TODAY's CASES:

• Chili Fiesta Sticks
• Dugan's Bakery Cracker or Cookie
• Non-Frozen Nesselrode Pudding

Chili Fiesta Sticks From: Dana Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2015 12:54 AM To: phaedrus@hungrybrowser.com Subject: Extremely hard to find recipe I have been looking for a recipe from my elementary school days. I am looking for something we called Fiesta Sticks. I went to school in Pensacola, fl. For any other information, email me back! Thanks! Dana Hi Dana, I had no success finding a recipe for these. A lot of people remember them fondly (or not so fondly) from their school days. I did find them listed on school cafeteria menus, such as this one from Escambia County, FL, which is Pensacola’s county: North Escambia Looking for a photo of them, I found this: Pinterest with the comment: “looks like the chili fiesta sticks from high school.” I also found “fiesta sticks “ for sale from a Mexican-themed food service company: West Best Foods The photo and the fact that these are a food service item lead me to speculate that “fiesta sticks” may be the same as (or at least very similar to) the “crispitos” that some schools serve in their cafeterias. They are also a food service item, sold by Tyson foods.Could it be that “fiesta sticks” and “crispitos” are basically the same thing, with the name dependent on which food service company the school purchases them from? I was not able to find out for certain, but it may be so. Either way, it appears that fiesta sticks, like crispitos, are entirely an invention of food service, created for sale to school cafeterias. And that’s why it’s so difficult to find a recipe for either of them – they are a commercial product created for food service use, and there has never been a home recipe for them. Here’s my article about crispitos. These might be similar to Mexican “flautas”, and there is a link to a recipe for flautas there. Crispitos Note that I have seen frozen beef and chicken crispitos for sale in our local supermarkets, so they are now being marketed as a retail item by multiple brands. Phaed Dugan's Bakery Cracker or Cookie -----Original Message----- From: Linda Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2015 11:06 PM To: phaedrus@hungrybrowser.com Subject: Dugan's recipe Dear Uncle Phaedrus, Growing up in NJ in the 1950's my mother purchased baked goods from Dugan's. My favorite was the whole wheat cracker or cookie which she packed for my school lunch snack every day. I recall it was rectangular in shape & the flavor was very wheaty and not very sweet, but memorable. Some time after Dugan's closed in the mid-1960s, the NJ newspaper Bergen Record (now the Record) published a full page feature article about the (then closed) Dugan's Bakery & included some recipes, one of which was for this cracker/cookie. I tried to locate the article from the Record's Archives, but the Record Archives goes back to 1988 & I cannot confirm the exact year in which it appeared. Do you have a way of reaching the newspaper's Archive office to locate this article/recipe? If not perhaps one of your readers can. I appreciate your help! Linda. Hi Linda, My friend Gwen tried to locate this, but she had no success. She says: Lovely to hear from you, and I am, as always, thrilled to help. Unfortunately, this time I have not been successful. The only article I could find close to this description is from 1969, with recipes for "juiced apple pie" and pastry for the pie, "spice drops," "spritz Christmas cookies," and white bread, the same featured on the dugansbakers.com site (I see you have a link to this on your website). I found another article from the '90s with someone desperately hoping for the recipe for a whole wheat cookie from Dugan's, but no one replied with the recipe. I could find no articles discussing a cracker recipe using search terms of Dugan's, Dugan Brothers, Dugan Bakery, and Dugan Bros. Bakery. My suspicion is that this article and its recipe are buried in microfilm. It looks as though your only hope of getting this is going to be to actually contact the Bergen Record and then go there and search through their microfilmed copies of their 1960s editions yourself or else get someone else to do it for you. That would be a quite long and tedious job, so I seriously doubt that any of the Bergen Record employees would be willing to do it. A city library in that area might also have the 1960s editions on microfilm, but again, if they are not digitized (which they are apparently not), you'd have to go through them manually, and that's a lot of newspapers. Phaed Hi, I read Linda's memory and recipe request. Since Dugan's was an Irish bakery, I thought maybe the cookie she remembers was a simple Irish wheat digestive biscuit. Here is a link to a taste test where she can read flavor and texture descriptions. Couldn't hurt! http://sweets.seriouseats.com/2014/03/taste-test-best-british-digestives-cookies.html Kate Non-Frozen Nesselrode Pudding -----Original Message----- From: Virginia Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2015 12:56 PM To: phaedrus@hungrybrowser.com Subject: Non-frozen Nessellrode Pudding Dear Uncle, I am searching for a Nessellrode Pudding recipe that is not frozen, but instead contains a little gelatin to help it set up when chilled. The only one I can find uses gelatin "sheets," which I don't know how to locate. So I need a recipe or a way to convert between the gelatin sheets or standard, unflavored, powdered gelatin. Thank you. Your site is a fantastic experience! Virginia Hello Virginia, There are numerous recipes on the web for Nesselrode Pudding that is not frozen and that call for powdered gelatin. This type of Nesselrode Pudding is often put into a baked pie shell before chilling and called "Nesselrode Pie".If you are not finding these recipes, it may be because of your use of the spelling "Nessellrode" rather than "Nesselrode." I found these: 12-16-2003 Old Colony Club My Recipes Astray NY Times All the Cooks Phaed