welcome friends welcome back to the kitchen welcome back to sunday morning and the old
cookbook show today we're going to do a recipe out of this cookbook called the Purefoy hotel
cookbook true and tried recipes of real southern cooking first published in 1941 and revised a few
times after that this is the anniversary edition so the Purefoy hotel was in Talladega Alabama
and right off the bat I have to tell you I struggled
with this book someone sent it in to us and the recipes are great but I struggled with some of the
1940s thinking of Alabama there are several passages in this book that I find
just morally reprehensible like absolutely off the chain morally reprehensible
so I'm not going to go into those parts of the book I'm just going to stick to the recipes
and the the idea is that this hotel started in 1920 essentially as a rooming house
for traveling salesmen and the dining room became known as this amazing place to eat
and so the hotel expanded and expanded the dining room expanded the dining experience and then they
came up with this cookbook and what I find most interesting about this cookbook is that
it's not written in one voice you can tell by looking through the recipes
that it's written in several different voices in several different recipe styles and the
one that we're going to do today is written in a completely different recipe style than
any other recipe in this book and it's called poncho pie
I think i'm really going to enjoy this which is one of the reasons why I'm making it I
think it's going to be great so it tells you to start off to saute in a large frying pan
green pepper cloves of garlic and two tablespoons of shortening so I didn't have any shortening or
lard today but I had bacon fat so the bacon fat is melted and pretty hot so in goes the green pepper
and
we'll crush in some garlic
I talk about this being written in different voices it's not just the style that the
the recipes are written down in and how the ingredients are laid out in the instructions
it's also something like this recipe calls for three cloves of garlic and a clove of
garlic is what we call it here where I live in toronto and that's the inside the bulb you
break the bulb apart and there's cloves of garlic inside a couple of weeks ago we did a recipe from
gebhardt's chili powder from Texas and it called for a button of garlic
I'd never heard button of garlic before but on this same page
there is a recipe for Italian spaghetti and it calls for one garlic button and so
that word comes up again a button of garlic that I'd never heard before that I've never used but in
this book it's used interchangeably through the recipes so you can sort of tell that different
people have have written these recipes so I'm just going to saute these green peppers a little bit
more and one of the passages at the beginning of this book that I that I do want to bring your
attention to I thought was was pretty interesting prominent men and women from all parts of the
world have come to Talladega Alabama to sample the food served in our dining room and have returned
home singing the praises of meals prepared and served in the manner of antebellum days
Duncan Hines in his book adventures in good eating lists the Purefoy along with the select eating
places of the nation so I really want to I really want to find that other book and see what Duncan
Hines says about his time at the Purefoy hotel and about the food there and whether he thinks it is
good as they sort of allude to they don't come right out and say that he sung its praises but
that he ate there and that he spoke about it and yes Duncan Hines was a real guy Duncan
Hines was a writer a food critic food reviewer who sold his name and that's how his name ends
up on cake boxes I think if he was alive today he might be aghast that his name is on some of
those cake boxes anyway so on to the next thing it says to this add a pound of ground
round steak a teaspoon of chili powder and two teaspoons of salt so in goes the ground
beef chili powder and salt and we'll just break that up and it says to cook this
no it just says to cook this it doesn't give a time or what to expect so oh wait yeah it does say
the way that this recipe is laid out is is a little bit wacky but it does say
to cook 10 minutes then add the next set of ingredients so
I'm supposed to cook this for 10 minutes in that 10 minutes the ground beef will sort of brown a
little bit I expect and I want to break it up so that the pieces are as small as possible
I mean this smells really good I could eat just on its own I could
take that pour it over some mashed potatoes and I would be very happy I think
I don't think I necessarily need to add anything more to it but it now tells me to add one and a
half cups of cooked tomatoes and one cup of creamed corn I'm gonna cheat a little bit
creamed corn not something that I really ever bring into the house Julie doesn't like cream
corn at all and a can of creamed corn here is much more than a cup so I'm going to use the whole can
because what am I going to do with the rest of the can so I'm going to put that in
for the for the tomatoes instead of cooked tomatoes I'm going to use Rotel
and for people that live outside of Canada or the United States Rotel is chopped cooked
tomatoes with diced chilies in it it's got a bit of a tang it's got some real flavour to it
it's great in a whole bunch of things I'm going to use that instead of the one and a half cups
of cooked tomatoes because this can is only about a cup and a quarter so I think between
too many too many creamed corn and not enough tomato we should be fine
now we're supposed to bring this to a boil and boil briskly before adding the next ingredients
okay that is that is now boiling briskly so I'm supposed to add in cornmeal
milk
minced olives so minced green olives i'm assuming green it doesn't say what colour
we'll just go with green then it asks for cooked mushrooms
and I struggled with this what what would be cooked mushrooms in this time period and going
through this book a lot of the other recipes asked for canned mushrooms canned mushrooms in this time
period would have been the norm I know you go to the grocery store today fresh mushrooms there's
always fresh mushrooms and they're relatively inexpensive but even just 25 years ago fresh
mushrooms were harder to come by in a lot of parts of North America and canned was kind of
the normal so i'm going to put in a can of sliced cooked mushrooms and we stir that all together
i'm supposed to transfer this to a casserole dish
and then bake it at 325 degrees uncovered until set so let's get this into the oven
hey hey glenn hey friends i'm not sure uh spoon let's go for a spoon
i think i think spoon should be let's see it looks almost like you could cut it like a
almost but it's hot it's hotter to the oven so as much as it has
so okay once it cools i imagine you just slice it out okay but would you eat it cool um no i don't
think you eat it cool as i try and figure exactly what you got going here you've got peas and
nut peas corn pepper some tomato mushroom mushrooms olives cornmeal
i don't even know what to think about this
so two years ago we did a recipe from a cookbook from St Catherines
and it was called tamale pie and it was this it was beef on the bottom
and then cornmeal mush on the top and it was a strata this is essentially that
built out with a few more things and then just mixed all together before it's cooked there's one
oh good it's the olives that are the surprise flavour
okay i can maybe do without the olives yeah i can maybe do without
the olives fencing surprise flavour but the rest of that is comforting strangely
but these things often are right yeah and you don't even notice that it's creamed corn
even just saying that makes me want to not maybe that's the problem maybe it's not the olives is
creamed corn huh yeah i guess there's enough other stuff which is good it's good i mean
as with any recipe there'd be a few things i would change to make it my own that's it you
look at a recipe and you know you make it once and you go this is really good but i think if i change
these three things it would be more to my liking and i think that's the case with this one i would
leave out the olives and i would maybe bump up the chili flavour i'd maybe use a different kind
of chili i was going to say i would you know you could even do like a i'm more of a taco
kind of flavour yeah definitely something like that i suspected that if you took out
use a different kind of tomato you could also do like a jerk flavour would be amazing
wouldn't it okay so lots of things you can do with this and i wonder you know did i have to
find the Duncan Hines book what did Duncan Hines eat here at the pure hotel and hold on hold on
Duncan Hines yeah the Duncan Hines he was a guy okay so it's not just some it's not just the box
of it's not a cake it's not just a brand name no he was a real guy he's an actual person yeah
an actual an actual person who sold his name to a giant conglomerate to make boxed cakes on that
note if you want glenn and friends black cat box cheeks i'm willing to put my name in a box today
so i would give this a try i think it's a very interesting meal and let us know i mean i when
we did that last recipe a lot of people said this is that you know how their family made it if this
is something that you eat let us know how your family makes it because i'm it's not something
that ever was part of our family life no no so thanks for stopping by see you again soon