Bless me father, for I have sinned. I made this thing out of gelatin, cheese, and carrots:
So, there is a story here: back in the long-ago days of when I was singing in choir in Kitchener-Waterloo with Leith, the church we sang at was having a book sale, and we found an AMAZING two-volume Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking, from 1954, by one Ms. Meta Given, who seems to have been, like, the poor woman’s Betty Crocker, from Pittsburgh, and who is potentially fascinating. Someone’s dissertation should be on atomic-age cookbooks and gender and domesticity, and there should be a chapter on Meta Given, but because I am in Musicology they want my dissertation to be about music, or something, so that won’t be my dissertation, sadly. ANYHOW, the Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking is ridiculous and has lots of horrible gelatin-based things in it because it was the Atomic Age, and, you know, Better Eating Through Chemicals and things!
And one of the most amazing recipes was cheese carrots. I cannot remember the actual specifics of the cheese carrots recipe because the book is at home in Canada somewhere in my parents’ basement, so I had to recreate this from vague memory, and in my vague memory the recipe for cheese carrots was this: you take your carrots, you grate them. You take your cheese, you grate it. You mix them with gelatin, mold them into teensy, canape-sized carrots, and you make carrot greens with sprigs of parsley. Um, yeah, I know right?
And then one day, for reasons far too complicated to explain to anyone who has not been in Musicology wing of the Schoenberg Music Building this past quarter, I needed to make food that was a culinary representation of the musical oeuvre of Lady Gaga (for homework, because graduate school has done nothing but equip me with useful and practical skills with real-world application), and that is when I decided that cheese carrots were the only possible thing.
My blissful unawareness of certain important facts like, say, the proportions of the ingredients, did not prevent me from boldly sallying forth on this journey of culinary blasphemy. So when the cheese carrot batter was too runny to roll into tiny canape-sized carrots, we MacGuyvered a mold out of a loaf pan, cardboard and some tin foil, poured the mix in, and giant cheese carrots were, unfortunately, born.
They’re more art than food, really, and remarkably inoffensive in flavor. But the texture is . . . just not the texture of something you really want to eat. Oh, 1954. Truly, you were another planet.
As a counterpoint, I also made this blackberry/muscat jelly from a Nigella Lawson recipe, and it was legitimately delicious, although less like Lady Gaga.
Also: in the UK gelatin is measured in leaves, and in the US gelatin is measured in packets, and neither of these units of measurement is not even remotely related to the metric system and therefore I throw my Canadian hands up in exasperation at both of them. For the record, 1 leaf gelatin = 1/4 packet of gelatin, or something, I think, I don’t actually remember. So this recipe calls for five leaves of gelatin which is 1 and 1/4 packets, which is a stupid amount, because what do you do with 3/4 of a packet of gelatin? Add it to your cheese carrot batter, I guess. Too bad.
Is that math even right? Who actually counts things anymore, anyhow? Whatever.
Someday you are going to have to explain to me how you got from Lady GaGa to cheese carrots. Seriously.
I recently bought an amazing mid-century cookbook at a yard sale. The front cover is some kind of molded gelatin item surrounded by deviled eggs. It’s obviously the best cookbook ever.