Ms. Susan Dunn's Sweet & Sour Sauce

This is another recipe from Simpson-Fletcher's Soul Food Recipes.  I am making homemade Egg Rolls today. I buy the Egg Roll Skins at local Asian Market. I am going to make this Sauce. So good for anything one would find on a PuPu Platter extravaganza. I like it on Crackers with Cheese. 

I produce this recipe verbatim. I use a small can of Crushed Pineapple. 

SWEET & SOUR SAUCE.

1 (1 lb.) can of Apricots
1/2 (1 lb.) can of Pineapple
1/2 cup Brown Sugar
1/4 teaspoon White Pepper
1/2 cup Honey
4 tablespoons Vinegar
1/2 teaspoon Salt

Force Apricots through a sieve. Put into a saucepan and add all the remaining ingredients except the Vinegar. Cook the mixture over high heat until the Sugar is dissolved and the mixture boils. Reduce heat and cook 10 minutes longer. Remove from heat and allow to cool slightly and then stir in the Vinegar.

Don Marquis' Baked Beans Nirvana

Don Marquis' Very Special Baked Bean Recipe

From "The Almost Perfect State"
By Don Marquis
Doubleday, Page & Company
1927

If you WILL eat beans, here is the way to prepare them.

First, you must have an earthenware Bean Pot, about six hands high, and of a dark bay colour. It is better if this Bean Pot is inherited from a favourite grandmother, with a porous texture (the pot, not the grandmother) that has absorbed and retained the sentimental traditions of at least three generations. But if you own no such heirloom (more precious than the rubies of an imperial crown!) a new one can be made to do.

Procure your white navy beans, and pick them over on a Friday night, not hastily or cursorily, but with love and care, one bean at a time, for this is both an art and a science on which you have embarked--it is more; it is almost a religious rite. Cast from you all split beans, all rusty or spotted beans, all too-wrinkly beans; save only such superior beans, smooth, hard, and shining, as a twelve-months' old child would love to poke up his nose.

Put these aristocrats to soak in water that has three or four tablespoonfuls of baking soda in it. Don't ask me why the soda. I am not arguing with you. I am telling you.

Some people say that after these beans have soaked all night they are ready to bake. These people lie. They are not ready to bake. They are merely ready to boil.

Boil them from ten o'clock Saturday morning until noon, in a pot with a piece of salt pork in it. And time your boiling so that on the stroke of twelve there is very little of the liquid remaining. For they must not go into the Sacred Earthenware Bean Pot, the Ancestral Amphora, too soupy or sloppy.

Put into the bottom of the Bean Pot a layer of Beans four fingers deep. Poke deeply into this one bay leaf. Put on top of this a layer consisting of pieces of just the right kinds of salt pork. On top of the layer of pork, dribble a thin layer of thick New Orleans molasses.

Put in another layer of beans. Into this second layer poke four or five slender curling strips of pungent shredded onion. Put a dab of mustard on the onion. Then a sparse layer of pork. Then another dribbled layer of molasses.

Pause and put your Ego in harmony with the Cosmic All.

Build up these successive layers of beans, pork, and molasses, alternating the subtle bay leaf with the poetic onion, until the pot is filled within two inches of the top. From time to time, a conservative sprinkle of black pepper, as you work from the bottom upward. From time to time hum a verse of "Old Hundred." Don't put in any salt; the pork salts all.

Let the top layers of pork and molasses be a bit thicker than any of the others.

Bake, slowly, in a moderate oven, from noon until six o'clock in the evening. Some say it must be a brick oven. Nonsense! Your Bean Pot itself is your bricky heat-retaining medium.

Eat from six in the evening until midnight--and without fear of indigestion. The thorough cooking has taken all that sort of thing away.

Each separate bean of all these beans retains its form--almost. Almost. Not quite. Each bean is ready to melt tenderly into amalgamation with his neighbor bean. At the touch of the serving spoon the touched beans lose their individual identity, yield up their pride, merge gently into a kind of Bean Nirvana.

Some eat them with vinegar. Very good. Others with tomato catsup. I eat them with a squeeze of lemon juice. Ambrosia!

Texas Weiners

July is National Hot Dog Month.

I am not a sports fan. I am often surrounded by sports fans who, on crucial game days, require sustenance that is easy to make and goes well with beer. Hot dogs are also called wieners. 

I serve Texas Weiners with this sauce and chopped onions. This sauce is HOT so exercise discretion. For a milder sauce, omit the Cayenne Pepper.

This recipe comes from a chef who posted on the old AOL Comfort Food Board named Big Saab Guy. He actually lives in Texas. It will dress about 2 dozen hot dogs. I give it to you as he gave it to the board. You can keep the Sauce and the Hot Dogs warm separately and the sports fanatics can assemble and eat at will. Give lots of napkins.

The sign on the right comes from Plainfield NJ. It hangs on one of the original Texas Weiner joints in business since 1924. The Texas Weiner was actually created by a Greek in Paterson NJ.


Texas Hot Dog Sauce

1 pound finely ground Beef
3 tablespoons Chili Powder
1 teaspoon Salt
1 teaspoon Cumin
1 teaspoon Cayenne Pepper
1/2 teaspoon Thyme
1 teaspoon White Vinegar
2 cups Water

Very thoroughly brown Beef and drain. You want the pieces to be as small as possible. Really work to break them up as you brown them.

Add the spices and mix well. Add the Water and simmer for one hour, uncovered, stirring often. It should be the consistency of something like tomato soup.

Stir in the Vinegar. Then serve as follows: put a thin smear of Yellow Mustard on both sides of an open hot dog roll, then insert the Hot Dog, then a layer of finely chopped Onion, then drizzle the top with about a tablespoon of the Sauce.

This video and the recipe that it contains is an elaborate sauce more like the North Jersey version I know and love. Feel free to use cinnamon if you have no allspice. Garnish with chopped onion for sure.

June is the Month of Roses - or - Sweet Honey in the Jar

The Old Design Shop provides the illustration from Flower Children, The Little Cousins of The Field and Garden by Elizabeth Gordon published in 1910. My title is a hat tip to Sweet Honey in Rock. One of their songs below.

I am off on a quest only a Mad Gardener and dedicated Foody would attempt. I am going to make this Rose Honey. My quest? Find a good source of unsprayed Pink Roses. I will make and taste this. I must.

This recipe comes from Gourmets for McGovern. I reproduce it verbatim. The Colophon reads "This cookbook has been peacefully and lovingly put together by volunteers for McGovern." I wrote the article at dkos. That article gave birth to this article. 

"According to The Pittsburgh Press Sept. 16, 1972: "Philadelphian Joan Cantor has written a cookbook 'Gourmets for McGovern,' to raise money for the senator's presidential campaign. The 46 page book contains such recipes as 'Mexican Drunken Chicken' and 'peaches poached in apricot sauce' -- all composed by local ladies. The national campaign headquarters has ordered 100,000 copies which it hopes to sell at $2 each." Printed on multi-colored cardstock and illustrated throughout with line drawings presumably done by the same "local ladies," the book includes Cantor's excellent recipe for Banana Cake re-blogged by Cooking with Kos May 31, 2015." - description Abe Books.

HONEY

from Kathy Weinerman

5 pounds Sugar

1-1/2 pints hot water (sic)

alum (about the size of a cherry)

20 red clover blossoms

12 white clover blossoms

8 pink roses

Melt sugar in the water. Add alum and boil 2 minutes. Remove pot from the flame and immediately add the petals of the blossoms and the roses and let stand 10 minutes. Strain and bottle. Try it, you'll like it!

 

Foody Helping Foody or the Sour Cream vs.Yoghurt Evaluation

I published the best recipe I know for Banana Cake and it generated the following discussion. I heart my readers. I am thrilled to have foody pen pals.

Banana Art by Zazzle

Sour cream substitute by pdh

It's Sunday morning. I'm suddenly feeling a need for McGovern-inspired banana cake ... but I have no sour cream. I have some plain yogurt; will substitute that ... should work according the intertubes.

My concern is more profound, though. Since you are a student of the politics of food, can you tell me if the substitution will be politically correct?

Please let me know how it goes by Yours Truly

Politically correct. But there is something about the fat in the sour cream and the taste of sour cream that makes it essential, I think. However, I am a fan of experimentation. I look forward to your analysis of the sour cream situation.

So I need two cakes, I guess by pdh 

Actually, I think I will try the experiment. Today, with yogurt ... then with sour cream after my next trip to the market. I will let you know my opinion after a proper comparison.

Drain the yogurt by UnionJok

Years ago, a native of the Middle East showed me how to "thicken" yogurt for use in the standard recipe for baba ganooj and hummus. The traditional process consists of removing the whey by placing the yogurt in a cheesecloth-lined strainer over a bowl. The result is pretty much the same as "Greek" yogurt, and the whey can be used for other things. Even when made from fat-free yogurt, the texture and taste of the result make it a good substitute for sour cream in baking, salad dressings, dips, or desserts.

More convenient, if somewhat less effective, is to dig a well down the side of the container with an iced tea spoon, periodically pouring off the whey accumulating there. In this method, the top layer of yogurt becomes thick and creamy.

The denouement by pdh

Some time ago you posted the McGovern Banana Cake recipe to DailyKos.
I inquired about substituting plain yogurt for the sour cream which I did not have available. Another dkos poster suggested draining the yogurt in a cheese cloth to get a more appropriate texture, which
sounded like a sensible thing to do. So I prepared a banana cake with the drained yogurt; found it quite satisfactory.

Not trusting my memory of the taste of banana cakes past, I prepared
two cakes the same day, sampled them both at the same time. It was
very close, but the sour cream did seem to give a slightly better result. I expect that the flavor added by the sour cream counts for
more than the fat since there is 1/2 cup of shortening already in the
recipe, but didn't test any other variations. Next time I think I'll
add some chopped walnuts, though.

So my conclusion is that Dannon yogurt (plain whole milk kind) drained
in a wire mesh strainer lined with a paper coffee filter is a
satisfactory substitute for sour cream in recipes where the sour cream
is not a main ingredient. One would not slather a baked potato with
the densified yogurt and expect a sour cream experience, though.

I almost always keep some yogurt around because one of my favorite
snacks is yogurt with berries. In fact, I've prepared little single-
serving sized packets of whole berry cranberry sauce for the freezer
for those times when fresh berries are scarce. I'm sure I'll be
repeating the McGovern cake ... using the pseudo sour cream in other
places, too!