Tag Archives: snack

Baked Apples with Sweet Potatoes

The original recipe, “Apple Stuffed with Sweet Potatoes,” is from the 1941 edition of Ruth Wakefield’s Toll House Tried and True Recipes. We adapted the recipe to make a delicious and quick snack, but the original recipe is perfect as a sweet side dish or a dessert.

Forgive today’s photos—I took them after sunset so it was dark in the house. I’ll try to remember to take a few more next time we have this as a snack or dessert.

Here’s the original recipe.

Apple Stuffed with Sweet Potato

Core large red apples and cut crosswise into two circles. Allow one half for each person. Place in shallow baking pan with cut side of circle up. Fill core and cover cut side of apple with brown sugar and bake slowly until tender.

Have ready well seasoned and smoothly mashed sweet potato. Pile on top of apple, swirling potato into attractive peaks. Cover with melted butter and place into oven long enough to reheat and brown lightly.

Pineapple rings can be used in place of apples. If you do this, flavor the sweet potato with the pineapple juice.

Our Snack Version

We cored and sliced the apples and then followed the instructions above, covering each slice with brown sugar and baking. We then covered each slice with mashed sweet potatoes and butter and browned the slices a bit. You can mash canned sweet potatoes to really speed things up.

Results

This is one of our favorite snacks. The apples are warm and soft, and the brown sugar, sweet potatoes, and butter make this a sweet treat that we never seem to make enough of. If you crave a little crunch, adding chopped nuts would add that extra bit of texture. Make more than you think you’ll need—you can never have too many!

Welsh Rarebit

Welsh rarebit is a melted cheese sauce containing a variety of ingredients traditionally served hot over slices of toasted bread. The 1941 recipe book 500 Snacks: Bright Ideas for Entertaining has a basic recipe for Welsh rarebit in the “hot entrees” section, and it includes several options to change it up a bit (more on that in a minute). I decided to use the basic recipe and eat it as a more modern snack. We scooped the melted cheese sauce up with hot soft pretzels.

Welsh Rarebit

  • 2 pounds American cheese, diced
  • 1 tbsp butter
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp paprika
  • 1 tsp dry mustard
  • few grains cayenne
  • 1 c beer
  • toast, bread croustades, or crackers

Melt cheese and butter in a double broiler, add seasonings, then beer. Stir constantly until smooth. Serve on toast, bread croustades, or crackers. Serves 8.

Results

This recipe made a perfect melted cheese dip for our pretzels. If you love melted cheese sauces, give this a try. It’s delicious. You can just slightly taste the beer if that is a concern for you. I’m curious about the other variations on the recipe, too. I think this is definitely one of those dishes that you can add a number of ingredients to make it a little fancier. Meat, green onions, peppers–there are so many possibilities. I’ll leave a copy of the recipe variations here so you can see what other offerings the recipe book included.

The cheese sauce thickened and hardened very quickly, so if you use this as a dip, you might want to keep it over heat or in a fondue pot. If you are pouring it over toasted bread slices, I think the thicker sauce would actually work in your favor. It would be less messy.

I hope you try a variation of Welsh Rarebit. It’s a versatile dish and makes a great quick and easy snack.

Lemon Marshmallow Ice

It’s been so hot here. I wanted to try to find a cold treat to keep us cool in the triple-digit heat. There are many ice recipes, but I had never seen one with marshmallows before. I decided to try it out. This recipe is from the 1941 Montgomery Ward Cold Cooking: It’s Easy cookbook.

Lemon Marshmallow Ice

  • 24 marshmallows
  • 5/8 c water
  • 1/4 c lemon juice
  • 1/8 tsp grated lemon peel
  • pinch of salt
  • 2 egg whites, beaten stiff

Melt marshmallows with water in a double broiler. Add lemon juice, grated rind, and salt. Let partially freeze. Fold egg whites into mushy fruit mixture. Freeze. Stir again when the mixture is partially frozen. Serves 6.

Results

This didn’t turn out like I expected. There definitely wasn’t enough for 6 modern sized servings. If I make this again, I’ll probably double or triple the recipe. There were at most 4 servings with the recipe as it is.

The consistency was somewhere between melted ice cream and marshmallow fluff. It wasn’t bad, it just was different than I thought it would be. The mixture never froze–it stayed the texture of melting ice cream. It was in the freezer for more than a day, so freezing time was not a factor.

The ice was very lemony. In fact, if you are not a fan of strong lemon flavors, you might consider making adjustments to the amount of lemon juice needed. I thought the strong lemon was fine, and I enjoyed the combination of lemon and marshmallow. A couple of my testers felt the lemon was way too strong. The ice is also very sweet, almost to the point where it isn’t refreshing.

I think my quest for a cool treat will continue. August temperatures usually show no mercy here, so I’ll keep looking. Do you have an ice recipe that you love? Let me know.

Until next time, stay safe and cool.

Baked Bananas

I had several leftover bananas from making a Father’s Day banana pudding, so I decided to look in the 1942 Short Cuts and Left-Overs cookbook for new ideas on how to use them. I found a recipe that was fast and easy and tried it out.

Baked Bananas

Remove one section of the skin. Put fruit into pan. Sprinkle each banana with lemon juice and a little brown sugar. Bake until tender in hot oven.

Notes: This cookbook doesn’t list cooking temperatures and often doesn’t have ingredient amounts. We baked these at 350°F and guessed at the amount of lemon juice and brown sugar.

Results

We baked these until we were worried the peel would burn. The bananas were tender but not mushy and there was a sweet syrup inside the peel. This isn’t a pretty dish, but it would make a nice after school treat or a quick dessert. We ate ours right out of the peel, but you could slice or mush the fruit and put it on a sandwich with peanut butter or use it as a sundae topping.

We eat a lot of bananas in our house, and it’s always nice to find a new way to prepare them that’s quick and easy. Let me know if you try these.

WW2 Ration Cook-In: Dessert

I made a variation of a cottage pudding recipe today. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but the end result was much better than yesterday’s beverage.

I found cottage pudding in The American Woman’s Cook Book. There was also a blueberry variation, so I decided to use that recipe.

Results

Blueberry pudding ends up like a biscuity blueberry muffin. We ate them fresh out of the oven with some butter. They were a little drier than a traditional muffin, but the blueberries were juicy and made up for that. These cooked a lot faster in the oven than the recipe says, so watch them closely.

I used these for dessert, but they would be perfect at breakfast or for a snack. They were very easy to make.

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Update: Soft Ginger-Date Jumbles–One Week Later

As promised, we tried the Ginger-Date Jumbles after being sealed in an airtight container for a week. We also sealed them according to the article with wax paper and tape. We kept some out of the containers to eat over the first few days.

The article suggested planning for double the usual shipping time, so we thought a week would be a good average time from the day the cookies were made to the day the soldier received their package. Remember–the cookies were only being sent to stateside soldiers and these cookie recipes were specifically created for lasting until the box got to its destination.

I would have been disappointed to get these cookies in a Christmas box. The first two days the cookies were moist and flavorful (and then they were gone!). After a week, we ate the ones that had been packaged. They were incredibly dry and tasteless. I couldn’t eat a whole one. I’m not sure how the Good Housekeeping recipe creators tested these cookies, but this recipe did not keep well.

I did like the cookies fresh, though. You can see the original blog post here.

Cheese Appetizers

Monday I posted a menu that included a recipe for Cheese Appetizers. It looked interesting, and unlike any of the other recipes I’ve seen from the war years, so I thought I’d test it. It was in the December 1942 Better Homes and Gardens.

My initial plan for this post was to find other snack mix recipes and include them, but I couldn’t find any. I know that modern party mix recipes were not published until the early 1950s, but I had assumed I could find something similar. Do you know of a snack mix that was commonly eaten in the first half of the 1940s? Let me know if you do, and I’ll add it here.

Cheese Appetizers

  • 2 tbsp butter
  • 1/2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 tsp salt
  • dash of cayenne
  • 3 c bite-sized whole wheat cereal
  • 3/4 c grated American or Parmesan cheese

Melt butter. Add Worcestershire sauce, salt, cayenne, and cereal. Sprinkle mixture with cheese and toss gently until cereal is coated.

Results

I used Wheat Chex and grated Parmesan cheese. With the ingredients measured as listed above, the mixture tastes like salty Parmesan cheese. If you like Parmesan cheese, this isn’t a bad thing, but it definitely needs something else to work as an appetizer today.

First, I would cut the amount of salt in half. I’d add more cayenne because a dash doesn’t offer much flavor in this recipe. I added more Worcestershire sauce and it helped a bit, but this mixture could use some outside help. I’d add things like pretzels and breadsticks for variety.

I think these cheese appetizers would be great as croutons in a salad. You could crush them and use them for breading in a chicken dish. If you like crackers in your tomato or potato soup, tossing a few of these in your bowl would add nice flavor and texture. I think I am going to use the remaining mix I have to make a movie night party mix.

Let me know if your family has a snack mix recipe that’s been passed down. Is it similar to this one, or more like the mix we think of today when eating a snack mix? Can you think of other uses for this recipe? How would you serve it?

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