Although the Time Life books are occasionally a little odd in their organization, they definitely deserve props for including a volume dedicated to the wealth and variety of influences brought to the US by its immigrants from around the world. The Melting Pot volume includes recipes ranging from Jewish to Chinese to Caribbean to Italian to Eastern European. I didn't think I could assemble a cohesive meal drawing from all those sources so I elected for a simple meal of homey Eastern European dishes.
The book: Time Life: American Cooking: The Melting Pot
The menu:
- Main Course: Mushroom Pierogies, Cabbage Pierogies, Cream of Leek Soup
- Dessert: Honey-Orange Loaf Cake
I can't claim the Ukrainian pierogies were a smashing success, but maybe I'd get better at them with practice. For starters, the ration of filling to dough didn't seem to work out at all and, in fact, I only managed to produce about half as many pierogies as the recipe claimed to make (although with just two of us, we still ended up throwing some out, even after consuming all the leftovers we could face). The recipe is broken into three parts, the dough, the mushroom filling, and the cabbage filling. I made the (correct, it appears) assumption that the filling recipes each produced enough filling to fill a whole dough recipe (ie the authors assumed that you would make one variety or the other, but not both). Since I wanted to experiment with both, I made a half recipe of each filling. I did omit the rice from the mushroom filling since producing 3 tbs of cooked rice seemed like more trouble than it was worth and I didn't have any convenient leftovers. The lack of rice doesn't seem to have hurt the filling at all. Everything seemed to be going along swimmingly until I started actually assembling the pierogies. I'd used no more (and probably less) than half the filling by the time I'd used up all the dough. The recipe said to make the wrappers about 1/4" thick which, I think, I did. I don't know if I was somehow supposed to be able to cram a lot more filling into each one, if I actually made them too thick, or if the dough wasn't quite right, but something was clearly not so right. I had a pretty tough time sealing up the pierogies around all that filling. I imagine practice would help. I popped them in the oven but when the designated 10-12 minutes had passed the little beasties appeared far from done. A hint, perhaps, that my wrappers were, indeed, too thick? In the end I baked them for more than twice the allocated time, the second half on a higher temperature. They never picked up the golden-brown color I thought they ought to have, but did at least seem to be cooked through. Unfortunately, my troubles sealing up the packets made themselves totally evident. Nearly every pierogie popped open in the oven. We set to and ate them anyway. Next time (if there were a next time which there probably won't be) I'd definitely cut the salt a bit. Otherwise they weren't too bad, although we definitely preferred the mushroom the cabbage.
We both thought the Romanian leek soup was pretty good. It was nice and leek-y. I liked it rather better than the last leek soup I made since I didn't so much care for the caraway in that one. It had a lot more leek and a lot less potato than other recipes I've used, just enough potato to give it some structure. It also has a much more complex array of flavors, relying on a combination of chicken stock and wine for liquid, rather than water as so many other recipes do. Processing the soup through the food mill was a lot more effort than using the stick blender, but did produce a substantially better texture. I think I'm persuaded that the extra effort is worth it.
As has been the case with several meals, now, the dessert was really the capstone. Although I am not sure I'd call the confection a cake so much as a tea-bread (in the same family as, say, banana bread), it was thoroughly enjoyable. The addition of a bit of coffee ensures that it is not nearly as sweet as the honey in its name suggests it might be.
Next time we head to New England.
