Notes on Rickety Uncle
My late aunt Gaylynne gave me this recipe, essentially identical to the one in the 1940s cookbook, which she probably had from her mother, my grandmother. I realize (belatedly) that I've posted about this before, but I've just made it again and have a few notes. Apologies for any repetitiveness. It's all because of corona-virus isolation and a need to cook to fend off boredom!
Lots of people have written about this recipe, expressing problems, e.g. too crumbly, and I think it's a question of ingredients and process. Here are my notes.
- it's best to think of this recipe as candy with embedded oats, rather than as a cake or squares
- the objective is to caramelize the sugar and butter, to a point that they bind the oats but before they burn -- a fine dividing line!
- it is therefore necessary to use the full complement of butter and sugar relative to oats, otherwise you won't get the caramelization; of course, variations are possible in terms of proportion, but not too much; some versions of the recipe had margarine, and I'm sure it would work fine
- there are different kinds of brown sugar, and it makes a difference; where I live, you can get yellow sugar (brilliant yellow sometimes), dark brown sugar, natural brown sugar and demerara sugar. I grew up with the yellow, and it works ok, but I think that the darker grades work better,. Haven't tried demerara in this recipe.
- I've tried different ways of mixing, including melting the butter before combining with the vanilla and sugar, and then adding the oats; I think creaming the butter and sugar and vanilla first works best; I do it by hand, no need to beat in eggs, and a few small lumps of uncreamed butter are inconsequential; melting the butter first works, but for some reason it doesn't seem to produce as good an end result
- after combining the butter/sugar/vanilla, I mix in the oats by hand
- but which kind of oats? I like the flavor of old-fashioned slow-cooking rolled oats, but they are large and sometimes seem to inhibit the binding of the caramelization; I've taken to using an equal combination of old-fashioned and quick-cooking (not instant) oats; I might settle on a ratio with more of the old-fashioned kind; no reason not to use all old-fashioned or quick, if that's what you've got, but the end consistency will vary
- the original recipe said a "hot" oven; I find that too hot will result in browning of the edges in the pan, and prefer 350; for this recipe, with 4 cups of oats,1 cup of butter, 1 tsp vanilla and 2 c of sugar, I cook in a 9x13 pan for about 15 or 20 minutes; monitor closely to make sure it doesn't over-brown at the edges.
- the original recipe had half those quantities in an 8x8 pan, and that works fine.
- I think it's important not to make too thick, e.g. the full 4 cups of oats recipe in an 8x8 pan, which would look more like a cake; caramelization won't happen properly.
- when it's cooked, take out of oven and immediately cut into the kind of units you want; don't use a knife, but rather something like a fine metal spatula blade, pressing down to score the "batter" to the metal of the pan; dragging a knife will distort the squares, leading to crumbling; you need to do this quickly, if properly caramelized it will start to firm up right away
- there are many variations possible, but I don't find any of them improve on the basic