Category Archives: Food and Cooking

Because food is interesting and recipes are good.

“I’m a little teapot, here’s my spout”–a close-up of a family teapot

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Above is a photo of the family teapot.

This is the teapot that traveled with my family since… I’m not sure when my parents bought it, but I’m currently sifting through family photos so possibly I will have a better answer later on. The steel part is a sort of tea cozy that fits over the plain white pot. No need to worry about the lid tipping off when you pour.

I love tea paraphernalia, and I have several teapots of my own. Some are inherited (silver with scallops, white with blue-and-gold); some were chosen (spring green, spring flowers). I like teapots with pretty designs or in appealing colors. I don’t like pots that are made to look like something else, such as a cake or a rabbit. That just isn’t my thing. I do like some teapots with simple, modern shapes, like this one. But there’s also one other important thing.

It has to pour well.

You’d think this would be required for any teapot, but I guess a lot of the really decorative teapots are bought by collectors and don’t get much use. (Mine don’t get much use, and I only have seven or eight! Imagine trying to use all of forty or so teapots!)

What makes a teapot pour well? I don’t know the answer. I do know that my parents’ teapot has a very unusual spout, and I can only assume it was meant to help it pour. I had never really looked at it, despite all those home-for-break teatimes, until now.

As you can see, there’s a small channel that runs down from the tip of the spout, and it is pierced.

And there’s a channel inside the spout that starts right at the hole. Is the drip meant to go back inside? Does this actually work? Did someone really do all this work to create a teapot that doesn’t drip? Surely this is more than is required.

I just looked up this company. It appears that other pouring vessels they made in the past, such as coffeepots, did have pierced spouts. I couldn’t find out if this was true of their current products. I would love to read more about this feature, how it compares to other spout shapes, and who came up with it. Maybe someone out there can point me to an article?

Till next tea-time–and next post.

Vegetarian Steamed Dumplings

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America’s Test Kitchen put out a book in 2022, Cooking With Plant-based Meat. That is, 75 recipes using the latest, best versions of fake meat that are in the stores. One of the recipes is for dumplings/pot stickers. Since I really like dumplings and my recipe uses ground turkey (not suitable for vegetarian off-spring), I was interested in trying theirs.

I’m not going to give the recipe or go into any detail about making it. I’m just going to comment that we thought it was quite tasty. Also, that squeezing the juice out of shredded Napa cabbage feels kind of weird. That’s a lot of cabbage juice down the drain.

And photos! I do want to include a photo of the results.

Hmm, I thought I had some photos of dumplings lined up and waiting to be cooked. Apparently not.

Regarding the sauce–I recommend soy sauce and rice vinegar (maybe 3:1?), with a bit of sauteed green onion and garlic. Maybe also a dash of ginger, powdered or otherwise. But I admit, I’m lazy. By the time we were done cooking, I probably just used soy sauce and vinegar.

Trying an Old Family Cake Recipe and a New (To Me) Frosting

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My Grandpere, my father’s father, was a baker. When we celebrated birthdays while staying with him and Grandmere, he always produced a cake. Not a chocolate cake, though. I’ve never actually known what sort of cake it was, other than that it had two layers, a sort of whipped cream filling, sliced almonds patted onto the sides, and–for my birthdays–a glossy, smooth, pink frosting.

I do remember that it was delicious, even if I’m not sure what it was flavored with.

I have one of my Grandpere’s cookbooks, Cakes For Bakers. It’s clear that he used it, and it’s full of scraps of paper with recipes. I say “recipes,” but “lists of ingredients with a title” is a better description. I know I’ve looked through them before, trying to find out what cookie recipe he used, but this time I was curious about the cake recipes. “Mace” showed up several times, particularly in connection with something called “wine cake”, but also in a few other places. What would it be like to flavor a cake with mace?

One of the recipes says “layer cake.” I decided to try that, but add the “mace, lemon, vanilla” that shows up in the context of the wine cake. Mace is similar to nutmeg, and I already know that nutmeg and lemon are a nice combination.

However, I didn’t want to end up with us having to eat a whole cake, so I decided I would make the batter into cupcakes so I could freeze some for later.

At the same time as I decided to try the cake, I also decided to try a new and unrelated frosting that I’ve been curious about–Ermine Frosting, which involves boiling milk and flour together. (It also has a lot of butter.) So, not one but two experiments–perhaps not as tightly linked as they should have been.

First, the cake. I deciphered and “translated” the measurements (what’s a gill?) and tried using the standard approach for a butter cake, creaming the butter and sugar, adding eggs, then alternating the flour mixture and milk. I guessed at suitable amounts of mace and lemon and vanilla. The result was a thick but tasty batter, and cupcakes with a fairly firm but good crumb. The flavor of mace was pretty strong–perhaps I should have gone heavier on lemon and lighter on mace.

The ermine frosting was intriguing. Some methods have you beat the butter and add the thickened milk/flour mix to it, while others have you add the butter to the thickened, beaten milk/flour mixture. I used the recipe from King Arthur Flour’s website, and heated milk with flour and sugar to make a cooked paste, then beat it till it cooled down some, then added butter. The texture is very smooth and buttery (no surprise that it is buttery) and I think it would be good with flavors besides vanilla. It reminds me of the texture of the filling that Phoenix Bakery in Pittsboro, North Carolina, uses in their doughnuts–silky with butter.

However, vanilla ermine frosting doesn’t seem a good match for these cupcakes. I’m not really sure what would be–something citrusy? Cinnamony?

This brings me back to the fact that the flavors–mace, lemon, vanilla–seemed to be connected to wine cake. In the cookbook and in the notes, the recipes for wine cake do not contain any wine. Is it so named because it is accompanied by wine? Or is there supposed to be wine involved later on?

When I looked up “wine cake” on-line, every recipe I found did in fact include wine as an ingredient (and often, cake mix and pudding mix.) So why is this cookbook’s “wine cake” so different? Why can’t I find out anything about the origins of this wine cake?

The internet can tell you a lot, but some mysteries resist easy answers. I should have asked more questions of my Grandpere, but I wasn’t interested in baking back then. I should have asked more questions of my father too, when I started baking, though I’m not sure how many more answers he could have provided. Maybe he didn’t ask those questions of his father either.

If you know anything about a “wine cake” that doesn’t contain wine but does contain mace, I’d love to hear from you.

Till next post.