Wasp Nest Cookies (1949)

This is why I like to test these old recipes before I post about them.

It seems like it shouldn’t be too difficult to write a cookbook. At its simplest, it's: Step 1 – Collect a bunch of recipes, and Step 2 – Write the book. But for people who really care about the art and craft of cooking and baking, there are additional sub-steps including testing and developing standards that will produce results that are repeatable in somewhat variable conditions. In their earliest forms, published books of ‘receipts’ were of the Steps 1 & 2 variety. Details were few and you sometimes get recipes that as written just don’t work. Cooking schools, chefs, and emerging home economics institutes understood the value of the testing and standards, and as they started publishing their own cook books home bakers eagerly sought out those volumes that they could trust.

Nonetheless, you still get a lot of cook books even today that are essentially collections of other folks’ contributions. In the 1930s through the 1950s cookbooks that assembled recipes around a theme were extremely popular, and the 1949 cookbook where we get this week’s recipe is one such example.

America Cooks: Favorite Recipes from 48 States was written by Cora, Rose and Bob Brown with the premise of a family traveling through the US, collecting unique recipes from home cooks and others in each state while learning and sharing bits of homespun folklore and state culture. This week’s recipe, Wasp Net Cookies, is featured in the ‘Wisconsin’ chapter along with fun facts about the Scandinavian influence on the state (the Browns apparently enjoyed the lutefisk feasts with quite a bit to say about them). It seems to be a fairly straightforward recipe for a variety of meringue cookie – but it’s apparent the Browns never actually tried to bake them.

Wasp Nest Cookies

From America Cooks: Favorite Recipes from 48 States by Cora, Rose and Bob Brown (1949 edition)

Ingredients:

2 cups blanched almonds

1 cup powdered sugar

8 ounces chocolate, grated

1 cup granulated sugar

3 egg whites, beaten stiff

1 teaspoon vanilla

Split almonds and heat with powdered sugar in frying pan, stirring constantly until nuts are well covered with lightly carameled sugar.

Mix grated chocolate with granulated sugar and beat into egg whites. Add vanilla and cooled nuts. Drop from teaspoon on well-floured pans in slow oven, 300 degrees. Let cool and remove from pans.

Challenges and Changes

Well.

I followed the instructions to the letter, and because the recipe didn’t give a baking time, I decided to peek into the oven every five minutes. At five minutes the cookies seemed ok, but at ten minutes I discovered that disaster had struck.

There was no salvaging this batch. I tasted a few bits, and they seemed nice – chocolatey with crunchy almonds. In figuring out what had gone wrong, I hypothesized that:

· the almonds as halves or long slivers were too heavy for the meringue

· beating the chocolate and sugar into the whites and then stirring in the nuts completely deflated the egg whites – it took a lot more work than expected to get everything evenly mixed

· the oven was a bit too hot

· I had made the cookies too large

So, take two.

I decided on the second attempt to:

· Chop the almonds into smaller bits; this meant not caramelizing them, as the tiny bits would have been very difficult to separate after cooling

· Mix the grated chocolate and sugar into the egg whites in stages, and keep using the hand mixer to (hopefully) keep the meringue structure thick and airy

· Make the cookies much smaller

· Let the cookie batter in the pans sit for 20 minutes before baking (in previous meringue baking, I have learned it’s a good idea to let the outsides dry a bit and develop a sort of ‘exoskeleton’)

· Bake the cookies at 280 degrees

The batter appeared more airy than it had in the previous batch, so I was optimistic. I let the cookies sit and then baked.

They were round, but they flattened out which I don’t think was supposed to happen. The meringue was STILL deflating and melting in the oven. Worse, the floured pans were no match for the sticky batter. Disaster.

Out of three pans of 15 cookies each, only six released cleanly. I tasted some scraped up cookie bits, and they tasted OK but I could tell that I should have been going for a much lighter, airier cookie and this wasn’t it.

The Ratings

Cookie Appearance: N/A

Cookie Texture: N/A

Cookie Mouthfeel: N/A

Cookie Flavor: N/A

Overall Cookie Rating: A RECIPE FLOP!

In my rules for this blog, I’ll try a recipe twice before declaring it a Recipe Flop. In addition, I have to be able to produce at least 12 edible and presentable cookies in order to have my taste-testing groups try them. I did have my Home Taste Tester try a couple, and he thought they were OK but probably chewier than intended. This bolsters my assumption that the meringue just wasn’t handling the additions well.

If I were to attempt this recipe again, I would probably:

· Forget the floured pans and use parchment paper or silicon mats (I know the 1940s cook likely didn’t have either, but I used a lot of flour on my pans and it didn’t make a lick of difference)

· Substitute cocoa powder for the grated chocolate; the chocolate bits definitely added their weight to the merengue

· Use less granulated sugar; a cup of sugar (plus all that chocolate) for three egg whites seemed like a lot to whip in and keep airy

And so we have the blog’s first Recipe Flop! It had to happen eventually. Hopefully next week’s recipe will work!

Next week’s recipe: Double Decker Brownies (1962)