Pieathalon 8! Tarte au Petit Suisse

Grab those forks, it's time for pie!

To recap the rules of Pieathalon:

1) You choose a vintage recipe and send it in
2) You receive a vintage recipe submitted by someone else
3) You make that recipe
4) You post about your experience

My contribution to Pieathalon was a Farm Boy family favorite, Osgood Pie. I was trying to play nice this year, so hopefully the recipient likes pies with nuts and raisins! 

My pie to bake comes from battenburgbelle at  Kitchen Confidence.  The recipe, La Tarte au Petit Suisse, comes from French Country Cooking by Elizabeth David, originally published in 1951 and still in print as recently as 2013.  After reading reviews online and trying this recipe, I am sorely tempted to buy a copy for myself.  Because I need another cookbook!

I like the cute cover illustration!

Pie pastry is my culinary nemesis, mostly because I get such inconsistent results.  I considered using a refrigerated pie crust, but since this recipe included a recipe for the crust (or paste) and I was feeling brave, I decided to give it a go.  I did have a purchased pie crust in the refrigerator (along with a beer), just in case things went sideways. 

The recipe calls for blind baking the pastry and recommends keeping a jar of dried beans on hand to use as weights for this purpose.  As it happens, I have been using the same old pinto beans for years, although mine are in a plastic bag, not a nice jar.  Farm Boy is of the opinion that they are still edible, but I have serious doubts about that.

Some very well-baked beans

Ta-da!  Blind baked and ready for the filling.

The recipe calls for Petit Suisse cheese, which I could not find.  Some Google searching suggested that I could substitute cream cheese thinned with a little milk.  I chose to use buttermilk, to add a little more flavor.  I also used orange zest in place of the orange flower water, as suggested in the recipe.

The filling, before adding the beaten egg whites

It took significantly longer to bake than the 15 to 20 minutes listed in the recipe.  I would say it was closer to 40 minutes before it started developing some browned bits on the top.  By the end, it had puffed up dramatically and smelled divine!

It smelled soooo good!

The puffiness didn't last long, though. By serving time, it was much thinner.

Pie baking day was also Serafina's birthday, or rather her found day.  She was found as a 3 week old kitten in someone's yard.  Our vet's office apparently keeps a list of gullible people and immediately called us.  How could we say no to this face?

I showed her the pie and sang happy birthday to her.  She was not impressed.  For all that floofiness, she can be a harsh critic sometimes.

Please stop, Mom.

By serving time, the pie was really thin, but great googley-moogley it was good!  It is lightly sweet, really creamy, with just a hint of orange, but the crust is what really makes it.  It is completely different than a normal pie crust.  It is thin and crunchy, reminiscent of a Norwegian krumkake or a pizzelle. 

 

Yum!

All of the taste testers liked this pie, including Queen Lily.  I gave her a tiny bit first, then had to eat the rest of my piece while holding her back with one arm.  Someone around here has taught her some bad habits.

Give me all the pie!

That is mine!

Thanks to Yinzerella at Dinner is Served 1972 for another fun Pieathalon! 

You can read about all the other fabulous Pieathalon pies at the links below:

Osgood Pie at A Book of Cookrye

Chocolate-Crusted Coffee Pie at Grannie Pantries

Tarte a l’Orange at Recipes 4 Rebels

Surprise Fudge Pie at Silver Screen Suppers

Rum and Butterscotch Pie at Vintage Recipe Cards

Save Your Marriage Meat Pie at Dr. Bobb's Kitschen 

Ozark Pie at Retro Food for Modern Times

Mahogany Pie at Dinner is Served 1972

 

Strawberry Ice Cream from The Boston Cooking School Cook Book, 1942

After watching a video about making strawberry ice cream, I decided that I must have some!  I'm not a big fan of most commercial (aka, artificially flavored) strawberry ice cream, but homemade ice cream with real strawberries is one of my favorite things.

The Boston Cooking School Cook Book, 1942

I opened this book first and was happy to see a really simple recipe.  I decided I didn't desire the egg whites, so I left them out.  I also misread the instructions and mashed the berries with the sugar at the first.  Since they released their juices so quickly, I only let it stand for about 30 minutes.

Oooh, the mashed, sweetened strawberries smell good!

Starting to freeze!

I would say this recipe makes significantly more than one quart.  My ice cream maker was almost full and I believe it has a two quart capacity.  It was still really soft, so we froze it in a container for a couple of hours.  Even then, it was softer than Farm Boy likes, but I thought it was just right for homemade ice cream.

Final result?  Delicious!  There is no vanilla to compete with the strawberries, so it is a full-on strawberry flavor.  After two hours in the freezer, it was the consistency of a soft-serve custard.  By the next night, however, it was rock hard, and the strawberries were little icicles that froze my teeth.  So I would recommend letting it sit out for a bit to soften slightly, if you're trying to keep it for more than one day.  

Variety Corn-Cake

This little book has been in the bookshelf for a while, but hasn't had much - if any - use.  I told Farm Boy that he could help it earn its keep by choosing between two recipes: Sweet Potato Biscuit and Variety Corn-Cake.  

Fortunately for me, he chose Variety Corn-Cake.  I say 'fortunately' because after reading through the biscuit recipe, it seemed like kind of a pain to make.  

Variety, as it turns out, means coconut (and a boatload of baking powder). As I've said before, I am all about the coconut, so I was excited to try this.  Reading through the recipe, it seemed like a pretty standard cornbread recipe, except it is fairly sweet and contains no eggs.  

My slight deviations from the recipe: I used unsweetened coconut and baked it in an 8" cast iron skillet, (a #6 Wagner).  I also placed the pan in the oven while it was heating.  Just before baking, I added about a tablespoon of butter to the pan to melt before pouring in the batter.  This makes for some crusty goodness.

So let me just explain the greige-ness of the following photos...  The last time I purchased cornmeal, my choices were a blue cornmeal milled and packaged by a local company or a yellow cornmeal that is labeled as "medium grind" that I know from past experience is really better suited for use as concrete aggregate than for eating.  So I chose blue.  And let me tell you, it is the best tasting cornmeal I have ever had!  It has a really nice, intense corn flavor and is much softer than the gravel yellow cornmeal.  But I haven't quite adapted to the color.

Okay, this one isn't too greige.

There's some definite greige going on here.

I had some concern that it would be a crumbly mess without the egg, but while it is slightly more crumbly than a standard cornmeal, the overall texture is very light and fluffy.  The flavor of the unsweetened coconut really came through.  I think a sweetened coconut would be too much, although you might be able to cut the sugar a bit, if that's all you had.  I also now think you could add some sugar and coconut to any regular cornbread recipe and get something pretty tasty.  

Farm Boy and I both really liked this.  It was good warm, cold and even waffled!  With lots of butter and honey, of course.  We will definitely have this one again.

Mmmm, waffled Corn Cake!  And look, it's less greige!

Popovers from Any one can Bake, 1929

Apparently the Canadian weather decided to take a vacation here in Texas!  We had around 8" of snow, followed by several inches of sleet/freezing rain and several days of below freezing, all the way down to -1F one morning.  I know that a lot of the world deals with this every winter, but in this part of Texas we don't.  Normally we get maybe one snow per year.  We shut everything down, ooh and ahhh for a day, then it melts by late afternoon.  This snow/ice combo overstayed its welcome!

Brrrrr!

We were fortunate that we didn't lose electricity or water, like so many people did.  And we were very happy that one of the extras we decided on when we built this house was a wood-burning stove.  The cats were also pretty happy about that choice during all this!

Gil and his adorable toe beans!

Another thing we were happy about is that our Chambers stove uses propane.  We had just had the tank filled, so we were able to cook without worrying about using too much electricity.  And as cold as it was, I was looking for any excuse to turn on the oven.  

One one of the coldest evenings, I was making some soup and looking for something to go with it.  I pried this gem, Any one can Bake by the Royal Baking Powder Co. (1929) out of the overstuffed bookshelf and spotted the recipe for popovers, which start with the oven at 450F.  Yes, sign me up!

I don't remember how I acquired this book, but I do remember thinking that for an older book, the quality seems to be really high - glossy paper for the pages, a lot of (charming) color illustrations.  The outside of my particular copy has taken a beating, but the pages are pristine.  

Popovers!

The Green Corn Gems sound interesting

I'll be trying that Cocoa Bread one of these days

I had exactly 1/2 cup of whole wheat flour left, so I opted for the whole wheat version mentioned below the recipe.  I don't think I have ever had popovers before, so I don't have a basis for comparison, but I liked these.  I am guessing that the whole wheat flour made them a little more dense than usual, but Farm Boy and I liked them.  

The recipe says it makes six popovers, but it filled nine of the eleven cups (11?  why 11??) of my cast iron muffin pan.  I wasn't sure how full I could fill them without the batter running over, but I think I could have gone a little higher.  

So warm!

This is the first recipe I have tried from this book.  Since we were pleased with the results and there are quite a few other recipes that look promising, it will be bringing it out again.

Hedge Hogs

This little cookbook, Our Favorite Recipes by the Abilene School Food Service Association, belonged to my mother-in-law.  Since her mother-in-law was a teacher in Abilene at one time, I'm guessing that's who originally gave it to her, but there is nothing to note that.  Nor does it have a date or an explanation of why it was published.  It only contains 64 pages, but it's made of a stiff, highly textured paper that makes it hard to open.  The outside cover is stained, but the inside pages are pristine, so I don't think it saw a lot of use.

No date listed, but maybe late 1950s/early 1960s?

I was in the mood to bake something the other day, but not in the mood to put a lot of effort into it.  After flipping through a few other cookbooks, I pulled this one out and found something that suited my needs: Hedge Hogs by Mrs. Cliff Landers.

There is a food grinder somewhere in this house, but it seemed like a food processor would work just fine and would also let me make it in one container.  Yay for even less effort!  

Not the most beautiful cookies, but tasty!

Mine look more like feral hogs than hedgehogs, but they are quite nice in flavor and texture.  They are dense and chewy, somewhere between an energy bar and candy, flavored strongly of dates and brown sugar with a hint of coconut.  I gave my sister a few and she asked for the recipe and baked her own batch the next day, so I would say this is a keeper of a recipe!

 

Scotch Apple Pie

I first made this pie a little over four years ago.  We really liked it, so of course I promptly forgot which cookbook it was in.  I had shared a photo of it, so it popped up in my memories every year, punishing me for my forgetfulness.  However, a few days ago I was going through some old photos and saw not only the picture of the pie, but a picture of the recipe and the cookbook, too.  Hooray!

 

Talk About Good! by the Junior League of Lafayette, Lousiana

I found this cookbook at an antique store several years ago.  I picked up up, carried it around, put it back, left, drove back the next day and bought it.  My copy is the 1967 edition (printed in 1971), but according to the Junior League of Lafayette's website, it is still in print and available for purchase more than 50 years later!

Farm Boy was a little disappointed that no scotch whisky was involved

Rule #1 of baking: make sure to spill some flour!

Thermobaker instructions

Because I am a Chambers nerd, I chose to bake it in the Thermobaker in the Thermowell.  With the well preheated for a few minutes, you can bake an 8" pie with about 15 minutes of gas, then 30 to 40 minutes of retained heat cooking.  Have I ever mentioned that I adore this stove?  Oh, I have?  Sorry!  

It smelled divine while baking!

I was too impatient to wait for it to cool, so my servings were not very photogenic, but it was as tasty as I remembered!  I would say it's closer to a crisp or a cobbler than a pie, since there is no bottom crust.  It is fairly sweet, too, so perhaps the sugar could be cut back a bit or maybe serve it with whipped cream to buffer it a little.  But the combination of the crunchy brown sugar topping and the clear apple flavor of the filling really work well together, so I will be making this again in the future now that I have rediscovered the recipe.

Lemon Pie - Reliable for the 7th Annual Pieathalon!

 

That's right, boys and girls, it's pie time again!

To recap the rules of Pieathalon:

1) You choose a vintage recipe and send it in
2) You receive a vintage recipe submitted by someone else
3) You make that recipe
4) You post about your experience

Last year I was feeling all kind and benevolent and sent in Honey Cream Cheese Pie as my submission.  For 2020 I have reverted back to my normal state and am waiting with baited breath to see the results of Avocado Lime Pie.  Lime gelatin, pineapple, avocado and cream cheese.  Heh heh heh.

Fortunately for me, Camilla from Culinary Adventures with Camilla is less evil than I am.  She chose Lemon Pie - Reliable from the 1908 Washington Women's Cook Book and even sent a slightly updated version (with modern instructions) from the new book about women's suffrage, All Stirred Up by Laura Kumin.  I've already added it to my "books to read" list.

Based on the instructions from All Stirred Up, I added more lemon juice (3 small lemons) and an extra egg, along with a bit of salt.  I'm pretty sure this is the first lemon meringue pie I have ever made and I was surprised at how easy it was and how firmly it set up. 

Hey, that's not too shabby!

For the taste test the only human participants this year were Farm Boy and myself.  We both thought it was quite nice.  It has a pleasant lemon flavor which we thought was even more pronounced the second day. 

Gil, our resident orangey, decided that he wanted to represent the felines this time around.  Alas, it turns out that he is not a fan of citrus.

"Why?  WHY???"

Rejected lemon filling and a harrumph.

It was great fun to be able to participate in another Pieathalon.  Thanks to Yinzerella at Dinner is Served 1972 for organizing this once again! 

Now go check out the rest of the pies!

Yinzerella at Dinner is Served 1972 is making Betty Crocker Sombrero Pie

Camilla at Culinary Adventures with Camilla with Lattice Pineapple Pie

Dr. Bobb at Dr. Bobb's Kitschen tries out Empenada Mariscona

Kelly from Velveteen Lounge makes Chocolate Mint Prune Pie

Battenburg Belle of Kitchen Confidence with Sour Cream Apricot Pie

SS of A Book of Cookrye and Honey Fruit Pie

Jenny of Silver Screen Suppers makes the intriguing Party Pink Pie

Wendy from A Day in the Life on the Farm tries Cherry Blossom Pie

Surly from Vintage Recipe Cards gives Crumb Pie a try

Taryn of Retro Food for Modern Times with Easy as Pie Chicken Salad

Poppy Crocker of Grannie Pantries drew the short straw with my Avocado Lime Pie

Judy of Book Club Cookbook tests Pumpkin Pie with a Secret

and Greg of Recipes4Rebels gives Apple Crumb Pie a whirl