Happy St. Patrick's Day and National Irish Food Day with Almond Short Bread Cookies

Happy St. Patrick's Day and National Irish Food Day! This semester we are featuring recipes from cookbooks located in the UW-Stout Archives Special Collections. The Special Collections are older, more rare, or Stout related books that were originally located in the UW-Stout Library’s main stacks collection. This past year we added a wealth of cookbooks to the special collections, and I scoured the shelves for recipes to bring the world of baking to your home during this time.

Get into the Irish spirit with an easy 5-ingredient cookie recipe, Almond Short Bread, found in Around the World Making Cookies, by Josephine Perry, 1940, TX771.P4 1940.

Almond Short Bread, p. 98

Mix together:

2 cups flour sifted

½ cup almonds blanched and ground

½ cup butter softened

½ cup sugar

1 tbsp. water

Add the sugar and flour alternately to the butter, blending in the water as needed to make a stiff dough. Divide into halves, form into flat round cakes about the size of a saucer, prick with a fork, flute the edges and bake at 350*F for 30 minutes.

This is a short, 5-ingredient recipe, but I still had some issues, probably because the directions are so simplified. Mixing one cup flour and the butter together started well and it had a dough like mixture, but as I added more sugar and flour the mixture became more dry and crumbly. I added almost two extra tablespoons of water. The recipe does not specify where to add in the almonds, so I added them at the end after mixing the other ingredients together. When dividing the dough into halves, other Almond Short Bread cookie recipes call for wrapping the two halves in plastic wrap and putting them in the fridge for one hour. You could use a round cookie cutter to cut the cookies (which I should have done, but I thought it would be hard with the crumbly texture of my dough), or roll the dough into two logs and cut into slices for baking the cookies. This recipe said to make them about the size of a saucer, like a small plate placed under a teacup, so I made my round cakes bigger than a regular sized cookie, and made three cakes. They still turned out good in the end, they just need to be broken up to eat them. They taste similar to the Ischl Tartlet cookies I made in February. They are a little on the dry side, but would be good spread with raspberry jam or dunked in your morning cup of coffee. No matter how often we bake and cook, we are continuously learning new ideas, skills, and recipes, so don't be discouraged if something doesn't turn out perfect the first time you try it. Learn from your experience and try again, or apply your new skills to another recipe. I also try to find a silver lining, such as being able to dunk my slightly dry cookies into my morning coffee for a breakfast treat. Bon Appetit!

My 5 ingredients: sugar, flour, water, butter, ground almonds

The mixes dough

My attempt to shape the short bread from my dry dough

Almond Short Bread hot out of the oven

There are many variations of shortbread cookies. Try Almond-Orange Shortbread from Martha Stewart: https://www.marthastewart.com/340976/almond-orange-shortbread

And a Gluten free Almond Flour Shortbread Cookie:  https://www.theconsciousplantkitchen.com/almond-flour-shortbread-cookies/

By: Julie Hatfield, Archives Assistant, UW-Stout Archives

May the Luck of the Irish be with you with this UW-Stout inspired recipe

We are back for March with another UW-Stout inspired recipe. I am celebrating National Noodle Month and National Irish Food Day coming up March 17^th (St. Patrick’s Day!) by recreating an Irish inspired recipe I originally cooked back in February 2017, Corned Beef Casserole from Stout’s Favorites 2^nd edition cookbook, p. 22, available via the Internet Archive at   https://archive.org/details/StoutsFavoritesSecondEdition

Original Recipe, Stout's Favorite's 2nd edition, p. 22

The cookbook was published by the Home Economics Club of Stout State College, 1958, featuring favorite recipes of faculty and students, and "dedicated to all those people who enjoy preparing and eating good food.” The recipe was submitted by Wesley L. Face, an Instructor of Industrial Education. Face taught at Stout for over 30 years and was Acting Chancellor in 1988 when UW-Stout was transitioning between Chancellors Robert Swanson and Charles Sorenson. 

Wesley Face, 1958 Tower Yearbook, p. 25

I followed the recipe pretty close. I used about two-thirds of a 12 oz. box of Creamette bowtie noodles which work great, but a variety of small noodles could work, and cook the noodles according to the directions on the box. I used a 14 oz. can of Hormel Homestyle corned beef hash (vs. just corned beef), which has small chunks of potato in it, and an 8 oz. block of Marble Cheddar cheese, because I could not find American Cheese, which I sliced. I mixed half of the cheese in with the casserole, and laid half on top of the casserole, before I spread the cracker crumbs on top. I used my Pampered Chef manual food processor to chop the crackers into crumbs, which also works great for chopping onions. I used a 2.75 quart casserole dish vs. a 2 quart dish, but I think this recipe you could make as big a batch as you like and adjust the ingredients accordingly. The casserole does not look too appetizing when you are mixing it up, so I did not take a lot of photos of the process, but it really does taste good after it is cooked, which I didn’t think I would like this recipe the first time I cooked it. The casserole started to smell really good when it was halfway done cooking in the oven - I wish we had smell-a-vision. Bon Appetit!  

Getting the ingredients prepped

 

The mixed up casserole before popping it into the oven

The finished product, hot out of the oven. Bon Appetit!