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 supplies are here. The lettuce is in the fridge, and I didn’t bother photographing the salt and sugar, etc., but the items pictured here are the rest of those needed to cook the 1930 Tomato Jelly Salad recipe. Stay tuned to see how it goes.

In the meantime, here’s an old recipe for Tomato Jelly — not the same one I’m going to use, but sort of similar. I kind of like that this one has Tabasco in it. Makes it a little more like spicy V-8.

And a bonus illustration of another aspic recipe that I believe I will avoid:

Both of these are from Practical Cooking and Serving: a Complete Manual of How to Select, Prepare, and Serve Food by Janet McKenzie Hill, 1902. (These are Google Books clips, so you may not be able to see them if you’re outside the US. I apologize.)

How about gelatin in general? When was the last time you had gelatin (as a major part of a meal, not just a minor ingredient) that wasn’t some brightly-colored fruity-sweet hue? (Heck, I can’t even remember the last time I ate Jell-O.)

As a child, I had Jell-O a lot. (And I use the brand-name here because brand-name Jell-O was what we ate. Orange. Cherry. Lime. Whatever.) It was always dessert of some sort. Plain, much of the time, or other times with whipped cream on top or as part of some fruit salad mixture at a family or church get-together. (Few things said “1970s church picnic” like a Jell-O fruit salad.)

What I didn’t know at the time was that these gelatin salads were sort of a last vestige of a gelatin salad craze from a few decades earlier.

The 1920s, if the cookbooks can be believed, were gelatin-crazed. Salads, particularly, were not complete without the clear, jiggly stuff. The Silent Hostess Treasure Book from 1930 says, “With a supply of salad greens, a jar of dressing, and some tomato or lemon aspic in your refrigerator you will be able to prepare a great variety of delicious salads on short notice.” To the 21st century cook, only the greens and dressing would be necessary. But the 1920s homemaker would need aspic to be acceptably chic.

The Treasure Book follows the above instruction with recipes for Lemon Aspic and Tomato Aspic. Here’s the lemon:

Lemon Aspic

1 tablespoon gelatin
1/4 cup cold water
1 3/4 cups boiling water
2 tablespoons lemon juice
4 tablespoons vinegar
1/4 teaspoon salt

Soak the gelatin in cold water for five minutes and dissolve in boiling water. Add lemon juice, vinegar and salt. Cool. This may be made up ahead, kept in the Cabinet, and used as a basic jelly for vegetable salads.

No sweet lemon Jell-O, that.

An example of how the lemon aspic was then used was Summer Salad:

Summer Salad

Add equal amount chopped cucumber to Lemon Aspic, which has been allowed to thicken slightly. If onion flavor is liked, add one-fourth cup chopped young onions. Turn into molds to chill. Unmold and serve with cooked or mayonnaise dressing.

Ehhh. I can see that it might not taste bad, but I can’t say it sounds good, either. Add some carrots (as the Golden Salad in the same cookbook does), and I suspect you end up with something like this:

Photo by chotda on Flickr.

So this leads me to my next ResRec challenge, also from the Silent Hostess book. Tomato Jelly Salad. I mentioned it earlier — it’s on their suggested Thanksgiving menu, so what better time to try it? I am both scared and excited. Will it look like this quite tasty-appearing preparation,

Photo by Scott Partee on Flickr.

or this meal of doom?

Photo by amy_b on Flickr.

We will find out soon. (And this time I’m making sure Kristen tries it.)

I still need to find some molds and actually buy the gelatin, so it might be a few days before the results are posted. Stay tuned. And enjoy this picture of egg in aspic.

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.)

The version of the recipe I chose to use was from The Way to a Man’s Heart: The Settlement Cook Book, Tenth Edition, 1920:

Orange Omelet.
Rind of 1/3 orange,
1 egg,
1 tablespoon orange juice,
2 tablespoons powdered sugar.
Beat the yolk of the egg and add the orange rind and juice. Add the sugar. Fold in the beaten white and turn on heated buttered pan and cook until set. Serve with powdered sugar.

I had eggs and powdered sugar on hand. For the orange, I picked up organic Valencia oranges at Metropolitan Market. (Organic so the orange rind would not have pesticide residue.) Valencias are very sweet, but that doesn’t bother me. I like sweet. This might end up being a dessert omelet… but desserts are lovely things.

Just look at those oranges. Is your mouth watering yet?

I separated the egg yolk and white. Did I mention I’ve never really cooked an omelet before? It was a bit of a gamble. I beat the yolk (“thoroughly,” as one of the older recipes mentioned) and added the orange zest, juice, and sugar. Then I beat the egg white with a milk frother, which was not 100% successful (hint: $1.99 IKEA milk frothers are great with milk, but not so much with anything that has more bulk to it, like egg white), but did eventually get the egg white to a soft peak stage, which seemed acceptable.

I folded the egg white into the yolk mixture, and off it went into the buttered pan. When it set, I put the pan in the oven for two minutes to finish it, then sprinkled it with a tiny bit of sugar, and (from one of the other recipes in yesterday’s post) served it with a spoonful of marionberry jam.

Verdict:

Wow, that is tasty! It is fluffy and airy and orangey and sweet. Just a touch of jam with it is good, but it’s also very good without the jam. It is indeed dessert-level sweet — very much like a sweet crepe. I imagine that a little less sugar or a less-sweet orange would be just fine if you don’t want that sweetness, but I think it’s great as is.

I can’t really imagine why this recipe has been neglected over the last few decades. It’s lovely. I will eat this again.

Photo by Vincent van Dam.

You can still find sweet orange omelets here and there, but they are decidedly old-fashioned. None of my modern cookbooks contain one, but they are frequently found in classic late 19th/early 20th century cookbooks such as Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, The Settlement Cook Book, and Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book.

The orange omelet, however, goes back a lot further than that — at least to the 1430s, when Johannes Bockenheim, cook to Pope Martin V, published this recipe in his cookbook:

How to make an orange omelette

Take eggs and break them, with oranges, as many as you like; squeeze their juice and add to it the eggs with sugar; then take olive oil or fat, and heat it in the pan and add the eggs. This was for ruffians and brazen harlots. (“Et erit pro ruffianis et lecceatrichus.”)

Ruffians and brazen harlots? Well, call me a brazen harlot, then.

Bockenheim’s recipe is not terribly different from those that followed about 100 years ago.

Good Housekeeping, February 1898:

An American Omelet.
Make an omelet of four eggs, the yolks and whites beaten separately, four tablespoonfuls of sugar, a pinch of salt, grated rind of one orange and three tablespoonfuls of orange juice, fry. The instant the omelet is cooked, spread the sliced oranges on it and fold or roll the omelet. Serve very hot.

Parisian Orange Omelet.
Take the whites and the yolks of four eggs beaten separately, very thoroughly. To the yolks add three tablespoonfuls of sugar, not more than a pinch of baking powder, two tablespoonfuls of flour, four of milk, one tablespoonful of orange juice. Pour into a heated saucepan, then the whites, fry rapidly, fold, serve very hot with raspberry jam. A delightful luncheon dish.

Good Housekeeping, March 1898:

Orange Omelet.
Four eggs, five tablespoonfuls of sugar, a little salt, two oranges, two tablespoonfuls of butter. Grate the rind of one orange on one tablespoonful of sugar. Pare and cut the orange in thin slices and sprinkle with two tablespoonfuls of sugar. Beat the whites of the eggs stiff, add the sugar and orange rind, salt, beaten yolks, and two tablespoonfuls of orange juice. Put butter in a hot omelet pan and pour in the mixture. When it begins to thicken well, spread over the sliced oranges (no juice). Fold omelet from the side of the pan over the sliced oranges, turn on a hot dish; put in the oven two minutes, and serve immediately.

Then, about 20 years later in The Way to a Man’s Heart: The Settlement Cook Book (about which I will be posting more soon):

Orange Omelet.
Rind of 1/3 orange,
1 egg,
1 tablespoon orange juice,
2 tablespoons powdered sugar.
Beat the yolk of the egg and add the orange rind and juice. Add the sugar. Fold in the beaten white and turn on heated buttered pan and cook until set. Serve with powdered sugar.

I tried the last recipe yesterday — it’s simple, and serves one, which is nice when I’m experimenting. Watch this space tomorrow for the results.

This was a premium offered to subscribers of American Cookery in 1920.

“Her cakes never stick either.

“She had me get her a cheap paint brush for greasing pans, and to make sure the bristles wouldn t fall out into things, she dropped some shellac varnish on the bristles where they are set into the wood.

“Now take her way of making cookies. She rolls the dough out in one sheet and bakes it in one large dripping pan. Then just as soon as she takes it from the oven she scores it into squares or triangles and the cookies break off neatly when cool.

“Yes, and I thought I knew all about making pies, but to see her go about it makes me feel as though I didn’t know anything; she always measures everything used, and then she mixes the shortening in with a fork.

“I suppose you think she has been to college by the way she measures everything, but she says it’s more economical than guessing, and I’m beginning to think she is right.

“And did you ever hear of weighing the shortening? Sally says it is far easier to weigh it than measure it, because one pint of lard weighs one pound.

“And what do you suppose she uses for a rolling pin? Why a big round bottle full of ice or ice water. She got the idea from a place where she used to work in the city; they had a hollow rolling pin that they could fill with ice.

“Gee! Sally is great on saving dish washing, too. She never seems to use my bread board for pies or anything. Instead she uses a piece of white paper, or waxed paper, and I have seen her use the inside of a paper flour sack. It is thrown into the fire and there is nothing to wash but the utensils used.

“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.

“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.

“Cabbage, nuts, pineapple, and so many things are all laid out on the board, and using the knife as kind of a lever, cut into even lengths in half the time it takes by the old way.

“Vegetables, like salsify and parsnips, are scraped on the board. She holds them firmly against the board and with the other hand scrapes with regular downward strokes.

“And let me tell you how Sally crushes bread crumbs; she says one is silly to roll them with a rolling pin and have the crumbs flying all over the room, she always uses a sugar or salt sack and fills it with the dried crumbs and pounds it with a mallet. Now isn t that simple enough? But I never would have thought of it.

“Oh, yes, and another thing Sally uses so much is my scissors. I think she uses them more in the kitchen than I do in the sewing-room and, when she cuts up anything sticky, like raisins or marshmallows, she rubs a little butter along the blades and on her fingers, too, and then she can work so much faster. She always uses a big pair of shears to cut up a chicken, and where I always sewed up the opening of a stuffed fowl, why Sally don’t, she just does it in a few minutes by sticking toothpicks into the edges and lacing it up with a string. It is so easy to remove, too.

“When Sally first came to our house, I didn’t think she knew anything about cooking, but really she can fix up the daintiest meal I ever ate with her labor-saving methods, as she calls them.”

(Was the use of a cutting board really considered unusual?)