Food History

Dreams shatter. Nicole and I made negus from the recipe in The Jane Austen Cookbook. I need more authenticated recipes for it before I pronounce it doomed to never darken my kitchen again. Right now, our simple thought is that negus is dull.

Think of port, diluted with water so it’s the mere sugary aftertaste of a rich drink. Add some more sugar. Add a few spices and pretend it’s like mulled wine. It’s not. It’s not a drink: it’s an affectation.

If you really love sugar and don’t like rich flavours, it would suit you better than it suited us. It’s a good drink for drivers, because the alcohol is heavily diluted. But it’s boring.

Part of the problem might be that Canberra is a few hours drive from some of the best fortified wines in the world. We take our fortified wines rather seriously. And this recipe did not produce a serious drink. So if I don’t find a better recipe for negus, I won’t be able to make Star Trek jokes at a science fiction convention. This is a strong incentive to try more recipes!

These are my notes. Nicole will send her notes later in the week: right now her newspaper is in deadline mode.

First of all, this was our favourite dish. The cooking entailed basically boiling mushrooms with mild spice, then adding the ingredients to give the dish a cream sauce. A full recipe made enough to serve two very hungry people, with lots of leftover sauce for eating on toast later in the weeks. Very, very delicious.

The dish had a smoky nutmeg scent and would be even nicer with field mushrooms than it was with the commerical variety. The modern version of the recipe in the cookbook suggested button mushrooms, but I used to pick mushrooms fresh in the pine forest of Yarralumla with friends and so I went for the closest to those mushrooms that the supermarket had. We chose mature, fully opened common-as-mud mushies and the extra maturity made a significant difference to the flavour. The commerical mushrooms in Australia are still young enough to be treated as ‘white’ in my book, but I like mushrooms and prefer a stronger flavour. It took longer to cook the dish than we thought (well over 1/2 hour) but it was well worth the wait. If we hadn’t enjoyed our mushrooms on toast so very much the recipe might have done four people. Or if the eaters hadn’t had a high tolerance for cream.

This is the first recipe to go to the long list for consideration for the banquet. And - as I have said elsewhere - even if it doesn’t make the banquet, both Nicole and myself will make it again, happily. It’s on p. 69 of The Jane Austen Cookbook. The recipe there won’t be the exact recipe in the menu if it gets included - I will jiggle it for Australian ingredients.

What we think will work for service is small portions (as it’s so rich) on small half rolls, toasted on the outside. That gives the crisp outside texture of the bread and the soft inner texture of the bread, the texture of the mushrooms and the creamy sauce. For coeliacs it would have to be seved on some kind of gluten free biscuit, or plain.

I stole the chair of Conflux yesterday. Or she stole me. Either way, we dumped our usual Sunday afternoon activity and tested four of recipes for the Regency Gothic banquet. She’ll send me her notes later in the week and I’ll blog them for you. I’ll also blog my own notes, but not tonight. I had one very exhausting day today.

The verdict is that two recipes are awesome. We don’t know if they’ll make the final menu, but they are not only longlisted, we’re both taking the recipes into our lives longterm. Splendidly rich and very delicious.

The chicken curry was sadly dull in flavour. The sauce was nice and I steamed rice with it for dinner tonight and it made really, really yummy rice. The actual chicken was not to our taste though. “Ordinary” was our verdict.

I mentioned the chicken to my mother and she had me describe the spicing. She recalled an English friend of my father’s from the 1950s who used that same spicing - he had learned to cook curry in India and had modified it to taste. So that rather ordinary spicing was so close to English hearts that it lasted at least 150 years. I’ll make the recipe again for the sauce and for the history, but I will have to be very careful what I serve with it.

The last thing we tested was negus. I wonder which of Nicole and myself will find the most interesting epithets for this one. Keep an eye on this space :). One of my big priorities is to find better after dinner drinks, since this recipe for negus won’t go the distance for most modern palates.

There is one piece of good news with the testing. The recipes from the historically accurate but culinarily dubious book won’t be making the blog so your lives are not at risk. My mother’s life is not so protected: she asked me to bring it with me to Melbourne so we can test things together. My mother is an outstanding cook and will know what’s safe and what isn’t. She also keeps very strictly kosher which limits the number of dishes we can test to the achievable.

One thing that Nicole and I discovered yesterday was that the modern versions of recipes in the The Jane Austen Cookbook don’t actually reflect the original precisely all the time. They cut down cholesterol-laden ingredients for instance, which is laudable but historically inaccurate. When you cook from these recipes, I strongly recommend you keep an eye on the original transcribed recipe, and make up your own mind what ingredients you use. And taste the dish with the original ingredients before you swear never to cook a dish of such extreme richness - it’s worth trying something the way it was made originally before you adapt it to your own kitchen habits.

I promised you an online source of ingredients, and here it is: Francesco Sirene, Spicer

Sometimes the Australian Quarantine people get uppity when you import from here and sometimes they are perfectly equable about it. Ours is not to wonder why…

The company is Canadian, so North Americans don’t have quarantine issues.

This is an eighteenth century recipe. The link magically appeared in my email just now, which means it *has* to be shared: cucumber salad

In case you’re as confused as I was, I post according to East Coast Aussie times but the timestamp is the time and date in Mississippi. I think it’s Mississippi. This is why it looks as if there are 2 posts from me on one day and none on another and why I say things like “It’s Saturday” when some of you are fully aware that it’s Friday. If you want to calculate the differences up till now, then know that I’m typing this just after 1.30 pm on Saturday. After tonight we have Daylight Savings, so an extra hour different.

If times and dates tangle you and you don’t even notice the datestamp on posts, then ignore this entry :).

When I was a child popcorn was salted and unbuttered and made fresh on the stovetop. Australia in the 1960s. We wanted popcorn because we had read about it in Laura Ingalls Wilder and so most of the children I know learned how to put oil in the saucepan and just enough dried corn and shake it and pop it.

When I lived in London in the 1980s my ability to make popcorn using a stovetop and dried corn was regarded as a rare and special skill and British and Indian students asked me to teach them as did Canadians and Americans. We would sit around and say things like “I really like US popcorn better” until someone taught us how to make hot rum with lemon and cloves. That combination sums up winter in London for me. Salted popcorn always belongs with hot rum (use rum, lemon, cloves, some boiled water and a little sugar).

Going back to my childhood, my family and friends never did work out how Ingalls Wilder’s family coloured their plain corn to make chains for the Christmas tree, largely because my non-Jewish friends were stubborn about how they decorated their trees. If I had convinced Marilla to do this when we were nine, it would have been my first serious foray into culinary history. And it would have failed. Cranberries were only available rarely and tinned in Australia back then.

These days the influences are movies rather than books and the pre-packaged buttered popcorn is the big seller. And you can buy fresh cranberries occasionally and frozen cranberries all year round and when we eat turkey we’re at least as likely to eat it with cranberry sauce as with gravy.

What we do with our spare time changes how we eat.

I still have to email out some recipes (last week was *so* busy!). When we get enough test results from the first list, I’ll generate a second list, so this is not the end of the fun, just the beginning. And for anyone living in Canberra, the Conflux chair has decided that sometime next year there will be a recipe-testing party where we all bring dishes.

For people who are interested in joining the testathon now but haven’t quite made their mind up, these are the recipes you can choose from. If you emailed me asking for one and it’s still on the list, then would you mind asking again, as I must have missed the email.

Summer pease soup
Onion soup
Roast ribs of beef
Dressed breast of lamb
A fine cake
Chicken baskets
Marmalett of Aprecocks
Ice-cream
A Trifle

Today is the first day for recipes from one of my grandmother’s notebooks. One grandmother didn’t keep notes of recipes and the other kept two books of them, so it all evens out.

Belle died when I was a cute toddler (I know I was a cute toddler because one of my uncles reminds me regularly and yearningly that I was so cute when I was a toddler). She is the link between our family and its nineteenth century recipes, as Belle was born in the late nineteenth century to a very large Melbourne family. The age gaps between the generations on my father’s side of the family are immense, which is something that really helps in preservation of some traditions.

Her notebooks show us Australian Jewish cooking prior to World War II and in some cases prior to World War I. In a few instances the recipes are older still. Watch the cuisine unfold as I give you samples from her red notebook and her green one. Her green one is the disorderly one, the one with newspaper clippings and blank sections. The dates of the clippings are all from the 1950s and the cooking methods are all pre-blenders and metrication.

The green book is speciality-printed to house family recipes. It has coloured dividers with right hand tabs: soups, fish; poultry, meat; entrees vegetables; puddings jellies; savouries cakes; preserves jams; pickles sauces; sundries. The shape of Australian 1950s and 1960s cooking. A pudding with every main meal. Formal or semi-formal afternoon teas on weekends. Girls learning to cook starting from age four, but in the kitchen banging pans together for as long as we can remember. It’s funny how classifying dishes brings forth the shape of the family foodways.

What’s even more funny is that my grandmother Belle didn’t bother with the classifications half the time. This is her overflow book, and it’s fun to see what’s not there. Soups and fish are empty. Meat and poulty contain nothing apart from a clipping with various cherry recipes. I’ll give you the cherry icecream recipe below, because cherry season starts with Melbourne Cup Day here, the first Tuesday in November.

There are no entrees and no vegetables, and the only pudding or jelly is an Austrian apple pie. Savouries and cakes contains eighteen recipes, some written on the cardboard of the next divider while there are four recipes for jams and preserves. The single recipe under pickle and sauce is actually a soup, while “Sundries” contains the top-secret and amazingly important historically raisin wine recipe as well as recipes for lemon butter, honeycomb toffee, how to whip evaporated milk, how to make mock cream, and a recipe for marmalade.

These are going to be my Friday recipes for a little while. My grandmother was an interesting lady and her recipes reflect a lot of the Australian past. For instance, the Madeira Cake recipe was brought out from England in the 1850s. From the memories encapsulated by the notebook to the clipping, that little green book contains a hundred years of Melborune Jewish cooking.

Cherry Ice Cream

1 pint milk
4 heaped tbs powdered milk
1/2 cup cold, cooked cherries stoned and chopped
1 tsp gelatine
3 tbs water
3 tbs sugar

Gelatine and water and sugar need to be dissolved over low heat. Bring the mixture to the boil. Set it aside until cool then bat until it is thick and white. Beat the powdered milk into the fresh milk until they are evenly mixed then gradually beat in the gelatine mixture. Pour into refrigerator trays and freeze for an hour or until the mixture is set. Turn the ice cream out and beat it until smooth. Add the cherries. Return to trays and freeze until firm. Goes well with cherry sauce.

Pity shopkeepers who encounter Gillian.

Today I explored a magic shop. Not a shop that sells cute tricks for enthusiastic entertainers, but one that has the various stuffs that the local Wiccan and Pagan communities need for their daily whatever. Since I teach the history of magic from time to time, I was curious to see what they had.

The lady who runs the shop is very charming and had the cutest baby. She is also very accepting of differences. When I asked her the source of her dragon’s blood she answered me straightforwardly: it was not the right dragon’s blood for my history classes, alas - I would have loved to ring my mother and tell her I had just bought some dragon’s blood. When I gave her a potted history of the use of spikenard and some of the problems with working out exactly which herb was meant in various documents over 2000 years she dealt with aplomb. When I gave her an even more potted history of Medieval-lack-of-evidence-for-Druids she was unfailing cheerful and courteous. I think she is owed a reward for handling difficult customers and I intend to go back there and buy things when I get paid.

This is the first shop I have seen that sells spikenard in Australia and spikenard is an ingredient in the very best hypocras recipe I have ever tasted. If you ever need spikenard (or gorgeous elven cloaks, or the stuff to create magic) the shop is just down the road from the Canberra Centre - go up one of those obscure stairways that pepper the street between Sammy’s and the Canberra Centre and then walk down the corridor a way.

For non-Canberrans who are otherwise reduced to making hypocras using lesser recipes, my useful URL this Sunday will point you towards an online shop that stocks it.

PS Please don’t cook with dragon’s blood. Culinary is not my only history and I wanted the dragon’s blood for classes on Medieval manuscripts. I don’t even know if it’s poisonous - another thing on my list of need-to-know.

The closest I will get to blogging brilliance today is the title of the post. You can tell how tired I am by the fact that I made hobbit-method mushrooms for dinner (open frying pan, quick and simple and savoury - and very, very much comfort food). I have three cookbooks near my computer each and all of them not wanting to be put away. Two you already know about: “The Anne of Green Gables Cookbook” and “The Jane Austen Cookbook”. The third I will introduce properly when I am less exhausted. I’ll also get back to looking at food in literature, I promise. I taught cross-cultural awareness on Tuesday and today and it’s a fabulous thing to teach but is emotionally exhausting.

Expect the brain to spark back next week and in the interim I’ll feed you recipes and links and things.

Oh, and the name of the third cookbook sitting on my desk. It’s “The American Frugal Housewife. Dedicated to those who are not ashamed of economy. By Mrs. Child, author of “Hobonok,” “The Mother’s Book,” editor of the “Juvenile Miscellany,” &c. Twelfth Edition. Enlarged and corrected by the author. Boston, 1833.”

I need a subtitle for my week “Dedicated to those who are not ashamed of fatigue.”

The first batch of recipes to be tested are from The Jane Austen Cookbook by Maggie Black and Deirdre Le Faye. If you like the sound of something (or somethings - more than one recipe is fine) then wave your hand madly in the direction of the contact button or send me an email or accost me in the street demanding “Recipe - now!”. If you can come up with suitable gluten free or vegetarian versions (and if they taste good) it will help the chef cater for people on restricted diets. This period’s food is way bad for people with gluten problems, so finding substitute ingredients is going to be important.

A receipt to curry after the Indian manner
Apple pie
Summer pease soup
Onion soup
White mushroom fricassee
Roast ribs of beef
Dressed breast of lamb
Solid syllabubs
Apple puffs
Naples biscuits
A fine cake
A pretty dish of eggs
Chicken baskets
Martha’s gingerbread cake
Marmalett of Aprecocks
Negus
Asparagus dressed the Italian way
Ice-cream
A Trifle
Martha’s almond cheesecakes

This is a warning [insert suitably evil chuckle here]. Tomorrow I’ll be blogging the first list of recipes for testing for the Regency Gothic Banquet. Anyone is welcome to help me test - the more the merrier.

All you need to do is give me an email address using the “contact Gillian” link on the right and I’ll send you the recipe of your choice or my choice (depending on how much of a risktaker you are). All recipes will be from the late 18th to early 19th century. They are all English, and some have been kitchen tested for modern equipment and others not, so it’s a food history lucky dip.

When you’ve made the recipe, you send me back detailed comments and I blog them so that we can all vicariously enjoy them. I will blog the final menu when it’s approved by the Conflux4 chef and I will post the complete recipes after the banquet next year.

Nearly twelve months of glorious historical food. What more could you ask? Well, besides chocolate.

The last couple of weeks fats have been creeping up on me. Someone asked me a question that led to me thinking about the use of fats in late Medieval cooking. Someone else became very vehement about cooking in fantasy novels where somehow tremendously satisfying meals are put together on the march with almost no preparations. And that got me thinking about goosefat and chicken fat and other kinds of animal fat.

I made a variant of a traditional Jewish dish tonight because I had a little yellow fat from a corn fed chicken and I wanted to know if it was different in fllavour to the fat of a less yellow chook. I fried onion in it and added the requisite salt and yes, it was savoury and full of cholesterol. It would answer the question of a quick and filling meal at the end of a day’s camp, because the fat gives the vegetable substance and cooks quickly. And it is a way of getting calories when they can be scarce. So fat was something worth treasuring until very recently. When the wedding present of goosefeather bed equipment in ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ causes cheers, it calls to mind the marvellous recipes that can be made with goose fat to help keep winter at bay.

Various kinds of animal fat are key to the food history of Northern and Central and Eastern Europe. The Mediterranean relied more on olive oil. Think of the type of fat used as a mountain range that demarcates dietary differences over time.

I do wonder what the radical change in types of fats we use has done to our eating habits overall. And I wonder about our taste buds. Are we eating junk food because some of us were used to a certain salty fat flavour and fill in the gap left by its disappearance?

All this is speculation. Me pondering why my family lost chicken fat as a staple ingredient for some types of cooking and linking it to random questions. I do think we underrate the importance of fats in our cooking, however. In the seventeenth century they had largely replaced spices for many dishes - they are powerful ingredients, not merely a rapid path to heart attacks.

The link of the day is a place I go to browse and dream a bit. Modern views of Medieval and Renaissance cooking are seriously fun, especially when they come stuffed with recipes: http://www.godecookery.com/