1838 biscuits
Tonight I crossed nikujaga with Irish stew for dinner. It tasted entirely delicious, but made me feel very guilty about warping history. I think the moral of that story is never to make Irish stew while you’re missing your Japanese friends.
The other thing I ate today was a test recipe for the Prohibition banquet. It was a rice pudding that just doesn’t make the cut. The flavour is almost divine, but the texture was so sad I nearly wept. I wasn’t sure about rice pudding on the menu anyway, so it’s gone. Well, except the last little bit, which is tomorrow’s breakfast.
To assuage my guilt and the recipe failure, I’m giving you recipes from 1838. There’s a surety and certainty about life in 1838 that is missing today. What’s also missing today is the level of adulterated foods for purchase in shops. We have occasional problems (cassava imported into Australia is an issue right now, for instance), but that’s all.
The book is The Virgina Housewife, by Mrs Mary Randolph. It’s from Baltimore.
What she called a drop biscuit, I call a biscuit. Tavern biscuit is also a biscuit in my book. It’s rather nice when Australian and US biscuit recipes overlap for a change. What this means is terminology overlap and that things are suddenly hotting up in the little collection of biscuit and scone recipes.
To make drop biscuit
Beat eight eggs very light, add to them twelve ounces of flour, and one pound of sugar; when perfectly light, drop them on tin sheets, and bake them in a quick oven.
Tavern biscuit
To one pound of flour, add half a pound of sugar, half a pound of butter, some mace and nutmeg powdered, and a glass of brandy or wine; wet it with milk, and when well kneaded, roll it thin, cut it in shapes, and bake it quickly.
To make nice biscuit
Rub a large spoonful of butter into a quart of risen dough, knead it well, and make it into biscuit, either thick or thin: bake them quickly.
Soufle biscuits
Rub four ounces of butter into a quart of flour, make it into paste with milk, knead it well, roll it as thin as paper, and bake it to look white.
February 14th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
Hi Gillian
I have a question for you — not about biscuits, actually, but about bread.
Do you happen to know how a person would have made bread in 13th century Italy (i.e., ingredients, process)?
February 17th, 2008 at 3:30 am
it depends on the person - ingredients varied by wealth, to a certain degree (though less, perhaps, in Italy than some other places). The bread would be a yeast-based bread (but might depend on natural yeasts or may have used a more standardised yeast - I’m not sure I’ve seen any evidence of either - Barbara Santich would know, if anyone does). The oven was probably a bread oven of the sort you still see in some places, where you heat up the oven first, then remove the fuel and bake while it’s hot.
February 19th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Thanks!