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Favorite Dishes in Famous Homes: Yolks
1/2 cupful sugar, 1 tablespoonful c o r n s t a r c h (scant), Filling Yolks 3 eggs, cupful sugar, 1 cupful milk, 1 tablespoonful (scant). cornstarch Heat milk in a double boiler, add eggs and cornstarch, cook till it thickens, add pinch of salt and any flavoring desired, and put between layers of cake.
From Mrs. A. C. Shallenberger, wife of Governor of Nebraska.
Amber Cream. 1 quart milk, package gelatin, 1 cupful sugar, Yolks 6 eggs, Whites 6 eggs, 1 teaspoonful vanilla.
Dissolve gelatin in a little cold water, let milk come to boiling point and melt gelatin in it. Add sugar and well-beaten yolks of eggs, stirring constantly till well blended, cook in a double boiler till it thickens, then turn in whites of eggs whipped to a stiff froth. Flavor with vanilla. Pour into cups or a fancy mold and set in a cold place over night. When ready to MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK serve, turn out on a plate or sauce Almond Cream. dish.
From Mrs. John F. Shafroth, wife of Governor of Colorado.
Cucumber Mangoes (Prize recipe).
Soak in strong brine nine days as many large green cucumbers as you wish to use. Then lay them fortyeight hours in clear water. Cut a slit lengthwise in each, scoop out seeds, wipe dry and fill with stoned raisins, lemon cut in long, thin strips, and 6 or 8 whole cloves. Sew up slit, pack cucumbers in a stone jar and cover with a boiling sirup made after following recipe: Add to 1 quart vinegar 5 pounds sugar, also mace, cinnamon, and cloves to taste. Reheat sirup and pour boiling hot over cucumbers for nine successive mornings. From Mrs. J. S. Sanders, wife of Governor of Louisiana.
Strawberry Ambrosia.
Select large, ripe strawberries. Arrange in a glass bowl with alternate layers coarsely chopped pineapple.
Sprinkle between layers plenty of powdered sugar and freshly grated cocoanut, then pour over top 1 cupful orange juice. Set on ice, and serve very cold.
From Mrs. M. R. Patterson, wife of Governor of Tennessee.
Four separate contributions from governors' wives, printed one after another with a stray line of running head ("MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK Almond Cream.") caught in the middle. Two of the four are straightforward; two cannot be recommended as written, and the notes below say why.
- Amber Cream: the uncooked whitesThe custard base is cooked, but six stiffly beaten egg whites are folded in afterward and the mold only chilled overnight. Nothing in the finished dish reaches a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and the residual heat of a thickened custard folded into a large volume of foam is not sufficient. Use a current recipe if you want a gelatin cream of this type.
- Cucumber Mangoes: unmeasured brine, unsealed jarNine days in "strong brine" gives no salt concentration, the stone jar is never sealed, and the syrup is simply reheated and poured over for nine mornings — a nineteenth-century open-kettle method with no processing time, no headspace and no acidity check. Household vinegar of the period was also not standardized at today's 5 percent. Follow a tested modern pickle recipe instead.
- "Mangoes" means stuffed picklesNo mango fruit is involved. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries "to mango" meant to hollow, stuff and pickle a vegetable in imitation of imported pickled mangoes; melons, muskmelons and green cucumbers were all mangoed.
- Filling: the method is out of orderAs printed, the egg yolks and cornstarch go into hot milk together. Slake the cornstarch in a little of the cold milk and temper the beaten yolks with hot milk before returning them to the pan, or the yolks will scramble in threads. Cook to a full boil for a minute so the starch loses its raw taste, then cool before spreading.
- Filling quantityThree yolks, one cup milk and a scant tablespoon cornstarch make roughly 1 1/2 cups of thick filling — about enough between two 8- or 9-inch layers.
- "Package gelatin"Package sizes were not standardized at this date; contemporary cookbooks calling for a fraction of a box of granulated gelatine generally work out to appreciably more than one of today's 1/4-ounce envelopes. A quart of milk set with a single modern envelope will not hold a mold.
- Strawberry AmbrosiaQuantities are left to the cook throughout except the cup of orange juice. On the coconut, "freshly grated" means unsweetened, and the sweetened flaked kind sold today will make the dish cloying alongside the powdered sugar. Assemble within an hour of serving; the sugar draws juice from the berries and the layers slump.
- Set on iceIn these households that meant the icebox or a bowl nested in cracked ice, not a freezer. Refrigerator temperature is what is wanted for both the Ambrosia and the molded cream.
Favorite Dishes in Famous Homes is the heading of a section rather than, on this evidence, a freestanding volume: the running head caught in the middle of the page reads "MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK." It belongs to a genre that flourished around the turn of the twentieth century: the celebrity-contributor cookbook, in which recipes were solicited from the wives of governors, senators and mayors and printed with the office named as guarantee of respectability. The names here place the collection in 1909–1911 — Ashton C. Shallenberger governed Nebraska, John F. Shafroth Colorado, Jared Y. Sanders Louisiana and Malcolm R. Patterson Tennessee, and those are the years in which all four terms overlap. The four dishes are a cornstarch-thickened cake filling, a gelatin cream, a fruit ambrosia and a stuffed sweet pickle, three of them relying on ingredients that had become cheap and reliable at the grocer's in the preceding decades — packaged granulated gelatin, cornstarch, and shipped pineapple and coconut.