Food History

I am having the most fun you can have and still call it work. I only got in a few minutes ago and am still all abuzz. It may be the chocolate we ate for dessert, of course, or the coffee I had afterwards, but mostly it’s the food and the company. The food is the bit you’ll want to hear about.

Tonight was the last of the tests for the Regency Gothic Banquet. Our consensus is (the main testing team and myself) that if the hotel accepts the menu as is, it will be a very special evening.

The soup was delectable and the meat frabjous. The salad was just as delightful as the first time round and all of the accompanying dishes worked rather well.

The moment I get the final recipes in modern form from the various cooks, I can put the menu together with the recipes and my diagrams of the table setting and it’s over to the chef. Vegetarians and coeliacs will have plenty to eat. No recipe has been bastardised to reach this stage. Life is just very good :).

I’ll post the menu when the chef has made his changes (hopefully small) and you can see for yourself what we’ve been eating. Then you’ll have to wait until October, when you’ll get all the recipes. Then you,too, will be able to sigh at the simple pleasures of the table.

The other thing I’ve done tonight that’s rather late eighteenth century in feel is read the latest issue of New Ceres. I was the initial creator of the world they’re using for the online magazine and the new stories are rattling good reads. I keep telling people that it costs less than a cup of coffee and a piece of cake to read the new issue. My favourite story is by Lucy Sussex. If Lucy has written a bad story I have yet to discover it - she is one stylish writer.

I do adore the New Ceres universe. I imagined it through food, of course, and the food on the planet is life or death. This issue is more about love and death on the planet, and how the secret police handle illegal technology. The food is there, in my mind, just as a draft New Ceres high society menu is sitting on my computer, waiting for me to finish the chapter of my New Ceres novel. While I work on other things, the project gets more exciting and better writers than I am develop the world in different directions. I had to mention it tonight, though, because the coincidence of writers doing amazing things using my foodie planet while I work on this Regency Gothic Banquet for an SF convention is just very amusing.

food history, recipes tests, SF writers, Conflux, Regency Gothic, banquet, New Ceres

Battling wines are good for an extraordinary number of things. The post I did on the Medieval poem has been mentioned in this month’s Carnivalesque (thank you, a_d_medievalist, for alerting me so quickly). What’s really cool about this is that it’s an edition about “food, on drink, on violence, on sex, on spectacle and pageantry, on the startling and the surprising, on chance and vicissitude” and there are some great posts linked. There’s more history than food in it, however, so I’m giving you a wine ad here for your delectation and to balance things out.

I was 2/3 of the way through a long post about Anne-Marie Nicols and Women’s History Month when my computer misbehaved and ate the post. It must’ve been the mention of chocolate within it and the analysis of why it was highly unlikely that choc chip cookies could have been invented much before they were actually invented. Nothing else explains the sudden gobbling sound and the disappearance of the post.

Anne-Marie has a series of Women’s History Month posts - one very foodie - starting here. Don’t wait for my computer to behave - just enjoy them now!

This is a quick update to let you know that there’s a new blog carnival. The Carnival of Dining Out looks very handy (and yes, one of my posts is in there) - I’m going to keep an eye on it.

I didn’t even know the Gode Cookery site gave awards for historic food writing, but they do and I have been given one. What a nice way to start the working year!

Several years ago a Sydney (Australia) organisation that works to make kosher food more interesting asked me to do them a little booklet on Medieval food for Jewish New Year. I kept all my rights on it and not too long after it appeared in print I denuded it of recipes and gave the article to my publisher for her website. It’s not my most popular article on the Trivium Publishing site (that honour belongs to the one that has descriptions of Old French insults) but the number of hits it attracted was one of the reasons I started this blog.

To celebrate my article being the recipient of the January 2007 Gode Cookery Award, I think I’ll give you one of the missing recipes.

Spiced mushrooms

500 g small button mushrooms (Swiss brown are ideal, but will need to be cut into quarters)
1 small onion
olive oil
1 pinch ground pepper
1 pinch powdered ginger
1 pinch nutmeg
2 pinches coriander seed (ground)

Peel and wash mushrooms. Boil until they shrink (c 10 minutes).

Cut onion finely, then fry it in olive oil. Keep the heat high, add the mushrooms and cook for maybe 2-3 minutes. Add salt and spices, lower the heat and cook covered until golden.

May 2007 be full of good food and delicious history. My New year present to you is that if there are any aspects of food history you would like to explore, or any recipes you have yearned after then I will do my best to oblige. You might have to let me know, though, since I am not good at the telepathy thing.

There is a little bit of news for the New Year. All the 451 Press blogs are turning a little pictoral. Watch this space and you will see pictures. If they don’t quite fit the post it will be either my sense of humour that is at fault or the fact that there were no cameras at Richard III’s coronation feast.

I am seeing 2007 in with Callebaut chocolate and fortified wine from Rutherglen. Have a happy and foodie New Year!

I’m still waiting for reports from recipe testers, but all but one of my new recipe testers have recipes. I rather suspect I will get scads of notes all at once. There are still lots of recipes to play with, so if you’ve always had a deep desire to play with food I am happy to help.

The sources this bunch of recipes come from are an 1806 cookbook and an 1830 cookbook. The 1830 cookbook is backup rather than first port of call, because it really is a fraction late.

The new old recipes given to my enthusiastic friends are:

a mushroom and egg dish
lemon puffs
heart cakes
asparagus and eggs
spinach and eggs
to ragoo asparagus
eggs and broccoli
apple pie
shoulder of lamb, stuffed
lamb steaks ragout
fricassee chicken (I was this to work because if it does it may well go with that mushroom fricassee that is #1 on the dishes we’ve tested so far)
chicken pulled
Windsor syllabub
Staffordshire syllabub

Dishes I need help with (or will cook myself) from this new list are:

to fry a neck or loin of lamb
grass lamb steaks
to force chickens
to fry chickens
lemon sauce
fennel sauce
mint sauce
gooseberry or apple trifle
raspberry or strawberry cream
small tarts and puffs of fruit
small puffs
apple puffs
lemon or orange puffs
to stew a ragout or brisket of beef
fowl with mushrooms

I still haven’t found a decent after-dinner drink. And I am suddenly reading Jane Austen with a whole new eye. She uses cooking terms far more liberally than I realised :).

My next task is to locate a dinner party scene from an Austen novel that we can use in the webpage for our Regency Gothic Feast. Nicole (Chair of the SF convention) suggested Emma, but I can’t help thinking that Northanger Abbey is the place to look first. I love the way Northanger Abbey mocks people who read fiction as an alternative reality (I get readers like that, sometimes and I give them sad bewildered looks and say “I wrote it as fictional, you know”). If any of you have favourite Jane Austen dinners, please share them!

I like the title of this blogpost. In fact, I really love the title of this post. That’s because it’s a snippet from a review of this blog: Ted Gross at Help! I Have A Fire In My Kitchen gives the blog 5 + stars in the review.

I didn’t bribe him with lots of recipes. Well, I did send him some recipes, but they weren’t by nature of a bribe :).

Check out his whole post and - while you’re at it - have a look at some of the recipes he posts. All kosher and all graded according to level of difficulty. Like all of us, he loves it when someone leaves a comment, so when you drop in, maybe let him know you’ve visited?

Just for the record ’strange but interesting’ is as accurate a description of me as it is of my blog. Well, mostly. Sometimes I’m hardly strange at all and I’m seldom interesting before lunchtime.

There will be a “retro recipe challenge” on November 17 here. They welcome submissions, and have already expressed an interest in my grandmother’s salad cream recipe.

Has anyone noticed the number of duck recipes on US foodie blogs since Tuesday? The wave of recipes celebrating the Democrat’s political victory (or Bush’s finishing his term in office as a lame-duck president) may pass by tomorrow and be forgotten except when grandparents tell their grandchildren in fifty years time “And the last time I cooked duck was in ‘06. Ah, that was an election.” If we’re really lucky, though, one recipe will capture enough people’s imagination and it will become a standard.

If anyone has a sublime duck recipe that they think ought to become a standard please send it to me. I don’t have much in the way of duck recipes and besides, new events that the public spontaneously commemorate with cooking are reasonably rare. And besides, I’m Australian so it’s not my election. I will blog your recipes and we can all have a share in the fascinating proces of watching a country add to their culinary history. Let’s all watch politics blend into foodways. Frabjous stuff.

It’s just as fascinating from my end if no-one sends me recipes, to be honest. It’s an indicator that this is just a tiny blip on the food history radar. Just as frabjous - blips are just as much the stuff of history as changes to the food calendar due to political events. They’re way harder to track, though.