What could be better than owning an electric refrigerator in the (probably) late 1920s or early1930s? 52 Recipes for Frozen Delicacies (from Copeland Dependable Electric Refrigeration) suggests the answer is having a new recipe for a frozen delicacy for each week of the year.
There's a lot of fairly standard stuff in this booklet, like lemon sherbet or chocolate mousse. Still, a few of the offerings caught my attention.
For instance, while I see a LOT of gelatin recipes, they are rarely minty.
I think this Old-Fashioned Peppermint Delight would be better than Jell-O full of Grape Nuts and dried fruit or black cherries and olives.
As someone who often cooks my food until it's just this side of being burned because I like the hint of smoke, I was happy to see a recipe with "burnt" right in the title.
And the almonds aren't actually charcoal-- just roasted until "very dark brown." Sounds perfect to me!
I'm not quite so sold on the Russian Tea Ice Cubes, though.
It's not that uncommon to see recommendations to freeze fruit juices into ice cubes as a way to avoid watering down cold drinks, but the thought of potentially finding whole cloves floating in a beverage once they've been liberated from their icy home? Not so appealing.... And I can only imagine what Lace maker would have to say about potentially encountering a maraschino cherry in some tea!
But hey-- the inclusions in the ice cubes can really remind your guests that you have a fancy electric freezer, just in case they didn't notice that the cubes were composed of fruit juice. Part of the point of owning one of these is showing off, right?
I'm just glad I can lazily stock my freezer with vegetarian "chicken" and frozen veggies and call it a day, without having to make any frozen confections to show off that I have a freezer. Nobody would be impressed now anyway!
I'm still trying to figure out what is Russian about those ice cubes. If memory serves, Russian tea is smoked black tea. I'm not aware of any region in Russia that produces oranges, lemons, or cloves. The maraschino cherries sound like a precursor to bubble tea, so maybe the writer spilled some in her tea once and decided to go with it.
ReplyDeleteI also like how they indicate to use thoroughly frozen ice cubes. Do other recipes recommend half frozen ones?
Old cookbooks sometimes have a "Russian" drink recipe that's mostly lemon- and/or orange-ade (usually from a powdered drink mix) and some spices-- often with tea as a base. (I posted a non-tea version a long time ago at https://granniepantries.blogspot.com/2017/12/this-might-be-mixtake.html). I never thought about how it got its name, but "Garden & Gun" (interesting magazine title! https://gardenandgun.com/recipe/the-souths-other-favorite-tea/) claims it "dates back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when American urbanites sipped black tea with lemon and sugar in imitation of upper-class Russians."
DeleteSo it's classy! Like owning a freezer. And using fully-frozen ice cubes.
Maybe the cloves were there to prevent unseemly drink slurping in front of company?
ReplyDeleteAlso, I know this book is a lot more recent than the ones you write about, but I was stunned at how many of the recipes in it looked like they'd be right at home: https://archive.org/details/waspcookbook00went/mode/2up?view=theater
Now I've got another book to put in my Internet Archive favorites! Right next to "The Woman Doctor's Diet for Women," "Gluten: The Economical Meat Substitute," "Deadly Thrills" (Not a cookbook! I have other interests too...), and "Help Lord-- The Devil Wants Me Fat!"
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