THE COOKBOOK TEST #0073: FAMILY CIRCLE ALL-TIME BAKING FAVORITES

INSTALLMENT #0073 (PAID) BACK IN TIME / COCONUT CUSTARD PIE LOST IN TRANSLATION / PUMPKIN PIE RENEWED / THE MYSTERY OF ANADAMA

Dear Subscribers,

I probably should tailor these book reviews to things that are search engine optimized, right? That would be smart. Or look for a provocative "angle" that immediately stokes drama. Or ... I don't know. At least try to stay on trend?

Instead this week I am doing what we always do here, which is exploring a book clawed seemingly at random out of a giant ethereal closet filled with every cookbook ever written. 

FAMILY CIRCLE ALL-TIME BAKING FAVORITES is a mid-'70s throwback to homemaker-focused baking bibles, stuffed with pies and cakes and breads with a heavy emphasis on Middle Americana. Beyond strudel and challah, there's not much evidence that the outside world exists: it's mostly pound cake this, cranberry-pecan bread that, yeast rolls the other.

I'm not going to lie: there's an incredibly dated, myopic, familiar feel to this book that is ultimately pretty comforting. If you read through this book and find something surprising, it's not because it was ever outside of the American cultural mainstream, but rather that its particular part of the mainstream is so obsolete that it has practically disappeared.

This isn't a critique of the book's overall construction - All-Time Baking Favorites is clear, concise, smartly written, and easy to follow. Like so many books of its time period, it was obviously assembled thoughtfully by a competent team of communications professionals, as opposed to the modern standard (a single stressed-out influencer working with a six-month deadline and a budget of $8,000). 

Maybe that's the thing these older workhorse books really lure me in with: visions of a distant past when writing, editing, photography, and publishing were treated like serious crafts, and not despised hobbies to be corrupted and eventually supplanted by apps powered by chronically buggy artificial intelligence.

Anyhoodles, let's bake some pies!

at your service,

James

FAMILY CIRCLE ALL-TIME BAKING FAVORITES
JOANNE ALTER (EDITOR)
NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY | 1974  

I was going to file this column with just two pie recipes tested, but I got into the zone and wound up making a fairly involved bread recipe as well. If you're not already a subscriber to THE COOKBOOK TEST, please think of my thrice-trashed kitchen and start underwriting this insanity.

COCONUT CUSTARD PIE LOST IN TRANSLATION

The introductory flavor text for the All-Time Baking Favorites Coconut Custard Pie suckered me in. No shame in that: sometimes a framing device reveals intriguing and important things about a recipe and rightfully creates intrigue and desire. Here's what caught my fancy about this one:

[This is] one of America's favorite pies - crunchy coconut and vanilla in a smooth custard filling.

Here's what I have to say about that: There's no way the pie I came up via this recipe was ever a favorite in any country larger than Andorra. I'm not saying it was bad, because it wasn't. It actually reminded me of kheer (Indian rice pudding), which often isn't terribly sweet, and a little bit also of tembleque, the Puerto Rican coconut pudding, except not as good. 

I wanted this egg-forward pie to be sweeter (and I made sure to use sweetened coconut flakes from the get-go, since the recipe's 1/3rd of a cup of sugar seemed stingy), I wanted it to be lighter and fluffier, and I wanted it not to be adulterated by the textural menace of stringy, chewy, dental floss-like chips of coconut. 

If I had to make it again, I probably would use sweetened coconut milk in lieu of the flakes, and maybe even add a meringue layer to play up the fluffy side of things. Fortunately, barring some kind of weird encounter with a coconut-obsessed stalker or an unexpected grant from an external, coconut-focused funding source, it is highly unlikely I'll return to this particular culinary well.

I'll spare you the recipe, which either never worked, or has failed due to a "time marches on" lost-in-translation issue (it calls for a 3.5 oz. can of flaked coconut, not a size or format I'm used to for the stuff.)

PUMPKIN PIE RENEWED 

Our family's repeated - some would say, excessive - celebration of Thanksgiving has its benefits. Though we've scaled back our number of Thanksgiving meals to one or two per year (from the three or four they were clipping along at for a while there), we have plenty of experience making and tasting pumpkin pies - the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The All-Time Baking Favorites streusel-finished pumpkin pie is, I'm pleased to say, one of the good guys. If I got this at a Thanksgiving dinner, I'd finish it with gusto, and possibly go for a second piece depending on what the other options were. Three reasons:

1.  It's legitimately sweet without being cloying. Pumpkin pie is often either a little austere or spice-heavy; this one, to me, gracefully hits the "dessert" level of sugary.

2. It leans pretty hard into cinnamon (as opposed to cloves / nutmeg / mace) and I'm here for it - it's the same autumn spice profile that you know and love, but the cinnamon is bigger and bolder and that makes the pie extra friendly and delightful.

3. The streusel addition is brilliant - it's kind of like having a pumpkin pie, coffee cake, and pecan pie all at once. This is a fairly simple upgrade, but it's one that really works.

NEW ENGLAND PUMPKIN-NUT PIE

Pie crust, unbaked, in pie tin
2 eggs
1 can (15 oz.) of pumpkin
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1 can (1 2/3 Cups) evaporated milk
Nut Topping (recipe follows)

Preheat oven to 425 F.