Food History

I’ve decided I really love being a (small) part of Project Blog. What’s not to love? I get to share recipes with deserving people, and fellow-bloggers say really nice things about me in an effort to induce you to win my recipes (go there and see!).

I feel I ought to say ‘mwa-ha-ha’ instead of ‘welcome,’ though, to all Project Blog folks who are dropping in to suss out winning historical facts. I’ve been in contemplative mood these last few days so you all have to read back a bit. Unless your useful fact is that I’ve fooled the world and don’t actually have a sense of humour? Or that Aussies don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. We could roast a turkey in honour of this Saturday’s Federal election, I guess, except that not a soul is going to want to roast a turkey with the outside temperature being thirty-five degrees. (trust me, you don’t want that in Fahrenheit.)

So, what food history am I giving to you today? No election food, because I can’t find any for Australia and my non-US readers will fret about the US taking over the world if I give you US recipes for an Australian occasion. I can’t even tell you why we don’t have election cake here, though I can promise to try to remember give you a recipe on US election day. I don’t know if I’ll blog Thanksgiving at all, unless I get lots of requests.

So what food history am I offering today? A recipe. A celebrational recipe, since – after all – we really all ought to be united in celebration this week. But if we can’t celebrate Thanksgiving or the Aussie elections, what can we celebrate?

I’ve finished my food history paper for this weekend’s conference. That will do nicely. I’ll be in big trouble next week, of course, as angry scholars descend on me. I’m even expecting a phone call from my mother saying “Gillian, so-and-so was at a conference over the weekend and your name was attached to some strange anecdotes. Lokshen dried on clotheslines? For goodness sake.”

With all that in mind, here’s a recipe from Francatelli’s A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes, a little (and cheap) publication put out during the reign of Queen Victoria to make sure that those who missed out on the glories of the British Empire (through being poor) got to eat well. It was published in 1861 and intended to provide basic cooking instruction for those who knew not how to boil an egg. I have never quite understood why being poor should make one stupid, but Francatelli assumed near-complete kitchen ignorance (though obviously his poor were literate). To be fair, Francatelli doesn’t instruct the poor on how to boil eggs: he explains how to fry them.

Buttered eggs

Fry half an ounce of butter in a frying-pan, then break three or four eggs into this; season with chopped parsley, pepper and salt, and again set the pain on the fire for two minutes. At the end of this time the eggs will be sufficiently set to enable you to slip them gently out of the pan upon a plate; and to finish cooking the eggs, it will be necessary to place them or hold them in front of the fire for a couple of minutes longer.

I wonder what Francatelli would make of a microwave?

Someone else who doesn’t know how to fry eggs. (Picture by Kate.)