Cooking

All the dog cookies are now gone. Slow boats to across town,  Michigan, Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania. Hopefully the boats will dock sometime before Christmas. The post office suggested that if I were to pay for first class passage that they might arrive before New Years but since I opted for steerage they couldn't make any promises. They did however make it clear that the US Postal Service thought that I was a cheap cow who clearly didn't care about the people she was shipping things to; I could have pointed out that for  the $28 they wanted me to pay to send  just one of my small, light weight boxes to its destination, one way over night on a truck, that I could fly my not small not light weight self one way almost anywhere Southwest Airlines flies and I would still beat the cookies to the finish line... but I chose to not go there. And the "people" I was sending the boxes to were dogs who are fully liberated from calenders and other abertrary constraints and Phhhht anyway  and staleness only improves dog cookies.

Oh, and for those wondering about the saga of  Cookbook Search for my Giftee : She's loving them! She gets all excited about them, especially the older books because she's all about antiques and today when she opened her gifts said Wow. Someone really knows me. I didn't think anyone here really knew me...  I was standing there trying not to get all weepy from the sweetness of it and give myself away. In reality I didn't think about her love of antiques, I was just looking for cookbooks that might have recipes with  funny ingredients like lard or brain or more than one egg.

Speaking of old, weird recipes. I have my own veryold cookbook and I was flipping through it today and I ran across a recipe for Mashed Potato Cake.

1 1/2 cups flour
1 cup sweet butter, creamed well
1/2 cup mashed potatoes
1 cup chopped walnuts
1/2 square melted chocolate
2 teaspoons baking powder sifted with 2 cups of floor
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1 teaspoon nutmeg
4 eggs beaten lightly

No further explanation of what you do with all this and no directions as to temperature of oven or how long to bake it, but I would imagine it would be until you could stomach eating chocolate flavored potatoes.

If you would like a sandwich, try a Dried Beef

For a dozen sandwiches soak a half a pound of dried beef in cold water for half an hour; then take out and press out all the water. Roll in flour and fry in butter, place between thin slices of butter bread. Wrap in oiled paper.

Have any curiosity about what goes into Thousand Island dressing? Wonder  no more

Thousand and One Island Dressing

First Part
1 Tablespoon flour
2 Tablespoons sugar
1 Tablespoon salt
3 Tablespoons olive oil or butter
1/4 teaspoon dry mustard
4 tablespoons vinegar
2 tablespoons water
1 egg

Second Part
6 mushrooms
1/2 cooked beet
12 green olives
1 canned pimento
1 or 2 teaspoons of chives or onions
1.3 green sweet pickle
1 hard boiled egg
dash of pepper
1/2 pint heavy cream

Mix chopped mixture with cooked dressing, add cayenne pepper. Then add cream and hard boiled egg riced.

If you are more of an oil-and-vinegar  person

1 cup vinegar
1 tablespoon each of flour and butter
salt and pepper
1 egg

Cook in double boiler

Want the recipe for "ideal" salad dressing?

1 egg
4 pounds vinegar (yes , see page 77 The New Home Cookbook, 1926)
1 pound flour (ibid!)
1 pound sugar
1 tablespoon salt
1/2 cup thick cream
1 tablespoon dry mustard
1 tablespoon paprika
2 tablespoons pepper
1 onion the size of a walnut
1 pimento
8 ripe olives

Apparently in 1926 as an average homemaker had very strange ideals and knew what to do next with six plus pounds of goop in her kitchen and didn't need any further directions. If I found this mess in my kitchen I would  invest in a slip and slide  and sell the whole lot on Craigs list to the first group of consenting adults that would have it, but I doubt Mrs. Homemaker 1926 would have found that "ideal".