Food History

The reason you had no recipe last night was that I was busy Star Trekking. There was a sad lack of food in the film. I’m making up for it tonight by using a recipe from Martha Washington’s 18th century book. Except I’m cheating. Madly.

Her recipe for curd pudding uses fresh curd (obviously) where I am using my third tub of Perfect Italiano cheese (kindly donated, as I explained in the first post). It’s not a sweet cake by modern standards, so I used the savoury ricotta, which is basically ricotta with a little salt. This means I can skip the salt bit of the recipe. I’m also using butter and egg yolk, which aren’t part of the recipe at all. The egg yolk is left over from the other night and needs finishing (so it’s one egg and 2 egg yolks – you could use 2 full eggs and get a lighter version) The butter replaces marrow and suet. It ’s not only the vegetarian version – it’s the kosher version.

From an historical point of view, this is not a good exchange. Firstly, suet and marrow add more flavour than butter and two flavours, where I only have one. It will not be quite as sophisticated a dish as it should have been. Secondly, suet and marrow are important to English and English colonial cooking in the eighteenth century. I am distorting the recipe beyond my historical intolerance.

I’m doing this for a reason. An important reason. So many cooks do what I’m doing. They say “I can’t eat this” and “I won’t eat that” or “I have this left over.” For personal cooking, this is fine. But what you’re cooking is between one and twenty steps removed from the dish as it was known at the time. How far it is depends on how likely and close the substitutions are. Butter is fine for the cooking for the period, but not really as a replacement for marrow and suet.

Having said that, the dish as a modern one and the ricotta in it will stand and fall according to the taste. Butter and cheese and currants are not the same as suet and cheese and marrow and currants. My taste memory kept prompting me to add sugar with the ingredients I used, and I may have to sprinkle sugar on at the end: important savoury dimensions have been lost with my substitutions. It’s in the oven now, and I’m dead curious to see how it comes out.

Curd pudding

1 tub savoury ricotta
1 generous oz shredded butter
1/3 teaspoon nutmeg
a small sprinkle rose water
2 eggs or one egg and leftover egg yolks (beaten)
2-3 tablespoons plain flour
currants to taste (I love currants, so I used about 1/3 cup)

Bake in a moderate oven for half an hour.

RESULT: Really yummy. It would make a good dessert (especially with double cream) for those who don’t like their sweetness to be all sugar. The substitutes may make this dish inauthentic, but they were worth doing anyhow.