Sour Cream Cornmeal Muffins

Many nights I end up doing fly by the seat of my pants meals.  I know what the main dish will be but the sides are always a mystery until I start diving into my vintage cookbooks and coming up with a plan.  This is one of those recipes that comes by way of the "Rumford Dainties and Household Helps" cookbook from 1922.  It needed some tweaking as Sour Cream was different back then from the thick stuff we use on our potatoes now so we have to add a little milk or risk a dry muffin at the end.  They went well with our dinner that night and I think you'll like them too.

Mother Bechamel And Her Daughters

Back in the vintage era the home cook always knew how to make a sauce that would be the perfect accent to any meal.  This has becomes something of a lost art in the modern world as we have been indoctrinated over the years by the wood be health gurus that sauces are bad for us because of their richness and fat content.  Poppycock!  A well chosen sauce is perfect for making a dull uninteresting piece of meat sing with renewed vigor.  You may think that making sauces at home is time consuming but I assure you it will become second nature with practice.  Indeed, sauce making from scratch is rather easy once one knows the tricks of the trade and after a few times of doing it yourself you will wonder why you ever used a shortcut sauce like the disgusting concoction above.  To learn the whole array of sauces available to chefs would be a lifetime of work and take up volumes on the bookshelf but the vast majority of sauces available are really only attainable by professional chefs.  So for the purposes of this article we will be dealing with 1 mother sauce and it's daughter sauces.  With these you will be able to put the topping on any meat desired.

Mushroom Gravy

It may seem silly to post something as trivial as a mushroom gravy on here given all the more complicated recipes that I have talked about over the years, but you would be surprised how many cooks cannot make a simple sauce without resorting to something in a jar or worse, an envelope.  It's really not that hard and this makes the perfect accompaniment to the Bacon Meat Roll With Olive Stuffing I wrote about the other day.

Recipe: Bacon Meat Roll With Olive Stuffing

I found this ad online and I immediately became intrigued because we seem to think that wrapping everything in bacon before cooking it is a modern invention.  That point of view couldn't be any more misguided as this 1936 ad for Armour Bacon shows.  Unfortunately the recipe was not included in the ad, just a note to "Ask your grocer for the recipe folder".  Hmm, another thing we still do to this day, grocer inspired recipes.  I posted this ad to my blog's Facebook page and immediately started getting requests for the recipe, I suppose the siren call of crisp bacon is too much to ignore so I set about searching for the lost recipe.  Now this is where I truly shine when it comes to vintage cooking because I am the Jedi Master of the search.  It didn't take long to hunt down the recipe on an old edition of the Deseret News thanks to Google and the Gutenberg Project.  While the ad may claim this is a frugal recipe, that is not the case today as it calls for 1/2lb of ground veal and veal is very dear right now.  I replaced the veal with ground chuck and the recipe came out fine.  The article claims you get "10 generous servings per roll" and they are quite right.  We ate it for dinner 2 times and I had enough for lunch for a couple of days.