Recipe from the not-so-good old days

The odds were stacked against yesterday’s breakfast experiment. MFK Fisher’s tomato soup cake sounded so unappealing that even I wasn’t looking forward to eating it so much as probing it. The recipe comes from her 1942 book “How to Cook a Wolf,” about cooking and living in times of extreme deprivation. One chapter’s called “How to Be Cheerful Though Starving.” This recipe comes from a chapter called “How to Comfort Sorrow.”

I like to run these financial fire drills from time to time, to explore what we might do if things got really tough and we weren’t just frugal but financially fragile. I’d actually been wondering if I could convince everybody to spend a couple of days eating nothing but Fisher’s so-called “sludge” -- from the chapter called “How To Keep Alive” --  but figured the oddball tomato soup cake was a better place to begin.

It didn’t help that Ben began inquiring about breakfast the night before, having noticed that our weekly allotment of cereal was running low. When I told him I was making a cake, he said, “Oh, great. It will probably have sauerkraut in it. Or pieces of ground-up broccoli or spinach leaves.”

He had cause to be suspicious. Though I’ve never hidden broccoli or spinach in cake, I have put sauerkraut in a chocolate cake before -- but only because the recipe called for it. “Besides,“ I noted, “you liked that one.”

I couldn’t help thinking he would’ve enjoyed making this cake, too. When you add the baking soda to the can of tomato soup, it starts fizzing up out of the can, kind of like those baking soda-vinegar volcanoes he likes to make. But there was no way I was going to blow this cake’s cover until they tried it. Stirring the brownish-pink batter, I thought it was probably a lost cause. If nothing else, we could always hide Buddy‘s pills in it once we ran out of leftover rigatoni.

But it looked a lot better when I pulled it out of the oven. The pink tint was gone, leaving what appeared to be an ordinary brown loaf of something or other.  It tasted vaguely like gingerbread -- probably from the ginger and nutmeg -- and so that‘s what I called it: “Poor Man‘s Gingerbread.” The earliest breakfasters -- Bob, Rowan and Cassie -- had no objections. Ben and Colleen initially resisted a taste test. But when Cassie and I got back from her speech therapy, Colleen greeted us in the driveway, saying, “Hey Mom, you‘ve got to make some more of that gingerbread!” Ben admitted it wasn’t bad, even after I revealed the secret ingredient. We’ll probably make it again, if for no other reason than I want to let the kids do the foaming tomato soup experiment.

    Tomato Soup Cake
3 tablespoons butter or shortening
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon of a mixture of nutmeg, ginger and cloves
1 can tomato soup
2 cups flour
1 1/2 cups raisins, nuts, or dried fruit.*

Cream butter and sugar. Add the soda to the soup and the spices to the flour, then alternate adding these mixtures to the butter and sugar. Stir well and bake in two loaf pans at 325 degrees.

*We made one loaf plain and one with cut-up dried plums. The plain one was fine, so you don‘t have to add this stuff if you don‘t want to.

Thrifty sleepover strategy

After working hard last week to come in nearly $20 under our grocery budget goal, we decided to ease up this week and let ourselves spend the full $90. Pacing is important if you want to keep morale up. It’s funny how you can feel like you’re living large on $15 a person per week when you’ve been getting buy on considerably less than that for a few weeks in a row.

For us, living large included takeout pizza, trying a couple of new dishes for a Super Bowl party and hosting not one but two sleepovers -- one on a school night during a stretch of three straight snow days.

Sleepovers needn’t be expensive, though. For us, the key is making a big batch of bread dough. Use half the dough to make pizzas, and the other half for cinnamon rolls the next morning. Throw in some popcorn and Kool-Aid, and you’re all set.

The bread dough I make most often now is both tasty and simple:

Take 2 cups of prepared mashed potatoes (I usually make instant in the microwave, if I don’t have any already made in the freezer), add 1 tablespoon of yeast, three tablespoons of salt, four cups of warm water and about eight cups of flour. (You might need more or less, depending on the flour; keep adding until the mixture is not too sticky for you to start using your hands.) I usually use a bit of whole wheat flour in my flour mix, but obviously you don’t have to.

Cinnamon rolls are easy, too. Just spread some dough on a greased surface, as if you’re making a pizza, only slather it with butter instead of tomato sauce. Then sprinkle it with a mixture of cinnamon and sugar, and roll it up into a log. Slice each roll off and set it in a greased baking dish. Then butter each top and sprinkle with more cinnamon sugar. Bake at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes (it depends on the size of your rolls, which depends on the size of the “log” you rolled up.)

For icing, the simplest is to just pour a dab of milk into a cup of powdered sugar and whisk with a fork until your get a consistency you can deal with. If you want to go all out, though, caramel icing isn’t too much harder nor much more costly. Just heat a stick of butter and cup of brown sugar until it boils, stir for a minute or two, add 1/4 cup milk and heat til boiling again, then remove from heat and cool. Add 1 teaspoon vanilla flavoring and a couple of cups of powdered sugar. (That’s what the recipe I use calls for, but I sometimes like to use a little more than that.)