triticale - the wheat / rye guy

Rum Tum Tiddy

A recent addition to the wee wifey's vaste horde of cookbooks is the second edition of Campbell's promotional pamphlet "Cooking With Condensed Soups". It cost me 35 cents at the "Dress For Less" and would go for roughly ten times that on Ebay. There is no copyright date, and by the graphic style it could have been produced any time from the late '30s thru the early '50s. I'd be interested to know when it was actually published because the listed canned soup selection lists only one clam chowder, and tomatoes are among the ingredients.

Some of the recipes sound simply awful. Anyone who would use cream of celery soup in lamb curry or chop suey probably wouldn't even bother making such dishes. The tomato soup gingerbread cake doesn't sound half bad, but I wouldn't bother making it unless I ran a school cafeteria. The one recipe I found to be of interest is for something called Rum Tum Tiddy.

1 can condensed tomato soup
2 cups shredded American cheese
1/4 tsp dry mustard
1 egg, slightly beaten (edged, as the sportswriters would say)
6 slices toast

Heat soup over low heat and stir in the cheese until melted and blended. Add the mustard and egg, continue stirring over the heat until completely mixed. Serve by pouring over toast.

The wee wifey came up with a recipe, out of some ladies magazine from the '50s, called Ringtum Tiddy, which adds sliced onions, black pepper and whatsthishere sauce, and substitutes racing cheese slices for the easier to stir grated stuff. The biggest difference is that it uses three eggs, seperated and beaten. Folding in the stiff whites as a final step will completely change the texture.

An online search produced no hits for ringtum (or ring tum or rumtum) but consistantly bought up a Rum Tum Tiddy recipe which splits the difference. It calls for

1 tb Butter/margerine
1/4 cup Finely chopped onion
1/4 cup Chopped green pepper
3/4 cup milk
1/2 tsp worcestershire sauce
1/4 cup Dry sherry

in addition to the canned soup and one beaten egg, and substitutes 3 cups of shredded cheddar (clearly an improvement) for the 2 cups of American cheese. The vegetables are sauted and set aside. Everything but the egg and sherry are heated together. The instruction to blend 1/2 cup of the cheese sauce into the beaten egg in a bowl, add it back into the remainder of the cheese sauce in the saucepan and continue heating no doubt avoids the risk of lumpiness. The sauted vegetables and sherry are added just before serving over crackers and toast. With the rest of the sherry on the side, it sounds like a perfect dish to serve on a crisp autumn morning.

Update:

The magazine which featured the ringtum variant was the May 1958 issue of Woman's Day. The wee wifey has issues; she formats the recipes in them for use with the Mastercook program. Anybody remember when home computers first hit the market? Standard question: "What would you use one for?" Standard answer: "Well, um, you could store your recipes in it..." The future is here, and we're part of it.

Posted by triticale at November 5, 2005 10:33 AM | TrackBack