The Great Cookie Mystery

With all the Southern cooking going on around our house as research for the Haunted Gift Shop series (hey, it makes a good excuse!), I am constantly picking the Official Taster's brain for ideas.  I want to know what dishes he remembers from his childhood, the things his mother, grandmother, aunts, friends, and neighbors cooked.

One evening recently, he started telling me about a cookie his Mema used to make.  He couldn't remember what she called them, but as he talked, I realized he was describing what I knew as a Russian Tea Cake.  Curious, I called on my Google-fu and started looking for recipes and history.  What I found was a basic shortbread cookie with nuts added, and many, many names.

What do YOU call these?

Online, I found Russian Tea Cakes, certainly.  I also found Southern Butterballs, Viennese Crescents (though with a variation in shape), Biscochitos,  Kourambiethes, Moldy Mice, Rohlichky, and Mexican Wedding Cookies.  At work, I offered several people samples, and asked what name they knew them by.  My boss, who grew up in Pennsylvania, called them Italian Wedding Cookies.  Another friend said they were Mexican Wedding Cakes, and a couple Mexican friends identified them as Polvorones.  Intrigued, I went back to online searches, and found Polvorones, with the speculation that the name was derived from the word "polvo," meaning dust, or powder.  Other friends called them simply Wedding Cookies.

I found versions with pecans, hazelnuts, walnuts, almonds, and poppy seeds.  Some recipes called for an egg, others did not.  There were variations with all butter, all lard, or a combination of the two.  The ratio of flour and sugar to ground nuts varied from 4:1 to 1:1.  Some had vanilla, some cinnamon, some chocolate, and one included orange zest.  Polvorones are said to date to 16th century Spain, with several regions claiming ownership, and some references claim the Spanish were introduced to them from Medieval Arab cuisine.

Of course I had to make a batch, which the Official Taster pronounced good, but not exactly the same as Mema's.  However, there are dozens of recipes for every one of the many names, so I'll keep experimenting until I find that magic combination that perfectly matches his recollection.

Making the cookies:
I started by toasting the pecans.  I have a stash of very good pecans in my freezer, thanks to the generosity of my mother- and father-in-law, who harvested them from their trees and shipped them to us.  I placed a single layer on a cookie sheet in a 350 degree oven for about five minutes, then let them cool.  This richens the flavor and helps reduce the tendency to turn into paste in the food processor.  When they were cooled, I put them in the food processor with a tablespoon or so of flour (another trick to help you get chopped, not pureed, nuts) and pulsed it until the nuts were finely chopped.

A few simple ingredients is all it takes

With the nuts ready, I measured the flour, powdered sugar,and vanilla, and softened two sticks of butter.  These are very rich, though they don't have a lot of sugar; the flavor comes from the butter and the nuts.

The butter should be at room temperature, soft enough to work.  The dough can be mixed by hand (which I did) but a stand mixer is well-suited to this dough.  If the butter isn't soft enough, give it a few seconds in the microwave.
Mix the flour, powdered sugar, nuts, and vanilla into the butter, just until it forms a ball in the bowl.  You want the dough to hold together, but don't overmix.  Refrigerate the dough for an hour or so, in order to make it easier to handle, then form it into small balls on an ungreased cookie sheet.

Cookies ready for the oven

Bake at 350 for 10-12 minutes.  They will be faintly golden.

After baking.  Gold, not brown

Now comes the fun part.  Let the cookies cool for a couple minutes on the baking sheet, then roll them in powdered sugar.As each cookie is rolled in the sugar, place it on a cooling rack.  The sugar will cling to the hot cookies, but it will tend to melt into them because they are still warm.  That's just fine.

You're going to get sugar on your fingers, and that's okay!

 Resist the temptation to nibble, and let the cookies cool.  Because once they are cool, you are going to give them another coat of powdered sugar.  You can also sift powdered sugar over them, but I like to roll them, making sure the entire surface of the cookie has a coating of soft white.

One tip:  If you place your cooling rack over a clean cookie sheet, you can use the powdered sugar that falls off to roll the cookies the second time.  Because there will be sugar that falls off!

After the second coat of sugar, the cookies are ready to be packed in an airtight container, and enjoyed for several days, or weeks.  As if there will be any left that long!   

With a second coat of powdered sugar. Yummy!!

The Cookies of Many Names

2 sticks butter, softened

2 cups flour

2 cups chopped nuts - your choice of pecan, walnut, almond, or hazelnut

1/2 cup powdered sugar, plus more for coating

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Mix dry ingredients into softened butter, along with the vanilla.  Stir, or mix at low speed on stand mixer.  When the dough forms a ball in the bowl place it in the refrigerator for an hour.  The cold dough will be easier to handle.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Remove dough from refrigerator and roll into small balls, about the size of a walnut.  Place them about an inch apart on an ungreased cookie sheet, and bake for 10-12 minutes, until they turn light gold.  Remove from oven and allow to cool on the cookie sheet for a couple minutes.

While the cookies are still warm, roll them in powdered sugar, coating all sides, and place on cooling racks.  Once they have cooled completely, roll  them in powdered sugar again, and store in an airtight container.

Cooking Up a New Series - Part Seven - Sweet Potato Casserole

You can tell it's Southern cooking by the parrot!

All of my Southern cooking is an experiment, and some of the results are better than others.  For instance, the problem with the hush puppies (see Part Two).  I had to thicken the batter, and I didn't make notes of my changes so I haven't been able to post a recipe yet.  On the other hand, the fried cornbread came out well and I was pleased with the results (in Part Six).

My first attempt at sweet potato casserole falls in the "less successful" category.  It was tasty, but it wasn't what my expert taste-tester expected and it needs some work.

But I'm not proud - I'm happy to share the tasty failures, too!

Mis en place for sweet potato casserole
The bowl at left is cornmeal for fried cornbread

There are a few tricks I've stolen from cooking shows over the years, and one is the concept of mis en place.  It's a French phrase that means (more or less) "everything in place."

You know how it is when you watch one of those shows, and they have little dishes of every ingredient already measured and ready in a tiny glass bowl?  They never waste camera time measuring, and it's also a great way to determine that you have every ingredient.

In fact as I was setting up for this recipe I discovered that I didn't have miniature marshmallows.  Fortunately the grocery store is only three blocks away.  On a cooking show there would be an able assistant, ready to run do the chef's bidding at any moment.  For me that was the amazing husband/photographer/Official Taster, who ran to the store for marshmallows as I started cooking.



Because the Official Taster prefers yams, that is what I actually used.  Most any variety of sweet potato or yam will work, but that may be part of what went wrong with mine.  I will need to experiment with either different tubers.  But once they were peeled and chopped I put them on to boil until tender.

While the yams simmered, I took a few minutes to clean up the kitchen.  I have discovered that this kind of cooking -  with new recipes and sometimes unfamiliar ingredients - can create a lot of havoc in my kitchen, and lead to many piles of dirty dishes.  Since I have an older house, built at the end of WWII, it doesn't have a dishwasher.  Someday, I have promised myself, we will remodel the kitchen.  Someday!

Bubble, bubble
Sweet potato trouble!

After a few minutes at a slow boil, the yams were fork-tender and ready to mash.  The recipe called for three cups of mashed sweet potato, which seemed like a lot for two people, so I used two small yams and cut the rest of the ingredients in half.  It was plenty, and we even had leftovers.

Once the yams were tender, I drained them in a colander and returned them to the pan to mash them.  I have an ancient hand masher, which was all I needed to smash the yams without completely destroying the texture.

An old-fashioned hand masher works just fine!

However, I think I may have over cooked the yams.  The consistency, as you will soon see, was thinner than I would have liked.  The Official Taster also said it should have been more like dense mashed potatoes than the dish I produced.  Thus the label of Tasty Failure.

But I digress...

Sugar

 The yams were mashed, ready to be mixed, and here is where the mis en place shines!

Once the yams were mashed, I added the remaining ingredients,


Sugar ...

Butter

Butter ...

Milk ...

Eggs and vanilla,
and poured the resulting mash into a baking pan.

Tasty, but way too soupy!

This is when we realized the mixture wasn't as thick as we thought it should be.  There wasn't a lot I could do at this point, so I forged ahead with the topping

A chef's trick, right in my own kitchen

A second mis en place was ready with flour, brown sugar, melted butter, and chopped nuts.  In a concession to the Official Taster I omitted coconut.  Not pictured are the miniature marshmallows my dedicated assistant fetched from the store while the yams were simmering and I was cleaning up the mess from peeling and chopping.

I mixed the nuts, brown sugar and flour into the melted butter, and then added the miniature marshmallows.

I spread the topping over the mashed yams in the baking dish, and it was ready for the oven.

After baking, the casserole was a beautiful, bubbly brown on top, with puffs of golden melted marshmallows. It smelled great, and tasted fine, but it wasn't exactly ready for its close-up.  Here's hoping I can do a better job next time, and show you a finished product that will make your mouth water!

But for the record, here is a plate of the finished casserole.  Too soft to hold its shape, it probably belongs in a small bowl rather than on a plate - it was more like a pudding than a casserole, and it's quite sweet, too.

Stay tuned for more Southern cooking adventures soon!!  Maybe I'll get the pictures for that banana pudding ...



Sweet Potato Casserole


3 cups boiled and  mashed sweet potatoes
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup milk
1/3 cup butter
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs, lightly beaten

Add sugar, milk, butter, eggs, and vanilla to mashed sweet potatoes.  Place in an oven-proof casserole and top with a mixture of

1/3 cup melted butter
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup chopped nuts, pecans preferred, but walnuts also work
1 cup coconut (optional, according to the Official Taster)
1 cup miniature marshmallows

Bake at 350 degrees until brown and bubbly, about 30 minutes

Cooking Up a New Series - Part Three - Fried Catfish

Research for MURDER IN A SHOT GLASS continued with fried catfish (see Part One for the beginning of this thread,  and Part Two for my adventure with hush puppies).  Now, I am a West Coast girl and my favorite fish are probably salmon, trout and tuna, but my husband's taste buds were formed in Alabama, and he remains a loyal catfish fan.

Fortunately, his mother gave me her catfish recipe.  I had my fryer (already hot from cooking hush puppies) and I had the catfish, which had finally thawed completely, thanks to putting the zipper bag from the grocery store in a bowl of cold water.  This is a small town, far from catfish country, so we had to settle for frozen fillets on short notice.

I cut up the fish, salted it, and left it to soak in buttermilk while I assembled the coating.  The recipe said to soak it in a shallow pan, but since it came in a zipper bag I used that.  It seemed to work fine.  All I did was sprinkle the fish with salt, put it back in its bag, and pour the buttermilk in.  I made sure the fish was covered by the buttermilk, squeezed out as much air as I could, and set it back in the bowl so it wouldn't accidentally get bumped, dropped, or otherwise disturbed.

The instructions I had said to fry the fish first, and I suspect some flavors would transfer to the hush puppies as they're cooking.  But I had to wait for the fish to thaw, so I did hush puppies first.  Next time I will allow thawing time - if I can't get fresh, or at least thawed, catfish - and do the fish first.  And yes, there will undoubtedly be a next time, if only to make my husband happy!

Mixing the coating was easy, since I had already made self-rising cornmeal for the hush puppies, and I had been able to buy self-rising flour.

I put the dry ingredients in a large, shallow bowl to give me lots of room to work, and started dredging the soaked fish pieces.

One thing that surprised me was how much the buttermilk clung to the fish when I took it out of the soak.  I guess I'm used to regular milk, which doesn't cling as much.
It did make it easy to coat the fish pieces, however, and they retained their layer of cornmeal nicely.

With the oil at the proper temperature, and the fish soaked and coated with cornmeal, it was time to start frying.  While my recipe called for 370 degree oil, the fryer recommended 340 for fresh fish, and I followed the manufacturer's recommendations.  It only took three or four minutes for the fish to develop a beautiful light gold crust, and float to the top of the pan.  As with the hush puppies, I could only do a few pieces at a time.  But with the timer running to enforce patience, and a stack of dishes to clean up as a distraction, I managed to wait as each piece turned golden and tempting.


Finally, we reached the rewarding end of the experiment: Tasting!  OK, I admit it, we'd been sampling hush puppies as I worked, and had decided on the more-onion option as the preferred version.  Steve, to his credit, had been patient and helpful, and took the pictures that accompany these posts.  He had even managed not to eat all the hush puppies while he waited for the fish.  (Though, in truth, there were so many hush puppies we actually had leftovers - which he ate the next day with the last couple pieces of fish.  Imagine, it was good enough to eat as leftovers!!)

Here's the finished product, in all its glory.  And the recipe for the fish is below the picture.

Next up, banana pudding.  After all, you can't have a good Southern meal without a sweet finish!!

Fried catfish and hush puppies - can't get much more Southern than this!

Fried Catfish

2 1/2 - 3 pounds of catfish fillets
1 tsp salt
2 cups buttermilk
2 cups self-rising cornmeal
1 cup self-rising corn flour
lemon quarters (optional)

Place fish in a shallow pan and sprinkle with salt.  Pour buttermilk over fish and refrigerate for 30 minutes.  Combine cornmeal and flour.  Remove fish from buttermilk.  Dredge fish in cornmeal mixture.  Carefully drop fish in deep fat heated to 370 degrees.  Fry until fish float the the top and are golden brown.  Drain well and serve with lemon quarters.  8 servings.

(Note:  I only used 1 pound of fish, since I was feeding two people, and we had a little bit left over.)

Cooking Up A New Series - Part Two - Hush Puppies

Actually cooking some of the recipes for MURDER IN A SHOT GLASS was one way of making sure I understood the action in the cooking scenes.  Once I was set up with the proper ingredients - or reasonable substitutes - I was ready to start cooking.

The banana pudding was already made and we'd actually had some last night.  It's even better the second day, when the vanilla wafers have softened and the flavors have blended from sitting in the refrigerator overnight.

I prepped the catfish, salted it, and set it to soak in a buttermilk bath while I worked on the hush puppies.

First I needed self-rising cornmeal, one of the ingredients I didn't actually find in my shopping expedition.  Self-rising simply means the cornmeal already contains a leavening agent, in this case salt and baking powder.  According to the information I found online, all I had to do for each cup of cornmeal was replace 1 tablespoon of cornmeal with a tablespoon of baking powder and add a half-teaspoon of salt.  (Thank you, Food.com!)

I mixed the cornmeal and self-rising flour, sugar and garlic powder and added the onion.  My husband was leery of too much onion, and I dialed back the amount the recipe called for.  Then I added eggs and buttermilk, and I had hush puppy batter.  It looked thin, and I had my doubts, but I dropped a spoonful in the hot oil.

Now THAT looks right!

I was right, it was way too thin.  I had little crumbles of cornmeal batter, not a beautiful hush puppy.  At that point I double-checked the recipe, verified I had used the proper amount of each ingredient, and decided I needed to fix the mixture.  I added some more cornmeal and baking powder, until I got a batter that had the consistency I expected, and tried again.

This time things went much better.  The dough formed little balls in the hot oil instead of falling apart like cardboard in a heavy rain.  The fryer would only hold 4 or 5 at a time, but I waited patiently as each batch made its way from gooey dough balls to golden brown globes of corn-y goodness.

My husband taste-tested one of the first ones and pronounced it edible, much to my relief.  In fact, after a couple tastes, he said it could stand a little more onion.  Since I like onions I quickly added a couple heaping spoonfuls of minced onion and stirred it into the remaining dough.

Patience is not one of my strong points, but these were well worth the wait.  As you can see, they tumbled out of the fry basket onto the paper-towel-lined plate all golden brown and crunchy.

It took quite a while to cook up all the dough I'd made, but in the end I was rewarded with a baking pan full of lovely hush puppies.


Since I had a problem with the consistency of the original recipe I am not going to post it here - at least not until I have a version that works properly.  But in the meantime, here's a link to a Food.com recipe for hush puppies, similar to what I made.  There's also a link to a Paul Prudhomme recipe that I want to try.

In the meantime, here's a photo of the final result.  I think they came out looking good, and they tasted great in spite of the experimental nature of the recipe.

But that catfish was still soaking in buttermilk, and my work was far from over...

(To be continued...)

Cooking Up A New Series - Part One

I'm working on the new series, and doing a lot of research to make sure I get the details right.  Research can be challenging, it can be fun, and sometimes I need to ask for help.  Right now it's all three.

One of the things that will run through the series is a weekly dinner for Glory and her friends Karen, Ernie, and Felipe.  In MURDER IN A SHOT GLASS the foursome are focusing on traditional Southern cooking.  For me this means learning some new ways of cooking (challenging), tasting the food (fun), and finding authentic recipes (help!).

Fortunately, my mother-in-law (a wonderful lady) was born and raised in southeastern Alabama, just north of the Florida panhandle.  She was my first call when I started looking for recipes and she didn't disappoint me.  I now have a list of things to try.

But before I could start cooking, there was the problem of rounding up typical Southern ingredients in a small West Coast town.  Especially a small town on the beach, with limited shopping opportunities.

To the Internet for help!!  I found instructions on how to make your own self-rising flour and cornmeal, and also discovered advice about using masa - readily available in a town with a large Latino population - as corn flour (when you look at the label, the words "corn flour" are right there).  At this point I'm guessing that  "corn flour" is probably the functional equivalent of "fine ground corn meal."

I hope.

Armed with this knowledge, I made a trip to the "big city" in search of supplies.  I found self-rising flour, several varieties of cornmeal, and a bag of masa.

Back home I consulted with my husband - an escaped Southerner - about what to try first.  We decided on a few of his all-time favorites: fried catfish, hush puppies, and banana pudding.  I've made a lot of banana pudding over the years, and I even had all the ingredients on hand, so that was no problem.

Catfish was another matter.  We managed to find some frozen fillets at the market, in portions large enough to feed a half the town.  Fortunately the woman on duty at the meat counter was kind enough to break up the package and sell me just a pound of fish.  (Which was still quite a lot for two people!)

Now that I had ingredients - or at least instructions on how to make substitutes - I needed the proper utensils.

The first problem was getting an appropriate fryer.  We considered using a pot on the stove, but I had a couple concerns, first and foremost being temperature control.  I have a lovely new stove, but keeping hot oil at a consistent temperature can be a pain, and requires a good thermometer and constant monitoring.  I needed an electric deep fryer.

I hit the local Goodwill looking for a deep fryer, but struck out.  I went in the Bi-Mart next door, hoping to find one of those miniature fryers that wouldn't set me back too much.  For once luck was on my side, and I found a nice sized one on sale for $30.  I have no idea where I am going to store this thing, but it was a great price, so we dragged it home.

Back home I now had ingredients and tools, all I had to do was cook...
(To be continued!)