I found a recipe for plum pandowdy and hadn't heard of it before. I asked Shu, and he reminded me of this song.

Is pandowdy that common? It must be since it was a recipe in our local newspaper. Here's an article about the history of many similar desserts, including pandowdy, but it says the origin of pandowdy is unknown. Does anyone know anything more about the term?

I've never heard of either shoo fly pie or pandowdy. I can't say I can recall ever hearing the Ella Fitzgerald song, either. I have, though, heard the song "Shoo Fly, Don't Bother Me".

Oh, proof, I really liked this dish:

quote:

Grunts and Slumps: These are fruit and dumpling dishes cooked on top of the stove. Supposedly, the fruit “grunts” as it cooks and the dumplings “slump” down into the filling. (We've made these out camping but we've never heard the fruit “grunt”.)

I want to hear fruit grunt!

My wife's cooking does that no matter what the dish.

I love the old song and have made both desserts because of the song. I like making foods from historic recipes, too, so this was right up my alley (down my alley? over my bridge? in my baileywick?)

Anywho, both are delicious, although Shoo-fly pie tends to be too sweet for me. I usually prefer desserts that have more flavor notes than just sugar. With Pandowdy, you at least get some acid tones from the fruit (if you do it right).

I've made apple dumplings but I've yet to make a grunt. Something to look into! I have a few cookbooks of Early American recipes to dig through.

We have a great old cookbook from the early days in Chicago. It's called "Prairie Avenue Cookbook: Recipes and Recollections from Prominent 19th-Century Families." Some of the recipes are interesting, and I've made several of them, such as their goose recipe and all sorts of great stuffings. Some of the ones I haven't tried are quail on fried cornmeal mush, potted pigeon (there are lots of them in Chicago!), pheasant pie with oysters, roast partridge, young roast pig for Christmas, and pig's feet a la S. Menehould.

In the book they had this great quiz to help screen perspective kitchen staff:
1) What do you like best for deep frying, for fishballs or potatoes?

2) For frying in the pan, like fritters?

3) Did you do our tomatoes on toast in the oven or broiler? Butter on both sides of bread as the recipe calls for? Bits of butter on tomatoes?

4) Does it help steer's liver to soak it in milk or did you give up doing that?

5) Did you make our creamed potatoes of raw or cooked potatoes?

6) How thick did you cut eggplant for frying?

7) How big did you cut the pieces of meat for Scotch broth?

8) What heat of oven for popovers?

9) How thick a batter did you make for our apple fritters? Please give recipe.

Can you imagine?