Recipes to make and share

Ensign » 1971 » April Today’s Family Conducted by Mabel Jones Gabbott

Webb Dycus, “Recipes: A Sharing of Friendship,” Ensign, Apr. 1971, 78
A recipe can be many things. It can be a new dish, an untried flavor; it can be a delectable combination of familiar ingredients that add up to luscious eating.

A recipe can mean a new friend, a giving of some part of you and your day to brighten mine, a bit of your kitchen experimenting to be experimented now in mine.

A recipe can be a reaching across the miles, a blessing from your home to mine, a seal of friendship given and received.

Webb Dycus, of Duck River, Tennessee, received her apple bread recipe from her friend Erma Lee Stovall in Wichita, Kansas. Aileen Kilgore Henderson, of San Diego, California, says her recipe for pound cake was given to her many years ago by an Alabama relative. They share these recipes with friends of the Ensign.

Apple Bread

3 cups flour 1 1/2 teaspoons soda 1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon 2 cups sugar 1 1/4 cups cooking oil
3 whole eggs 2 teaspoons vanilla 3 cups thinly sliced peeled apples

Sift together flour, soda, salt, and cinnamon. Cream together by hand the sugar, oil, eggs, and vanilla. (Be sure to add the eggs one at a time and beat well after each addition.)
Add the sifted ingredients to the creamed mixture, alternating with the apple slices. Beat well.
Bake in a loaf pan at 325° F. until lightly browned and done. Wrap bread in foil as soon as cool, and it will keep in the freezer very well.
(I don’t believe one can go by oven temperatures in a standardized way. Perhaps you will want to bake the bread at 350° in a gas oven. However, my electric oven cooks hotter than my sister’s. I cooked my bread, starting at around 300°, until it was well on toward done, then ran it up to 325°. This is one of the best breads I have tasted.)

Aileen Kilgore Henderson, “Social Insurance, Anyone?,” Ensign, Apr. 1971, 78

With an insurance policy to cover nearly every contingency, why not social insurance for homemakers? Master the art of making pound cake and you will be insured for any social emergency.

Serve the pound cake just as it comes from the oven—a slice of golden, fine-textured velvet encased in a thin shell of rich brown crust. Or, serve it with mandarin oranges steeped in chilled Catawba juice, or topped with a dollop of whipped cream and a maraschino cherry. A wide variety of frostings can be used to enhance the delicate flavor of this cake, and to produce as dramatic a dessert as you might desire.

Pound cake can be baked in an eight-inch spring-form pan or a regular-sized loaf pan. A kugelhupf pan turns out a spirally fluted product, especially beautiful when dusted with confectioner’s sugar. A pound cake mold, should you be fortunate enough to own one, is especially appropriate.

Have all ingredients at room temperature. Butter and flour thoroughly the pan you have chosen. The kugelhupf pan or pound cake mold takes a bit of extra attention to make sure that every bit of the design is well-coated.

Pound Cake
1 cup vegetable shortening (part butter if preferred) 1 2/3 cups sugar
5 eggs 1/2 teaspoon almond extract
1 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice 2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt

Cream until light vegetable shortening (part butter is delectable but not at all necessary) and sugar. Add eggs, one at a time, beating thoroughly after each addition. Add almond extract and lemon juice. (This combination gives the cake a delightful flavor, but for a subtle Bavarian shading that is guaranteed to pique the taste buds, stir in additionally the grated rind of 1 large lemon. For another change, substitute for these combinations 1/2 teaspoon vanilla and 1/4 teaspoon mace.)

Sift together salt and lightly spooned cake flour. Add the dry ingredients to the creamed mixture. Beat well.

Bake in a preheated oven at 325° F. for 70 minutes or until nicely browned.

The hostess with a pound cake tucked away in her cake box can greet unexpected guests with composure. She knows that an important part of the entertaining is already done.

Don’t you need to bake yourself some social insurance today?

As a side note, having a store bought Pound cake can also be used. Topping it with some ice cream topping (strawberry, caramel, chocolate) which can be kept in the pantry for an emergency, or fresh or canned fruit (bananas and crushed pineapple) with some whipped topping for an elegant treat.