Judith Fertig - All-American Desserts: 400 Star-Spangled, Razzle-Dazzle Recipes for Americas Best Loved Desserts

The Harvard Common Press
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Boston, Massachusetts 02118
www.harvardcommonpress.com
2003 by Judith M. Fertig

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Printed on acid-free paper

L IBRARY OF C ONGRESS C ATALOGING-IN -P UBLICATION D ATA

Fertig, Judith M.
All-American desserts : 400 star-spangled, razzle-dazzle recipes for
America's best loved desserts / Judith M. Fertig.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-55832-190-X (hc : alk. paper)ISBN 1-55832-191-8 (pbk : alk.
paper)
1. Desserts. I. Title.
TX773.F4 2003
641.8'6dc21 2003011844

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Interior design by Richard Oriolo
Illustrations by Laura Tedeschi
Cover design by Night & Day Design
Cover photographs by Eric Roth Photography

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For my family, who makes life so sweet

First of all, I wish to thank publisher Bruce Shaw and editor Pam Hoenig of The Harvard Common Press, who had the vision and then gave me the opportunity to do a book with such a wide scope. Copy editor Deborah Kops did a painstaking and thorough job, whipping recipes from multiple sources into shape and holding my hand a time or two. My gratitude also goes to Jodi Marchowsky, Valerie Cimino, Skye Stewart, Beatrice Wikander, Chris Alaimo, Betsy Young, and everyone else at The Harvard Common Press who makes it all happen.

Next I want to thank my familyJean and Jack Merkle, and Julie and John Foxwho have made my kitchen a very special place to be. I apologize to my daughter Sarah for ruining her taste for cheesecake and marzipan with too much of a good thing, and to my son Nick for even attempting tomato ice cream (you'll notice it's not in the book). I'm grateful to Altha Fertig and Bev Fertig for their recipe contributions and our ongoing relationship.

My deepest thanks to all the contributors, past and present, who have given this book its depth and richness, and to the librarians overseeing the extensive culinary collection at the Kansas State University Library. I'm grateful for professional advice and information from Shirley Corriher and John'T. Edge, and for the work of Jane Grigson, James Deetz, David Hackett Fischer, and Henry Glassie, which opened my eyes to the importance of American foodways as cultural touchstones.

Thanks to all the testers and tasters who, with good humor and great sense, have helped me make each dessert recipe the best it can be: Mary Bandereck, Jean and Jack Merkle, Julie Fox, Karen Adler, Reene Jones, Mary Pfeifer, Mary Ann Duckers, Dee Barwick, everyone in the test kitchens at Mary Engelbreit and Better Homes & Gardens magazines, the Heart of America Chapter of Les Dames D'Escoffier, and the Kansas City Cookbook Club.

American desserts are truly a national treasure.

What makes a dish American?

For Julia Child, it's simple. "As far as I'm concerned, it is American food, cooked in America by Americans with American ingredients," she says.

Boston chef Lydia Shire agrees: "American cooking is really the creative cooking of good, simple food, using American products and infusing some kinds of classical preparations."

I would add that an American dessert is one that was either adapted from other culinary traditions to suit American ingredients or tastes, or one that was created by an American cook using American ingredients.

Since Europeans first landed on Northern American shores, we've amassed a staggering number of desserts that we can proudly call American. You'll find around 400 of them in this book, which could easily have grown into a multivolume set with thousands of recipes.

The trick for me has been to carefully select or develop the recipes that best showcase what American desserts are all about. In choosing these recipes, I have to confess a bias. I can easily decline any old cookie, brownie, piece of cake or pie, mousse, or ice cream. For me, dessert has to be really, really good to pique my interest. And if I fall into one of the classic trio of dessert divisionsthose people who prefer chocolate, cream, or fruit-based dessertsit is probably fruit for me.

That said, I think my bias has made me develop, choose, and adapt recipes with better, fresher, or richer flavor in mind. For example, instead of a classic carrot cake with cream cheese frosting (for which everyone has a recipe), I was inspired by an American quilt design to create my three-layer Praise and Plenty Cake () is exactly that. American desserts should be the best they can be.

Even historic recipes have had to prove themselves for inclusion in All-American Desserts. They have to have a reason for appearing on the American table beyond their historic value because not all of them appeal to contemporary tastes. Journalist Peter Nulty sums up our take on most seventeenth-century fare: "I guess people who wore armor weren't fussy eaters. They just added tons of cinnamon and cloves. Everything tasted like Christmas." The handful of hardy Pilgrim housewives who had to cater the first Thanksgiving dinner probably served a dessert that did taste like Christmas, at least to us today. Their dessert was most likely full of rosewater, dried fruit, and spices, and definitely not pumpkin pie, which came later.

But it's hard to beat Monticello Vanilla-Flecked Ice Cream () are still as delicious and as well loved as when their early makers crossed the Atlantic from Britain centuries ago.

Transparent Tartlets, which my family has enjoyed on weekends spent in Kentucky, provided the breakthrough I was looking for in this book. I wanted to know where most of our classic American dessert templatesthe patterns for pies, puddings, cakes, cookies, etc.originated. During my years of living in England, I noted that British desserts were similar but still different from ours. In researching this book, I reread Jane Grigson's The Observer Guide to British Cookery and found her mention of transparent tarts. They turned out to be originally English, but are now found only in Kentucky and the Carolinas. People don't make transparent tarts, or tartlets, in Kansas City or Boston or San Francisco unless they were born and raised in the above-mentioned states. Why only there?

That question sent me back to Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer, a scholarly but readable tome on how and why the cultures of various British regions were transplanted to American shores.

Puritans who settled Massachusetts from 1629 to 1641 were originally from the region of East Anglia (the counties of Suffolk, Essex, and Norfolk). Not only did they rename the New World with their old place names (Boston, Boxford, Andover, Cambridge, Ipswich), but they also brought their preferred style of cookingEnglish tastes mixed with Puritan austerityfor example, cold baked beans and brown bread and the classic New England boiled dinner. The New England climate is not kind to growing wheat, so the precious wheat flour was used only on a top crust for a piehence the term "upper crust." Cornmeal replaced it in many desserts like Indian pudding and hasty pudding. Indeed, baking was the most popular form of cooking. Writes Fischer, "The austerity of New England's foodways was softened by its abundance of baked goods." The classic American fruit-filled and pumpkin pies, small cakes (or what the Dutch called cookies), baked Indian pudding, and later Toll House cookies, betties, cobblers, crumbles, crisps, and Boston Cream Pie have all evolved from these English roots.