Using Durkee's Sauce: A Follow-up

Making potato salad with Durkee's Famous Sauce, to which I wrote an
ode this morning. You can see the spoonful of sauce ready to stir into the mix.

Ready for dinner -- it was tasty! Fingerling potatoes, parsely, celery, egg, mayo, and SAUCE.

A kind of an ode to Durkee's Famous Sauce

O Durkee's!
Once the love of millions... on salads, eggs, and turkeys,
Between the mayo and the hot sauce,
On every grocer's shelves.

O Durkee's!
You may have been on Mary Lincoln's table in the white house,
At cook-outs and at our house,
But now missing from our markets:
No one wants you any more?

O Durkee's!
Creamy, mustardy, and tangy,
Our little jar, hand-carried from St. Louis
Where Durkee's still appeals.

Durkee's Famous Sauce was invented in New York in 1857 by
Eugene R. Durkee, and advertised by ads like this in the 1880s and 90s.
I found several old ads by randomly searching with google.

Twentieth Century Ads for Durkee's

Durkee's sauce isn't so famous any more. However, we've been enjoying our one jar that Carol brought us from St.Louis, which seems to be the main place where this historic condiment is still well-loved. Maybe Abraham Lincoln liked it on his boiled meat, maybe people used it as a basting sauce for BBQ chicken, maybe lots of people eat it the day after Thanksgiving on sandwiches of leftover turkey, stuffing, and cranberries. Our jar isn't going to last until Thanksgiving, but maybe I'll manage to try it in deviled eggs.

Toast

Toast is new in my kitchen. For years we didn't eat much toast, so we didn't devote valuable counter space to a toaster. Lately, we've been eating more toast, so we have acquired a toaster, which is occupying a space on the high counter where we eat breakfast. The toaster was a gift from Evelyn, who took us to Target and helped us pick it out during our visit with her last weekend.















I enjoy toast with butter, with peanut butter, or with peanut butter and pepper jam. I like it with cheese. I like lots of other kinds of jam. I haven't toasted a bagel yet, but my new toaster has wide slots in order to accommodate bagel halves, and a button that reads "Bagel." I'm still experimenting with the little slider that determines how dark to toast the bread. I wonder how long it will take until I tire of toast!

Toast on google images. So simple!

Toasters have retained their simplicity and they still just consist of the slots with electric coils, the pop-up mechanism, and the darkness selector -- no "feature creep" that dreaded phenomenon that more often happens in computer programs. My new toaster is pretty much like the even-simpler electric device invented in 1893, with the pop-up feature developed in 1919: history here.

The toaster oven, I would say, is a toaster with feature creep. If I want the cheese toasted on top of the bread, or if I want a tuna melt, or if I want to toast a huge sandwich bun, that's a job for my big, beautiful Breville toaster oven. It also reheats pizza or other leftovers nicely, and can bake a two-person casserole or a small tray of cookies. Theoretically, it could broil small items, but I don't want to make a mess in it (my big oven is self-cleaning).

Though a great device, the toaster oven is simply too slow for the basic job: toasting. The toaster takes around 2 minutes to toast 2 slices of white bread. My toaster oven takes 5 or 6 minutes, and although it does more slices at a time, the wait until you can start spreading your peanut butter is something like two times longer. As every user of Microsoft products knows, when designers add a lot of functionality to something simple, it gets less convenient to do what you originally liked it for.

That's all that's really new in my kitchen at the end of September, unless you count the new brand of pepper jam that I bought recently. Or the new jar of Durkee's Famous Sauce that we now have on hand after a long absence -- but I'll write about the Durkee's later.

I'm sharing this post with a group of bloggers who post about numerous new things in their kitchens each month. I feel rather un-adventurous compared to them, since I rarely try really new items from the store, although I try new flavor combinations and new recipes sometimes. To see their much broader selection of new things, check the master list of links at Sherry's blog here: Sherry's Pickings: In My Kitchen. What's new in your kitchen?