Monthly Archives: December 2012

Mincemeat Pies

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At this very moment I am diving into a tiny mincemeat piece of deliciousness made with love by my friend Jan Riley.  It would have been more than enough to enjoy lunch with her and David yesterday at our usual spot but in she came with this Christmas goodie straight out of her past and mine.

My father loved mincemeat pies and my mother could make a pretty good one albeit with None Such Mincemeat filling.  It was a bit foreign to the Italian side of things at our house but my father, or should I say his parents, being Scottish was quite familiar with the savory/sweet deliciousness.  He pretty much had the entire pie to himself until we eventually caught on.

The recipe for these little tarts comes straight out of Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management.  This indispensable handbook of many a newly married woman was originally published back in 1861.  Jan and I have had, and continue to have, quite the laugh about this book whenever we mention it.

Mrs. Beeton from the preface:  I must frankly own, that if I had known, beforehand, that this book would have cost me the labour which it has, I should never have been courageous enough to commence it. What moved me, in the first instance, to attempt a work like this, was the discomfort and suffering which I had seen brought upon men and women by household mismanagement. I have always thought that there is no more fruitful source of family discontent than a housewife’s badly-cooked dinners and untidy ways. Men are now so well served out of doors,—at their clubs, well-ordered taverns, and dining-houses, that in order to compete with the attractions of these places, a mistress must be thoroughly acquainted with the theory and practice of cookery, as well as be perfectly conversant with all the other arts of making and keeping a comfortable home.

Yeah.  Right.  That said it is still indispensable today and while the domestic side of running a home has changed dramatically the recipes are as contemporary as they’ve always been.  And Jan and her legacy would be lost without them.  This little taste of what my grandparents must have enjoyed back in Scotland and this little moment of “coffee and..” with my father is making an otherwise cold, windy and grey day quite a bit brighter. The real gift, however, is the memory of my father and his heritage and the warmth my dear friend has provided.  Merry Christmas Jan.

So laugh if you must, from my internet copy (yes Mrs. Beeton has a website) of Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, Chapter 27, the recipe for “Excellent Mincemeat” and the delicious little pies.  I’ll need Jan to translate a few things…

EXCELLENT MINCEMEAT.1310. INGREDIENTS – 3 large lemons, 3 large apples, 1 lb. of stoned raisins, 1 lb. of currants, 1 lb. of suet, 2 lbs. of moist sugar, 1 oz. of sliced candied citron, 1 oz. of sliced candied orange-peel, and the same quantity of lemon-peel, 1 teacupful of brandy, 2 tablespoonfuls of orange marmalade.

Mode.—Grate the rinds of the lemons; squeeze out the juice, strain it, and boil the remainder of the lemons until tender enough to pulp or chop very finely. Then add to this pulp the apples, which should be baked, and their skins and cores removed; put in the remaining ingredients one by one, and, as they are added, mix everything very thoroughly together. Put the mincemeat into a stone jar with a closely-fitting lid, and in a fortnight it will be ready for use.

Seasonable.—This should be made the first or second week in December.

MINCE PIES.

1311. INGREDIENTS – Good puff-paste No. 1205, mincemeat No. 1309.

Mode.—Make some good puff-paste by recipe No. 1205; roll it out to the thickness of about 1/4 inch, and line some good-sized pattypans with it; fill them with mincemeat, cover with the paste, and cut it off all round close to the edge of the tin. Put the pies into a brisk oven, to draw the paste up, and bake for 25 minutes, or longer, should the pies be very large; brush them over with the white of an egg, beaten with the blade of a knife to a stiff froth; sprinkle over pounded sugar, and put them into the oven for a minute or two, to dry the egg; dish the pies on a white d’oyley, and serve hot. They may be merely sprinkled with pounded sugar instead of being glazed, when that mode is preferred. To re-warm them, put the pies on the pattypans, and let them remain in the oven for 10 minutes or 1/4 hour, and they will be almost as good as if freshly made.

Time.—25 to 30 minutes; 10 minutes to re-warm them.

Average cost, 4d. each.

Sufficient—1/2 lb. of paste for 4 pies. Seasonable at Christmas time.

 

 

Riley’s Year End Review

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The dogs start barking because our mailman is tossing a package up on the front porch.  Had I not heard the dogs barking I would never have known…UPS rings the bell and runs but our mailman does the close enough to the porch toss.

There it is, Christmas in a box from Amazon.  Done.  So if my package landed on my porch then there must be mail in my box.  Saddle up the girls and off we go for the evening walk and mail pickup.  There’s all the usual stuff and many many Christmas cards.  Somehow I always forget about the cards. I’ve long ago stopped sending them so it’s such a pleasant surprise to see them piled in the mail box.

There are all those wonderful greetings and good wishes and then there are the ones with the year in review letters.  Then there is the one in particular from my dear friends Jan and David Riley.  David’s been trying to pass the job along for years but there are no takers.  Partly because he keeps such a fabulous calendar through the year, I know because I provide it to him. But mostly because he is a wordsmith, a wonderful writer who can bring you through the year in all its joys and woes and come out the other side with gratitude and love.  He wants very much to be a curmudgeon but no one’s buying that either.  Well maybe Jan is.

When I see the typed page drop out of the card I immediately put it aside for savoring with my morning coffee.  I am lucky enough to see David and Jan regularly throughout the year, our lunches at Davies and dinners at one another’s homes always bring us to tears of laughter and enriches our friendship even more if that is possible.   But still, sitting down with David’s year end letter brings me back through the year with them and I enjoy every word, I can see every nuance, and yes I know like I know that this will indeed be grist for his “ordinary legacy”.

Twenty Five Dozen

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And so it begins, that time of year where I turn into the Little Red Hen asking who will help me make the cookies.  “Not I”, said…everybody.  Excuses from A to Z, but my very favorite is the “they don’t taste the same if we help” defense. Yeah yeah yeah.  The fact is I enjoy the cookie making escape.  I put on my favorite music, I get in the rhythm of the repetition, and the smell is intoxicating.

I begin with the sturdiest cookies.  The butter cookies come first, rich buttery vanilla flavors that melt in your mouth.  This is an old recipe that uses only the yolks of the eggs, rich bourbon vanilla, and powdered sugar instead of granulated.  It is luscious.  Made three weeks ahead of time; when it gets closer to Christmas I make them into sandwich cookies filled with Nutella.

The other sturdy cookie is the anisette cookies.  This recipe is from Nanny LoConti.  The boys usually get together each year to make them at the deli.  They use the huge stand mixer, the commercial ovens, and a gun formed from a calking kind of thing.  Obviously, I don’t have a deli, nor do I have a caulking gun kind of thing and I was lucky enough to escape with the recipe so I improvise.

The recipe had to be halved so that it would fit in my Kitchenaid stand mixer.  It’s a very solid dough so I use the bread hook. I once, and only once, tried to mix it with a normal paddle but the mixer was groaning and straining and just simply refused to move after a while.  Then I had to figure out the extruder kind of thing. Hmmm.

I am so damn clever some times.  I bought the sausage attachment for the mixer so instead of filling sausage I’m extruding the dough so I can form them into the signature braid-like shapes so easily recognized by my mother.   There is a knack to it, a rhythm, and a bit of dexterity required.  As the dough is extruded I measure it against the palm of my hand, clip it off with my finger and drop it on to a plate as I count them off by the dozen.  Once I’ve got a dozen, I twist them into the braid and place them on the sheet pan.  Get two pans done and into the oven they go.  But any number of things can happen in this little operation.  The strands can stick together on the plate, they can break on the sheet pan, and I can, and have, increased the mixer speed instead of turning it off.   That’s always fun, an I Love Lucy moment.

But all in all, the concentration takes your mind off of everything.  The music lurks in the background and the smell is like the best kind of aroma therapy the spa has to offer.  It is the Zen of Christmas.

I have containers especially for the zillion dozen cookies I make every year and a little mistake container for those who burst through the door (usually looking for their keys because they’ve locked themselves out) and stop in their tracks saying, “What is that smell?  What is happening here?”  As if they didn’t know.  Off they go with a bag of “mistakes” to enjoy later on, if they make it to later on.

I don’t know if everyone enjoys the cookies as much as I enjoy the process of making them. Little Red Hen be damned.  I don’t know if everyone knows where the recipes come from or that they will be gone at some point if no one learns to enjoy making them going forward. I don’t know if anyone appreciates the love that goes into them or the honor it is to continue the tradition but I know like I know that there are never any left come New Years Day.

Well, accept for the ones that Sandra stashes in her freezer for emergency consumption on a really bad day (those get made closer to the day).  So OK, maybe I don’t know but I have a funny feeling that if there were no cookies there might not be any crumbs in the beds of those sneaking them up to their rooms, there might not be the saving grace cookies that can be eaten by the celiac disease crowd, and I wouldn’t have the wonderful Christmas celebration I have each year by avoiding all malls in lieu of my kitchen and all its comforts.  Next week, snowballs, fig chiucharidi, Sandra’s favorite Italian cookies with the anise icing and nonpareils.  The week after that, pignoli nut cookies and finishing touches.  Stay tuned.

Hello

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I’ve never been good at goodbyes she said, and now I know that he isn’t either.  I don’t know why that reply to a recent blog post is sticking in my head.  I think my fear is that knowing you’re not good at goodbyes might hold you back from the hellos.  I can’t think of two people more destined to say hello than these two people.  I don’t know them nearly as well as I know their energy, especially hers.  It has depth and breadth and magnitude. They are made of circumstance and substance.  I know, I am too.

But I’m good at goodbyes.  I’ve said goodbye to people, dogs (both living and dead), places that I thought were mine (but not so much), perfect kitchens, cottages that could easily be moved to the Cape, and a life that was far too hard to live.

I’m good at a certain kind of hello, the kind that gets people to talk to me about themselves and their stuff.   The kind of hello that puts a room at ease while putting insulation around me I can pull off pretty well.  People always say hello to me, always. My friend Sandra says, “It’s the face…”.

I had a huge Ah Ha moment the other morning while walking the dogs.  Down the street came our friend Steve and his dog Karma (yes the dog’s name is Karma) and the girls lunged.  Tails wagging, happy crying and woofing and it occurred to me that they weren’t lunging to attack, they just didn’t know how to say hello.   Oh no.

Do I know how to say hello?  Saying hello to someone standing right in front of you, for no other reason than to make their acquaintance, can be difficult if your capacity to trust has been diminished.  What will their reaction be?  Will they like you?  Are they what they appear to be?  Question after question go through your mind at lightning speed and somehow the hello never comes out of your mouth.

Goodbyes are based mostly in the fact that people change.  If you changed, if they changed, someone changed.   Hello brings the promise of things changing, something going right, things falling together.  Marilyn Monroe said it best, “I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they’re right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.”

Not entirely sure that I should follow her philosophy but I get it.  It’s the yin and yang.  So now what?  Practice practice practice?  Examine your motivation?  Take a chance?  All these things require courage and a certain vulnerability that will come in time if only…you can learn to trust someone other than just yourself.

Trusting in myself, oh OK that I get it.  There is a saying from my old life, what’s the worst that can happen?  Too often in my old life I found out exactly what the worst was that could happen.  But now, with every week and month and year that goes by I can see what the best is that can happen.  I just gotta know like I know that hello won’t bite me in the ass.  There it’s out there.
 

 

Pinky Swear

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Once the mainstay of all promises adolescent, I wonder is the pinky swear dead?  This was the outward consummation of all promises that were binding for life.  It cannot be broken by anything including the crossing of fingers and toes.  Press your thumbs together at the end while stating the promise and the deal is sealed.   It became the pinky swear because if you didn’t live up to your promise you risked having your pinky cut off.  The good news is that if a pinky swear is broken all bets are off; you owe that person nothing from the past or going forward.

Can one make a pinky swear by phone?  By email? By text? Do the words pinky swear in themselves cement a deal?  I wonder.  I’d like to think that one can make a pinky swear by text as it’s one of the ways I’ve been trying to get my dear friend back to her fitness class.  She’s stuck, or discouraged, or something, surely not just lazy.  Truth be told, she’s fun, entertaining, full of stories and I miss her.  I should check my motivation, I guess, because I’m a bit tired of going to class alone.  It takes more and more to motivate myself as the days grow shorter and the wind gets colder.  Staying home with a glass of wine and a good book is ever more tempting.  But I go.

I believe in the power of a pinky swear and I hope that she decides that her health and the continued camaraderie of good friends, good music and increased energy is more important than a glass of wine and a good book.  Besides, I don’t know how much longer I can make it on my own.  Baby its cold outside.