Onion Shortcake

My cookbooks reside on shelves in my dining room, which I can easily see from my place at the table.  Sometimes a book just seems to be vying for my attention, by catching my eye over and over again.  This time the book was River Road Recipes.  I have had it for a while but I never really looked it over.  So I gave into its siren song and pulled it off the shelf.

Published by the Junior League of Baton Rouge, Inc.

The cover says it is a Louisiana #1 Best Seller, and looking inside the front cover tells me why.  The original copyright, for the first printing, is 1959.  My copy is from the fifty-eighth printing, in October 1983.  At 10,000 copies for each of the first twenty printings (200,000 copies!) and 20,000 copies for each of the rest (760,000 copies), this book clocks in at over 1,000,000 copies -- and that was 36 years ago.

I looked around the Internet and saw one copy boasting the 80th printing and the total number of copies at 1.2 million.

I am impressed, and the Junior League of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, should be very proud. 

I also found it amusing that my copy was inscribed:  "Won by Mildred Cyran on Delta Queen."  My book has been on the Delta Queen!

So what called to me from this book?  I looked through it and saw many recipes of the category I call "Ladies' Group":  recipes submitted by women (and some men) to build a fund-raiser cookbook.  Examples are:  "Hot Stuffed Tomatoes", "Baked Lasagna", "Cheese and Walnut Balls", and "Eggs Benedict."   Those are fine and lovely recipes, but I wanted to see something unusual, intriguing, or new.

Enter page 45, in the Hot Breads section.  At the top of the page was "Onion Shortcake" and I was intrigued.

Onion Shortcake

2 cups flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons shortening
1/2 to 2/3 cup milk
2 tablespoon butter
2 1/2 cups sliced onions
1 egg
1/2 cup top milk
1 teaspoon salt

I used just one onion for the 2 1/2 cups

Sift together flour, baking powder, and 1/2 teaspoon salt.  Cut in shortening.  Add milk and knead dough slightly.  Flatten into a greased casserole. 

Melt butter in a skillet; add onions and brown.  Cool and spread over dough.

Beat egg, milk, and salt and pour over onions.  Bake in a 400 degree oven for 15 - 20 minutes.  Good with roast beef, and also nice when you have no gravy.

-- Mrs. D. C. Johnston, Lindsay, La.

My Notes

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

I decided to start the onions first since they would take longer to cook than it would take to make the dough.  I didn't let them cool before using.

I sliced the onions into thin half-rounds while the butter melted in the skillet.  Then I cooked them over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally, until they were mostly browned.

Thin!

I used 2/3 cup milk in the dough.  This gave me a fairly dry dough that still stuck to itself more than the bowl.

The dough was patted into a 2 liter casserole dish that had been coated with non-stick cooking spray.



Once the onions were cooked, I spread them evenly over the dough.



"Top milk" is the milk-and-cream mixture that you get in unhomogenized milk.  I didn't have any cream available but I didn't worry about it because the butter in the onions would probably make it rich enough.



I declared the dish ready after 20 minutes of baking and the milk-egg mixture was slightly browned, puffy, and looked set in the middle.



The Verdict

I served the onion shortcake as a side dish to a lovely Tahiti squash soup. 

The shortcake is basically a biscuit with a topping of onions in a savory custard.  And it was tasty!



The biscuit portion was tender and fluffy.  The onion/custard topping was moist and flavorful and tied the whole dish together.  Overall, the experience was a savory bread with enough substance to stand up to roast beef.

My guest taster and I both enjoyed it and I thought it was a good pairing with the soup.  Success!

If I were to make it again, I would use a slightly bigger pan to spread the dough out more and not make the biscuit part quite so thick.  My guest taster disagreed as he liked how much biscuit was there.  We both agreed that more onions in the topping would be better.  I would like almost twice as much, I think.

My guest taster thought the shortcake was rich, and I thought it was just right.

I recommend the book based on this one recipe and on how many interesting recipes there are in it.  There is a Game recipe section and even one called "How Men Cook":  "We give to you their recipes -- untouched -- just as they gave them to us.  To standardize would have wasted their wording; to edit would have lost their charm.  To change them in any way would be unfair, and so the wording, the methods, as well as the recipes themselves are how men cook!"

Mrs. Fisher's Cheese Pudding

Abby Fisher was born a slave in South Carolina circa 1832.  After she was freed she moved to northern California where she distinguished herself by her cooking skills: 

she had clearly long been steeped in the best traditions of Southern cookery and was a fine practitioner, so recognized in her day.  ... she was awarded medals and diplomas at various fairs in California ... 

So impressive were her skills that a "committee of residents in San Francisco and Oakland <were> responsible for recording her knowledge of the art from dictation."  You see, neither Mrs. Fisher nor her husband were literate.

These quotes, from page 75 of the book What Mrs. Fisher knows about Old Southern Cooking, brings to our attention that her book appears to be the first cookbook written by an African-American that was published in the United States.  It was published in 1881.

ISBN 978-1-55709-403-2

I had the good fortune to recently visit Charleston, SC, where I found this reprint of Mrs. Fisher's book in a gift store.  It didn't take much perusing to decide that this book needed to come home with me.  It contains 160 recipes that address breads, meats, croquettes, cakes and other desserts, pickles, sauces, salads, sherbets, soups, and miscellaneous.

I saw several intriguing recipes I would like to try.  But the first was Cheese Pudding, recipe #159, partly because the ingredients caught my interest and also because we are directed to send it to the table "as a vegetable."  That made me laugh, because my first reading made me think it was a dessert!  However, I think she meant it to be a side dish to cooked meat, which is how I decided to serve it.

Cheese Pudding (159)

Have mild cheese; grate half pound of cheese and half pound of apples, add to this half pint of sweet milk, beat four eggs very light, and add to above.  Before mixing apples with cheese, put to it one tablespoon white sugar; stir all well.  Season with nutmeg, and pour it into a dish and put to bake, putting one tablespoon of butter over it in small pieces.  Twenty minutes will bake it, and send to table as a vegetable.

My Redaction

1/2 pound mild cheddar cheese (I used a mixture of mild and sharp cheddar), shredded
1/2 pound apple, cored and then shredded
1 cup milk
4 eggs
1 tablespoon sugar
ground nutmeg, to taste 
1 tablespoon butter

This is enough for two batches, except for the butter

Preheat oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit.  Grease a baking dish that has at least four cups capacity.

Put apples and cheese together; mix well.  Add the nutmeg and mix well.

Shredded apples!

Apples and cheese

In a separate bowl, beat the eggs until they lighten in color.  Add the milk and beat again.  Pour this liquid over the apple/cheese mixture and shake the baking dish a little to push out the air bubbles.

Dot the top with the butter and place in the oven.

This is the deeper baking dish

This is the shallower dish

Bake until the center is firm and the surface is lightly browned.  This took much longer than 20 minutes.  See notes.

My Notes

I was preparing to feed seven people with this, so I doubled the recipe.  I baked it in two separate containers, one that was wider than the other which affected the cooking time. 

It was easy to prepare; I was visiting with my company while fixing it and didn't worry that I would make mistakes.

The wider pan cooked for 30 minutes and was almost ready, although still too soft in the middle.  I think it should have cooked at least another 10 to 20 minutes. 

The deeper pan was cooked for a total of 50 minutes and was just right -- lightly browned on the top, puffy, and firm in the middle.

The Verdict

I didn't manage to get a picture of the deeper pan, despite it being cooked just right.  But here is the shallower one:

Close but not quite right yet

We scooped it out using a ladle and that worked well considering how soft it was.  The sides of the pudding were firmer, much closer to what I expected.

This was from the firmer side region of the baking dish

Letting it cool a little before serving helped with the firming up process.  But cooking it further would have been better.

I served it as a side dish to a lovely smoked beef brisket and a tossed green salad.

Three of us had the softer version and four had the firmer version.

First, everyone thought it was delicious!  Basically it was a cheese custard with the sweet flavor but more importantly the slightly crunchy texture of the shredded apples. 

The criticism I would make (and some of the others agreed) was that it was too oily -- perhaps the cheddar cheese was oily enough that I didn't need to put on the butter or that the butter wasn't necessary at all.  If I did this again, I would consider a different cheese that wasn't as oily.  It is hard to tell what would be good considering the cheese has to be firm enough to shred. 

I felt that apples went with cheddar, so that is why I picked it.  I think a good Swiss-style cheese would be good, too.

The apples kept the pudding from being too uniformly a fine-textured custard and the sweet cut through the oily enough to keep it from being heavy.  It was rich so a small serving was appropriate but it was tasty so many of us had second helpings. 

It was definitely not a dessert but I think you could serve it as such, especially if you put some chopped, toasted pecans on the top.  Apples and cheese and nuts all in one dish would certainly make a tasty dessert accompanying a good wine!

If twenty minutes cooked it to firm, then I think Mrs. Fisher used a hotter oven than I did.  350 degrees, maybe?  I'm not sure but it would be interesting to try it at that temperature another time.

So I call it a success.  I enjoyed my small taste of an old Southern recipe. 

Thank you, Abby Fisher, for sharing your well-honed cooking skills with us!