What they ate!

When General Lafayette, the French hero, came to visit George Washington in the 1870s, Mary Ball Washington, Georges mother, famously prepared Gingerbread.  

The soft cake like gingerbread she offered was popular in those days, it is recorded to have been a favorite of the writer Louisa May Alcott and Emily Dickinson, and yet it seems to have made its way into extinction.  Its hard biscuit cousin being the "gingerbread" of today! It is a pity, because, after the soft yielding squares that were cooling into my kitchen became too much of a temptation, I discovered that the ancestor of the hard brittle gingerbread man is actually a superior sensation of taste and texture.  

I wanted to recreate this softer cake like biscuit, and so set about bastardising a few recipes until I was happy.  I found the rigmarole of online recipes for "Lafayette Gingerbread" ridiculous and unnecessary so using our dear Hannah Glasses recipe as a base I came up with my own.  Here is a simple recipe for 19th century gingerbread that can be whipped up in a minute, even if a processor.

Gingerbread

You'll need

3.5 cups (1 lb) of flour (I used my measuring cups for this recipe instead of the scales)

1 tsp salt

2 tsp ground ginger

1 tsp nutmeg

A good pinch of white pepper

6 oz of soft butter

6 oz of golden caster sugar

1 cup golden syrup or treacle

2/3 tbsp cream

Method

Mix everything together until you have a firm dough, like a shortbread.  Fashion into a square, as deep as a brownie tray and bake for 15-20 minutes until the top is browning at the edges.  

Leave to cool, cut into brownie size squares.

What they ate!!

God only knows where it got its name, I've hunted around and found recipes for things "in a hole" dating back to the 1600s, pidgeon in a hole, game in a hole, all with the "hole" represented by batter of the yorkshire variety! So I deam that the 'toad' is anything but good meat, the bits and pieces you're left over with, the kind of things now stuffed into sausages.  An 1861 recipe calls for the cheapest meat you can find, the sausage of today!

Anyhoo... I've always loved Toad in the Hole, it amused me as a child with its endearing title, and it is probably one of the most satisfying meals to present to your hungry family, on a day which promising sun turned to wind and rain... those cold bitten cheeks in from the cutting outdoors turn cosy and red as they eat away...

I'm delighted to include this in my What they ate spot, and I am forsaking my own recipe for an 18th century one, taken from an 18th century cookbook called "The New Art of Cookery" by Richard Briggs 1792!

Make sure to always have plenty of mashed potatoes and hardy veg to go alongside!! 

Toad in a Hole.

Mix a pound of flour with a pint and a half of milk and four eggs into a batter, put in a little salt, beaten ginger, and a little grated nutmeg, put it into a deep dish that you intend to send it to table in, take the veiney piece of beef, sprinkle it with salt, put it into the batter, bake it two hours, and send it up hot.
[The new art of cookery, Richard Briggs; 1792].

You'll need

6 Sausages (or if you must a piece of veiney beef!!)

Knob of lard

4 eggs

750mls made up of approx half milk and half water

500 gms approx of plain flour

1/4 tsp salt and same of ginger and nutmeg

Method

Whisk the milk, eggs, flour and spices together and leave to stand for at least an hour.  Put a knob of lard in a roasting dish and put into a hot oven, 220c to heat.  

Lard

In pan, melt another knob of the lard and fry the sausages for about ten minutes, until browned.  Check that the lard in the roasting tray is ready by dropping a teaspoon of batter  in, if it sizzles its ready.  Add the sausages to the tray and pour over the batter.  Replace straight back into the oven for about twenty minutes (not the two hours needed from a 1761 oven!) or until risen and golden.

Have everyone sitting around the table before removing from the oven, as it is at its most impressive while puffed up and steaming.  It will collapse into itself soon after, and you can slice it up like a tart and serve alongside mashed potato and veg!

Dear oh dear...

I was dying to make another medieval dinner, especially after watching a feast scene in 'The Tudors' so I looked through the recipes and came across "Beef Stekyes" - beef steak! I noticed though, that it was a stuffed steak concoction and thought it was worth a shot.  I prepared it all, cooked it and carved it up to eat, only to discover the steak I had purchased was tough as hell, practiably inedible! Most of it went to the dog! I had flown across to the supermarket and as usual, the meat was rubbish quality in comparison to the local butcher. 

Oh how I hate it when that happens, its such a pain in the backside, especially when you hear the sad toned "its not that bad" coming from your family as they break their teeth and bend their forks.

The stuffing however, was delicious and well worth making again, this time with better quality meat! It was really unusual, with a spicy sweetness that has been forgotten for likes of 'sage and sausage' on every table!

It looks a bit green in the picture, whereas in reality it was a yellow beige colour!

I'm going to give you the recipe for the stuffing, which I have noted they also stuff into mutton!

Stuffing for Steak!

Take raw percely and oynyonys smal-y-scree, and yolkys of Eyroun sothe hard, and marow or swette and hew alle thes to-geder smal; and take croms of white bread and bray them to-geder smal, than caste ther on poudere of gyngere amd saffroun tolle hem to-gederys.

You'll need

A handful of fresh parsley 

1 cup of breadcrumbs

1 tsp ginger

Pinch of saffron

1 cup of mashed turnip

2 eggs, mashed

1 onion, chopped finely

Method

Mash everything together in a bowl and spread on a large steak, roll and tie together, then roast in a hot oven until the meat is to your liking.  Serve sliced with creamed leeks and some mashed turnip on the side.

What they ate!

"Over-riding all these trifling discomforts was the non-stop foraging by the housewife to provide some variety in her family's meals. I cannot recall ever being literally hungry, but the country had been reliant upon imports, which were now impossible because of the sea blockade. Everything was scrupulously rationed and we ate some strange things to supplement our diet.

Tea tablets were used to make the tea look stronger; babies' dried milk or 'National' milk was added if it could be obtained; and saccharine was used as a sweetener. Some even resorted to using honey or jam. What a concoction - but we drank it. Bread was heavy and a dull grey colour, but it, too, was rationed - so we ate it.

Sweets were devised from a mixture of dried milk and peppermint essence with a little sugar or icing sugar if available. Grated carrots replaced fruit in a Christmas or birthday cake, while a substitute almond paste was made from ground rice or semolina mixed with a little icing sugar and almond essence. Dried egg powder was used as a raising agent, and this same dried egg could be reconstituted and fried, yielding a dull, yellow, rubbery-like apology for the light and fluffy real thing - but there was nothing else, so we ate it.

Bean pies and lentil rissoles provided protein to eke out our meagre meat ration, and the horse-meat shop, which previously had sold its products only for dogs, now bore a notice on some of its joints occasionally, 'Fit for Human Consumption'. This horse-meat was not rationed, but it did have to be queued for and sure enough eventually it appeared on our table. It had to be cooked for a long time and even then it was still tough. Nevertheless, it did not get thrown out.

In complete contrast, one highlight for me was the coming of spam from America. It was an oasis in our desert of mediocrity; an elixir in our sea of austerity. It seems to me that it was meatier, juicier, and much tastier than it is now. (Tricks of memory again, no doubt.) We ate it in sandwiches; we ate it fried with chips; cold with salad; chopped in spam-and-egg pies, until, of course, it ceased to provide the variety we longed for, but I never tired of it." 

- Anne Butcher

So back in time again, we go! This time to the 1940s, with war raging all around, and the British and Irish governments issuing ration books to households around the country! 

I did a bit of research, along with dipping into my ration cookbook, and, not being able to find any Spam for sale in our local supermarket, decided on Corned Beef instead and to make some sort of hash.  Its something I cook myself, with fresh corned beef and plenty of potatoes, so I was intrigued as to how they would have made it in a time when there was few onions, hardly any potatoes and tins of meat! 

So this is the recipe I chose, as it was one which the ingredients were available in war time, and it was a bit unusual and fancy, often served on a Sunday!!

Layered Hash

You'll need

Twelve thin slices of corned beef

1 small green cabbage

2 leeks

2 tins of haricot beans

Half a pint of gravy (Made from bisto!)

1 tsp english mustard

Method

Fry the cabbage and leeks in a small bit of oil until soft.  Then layer the greens, beans and slices of corned beef in a lasagne dish. 

 Mix the mustard with the gravy and pour over the top.  Bake for 1 hour in a medium hot oven.  

This was a lovely meal, hot, comforting and very tasty.  I'd imagine, with the little they had in wartimes, that taste came before anything in the meal stakes! 

What they ate!

In 1747 a lady called Hannah Glasse published a book called the Art of Cooking.  Hannahs story after that is a sad one, ending in the debtors prison but her book was a huge success (last published in 1863), and it is in which she recorded the popular dessert known as "A Pupton of Apples"... 

I have never heard the word pupton, and immediately looked it up in my Word History dictionary... It wasn't there!! I googled it, no luck either except to see a historian on a closed website define it as "a dish where a ragout..." - A dish where a ragout what? 

The curious thing about cooking these ancient dishes is that, a)there are no "heres one we made earlier" pictures, and b) there is no method.  The book from which I am sourcing my recipes, offers modern versions of the dish but it is the artistic italiscised original recipe that I am attemping so I really wanted to know what a Pupton was.  Was it a bowl of sorts? A texture? WHAT IS IT??? So I googled and googled and googled!

The closest I got was with this, a glossary of 17th century terminology where it lists Pupton,

PUPTON, POUPETON: These are worth studying. One or two of the fish puptons, such as pupton of salmon, might be adapted for today. They seem rather like the hot fish terrines recently made popular by the more progressive French chefs. The French poupeton probably came from the Italian polpettone, a meat roll, or polpa, a hash. (John Nott, 1726)

So from that I deduced that I was dealing with a terrine of sorts, something that would be baked and then chilled.  Right so... Off we go!

A Pupton of Apples

"Pare some apples. Take out the cores and put them in a skillet; to a mugful heaped put in a quarter of a pound of sugar, and two spoonfuls of water; do them over a slow fire, keep them stirring, add a little cinnamon and when it is quite thick and like a marmalade, let it stand quite cool; beat up the yolks of five eggs and stir in a cup of grated bread and good bit of fresh butter, and then form it into what shape you please and bake it in a slow oven, and then turn it upside down on a plate for a second course." - Hannah Glasse 1747

You'll need

5 Large apples, peeled, cored and chopped into small pieces

1 cup of caster sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

2 tbsp water

5 egg yolks, beaten

1 cup breadcrumbs (freshly crumbed if possible)

Large knob of butter

Method

Place the apples, with the water, sugar and cinnamon into a hot pan.  Stir over the heat until the apples are very soft.  Remove from the heat and add the breadcrumbs and the butter.  Stir together.  Allow to cool.  Beat the egg yolks (I added a splash of cream) and add to the cooled mixture.  Shape into a log, or pat down into a cake tin and bake at 180c for 25 minutes or until golden brown.  Serve hot with whipped cream.

This was absolutley delicious, like a caramel pudding.  It was so easy to make, and I think the next time I will make it into a pudding shape, it would look really sweet served on a plate with dribbles of cream running onto the plate! 

What they ate!

So I'm starting my experimental history of food posts, and I have to say, I have not enjoyed cooking so much since I was in school taking Domestic Science.  I decided to go all the way back to the time of Henry the Eighth for my first venture, and the dish was so unfamiliar, it really reminded me why my love of cooking started all the way back in my teens. The relationship between ingredients is so wonderful, and I was amused and intrigued by the ban on garlic - which did not make an appearance until the late 1600s (and then was never eaten by ladies!!) - and I was astonished by the amount of Saffron in every dish! I would have presumed that Saffron was a fairly recent spice, for the British Isles, but in medieval cooking it is everywhere! In the medieval times apparently, they loved their food very colourful and used Saffron and cochineal left right and centre! 

So I looked through the recipes I have here, and settled on a main course called Meat Custard. Sounds horrific doesn't it? Well, it was really lovely, and everyone commented on how different it was to our modern food, how the tastes were unusual yet not of any world cuisine they could think of.  

What did I think? I really liked Meat Custard.  I absolutely loved making it, I felt close to my ancestors (me granny was english!), I could picture them in their bright airy kitchens, rolling up their sleeves and chatting away in the lovely poetic 'olde' english language... and it tasted great too! The sauce was delicious, the meat custard delicious, and everything just worked so well.  These dishes would have had to have been popular to have been recorded, so it would seem Meat Custard was a days of olde Lasagne!! 

Should you try it? Sure! Its not difficult to make, it is good hot or cold and Bill tells me its great in a sandwich - so why not! 

Meat Custard and Saffron Sauce

Soupes of Salomere : Take boylid beef & boylid pork & hew yt an grynd it; then take cowe mylke, & Eyround y-swonge, & Safroun & mynce Percyly bladys, & grynd mace an pepir in, & caste there to & let boyle alle y-fere ; & dresse uppe-on a clothe...

You'll need

500gms Beef mince

100 gms Pork mince

Handful fresh parsley, chopped

Pinch saffron

Ground pepper 

2 cups of breadcrumbs

5 eggs

1 cup of milk

Half a cup of walnuts

1 tsp Ground nutmeg

Method

Fry the beef and pork together with the spices until brown.  Strain any water or oil away, and place in a bowl with the breadcrumbs, and nuts and mix.  Beat the eggs and milk together and add to the mix.  Pour into a lasagne tray, loosely cover with foil and bake for 40-50 minutes until a knife comes out clean.  Allow to cool slightly before slicing.

For the Sauce

Pinch of saffron

1 tbsp flour

1 tbsp butter

125mls double cream

Melt the butter in the pan and add the flour (this is not strictly 1300s method, but I didn't have the thickening agent they used, rice flour, and so I made a rue...!). Stir in the cream and add the saffron.  Stir until the sauce is a nice shade of yellow and thick.  

Serve the meat custard with new potatoes and haricot beans, fried in oil.  Top with plenty of sauce.