Regency Gothic Banquet food testing update
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!
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