Food History

Today I’m better. Not well, but better. In fact, I’m well enough to catch up in my reporting of the food testing. We’re almost through that stage of preparations for the banquet, as you know, so I had better catch up!!

There were two sweet recipes, one of which worked but not with this menu and the other of which might work, but needs further testing and has other problems. Naturally (since I’m cruel and heartless) I’m not going to give you the details of the recipe that might appear, but I thought you might like to hear the tester’s comments. It ‘was the victim of a unit mismatch’ which is a lesson to us all (or something). What happened was that the tester made the easiest error of all. He read ‘tablespoons’ in the recipe and used tablespoons to measure ingredients – but not all tablespoons are equal.

He asked how alcoholic desserts fit in with Prohibition cooking and I have to answer “out of sight of the law.” This is probably the reason that recipe will be dropped, which is a shame. It would be good in other respects, though, so I’m hanging onto it for a wistful moment.

Dawn tested another potential dessert recipe: Creole Pineapple. She liked it enough to have several servings. My thoughts are that I will take it to the next round ie test it against the other surviving desert recipe. I think the flavours might not be quite right with the icecream, is the problem, but I need to make it to check.

This sometimes happens: I get a good result from an experienced cook and have to make the dish again to find out where it fits. Of the three desserts just tested, only one will make it to even this stage. We still don’t know what dessert will feature on the menu, though the rest of it is beginning to shape up.

I just checked my calendar from last year and we’re ahead of ourselves. This is essential, however, as this year we have cocktails to test. I need ten really scrummy cocktail recipes by mid June and can’t start testing until May 1. If you’re interested in cocktail recipes, please feel free to volunteer, and I’ll contact you in May. I still have a few fridge magnets, too, though they’re going fast.

Today was the first Big Day. I put together six pages that covered the work that everyone’s done to date on the Prohibition banquet and Karen (the Chair of Conflux) and I went to The Marque to talk to the chef.

I felt underdressed sitting at a table next to someone in full chef regalia and I felt very much like explaining things in French. I defend myself with the excuse that it was his accent, but really, it was the meeting being on April Fool’s Day.

It was a serious meeting, despite the date. We made some serious decisions.

I’m very happy with the new chef. He has cooked historical food before – he did a Titanic meal last year, in fact. When I talked about the changing fat content in milk and the move from rich to subtle, he understood. He also understood French influence and how far to take it. In fact, his understanding was sufficient so that I finally feel I can stop worrying about the main soup and about the sorbets. All I need to do is indicate the most popular garnishes for that soup now, and he already knows the preferred sorbets.

My feeling from the meeting was that it’s going to be a very fine meal indeed.

My feeling from today’s other meeting, with the functions manager, is that the rooms will work well. Their standard table format will look just fine and when the down lights are turned off, the light comes from chandeliers and very Art Deco looking wall lamps. With white tablecloths and people in their finery, the room is going to look extraordinarily smart.

The truth about creating historic banquets is that the historian can only do so much unless she is also trained as a chef (which this historian is not). It doesn’t matter how well I interpret sources or how many languages I read or how much I understand the trade and culture and society, my actual cooking is of good amateur standard. The big moment is always when the chef sees what I’ve done and nods and says ‘This is possible.” The ideal situation is what happened today, when he gets a glint in his eye and takes all the papers away saying “I will play with this.”

He’s going to take ownership and that means – given how excellent he is at his job – that the food will be divine. He understood exactly what I was saying about the look and feel and flavours. He understood about the problem areas. He didn’t try to brush over anything or dismiss me. In short, both of us want to see what happens next.

Tonight I have a bunch of test results. Some of my testers are getting really experienced at this and anticipate the questions I was going to ask them. Jane, who has tested most of the canapés has done me particularly proud and solved a whole host of problems with one simple email. She understands that it’s not all about one person’s palate, and has reported back on four different people, plus she talks about looks and how she interpreted the recipe. Stuart did the same. I guess working with me over time means they know it will save them time and me effort if I get everything I need to know at once. It has really cut down the testing time, too, because they know what they’re doing with historical recipes. In fact, I’ve been particularly lucky with my testers this year.

The menu still has some problems, but it inches ever closer to joy. This is good, because other facets of my life are less joyous.

So, let me bring you closer to happiness or, as Jane said about a nut recipe ‘oh my – I thought my mouth had died and gone to heaven.’ Now you have to wait seven months (or thereabouts) to find out exactly what nut recipe sent Jane to heaven, but hey, anticipation isn’t such a bad thing.

The other thing she said about the nuts was that they were sophisticated and yummy, which actually applies to everything so far. Subtle, sophisticated, delicate: these words occur over and over again in the comments of testers. Well, except for the soup testers. I still have problems with soups. One good one only, and that has a strong flavour, which may well conflict with the subtle sophistication of elsewhere. Hopefully I’ll get another half dozen soups tested and maybe they’ll allay my anxiety about this single course.

In terms of the rest of the menu, it really is looking rather possible. We have canapés and we have the dish that appears on the table when folks sit down and we have to make a selection between 3 delectable mains. We still haven’t looked at sorbets (but I’m not so worried about that) and a dessert is looking possible but not quite there (nothing really stands out yet) but the icecreams… the icecreams are divine. If I were persuading people to come to the banquet, it would be on the strength of that one dish alone.

I don’t know how I managed to post the same post twice, once blue and once in a perfectly normal font. I hope it didn’t confuse anyone!

Update: It wasn’t me. It was Wordpress. I feel relieved :).

Recipe testing is the name of the game right now. My SF convention may not be until October, but there are a dozen of us working madly on the menu for the banquet right now.

I’m still waiting for results on canapés, but I’m not too worried about them because they’re not really very complicated and I can rustle them up myself at the last minute if everything else goes wrong. I know the dish that goes after them and I know the exact flavour mix they need to achieve, and most of the recipes are surprisingly familiar. This means I won’t start worrying about canapés until everything else is sorted.

The soup is not sorted. The soup, in fact, is the gaping hole in the menu. We have one possible fallback recipe, but it’s complicated and took an experienced cook two attempts to sort it out. All the other soups so far, though, are just not good. I need to find out why, so I’ve asked all the soup testers if they would mind brining their tests a little forward. I need to find out if it’s the nature of the soups or if it’s the nature of the ones that were tested early on. One of them was the nature of ingredients in Australia, and all it needed was a bit of constructive thought about how to achieve a basic flavour. I’m, hoping the others will be that straightforward, but right now I don’t know, and right now I’m worried.

The main course still has to be selected, but it’s between good and better. I would still like at least one more vegetarian option before I make my final selections, but we’re in a good position even if nothing else comes through.

I’ve looked at sorbet recipes and decided that they only need testing if we’ve someone who yearns and longs to make sorbets. The main decision is flavour (sorbet recipes all look a bit the same – at least the ones I found), and that entirely depends on what comes before and what comes after.

We have two lovely dessert recipes that can’t go on the menu because they just don’t fit: one is my coffee custard and another is an amazing frozen dessert with glacé fruit. The coffee is too strong for the icecream and the frozen dessert is too icecreamy to contrast with the icecream. My latest dessert report (arrived a few minutes ago) is for a rather fancy stuffed apple. It looks quite possible, and rather elegant. The tester who produced it also came up trumps last year with the beef sirloin, so I’m beginning to wonder if the good recipes gravitate towards Stuart naturally.

To make up for the complications with the dessert, our icecream tester has done everyone proud. She has found the perfect French Neapolitan. I won’t tell you about it now, except that it is subtle and delicious and perfect for where it fits into the meal.

And that’s where we’re at. Very close to a solid draft of the menu. There’s still quite a bit of work before the final menu, but (except for the soup) life feels less insecure than it did a few weeks ago. When the menu is finalized (not until may or later) I shall give you one of the yummy but excluded recipes, as a little celebration.

Every week after food history, the students who are testing recipes for the Prohibition Banquet come up to me with their questions and their results. This week one set of results added into another and I am waxing rather merry.

For the Prohibition Banquet we need vegetarian options. It was never going to be as easy as last year, when we just rolled those options into the masses of food that go on a table at the same time, for the Regency Gothic banquet. There was a moment of debate with the chef, who needed to see this, but that was all. All I and my testers had to do was find dishes that went well with the sirloin and we were laughing.

This year there need to be real vegetarian choices in a couple of places. The big one is the main course, naturally. Finding dishes that made a substantial stand-alone course was always going to be a little tricky, because it was just not a facet of the sort of dinner menu I’ve been using as my 1921 base.

What I did was find lunch and brunch dishes that looked possible. These are the dishes that flooded in this week. There are maybe three more out there that might be useful, but the worst is over for that section of the menu. I have three options to test against each other and get new tasters to check. I might have four or five, because the egg dishes are proving surprisingly palatable to my testers, but that’s it. The next round for that bit of the menu is almost there. And it looks as if the ice cream dilemma might be solved next week, too.

Just a few more steps to go and we can finish looking at new recipes and move on to finding out how it all fits together. I really looking forward to it.

Having carefully downloaded and selected my photos of the Show and its food, I can’t write you any of those promised posts. Not for a few days, anyhow. The reasons are rather good, though.

Some of them you know already. You already know that I’m teaching my food history course right now. Tomorrow we’re looking at the Middle Ages, but we also might be looking at historical apple varieties. I’m hoping to get a half dozen of them (fresh and crisp and just in season) from Pialligo Apples, first thing tomorrow. I also hope to get enough bullaces to make much alcoholic beverage to drink in two years time, but I guess that’s a separate issue, even if the bullaces are older than the varieties of apples in season right now. In fact, the class will meet some bullaces and other plums as well as the apples. I might even let them have my favourite Japanese tonguetwister, which entirely illuminates the relationship between the various types of stone fruit. I’ll report back on all this tomorrow, probably. I will be very joyous if I can get the apples and rather sorrowful if I can’t, since this is one of those weeks of much temperament.

In between the teaching, I’ve been testing more recipes for that Prohibition banquet. In the oven right now is a coffee custard. It smells good and it looks good, but it will be an hour before I can find out just how delectable it tastes. I’m very optimisitic, though, mainly because the basic proportions are beautiful.

I couldn’t find enough deep containers for the bain-marie, so I put one shallow container in the oven. This was a mistake. Before it even started baking, that particular custard was overflowing with water. Just goes to show that you can improvise almost anything in the kitchen, but there are some directions where improvisation should not go.

It’s been so long since I’ve strained anything the old-fashioned way that my lovely cloth for straining was curiously fungal. It’s going to have two hot washes before I introduce it back into my kitchen and even then I will have a triple-think about it. I may just have to get a new cloth.

That’s the trouble with days when moods swing: things go all kinds of funny. I think I’m due a quiet night tonight. Tomorrow should be good, starting with an orchard trip and ending with my food history class.

Right now isn’t half bad, despite my imperfect cooking. How can life be bad when the room I’m in is suddenly full of the delectable fragrance of coffee?

Today several reportable things happened, which means you get a post all about what happened today rather than anything more deep and meaningful. Mind you, I think it’s deep and meaningful when a recipe tester reports back.

Rachel tested a tomato soup for me. What was particularly wonderful about her test is that it suddenly illuminated the underlying nature of the cuisine for me. This happened with each of the other periods we ran banquets for and it’s an important thing. It means I can balance dishes and be much more certain about getting the flavour balance right.

What she said that gave me my little epiphany was “It smelled delicious as it was cooking but on first taste I was somewhat underwhelmed. Later I figured that was because it was too hot. It was much subtler than I expected, not a “hearty” soup.”

There are two important elements to her report. The first is the subtlety of the flavour: this is not the nineteenth century and it’s not England and the palate shift is discernible. The second is the temperature it ought to be served at. It makes so much sense for a restaurant soup to not have to be served burning hot. I don’t know yet if this is standard, or just that this soup tastes better a little less hot: it’s something I must watch out for when the other soup testers report back.

The other thing that happened today was that I finally unloaded the pictures from my camera. This means I have a whole heap of food history related photos from the Royal Canberra Show. I’m sorely tempted to do a series of posts on them, just because I can. Watch this space … and tremble.

Tonight I’ve been testing dishes for the Prohibition banquet again. I have a vegetarian dish that would be perfect … for brunch. The rest was better.

Testing dishes makes me tired, so today you’re getting some more biscuit and scone recipes for our ever-growing collection. These are from 1904, from The Blue Grass Cook Book, compiled by Minnie C Fox.

Beaten Biscuits (more…)

Today I updated my testing notes for the Prohibition Banquet.

From the diner’s point of view the banquet is a long way off, but the hotel chef needs information considerably sooner in order to plan their first reconstructed historic meal.

At my end, things have suddenly got simpler. I’m emailing most of the testers to say “No need to test any more meat and vegetable dishes,” though there are still vegetarian dishes out there to sort out for the main course, as I don’t have anything suitable for vegetarians yet.

The ice cream and sorbet testing has slowed down a little, but the preliminary tests mean that some of these recipes won’t need testing any more either. I’ve made a note to see if I can chat with my ice cream expert on Thursday. Given that her knowledge is rapidly outgrowing mine (which is the joy of the testing) it would be best to work on this together. I know what has to fit into the rest of the meal – she knows what’s most likely to need testing.

The numbers are getting a little worrying. They won’t become unworrying until I start getting more reports back from testers. This is the month where it feels it could all go wrong, even though really, there’s nothing to worry about. The thing is, I started off with 5,000 pages of recipes and all those menus. Now I have exactly five pages of recipes not out there being tested, and some of those recipes will be taken by my students on Thursday and then some more by me. That leaves … not much.

When it starts flooding back, I can start playing with tastes and thinking about what needs to go to the next stage of testing. Some things ought to go straight through to the final menu. Until that happens, though, I will worry. This is the six weeks when, really, everything is out of my hands.

What have I been up to today? Why do I look so very content with life?

The answers are all to do with the Prohibition banquet.

My hardest working tester picked me up after work and we did a quick shopping trip. At 7 pm we finished cooking and at 10 pm we finished eating.

What we were doing tonight was something very special. I had talked to my friend about that possibility of reducing the number of dishes to be tested by using a different approach. This was when we were talking about the markets the other day. She asked “Can I help?”

What we’ve done is sort out the main course. Not entirely. We still have some testing. But we’ve worked out what sort of dishes were standard and why. We have the hook to hang the rest of the menu around. And we only have one more test for the whole course. This is because we cooked an incredible number of dishes in that short time.

Actually, she cooked. I worked out the recipes, gave historically useful advice and was her kitchen assistant.

Some of the issues we dealt with were types of oil, how to cook a perfect roast tenderloin, what Madeira tastes like, why commercial breadcrumbs flake dishes, why kittens adore potato. We also worked out that shape was an important element in the look of a plate. We discovered an amazing potato recipe, a superb sauce recipe and some delightful vegetable recipes, but mostly we looked at the shape and taste of the core of the menu.

This means I can talk to the hotel with many fewer qualifications. It means we can price the menu. It means we’ve made some very good progress.

Today was market day and icecream day.

Icecream day first. Two new icecreams for the Prohibition banquet. Another peach and another raspberry. The raspberry got a thumbs up from me and a thumbs down by Kate. It has a slightly funny texture, as does the peach. I consulted my icecream guru and she suggested that the custard simply needed to be cooked longer ie the recipe was basically a good one. We had an interesting talk about the need to break down the starch in a custard-based icecream to get a good texture.

The market was partly about regular shopping, partly about doing some identificatory work on aspects of Australian cooking (no doubt it will emerge here in due course, just when you think everything in food history is all about the written word) but also very much about the Prohibition banquet.

I don’t have as many volunteers this year and besides, the shape of the menu is entirely different (over a hundred years and a continent apart – the differences are very obvious) and so my approach to testing is different. I started off with 5000+ pages of recipes and menu advice. More than last year, because there are more cookbooks and many more advice manuals around for the 1920s.

I got rid of breakfast recipes and lunch recipes and snack recipes and recipes that are entirely impossible to make in Australia. My shortlist, however, was well over a hundred pages, with an average of six recipes a page. This year I don’t have the resources to test that many and besides, it’s really not necessary.

There are some parts of a New York restaurant meal in the 1920s that are fairly standard and only need maybe a half dozen recipes checked to establish the best way of cooking something. There are other parts of the menu that have clear restrictions round them. My way of dealing with that this year is to focus on the high prestige dishes that are able to be made in modern Australian kitchens. In other words, I’m testing far fewer substantial dishes.

On the other hand, lots of sauces need testing. Each time I test a different meat dish (the main course) I’ll test all the key sauces that would be served with it, along with a few standard vegetables. Not many tests, but more complex ones.

Each year I do this, I find out quite different thing about food in history. The testing and the evaluation against the food available near me and its quality helps me understand how a period and place develops its prestige food, for instance. I begin to understand the social side of food in more depth. I’m also learning that, no matter how much I learn, I’ve still only seen the tip of a very, very big iceberg.

I was thinking today about icecream. I should get some more soon, and the weather is warm and sticky and I’m watching my waistline. Why am I thinking of icecream and watching my waistline? And why am I expecting some?

It’s banquet testing time. The first thing I’m getting sorted out are the interstices between courses. I know this is a bit of a radical approach, but I reckon that if I have 2-3 sorbets to choose from and 2-3 icecreams then it will be easier to test for what bigger food goes in between those sorbets and icecreams. I’ve already got rid of a dozen soup recipes simply because the flavour will be wrong with the dish that appears on the table as everyone sits down to dine.

The 1920s banquet is such a different beastie from the Regency one. In some ways it’s much easier, because so many of the recipes are a bit familiar. In other ways it’s harder, because I can’t compromise on service to save the hotel money. For this banquet to work, I have to sit down with the chef early and work out what suits both of us.

It’s a different chef, too. We’re at the Marque Hotel this year, not Rydges. The Rydges chef was amazing and did the most brilliant Regency banquet, but alas, the rest of the hotel wasn’t that good and left a lot of disgruntled Convention goers.

So I’m thinking icecreams and sorbets and suddenly remembering that I was supposed to tell everyone who might like a seat at the 1920s evening that the new Conflux site is up and running and we are taking registrations and that there’s a totally wonderful progress report that tells you all about everything and… I really need a scoop of 1920s icecream, right now.

Happy New Year, everyone. May you all have beautiful and delightful years, full of everything you want and need and missing all misery.

My New Year’s Eve dinner was a traditional Aussie BBQ (in more than traditional Aussie heat). We ate early, because even a medium dinner in thirty-three degree heat requires the fullness of the evening to digest.

Why on earth do we do this to ourselves? Why don’t we simply live on leafy greens and slivers of ice for a month instead of eating full meals? It’s food history, of course. Australia was settled by the British and every time we eat a meal full of meat and bread and potato, we’re remembering our past, even when we don’t quite realise it.

What was wonderful about my New Year’s Eve barbecue was the way it summed up my Old Year. We had hamburgers with beetroot and accompanied by potato salad.. The small sausages were from my favourite local farm and we ate them with home made Southern ketchup, preserved in my mother’s forty-five year old Fowler’s Vacola kit. The dessert was raspberry icecream cooked to a 1920s recipe by Kate. It’s perfect on a hot day - the ideal summer icecream, light and with a flavour that fills the mouth.

I didn’t want to share it, but my freezer bulged prior to dismantlement. My New year present to myself is a new secondhand refrigerator big enough to deal with my lifestyle – my current one is 270 litres, 1/3 of which is unusable and which is patently just not working and which I equally patently dying of old age. From tomorrow I shall have enough space for all the homemade icecream my friends give me!

One very important bit of New Year’s Day was also to do with food memories. I had black eyed peas and broccolini to toast my best friend, who is from Arkansas. The broccolini was because Southern greens are just not that easy to come by in Australia in midsummer. I made a rather yummy sauce for this dish and it made a delightful small dinner for a very hot day.

I celebrated a number of friends and some family and remembered foodways through my meals. That’s why they were perfect. The flavours were pretty perfect too, but flavours without meaning are far less vivid.

Did any of you have good food memories in your end-of-year or beginning-of-year meals?

I was so certain today was Friday that when I discovered it wasn’t, I floundered for about two hours. I solaced myself with a 1920s ice cream, the very first product of the Prohibition menu tests. Kate made two ice creams initially, although she has taken some more because summer is such a perfect time to test ice cream recipes. Yesterday she thought I should taste them too. She made a white peach one and a raspberry. (more…)