Cookie Quest - Chess Pie Cookies

I've been trying to organize all my recipes lately - seemingly an insurmountable task - and in going through all of them, I found this one from my mom that I hadn't made in a long time. And that's the beauty of recipe organizing - we've been trying a lot of new recipes lately, some good, some not so good. This one isn't a new one, per se, since I can remember my mom making it when I was a kid, but it's definitely new to Matt.

Looks like the cookie monster's been here.

Part of the inspiration for making these cookies came from paging through a copy of The White House Cookbook by Janet Halliday Ervin that was given to me by my mother-in-law. This cookbook was published in 1964 and includes the entire text of the original White House Cookbook written in 1887 by Mrs. Fanny Gillette and Mr. Hugo Ziemann (then White House steward). The 1964 version contains not only the un-updated original text, it also contains a section on each of the First Ladies and a few recipes that they liked to serve during their time in office, ending with Lady Bird Johnson. This part was particularly interesting to me, both in terms of learning about the former First Ladies and because it put a lot of recipes into context. It was interesting to watch how the American palate evolved (at least through the '60s) and to see the strong British and French influences that remain. There are a lot of recipes that I want to try, including one for Maids of Honor, a treat that Matt and I tried for the first time during our visit to London over the summer. One of the last recipes in the book is for Chess Pie from the LBJ White House.

1 cup chopped pecans, ready to go

There is a note below the recipe stating that it is an old recipe, and inviting the reader to compare it to an even older recipe for Chess Cake dating to 1879. Chess pie is a Southern specialty - apparently originally from England - that seems to me to be pretty similar to the sugar pie of French Canada (except I think that one has cream in it). Lady Bird Johnson's recipe is: Mix 2 cups sugar with 1 heaping Tbsp flour, and add to 1/2 pound butter. Blend until light and fluffy. Add 4 eggs, one at a time, beating after each addition. Add 1/2 tsp vanilla and pour into unbaked pie shell. Bake in 300 degree oven until knife inserted comes out clean - about one hour. (The White House Cookbook p. 488). The older recipe is similar, but uses six egg yolks and no flour and calls for adding "some pretty jelly into the center" of the pie (p. 489). When I first read the older one, I wasn't sure why it's called Chess Cake. Bill Neal, Chapel Hill chef extraordinaire, can answer that question. His version of Chess Pie is slightly different than Lady Bird's - his is flavored with lemon rather than vanilla. What's interesting, though, is his note before the recipe: "In Tennessee, as many as six or seven of these pies, baked and cooled, are stacked on each other and sliced as a cake" (Southern Cooking p.191). The White House version said nothing about stacking them, but the recipe did imply that more than one was being made at a time, and maybe everyone just knew that you were supposed to stack them into a cake. I can't even imagine eating a slice of that cake - it must be super rich.

Ready to go in the oven!

Anyway, bringing this all back together, when I saw Lady Bird's Chess Pie recipe, I remembered that I had recently seen the Chess Pie cookies recipe from my mom, and decided to make those. Matt had never heard of chess pie in any form, but was sold on the cookies. The cookie recipe comes from the mother of a friend of mine from elementary school, and is a less egg-y version of the filling of a chess pie with some pecans thrown in. They're actually pretty similar to blondies - in fact, they're basically identical to my blondie recipe with only slightly less flour. The main difference, of course, is that chess pie cookies have chopped pecans in them while the blondies have chocolate chips. "That's a completely different thing," Matt says. Like the blondies, they are easy to make and very delicious. And also like the blondies, I feel a little silly that I haven't made these very often.

Chess Pie Cookies
From Mrs. Hackney

1/2 cup butter
2 cups brown sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla
1 1/2 cups flour
2 tsp. baking powder
pinch of salt
1 cup chopped pecans

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 13x9 pan and set aside. Melt butter over low heat, add brown sugar. Remove from heat, and stir in eggs, one at a time. Add in vanilla. Mix flour with baking powder and salt. Stir into brown sugar mixture and combine well. Add nuts. Spread into prepared pan and bake 20-25 minutes or til browned. Let cool before cutting into bars.

Cookie Quest - Moravian Ginger Cookies

When I was a kid, we used to go on school trips to Old Salem in modern day Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Old Salem is a living historic village that replicates the Moravian settlement of the area in the 18th and 19th centuries. My main memories of going to Old Salem are watching the Old Salem kids play with an inflated pig intestine as a ball and eating Moravian ginger cookies. Clearly those memories are not equal. The Moravians figured out how to make these delicious, super-thin, crispy, spicy ginger cookies that are crisper with more of a bite than your typical gingersnap. And they're so good! But I could never figure out how they got them so thin and so perfectly round. I suppose the real answer is 'robots' but that's not the Old Salem answer. Those old-timey ladies must know something I don't.

Old Salem, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Bridal Shower Bites - Aunt Josette's Leib Kuchen

 I have been wanting to make these cookies since Aunt Josette sent the recipe for the shower, mainly because of the note she wrote on the recipe: "Grandpa Kessler loved these cookies!" One of (the many) great things about Aunt Josette is that she and Uncle George are a part of both sides of the family. As kids, that meant that we got to see them at family reunions on both sides, which then meant that we saw them probably more often than any other family members. Which was awesome. They bridged the gap for us between the Kesslers and the Mootses, which led to little insights like the one on the recipe. Grandpa Kessler loved these cookies.

I trust Grandpa's cookie recommendations

Cookie of the Month - First American Cookies

Yesterday, Matt and I took a super-fun field trip to Old Sturbridge Village, an 1830s re-enactment town about 50 miles southwest of Boston.  We went for my new favorite holiday, Tomato Day, where heirloom tomato plants are given to visitors as part of the entrance fees.  Matt and I are newbie gardeners, but our garden is growing pretty well so far, so we figured we'd supplement it with a tomato plant.  Matt's not even big on tomatoes, but I love them enough for the both of us.  And they're free!  Ahh, America.  Unfortunately, when we got there, we were told at the door that they were out of tomato plants.  That was discouraging, but we had a great time exploring the village anyway.  While there, we saw re-enacters making shoes, carding wool, throwing pots, making barrels, printing leaflets, forging iron, and making candles, as well as an old-fashioned baseball demonstration (they run to third base first!  What is that about?!).  Maybe most fascinating was the hearth cooking re-enactment with a woman baking bread and a pumpkin pie from dehydrated pumpkin, as well as making soup with dumplings.  Keep in mind that it was about 80 degrees out yesterday, and she was wearing a full 1830s respectable woman outfit - including long sleeves and a bonnet.
  

Old-timey Cooking - Brownies

I've been looking forward to making the Palmer House brownies since I made brownies the last time (which you can read about here).  Now, my brownie recipe is pretty different from the Palmer House one.  All the basic ingredients are there - chocolate, flour, sugar, butter, eggs - but the Palmer House recipe uses more of everything.  I mean a lot more.  For the same size pan.  This is madness, I tell you, sheer madness! 

I sprung for some of the good stuff.

Old-timey Cooking - Shrewsbury Cakes

Alright, friends, today is the day.  After all this research-cum-procrastination, today is the day I conduct my first old-timey cooking experiment from American Cookery.  Picking a recipe wasn't that straightforward - I don't eat a lot of meat, and even if I did, I'm not quite up to the task of something like Dreffing a Calves Head, Turtle Fafhion.  I'm not even really sure what that means, but anything that involves me messing around with a cow's brain is not going to happen (and especially not with the recent reports of mad cow disease in California).  So that cut out a lot of recipes right there.  Not the cow brains, per se, but the meat in general.

Another gratuitous shot of the flowers from Matt.  Not like I'm bragging.

Of the baking recipes, I don't have the leavener needed for her cookies and many of her breads.  This is a solvable problem, but I haven't yet solved it.  For the cookies, Amelia uses pearl ash to create carbon dioxide in her recipes, thus getting a rise out of her cookies and cakes.  Pearl ash was an early precursor to the baking soda and baking powder we use today, but the chemical properties of it are different so substituting baking soda in Amelia's recipes won't quite do the trick.  For her other bread recipes, Amelia calls for something called "emptins" as the leavener.  She also describes how to make emptins: Take a handful of hops and about three quarts of water, let it boil about fifteen minutes, then make a thickening as you do for ftarch, ftrain the liquor, when cold put a little emptins to work them, they will keep well cork'd in a bottle five or fix weeks."  Since Matt's semester is over, I think he'll start brewing again, so the next time we go to the brewery supply store I can pick up some extra hops to make the emptins.  But until then, I have neither pearl ash nor emptins.  Many other early recipes call for beating by hand "for an hour" to incorporate air into the batter.  Unsurprisingly, that is not appealing.