baking-with-frank

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Nine parts? Them’s a lot of rules.

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In this family, pie is religion.

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Who knew Railroad Cakes were so versatile? #DailyFrank

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I have several Dutch friends. I’ve not had any of these. #DailyFrank

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I’ll take a luxury two oven and a fridge. #DailyFrank

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Not baking, but….EEL SOUP!! What’s not to love? #DailyFrank

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walnut sponge sheet? #DailyFrank

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Yeast made with hops? Yes. #DailyFrank #Yeast

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Boiled beef, chopped fine. Well, that explains it.

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Daily Frank: Gonna be a hot one, regulate your temperature by opening doors and dampers and watching results.

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Daily Frank: Before baking the tarts, have the fluted tins clean. If they have been washed, place them into the oven so as to thoroughly dry them and then if the crust does not contain very much shortening, grease them slightly. (Fancy Cake Baking, Henry Heide Incorporated, copyright 1926)

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Recipe 1: Almond Macaroons. The ingredients on this one were simple enough…almond paste, sugar, corn meal, egg whites. I decided to follow the order of the ingredients (because I heard somewhere you should do that). A few pro tips: sugar and almond paste do not respond to a potato masher. They are equally difficult to combine with a fork. So-hands in, and I mixed the two to an oatmeal-like consistency.

Next up was the cornmeal. After weighing it out in a contemporary (to Frank) balance scale—as I did with the sugar—in it went, then the hands. All in all, it was going pretty well.

Egg whites. Easy peasy. I started with 9 eggs, and dutifully cracked and separated them, having a bowl for the whites, a bowl for the yolks, and a bowl for the shells. Well, except for two of them, where I got distracted and the whole egg went into the shells. Serendipitously, and I’m sure this was both Mom and Frank stepping in, 7 egg whites is EXACTLY 1/2 pint!! In they went. Hands in.

And, after mixing this concoction, I got…gloop. The dough was the consistency of pancake batter. As these needed to be cookies (and I did a little pre-research on the back of the almond paste box-thank God for that), it wouldn’t work. Jonathan suggested whipping it to remove the lumps-still juice. Aha, I thought…CORN STARCH! Corn starch makes everything thicken. Except, apparently, almond macaroon batter. OK, fine. Self, I said, cookies have flour. So I added some flour. NOPE. It mocked me. When I tried to make a cookie, it smooshed on the sheet.

At this point, Jonathan’s eyebrows were high and he was grinning. I can beat this, I thought. I resorted to a search on the Information Superhighway. SUGAR. Sugar, the answer to most things, was the answer here.

Viola. Almond Macaroons.

Next time: Special guest star. (How many of you are having Love Boat flashbacks? It isn’t Charrro.)

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It starts, as so many things do, with a book. In this case, the cookbook of my Great Grandfather, Frank Rush.

I’d known the book all my life. Mom had shown it to us occasionally, always ending with “I’d love to make some of these, but I’d need a bathtub to mix them up!”

Frank was born in 1888, and grew up in the Cincinnati area. He married Cora Ruettinger, my Great-Grandmother, in 1911 and had three children-the youngest, also Frank (and my Grandfather) was born in 1916. Cora was a victim of the Spanish Flu Pandemic, dying in 1918. Frank remarried soon after to Effie.

He initially worked in the Edwin Effelmann Bakery in Cincinnati (which was eventually absorbed by the Klosterman Bakery, which still operates today), and then opened his own bakery later in life. We believe these recipes are from that timeframe, ending with his death in 1934.

As Mom approached her 75th birthday, the plan was to make some of the recipes she’d always talked about, with the help of friends who own a restaurant. Mom passed one month shy of her 75th.

This, then, is a way to hold on to Mom, to honor Frank, and to not make too big a fool of myself as I try to make some of Frank’s recipes-many of which likely haven’t been made in a century. And to have some fun along the way.