Thursday, January 8, 2015

HFF Challenge 16: Celebratory Foods

This challenge is about coming up with a historical dish that is made for a celebration - either New Year's or otherwise. In my case, this celebration is for the discovery that I didn't owe as much as I thought I did on a car insurance payment. Small pleasures in life :)

My wonderful boyfriend took me to the Glenn Curtiss Museum in Hammondsport, New York a few days after Christmas. Even though it's mostly about planes and motorcycles, which I consider to be more "guy stuff", I really enjoyed myself (I saw a MASSIVE circa 1860 hair wreath -un-joined, so not memorial - that contained hair from 15 [or 16, now I can't recall] people!). Knowing how much it costs to keep a museum, especially a little one, going, I couldn't leave without getting a little something. So, I bought this interesting little cook book.

The recipes in here really aren't all that weird to me, but then, working at the Museum, I'm kind of jaded to things like brains, tongue, and chickens encased in aspic as food items.

I decided to make chocolate apricot cookies from the 1940's section of the book. This is a secondary source, which makes me twitch a little, but I don't think that the author has altered the recipes all that much to suit modern palates. Here's my end result (there was a little misunderstanding with the flour and the first sheet that went in the oven was wasted, so I only ended up with 9 medium sized cookies. But yummmm.
Not too chocolatey-looking are they?
The Date/Year and Region: 1940's America

How Did You Make It?: It's really a basic cookie, and like my historical counterparts, I'm going to assume you know how to make a basic cookie.

Time to Complete: 20 minutes, max. You know I never time these things, haha!

Total Cost: I honestly don't know, my father was going to the supermarket and offered to get baker's chocolate and dried apricots for me. He never did tell me what I owed him for it.

How Successful Was It?: HAHAHA After the disastrous first tray, where my cute little cookies just oozed all over the place? Very good! The chocolate flavor is much more delicate than we're used to these days, and the apricot flavor even more so (in the future I might add a little apricot jam, just to boost the flavor), but the cookies were perfectly baked, to toot my own horn :P

How Accurate Is It?: Assuming that the recipe wasn't altered (other than the author recommending the addition of chocolate chips, to boost the chocolate flavor), pretty accurate. Of course, I didn't bake them in a 1940's oven, or mix them by hand, and I used butter instead of shortening because...butter.

I'll definitely (tweak these a smidge and) bake them again!