This pie was the favorite of my brother Craig and I growing up and my mom made sure to have it on hand for family gatherings. This year I made it for that same brother and niece for Thanksgiving.
I had a long time tracking this recipe down after my mother passed away and was able to find it at the University of Iowa’s Main Library Special Collections Department in the Freedom Township Women’s Club Cookbook, published in 1934.
It’s maybe a little sweet for my tastebuds these days, but the hit of sensory memory I get when I take that first bite is a time travel worthy of Dr. Who.
Step 1: Preheat the oven to 350°F. Roll out the short-crust pastry dough on a floured surface. Coat a nine-inch pie pan with oil or non-stick spray and line the pan with the dough. Place in a freezer for at least 15 minutes.
Cover the pie pan with parchment paper and weigh down with pie weights. Place the pie pan on a sheet tray and blind bake for 35-40 minutes.
Before Blind Bake with weights
Post Blind Bake
Step 2: Combine sugar, flour and egg yolks and mix well.
Egg yolks, sugar and flour
Mix in the heavy cream, raisins and vanilla extract. Heat the mixture slowly so as to avoid scrambling the eggs until the mixture comes to a light simmer while stirring constantly. Simmer lightly for about one minute until the mixture starts to thicken, then remove from the heat.
Step 3: Make the meringue by using a mixer to beat the egg whites. When the egg whites start to foam, gradually add two tablespoons of sugar and continue until you have stiff peaks.
Step 4: Pour the filling into the pie crust and spread on the meringue. Bake for 15 minutes until the top begins to brown. Let cool on a wire rack.
The flavor of our family recipe for a Traditional Homemade Mincemeat, made with beef and suet, is so big that a small tart is just about the right amount to enjoy.
A small amount of Pie Dough can be rolled out and blind baked for a short time and filled with a few dollops of mincemeat before finishing in the oven for 15 minutes.
Just zap for 15 seconds in the microwave before serving.
Directions:
Step 1: Preheat oven to 400°F. Roll out a small amount of Pie Dough. Coat tart pans with oil or non-stick spray and line pans with dough.
Tart dough pre-baked
Step 2: Crumple parchment paper and place on the tart dough in the pans. Fill with pie weights. Bake at 400°F. for 15-20 minutes.
Tart dough with weights for blind baking
Tart dough after blind baking
Step 3: After blind baking the dough, fill with mincemeat and bake another 15 minutes.
The social isolation of Covid was a long haul. After a long Iowa winter, after our family was safely vaccinated, I got a message from my oldest brother in May of 2021 asking if he could come down for the Memorial Day weekend. He wanted to make mincemeat. In summer.
Typically, the flavors of mincemeat are more akin to winter eating, being strong with clove, cinnamon and nutmeg. In fact, that trio of spices has symbolic significance since they are supposed the represent the Three Gifts of the Magi at Christmastime.
However, he is in possession of a family recipe for a true traditional mincemeat made with beef and suet and I looked at this as an opportunity to share an activity together that would not only preserve a bit of family history, but also explore a bit of forgotten food history. Mincemeat has been around for centuries but gradually the meat disappeared and it became the sweet-tasting dessert we know of today.
We’re not sure about the provenance of this recipe beyond the fact that it came from my uncle, Virgil. My brother’s innovation is to use a good quality cut of beef instead of junky scrap cuts, which is what people have traditionally done. We used a standard-sized beef chuck roast from the supermarket that we cooked and cut up into bite-size pieces.
Finding beef suet on short notice was a bit of a trick. Suet is a crumbly fat that surrounds the kidneys and organs of cows and sheep and was prized by bakers, but is not a common item anymore. The Atora brand has been around since the 1800s and I was able to order it online.
The recipe calls for a HUGE amount of citron. The fresh fruit was completely out of season and grocery stores are not carrying anything like candied fruit except during the winter holidays. We decided to make our own candied citrus peel from scratch and it turned out glorious. Making your own candied mixed peel from scratch is really not that hard and there is no comparison between that and the gooey, DayGlo-colored commercial stuff you can buy in stores.
We decided to substitute dried cranberries for currants. Currants are very pricey and I already had a stockpile of dried cranberries. We also liked the idea of having the tartness of the cranberries to counter the sweetness of the other fruits and brown sugar.
The final result is, hands down, the best tasting mincemeat I’ve ever had. There’s a complexity to the flavor that is not remotely there with modern mincemeat made without beef and suet. Modern mincemeat is dominated by sweetness. The sweetness of a traditional mincemeat is appreciated more because it plays off the depth that is anchored by the beef and suet. It’s like a funk band with a really good bass player.
Chic “Good Times”
This recipe makes eight quarts. It’s a huge amount and we did not try to size it down. It does freeze well.
It was a lovely weekend and I was grateful for the chance to preserve a family tradition and work on this project with my brother together.
Ingredients:
2 -3 lb. Beef Chuck Roast
1 lb. Suet, ground
5 lbs. Apples, peeled and diced. Tart varieties like Granny Smith preferred
Combine brown sugar, salt, pepper, ground cinnamon, ground cloves, and ground nutmeg. Add to the mincemeat and mix well.
Mix in the apple juice, lemon juice and molasses.
Bring to a simmer and cook for one hour, stirring occasionally. Allow to cool. Refrigerate and freeze excess.
Adding Molasses
Before Cooking
After Cooking
Notes:
Mincemeat has been around for many hundreds of years and came about as a means of preserving meat without salting, curing, smoking or drying it.
Mince pies descended from meat pies made from mutton and spices and came to be associated with Christmas in England after the Crusaders brought back spices from the Middle East. The trio of cinnamon, clove and nutmeg came to be viewed as symbolic of the gifts given by the three wise men on Christmas night. Mince pies were baked in the shape of a crib. Mince pies of the Middle Ages were made of 13 ingredients to symbolize Christ and the 12 apostles.
The mincemeat pie was once banned in England. The Puritans, under Oliver Cromwell, thought celebrations like Christmas and Easter were too decadent and not biblical since they aren’t specifically mentioned in the Bible. According to the website for The Cromwell Museum, Parliament introduced a new ‘Directory of Public Worship’ in 1645, designed as a replacement for the Book of Common Prayer. It said that Christmas, Easter and other such festivals were no longer to be observed with special services or celebrations.
I mentioned the Book of Common Prayer in my post about Christmas Pudding with Brandy Sauce because that is where the tradition of “Stir-up Sunday” comes from as the day to start making Christmas Pudding. On the last Sunday before Advent, which is five weeks before Christmas, the opening words of the Book Of Common Prayer reads: “Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people,” and this date has been used for generations as the day for families to gather and “stir-up” the Christmas Pudding. I imagine there was an element of poetic “stick-it-in-your-eye” when this tradition came about that was aimed at the Puritans.
There’s an old English tradition that says the mincemeat mixture should be stirred in a clockwise direction when cooking in order to bring good luck. It was considered to be unlucky to cut the pie with a knife. They used to be made as hand pies and one pie was eaten for each of the 12 days of Christmas as a way to ensure a year of good fortune.
According to the website for The Mince Pie Club, tradition also says that one should make a wish whilst eating one’s first mince pie of the festive season, and that mince pies should always be eaten in silence. Mince pies should traditionally have a star on top, to represent the Christmas Star which led the shepherds and Magi to the baby Jesus in Bethlehem.
In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit entered—flushed, but smiling proudly—with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
My partner, Debra, makes this traditional Christmas Pudding from a recipe that is the family recipe of a friend she met when she lived in Perth, Australia in the early 1980s.
Family recipe from Barb Lochyer of Perth, Australia
Traditionally, a Christmas Pudding is started five weeks before Christmas on what is called “Stir-up Sunday.” The opening words of the Book Of Common Prayer, used on the last Sunday before Advent, reads: “Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people,” and this date has been used for generations as the day for families to gather and “stir-up” the Christmas Pudding.
The pudding is steamed for over five hours on the day it’s made and injected several times with brandy in the weeks before Christmas. It’s then steamed again for another three hours on Christmas Day. Deb was able to bring home a traditional pudding tin home with her.
This recipe makes more than can fit in this eight cup pudding tin since we leave plenty of headspace at the top. We’re able to make a smaller pudding by using this steam table insert.
Steam Table Insert
Ingredients:
372 grams Raisins, roughly chopped
375 grams Sultanas
250 grams Currants, roughly chopped
185 grams Prunes, chopped to same size as raisins and sultanas
Step 1: In a large bowl, mix together the raisins, currants, sultanas, prunes, chopped candied peel, grated lemon peel, chopped almonds, grated carrot, and breadcrumbs.
In another bowl, mix together the sugar, flour, salt, grated nutmeg and pumpkin pie spice. Add to the dried fruit mix and stir to combine.
Lightly beat the eggs and then add the milk, brandy and stout. Mix in the melted and slightly cooled butter. Add the liquid mixture to the dried fruit mixture and stir to combine.
Step 2: Cut a round of parchment paper to cover the top of the pudding tin.
Use non-stick cooking spray or vegetable oil to grease the pudding tin. Fill the mixture into the tin, leaving at least an inch of space at the top.
Wrap aluminum foil around the top of the tin and cover with the lid of the tin.
Step 3: Place the tin in a pot, preferably with a trivet in the bottom to keep the tin from making contact with the pot, and fill with hot water ⅔ up the side of the pudding tin. Place a cover on the pot and bring the water to a light boil. Continue cooking bain-marie style to steam the pudding for 5 ½ hours. Add water as needed throughout the cook time to keep the water level consistent.
A pressure cooker pot with a trivet works well
Allow to cool and refrigerate.
Step 4: About every two weeks until Christmas, use a syringe to inject a 50 ml. sample bottle of brandy into the pudding around the top of the pudding as far as the syringe will go. Keep refrigerated.
Step 5: The final steaming can be done a few days before Christmas. The pudding should be steamed a final time for three hours.
After the pudding has cooled thoroughly, it can be removed from the tin. It freezes extremely well when wrapped in wax paper, plastic wrap and aluminum foil.
Heat before serving and top with a Brandy Sauce.
Brandy Sauce
4 tbsp. Butter, softened
2 tbsp. granulated White Sugar
1 tsp. Pure Vanilla extract
1 tbsp. Brandy
Nutmeg, freshly grated
Whip butter until creamy. Add sugar and beat until frothy. Whip in vanilla extract and brandy and dust with freshly grated nutmeg.
Many people reacted to the pandemic by starting a garden, taking up baking and learning about food preservation. Pressure cookers and home canning supplies were in short supply because of the increased demand.
In many ways, this was right up my alley because I grew up on a farm with parents who grew up in the Great Depression. When I was 14 years old in 1976, I started subscribing to The Mother Earth News. My dad had quit using chemicals on his farm in 1968 because he became concerned about the impact of farm chemicals on the water supply and environment. The Back-to-the-Land movement resonated with me as a young man.
The Waltons also played a factor because it came on the air in 1972 when I was 10 years old. I felt I was able to connect to my parents because they were kids in a rural setting at the time when that show took place.
And then there was The Good Life. When it was shown in the United States on Public Television, the British TV show that originally ran in the 1970s was called Good Neighbors. It’s about a couple living in the London suburb of Surbiton who decide to quit the rat race and become self-sufficient. It was an enormous hit and has been a beloved show for decades.
The book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance informed the hippie ethic of the 1960s and ’70s with the pursuit of quality over quantity and the affirmation of homemade food over TV dinners was an expression of that ethic. Home canning, craft beer and sourdough bread all saw a resurgence.
Our basement, 2021
Another response to the pandemic which involved stocking up was informed by the Doomsday Prepper movement. That movement had it’s own enormously popular television show that became a cultural phenomenon.
Unlike the Back-to-the-Land movement, the Doomsday Prepper movement is a dark, paranoid vision of life. Instead of a quest for a better life and a better society, the Doomsday Prepper movement is about throwing in the towel on society and hunkering down to a miserable existence of packaged meals-ready-to-eat and dehydrated foods suitable to eat only if nuclear war has eliminated all other options.
Both The Good Life and Doomsday Preppers are fantasies, although DoomsdayPreppers calls itself “reality” television. That’s the tyranny of people pushing the “American Carnage” narrative; they want to squash everyone else’s reality so that, once society breaks down, they can thrive after making everyone else as miserable as they are.
A lot of individual choices go into making a society. Do you want to be good neighbors and live where people exchange homemade goodies across the fence or do you want to be that asshole who leaves a floodlight on in their backyard all night because you’re convinced The Brown Hordes are coming to take your stuff?
I was researching family history in the Special Collections Department at the University of Iowa’s Main Library when I came across a recipe for something called “Keokuk Pie.” It was in a cookbook published in 1934 by the Freedom Township Women’s Club. Freedom Township is a rural area east of Emmetsburg, Iowa and my grandmother belonged to the club when my grandparents farmed there at that time.
I’d never heard of Keokuk Pie. I looked online at the menus of restaurants located in Keokuk, Iowa and nobody carried anything called Keokuk Pie. A broader internet search turned up nothing. Why would this pie be called Keokuk Pie?
It’s basically a vanilla cream pie. Mark Twain, who lived in Keokuk, Iowa in 1855 and wrote for the local newspaper, is said to have written more words about pie than any other American author. None of them were about vanilla cream pies.
Keokuk, Iowa served as a departure point for 2,500 Mormons setting out for the long journey to Salt Lake City in 1853. According to a magazine article published in 1976 by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the favorite dessert of Joseph F. Smith was a custard pie. However, the recipe for the Mormon leader’s favorite pie clearly states that it contains “no vanilla.”
So why Keokuk? Did Mrs C.J. Miller, of Emmetsburg, Iowa, have a particularly good slice of vanilla cream pie while visiting Keokuk, Iowa and forever call all vanilla cream pies “Keokuk” pies thereafter? That’s as good a theory as any I guess.
Well, whatever the reason, it’s a pretty dang good pie. It can be made on short notice from items found in a typical kitchen. Someone can score major points by making Keokuk Pie and saying, “Oh, this? Why, it’s just something I threw together. It’s called Keokuk Pie. Oh, you’ve never heard of it?”
I’d probably make up a story about Mark Twain or the Mormons at this point.
Directions:
Pie Crust
12 flats (6.3 oz.) Graham Crackers, crushed into crumbs
2 tbsp. Sugar
4 tbsp. Butter, melted
Preheat oven to 350°F. Mix cracker crumbs, sugar and melted butter and form a crust in a nine-inch pie pan, reserving a tablespoon of crumbs for topping. Use a spatula to tamp down the crumbs firmly in the pan. Bake the empty crust for seven minutes.
Filling
1½ cups Whole Milk
2 Egg Yolks
2 tbsp. Corn Starch
6 tbsp. Sugar
½ tsp. Pure Vanilla Extract
Combine sugar and corn starch, then mix in egg yolks. Add milk and whisk thoroughly. Slowly heat the mixture while stirring constantly in order to avoid scrambling the egg yolks. Heat to bubbling and continue stirring for about two minutes until it thickens to a pudding-like consistency.
Meringue
2 Egg Whites
2 tbsp. Sugar
Beat the egg whites until foamy, then gradually add the sugar and continue until you have stiff peaks.
Pour the filling onto the pie crust and spread on the meringue. Sprinkle the top with reserved graham crumbs. Bake for 15 minutes until the top begins to brown. Let cool on a wire rack.
*** Thank you to The Storm Lake Times for running an article from this post. ***
The 20th anniversary of 9/11 comes at the same time as canning season and the metaphor of taking stock has been playing on my mind.
When I started this blog two years ago it was so I could have a creative project that someone else could not take away from me. Long story, but I’ve had a lot of opportunities that have gotten torpedoed just when they might have had a chance to develop and grow and the consequences have been life-altering. I finally had one too many.
20 years ago was also a time when I was taking stock because things had not been working out for a long time. When I was in my early teen years I was someone who had a creative spark, was reasonably intelligent and could communicate well.
At key moments in my life, when there was a door open to a professional opportunity that looked like I was going to be able to develop my talents, something happened to slam the door shut. And then one day, like many people, I looked back and realized that I was a long way from that kid on the farm who had all that potential.
It was always kind of a long shot anyway because I did not come from a culture that valued individual growth. Growing up in rural Iowa, conforming to the norms of the group was the dominant ideology.
The funny thing is, it has often felt like my efforts to develop a professional life have been blocked by the gatekeepers to another kind of group. A kind of club. It’s a club full of people who were encouraged from a young age to develop their talents and they were telling me that I didn’t belong.
I’ve made a conscious effort to reconnect to that kid who represented the best of my young self. I feel a need to develop my own expression even if it never connects to an audience just so that I can see where it goes. It always got shut down before.
I think a lot of the resentment rural people have towards those who celebrate personal expression and growth comes from the fact that many rural and working class people feel like they never got the chance to develop as individuals so why should anyone else?
And that’s where the appeal of Donald Trump comes in. I know that sounds like a stretch, but bear with me.
My first thought when I tried to understand the appeal of Donald Trump was that he is a fantasy figure. He’s what people think they would be able to act like if they ever won the lottery. All the frustrations they’ve ever had in life would be removed because they could just walk over anybody who got in their way. He’s the repressed Id on steroids.
Trump Golden Idol. Photo: AP News
I think Trump supporters look with anger at people in the arts, people marching for liberation, people in academia and people experimenting with gender identity because they feel resentment toward people who seem to be playing by a different set of rules.
And I get that.
As I’ve tried to re-career throughout my life, I’ve gotten blocked by people who don’t think I belong in the club.
But I’ve kept coming back to the idea of reconnecting to the young teen who grew up on an organic farm. At the age of 39, I moved to a small town in Iowa and bought a natural foods store that I ran for seven years. That’s when I discovered that small town Iowa was not the same place I grew up in and the culture of resentment I experienced predicted the rise of Donald Trump.
I was only in my late 40s when I moved away from there and ran face-first into a wall of ageism that was ready to throw me on the scrap heap of society. It’s been a long decade plus since then.
But when Covid hit I found that a lot of my farm mentality became a positive. I could conceptualize Covid as being like the Great Depression. My parents had grown up during the Great Depression and, funny as it may sound, I felt a connection with them about that through the TV show, The Waltons.
Hey, I was ten years old when it came on.
In a lot of ways, journaling and blogging has been a way to get in touch with my inner John Boy.
The Waltons
Which brings me back to canning.
See, it all ties together!
And to gardening. And to the fact that for a number of years we have been converting our backyard into a perennial wildflower pollinator haven. I truly believe our backyard has more soil microbe, insect and pollinator activity than the average Iowa cornfield.
Our mental health during Covid has been surprisingly good because we have rejected the expectations of society and have taken pleasure in the rhythm of the seasons of our home and yard. Gardening and freezing and canning have given us activities that keeps us productive with a sense of accomplishment.
Cooking gives you a reward that office politics cannot take away. Opening up a jar of something in the wintertime made of something you grew in the summer is a reminder that seasons come and seasons go and that each has its own rewards.
I think a lot of people freaked out so much during Covid because their status as members of a group was threatened. That wasn’t such a big loss for me because I’ve been consistently rejected by the dominant groups of every community I’ve lived in my whole life.
So I don’t really have any great insights into the meaning of 9/11 or the times we live in other than these moments are opportunities for reflection and, hopefully, a chance to see that growth has been happening and that things are getting better. I’m trying to write my own narrative and not let other people write one about me.
I will close with some contemplative music that was some of the most requested to Public Radio stations after 9/11. It’s called Farewell to Stromness and is about a town on an island off the coast of Scotland that almost disappeared. Almost.
We’ve been converting the lawn in our backyard to a large pollinator garden full of drought resistant perennial flowers and native grasses. It’s a response to climate change and a desire to encourage biodiversity. It’s also building on the legacy left by the original owner of the house who was an avid gardener and winemaker who planted Marechal Foch grapes in the 1970s.
The grape was prominent in the Upper Midwest because it could survive the harsh winters and is disease resistant. I’ve had to learn about pruning and have made some lovely jam from the fruit before, but usually the birds eat most of the grapes before we ever do much with them.
Last year the birds ate every one a good three weeks before they were even close to being ripe. This year we were determined to enjoy some so I started picking them before they were completely ripe and freezing them whole until I could decide what to make from them. After I had five gallon-sized freezer bags full I started to get concerned about how much space they were taking up.
I decided to can the juice and that has wound up being the thing I want to experience most this winter as a way to remind me of summer by mixing it with sparkling mineral water.
It’s also a way of reminding me of a mission trip I went on with my mother to Tisovec, Slovakia in 1994 after my father had died. A free-flowing spring is located a few hundred yards outside of town and locals hike out with carts and backpacks to fill bottles with the naturally carbonated mineral water.
People there would mix a homemade fruit syrup with the mineral water to make a refreshing naturally-flavored carbonated soda.
Naturally Carbonated Mineral Spring in Tisovec, Slovakia
Communal Mineral Spring in Tisovec, Slovakia
Waiting to fill bottles at the mineral spring in Tisovec, Slovakia
We’ll wind up with about a dozen quarts of a lovely unsweetened grape juice made from our own grapes. It’s quite nice without any additional sugar.
There’s not much to making it, really. Just bring the grapes to a simmer and boil for 10 minutes – just enough to break down the skins while crushing them with a potato masher. Marechal Foch grapes are seedless. Strain through a fine mesh Chinoise or cheesecloth and process according to the USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning instructions. Basically, if you’re doing water bath canning it’s processing at a full boil for ten minutes and if using a pressure canner it’s six lbs. of pressure for ten minutes.
We’ll enjoy it in the wintertime as a way of reminding us of summer. There’s a satisfaction that comes from something you made yourself that can’t be matched by simply being a capitalist consumer.
There’s a timelessness to following the ebbs and flows of the seasons. Growing … producing … stocking up. Then, in the dead of winter, getting a flood of memory from opening up a jar.
“No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Evanjelické Gymnázium Tisovec, aka The Lutheran High School of Tisovec
The Evanjelické Gymnázium Tisovec, or Lutheran High School of Tisovec, was a very popular mission trip in the early 1990s for members of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. The Missouri Synod Lutheran Church was the church I grew up in and one I ultimately rejected as an adult. However, my mother wanted to make this trip after my father passed away and she asked me to go along.
It was an extremely good thing I went for her sake and it did spur me to renew an interest in religion. I investigated religion as an adult and rejected the fundamentalist sect nature of most of what I see in American religious life. I joined the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America because of their inclusiveness. However, serving on church council in a small town in Iowa pretty much did in my desire to belong to a church ever again. I’ve since stopped believing in a personal God as a man with a snowy white beard who knows the number of hairs on my head.
Still, the trip was an important experience and I’m sad that I’ve had so many defeats in life that it remains my only overseas trip. I am grateful that it’s easy to recall the sensory impressions I had at that time and at that place.
“But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years – and it opens.”
Our friend Jackie was staying with her mother in the city of her youth in Kolkata, India when the pandemic hit. She’s been a teacher and department chair at a university in Minnesota for many years and was on sabbatical doing research in her home country. There simply was no way to get back.
Our conversations with her every Sunday morning via WhatsApp became another of the rituals we assigned personal meaning to that helped us through the pandemic. Inventing rituals that had personal meaning became so important to us during that time because the established public rituals required by religion and civics were such abject failures. In both India and the United States, religious and political leaders goaded the public to risk killing themselves and others in order to appear “normal.” Our weekly conversations allowed us all to maintain contact with other sane people.
Jackie continued to teach online for the university, conducting her classes in the wee hours of Kolkata time. She was able to provide an extra layer of caring and protection for her elderly mother. As the vaccines became available early in 2021, India exploded with Covid-19 thanks to religious festivals and political campaigns that turned into super-spreader events. Even attempting to get vaccinated was extremely risky because it involved standing in long lines at a hospital with hundreds of people.
I have no doubt that had Trump been reelected the United States would have been just like India. Trump and the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, are two peas in a pod and Trump would have withheld vaccine from “Democrat states” just like Modi doled it out to his preferred groups and withheld it from others.
A family friend was able to get Jackie’s mother vaccinated in a safe setting but Jackie was not able to since she is now a U.S. citizen and lacked a form she needed. Her safety was on our minds constantly.
As the Delta variant burned hotter across the globe during the summer of 2021, it looked less and less likely that we would see her any time soon. Travel was still restricted from India for non-citizens and who knew how long it would be before it closed altogether?
Then on August 5th, we got a message from her that she had booked a flight and was coming the next week. Not vaccinated.
We held our breath.
Air India Flight Crew. Photo: NDTV
The Air India flight crew from Kolkata to Mumbai inspired confidence and all passengers were required to wear masks and face shields. Jackie brought seven different changes of masks that she would wear throughout the 27 hours of flight time to Minnesota.
We picked her up at the Minneapolis airport at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, August 14th. We all wore masks on the car ride back to her house where she showered immediately and then got her first round of vaccine in the early afternoon. A tear welled up in me as she walked back to get the jab. It had been a long haul but it ended in success.
The anti-mask, anti-vaccine people are complete idiots. They’ve made a false idol out of Infantile Selfishness and profess that to be their One True God.
Trump Golden Idol. Photo: AP News
Jackie actually knew Mother Teresa in Kolkata in the 1980s. Mother Teresa’s God is very different than Donald Trump’s.
As a gift, Jackie brought us a masala dabba for storing spices and a bamboo mortar and pestle for grinding them. Our greatest gift was knowing that she was going to be safe.
Candied citrus peel is something simple and wonderful. 20th Century food industrialization turned it into an abomination. This is worth pulling back from the abyss.
My first experience with homemade candied peel was when my friend, Jackie, brought back to the States a fruitcake made by her brother at her childhood home in Kolkata at Christmas time. My own brother makes a pretty awesome fruitcake during the winter holidays, but Jackie’s brother made his own homemade candied peel and it was on a whole other level.
Many traditional foods became bastardized in the 20th Century by industrialization in the United States. Beer is a great example. After the 1950s, a cornucopia of beer styles had been reduced to a choice of one. Thanks to marketing, the neo-fascists who consider themselves to be the only “real” Americans now consider pale piss-water to be “real” beer.
I’m not a fancy cook. I live in the realm of peasant food. I want to reclaim traditional recipes, use good ingredients and maybe “healthy” them up a bit by not relying completely on salt and fat for flavor. Reclaiming candied peel is right up my alley.
My oldest brother – the one who makes the awesome fruitcakes – announced after the long winter of Covid, after we had all been safely vaccinated, that he’d like to come down for a visit and make mincemeat. In summer.
His recipe called for a lot of candied peel and we soon discovered that the stuff sold in grocery stores – those tubs containing the nuclear-colored Rosemary’s Baby known as Candied Mixed Peel – was available only at Christmas time.
It just so happens my partner, Debra, made her own candied citrus peel for a Christmas Pudding she made from scratch last year. (It was wonderful and will be the subject of a future blog post. So will the recipe for mincemeat.)
Candied citrus peel is simply splendid. It’s one of life’s simple pleasures and should not be missed. They’re fabulous dipped in chocolate.
Ingredients:
3 – 4 Oranges
3 – 4 Lemons
1 Grapefruit
2 cups Sugar
2 cups Water
Directions:
Step 1: Peel the fruit and slice into ¼ inch strips. Try not to get very much of the white pith.
Step 2: Put the peel in a pan and cover with cold water. Bring to boil, reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes. Drain, return to the pan and cover with fresh water. Bring to a boil and simmer for another 30 minutes.
The purpose for this initial two stages of boiling in water is to reduce bitterness.
Step 3: Drain the peel and bring two cups of water to a boil and stir in two cups of sugar until dissolved. Add the citrus peel and simmer for 30 minutes until the peel is translucent.
Step 4: Spread the candied peel out on wire racks over baking sheets to cool and dry. If you’re planning on storing them it’s a good idea to toss them in sugar to prevent them from clumping together.
