Food History

THE FIRST BAWBEE

I met auld granny at the door,
Noo Rab, says she, tak care,
Nae feckless whigmaleeries buy
When ye gang tae the fair;
A gaucie row, or soncie scone
Is best for one that’s wee;
And muckle lies in how you spend
Yoor first bawbee

MY NANCY.

I well know that weezles and rats play me pranks,
At my cost they are feasting and drinking;
They nibble my biscuits, and gnaw at my planks,
And would fly if once I was sinking.
Lord help them poor things, they can do me no harm,
Let them pilfer away at their fancy;
They may rob me of money, try to injure my name,
But they never, no never, can deprive me of Nancy.

Trials & Sentences

Sarah Gardner, servant of wm. Green; saw the prisoner in the shop negociating with the
preceding witness in an affair of an Irish note, witness was asked to go and get change for the note, and returned with an answer, that she could only get 26s. for it, to which the prisoner consented; shortly after this Mr. Campbell made his appearance, and, producing a note, said ” did not you give this Bute to-day at our warehouse;” while Miss Bond was out, the prisoner, being seated near the witness, said ” I wish all my be right—I hope she has not gone to Campbell’s.” The prisoner complained of a sore ankle, and having a piece of biscuit in her hand, she said she was chewing it, but the note was found on the spot, in a chewed state; identified the note.

Catalogue of Newest Songs’ and Recitations.

Break it gently to my mother
Biscuit van
Beautiful Nell
Beautiful for ever
Bonny banks of Clyde
Battle of Chevy Chase
Colin Dulap
Coal Jock
Chargs of the light brigade
Lodging house cat
Lines on the dreadful murder of Mr Glass
Lines on the death of the Rev. Thomas Flood
My dear native home
Many changes have I seen
May queen
Mowing of the hay
Saturday, Dec. 23,1871.

CARSE 0′ GOWRIE DAIRY.

CHORUS.
The Duke O’ Argyle brocht the Lass O’ Ballochmyle,
Doon tae the Carse O’ Gowrie Dairy;
They were a’ as busy as bees making scones and sour milk cheese,
For a pic-nic in the bonnie Den O’ Airlie.

[some cut]

Noo says I tae the Duke wid ye tak a drink o’ dough,
It wid quench your thirst man fairly,
But says he if you please I would rather taste your cheese,
That’s a credit tae the Carse O’ Cowrie Dairy.
But his heart gaed in a flutter, when he got a scone and butter;
And he polished aff twa, man fairly,
And ho says look man, they’re grand, and he took me by the hand;
And said, Thank you in the Carse O’ Gowrie Dairy.

THE STORM ON THE PAISLEY CANAL

Spoken.-Ay, freens, I spared nae expense tae mak’ her comfortable, I took a cabin passage in that late and commodious steamship O’ twa hunder punds burthen, the “Bumbee,’t o’ Crossmyloof. And before starting that nich I bocht a bottle o’ the hard stuff, nane o’ the “Weekly Mail” kind, mind ye, but the rale Glentak’it, some curran’ scones, some potted head, some wulks, and several ither luxuries. I took ane last look o’ the shore o’ Glesca, a carter gied us a shove aft’, and awa’ we started, but I micht hae kent there wis something gaen tae tak place for before we left the Quay there wis a punt lying opposite tae us wi’ a lot o’ man-o-war sailors on board, and they aye kept winking at Mary, and she seemed It ‘ke it.

SANDY AND THE Days o’ Langsyne.

Cheer up my auld Sandy, times may tak’ a turn—
Nae langer allow us frail mortals to mourn.
Wi’ a scone and a drappie, our brose buttered fine,
We still may sing cantie o’ the days o’ langsyne.

THE MUCKLE MEAL POCK.

You may think there is meal i’nt, but that you are far wrang
For I have cakes in’t, and scones in’t, and for cheese a dainty whang,
And whiles a bit tobacco, if I want a chew or smoke,
And I hid a’ my fallings in my muckle meal pock.

I have a bunch of work to be done by tomorrow lunchtime, but my brain has switched into research mode and the next posts (broken up because one post would be way too big) are the result. It certainly adds some social contexts to my blog and introduces us to some rather curious characters to boot.

My purely historianish name for this little series of posts is “Mentions of scones and biscuits in National Library of Scotland Broadside Ballads”
http://www.nls.uk/broadsides/search.html

Ballads are one rather cool type of source for what scones and biscuits used to be. A rather different facet of culinary history. Though the ballad collection ranges from the 17th to the early 20th centuries, all the mentions of scones or biscuits were from the nineteenth century.

Why the nineteenth century? It doesn’t necessarily mean that scones and biscuits weren’t known earlier. It could mean that earlier ballads mentioning them are lost, though the fact that *none* of the ballads earlier than 1820 contain the words argues against this. It could mean that the stuff of earlier ballads (their themes and style) didn’t allow those particular comestibles. And there are other possible reasons.

We know that scones and biscuits went along with certain other foods in nineteenth century English-speaking Scotland (these poems tell us nothing definitive about the non-English speaking areas) and that some were savoury (buttered, or bought alongside cheese) and that some had fruit in. Some biscuits were chewable (which maybe suggests the doublecooking) and some were flavoured with cinnamon. And there was a thing called a biscuit van, though that song wasn’t in the collection. We have scones on ships and biscuits on ships, in quite different contexts that really demonstrates that they were different things in Scotland in the nineteenth century. There more in it than this, but I just wanted to show how wonderful popular literature can be for finding out about common foodstuffs.

For more on broadside ballads, the National Library of Scotland website has some good introductory material. The NLS has the complete text of each ballad - I’ve just given you the appropriate culinary bit. Some of ballads in the collection (though not necessarily containing scones and biscuits) are to songs which are still popular in folk circles, so you, too can sing historical tunes containing culinary terms. For more on scones and biscuits, watch this space because as I come across things, I will post them until utter confusion is the order of the day. Then I’ll sort it and make sense of it all. Maybe.

Cherries have been sighted in Melbourne, just in time for Cup Day. This gives me license to have strawberries and fizzy alcohol later in the day, in time-honoured fashion.

The US has - in equally time honoured fashion - cake for an entirely different type of race. First Tuesday in November requires election cake in some parts of the States. Their race last longer than ours. Our race is less fraught with consequences than theirs.

The Food Museum Blog has very kindly supplied a recipe for election cake for the occasion. Please forgive me if I don’t instruct you on how to buy a bottle of bubbly and drink it with fresh strawberries.

I might be blogging late tomorrow. Can’t think why.

I have lots more on scones and biscuits, but you can’t live on a solid diet of afternoon tea. And besides, not all culinary history originates in the UK.

Today’s ingredient used to be cooked over a fire. Apparently bogong moths dry roast delightfully. When people ask if I’ve tasted them I reply “They’re not kosher” but the real reason I haven’t is I’m just plain nervous about eating moths.

Bogongs are a big dark-dark moth that colonise the valleys of Canberra in early summer every year. They were a pre-European delicacy and there’s a place up near where Miles Franklin’s family used to live that was a meeting place where people feasted on bogongs. They’re rather beautiful and mysterious until they try to knock their brains in the sheen of my eyeglasses. I won’t tell you what I call them at those times.

Bogong moths are survivors. American trappers decimated the lyrebird population of this area in their bid to make money on hat ornaments a century or so ago, but the bogong moth population is still so large that one year they just about covered Parliament House.

Australia is beginning to learn about native foods. We eat bush tomatoes (delectable on hot roast potato with butter), and we adore several rainforest spices. We kindly allow our US friends to think that they invented macadamia nuts. We’ve never taken to bogong moths though.

I keep thinking I should try them because I live right in the flight path and it would show my resepct of indigenous food history. Except bogong moths are big and dark and fluttery and look as if they have flown straight out of Harry Potter: I don’t *want* to eat them. I can tell you, however, that they are supposed to roast delightfully.

Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery and Booke of Sweetmeats (ed Karen Hess) is a lovely thing. You’ll hear more about it later on since I love it dearly, but today I decided you needed two recipes. I like the name of the first so you need the recipe. The second is because when I was typing up the biscuit recipe, lo these aeons ago, I caught sight of the blurb on the back of Hess’s book. It said “To make bisket.”

Spirit of Beazor

Beazor water is an excellent approoved antidote against all contagions of the plague, the purples, small pox, or measels. For preventing thereof 2 spoonfulls mixt with cardus or angellico water yt is stilld cold onely of the hearbs. & for want of these waters, use possit drink, which is provokeing towards sweat, & will expell the malignaty of mallady, the patient beeing kept temperately warm. It is alsoe good in a violent surfet, or when the stomack is oppressed with winde, cold, phleme, or any supefuilty. It is good for disgestion, to be drunk by it selfe. This is good for the stone in the kidneys by takeing 6 spoonfulls in halfe a pinte of small beer. It hath given present ease in the fits by remooveing it into the blather, & soon after caus.. oidance.

NB the bezoar stone has a wonderful history. More medicinal than culinary, so if I ever discuss it it will be in my other blog. I just couldn’t resist this recipe today :).

To make bisket

Take a pound of fine flowre of wheat, A pound of sugar, 4 whites of eggs & 8 youlks, & 4 spoonfulls of rosewater. The longer you beat it the better it will be. Then put it to eyther annyseeds or carraway seeds. You must beat it till it will bubble. The poure it in your plates. Then take some sugar finely beaten, & a little flowre, which you must put in a piece of tiffany (your sugar must be thrice as much as your flowre) & with this dust your plates of bisket before they are set into the oven.

I can’t resist a last bit of commentary. This cookbook was written using the same form as my grandmother’s cookbook. Abbreviations and skipped steps when everything was so obvious that it didn’t need spelling out. You do have to read home-written recipes with this in mind. Sometimes just one step is missed. In one scone recipe I have inherited, most of the recipe is gone and my sister and I couldn’t reconstruct it however much we tried.

The URL of the week is me cheating. It’s a course I wrote at Suite101. Way back when students paid for it they got me nagging the whole way through it, explaining things and answering questions. The question-answering was the best fun because my students knew a heap about food and brought local experience to play. We had market reports from three countries one time, which helped all of us understand seasonal food and regional food.

Anyhow, now the course is free but you don’t get any extras. It’s just the basics and written a few years ago at that. It’s not long, and not arduous and might be a pleasant place to spend an hour on a Sunday. More pleasant than my blogging since the course is (sadly) free of bad jokes: click here for no bad jokes .

I always have a little book at my computer. it’s a 1970s National Trust of Australia spiral bound book. I can convert between ounces and grams in my head (mostly), but some of the other Metric/Imperial comversions stump me. US cups and Canadian cups and Australian cups are different and Indonesian ounces are *excitingly* different. So I always keep my little reference book at hand.

Last time it got a serious workout was for Stuart Barrow’s Gastronomicon (which is either a cookbook with speculative fiction stories or an anthology with recipes - volume 2 is taking submissions, I believe, but only for about a week) when all the recipes were submitted with different measurement systems.

It strikes me that some of you might like some of the measurements I find handy so that you know how much - for instance - an Australian cup actually holds. If you only need cups then life is really easy. A cup of sugar is 6 oz and a cup of flour is 4 oz. I always remember the 6 and the 4 and the sugar and the flour and then use that to convert things. It’s my basis for reading US recipes (I translate cups into cups) and makes my cooking life simpler.

[useful aside: Australia didn't become metric until the seventies (earlier for our currency, but my recipes don't tend to include instructions for cooking money or even books).]

Anyhow, what I’m trying to say is that if it would make anyone’s life easier, I will post the main weights and measures that need translating, since the recipes and descriptions on the blog will come from a lot of countries and it might make it easier to play with them. I’ll then create a category for measurements and put this post and that post and any other one that discusses them into it, so that you can easily sort out problem areas. I’ll update the main post on it whenever we run into a problem.

Problem areas of home cooking where measurements are approximate are something that’s harder to address. When I don’t give measurements it’s because the recipe uses a traditional method which my mother calls ‘by guess and by God’ and when it gets codified some of the recipe is lost.

Elizabeth Chadwick has given me a good medieval source for ‘biscuit’ as a word meaning something taken aboard ship as food. It’s a source I know, but had never actually looked at for food mentions. You can see why I’m so keen to re-examine literary sources for foodstuff. It’s not just the evocative nature of a good picnic scene making a reader’s mouth water, it’s that the actual food mentioned gives evidence for how it was used and when it was used. So we have a food called ‘bescuit’ attested in Old French in the fourteenth century. It makes me happy :).

What I’ll do is accummulate all the information I get sent and keep posting it and recipes and when we all get sick of the subject, write a post that sums it all up. I like this thought because it means we all get to share in the adventure of finding out what biscuits and scones have travelled and tasted like during their history. So please, comment away or email me.

There’s no hurry - the Regency Gothic Banquet is in September next year so it has a deadline, but biscuits and scones are the stuff of leisurely eating and so can take as long as we enjoy exploring them.

Today I have another recipe that hasn’t been cooked in a long while (my speciality). This is an Australian biscuit recipe, from my grandmother’s green notebook.

Australian-style biscuits are nothing like US-style biscuits. I know everyone knows that, but I like making things clear. These biscuits aren’t that much like most Australian biscuits.

The word ‘biscuit’ - I have been told again and again - comes from the French ‘bis’ - ‘again’ and ‘cuit’ - ‘cooked’. My French is fine, but I am a bit wary of etymologies that make too much sense and for which I haven’t seen proof. If the etymology is correct, then originally biscuits were double-cooked and maybe a bit like rusks or hard ship biscuits. They would keep well.

I will keep an eye open for recipes using that technique that go back a long way - unless someone else has done a clear proof and I’ve missed reading it. I’ve seen lots of claims but not much in the way of evidence traced clearly and textually back over time. Mind you, until now I haven’t really been looking so it might be something that’s common knoweldge for more modern historians and might just go to show that my heart - and my doctorate - is the in Middle Ages.

This recipe is from the 1950s but reflects the family’s English antecedents. And yes, it does have the double baking. Now all I need is to find recipes that take the name back further and further and further. Watch this space. Or send in recipes. Both would be most welcome.

3 oz sugar
3 oz flour
3 oz almonds (whole)
4 egg whites

Beat whites with sugar. Mix in other ingredients and bake in a medium oven. Leave overnight. Cut in tissue slices and rebake.

PS Does anyone know what a ’tissue slice’ is? I assume it’s a tissue-thin slice and that these biscuits are what are sometimes called ‘almond bread.’

Are scones just US biscuits served with jam and cream? I’ve had different opinions on that one and seen a range of recipes that would prove and would disprove the link. Because I’m a kind and generous person, from time to time my Friday recipes will include clearly sourced scone recipes and biscuit recipes (for all culinary variants of the words ’scone’ and ‘biscuit’) so that you can make your own mind up.

Today’s recipe is Australian and for scones. It comes from the “Aerophos” Recipe Book. Aerophos was a brand of leavening that was so popular that you can locate it in the Women’s Weekly index: http://www.ssn.flinders.edu.au/wmst/WWIndex/search.php?search=subject&subj=Recipes This spiral-bound book is undated, but my guess is no later than the 1950s. I’ve found a bunch of these book on ‘collectables’ sites and the dates range from 1951 1958, the descriptions fit mine (except they give an edition number and mine has none) and the prices range from $6-25. None of them are in outstanding condition - this is the sort of book that sat round in people’s kitchens and got used. Given the number floating round, it must have been fairly common.

I haven’t tested any recipes from it yet. I was given a bag of old cookbooks by a friend when I was in Katoomba in July and this was among them. It’s a classic of its kind; full of standards. It follows the tradition of basic cooking for people who need to know (presumably women who need to know, given it was the 1950s) that was begun by chefs such as Francatelli in the nineteenth century. I might return to it another time, because there’ s more to this little book than that. Today you just need a recipe, and you need scones because scone variants trace wonderfully well across Anglophone cultures.

The book gives a basic scone recipe, then adds about 20 variants. Some I have never even seen (eg beef upside down scones) others were staple part of my family’s food (eg raisin scones). There is no mention of pumpkin scones. They appeared on the national Australian scene with Flo Bjelke-Petersen in the 1970s, from memory. If anyone knows anything more about pumpkin scones, I would love to hear.

(Note: I never give the exact words of a recipe within copyright - what you see here is the list of ingredients then my polite interpretation of what to do with them.)

Basic scone recipe

1 lb self-raising flour
2 oz butter
1 level tsp salt
1 1/2 cups milk

Heat an oven to 450 degrees F. Sift the salt and flour together, then rub the butter into the flour using your fingertips. Keep the mixture cool (if your hands get warm, then either rub further way from the bowl or give the whole thing a break). When the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs, make a well in the centre and add all the milk. Stir everything together lightly and quickly. Don’t overmix. Turn the soft dough onto a lightly floured surface and knead just enough to make things smooth. Don’t overknead. Roll to 1/2 inch thick and cut into rounds. Place on a floured tray and glaze the top of each with milk or with egg beaten with milk. Bake for 10-15 mins.

Scones do *not* improve with keeping.

If you go back through the comments of the last few days you can see thoughts on popcorn and on curries. Put them together and you get curry-flavoured popcorn? Umm. Maybe put them together and you start to see the foodways of the people who read this blog, which are part of the future’s culinary history.

And yes, my sagacity of the second is strange and not-quite-there. We had the first thunderstorms of summer today you see, and it isn’t summer for a month. None of the summer fruit is ripe enough to celebrate thunderstorms. Cherries are not due their first appearance before Tuesday. Mind you, cherries will be even more expensive than bananas this year. Australians abroad will be remarkable for their dedication to eating cherries or bananas. Or maybe banana splits topped with cherries which is, I believe, of US origin. Very suitable for fruit-deprived travellers.

It will be a long, long summer and I might have to look into icecream history to survive it. I am tempted right now to measure up my patio and to dream of turning it into an 18th century icehouse where I can take refuge. Except if the ice all melts at once then it will flood my lounge room.

On Monday I realised that the almond cheesecakes we tested had no cheese in. The dairy flavour is from pure, pure butter. It’s a very good preservative.

The little cakes are best slightly warm. And yes, Nicole and I covet this recipe. It’s really simple, too. Just a matter of mixing melted butter and lots and lots of egg yolks with almonds and a couple of other ingredients. All the flavours combine beautifully.

This is one recipe where we dumped the modern interpretation and followed the original. Black and Le Faye’s version would have been lighter and healthier, but one of the things we liked about the finished cake was its gentle richness, so I don’t regret the choice. I cheated once (note that the cheating was by me - Nicole is above reproach) in using the blender instead of mortar and pestle. It reduced the boiled peel beautifully and made the whole recipe very quick and straightforward. (OK, so we *both* cheated and used commercial pastry, but if you don’t tell anyone then I won’t.)

The wonderful almond cheesecake recipe is on pp. 123-4 of The Jane Austen Cookbook if you experience a sudden yearning to raise your cholesterol levels.

As I said in an earlier post, this recipe was disappointing. The chicken was nice cold and would make a nice addition to a summer platter of cold meats. I’d make it using chicken fillets, I suspect (the recipe calls for a whole chicken, cut into peices). I would reserve the sauce and use it to make a side dish of hot rice, but I would reduce the butter by nearly 50%. When I steamed the sauce with rice, I could taste the spices that were so sadly pale in the chicken.

As it stands, “after the Indian manner” in this case means a bit of cayenne, a bit more galingale and lots of rice flour. It’s a delicate dish and we’re all too used to more robust curries.

Retrospectively, I think Nicole and I judged it a bit harshly on the night because the recipe was called a curry, so we were expecting something less fragile. This is one recipe where modern Australian tastes have definitely moved in a different direction. I need to keep an eye on other English curries from that period, to find out if this curry is typical or an exception. That’s the wonder of testing things - it’s only when you taste the food that you get a real sense of what’s happening at a given time and in a given place. I’m rather hoping that Austen’s circle was so sheltered they had a different version of curry to those made by London families or families with strong links to India, but this is hope and needs testing. If I find more curry recipes that fit the menu overall, rest assured they will be listed for testing.

English curry is my food story for Wednesday. Look at the paths curry has traced through the world and how it has grown and changed. The chicken curried “after the Indian manner” is just one step in a very complicated trail that goes back long before the introduction of the chilli into Indian cuisine. Think of the early nineteenth century curry as a chapter in the curry’s long, long story.