Volunteer to Transcribe Menus for the New York Public Library

I've been on a long hiatus of late, but I've not stopped thinking about bygone food.

The New York Public Library is looking for volunteers to transcribe thousands of historical restaurant menus. The team intends to digitize the menus as well, but older handwriting styles and fanciful typefaces make it difficult for those conducting research in the collection--historians, novelists, and everyday people who want to know about old menus--to search the texts for key terms.

Sign on. Think of all the menus you'll get to see.

Cocke 'n Kettle

Some are trapped in the '70s, but it takes a lot of talent to embody both the 1970s and the 1770s. The old Cocke 'n Kettle restaurant in Uxbridge, Massachusetts managed to keep its feet in both of those decades.

A fixture in the Blackstone Valley for almost forty years, the Cocke 'n Kettle closed in 2008. Before that happened, however, people came for the famous popovers and the plentiful hors d'ouevres in the cocktail lounge.

You might say that the Cocke 'n Kettle attracted an older, less-than-hip clientele. My fondest memory of the restaurant is watching my great-aunt dance in the lounge at her sister's seventy-fifth birthday party in 1995. That was the only time in my life I ever indulged in a Southern Comfort Manhattan, a drink that you did not (and do not) see among the 21-34 year-old set in greater Providence or Boston.

Yet I prefer to think that the fans of the Cocke 'n Kettle simply appreciated being treated well. The hors d'ourvres in the lounge or the corn fritters at the dinner table were signs that the restaurant respected its patrons and wanted them to leave satisfied and happy. The Sampsons really looked upon customers as welcome guests in their home.

The interior of the Cocke 'n Kettle reinforced that feeling. In many ways the Cocke 'n Kettle was like an actual home. Part of the restaurant was a colonial-era mansion. Visitors took advantage of dining in all the house's various and distinctive rooms.

But people didn't come just to eat in an old farm building. The decor of the Cocke 'n Kettle, which constituted a much appreciated and very specific kind of colonial revival, reinforced new ideas about what it meant to go out to eat. The Cocke 'n Kettle did not re-create the building's past so much as it exemplified an early-1970s interpretation of how to celebrate the colonial period while accommodating the social mores of a society that was becoming increasingly less formal.

In the rooms of the Cocke 'n Kettle you saw two revolutions: the American Revolution and the social revolution of the 1960s/1970s. The dark woods and studded leather chairs spoke to what the owners imagined to be the more rustic or simpler ideals of the colonial and Revolutionary periods. Yet those same wood beams and chairs also provided patrons with a homey feel that allowed them a special night out that was neither stuffy nor overly formal. In harkening to the image of an older New England, the Cocke 'n Kettle created an atmosphere that facilitated the easy yet tasteful socializing that men and women desired in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I've no doubt in my mind that the combined effects of low lighting, dark leather, and British plaid in the lounge gave many the necessary courage to meet new friends or to chat up potential dates. (The short skirts sported by the young waitresses probably didn't hurt either. Today, you just don't find such "clean cut little beavers" eager "to add to your gourmet entertainment." Well, not in a place you could bring your parents anyway.)


The decor and the menu never really changed. I like to think that faithful customers appreciated that they could return to this little reminder of the sense of social change or freedom they were feeling when the Sampson family established the Cocke 'n Kettle in 1971.

I am fortunate to have a flyer that was probably printed around the time the restaurant opened as the Cocke 'n Kettle. Actually, I have two copies. My grandmother and my great-aunt, for whatever reason, both saved them. I hope the photos from the flyer help to illustrate my point.

Election Day Cake (by way of New England Folklore)

I must make Election Day Cake. Thank you New England Folklore for sharing the recipe and the story behind the cake. Readers, please check out the post.

Apple Knobby Cake

Last weekend we went apple picking at Thompson's Orchard in New Gloucester, Maine and wound up with forty pounds of Cortlands and McIntoshes. I've been trying to figure out how we let that happen. In my defense, I only had one cider doughnut at Thompson's, which should speak to the fact that I have some capacity for self control. I just don't know what forty pounds of apples in two bags feels like. Thompson's is also unique for passing out pronged, lacrosse-stick-like apple pickers. That made it much easier to get many, many apples from the high branches.

Yeah, I'll blame a pronged lacrosse stick.

As one with forty pounds of apples is want to do, I have spent a lot time eating apples, incorporating apples into oatmeal, juicing apples, inquiring about how to make hard cider, making applesauce, thinking about what kind of apple pie to make, and, finally, baking Aunt Harriet's recipe for Apple Knobby Cake.

This cake was apparently once, or maybe still is, popular. I had never heard of it before and I expect that I'm perhaps in the minority. I have found versions of the recipe on the web. The Boston Globe printed a story with a similar recipe as recently as 2008. The Brattleboro Reformer out of Brattleboro, Vermont ran a story on Apple Knobby Cake just a little over a week ago. You can even have it in the dining hall at the University of Massachusettts, Amherst. It looks like a New England food and, perhaps, has origins in England.

I guess it turns out that not all of my great-grandmother's or great-aunt's recipes are thoroughly bygone.

I'm a bit stumped as to the cake's exact origins though. None of the digging I've done online or in books has turned up much of anything. Surely if so many people still eat it, maybe one person might be able to enlighten me as to where or when this cake began.

Aunt Harriet probably got this recipe in the 1970s or 1980s. My scanned copy is not great, but the original definitely went through a ditto machine and I haven't had the pleasure of smelling ditto-machine ink since I was in elementary school. (It turns out that it took a lot of alcohol to make those copies, which may explain why all my elementary-school classmates were just a little addicted to ditto.) Maybe a school-teacher friend passed it along to Harriet. I'll have to do a bit more snooping if I've ever to know.

What I do know is that this cake is really simple to make and that it's wonderfully moist and sweet with a crispy, cookie-like crust. I've made it twice now and will probably make it one more time. Do peel the apples and don't forget to add the vanilla.

A photo of the Apple Knobby Cake right before it went into the oven.

A small fraction of our apple haul.

Baked Apple Knobby Cake cooling on the table.

Ginger Creams

I love making a hit with men! But who knew I could do that with so little sugar or shortening?

This recipe (click on the image to enlarge it) comes from a World War II-era Betty Crocker flier that I found along with the 1908 Lowney’s Cookbook. The small celebration of how little sugar and shortening it takes to make these cookies likely stemmed from the 1942 Food Rationing Program. Sugar rationing began in 1943, which probably means this recipe was published in that year or in 1944.

Butter rationing must have had practical results when it came to sending cookies to distant lands. Less butter in a cookie makes it ideal for shipping overseas. The more fat there is in a baked good, the more quickly it hardens. These pillowy ginger creams, with only one quarter of a cup (!) of butter across four-dozen cookies, likely arrived in the hands of soldiers in Europe or the Pacific still light and fluffy.

Send these to someone you know in the military. Make a hit with men and women! Or, do what I did. I sent them to my old office and made a hit with dieters.

Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins

The story of the demise of Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins is no secret. The company that is now Macy's bought Jordan Marsh, Jordan Marsh became Macy's, and the experience of going to Downtown Crossing in Boston for a shoe sale and a sugar-encrusted blueberry muffin at the flagship store was no more.

Yet that's not the story I want to focus on here. Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins were bigger than Downtown Crossing. Even if you could get the recipe at the department store, many of the muffins were consumed in the suburbs or in distant towns. They were gobbled up not just in Jordan Marsh stores but also at social gatherings where one woman brought other women the muffins fresh out of her own oven.

I always thought of Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins as indicative of how female social networks operated.

But that's over now and the Internet, not Macy's, is to blame.

I cannot help but recognize the irony in posting my Great-Aunt Harriet's prized Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins recipe on the Internet. Before the web you had to really fight for this recipe. You had to gain the confidence of the woman who baked the muffins and brought them to your workplace. You needed to suck up to your friend's muffin-toting future mother-in-law as women gathered round for terribly silly games and a little bridal-shower breakfasting.

To possess the recipe for Jordan Marsh Muffins was once a sign that you had made it in certain social circles. Far more than a piece of paper in a recipe box, it said you had unique charms and a master's degree in flattery.

But who needs to demonstrate social cunning when the internet just gives away your ticket to having the best muffins at so-and-so's baby shower?

I remember being instructed never to share this recipe with anyone. Now I'm posting it among the hundreds of other Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins recipes on the web. Not only is Jordan Marsh gone, so too is any reason to beg your sister or cajole a secretary for the muffin recipe.

At least the muffins I baked this morning tasted as good as I remembered.

Indian Pudding(s)

"Indian pudding?" my incredulous mother asked me.

"Yes, Indian pudding. You've heard of it," I insisted. "They serve it at Durgin-Park."

"Oh, of course, Indian pudding."

Indian pudding is one of those traditional New England dishes that you never see save for at Durgin-Park, where tourists eat more New England fare in one sitting than the average New Englander eats in a lifetime.

I have to admit that until this week I had never so much as seen Indian pudding. All the more reason for me to try making the Indian pudding recipe I found stashed away in my great-grandmother's cookbook. I was, however, somewhat surprised to see that the list of ingredients contained tapioca. That didn't seem right to me. So, I found a recipe for Durgin-Park's version of Indian pudding, located in the Boston Globe Cookbook, 4th edition. I discovered that its Indian pudding not only contained no tapioca but also required a lot more cornmeal. A full cup of it in comparison to 2 tablespoons.

Suddenly Indian pudding with tapioca wasn't looking so good to me.

You have to think that Indian pudding with less "Indian" wouldn't work. (It's called Indian pudding because of the cornmeal. British colonists applied the term "Indian corn" to that which we in North American call corn to distinguish Native Americans' corn from corn found in Britain, which described anything from wheat to flour. That British corn is not to be confused with the British fungal concoction called "quorn," which is pronounced like corn and, while I was studying abroad in England, resulted in a dining experience so confusing that it made the old "Who's-on-first" routine seem as simple as a power-point presentation.)

Mrs. Ralph Foss, or Anna as her friends knew her, was born in Canada around 1890 and emigrated to the United States in 1908. Her husband was a physician in Peabody, Massachusetts. Why she preferred tapioca I do not know. I thought that perhaps she submitted the recipe during a corn shortage or a tapioca surplus. Yet without knowing when she offered her Indian pudding recipe to a newspaper, I had no luck determining if my theory panned out. Perhaps she just liked tapioca. Or, she knew tapioca can stand up to hours of cooking time and figured she'd see how it would do in an Indian pudding.

Whatever her reasoning, tapioca in Indian pudding works. In fact, save for the Foss version's tasting not as strong of molasses and being a tad more moist than Durgin-Park's Indian pudding, I couldn't find much difference between them.

The Durkin-Park recipe also came sans ginger or cinnamon. I have since learned that adding such spices, or dried fruit for that matter, to Indian pudding is not all that strange. Thanks to a fabulous book called America's Founding Food: the Story of New England Cooking, I now know that there are many, many, many versions of Indian pudding. All or most seem to contain molasses, the kitchen staple that until recently sat in the back of my cupboard for years and years without so much as a pity glance from me.

Anna Foss's Indian pudding with tapioca (yeah, hard to believe the folks at Martha Stewart Living Magazine aren't knocking down my door with offers to be their food photographer)

The Durgin-Park/Boston Globe Cookbook Indian pudding (let the record show that someone other than myself took this photo)