Retro Recipes and Traditional Fare

I can never tire of a rustic dessert, especially one made with fresh, perfectly ripe peaches. Fruits like these when at their peak always make the difference, turning a ho-hum dessert into a spectacular one. I'd like to think that peach desserts are an American specialty, particularly a Southern one. There is the traditional peach cobbler, peach crisp, and peach crumble. There are also the peach pie and tart. But when simply baked on a pan with the edges of the dough turned over, you have what the French call a galette and the Italians a crostata. An extra crispy crust sets the galette or crostata apart from pies and tarts.

This crispiness is achieved by baking at high temperature and can not only be attained by professional bakers, but by home bakers too. Preheat the oven with a pizza stone and after adequately heating for a half hour, bake the galette in a pan placed over the stone. This is the foolproof method for the crispiest crust, but what if it's sill soggy? The French secret to keeping the crust from getting soggy is a thin layer of ground nuts between the dough and fruit. The Italians use amaretti crumbs. The nuts or crumbs absorb the excess liquid from the fruit and create a thickened consistency. They almost go unnoticed in the finished dessert.

It's well known that paprika is the famous spice of Hungary. What I think most people don't realize is that the red powder is made from ripened peppers also called paprika. The word paprika means pepper in Hungarian, and I don't mean peppercorns, but rather the fruit or vegetable, depending on how you look at it. Hungarian sweet peppers are typically pale yellow to pale green in color when they are fresh. They can be eaten raw or cooked into many recipes. But when they ripen to bright red, they are dried and ground into the fine red powder known as paprika or what I like to call Hungarian gold.

Hungarian paprika (pronounced puh-pri-ka) is available in sweet, hot, and everything in between, with eight varieties altogether. Sweet paprika has a deeper red color whereas hot paprika is more rusty in color. The signature dish most famous for using paprika is chicken paprikash, a stew of chicken with an onion sauce richly colored and flavored with paprika. I grew up on paprikás csirke, as it is known in Hungarian. It is my comfort food, and that's exactly what it is for so many Hungarians and Hungarian-Americans. I consider it my favorite home-cooked dish. And, of course, no recipe rivals my mother's.

Chiffon cakes are airy, moist, and delicious. They have an interesting history too. Harry Baker, a Los Angeles insurance agent turned caterer, is credited with the original chiffon cake in 1927.

For two decades he carefully guarded his secret recipe, making his special cake only for Hollywood screen stars and for the famous Brown Derby Restaurant.

In 1947, he agreed to sell the recipe to General Mills. They released the secret recipe in the May 1948 Better Homes and Gardens Magazine, and it became a nationwide sensation.

When I was a child I felt sorry for kids whose moms made "meat and potatoes" dinners. That was until I heard of moms who were vegetarians. I thought that was tragic.

I think I was about eleven when I discovered vegetarianism from a student teacher who was raising her children to be vegetarians. No hamburgers on the grill? No hot dogs at baseball games? No chicken parm sandwiches on Sunday night? What kind of a mother does that to her children? I wondered. If it weren't for my mom's meatball sandwiches, I don't think I would have made it through middle school.

Then one day several years later, I did the unthinkable. I became a vegetarian; not because I wanted to ruin my children's lives (I don't have children), but because of an unfortunate incident with some tainted chicken. I didn't eat meat for years after that.

I do eat meat now, but I still love vegetarian meals which I eat several times a week. For those of you who wonder whether or not a vegetable stew can be as satisfying as beef stew, I'm telling you, Yes, it can.