This photo of Waldorf Triangles and their triangular pan is from American Cookery, April, 1921, p. 680. It accompanies this recipe:

Waldorf Triangles

Beat the yolks of six eggs very light; gradually beat into these half a cup of granulated sugar, then two tablespoonfuls of orange juice. Lastly, add half a cup of sifted flour, sifted again with a level teaspoonful of baking powder and a few grains of salt. Put the mixture into Waldorf Triangle pans and bake in a moderate oven. As soon as the cakes are turned from the pan cover the sides with boiled frosting and sprinkle with fine-chopped pistachio nuts.

This should sound familiar, because it is nearly word-for-word the same as the recipe “Goldenrod Cake for Charlotte Russe Moulds and Waldorf Triangles” that the Boston Cooking School published in an earlier version of their magazine in 1904 and 1905, and that I included in my earlier post. One of the 1904-1905 recipes includes the boiled frosting and pistachio nuts, but the other does not. The older recipes also do not refer to the pans by name as “Waldorf Triangle pans.”

The title of the early Boston Cooking School recipes seems to be pretty clear that this is a recipe for Goldenrod Cake that can be used to make Waldorf Triangles. Other early recipes, however, do not mention the pistachios, and frequently mention orange icing.

The Rocky Mountain Cook Book: for High Altitude Cooking (1918 edition of a 1903 cookbook) includes a nearly identical one to the BCS recipe:

Golden Rod Cake.

Beat the yolks of six eggs till light; gradually beat into these one-half cup of sugar, then two tablespoonfuls of orange juice and one-half cup of sifted flour, sifted again with a level teaspoonful of baking powder and one-fourth teaspoonful of salt; bake in small cakes and cover with orange icing.

This is the same as the BCS “Goldenrod Cake for Charlotte Russe Moulds and Waldorf Triangles” and the later American Cookery “Waldorf Triangles” recipe, with one exception — the end. No mention of boiled icing sprinkled with pistachios, just orange icing. Could the pistachios be the defining characteristic of Waldorf Triangles? One of the BCS recipes doesn’t mention them either. Perhaps the cakes are Golden Rod Cakes if they have orange icing (or none?) and Waldorf Triangles if they have pistachios.

(Incidentally, the author of The Rocky Mountain Cook Book, Caroline Trask Norton, was a graduate of the Boston School of Domestic Science, so perhaps it should not be surprising that the recipe is similar to the BCS version.)

The recipe in 365 Orange Recipes: An Orange Recipe for Every Day in the Year is called “Goldenrod Cake” and says “Bake in goldenrod pans and when cold ice with the following Icing,” going on to describe an icing made from orange rind, egg, sugar, water, orange and lemon juice, and “sugar to make as thick as fondant.” The icing is then colored orange.

There are a couple more references to these recipes that could add clarity to the situation, or perhaps just muddy it further.

The Boston Cooking-School Magazine October 1905, p.174, has this recipe:

Waldorf Triangles

Prepare the goldenrod cake mixture given on page 91 of August-September, 1904, issue of the magazine. Bake this in goldenrod pans (it will take two pans, each holding six triangles). When the cakes are baked, cover the sides with confectioner’s frosting or with fondant, then sprinkle with blanched pistachio nuts, chopped fine.

The implication here is that Golden Rod cakes become Waldorf Triangles by the addition of frosting and chopped pistachios.

Then there is What To Cook and How To Cook It 1899, by Mrs. W. A. Johnson of Paris, Kentucky. In the appendix, on page 282-283, we find:

Waldorf Triangles or Golden Rod Cake.

One-fourth cup of butter, one cup of confectioner’s sugar, one-half cup of milk, two cups of flour, one level teaspoon of baking powder, two eggs, the grated rind and juice of one orange. Bake in orange quarter baking pans. Put a small quantity in each section and spread evenly. Spread orange icing over each triangle, made by mixing confectioner’s sugar with enough orange
juice to spread evenly.

Well, there’s the orange icing. No pistachios this time. And the title calls these either Waldorf Triangles or Golden Rod Cake, implying that they are alternate names for the same thing.

And then I found this photograph in the 1906 Table Talk Illustrated Cook Book:

The text reads: “Two new cake forms are on the market. Orange slices and Golden Rod pans. The former cakes are covered after baking with orange flavored icing. The Golden Rod cakes are iced in white and decorated with fancy candies and citron.” Here the Golden Rod cakes aren’t the orange ones, but they don’t have pistachios, either. No reference is made to Waldorf Triangles.

(I could go on. There are the German-American versions from Praktischer Ratgeber für Conditoren, Cakebäcker und Brotbäcker und Candy-Macher/Practical Manual for Confectioners, Pastrycooks and Bakers and Candy Makers, 1912, that parallel the 1890s versions I found in my previous post, and one of which specifically calls for “three-cornered, long pans” ["long" is left out of the English translation on that page, but it's there in the German].)

My thought, after all of this, is that Golden Rod/Goldenrod Cakes are probably the basic triangular cakes, usually iced with orange icing (and perhaps frequently conflated with the Orange Slice cakes which had a slightly different pan, but could also be made in the Golden Rod pan), and that Waldorf Triangles were a variation (presumably originating at the Waldorf Hotel?) that had pistachios and were not orange. This is really only speculation, subject to change as I find more information. I look forward to finding more versions of these recipes and researching this further, and to possibly trying the recipe one of these days.

I’m also looking forward to finding one of the darn pans! No luck so far.

The first class, though, was about medieval pottery, and how it would be used to cook. Mistress Gwenllyen the Potter showed us some examples of her pottery (all done based on authentic medieval designs), and then started right in on the cooking.

During the two-hour class, there were as many as 6 pots on the brazier at one time. The brazier had very hot charcoal, which was nice, because it was keeping us warm in the November weather as well as cooking lunch. To heat up a pot more, Mistress Gwen would just rake the coals closer to the pot, and to cool it down, just rake them further away.

The dishes you can see in the above picture are, starting at the upper right and going clockwise, stewed apples and spices (so good), chicken cooking on top of orzo pasta in the closed pot, rice (just started), beef stew, makerouns (in the closed pot on the left) and onion soup, just starting.

It worked really well. The pots that needed to come to a boil did so quite quickly. Three times during the workshop, however, we heard a loud cracking noise, indicating that one of the pots had cracked. The most spectacular breakage came when the pie plate cooking our makerouns (medieval macaroni and cheese, and quite tasty) broke into multiple pieces, as you can see in the next picture. We didn’t know it had broken into so many pieces until someone tried to pick it up, and the base (and food) stayed on the brazier while the edge of the pan lifted away. Have no fear, the food was fine. There was no spillage. We just had to scoop it off of the pan-base onto a plate.

It is pretty obvious why archaeological sites have so many potsherds — it seems very common for cooking pottery to break in use.

Despite the breakage, no serious amount of food was lost (just a little bit of mulled cider, I think), and everyone was warm and well-fed. It was a very fine meal.

Once you’ve bought your electric fridge, you’ll be able to make recipes like this one, from the 1930 GE cookbook The “Silent Hostess” Treasure Book:

Chocolate Ice Cream

• 1 1/2 oz. unsweetened chocolate (1 1/2 squares)
• 2 cups rich milk*
• 1 tablespoon cornstarch
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
• 1 cup cream
• Few grains salt

Melt chocolate and add scalded milk very slowly. Mix cornstarch with sugar and add to chocolate mixture. Cook ten minutes, stirring until thickened. Cool, add vanilla, turn into tray of Super-freezer, and freeze to mush. Fold in whipped cream and return to Super-freezer until proper consistency to serve.

(*”Rich milk” is essentially what we now call “half and half”.)

We couldn’t. Our fridge is now one of these:

(Photo by Phil Urwin)

…a late 1920s or possibly early 1930s GE Monitor Top refrigerator, the fridge that made it “safe to be hungry.” Seven cubic feet of frosty cold storage, and I do mean frosty. We have to defrost frequently, though it’s not terribly difficult.

For most people who acquired one of these Monitor Tops when they were new, it was the first electric refrigerator they ever owned. Even if they had an ice box before, they couldn’t have used it the same way a refrigerator would be used; ice boxes weren’t good at keeping consistent low temperatures. They certainly couldn’t have easily made ice cubes to cool their drinks.

General Electric came to the rescue with cookbooks/manuals like this one:

This “Silent Hostess” Treasure Book was published by GE in 1930, and includes illustrations, recipes, and instructions on how to properly use (and defrost) a Monitor Top refrigerator (though they never use that phrase).

Filling the refrigerator properly was important.

It was also important to know and use the different features of the Monitor Top correctly: the Cabinet, the Chiller, and the Super-freezer (always capitalized and in italics).

The Super-freezer is the small evaporator, which has room for a couple of ice cube trays and not much else. It does chill a can of pop very rapidly. The Chiller is the glass tray just under the Super-freezer, a good place to keep things that need to be extra cold, and also a place for the melted ice to drip into when defrosting. The Cabinet is just the rest of the fridge.

The housewife (yes, the book assumes that women will do all the cooking) with a new Monitor Top would then be able to entertain her guests with such cool and tasty treats as lemonade, with the suggestion “Serve with colored ice cubes or serve a spoonful of grape juice that has been frozen to a mush in each glass.” I like the grape juice idea. Unfortunately the picture doesn’t show the colorful ice cube suggestion.

The book also contains a lot of gelatin recipes: lots and lots and lots of aspic. The 1920s was the heyday of the gelatin salad. In the salad chapter, almost every recipe includes gelatin. Tuna Fish Salad? It’s what we would think of as tuna salad… surrounded by gelatin and molded. Summer Salad? Cucumber and onion in Lemon Aspic. Golden Salad? Carrot in Lemon Aspic. Tomato-Celery Salad? Celery, green peppers and olives in Tomato Aspic. The modern leafy green salad simply did not exist in this cookbook.

The book also contains suggested menus. Thanksgiving is coming soon, so here is the suggested Thanksgiving Dinner menu:

Shrimp Cocktail*
Roast Turkey
Mashed Potatoes            Chestnut Stuffing
Carrots in Butter                 Cranberry Jelly
Tomato Jelly Salad*
Saltines
Mince Tarts with Vanilla Ice Cream*
Nuts          Fruit          Mints
Coffee
(Menu items marked with * are recipes that are in the book.)

Thanksgiving is perhaps the most traditional of meals, so this isn’t too strange to our eyes. But there it is, gelatin again — Tomato Jelly Salad. Tomato Aspic, in individual molds, unmolded onto crisp lettuce and served with mayonnaise dressing. I can safely say that I don’t think this is part of most modern Thanksgiving meals.

We may try this one for the heck of it. 1920s gelatin-based salads are a bit off-putting to our modern tastes, but we are curious whether there is any good reason they were popular. Stay tuned.

(Edited to add — I just found this lovely picture of a modern “tomato jelly salad.” Whether the version in the “Silent Hostess” cookbook will look that nice (and taste good too) is yet to be determined.)

(Want to see more Monitor Tops? I set up a Monitor Top photo pool on Flickr.)

“Another thing Sally hardly ever uses is my chopping bowl. She had Max plane off a square board that she keeps lying on the kitchen table. When a vegetable is to be sliced or chopped she simply holds it on the board and cuts it down with a heavy, sharp knife.”

Surely cutting vegetables on a cutting board — such a basic kitchen operation — couldn’t have been unusual back then, could it?

I had never actually heard of the term “chopping bowl” before. Here’s one — a wide, shallow wooden bowl with a mezzaluna blade chopper. You can buy these today,but they aren’t standard equipment in the kitchen as they once were. Once you could buy the chopping board mezzaluna knife at the dime store, but it’s probably not quite as universally accessible these days. (Nor are “dime stores.”)

Even more than 100 years ago, chopping bowls had begun to be thought of as out-of-date. Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, had this to say in 1887:

“There is the old fashioned and, I hope, now entirely obsolete, chopping-bowl and its odd-shaped knife. With bowl on lap and the chopping-knife making its regular strokes, now and then stopping to shovel whatever is being minced into the centre of the dish, for hours the patient woman would keep at work. The famous ‘Patience on a monument’ would be impatience and irritability compared with her at work upon a task more irksome and wearying than that of the woodchopper.”

Dun’s Review, November 1912, gives us a hint to the causes behind the chopping bowl’s fall to relative obscurity:

“No one regrets the passing of the chopping-bowl, with its long and wearisome manipulation of its semicircular knives, since its place has been taken by the so-called chopping machines, which will do more and better work in five minutes than could be done with a bowl and knife in an hour. Many a ‘left-over’ that was formerly thrown away is now transformed into an attractive croquette or other tasty dish because of the ease with which it can be cut to any desired degree of fineness by one of these machines.”

Ah, new technology!

American Agriculturist, October 1884.

The meat chopper, easier and faster to use than the chopping bowl, was the food processor of the late nineteenth century. Of course, it was used for meat. But as the article I quoted in How Sally Did It (in 1920) mentioned, it could be an all-purpose tool:

“And I never saw anybody put the food chopper to so many different uses; instead of grating the lemons, and her fingers, too, she takes a sharp knife and pares off the rind, then runs it through the food chopper. Cheese is treated the same way, and she can prepare vegetables in a ‘jiffy,’ and they cook quicker, too, for the fine cutting. Once when we were late at starting supper and I didn’t think there would be time to cook potatoes, she had them peeled and run through the food chopper while I was worrying what to have in place of them. They fried in a few minutes.”

Good Housekeeping, ran this letter in March 1898:

“Editor of Good Housekeeping.
I have read with interest your recipes for sandwiches in the September number of Good Housekeeping. Will you allow me to suggest the use of the meat chopper or grinder instead of the chopping knife, in preparing the meat for sandwiches. I also use the meat chopper for meat for hash. The potatoes need to be chopped with the chopping knife, but the meat mixes better and is more satisfactory when ground. Corned beef of course is the best, but by the addition of a very little one put through the grinder with the meat, any other meat, or two or three kinds of meat make a very good hash. The flavor of onion must be very very slight for a breakfast hash. I also use the meat chopper for crumbing dried bread for croquettes, etc. I find the chopper an indispensable implement of kitchen furniture.”

As with many other new technologies, there was a backlash. American Cookery published “The Art of the Chopping-Bowl” in October 1919:

“Old things give place to new. With the coming of the meat-chopper or, more properly, crusher, the chopping block and bowl have been discarded and one rarely hears of or even sees a chopping-bowl in the homes of today.

“…The poor way is the quick way. The good housewife will not sacrifice good food and health for speed, but will do it the better way. Hash is a fine dish, or should be, which the majority of people turn up their noses at because it is made from meat-gristle, cartilage and bone forced through the meat-crusher; this fines it in a certain way, but when the unseemly mixture is mixed with potato and heated up, it is anything but a palatable dish, because one is constantly biting into a piece of gristle or bone.

“…Every home should have at least two chopping-bowls. One for meats, nuts, etc., which should never be used for chopping onions, etc.”

Nowdays, we don’t really tend to use meat-choppers in most kitchens — and if we do, we call them meat grinders and just use them to make ground beef. But many of us do use food processors, and often use them for the same reasons cooks turned to the meat-chopper in the nineteenth century. Most of us also do a lot of cutting directly on a flat cutting board. I can see the advantage to a chopping bowl for a lot of things, though. Cutting up nuts, or other items that are likely to scatter. I may have to get one.

As for the meat-chopper, I don’t have one of those because the only meat I eat is fish, so it never seemed useful. But I can see that it could also be handy occasionally for other things. Maybe I’ll get one of those, too.

…a very cool 1949 cookbook for new owners of Hotpoint ranges. It has some recipes and a few very cool vintage pictures of that mid-century type with colors that don’t really seem real.

Then, on Wednesday night I was browsing the Seattle Municipal Archives photostream on Flickr, when I came across this picture, captioned “Marilyn demonstrating electric stove, 1949″:

It’s the same stove!

Jason and I once lived in a rental house that had a similar stove to this one, but I can’t recall if it was the same one, exactly. It did have the multiple ovens, which I loved. I think it may have also had a feature of this stove which most stoves don’t have anymore: the “Thrift Cooker.”

Apparently the Thrift Cooker was a built-in slow cooker, recessed into the surface of the stove. Pretty useful, really, though it means you have one less burner available. You don’t need counter space for a Crock-Pot this way, and how often do most people use all four burners at once? (The ad here seems to indicate you can use the Thrift Cooker as a surface burner too!)

Here’s a Life magazine ad for a similar Hotpoint stove from a couple of years earlier. And here’s a 1937 article on using the frying basket that came with the Thrift Cooker.

I didn’t get to go home for Christmas this year. Weather was a big deterrent to most of us Beaconians (residents of Beacon Hill, Seattle) over the holidays. This last Friday, I had dinner with my parents before they headed to Belize with my brother and sister-in-law, and they brought along my Christmas presents.  Woo hooo!  I love prezzies… among them was *drum roll* the PINK KITCHEN AID STAND-UP MIXER!!  I thought the package seemed a bit heavy for what I thought was going to be some pieces for my Pfaltzgraf Grapevine Dinnerware… boy, they sure fooled me!  I don’t know when I ever actually mentioned this to my mom, but it must have been some random email ages ago.  I can’t wait to mix something fabulous… a smooth butter-cream frosting… oh my!  Thank you Mom & Dad!

~Kristen~

Jason opened up the oven tonight to try to fix it. As it turned out, there is a part in the stove that was fried pretty well. Fried enough that I am grateful that we did not have an electrical fire, because it seems possible that we could have. It might be possible to find a replacement part, but they are not all that cheap, and the stove is really pretty icky anyway. So we could maybe get a new one.

A new, shiny, 21st century sparkly modern stove, perhaps? Well, we could. But this weekend, instead, we may be going to look at one of these. Seriously. I have this idea to eventually restore the kitchen to its full 1911 splendor, and that would do the trick.

At any rate, I can’t bake anything until we have a working oven again.