Best Desserts Are Made With Heirloom Recipes

When it comes to dessert, there’s no place like home. Oh, it’s true that a glorious dessert cart is a grand sight in a restaurant, but for most people, the most memorable desserts in their lives are the ones that Mother used to make - the butterscotch pudding, the apple pie, the German chocolate cake, the bread pudding and the simple fruit and cream fools.

There’s comfort in returning to tradition, and this seems to be a time when people are returning to the past when it comes to sharing those meals.

“I think there’s no question that there is a definite return to tradition,” says Baltimore caterer Ami Taubenfeld. “People are going back to their mother’s and grandmother’s recipes for pecan pie or corn bread stuffing.”

It’s not just home cooks, she said: Four separate deliveries recently included, by request, apple, pecan and pumpkin pies. “They’re all traditional recipes that have been in our family for ages.”

That is a change, Taubenfeld said, because until just recently, “usually the first request is for chocolate, and the second is for something mousse-y.”

For author and TV cook Marcia Adams, returning to the old recipes is a crusade to keep food traditions from disappearing. In her latest cookbook, “Marcia Adams’ Heirloom Recipes” (Clarkson Potter, $22.50), she pursues her search for “attic receipts,” recipes handed down from mother to daughter to granddaughter.

What makes a recipe an heirloom? “For me, they come out of an oral tradition, in all probability they have not been written down or published in a mainline cookbook … They’re those recipes of your mother’s or your grandmother’s or your great-aunt’s that you remember being prepared, but nobody wrote them down because they showed you how to do it in the kitchen as you worked with them.

“And now we have a whole generation I call `cooking impaired,’ who’ve never worked with another cook in the kitchen. All of a sudden, it’s very important that they have these connections and attachments to their past and to their family and to their family history. And the recipes are all part of that.”

The recipes truly are heirlooms, Adams says. “They’re just as important as our dishes or our jewelry or our antique rose bushes … It’s all part of this ribbon of memory that connects people.”

Pumpkin cookies, biscuit pudding with warm bourbon sauce and Kentucky stack cake are among the homey dessert recipes Adams collected in her “heirloom” travels.

The renewed interest in capturing the past, she says, “has a direct bearing on our world being a sort of puzzling place. We can’t help acid rain, we can’t do a thing about refugees that are starving, we certainly can’t do anything about our computer breakdowns, or random violence - but for a little while, in your house, in the sanctity of sanctuary and safety of your kitchen and your dining room, you’re able to re-invoke better times through food.

“But … Hamburger Helper won’t do it.”

For Beth Dooley, co-author with Lucia Watson of “Savoring the Seasons of the Northern Heartland” (Alfred A. Knopf, $25), packaged ground-beef enhancers are exactly what today’s cooks want to avoid.

“As Americans, we’ve always been in love with convenience and technology,” she said in a telephone interview. “Our mothers’ generation saw a lot of convenience products and high-tech cooking methods.

“Today we’re wanting things a little bit different - people are trying to get closer to the sources of their food, to bypass technology and packaging. Everybody’s wanting to do something different than your mother did.”

And Dooley agreed that comfort is playing a big role in the kind of food people want to see on their tables: “There’s a lot to just the nurturing part of cooking, and some of the cozier foods play into that.”

For cookbook author Richard Sax, who researched his lavish “Classic Home Desserts” (Chapters, $29.95) by spending hours in the New York Public Library’s Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, copying old recipes from notebooks in the cooks’ own hands, the connection such dishes provide to the past is almost magical. He writes of testing a seed cake recipe from a Scottish cookbook of 1830 and having it come out perfectly.

“There was something miraculous to me about this, that I could take written instructions from someone long-gone (and) bake the same cake in my oven today. In doing so, I was continuing a process … set in motion two centuries ago.”

Sax’s book contains more than 350 recipes from around the world, from slumps and fools, to cakes and cookies, to blini and honey cakes, most connected to cooks’ names from the past or the present.

“The world of home desserts is more than just recipes,” he writes. “It’s also a world of people and the way that food is woven into family life, whether it’s a special layer cake that a mother bakes every year to celebrate her child’s birthday, a pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving, a coffeecake for Easter, a nut cake for Passover or just a chocolate pudding that’s an after-dinner favorite.”

The following are some comforting old-fashioned desserts:

Pumpkin Cookies

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, at room temperature

1 cup sugar

1 cup canned pumpkin

1 large egg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 teaspoon Angostura bitters (from liquor stores)

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

1/2 cup dark raisins

1/2 cup chopped pecans

For Frosting:

1 cup packed dark brown sugar

6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) butter

1/4 cup milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Speck of salt

2 cups confectioners’ sugar

Heat the oven to 325 degrees.

In a large mixer bowl, cream butter and sugar together for 3 minutes. Add pumpkin, egg, vanilla and bitters and mix well. In another bowl, whisk together the flour, pumpkin pie spice, baking powder, soda, cinnamon, salt and cloves. Slowly add flour mixture to pumpkin mixture; mix until combined. By hand, stir in raisins and pecans. Drop by heaping teaspoonfuls onto a greased cookie sheet. Bake 10 to 15 minutes, or until the top of a cookie springs back when touched with your finger. Transfer to racks and let cool completely before frosting.

Meanwhile, make the frosting: In a small saucepan, melt brown sugar and butter together, then stir in milk. Bring to a boil over medium heat, lower the heat, and cook gently for 3 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat and cool. Stir in vanilla, salt, and confectioners’ sugar and beat until well-combined.

Yield: 4-1/2 dozen.

Chocolate Bread Pudding

1/2 loaf unsliced homemade-type bread, cut into 1-inch squares (about 4 to 5 cups)

1-1/2 cups heavy cream

1-1/2 cups whole milk

3/4 pound semisweet chocolate, shaved, or chocolate chips

3 eggs

1/2 cup sugar

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1/2 teaspoon almond extract

Heat the oven to 350 degrees.

Put the bread cubes into a large bowl. In a medium-sized saucepan, bring cream and milk to a boil, turn off heat and stir in chocolate until it has melted. Pour over the bread and let sit for 10 to 15 minutes so bread absorbs the mixture. Beat eggs and sugar with flavorings. Pour over bread, tossing gently. Dump bread mixture into a large, greased 2-quart pan or an 8-by-8-inch cake pan. Cover with aluminum foil. Bake for 35 to 45 minutes, or until the edges are firm but the inside is still soft and moist. The pudding should seem underbaked.

Serve hot with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.

Yield: six to eight servings.

Gingerbread

1/3 cup (5 tablespoons) unsalted butter

1 cup blackstrap molasses

1 egg, beaten

2 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 tablespoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1 cup applesauce

Heat oven to 350 degrees.

Cream butter in a large bowl with an electric mixer set at medium speed. While beating, slowly add molasses. Add egg and continue to beat until well-blended.

In a sifter, combine flour, baking soda, salt and spices. Sift into the creamed mixture. Add applesauce, then beat at medium speed until smooth and thoroughly blended.

Lightly grease an 8-inch square cake pan with vegetable oil and pour batter into the pan. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes, until gingerbread begins to separate from the sides of the pan and a tester inserted in the center comes out clean. Transfer pan to a wire rack and let the gingerbread cool in the pan.

The gingerbread has a shelf life of 3 to 5 days; store in a tightly sealed plastic bag.

Yield: one 8-inch square loaf.

Apricot-Amaretto Fool

1/2 pound (about 1-1/2 cups, fairly loosely packed) dried apricots

2-1/3 cups water

3/4 cup sugar

1-1/4 cups heavy cream, well-chilled

1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon confectioners’ sugar

1/4 cup Amaretto, or to taste

1/4 teaspoon almond extract (optional)

1/4 cup sliced almonds, lightly toasted, for serving

Combine apricots, water and sugar in a heavy non-reactive saucepan; bring to a boil over medium heat. Cover, reduce heat to low and simmer until apricots are tender, about 10 minutes. Remove from heat; set aside to cool slightly.

Puree apricots and syrup in two batches in a food processor or blender. Press puree through sieve into a large mixing bowl, pressing mixture with the back of a spoon or large rubber spatula to extract as much puree as possible. Cover and refrigerate until slightly chilled but not cold.

Beat cream until thickened. Add confectioners’ sugar and continue to beat until cream forms soft peaks. Gently fold in Amaretto and then the almond extract, if desired.

Stir apricot puree once or twice to loosen it. Gently fold whipped cream into puree, leaving clearly visible streaks of apricot and cream; do not blend thoroughly. Carefully transfer to a glass serving bowl, six wine glasses, or six goblets. Cover and refrigerate until chilled, at least 1 hour. Serve the fool garnished with toasted almonds.

Yield: six servings.