. salt

1 c. whole milk

For frosting:

One Granny Smith apple

1 c. powdered sugar or fine/caster sugar (or just blitz regular sugar in the food processor for a few seconds)

2 of the egg whites from the four eggs above

Make the cake

1. Heat the oven to 350. Grease and flour two cake pans.

2. Separate the eggs: using three bowls, place all four yolks in one bowl, and two egg whites in another, and the remaining two in the third bowl (this will be used for the frosting - place these in the fridge until needed). 

3. Sift the flour with the baking powder and salt and set aside.

4. Cream butter and sugar together until light, about 5 minutes on medium speed. Add the orange zest.

5. Beat in egg yolks, one at a time, mixing thoroughly after each addition, scraping down the bowl as necessary. 

6. Alternate adding portions of the flour mixture with the milk, beating until smooth, several rounds. 

7. In a separate bowl, beat the two egg whites until stiff peaks form, but not dry (I overbeat these, I think, which might have caused my cakes to sink). Fold gently into batter until there are no white streaks.

8. Pour batter evenly between the prepared cake pans. Bake 25-30 minutes, until tops are springy and lightly browned. Remove from pans and completely cool on a rack.

Make frosting

1. Peel and grate the apple.

2. Beat the remaining 2 egg whites until stiff, then gradually beat in a cup of powdered sugar (I used regular sugar but found the texture rather grainy; I think powdered or at least caster sugar would have worked out better).

3. Squeeze excess juice from the apple and beat into the frosting. Frost the cooled cakes and layer together. Keep cool in the fridge until serving.

Cooking Bold and Fearless

Thanks for reading/caring about/sympathizing with my Joy of Cooking post last week. I'm really just scratching the surface of a much larger issue pertaining to mental load and traditional gender roles. I talk about this stuff all the time with my girlfriends, but I should also make it clear that I have it good - like, really good. I have been societally trained to worry about the stuff I worry about, but I have a partner who shares these household tasks more equally than a lot of men I know. On some weeks, I'm pretty sure it's lopsided toward him doing more of the work. More than that, he doesn't make a big deal out of it. I'm trying to take on his chill attitude and not take it for granted.

Coincidentally, a couple days after my blog post, this essay came out: It's So Much More Than Cooking. It captures the sentiment I was feeling at the time, and it continued to resonate with my own questions of Why do women care about this stuff so much? Can change happen if we stop caring about the stuff we're trained to care about? Is that OK? We each have to decide what that looks like. I did have an interesting moment last week when I personally experienced what I've teased Joel about for years in having "fridge eyes," i.e., not knowing that we had a particular ingredient in the fridge - "If you'd only look, you'd see it," I'd say in a very smarty-pants way. Turns out, when you don't buy the groceries, fridge eyes is real. 

Also, I had a delightful moment last weekend when I had the opportunity to make myself a baked potato and Joel had a burrito. We ate our respective dinners together on the couch while we watched a movie and it was bliss, I tell you. 

All this is to say I'm temporarily excited about a new cooking project I'm planning to undertake this fall. I started this blog to highlight ways to breathe new life into old things, and this project does exactly that: I'm taking old cookbooks I've collected over the years and am testing their recipes. I'm talking about ones that may call for MSG (which is actually gaining a resurgence among chefs) or chipped beef or gelatin, perhaps all three! I'm not sure where I'll find chipped beef or MSG in Spokane. No matter, I'm excited to experiment and see what can be attractive and delicious at the 21st century table, and what else I can learn. Most of these recipes don't have photos or detailed directions, so I view this as low pressure, starting with an attitude of "this might not taste good, but let's just see." I'll just make sure there's back-up frozen pizzas or canned soup at the ready for when a main dish is inedible.

Like these "cheese carrots" I made a few years ago.

Let the fun begin.

Community cookbook recipe test: Isabelle Jones' Zucchini Lasagne

I brought home a 4-pound zucchini that was abandoned by some gardener I work with (who knows who it was - people leave things they don't want on the break room table). I knew that I could get a few meals out of this thing, so rather than just bake a bazillion loaves of zucchini bread, as is my tradition, I checked out a P.E.O. cookbook for inspiration. I found it in a recipe for lasagne, which today might be billed as gluten-free, but for me, all that mattered was that it featured my cast-off squash as the star. Best of all, it was a recipe from a member of my home chapter, Chapter BN in Boise.

Long strips of zucchini replace the pasta noodles, which already gives it the simplicity of no-boil noodles. This recipe calls for a meat sauce that you cook down with wine for an hour and a half, and then there's gobs of cheese.

Lasagne is not a particularly inspirational dish. It's more of a hearty family meal, a meal you throw in the freezer for when unexpected company arrives, something that's hard to mess up and sure to please anyone who's not on a strict diet. And let's not forget it was the favorite of Garfield the cat. I've never had bad lasagne, but still, it's never been something I dream about or order off a menu; I certainly never think to make it for a casual dinner at home, let alone eat the day it's made, with sauce that didn't come out of a can. So now I will admit that this was a fun treat, and the zucchini made it fancy. No, it won't go into a regular rotation, but I will gladly add it to my "what the heck to do with all this zucchini" file.

Zucchini Lasagne
Recipe adapted from Isabelle Jones, found in Kitchen Treasures: A collection of recipes from Idaho's 50+ year P.E.O. members

4 large zucchini (or, in my case, half a big honkin' one)
2 T. olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 c. chopped onion
1/2 lb. ground beef or turkey (I used turkey)
1 15-oz. can diced tomatoes
1 6-oz. can tomato paste
1 4-oz. can sliced mushrooms (I used a big handful of fresh)
3/4 c. dry red wine
1 1/2 tsp. oregano
1/4 tsp. thyme
1/2 tsp. basil
salt and pepper to taste
8 oz. mozzarella, thinly sliced (I used part-skim)
8 oz. ricotta cheese (again, part-skim)
1/2. grated Parmesan cheese

Heat oil in skillet over medium heat. Add garlic, onion and ground meat. Cook until tender but not brown, stirring to keep meat crumbly (if using fresh mushrooms, add now). Add tomatoes, tomato paste, mushrooms (if using the canned variety), and spices and salt and pepper. Simmer uncovered for 1 1/2 hours.

Preheat the oven to 350. Oil a casserole dish (I used a 9x13 pan). Cut zucchini lengthwise into strips 1/4 inch thick and place half of them in the bottom of the dish to cover. Top with one half the mozzarella and one half the ricotta. Add half the meat sauce. Repeat the layering. Top with grated Parmesan cheese.

Bake for 30 minutes. Serves 4-6.