bakers rack : 20th-century cookbook offers precise techniques for the serious baker
sometimes leaf gently through the pages of old cookbooks, looking for quaint phrasing and old-fashioned recipes to share with readers.
I was recently surprised to find that you don't have to go back all that far in time for a cookbook to seem dated. We live in a new millennium, and it turns out that some cookbooks published as recently as the last century (1992, to be exact) can seem humorously out-of-step with today's standards for fast, easy cooking.
The arrival in my kitchen last weekend of the first few quarts of truly local strawberries (evidenced by both their flavor and the occasional less-than-perfectly shaped berry) had inspired me to research recipes showcasing strawberries. I picked Flo Braker's "The Simple Art of Perfect Baking" from the bookshelf because I recalled it contained a strawberry cake recipe that I'd always wanted to try. Strawberry Window Cake is filled with strawberry mousse, covered with a pretty basket-weave pattern, and topped with a few fresh strawberries.
The recipe sounded delightful, but I quickly came to realize that I was not in its league. The instructions for preparing the cake covered nearly four pages -- mousse directions were in another part of the book. A long rectangular angel loaf pan was called for, though a tube or springform pan could also be used. "If you are using a springform pan, balance the empty pan on top of four sturdy glasses turned upside down, in such a way that the pan's rim rests on the edges of the glasses' bases." The baked cake must be cooled upside-down for 12 hours, then freed carefully from the pan and cooled for another 12 hours before icing.
Talk about delayed gratification. I decided to go ahead and just eat the strawberries.
Unlike some other types of cooking, baking is a precise art. As a professional baker and teacher, Braker knows that "the process involves more than magic. It really means attention to details such as precise measuring, correct oven temperatures and specific rack placement." She takes the time to explain every step, because she's serious about baking. "In writing the book, she "visited bakeries and quizzed bakers in the United States and in half a dozen European countries ... I brought home each country's sugar, flour and chocolate and experimented with them ..."
Braker offers these "secrets" of perfect baking:
Buy a scale, because it is the most precise way of measuring flour (120 grams for unsifted all-purpose flour) and sugar (200 grams for granulated or brown sugar, 100 grams for powdered sugar). A scale is even invaluable for determining the correct amount of eggs, since each egg should equal 2 ounces
Use measuring cups correctly -- dry cups for dry ingredients and Pyrex glass measures for wet. Why does it matter? Liquids don't level off in the same way dry ingredients do, so a cup of liquid for puff pastry may be off by an ounce in a dry cup, with disastrous results. Using a liquid measure for a dry ingredient like flour can cause variations of as much as 1/4 cup per cup.
And finally, this encouraging thought from Braker: "Mistakes in baking may even lead you to create a new dessert, a new trend or even a new category of dessert." Puff pastry was created by a baker who forgot to put butter in the dough, then decided to try rolling it into the dough.
The recipe for Strawberry Window Cake is too lengthy to print here, but if you would like to see that recipe and other Braker creations you can borrow Flo Braker's "The Simple Art of Perfect Baking" from several Maryland libraries, including Pocomoke City.
By Tracy Sahler
I was recently surprised to find that you don't have to go back all that far in time for a cookbook to seem dated. We live in a new millennium, and it turns out that some cookbooks published as recently as the last century (1992, to be exact) can seem humorously out-of-step with today's standards for fast, easy cooking.
The arrival in my kitchen last weekend of the first few quarts of truly local strawberries (evidenced by both their flavor and the occasional less-than-perfectly shaped berry) had inspired me to research recipes showcasing strawberries. I picked Flo Braker's "The Simple Art of Perfect Baking" from the bookshelf because I recalled it contained a strawberry cake recipe that I'd always wanted to try. Strawberry Window Cake is filled with strawberry mousse, covered with a pretty basket-weave pattern, and topped with a few fresh strawberries.
The recipe sounded delightful, but I quickly came to realize that I was not in its league. The instructions for preparing the cake covered nearly four pages -- mousse directions were in another part of the book. A long rectangular angel loaf pan was called for, though a tube or springform pan could also be used. "If you are using a springform pan, balance the empty pan on top of four sturdy glasses turned upside down, in such a way that the pan's rim rests on the edges of the glasses' bases." The baked cake must be cooled upside-down for 12 hours, then freed carefully from the pan and cooled for another 12 hours before icing.
Talk about delayed gratification. I decided to go ahead and just eat the strawberries.
Unlike some other types of cooking, baking is a precise art. As a professional baker and teacher, Braker knows that "the process involves more than magic. It really means attention to details such as precise measuring, correct oven temperatures and specific rack placement." She takes the time to explain every step, because she's serious about baking. "In writing the book, she "visited bakeries and quizzed bakers in the United States and in half a dozen European countries ... I brought home each country's sugar, flour and chocolate and experimented with them ..."
Braker offers these "secrets" of perfect baking:
Buy a scale, because it is the most precise way of measuring flour (120 grams for unsifted all-purpose flour) and sugar (200 grams for granulated or brown sugar, 100 grams for powdered sugar). A scale is even invaluable for determining the correct amount of eggs, since each egg should equal 2 ounces
Use measuring cups correctly -- dry cups for dry ingredients and Pyrex glass measures for wet. Why does it matter? Liquids don't level off in the same way dry ingredients do, so a cup of liquid for puff pastry may be off by an ounce in a dry cup, with disastrous results. Using a liquid measure for a dry ingredient like flour can cause variations of as much as 1/4 cup per cup.
And finally, this encouraging thought from Braker: "Mistakes in baking may even lead you to create a new dessert, a new trend or even a new category of dessert." Puff pastry was created by a baker who forgot to put butter in the dough, then decided to try rolling it into the dough.
The recipe for Strawberry Window Cake is too lengthy to print here, but if you would like to see that recipe and other Braker creations you can borrow Flo Braker's "The Simple Art of Perfect Baking" from several Maryland libraries, including Pocomoke City.
By Tracy Sahler
