Tutti Frutti, yet again

Really, there's nothing like an old cookbook. I was kind of on a roll, what with the eggs in hiding and the tangerines, and then Harriet M. Welsch turned me onto an 1887 collaborative cookbook full of fabulous recipes and lovely hints, like "A cup of strong coffee will remove the odor of onions from the breath" (though it fails to mention what to do about the subsequent coffee breath).

There's a recipe for French Toast on page 14, that calls for gravy and no eggs. The missing eggs turn up on page 75, in a concoction called Egg Lemonade - lemon, water, sugar and an egg, all shook up in a mason jar - not something that I really want to drink (and neither do I want to drink "Farmer's Lemonade" which isn't in the Kirmess cookbook but which the guy behind the counter at City Bakery told me was lemonade topped off with half and half, but I digress).

What really made my day was the recipe for Brandied Fruits in the form of a poem. A poem!

If you didn't make brandied fruits last summer, plan to do it this year. It's really that good.

Use a big jar - three quarts or a gallon. Start with a bottle of brandy. Add summer fruit as it comes into season. For every 10 ounces of fruit you add to the jar, add seven ounces of sugar. Stir occasionally to dissolve the sugar. Use up to 10 pounds of fruit all together. Include raspberries, strawberries, peaches, plums, grapes. I found that blueberries were weird - their skins got tough. You could use some pineapple if you don't care about using only local fruit. Come summer's end, put it aside until December. Then, bottle it up and give most of it away as Christmas presents. Save some for yourself. Eat over vanilla ice-cream.

Yum.

Antique cookbooks are good for something.