My grandmother died last summer and I took over quite a few of her recipe books. I have been poring over them looking for promising dishes to try, but I have to admit that so far, I've come up a cropper. Nonetheless, I love the old handwritten notebook that my great grandmother gave to my grandmother one christmas. The knowledge that my great grandmother couldn't spell for beans (cheese, honestly, how many ways are there to spell it?) has been one surprise to me (given how ferociously the generations I know defend their spelling abilities, I always assumed it was a family trait) that is worth wading through the countless recipes for frozen hashbrowns with melted margarine and chicken soup covered with a melted margarine and cornflakes crust. I also love the way old recipes are written. There aren't any namby-pamby prep instructions for the uninitiated. These are recipes for people who know how cakes are made; they just give the ingredient list and and the cooking time and temperature. Who needs to write out "cream together the butter and sugar until fluffy" time and time again? The recipe pictured above has about as much instruction as would be included by an impatient person who knew what modern recipes were supposed to look like. Clearly the typing was a bit of a pisser, and there was no way anyone was going to go back and start again just because they'd forgotten the sugar. No way. Not after the butte(r) incident.
I haven't tried this one yet, but (see below, and presumably above) there are enough zucchini around to make it seem likely I will soon. I'll try to report on how it turns out. In an ideal world, what you get is a chocolate cake that's unexpectedly moist.
I apologize for the image, by the way. It's from photobooth and I am not sure what is going on at the periphery, but clearly there are limits to what the magic tiny camera can cope with.
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