RECIPES THAT WON’T DIE
After the Chocolate Chip recipe, read about more recipes “that will never die,” as well as get a recipe for Devil’s Food Cake, yet again an eternal recipe. (What izzit about chocolate that’s “forever”?)
Certainly a recipe that’ll never die, that for Chocolate Chip Cookies. The recipe for them here is (no egg) vegetarian.
RECIPE: Vegetarian (No Egg) Chocolate Chip Cookies
From Maharha Walters (full disclosure: one of BSJ’s sisters) who adds a note below the recipe so that you may go a step further and make these vegan. Makes 30 or more cookies, depending on portioning.
Ingredients
1 cup light brown sugar
1 cup white sugar
1 1/3 cups softened butter
3 tablespoons buttermilk or yogurt
2 teaspoons vanilla
4 cups all-purpose flour ( or 2 1/2 cups white and 1 1/2 cups whole wheat)
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup chopped walnuts
10 -12 oz good quality semi-sweet chocolate chips
Directions
Cream the sugars, butter, yogurt (or buttermilk) and vanilla. Add in the remaining ingredients and then form into balls. Place on cookie sheet about 2 inches apart and bake at 350 degrees for about 10-15 min or until done.
Note: To make vegan, substitute: vegan butter (such as Earth Balance brand) for cow’s milk butter; vegan yogurt for cow’s milk yogurt; and use vegan chocolate chips.
Certain recipes just won’t die. They’re not exactly zombie recipes; they’ve never been killed.
Despite periodic polling to ascertain just how many Americans truly despise the Campbell Soup Company’s 1955 recipe for “Green Bean Bake” (universally known as “the green bean casserole”—cooked green beans, canned mushroom soup, fried onions), around 20 million USA homes cook and serve it every last Thursday in November.
These recipes aren’t Lazarus recipes, dead for a while, then resurrected for some reason. We have had one-pot meat stews since we were able to throw a clay pot or hammer an iron one. Science is iffy on the commencement date, but count the cooking in thousands of years.
The recipes that refuse to die are more like Mel Brooks’ 2000-Year-Old Man recipes. They’ve just been around forever and will continue to be, because they are interesting and fun and delicious. They’ll never die.
Internet searches—of both the sort, on various cooking sites, of “Our Most Popular Recipes of All Time,” and those “most googled” by the general cook—turn up constants.
The surprise is the number of pastry (especially cookie and cake) recipes; it’s like starting dinner with dessert. Chocolate chip, sugar, and peanut butter cookie recipes appear will be with us always; so will chocolate (especially so-called “Devil’s Food”), carrot, and cheesecake. Recipes for brownies, apple pie, and lemon meringue pie also seem ageless.
By and large, the sweet tooth isn’t as much an overbite in other countries. The “most popular recipes”—in both cooking site and “the history of” searches—for France, Italy, and Spain, to name just three, return a predominance of what we call “savory” over “sweet” preparations.
Indeed, and characteristically, Italian cooks seem more constant in their pride in the never-die recipes that they have given the world than those that they cook themselves. Nonetheless, in 2017 (the year in which I originally wrote this piece), while the Italian home cook did prepare a lot of “Carbonara” and “Caponata”—yep, they’ve been around a while, both the many cooks and the recipes—the most sought-after recipe of the year was for a sweet, “Migliaccio Napoletano,” sometimes called in English “semolina cake” but traditionally made after the New Year with millet.
An aside here: I can’t stop loving the Italian over the English, “la ricetta più googlata,” “the most Googled recipe.”
On the savory side, we Americans have long been cooking—and have been cooking long—many variations on roasted or wet-cooked (braised) chicken thighs, pork roasts (both tenderloin and simple loin, as well as braised or long-cooked versions of shoulder), the ubiquitous and eternal pot roast, in both Dutch ovens and slow-cookers, and as many types of mac ‘n’ cheese or pasta as could be imagined by only Italian-Americans and their ever-ravenous audience.
In truth, all things chicken—not limited to the thigh, please—make up America’s most consumed, most-cooked meat. (According to sources as diverse as Chowhound, the World Atlas, and the USDA, we eat nearly twice as much chicken as beef.)
Chicken also sports the most recipes, many of longstanding use, due perhaps to its flexibility. Parts is parts.
The high-elevation recipe here for “Devil’s Food Cake” comes from former food editor for The Denver Post,Helen Dollaghan, and first appeared in the newspaper in 1967. Kristin Browning-Blas, who served from May 2002 until July 2014 as the second longest-serving food editor of The Denver Post after Dollaghan, said she received requests for this recipe “right up until I left.”
The devil don’t die.
RECIPE: Devil’s Food Cake
Fills a 9-inch tube pan or two 8-inch layers with batter left over for 6-9 cupcakes.
Ingredients
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
3 eggs
1/2 cup natural cocoa powder (not Dutch-processed)
3 cups sifted flour (sift, then measure)
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cups ice water
Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease a 9-inch tube pan or two 8-inch layer pans. In large bowl, cream butter and sugar together thoroughly. Add vanilla and eggs, beating until smooth.
In another bowl, sift dry ingredients together. Add dry ingredients alternately with ice water to creamed mixture, mixing well after each addition. End with dry ingredients and beat well.
Turn batter into greased pan. Bake 45-50 minutes for tube pan, 30 minutes for layers. Cool and frost with chocolate frosting or your preferred icing.
Wine Pairings and Why: Odd as it seems, sweet foods are the most difficult to pair with wine. Sweetness, as one or more sugars such as fructose or sucrose, combines with the majority of wines (themselves dry) to cause sensations on the tongue of bitterness, astringency and acidity. Drink a dry white Burgundy with vanilla ice cream and discover a terrible experience. But if you pair the level of sugar in the food with a corresponding (or slightly higher) level of sweetness in the wine, that works. A good example is pairing an apple tart with a medium-sweet muscat. But the overall guideline is that sweetness in food requires the same level of sweetness in wine. With some moderately sweet desserts, that wine would be a Moscato from Italy or this country or a Piedmontese Brachetto d’Acqui. With very sweet desserts, a Port, or a Bordeaux Sauternes, or even a Bual or Malmsey Madeira from Portugal.