These are the cookies that I am baking today, to distribute to our friends and neighbors, and why I couldn’t stick around for the Chicagoboyz Zoom Call –
Pecan Angel Slices
(from Joy of Cooking 1975 Edition)
Cream together until well-blended: ½ cup butter and ¼ cup sugar
Beat in well: 1 egg and ½ teasp vanilla
Combine and add to the above: 1 ¼ cup sifted flour and 1/8 teasp salt
Pat dough evenly into a greased 9×12 inch pan and bake at 350 ° for fifteen minutes. Remove from oven.
Combine: 2 beaten eggs, 1 ½ cup brown sugar, ½ cup flaked cocoanut, 1 cup chopped pecans, 2 Tbsp. flour, ½ teasp double acting baking powder, ½ teasp salt and 1 teasp vanilla.
Pour over cookie layer and return to oven for 25 minutes
Combine 1 ½ cup sifted confectioner’s sugar with sufficient lemon juice to make a smooth, runny glaze. Pour over warm cookie/pecan/coconut layer and allow to set.
When cool, cut into bars or squares.
Enjoy – and have a very Merry Christmas!
This is news we can use.
Merry Christmas!
That recipe made me smile. When we bought this house it came with the previous owner’s large collection of cookbooks, some of them older classics like “Joy of Cooking.” In the older books the recipes are like that one: general instructions that assume the reader knows what “creaming” butter and sugar is. Some of them don’t even have precise amounts of the ingredients in them.
Today’s recipes have to illustrate every single step because the young of today aren’t taught the basics of cooking like we were. (“Cook” was my very first Girl Scout badge.)
I will always keep to the 1975 edition of Joy – it was the one that Mom had, I think it was the last one that the original editor had a hand in producing, with all the very personal stories… but for another good reason – the “about” section. It also had instructions for drawing and dressing game birds, among other information about foodstuffs … and no matter what a meat or a veg might be – there was a recipe for it, or at least a suggestion of what to do with it.
As for teaching the young of our species … sigh. I graduated high school in 1972 – and I think it must have been shortly after that point that they stopped teaching home economics. AKA, cooking and sewing. Which to me was wasted, because I already knew how to cook and sew, but a lot of my peers were innocent of such skills and perhaps found those classes useful..
My daughter served in the Marines, post 2000, who couldn’t even sew on a button.
“My daughter served in the Marines, post 2000, who couldn’t even sew on a button.”
Not knowing how to sew a button is excusable, the list of things we are born knowing how to do is exceedingly short and generally not anything that could be remunerative. That people expected to deal with other people firing large weapons at them couldn’t figure it out in five minutes is frightening.
On a cheerier note, great recipe and Merry Christmas.