If vintage cookbooks and recipes are good for one thing, it’s to give today’s cooks basic recipes to revisit and revise, especially recipes like banana bread.  I’m a finicky banana eater.  If our bananas have any brown spots at all, I immediately give them to Kevin and turn my back on their starchy goodness.  In fact, I like bananas that still have a hint of green on them so that they’re almost a little crunchy when I take the first bite.  I know, I know, green bananas aren’t very banana-y yet, it’s more a texture thing than anything else.

Which is to say, as soon as our bananas show any hint of ripeness, I begin to scour our cookbooks for banana bread recipes.  Even though everyone has the best banana recipe (seriously, ask any home cook and they will always have one that has been passed down from various aunties or family friends) I haven’t found one that I can call my own.

I should just use my grandmother’s, but hers involves a layer of cream cheese frosting, so while it’s technically a banana bread, I feel a little guilty having a thick slice in the mornings.  Although when I was a kid, my sister and I would methodically eat our banana bread from the bottom up so that we could save the frosting-lined piece for the very end. What bliss!

But I digress.  I looked through cookbook after cookbook and found many strange recipes for banana bread.  A few recommended that the banana bread be served as sandwich bread and, for the life of me, I cannot imagine eating a ham sandwich on banana bread.  *shudders*  I also found many recipes from c. 1900 that touted the use of banana flour.  Banana bread as we now know it came about in the 1950s, as this ad from a 1953 issue of Life magazine suggests.  Perhaps, if I can’t get a job in academia, I can bake banana bread to make some cash!

This recipe comes from the 1962 printing of The Good Housekeeping Cookbook. It’s a solid, base recipe, and I am going to start tweaking it with some whole-grain flour next.  It was flavorful and had a very good crumb.  I was even able to use my new (well, new to me) enameled cast iron Copco bread pan.  I *loved* this bread pan because it made the entire bread have a great brown crust!

Banana Bread

Adapted from the 1962 Good Housekeeping Cookbook

1 3/4 cups flour

2 tsp. baking powder

1/4 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp. salt

1/3 cup and 1 tbsp. butter

2/3 cup sugar

2 eggs

3 mashed bananas

1/3 cup chopped walnuts

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees and grease a 9″x5″3″ loaf pan.

2. Mix together flour, baking powder, soda, and salt.

3. With electric mixer cream butter and sugar, then add eggs until mixture is fluffy and light.

4. Add flour mixture alternatively with bananas until just mixed.

5. Stir in walnuts and turn into pan.

6. Bake for 1 hour.

Dear readers, I have been so busy!  So harried, in fact, that I haven’t cracked open a vintage cookbook for a few weeks.  My advisor has given me a deadline for my completed dissertation: August 15th.  It’s just around the corner!  So, needless to say, I’ve been freaking out and not cooking a lot.

One thing that awakens me from my writing stupor is anything with rhubarb.  I know, I know, I just posted a recipe for rhubarb-strawberry pie, but when I saw a recipe for a rhubarb cake in The California Heritage Cookbook, I knew I had to make it!  Plus, Kevin and I visited our friends in Leavenworth, Washington, and these friends happened to have some of the most beautiful and healthy rhubarb I’ve ever laid eyes on.

So I set out to make some rhubarb coffee cake.  Plus, there’s nothing better after a few hours of writing than walking into the kitchen and stealing a little piece, alright, a BIG piece of coffee cake studded with tart, pink rhubarb.

I followed the recipe very faithfully for this cake and I wasn’t disappointed.  I think the cake recipe itself would be good with other fruits as well (especially something like blueberries).

We’ve been really busy at Chez Butter lately.  I’m trying to finish my dissertation by mid-August and the sun has finally started shining in Seattle, which means that everyone heads to their local nursery to plant as many things as possible before it starts to rain again.  In the middle of all this, I’ve been restocking the Etsy shop, so I have been lax about cooking blog-worthy dishes.  And although I’m sure everyone is just dying to hear about the slow-cooker chicken verde that Kevin and I ate for most of last week, I think I’ll take a pass and post something a little more interesting!

I love biscotti.  Particularly, I love Caffé Vita’s anise biscotti, so I decided I would make some something similar!  Sadly, the vintage recipe gods did not share in my passion for these little biscuits, so after scouring most of my vintage cookbooks, I found one lonely biscotti recipe from Recipes Old, New, Tried and True from the Edmonds, Washington Holy Rosary Altar Society, published in 1981.

After reading through the recipe, I realized that these weren’t really biscotti at all, but a cake-like cookie to pair with coffee or tea.  After some coaxing from Kevin, I decided I’d make the recipe anyway, with a few minor adjustments since I didn’t want to track down anise extract.

I have to say, I was rather pleased with how these cookies turned out.  They’re definitely not biscotti, but they’re not really cookies either — tea biscuits or tea cakes would be a better name for them, I think.  Regardless of what I called them, they were super-tasty with coffee and had a pleasant anise flavor from a few glugs of locally-made Pacifique Absinthe.

Absinthe-Laced Tea Biscuits

Makes about 2 dozen

1 cup sugar

3 eggs

1 cup and 2 tbsp. butter

3 cups flour

3 tsp. baking powder

3 tsp. vanilla

3 tsp. Absinthe

1.  Melt butter and allow to cool.  Meanwhile, in mixer, beat eggs and sugar until sugar is dissolved (about 5 minutes).

2. Add cooled butter, vanilla, and absinthe to the sugar mixture and mix until incorporated.

3. Mix flour and baking powder together and add to dough mixture and mix for 30 seconds.

4. (Dough will be very moist, so wet hands before touching dough.)  Shape into 1 1/2 inch diameter balls and place on cookie sheet.  Press down on each cookie to flatten.

5. Bake for 12-15 minutes in a 375 degree oven.  Cookies will not brown, so watch out for over-baking.

I associate spring with crunchy foods: the snap of a fresh piece of celery and the crisp taste of peas.  As I posted last week, I love strawberry and rhubarb desserts in the spring, but I also tend to favor desserts that are airy, even if they aren’t ‘light’ in the caloric sense!  Enter the meringue–dead simple to make, light on the tongue, and with the perfect crunch.

While I was leafing through the 1967 cookbook, Cookies!, by Patricia White, I stumbled on her recipe for meringues, and after looking through my cupboards, I found some lemon extract, which suited my mood perfectly.  I think these would be lovely served with some ice cream after a barbecue!

I followed the recipe with a few, minor differences:

1. I added lemon extract instead of mint.

2. I used parchment paper instead of greasing a cookie sheet (do people grease cookie sheets anymore?)

3. I piped the meringue with the widest pastry tip I had because I liked the shape.

Here are the cookies before the went into the oven.

And here they are, ready to tempt the next person who walks by the kitchen!