Hit with hard times, American bakers turned to tomato soup | Hacker News Reader

Hit with hard times, American bakers turned to tomato soup

atlasobscura.com

90 pointssamclemens24 comments

There's a TikToker named Dylan Hollis (https://www.tiktok.com/@bdylanhollis?lang=en) who specializes in baking recipes out of old cookbooks to see how they turn out. Always interesting to see what he finds and if those recipes are palatable.

Great channel. One of his fav recipes is potato chocolate cake

You may be interesting in "Caker Cooking":

* https://cakercooking.blogspot.com/p/the-caker-cookbooks.html

Where "caker" is (Canadian?) slang for Scots-Irish WASP. A fan favourite is "Lime Cheese Salad" which has as its main ingredients: 1 large package lime Jell-O, 1 ¼ cup boiling water, 8 oz cream cheese.

* https://cakercooking.blogspot.com/2014/02/reader-recipe-lime...

That seems to be a simpler riff off of Lime Jello Salad, which is famous in the South. Off the top of my head, it's lime jello, mayo, PET (evaporated) milk, cream cheese, crushed pineapple (and the juice), and pecans. You'll find it at any potluck church or family event.

Similarly, a dish I absolutely adore is the following:

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/18140/shrimp-mold/

Shrimp mold. My favorite holidays recipe of all time, bar none. Eat it with crackers like a dip. My uncle used to call it Lulu Lip Dip to tease my sister.

moo juice!

If you think that's odd, have a look at Velveeta fudge (nope, that's not a typo). When made correctly and kept chilled, you'd never know it has Veleveeta in it. Does smell a bit odd while it's being made though.

There also exists Mayonnaise chocolate cake recipes, and they're surprisingly not too bad.

I suppose it makes some sense; Mayo is basically just eggs and vinegar and oil, and I've seen all of those things in sweets recipes before.

There's an upside-down cake recipe I like that starts with you essentially making some sweet mayo before adding the flour.

See https://more.ctv.ca/food/recipes/blood-orange-and-olive-oil-... but if you like baking I really recommend buying the Dessert Person book by Claire Saffitz which this recipe is copied from.

Now Mayo is mostly just soybean oil.

We make it at home w/ olive oil (non-virgin). Takes just a few minutes and it's so much better!

Nice! What’s your favorite recipe.

I've had "chocolate cheese" before. Maybe we're talking about the same thing? I thought it tasted amazing.

Is that like Norwegian Brunost? I love the stuff and it pairs remarkably well with sweet and savory food.

Just on this subtopic, this is a great chocolate pie recipe that doesn't use any dairy but instead uses silken tofu https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/moo-less-cho...

likewise, you wouldn't otherwise know that there's tofu in it.

Reminds me of my mother's secret pie crust recipe. It has vodka in it. Comes out perfect, buttery and flaky every time!

A cup of Campbell's tomato soup has no fat, 4g of protein and 24g of carbs, with 16g of added sugar and just 4g of fiber. It's practically already a dessert before adding it to a cake.

Right. Tomatoes are technically berries. Which makes condensed tomato soup a kind of compote.

Another thing about sugar is that it holds onto moisture. Most of the fat in a cake is there to make the final product feel moist. This is why a lot of "fat free" cakes use a boatload of sugar and how it's possible to use apple sauce as a replacement for oil in most batters.

Trivia: in the US, people think of tomato juice as “cold tomato soup.” (I imagine in Europe it’s the other way around.)

This must be a regional thing. Tomato juice is called tomato juice in the Midwest.

Where, specifically?

Does it taste different compared to a more conventional spice cake recipe?

Man, every time I read an Atlas Obscura article I enjoy it. Fortunately, I just discovered they have an RSS feed (despite all the rumours that RSS is dead) so it's now in my reader!

Great tip! I just added them to my RSS reader. Long live RSS!

For a while I worked on a news application that depended on RSS, and a client needed their number of news sources radically increased for their international customer base. I discovered quite a lot of news sites around the world apparently still had a dusty server in a rack (or on a shelf) somewhere spewing out a feed, completely untouched for a decade+. You wouldn't find any links to it in the current UI, but there it was running on its cron job like a good little piece of software.

The problem was when the feed breaks, nobody remembers they had one in the first place...

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