Come on Joe, nobody ever did that. Oh yes, my friends, Lillie whipped her eggs the REALLY old-fashioned way, using a simple loop whisk and a flat wooden board. Well, it wasn’t totally flat. It had a shallow depression carved in the center where the liquid whites would sit before she applied her formidable elbow […]
READ ONReader Jacquie asks: Is there another dietary source of iodine other than salt? I tend not to add salt to things – mostly because I don’t care for the “saltiness” and I think as a culture foods are over-salted. (In part to mask the lack of taste from being grown in soilds lacking nutrients – […]
READ ONTalk about something that brings me back to childhood. Taking a bite of these put me right back in Lillie’s kitchen, where my twin sister and I would watch her whip up meringue by hand on a flat egg board (she didn’t own a mixing machine of any kind). Lillie was an ample woman, and […]
READ ONI was very lucky as a boy to live two doors down from the neighborhood baking queen. Her name was Lillie Lundstrom, a second-generation Swede whose cakes and cardamom rolls are still the stuff of legend on Lincoln Street. One of her lesser-known creations was this recipe for apricot bars, which takes the American concept […]
READ ONMexico Bob wrote in on the subject of salt. He wrote: What’s the big deal with salt. Salt is salt, right? Why do some recipes call for sea salt and others for Kosher salt, and others for pickling salt, etc? Can you really taste the difference? Bob, I think you’re right that salt is salt. […]
READ ONReader Laura asks this about lemon bars: Why can’t you just cook the curd in the pan to 196 degrees and then spread the fully cooked curd on the baked crust? That’s an excellent question that’s going to allow me to get good and geeky. It’s a fair thing to wonder. I mean, if I’m […]
READ ONIt has surprisingly little when you consider that citrus curds have been popular for about 125 years and shortbread for many (many) more than that. You’d have thought that somebody, especially somebody living somewhere in Britain, would have put those two things together in pie form. It seems, however, that this particular somebody never did. […]
READ ONWhen you’ve got a hold of a quality lemon bar, you know it. Last night the missus took a bite of one of these and said: “it’s like I’m sitting under a lemon tree in the springtime, and the sun is shining on me.” That’s about the size of it. Start by laying out all […]
READ ONScanwiches. Ya gotta love the simplicity and single-mindedness of this little online effort: lessons in the fine art of sandwich making. I’m really hungry now.
READ ONLemon bars have been much abused the last couple of decades. Once quite rare, they’re now a staple of coffee shops and fast-casual chains like Panera Bread and Corner Bakery. Though I wonder: are those thick yellow slabs next to the pile of fist-sized brownies really lemon bars? An argument could be made that they […]
READ ON