Food History

I feel full of Australian slang today. This means you need biccies and scones. Lots of them. And it means I need to behave and not fill your minds with Strine (Aussie dialect, full of amazingly strange terms and not always terribly respectful). The simplest way to avoid talking about how tired are my plates of meat (feet and summertime, you know, don’t always mix) is to find you US recipes.

These ones are from the charming Miss Leslie (Directions for Cookery, in its various branches, 10th edition) and demonstrate to us that scones were known in the US as ‘tea biscuits’ in 1840. (more…)

This is another set of biscuit recipes where the title says it all. I might come back to this book again one day, though, and talk about it a bit more. I’ll also talk about Southernness, perhaps, one day.

CONFEDERATE RECEIPT BOOK. (more…)

Today’s recipes come from a book with such a long title that I rather think it introduces itself.

THE COMPLETE CONFECTIONER, PASTRY-COOK. AND BAKER.
PLAIN AND PRACTICAL DIRECTIONS FOR MAKING CONFECTIONARY AND PASTRY, AND FOR BAKING;
WITH UPWARDS OF FIVE HUNDRED RECEIPTS:
CONSISTING OF DIRECTIONS FOR MAKING ALL SORTS OF PRESERVES,
SUGAR-BOILING, COMFITS, LOZENGES, ORNAMENTAL CAKES, ICES LIQUEURS, WATERS, GUM-PASTE ORNAMENTS SYRUPS, JELLIES, MARMALADES, COMPOTES, BREAD-BAKING, ARTIFICIAL YEASTS, FANCY BISCUITS, CAKES, ROLLS, MUFFINS, TARTS, PIES, &c. &c.
WITH ADDITIONS AND ALTERATIONS, BY PARKINSON,
Practical Confectioner, Chestnut Street.
PHILADELPHIA: J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 1864. (more…)

Some recipes that suit the wintry among us and the summery are recipes for biscuits and scones. For the next few days I think I shall give you some US recipes for these comestibles, just to expand our biscuit and scone recipes and to let the rest of the world labour over conversions for a change. (more…)

I’m still thinking of biscuits and scones. This is largely because it’s so very hot here. Too hot to bake, but not too hot to dream of a day when baking is possible.

Today’s imaginary afternoon tea is from GOOD HOUSEKEEPING’S Menus, Recipes, and Household Discoveries, 1922, one of my many, many sources for the Prohibition Banquet. The first progress report for Conflux 5 is about to come out and with it, the announcement about the Prohibition Banquet. Treasure your advance knowledge – the geekworld is about to catch up!

Aunt Malindy’s Buttermilk Biscuit (more…)

Everyone I know seems to be cooking up a storm for holiday guests. In a couple of days holidays will be over for most people. In the meantime, you might want a few biscuit and scone recipes. Handy for the collection I’m making on this blog, and handy for your store cupboard.

There’s always a guest who comes just after the holidays and who deserves home made biscuits. These ones are particularly sound in a political sense*. They may delight the heart of your after-holiday visitor or they may lure them to great wrath (”Women? Voting? Preposterous!!”) in which case you get to finish the plate in comfort after they’ve stormed off in high dudgeon.

Cookies

One cupful sour rich cream, one cupful white sugar, one-half teaspoonful soda, flour enough for a soft dough-only enough to roll out easily; salt and nutmeg if desired.
MRS. SARA T. L. ROBINSON.

Cream Cookies

Two cupfuls of sugar, one cupful of butter, one-half cupful of sour cream, one level teaspoonful of soda dissolved in a little hot water, enough flour to roll out as soft as possible.
EMILY S. BOUTON.

Fruit Cookies

One and one-half cupfuls sugar, one-half cupful butter, five tablespoonfuls milk, one teaspoonful soda, spice of all kinds, one cupful currants or raisins, chopped, flour to roll out thin.
MRS. L. W. JONES.

Lep Cookies

One gallon molasses, two pounds lard, one pound citron, one teacupful each of cinnamon and spice, one-half teacupful cloves, four or six nutmegs, two pounds picked nuts (hickory or pecans), flour to make a stiff dough; roll thin, and bake quickly; ice, and dry well before putting away.
MRS. JESSIE F. A. BANKS.

Molasses Cookies

Put into a large coffee-cup one teaspoonful of soda, two tablespoonfuls of hot water and three tablespoonfuls of melted butter. Fill the cup with molasses, add a little ginger if liked. Two cups are enough for one baking. Mix soft and bake quickly.
LOUISA G. ALDRICH.

Molasses Cookies

One egg, one cup molasses, one-half cup of sugar, one teaspoonful each of salt, soda and ginger; flour enough to roll easily. This receipt calls for neither milk or shortening, and makes very nice cookies. Bake in quick oven.
MRS. ELLIE A. HILL.

New Bedford Cookies

Two cups of sugar, one cup of sour milk with half a teaspoonful of soda dissolved in it, one cup of butter. Flour to roll not too stiff, and bake quickly.
EMILY A. FIFIELD.

Spiced Cookies

One cup of sugar, two cups of molasses, two-thirds of a cup of butter, one cup of milk, one teaspoonful of soda, one small teaspoonful of cloves, and one small teaspoonful of cinnamon, two eggs, one-half a nutmeg, and five cups of flour.
LOUISA G. ALDRICH.

Sugar Cookies

One egg, one cup of sugar, half a cup (scant) of butter, half a cup of milk, nutmeg to taste, two teaspoonfuls of cream of tartar, one of soda. Make soft dough as can be handled; roll thin and bake in quick oven.
MRS. ELLIE A. HILL.

Sugar Cookies

Two eggs, one cup sugar, two thirds cup of butter and lard, one teaspoonful cream-tartar, one scant teaspoonful soda, two tablespoonfuls cold water. Flavor with lemon; flour to roll. Roll thin. Bake in quick oven.
MRS. M. A. EVERETT.

*They come from the 2nd edition of The Woman Suffrage Cook Book, 1890.

You don’t have nearly enough cookie recipes yet. I’m assuming this because all my friends who do that mysterious and little-known festival called Christmas are baking and baking and baking. Slices and biscuits and every kind of cake, as well as identifiable recipes such as plum pudding and Christmas cake.

Me? I’m taking pasta with avocado and macadamia cream sauce (maybe also artichokes in the sauce – I need to think about this) to Christmas lunch at a friends, and that’s really all the cooking I have to do.

Today’s recipes are from 1845, (more…)

What do American Orphans recommend for Christmas? Especially what did they recommend in 1798? Amelia Simmons in her American Cookery, gave us two cookie recipes, which means I get to add to my biscuit recipes and you get something a bit different to all the pudding variants. (more…)

All around me people are panicking and making pronouncements and cooking and creating plum puddings and cakes. To celebrate the vast amount of festive fare being created in the Christmassy hemisphere (as opposed to the places the rest of us live, which presumably are lacking in reindeer and elves) I’m going to give you a bunch of plum puddings, from The complete cook by J. M. Sanderson, 1864. No history lessons today – these plum puddings will leave you too full to think.

Plum Pudding Sauce. (more…)

Youtube distracted me today. So did Shaun Micallef, one of my favourite comedians. I don’t know if his humour translates outside Australia, but in one YouTube clip he manages to summarise a food history sortie, so today’s post is about that clip. The photo above is for pretties – you’ll find the clip below, with a bit of commentary below that. On an almost unrelated note, I never understood why the network that hosted it didn’t understand that getting an off-the-wall comedian to host a tonight show might not produce a *normal* chat show, myself. (more…)

Back to the cookbook. Inside the front cover is the frilliest apron yet. Very daytime soap, that apron.

The cookbook has a technical section that explains electrical cookers and their wonder. This is important, because the gas fields of Bass Strait were discovered in the 1960s. I’d love to know if this book predated or postdated gas being so important to Melbourne: that bit of information would change the way I read the cookbook.

The contents are divided into Hotplate Cooking (how to do), Oven cooking (how to work the oven and sort out cooking times), Recipes, Fruit Preserving, Weights and measures, and SEC Advisory Services.

The important category here is Fruit Preserving. Many families did home preserves in Melbourne in the 1960s and 1970s because fruit was abundant and plentiful and local. We used to go fruit picking every summer then work hard for a few days with our Fowler’s Vacola kit and then eat bottled apricots and peaches all winter. That kind of preserving is making a comeback in Australia, so here’s a recipe for my family’s favourite winter dessert from the 1960s and 1970s and then another scone recipe (from the cookbook – the fruit salad recipe is from my childhood), for our collection.

Flaming Fruit Salad

Mix your favourite preserved fruit in a pyrex dish and heat until quite hot. Bring the pyrex dish to table. Heat some brandy (the amount depends on how much flame you like and how much alcohol you’re prepared to feed your children). When the brandy is hot, pour it over the fruit salad. Turn the lights off (in a hurry – this doesn’t work when the brandy is not hot enough) and put a match to the dish. Admire briefly Serve it forth – by the time everyone has a bowlful of salad the flames will have died and the alcohol content significantly diminished.

Derby Scones

8 oz SR flour
pinch salt
½ tsp grated nutmeg
1 dessertspoon cinnamon
2 tbs castor sugar
2 oz butter
1 egg
1 dessertspoon treacle
½ cup milk

Sift flour, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg. Rub in butter, add sugar. Mix to a light dough with beaten egg, treacle and milk. Turn on to floured board, knead slightly, roll out and cut into rounds. Place on greased tray, glaze with milk and bake in oven at 50 degrees, reset to 450 degrees, for 8-10 minutes.

Daylight savings is here and I’m awake at an exceptionally early hour. I lay in bed thinking “What did I forget to do yesterday?� I’d forgotten to blog! I feel like saying, with a dash of coyness “Imagine, Gillian forgetting to blog� because coy has a bit of a 1960s feel but I was so tired last night I forgot a whole bunch of things. If I’m a bit less thoughtful than usual, this odd sleepiness is why. It also explains why – when I finally write it – there is enough for two posts. I’ll post the first part now and the second part tonight. This means you’re guaranteed a post even if I’m still on the wrong side of fatigue.

Being tired explains a whole bunch of things about my life. Cooking Better Electrically is certain-sure to cure them. It has a woman in a blue print frock and a beehive hairdo on the front cover (also a frilly pink apron – why don’t I covet that apron? I surely ought to, especially since it’s perfectly clean and starched and belongs on a TV set). On the back cover, the lady with the beehive is looking up (coyly, of course) from the white bowl she’s sort-of stirring. This time she has a floral pink dress and 2 inch (white) heels. No apron, but the floor has white and black squares and makes me think that cooking is like playing chess.

For some reason the front cover has my bathroom tiles as the kitchen splashback. I wondered where those tiles came from. Should I give them back?

Cooking Better Electrically says (more…)

Yesterday I introduced you to a cookbook. Today you need recipes from it, right? Of course! And the particular recipes that will much improve the quality of your life are scones and biscuits. Scones are what the Country Women’s Association of Australia is most famous for, after all. (more…)

After yesterday’s post I thought maybe it was time to have a post about a foodstuff that has given much calm to many people for a very long time. You can tell I’m a tea-drinker, can’t you? It’s in the way I think about tea and the way I have at least six different varieties for different moods. Right now I’m drinking a Kenyan spiced tea and an Australian plain tea and a really good Japanese powdered tea that I whisk up in a bowl and fall into contemplation over. Tea is a drink of almost infinite possibility.

This isn’t a proper history post. If I were to give you the history of tea, it would take 6 volumes of sturdy size. This post is to get you thinking about tea’s past, no more.

Tea is a camellia variety (well, the botanical name is camellia thea). The different varieties of tea leaves available reflect the way they are processed (pan fried, dried etc).

In the eighteenth century, one of the names for it was bohea, which is my entirely useless piece of information for the day, produced simply because I’ve been doing lots of stuff based in eighteenth century society recently. My Hong Kong friends call the common garden Aussie-favourite tea “red teaâ€? and make a great pickled egg using eggs, salt and very, very strong red tea.

I often hear green tea described as Japanese, but it isn’t confined to Japan. There are Korean green tea, Chinese, and others. My current favourite is, however, Japanese. After what I said earlier, you’d think my favourite was the bitter tea used for the tea ceremony, and, while I love that style, it isn’t my top favourite. I obviously have low taste, because I prefer genmaicha - tea with very cute popped rice floating round in it, and a lovely rounded and slightly woody flavour.

You may wish to note that camellia sinensis and its relatives or melaleuca alternifolia and its relatives are not at all related and do not get confused with each other except in both being called “tea� trees- the Aussie melaleuca was used by early British settlers when tea was unavailable - and is now used for medicinal not culinary purposes. They nearly all go well with scones, though.

I promised you more Barossa recipes, and here they are.

I’m glad I didn’t promise more than a couple of recipes though. Last night I watched five movies with friends in an epic marathon of bad taste and good chocolate. This morning I woke up early and a friend started on my costume for the Regency Gothic Banquet (I didn’t get too much in the way, truly). And so tonight I’m tired. I really need to use a stronger word than ‘tired,’ but the word that comes to mind means quite a different thing in North American English to Aussie English and I’m so terribly tired that I don’t have the energy to be offensive.

Scones are inoffensive, aren’t they?

Brown Scones (courtesy Mrs. Alb. Keil)

1/4 lb wholemeal flour
1/4 lb ordinary flour
pinch salt
2 tsp baking powder
2 oz butter
3/4 breakfast cup milk

Mix together the flour, baking powder and salt. Rub butter well into this and add milk. Roll out, cut into scones and rush into hot oven*.

Cinnamon Scones (given by A.A. Kuchel)

Put 1 lb 8 oz flour into a mixing bowl, add 1 tsp castor sugar, 1 tsp cinnamon, mix well. Add 1 oz butter. Mix all into a moist dough with 1 cup milk. Roll out 3/4 inch thick., Bake in a hot oven.

And that’s it for today! If I had a crystal ball to gaze into, it would be showing me asleep at a terrifyingly early hour tonight. Let this be a warning against watching films with friends….

*Is it a sign of fatigue that I want to put a warning that you won’t fit into your oven and it’s best to rush only the scones there?

food history, The Barossa Cookery Book, scones, recipes