Clam Cakes

We also had clam cakes for first cousin once removed. It actually calls for canned clams, so I didn't have to do the search through multiple venues for ingredients routine. I prefer Rhode Island Clam Cakes, which I made this summer. These were okay, but rather liquid-y, partly due to my not reading the recipe all the way through in advance.

One is supposed to chill the clam cake mixture for at least 2 hours, and let the cakes dry out four 15 minutes after dipping them in egg and bread crumbs. I skipped that step entirely since I had to toss the bread crumbs intended for dipping into the mixture to get it to hold together.So while the Rhode Island Clam Cakes were luxuriously puffy, these Massachusetts Clam Cakes were flat. They were okay. People seemed to like them.They probably would have been better with the egg and bread crumb dipping. If you decide to make them, give yourself plenty of time





Clam Cakes



2 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons minced shallot

1 1/4 cup bread crumbs

2 eggs, lightly beaten

1/2 cup cream

2 seven ounce cans minced clams, drained

1/2 cup minced celery

1 tablespoon lemon juice

2 tablespoons chopped parsley

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon white pepper

1 egg beaten and diluted with one tablespoon water

fat for deep frying



1. Melt the butter in a saucepan and saute the shallot in the butter until soft but not browned.

2. Add one-half cup of the bread crumbs, the lightly beaten eggs, the cream, clams, celery, lemon juice, parsley , salt and pepper. Chill the mixture at least two hours.


3. Shape into eight two-inch cakes. Dip the cakes into the remaining crumbs and then into the remaining egg. Coast the cakes with crumbs a second time. Allow the cakes to dry out for fifteen minutes.

4. Fry the cakes, a few at a time, until golden brown in deep fat heated to 375 degrees. Drain. Makes four servings

Rutabaga Pie

Rutabaga Pie! Are you serious? Rutabaga Pie? Or, as my daughter asked, "Are you going to tell people what's in it?" The answer is, yes. I made this on Tuesday evening for Wednesday when my first cousin once removed came down from New York on a business trip. Son and fiance and daughter all came to dinner, and we had a high old time laughing about the antics of her two year old and looking at my parents' 1942 wedding pictures. FCOR is about 35. She was born right after I got out of college, and I used to spend a lot of time hanging out at her parents' house. So, as cousins should be, I am someone she has known all her life. Her mother is the sister of my cousin Cricket, my one blog follower. If her mother ever gave me any cooking advice, she would be referred to as my Boston cousin. Anyhow, although I refrained from Rutabaga Pie all these years (and Rutabaga Salad, and Pot Roast with mashed rutabagas as well), on closer examination, one will notice it has all the same ingredients as pumpkin pie. Of course, except for rutabaga instead of pumpkin. Anyway, it tastes pretty much like pumpkin pie. The rutabaga taste (and smell) is disseminated in the cooking and mashing of the rutabagas. The recipe says to sieve the rutabagas. Don't bother. Just make sure you cook them enough so they will be chewed up by the blender. So, if you have a surplus of rutabagas, (which frankly seems unlikely unless you live on a rutabaga farm) here's something new to do with them. Rutabaga Pie 1 1/2 cups cooked, mashed, and sieved (unnecessary) rutabaga or yellow turnip 1 cup light brown sugar 2 tablespoons unsulphured molasses, 2 eggs lightly beaten 1 1/4 cups light cream 1/2 teaspoon ginger 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg 1/4 teaspoon cloves 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 unbaked deep nine inch pie shell 1/2 cup heavy cream whipped sliced filberts 1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. 2. Beat together the rutabaga, brown sugar, molasses, eggs, light cream, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, salt and vanilla. Pour into the pie shell and bake fifteen minutes. Reduce the oven heat to 350 degrees and bake about forty minutes longer, or until set. Do not over bake. 3. Cool. Serve topped with the whipped cream and sliced filberts. Makes six servings.

Hot Apple and Potato Salad

This week has been a perfect whirlwind of blog related cookery, which just goes to prove that I could do this faster if I would put my mind to it. But that is true of just about anything. I could get better scores on my teacher evaluations if I put my mind to it. Anyhow, Hot Apple and Potato Salad is... a dish that one needs to monitor the cooking of the potatoes for.

I got on the phone with my friend Juliette while they were cooking. She told me that she, her mother, her two sisters and her husband are all coming to Son's wedding in May. Should be fun. As a result, the potatoes were more fit for mashing than potato salad. I am not terribly open to innovations in potato salad. German potato salad doesn't cut it at all. The various different deli potato salads such as three cheese are okay, but not great. Red bliss potato salad is about the best. This potato salad is not very potato salad-y, meaning it has no mayo. But, since the weather has been cold, windy and rainy, it is a good dish for a chilly night.

Hot Apple Potato Salad
1/2 cup golden raisins
1 cup boiling water
3 cups sliced cooked potatoes
1 cup diced celery
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
2 teaspoons salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
4 slices bacon
2 tablespoons cider vinegar
2 tablespoons tarragon vinegar
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon grated lemon rind
3 unpeeled red apples cored and diced

1. Place the raisins in abowl, pour the boiling water over rasins and let stand three minutes. Drain.
2. Combine the potatoes, celery, parsley, salt and pepper in a skillet.
3. In another skillet, cook the bacon until crisp. Add the cider vinegar, tarragon vinegar, sugar and lemon rind and bring to a boil.
4. Pour over the potato mixture. Heat gently. Add the apples and raisins and heat mixture to serving temperature.
Makes 8 servings.

Golden Cabbage

Monday night brought Golden Cabbage, which for some unknown reason I had viewed with suspicion. It's pretty simple. Shred cabbage, cook for an hour, make a cheese sauce and bake. The combination of cooking the cabbage for an hour and the cheese sauce gives it a mashed pototoey consistancy. It's good reheated too. It was very good. I didn't take a picture because it was very white food. I chose to serve it with pork chops on our everyday china, which is all white.

I got home relatively early for me after a satisfying hour with my first tutee, Elisa, who has been faithfully doing her homework without a glimmer of understanding as to what it was all about. She showed signs of being able to count money. I used my early arrival time to go down and work on the blog, not to start dinner.So when I went back upstairs and discovered that the cabbage had to boil for an hour, and then, "bake until thoroughly heated." I was somewhat dismayed.

My husband teases me about how, when he cooks, dinner is on the table when I get home. When I cook, no matter when he gets home, we eat around 9. So, this was another later than necessary meal.


Golden Cabbage



2 pounds white or green cabbage

2 quarts water

1 tablespoon sugar

1 1/2 tablespoons plus one teaspoon salt

2 cups milk

1/4 cup cornstarch

1/4 cup butter

1/4 pound Swiss cheese, grated



1. Remove and discard the core from the cabbage. Shred or chop cabbage finely and combine it with the water, sugar and one and one-half tablespoons of the salt. Bring to aboil, cover and cook over low heat one hour. Remove cabbage and drain thoroughly in a colander.

2. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

3. Combine the nmilk, cornstarch, butter and remaining salt. Bring to aboil over moderate heat, stirring. Combine with drained cabbage. Stir in all but four tablespoons grated cheese and blend well. Poour cabbage mixture into a buttered 71/2 by 12 inch baking dish. Sprinkle with the remaining cheese and bake just until thoroughly heated. Run the dish briefly under the broiler and serve hot. Makes six servings.

Egg Chowder

Egg Chowder is a monument to the inventiveness of the farm wife. Imagine being on a farm in Maine in the dead of winter. There are no more vegetables except the root veggies. All you have is potatoes. There's no fish, either because you live too far from the coast to buy it, or because the boats are frozen in by the ice. So what can you put in your basic potato, onion, milk chowder to make it a little different, to give it a little spark? Eggs! Egg chowder is the chowder base (milk, potatoes, onions) with eggs carefully broken into it and allowed to poach. It's cheap, easy and tasty. What more can you want from a soup? There are several (6,000,000 if you believe Google,) variations on this on the Internet. One, at http://www.the-coop.org/, involves making sort of a casserole and using dark rum as a flavoring agent. Several use hardboiled eggs. I had no idea until I started snooping through the book for unmade recipes, that there even was such a thing as Egg Chowder. Egg Chowder 3/4 cup diced salt pork 1 onion thinly sliced 3 potatoes, sliced 4 cups milk, scalded freshly ground black pepper to taste 4 eggs pilot crackers 1. Cook the salt pork until it releases some of the fat, but do not allow to become crisp. 2. Add the onion and potatoes and cook, stirring occasionally, ten minutes. Add the milk and pepper and cook gently until potatoes are tender.3. Break eggs into simmering mixture and cook three minutes. Serve with crackers. Makes 4 servings.

Tartar Sauce

On Saturday night, we had salmon and spinach with fennel. Aha, I thought. Tartar Sauce! Quick and easy recipe that knocks off another one and builds my monthly total. Also, tartar sauce goes well with salmon. I followed the recipe except, I used one cup of mayonnaise instead of 1 1/2 cups. I only wanted a cup of tartar sauce. I recommend this. The pickle and onion and the rest of the ingredients are concentrated in less mayonnaise so the tartar sauce has more of a punch. Just two random observations are, capers are hard to cut up, and cornichons (little French pickles) are too. Tartar Sauce 1 1/2 cups mayonnaise 2 tablespoons chopped sour pickle 1 teaspoon finely minced onion 2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley 2 tablespoons coarsely chopped capers 1 teaspoon chopped chives 1 teaspoon mustard, preferably Dijon or Dusseldorf 1/2 teaspoon finely chopped tarragon Lemon juice to taste 1 hard cooked egg, sieved

1. Combine all ingredients and chill. Makes about two cups.

Cole Slaw with Cooked Dressing

This salad, much favored by badgers, predates mayonnaise and things like olive oil in the farm kitchen. If you are the kind of person who stays up at night wondering what cole slaw originally tasted like, this will answer your question.
I had been planning to make this for weeks. It's possible that the cabbage was left over from the corned beef and cabbage that we had before we had corned beef hash. Luckily, cabbage has wonderful keeping qualities. You just shave off the black parts and chop up the rest.
My husband has been leaving early all week, since the Congress of the United States has been having one of its "District Work Periods" i.e. hit lobbyists up for money times, so he got to leave at 5:00 like a civilized person. Normally, he leaves between 8:30 and 9:00 pm, so we keep European hours. But this past week, he did all the cooking, so we would actually be finished with dinner and washed up by 8:15.
Well, all good things must come to an end, including district work periods, so tonight, I made dinner and got around to the cole slaw with cooked dressing. Don't be afraid of the double boiler. The dressing takes around 15 to 20 minutes to thicken. Just keep the water under the double boiler, which, in my house is whatever bowl I can lay my hands on, sitting on top of one of my pots, just simmering. You don't want it at a rolling boil, but not boiling means the stuff does not thicken.
Luckily, I happened to have a Campbell's Soup can with a little bacon fat sitting on the counter. We actually don't eat that much bacon. Two weeks ago, when I was home sick for a day with a cold, I cooked some bacon that was hanging around in the refrigerator, and made a bacon sandwich, which was really good. And, I kept the drippings. Back in the Berkshires, my mother kept one of those old coffee cans, that is wider and shorter than today's coffee cans, on the back of the stove, and put all the bacon fat in it. After it was full, she put it in the freezer and brought it out in the wintertime to feed the birds. One year, she complained vociferously about starlings flinging bacon fat onto the siding of the house.
Anyhow, this recipe calls for bacon fat, and is the better for it.
If you are wondering about the badgers, my husband unearthed them in the depths of daughter's closet, which is slowly being emptied out and the contents taken to school for "store" where kids will presumably buy with play money whatever detritus the teachers bring in from their overloaded houses. In a fit of whimsy he arranged them around the cole slaw.

Cole Slaw with Cooked Dressing

Cooked Dressing
1 egg, lightly beaten
3/4 cup milk
2 tablespoons flour
1 1/2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon dry mustard
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
2 tablespoons bacon drippings or butter
1/4 cup cider vinegar
Slaw
4 cups shredded cabbage
1/2 green pepper, seeded and diced
1/2 red sweet pepper, diced
1 teaspoon salt

1. To prepare cooked dressing, combine the egg and milk. In the top of a double boiler, mix together the flour, sugar, salt , mustard and cayenne. Stir in the milk mixture.
2. Cook over hot water, stirring until mixture thickens, Do not boil. Stir in the bacon drippings or butter and vinegar. Cool.
3. Combine the slaw ingredients in a bowl and toss well.
4. Stir in enough of the cooled dressing to moisten well.
Makes 8 servings.