Sludge for supper

In “Still Life With Crows,” a thriller by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, FBI agent Pendergast recreates the scene of an 1845 Indian massacre in Kansas using an ancient Eastern form of mystical meditation . He thinks there’s a connection between this historical event and a series of murders he’s investigating -- specifically, how the Indians suddenly appeared as if out of thin air to ambush the soldiers.

We were several hours into our own time-travel experiment this week when I found myself wishing I knew agent Pendergast‘s technique for mentally removing modern-day objects from your field of view. Because it’s really, really hard to pretend you’re a Depression Era family with nothing to eat but MFK Fisher’s recipe for “sludge” when you have all this other food sitting around the house.

Part of the problem is that Ben and I were the only ones running the experiment. So while we were choking down a gruel made of barley, a couple of strips of bacon, and an onion, the girls were making themselves peanut butter sandwiches and eating pretzels straight from the bag. It was really hard to picture a kitchen that didn’t have at least a dab of peanut butter in the bottom of a jar, or a couple of eggs in the ice box.

But sludge isn’t something you eat when you have other options. “There comes a time when helpful hints about turning off the gas when not in use are foolish, because the gas has been turned off permanently, or until you can pay the bill,” Fisher writes in her 1942 book “How to Cook a Wolf.” “And you don’t care about knowing the trick of keeping bread fresh by putting a cut apple in the box, because you don’t have any bread and certainly not an apple, cut or uncut. And there is no point in planning to save the juice from canned vegetables because they, and therefore their juices, do not exist.”

It’s a time, she says, to use the metaphor that frames her book, when the wolf is at the door, with “one paw wedged firmly in what looks like a widening crack.”

In our experiment, Ben ate two bowls of Fisher’s sludge -- which really should’ve had a few more wilted vegetables in it to be authentic -- before deciding he’d rather just fast until midnight, when I promised him a cheeseburger. I stuck to the regimen, and though the first bowl tasted like dishwater, by the second serving, with a little more salt, I found myself thinking that barley is a worthy grain, deserving of more attention than its bit role in my usual recipe for vegetable soup.

By late afternoon, though, I was really eager to have something else -- anything else, even just a dab of peanut butter or a single pretzel. And that was when I realized just how much better off we are even now, in supposedly hard times, when we open the fridge and think there’s nothing to eat or can’t imagine what we could possibly make for dinner -- we still have all these bits and pieces of this and that that look awfully good when the alternative is sludge.

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.