June 22, 2026, marks the fifty-first birthday of what was probably the longest-running gaming forum of its era, and probably well into the future. In the announcement for my personal cookbook, A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book, I wrote, about publishing personal and family recipes:

The preservation of food culture would be better if everyone did this or something like it. I wouldn’t buy everyone’s paperback, but I would download a lot of PDFs.

“A few of my friends”, I added, “make their Word documents and text documents of family recipes available on request”.

I very specifically had Lee Gold of Alarums and Excursions fame¹ in mind when I wrote that. Alarums and Excursions started in June 1975 and ran up to and including April 2025, almost fifty full years. I contributed to Alarums and Excursions from at least April 2008 to its end, with The Biblyon Free Press. At some point I started including vintage food, that being my other obsession after gaming. The road to seeing Lee Gold’s recipes began when I reviewed the ca. 1955 Home Cooking Secrets of Charlotte in the April 2021 issue, A&E 545.

Lee replied in issue 546:

I could email you our Recipes files if you want to see them. One file is my transcription of my father’s mother’s recipes, given her by friends and relatives when she left Virginia for Los Angeles (June 25, 1895). Another is my father’s and my mother’s recipes. The third is Barry’s and my recipes plus those of some of our friends.

When I replied that “I’d love to see your recipe files”, she sent three documents:

1. Some Recipes of Howard and Judith Klingstein
2. Leonora Wise Klingstein’s recipe book
3. Lee Gold’s Recipes

All of the recipes in these files come from either her file of recipes from her parents (Howard and Judith Klingstein, the first file), from her grandparents (Leonora Wise Klingstein, the second file), or are her own recipes from, among other sources, friends in the science fiction and gaming community (the third file).

The files of ancestral recipes were “transcribed by Lee Klingstein Gold, October and November, 1999” with at least the Leonora Wise Klingstein recipes “proofread by Barry Gold”.

This post appeared—in a slightly different form more suitable for people who already understand the references—in Something Completely Different, Lisa Padol’s festschrift celebrating the long and wonderful history of Alarums and Excursiions. All of the recipes in this post are available in a PDF convenient for printing to 6x4 cards (PDF File, 3.4 MB), three cards per page of cardstock.

I’d been meaning to try out some of her heirloom recipes for quite a while, but kept pushing them off in favor of my own family recipes and all the wonderful promotional books I’ve been making available. Without a deadline, I often don’t do things even when I want to do them. There are so many things to do, and so little time to do them all. There is so much food, and only so much stomach.

So when Lee announced the end of Alarums and Excursions earlier last year, and Lisa Padol announced a festschrift one-off APA² to thank her for “the decades-long party-in-a-zine and the community she created”, I decided to use Lisa’s deadline as a deadline for trying these recipes. If Lisa’s APA was a party to thank Lee Gold and celebrate A&E, what better way to celebrate an online community than a virtual community potluck? So grab a plate, have a seat, and enjoy!

Poul Anderson’s mother’s Danish cookies by way of Astrid.

Jack Harness’s soy eggs.

Howard Klingstein’s orange cream sherbet.

Cookie sandwich made with brunkager and sherbet!

Cookie to the Stars

Servings: 48
Preparation Time: 1 hour
Astrid Anderson
Alarums and Excursions recipe cards (PDF File, 3.4 MB)

Ingredients

• ¼ lb butter
• ½ cup sugar
• ¼ cup molasses
• ½ tsp ginger
• ½ tsp cloves
• ½ tsp nutmeg
• ½ tsp cardamom
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 2 cups flour
• ½ tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 4 dozen almond slices

Steps

1. Melt butter and cool.
2. Cream in the sugar and molasses.
3. Stir in the ginger, cloves, nutmeg, cardamom, and cinnamon.
4. Beat eggs in well.
5. Sift the flour with the salt and baking powder.
6. Stir flour into the batter.
7. Cover and refrigerate overnight.
8. Roll into a flat disc, wrap, and refrigerate for another day.
9. Roll thin on waxed paper and cut into 2-inch rounds.
10. Decorate each cookie with one almond slice.
11. Bake on a lightly-greased cookie sheet for 6-8 minutes at 350°.

I was meeting with a couple of fellow science fiction fans in August and couldn’t resist bringing gingerbread cookies attributed to Poul Anderson’s mother. The full title of these cookies in Lee’s notes is “Poul Anderson’s mother’s cookies from Astrid”. Astrid would be Poul Anderson’s daughter. Lee Gold likely knows both of them as part of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society. It was the LASFS’s APA-L that Alarums and Excursions broke off from to handle RPG content back in June, 1975.

I call them Cookie to the Stars because Trader to the Stars is one of my favorite Poul Anderson novels—and the one I’ve most recently read. It’s also likely a strong influence on the Traveller RPG.

The original recipe calls for “Karo (dark) syrup”. I don’t keep dark Karo on hand, so I used sorghum molasses. Given the spices involved, any molasses should be a fine substitute for Karo in these cookies. They’re very obviously a Danish gingerbread cookie, a brunkager or, as it’s listed in the file, brune kager, so the added flavor from using real molasses instead of just dark karo should be an improvement.

The Danish phrase literally means “brown cookie”. Even more literally, “brown cake”, but in the Danish tradition cakes and cookies are the same thing. While we got it from their Dutch semi-neighbors, it’s where our word “cookies” comes from: a cake was a koek in Dutch, pronounced “kook”. A cookie was merely a little cake, or koekje, pronounced “kookiyeh”.

Pay attention. There will be a test later.

These brunkager are a very good example of the genre.

Soy Eggs

Servings: 8
Preparation Time: 1 hour
Jack Harness
Alarums and Excursions recipe cards (PDF File, 3.4 MB)

Ingredients

• 4 eggs
• ½ cup soy sauce
• ½ cup chicken broth
• ¼ cup sugar
• ¼ tsp sesame oil
• 1 tbsp minced onion

Steps

1. Cover eggs with cold water and boil gently for five minutes.
2. Remove eggs and put under cold running water for five minutes.
3. Peel eggs carefully.
4. In a very small pan, combine soy sauce, broth, sugar and oil.
5. Wrap onion in cheesecloth, place in liquid, and bring to a boil.
6. Add eggs and simmer for ten minutes, covered, occasionally turning the eggs to color evenly.
7. Remove from heat and allow to sit for thirty minutes, turning a couple of times.
8. Marinate overnight in refrigerator.
9. Slice in half lengthwise or in quarters and serve.

The very first recipe I tried from Gold’s files was attributed to Jack Harness. Harness was another member of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society and an early participant (if perhaps only by observing) in Lee Gold’s D&D games. In her list of where roleplaying comments had appeared in APA-L, she has this note for the February, 1975, APA-L 511:

Jack Harness wrote D&D comments on a game he’d observed that Lee Gold had DMed and announced he intended to design his own dungeon.

Harness was also part of the announcement of her new zine’s name in the May, 1975, APA-L 523. From her notes on that issue (and talking about herself in the third person):

Lee Gold wrote, “We have named the D&D-zine ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS… I have lifted some material from APA-L so that Swanson, Digby, Harness, and Tedron [Ted Johnstone] will be contributors to the firstish³ which will be appearing June 22nd” and added more details.

Jack had at least a small hand in A&E’s early days, too. When Lee announced in APA-L 531 that she and her husband Barry “were going to Japan for four months” she added that “Jack Harness would be editing A&E till she returned.”

Harness’s Soy Eggs is not just a recipe for soy eggs. It’s a soy egg manifesto, appearing under “THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF SOY EGGS” in APA-L 817:

Lee and Barry Gold have taken to including my Soy Eggs at their Passover Seders.⁴ This means they have to explain to the newcomers there why a set of eggs the color of Ken Porter⁵ are added to the edibles and ceremony; they also have to explain why, if there is not an eggman there is no walrus. And are the eggs an Easter symbol… or possibly some more devious symbol. It didn’t help matters when one time I came hopping in the front door with the eggs in a yellow basket lined with shredded green cellophane.

Jack Harness’s original recipe notes that “the longer the immersion, the more the white turns chocolate. You will have a somewhat rubbery hard-boiled egg. But it will have a mild flavor, and many people like the soy eggs.”

Chocolate is not the color I’d use to describe these eggs. “Bathroom brown” might be more appropriate without being too scatological. They are indeed slightly rubbery. But they are very tasty. I’ve added the instructions to cut them in half, because a whole egg is a lot of food, and these would best be served as a side or appetizer. Harness’s original says to cut them in quarters, but it seems to me that would make them more difficult to handle as finger food.

Soy Eggs would also be a wonderful start for adding a bit of excitement to standard deviled eggs.

Orange Cream Sherbet

Servings: 8
Preparation Time: 45 minutes
Howard Klingstein
Alarums and Excursions recipe cards (PDF File, 3.4 MB)

Ingredients

• 3 large lemons
• 1 large orange
• 2 egg yolks
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 cups whole milk
• 1 cup cream
• 2 egg whites
• pinch of salt
• ½ cup sugar

Steps

1. Coarsely grate the lemons and orange; this should provide three or four teaspoons of peel.
2. Juice the lemons and orange.
3. Beat yolks.
4. Beat in the peel, juice, one cup of sugar, milk, and cream.
5. Beat the egg whites with salt until stiff.
6. Gradually beat in the ½ cup of sugar.
7. Fold egg white into the yolk mixture.
8. Place in freezer until almost firm
9. Beat until fluffy.
10. Pour into a chilled 1-½ quart container and return to freezer until hard.

I love ice cream, and I love sherbet, so this very creamy sherbet from Howard Klingstein has been on my short list of recipes to try since Lee sent the files.

Yes, my short list is very long.

Howard’s recipe calls for “extra-rich” milk. This is a product that is no longer easily available, at least in the States. There are apparently multiple ways to simulate it. One is to combine whole milk with milk powder. I decided to mix whole milk with cream. So where the original recipe calls for three cups extra-rich milk, I used two cups of whole milk and one cup of cream.

In fact I used more, because I somehow read down from “2 eggs, separated” to “3 cups extra-rich milk” and separated three eggs. Rather than try to grab only two thirds of the egg white, I chose to make a +50% recipe.

This stuff is very good, and I didn’t mind one bit having the extra. It would, however, have been easier to store the amount as written. The standard amount fits about perfectly in a 1-½ quart glass dish in the freezer. By increasing the recipe I had to use two containers in the freezer. In order to free up freezer space, I sadly had to breakfast from the extra container every morning until it was gone. Life Is Hard!

Tattered Potato Soup

Servings: 4
Preparation Time: 45 minutes
Leonora Wise Klingstein
Alarums and Excursions recipe cards (PDF File, 3.4 MB)

Ingredients

• 2 cups potatoes
• 3-4 cups water or stock
• salt
• pepper
• parsley
• celery seeds
• butter
• onion or garlic

Steps

1. Bring water to a simmer.
2. Chop potatoes into little squares.
3. Add potatoes, salt, pepper, parsley, celery seeds, butter, and onion or garlic, to water.
4. Simmer until soft, about fifteen to thirty minutes.
5. Mash as much (or as little) as you wish to give the soup a body.

I also love potatoes. Of the three fake food holidays I cover, one is National Potato Day. I featured potatoes three years ago for National Sandwich Day. And this year I featured potatoes on Pi Day for the Semiquincentennial. While I don’t cover National Soup Day (assuming that’s even a thing, which it probably is) I do like soup, and I especially like potato soup. I don’t make it very often because it requires more planning than I normally do.

But Leonora Wise Klingstein’s tattered potato soup requires no more planning than actually having potatoes on hand. Even better, it’s easily proratable to bring the recipe down to one, two, or three servings. The basic recipe is water, potato, spices, butter, and either onion or garlic.

An example of a non-food item in an early Alarums and Excursions. This Shao-Lin Monk class is from THE COLGAR CHRONICLES #2 from Druid Publishing, South Australia. It appeared in issue 82, from June, 1982.

It looks like a dump recipe, so that’s the way I treated it. I left out the garlic and butter during the boiling and instead stir-fried the garlic in the butter with some mushrooms that were about to go bad in the fridge. I poured the stir-fried garlic and mushrooms over the finished soup.

I used about a quarter cup of chicken stock that I had left in a carton in the fridge, then filled out the rest with water and some leftover spicy stock from making ground beef sauce.⁶

Even without the mushrooms, butter, and garlic, the soup was phenomenal. It would have been less flavorful, of course, without the beef “stock” that was itself well-spiced. But it still would have been good and the spices can be adjusted to taste. They have to be adjusted—no amounts are given.

This soup was very quick to make and a good way to mostly empty my fridge before a trip. It’s a very good base for just about anything you want. The last time I made it, I used a couple of leftover egg yolks to thicken it up. I’ve flavored it with caraway, with cumin, and even with my favorite homemade hot pepper catsup. No matter what I throw at it, I get a great and quick potato soup.

Something I enjoy a lot but rarely make are pancakes and waffles. The Matzo Meal Pancakes in the Leonora Wise Klingstein file are marked parenthetically as “from Mamma Wise”, which may mean they’re from Leonora Klingstein’s mother, that is, Lee Gold’s great grandmother. Depending on how ancestral slang worked in that place and at that time, “Mamma Wise” could even be Leonora’s grandmother.

It’s definitely an old-school recipe: it involves separating the egg and folding in the egg white after mixing the batter. It’s a common technique in old waffle recipes and the recipe itself definitely reads like a recipe from the last half of the nineteenth century or the first decade or two of the twentieth:

Matzo Meal Pancakes (from Mamma Wise)

1 pint sweet milk 3 eggs (separately beaten) salt

Enough matzo meal to thicken like pancakes

If it swells and gets too thick, thin with milk

Several things mark this as an older recipe: the lack of a separate ingredients list; the lack of amounts for the salt or the “flour”; and the lack of even a small amount of sugar. Also, the call for “sweet milk”, which is a phrase that mostly predates modern refrigeration. All it means is milk that has not begun to appreciably sour. It’s what we, in our era of abundant refrigeration, call merely “milk”.

The use of separated eggs could also mark it as a Passover recipe. Whipping egg whites and folding them into a batter is a substitute for leavening. It was very common in the era before commercial leaveners. Whether it’s also a Passover tradition, I can’t say. Apparently, whether or not adding leavening to matzo meal is forbidden during Passover is a complicated question. After a short dive into the topic, my conclusion is that I do not want to deal with it.

Whatever the reason, this recipe has no baking soda or baking powder. So the beaten egg white is the only thing that will cause the pancake to become fluffy.

I made both a pancake and a waffle from the batter. Using an already-baked “flour” gives this an interesting lightly toasted flavor. With no sugar⁷, these are not at all sweet. To make up for that I topped the waffle with Vermont maple peanut butter ice cream, and the pancake with good old Log Cabin syrup.

I would not buy matzo meal to make these. But if I had some on hand, I would definitely use it; and I’d probably use it as waffles.

Avocado Cake

Servings: 16
Preparation Time: 2 hours
John Redden
Alarums and Excursions recipe cards (PDF File, 3.4 MB)

Ingredients

• ½ cup butter
• 1-¾ cup sugar
• 1 cup mashed avocado
• 2 eggs
• ⅓ cup buttermilk
• 1-½ cups flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• ½ tsp salt
• ½ tsp nutmeg
• ½ tsp cinnamon
• ½ tsp allspice
• ½ cup candied green cherries
• ½ cup chopped dates
• ½ cup macadamia nuts

Steps

1. Cream together butter and sugar.
2. Cream in the avocado.
3. Add eggs one at a time, beating thoroughly.
4. Whisk the flour, baking soda, salt, nutmeg, cinnamon, and allspice together.
5. Stir in the dry ingredients alternately with the buttermilk.
6. Fold in cherries, dates, and nuts.
7. Pour into one 8x4x3-inch loaf pan (it will look like too much; it is not).
8. Bake at 375° for an hour and fifteen minutes.
9. Let rest for another fifteen minutes, and remove from pan.
10. Cool on wire rack.

Finally, and just in time to meet the deadline, I made John Redden’s Avocado Spice Cake. It’s not from the documents Lee sent me, but from Alarums and Excursions itself. John’s wife sourced the recipe from the apparently very much in demand 2002 Kona On My Plate. John called it “an island version of fruitcake with spices and fresh buttery avocados.”

The genesis of how this recipe appeared in A&E is a good example of how conversations went from issue to issue.

1. Issue 565. Lee Gold wrote in her prefatory “Natter”, “We plan to celebrate Barry’s and Rita’s birthdays on the evening after our November game. The festal desserts will be Napoleons and eclairs.”
2. Issue 566. John Redden replied, “Lee Gold: re food. My wife has been making avocado cake (also known as Hawai’ian fruit cake). It’s delicious.”
3. Issue 567. I cross-replied, “John Redden: I have never had avocado cake. I’d love to see your wife’s recipe, if she has one.”
4. And so the recipe appeared in issue 568.

I ran out of sugar at 1-½ cups, so, rather than open a new bag of sugar I filled out the remaining half cup with brown sugar. I suspect that contributed to the cake looking burnt.

In going with the “green” line of In My Kitchen at Biblyon, I replaced the raisins with candied green cherries. Partly for the green, but partly because they were left over from the holidays. The 2023 holidays. It was time to use them or dump them.

I chose macadamia nuts as the unspecified nuts because they’re the only nut that gets its own section in the Hilo Woman’s Club Cook Book. This makes them the most Hawaiian nut that I have on hand.

The batter is pea-green but it tastes amazing.

The cake started to look (and smell) burnt on top around 45 minutes in. I checked whether the loaf was done using a thin knife, and it was not, so I moved it to a lower rack. I’m not sure but that this might not be better made in an actual cake pan; the insides would then be done along with the top and sides.

That said, it doesn’t taste burnt, it just looks it. And it is incredibly rich. It was very good buttered warm as if it were bread. It was very good with a couple of scoops of Orange Cream Sherbet as if it were cake. Despite my jokes about it being green, the avocado color, strong in the batter, disappeared completely in the baking.

Tattered potato soup with mushrooms and garlic.

Matzo meal pancakes and waffles.

Avocado Cake batter has a greenish tinge that doesn’t show in the photo.

Avocado Cake with Cream Sherbet.

John concluded the recipe with:

And if you bake cookies and you don’t cook cookies, why aren’t they called “bakies”?

To which I responded in the next issue:

RYCTM on avocado spice cake, thanks! I will try it. RE cookies vs. cooking joke, cookies are little cakes (koekje). Cooking is from the Latin coquere—which included baking; it was basically any food preparation.

Enjoy the buffet by the gaming table. And to Lee, thank you for fifty wonderful years of freewheeling gaming, fantasy, and tangentially related discussion. Thanks especially for the seventeen years in which I was allowed to participate, however much that participation veered to the tangential rather than the gaming!