to preserve peaches.

Well, summer is over and I am back and in action.  In the hot weather I was less than interested in meat pies and baked puddings (this should tell us something right there about what it was like to live in the 18th and 19th centuries…) so I decided to put the blogging on hold until the weather made me excited to eat historic food again.  And voila, here we are, September.

Like many of you I have turned into a crazed, rapacious vegetable and fruit buyer and preserver.  My boyfriend actually had to tell me at the farmstand yesterday that I couldn’t possibly deal with any more vegetables because I’m in school now and have things to do outside the kitchen (*sigh*).  But preserving I am, and my first blog-recipe of the fall is the peach preserve from Lucy Emerson’s New England Cookery, or The Art of Dressing all Kinds of Flesh, Fish, and Vegetables, and the Best Modes of Making Pastes, Puffs, Pies, Tarts, Puddings, Custards and Preserves, and All Kinds of Cakes, from the Imperial Plum to Plain Cake.  Particularly Adapted to this Part of Our Country (Montpelier: Josiah Parks, 1808).  This is an incredible cookbook and I look forward to sharing it and learning from it throughout the fall and winter.

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To preserve Peaches.

Put your peaches in boiling water, just give the a scald but don’t let them boil, and put them in cold water, then dry them in a sieve, and put them in long wide mouthed bottles: to half a dozen peaches take a quarter of a pound of sugar, clarify it, pour it over your peaches, and fill the bottles with brandy, stop them close and keep them in a close place.

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Clarified sugar is a sugar syrup made by skimming the foam from the surface after you bring the sugar-water mixture to a slow boil and then turn off the heat.  In the 19th century, they would mix a stiff-whipped egg white into the sugar mixture: the whites would pick up and adhere to the impurities in the sugar, and make it easier to remove them.  My grandma informed me that these days this is an unnecessary step, because our sugar is milled at a higher quality (I use evaporated cane juice, but the same is true).  So just a little skimming of foam, like when you clarify butter, is necessary.

I sliced my peaches and added three cinnamon sticks to my quart-jar.  I also did a version with plums and cardamom, which I hope will be excellent.  As a side note, Lucy Emerson has a fantastic recipe for preserving plums while they are green and before they’ve developed a pit; if I ever have access to a year-round plum tree I look forward to trying it!

Happy 4th of July – Rye Breakfast Cakes

*next-day update*  These little gems did not keep very well!  They are dense and hard the next morning, so eat ‘em when they’re hot!

Today I’ve made Rye Breakfast Cakes.  Not the sexiest recipe, but I love the rye flour — something we don’t see very often these days in anything but a Jewish deli.  It’s coarse and rich-smelling, with flecks of light-green and brown, and these cakes, made in a “gem pan” (known today as a mini-muffin pan), are rich and sweet…nothing like what we associate with rye bread today.  We ate them hot — right out of the oven – slathered with butter and a little jam.  They have a slight tang from the rye, which is unexpected when you’re used to wheat muffins.  There is another rye cakes recipe in the Framingham book; it calls for molasses and “sweet milk” (as opposed to soured milk, a distinction that applies only to raw milk, since pasteurized milk goes bad before it sours), and no egg.

One of the joys of 19th century cookbooks is that they don’t tell you what temperature to bake at.  So I threw the pan in at 350F, and then turned it up to 400 at the very end, just to facilitate browning.  It worked well — there’s a nice crust but the inside is fully cooked.  Since their ovens didn’t work like ours, it seems like improvising is going to be the way to handle this problem.  My camera has crapped out; I’ll post pics later.

I like to think of Mrs. Cutting, making her cakes in her turn of the century kitchen, serving them to a husband and maybe children or grandchildren.  Maybe she worked to perfect them for many years, and then proudly submitted them to her church cookbook.  Maybe she got the recipe from her mother, or a friend.  It’s fun to know that I’m part of a line of women who have prepared this recipe — this is one of the joys of cooking, for me: the physical persistence of history through nourishment, made with my own hands.

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Rye breakfast cakes – Framingham cookbook

One c. rye meal, 1 flour, ¼ c sugar, ½ tsp salt, 1 tsp cream of tartar, ½ tsp soda, 1 egg, 1c milk.  Cook in gem pans.  Mrs. Cutting

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Today we remember the Declaration of Independence.  We remember John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and John Hancock.  We remember the great battles, the political struggles, the protests.  But we must also remember the small moments, the everyday pleasures and trials: of hearthsides, of farmsteads, of harvests and bedsides.  Incorporating these moments into our history will allow us to honor the unrecorded; these breakfast cakes are my small effort at bringing to our minds the great Americans we don’t read about in history books.  What they have left behind are in their recipe books, where they chronicled their yearly cycle of growing, harvesting, and preserving, of feeding husbands and children, of cakes and puddings and pies and cookies.  With this breakfast, and with this blog, I remember the American women before me.  Remembering is a political act.  Happy Independence Day.

Celery Soup

Also from the Framingham ladies’ cookbook, this soup received some modernization, thanks to technology and my own digestive tastes.  Instead of pushing the boiled veggies through a sieve, I used an immersion blender; I went without the whipped cream and just did a drizzle of cream on top of the soup, because my stomach really doesn’t enjoy whipped cream.  It was really nice to enjoy cream of celery soup from scratch, since most of us only ever encounter it in a Campbell’s can as an ingredient in casseroles and pot-pies!

If I were to totally update the dish, I would puree the vegetables directly in their own water, and then stir in cream and butter until it was of desired thickness.  I might also have browned the pieces of celery and onion (maybe in lard from local pigs?), and if it were winter, I might have thrown in some celery root.   I’d prefer to do this because the water from boiling the veggies had a lot of celery flavor that just gets tossed away, and the browning and celery root would have added a depth of flavor that the dish didn’t have.  I wonder if this says something about our tastes for stronger, more complex food nowadays.  But even still, as is the recipe is super delicious, and amazingly cheap because what is easier than just a head of celery and an onion?  Also this soup would be great if you’re planning on bloody maries and need to make use of the rest of the celery.  What a surprising use for this delightfully subtle vegetable!

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Celery soup

One head of celery, cut fine, and 1 onion, boiled intil soft; put through a colander, add 1 qt boiling milk, 1 tbs cornstarch, 1 of butter, salt and pepper to taste, boil a few minutes.  Place ½ c of whipped cream in the tureen, and pour this over it.  -  Miss Evans

Toast

I love this recipe, and furthermore find it interesting for several reasons.  From Mrs. G.C. Bigelow in the Framingham Church cookbook, this recipe for Toast is simple and wow was it delicious.  Here it is:

Toast

Take some raised dough which you have for bread, roll it thin, cut in squares, and brown quickly in hot lard; after you have enough for use, make a dip of equal quantities of cream and milk with salt, and thickened with a little flour.  If milk is used without cream, some butter must be used.  Turn dip over hot cakes and serve at once.

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So first of all this recipe is interesting because it assumes that you have raised dough sitting around your house.  I did, in fact: a sourdough/yeast bread with about 2 c white flour, 3 c white flour, and the rest barley flour.  It’s taking its time rising in my kitchen since we’re having freakishly cool weather.  Anyhow, this certainly indicates that the average housewife in an industrial town (Framingham, almost 200 years old in 1894, was home to many factories along the Sudbury River, and even had its own light rail system) would be baking her own bread still in 1894.  Cool.

Second, I’ve never heard of frying leavened dough like this.  I’ve been experimenting a lot with flatbreads from around the world recently, and this is similar but very much its own thing, since the dough is risen enough to make a loaf bread but then rolled thin.  This means it gets crispy on the outside, but stays tender.  My sourdough starter (they would have used either sourdough or cake yeast in their bread) made it really tangy and nice, which worked well with the cream “dip”.

Third, note the use of lard.  I did not use lard, because I only know of very few places where I can get good lard.  The farmer’s market meat purveyors I’ve talked to say that no one buys fatty meats or meat fats anymore — I had to special order fatback — so they just don’t stock them. I am making  a special trip on Friday for it, but until then I am using butter in my cast-iron skillet, which gives a rich flavor and is really delicious.  I’m sure I’ll discover more about meat and fat use today v. back then throughout this project.

Finally, the “dip” I guessed was supposed to be made hot — otherwise the flour thickener would become lumpy.  I imagine this is the kind of thing a woman would know if she was told to make a “dip”.  So I mixed equal parts cream and milk, and whisked in a little flour and salt and continued whisking until there was foam on the milk.  I poured it over the whole plate, like a sauce, as you can see in the picture.  It was really incredible.

Steamed Batter Pudding . Take 1

A “pudding”, nowadays relegated to nostalgic Christmas dinner tables, is a steamed or baked custard or cake that can be sweet or savory…essentially a catch-all term for a long-cooked dish with milk and eggs.  My second cookbook, Cookbook: Three Hundred Tested Recipes from the Ladies of Plymouth Church, Framingham, MA (1894) contains many, many pudding recipes and I thought I ought to get started trying them out.  They are a really easy, affordable dish to make and reflect the kinds of ingredients that 19th century Americans had in abundance: eggs and milk.

This “batter pudding” was contributed to the Plymouth Church cookbook by Miss Badger.  It is small, and steamed, and seemed a good place to start.

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Batter Pudding (steamed)

1 c milk, 1 egg, 1 tsp melted butter, 2 tsp cream of tartar, 1 soda, 1 c fruit.  Steam 2 hrs.

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Since there were no preparation instructions, I thought I would just whisk the ingredients together in a bowl.  It seemed odd to me that the recipe included no flour, since the two baked batter pudding recipes that followed in the cookbook included instructions like “enough flour to make a batter”.  So I also whisked in maybe a 1tbs of white flour.  2 tsp cream of tartar and 1 tsp soda is the same as 2 tsp baking powder — recipes from this period sometimes use baking powder and others use the two ingredients as you see here  — commercial baking powder wasn’t widely available until 1898. I just used powder.  For fruit, I used some gorgeous strawberries from the farmer’s market; from what I’ve read so far it was a highly preferred fruit in the period.

I steamed the pudding in a .5L pudding mold, which is essentially a small bundt pan with a lid that you can pick up from a little handle.  It seemed like a good idea to butter it, so I did — better safe than sorry.  All you do is put it in a pot of boiling water: there should be enough water to create good steam, but not so much that the pan floats (I learned this the hard way), maybe about 2-3 inches.  It knocks around a little bit as it steams, but it wasn’t bad.  It sure smelled good as it baked.

Here’s how it looked when I took off the lid after 2 hrs:

Success!  How pretty!  And here’s how it looked when I turned it over onto a plate:

Err…Yuck!

It made this horrible plopping-sucking sound, and immediately disintegrated into an awful mess. The lighter-brown, gelatinous stuff on the top there is the flour — I guess that was a bad idea after all.  And without any kind of sugar, the rest tasted weird and bland…though I can see what it was going for.  Alright, it was pretty disgusting.  But I’m not deterred!  I’ve read that steamed puddings do really well with dried fruit because they get all plump and moist; it seems likely that the strawberries had so much moisture that they made the whole thing watery.  And from a historical perspective, it would make sense that a pudding might be used partially as a way to rehabilitate dried fruits that have been stored; fresh fruits like strawberries, available only once a year, would have been put into pies, jams, or eaten fresh in order to take advantage of the harvest.  So I am going to try again, no flour, and with some golden raisins.  Hopefully this will keep it from getting all runny and yucky, and I’ll get a better idea of how this dish with *very* few ingredients can be made into something tasty and warm and nourishing, which is the whole point of this experiment.

Buckwheat Cakes

This recipe comes from my first treasure trove, the “Sutton Island Cookbook”.  This notebook, kept at a home in Maine from 1889-1897, contains clippings from the Boston Herald and other cooking periodicals, as well as handwritten recipes.  These recipes reflect a still very Puritan, British-style cuisine, though the growing influence of French cuisine and British Imperial influences can be seen in recipes such as Mulligatawny Soup (Indian) or bechamel sauces.

I found these leavened Buckwheat Cakes in a clipping with a suggested breakfast menu.  The cakes were suggested to be served with oatmeal, “escaloped mutton”, “escaloped potatoes”, and corn muffins.  This is a very different breakfast than we are used to today!  The cakes were not sweet — there is only 1 tbs of molasses for sweetener, and neither milk nor eggs.  We weren’t sure how to eat them, so I first served them just with butter but we decided to have about 1 tsp-tbs of maple syrup on each pancake.  I’m not sure this is how they would have been eaten in the 19th century, especially in the company of mutton and scalloped potatoes, but we loved them with the syrup.  It complemented the rich, rustic flavor of the buckwheat.

One of the coolest parts of this recipe is that it suggested that you reserve some batter (1 pt, or 2c) to use as a starter for future batches.  You are just to keep the batter in a cool place, if you make the cakes regularly, and add them to the batter for the next batch.  So I’ve got some batter in the fridge and we’ll see how it tastes later this week!  Also, another note on leavening: cake yeast was the prevalent form of store-bought yeast available in 19th century America.  1 cake of this yeast is equal to a scant tbs or 1 packet of active dry yeast, which is what is most available today.

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Leavened Buckwheat Griddle Cakes

combine: 1 pint (2 c.) buckwheat flour

1/2 cupful Indian meal (coarse cornmeal)

1 tsp salt

1/2 cake yeast (scant 1/2 tbs or 1/2 packet dry) in 1/2 c. water

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add: 1 pint of warm water

1 tbs molasses

beat, cover, and let rise overnight

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in the morning, sift in: 1 tsp. baking soda

stir well and fry

welcome . the point of this blog

hello!  this blog is part history project, part sustainability-epicurean journey.  i’m going to be working my way through the pre-20th century New England cookbooks in harvard’s incredible schlesinger library, mining for recipes and trying to reproduce them in my 21st century kitchen.  i’ll provide original recipes and my updates wherever necessary, and pictures and reviews of the recipes once i’ve made them.  so get ready for lots of puddings and oysters!

i think this project is interesting and important for foodies and mothers and anyone interested in women and the kitchen. first, the localvore-slow food movement — of which i am a part — spends a significant amount of time talking about how food “used to be”.  in the old days, people had raw milk.  in the old days, people preserved vegetables and ate what was in season.  in the old days, people didn’t have high fructose corn syrup.  yes, all these things are true.  but what *did* they have?  learning more about how people before industrial food ate will give us useful information about how to make use of the local, seasonal bounty in new england.  second, women’s relationships to their kitchens and their homes has changed a great deal in the past century.  one of the things i hope to connect to is the historical tradition of “huswifery” and the important female role of preserving cultural and culinary traditions.  because lets face it, cookbooks until very recently were for-women by-women.  so how can learning about housewives in previous centuries allow feminists like me to claim domestic traditions as powerful and not limiting?  finally, food is powerfully changeable and fundamentally reflects the culture in which it is made.  tastes and ingredients change, and i want to map that and see what’s happened to our palates over the years.  i’ll focus on new england because, well, that’s where i live!

of course, you don’t have to think about it that much if you don’t want.  just enjoy the recipes and delicious food pictures — and encourage me to keep going through the obscure ingredients, obsolete measurements, and piles of puddings!

…also.  don’t worry, i won’t make anything i think looks gross…this is about being able to apply historical recipes to our present-day life.  if something looks interesting but not good to eat, i’ll post the recipe and say, look at this!  no need to subject myself (and my hapless boyfriend) to unnecessary grossness.