Liverpool Curry.

The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations (commonly known as the Crystal Palace Exhibition) in London in 1851 made the country, at least for a time, a tourist destination. The visitors seemed to come for some years afterwards, and at least one author (who is not named) felt the need (or saw the niche) for a travel book. The American stranger’s guide to London and Liverpool at Table was published in 1859, and not only advised ‘how to dine and order a dinner, and where to avoid dining’, but also gave ‘practical hints to butlers and cooks’ – and threw in some recipes from the Royal Yacht Squadron Steward’s Manual. It all sounds as if the author wasn’t really sure who his target audience was, doesn’t it?

The author was, however, aware that the shared heritage and common language between the two countries did not obviate all cultural confusion. He spent some time explaining the mysteries of “Curry” to his American readers (the English considering themselves experts on the topic of course, on account of owning India at the time). He is clear and dogmatic on the fine point that Bengal, Madras, and Bombay Curries differ in the details, and pompous and pedantic in the associated footnote.

Speaking of Curries, it is lamentable to witness this aromatic dish served in Europe as an Entrée, sometimes with scarcely any rice, and that in the same dish. The rice should he abundant and carefully boiled; handed round in a separate dish, and then the Curry. It should never appear until the second course, and is an admirable substitute for Game, when the latter is not in season, or to be had. In India this dish is indispensable both at tiffin and dinner daily. It is a hors d’oeuvre that people never tire of, when properly concocted and served à l’Oriental, being in fact the Pâté de Foies-Gras of India. When partaking of Curry, always use a Dessert spoon instead of a fork; the use of the latter betokens a “Griffin”.

There is so much worthy of comment in this short opinion piece that it is hard to know where to start. His use of a capital for ‘Curry’ in every instance; Curry as a second course dish, never, God forbid! as an Entrée; Curry as an hors d’oeuvre; Curry as the ‘Pâté de Foies-Gras of India’; the entire concept of ‘Curry’ as an ‘Indian’ dish when it is unequivocally Anglo-Indian. I am sure those of you with a heritage based in the Indian subcontinent are falling about laughing or crying right now. I would love to hear your thoughts.

The last word intrigues me. It was clearly an undesirable thing to be a griffin, or at least poor form to demonstrate griffinism. I understood a griffin to be a fabulous, imaginary beast, half eagle, half lion – so how does that fit here?

The OED gives an alternative meaning of ‘griffin’ as ‘A European newly arrived in India, and unaccustomed to Indian ways and peculiarities; a novice, new-comer, greenhorn.’ One of the supporting quotations notes ‘Young men, immediately on their arrival in India, are termed griffins, and retain this honour until they are twelve months in the country.’ So, there we have it. Or at least, we have half of it. The definition begs the question of ‘why griffin?’. Why not unicorn or centaur or phoenix or dragon? Is there an Indian dialect word that is similar in sound and meaning?

There was no agonising dilemma in chosing the recipe for the day from this book. The delightful dissonance produced by the collision of words in the name of the dish was instantly irresistible (methinks in inverse proportion to the degree of irresistibility of the dish itself.)

Liverpool Curry.

à la Parry.

Form two table spoonfuls of curry powder into paste. Cut up a rabbit or fowl into small pieces an inch long, rub them over with the paste, fry the meat with butter, and four onions sliced, to a deep brown; then add about two-thirds of a pint of good gravy, and let simmer for twenty mintues, remove all fat and skim, and put by cold; when wanted stew gently for four hours.
Mix together 2 spoonfuls of cream, 1 spoonful of Soy, a tea cupful of sour apples, or a table spoonful of craberries, 1 of flour, Dessert spoon of salt, a bit of butter, which add to the curry half an hour before it is taken from the fire.
When dished up add the juice of half a lemon. In India ham is eaten with curry and pickles, &c., to suit the taste of partakers; the remains of a duck, or of game, all come well into season, if you have them

Quotation for the Day.

Where life is colorful and varied, religion can be austere or unimportant. Where life is appallingly monotonous, religion must be emotional, dramatic and intense. Without the curry, boiled rice can be very dull.
C. Northcote Parkinson.

Egg-O-See

With a bit of luck, on this day in 1914, you might have been aboard the SS Minnesota of the Chicago-Milwaukee-Buffalo Line. The breakfast sounds substantial, and is a fine demonstration of the inroads of commercial breakfast cereals into the traditional fare for this meal.

Breakfast

Thursday, July 9th, 1914

Fruit in Season Stewed Fruit

Rolled Oats      Manioca

Egg-O-See     Force     Maple Flakes, Toasted

Boiled Eggs

Fried Eggs or Eggs à la Turque

Fried Spring Lamb Chops, Breaded

Tomato Sauce

Smithfield Sausage

On Toast

Hash Brown Potato à la Spain

Baked Potatoes

Toast, Dry or Buttered Home Made Rolls

Coffee English Breakfast Tea

Uncolored Japanese Tea

Coffee, Boston Style        Milk       Postum Cereal

The proprietary breakfast cereals include the Postum which is listed with the beverages. Postum was a cereal-based substitute for the evil and over-stimulating drink of coffee, and was invented in the late nineteenth century by C.W. Post – one of the converts of John Harvey Kellogg.

We have previously considered Force – also on another steamship menu (and I was much enlightened on this topic by bloggers’ comments on this, thankyou). The Egg-O-See and Maple Flakes remain to be understood.


The Maple Flakes are presumably Mapl-Flake, a direct contribution of the Kellogg family’s Battle Creek company, who invented the whole concept of breakfast cereals in the first place. They are, according to the advertisements of the time “simply the Flakes of the finest Washington white wheat, flavored with pure Vermont maple syrup’ (takes 96 hours to make)”, also conveniently made and served in “leading hotels, clubs and dining car systems” in “‘dainty one-portion package, wrapped in embossed onion-skin paper and sealed with gold seals.”

The Egg-O-See (a strange name?) is yet another offering from Battle Creek. The flaked breakfast cereal‘takes selected wheat and makes it delicious and digestive.’ Advertisements in 1905 informed readers of its popularity with the information that “more than 3600 miles of Egg-O-See are manufactured and consumed annually, that is, over twenty-eight million packages are sold’ (1905), and of its deliciousness with the slogan “Dere aint go’n’er be no leavin’s”.

There is much else to ponder upon in this menu. What is ‘uncolored Japanese tea’? What, specifically, is ‘Boston Style’ coffee? How was the manioca prepared?

While I search out a recipe for my preferred dish for the morning – the Eggs à la Turque, I give you the following idea – nicer than manioca perhaps?


Delicious Maple Sauce.
2 egg yolks.
¼ cup maple syrup.
½ cup whipped cream.
Beat the yolks very light, putting in a pinch of salt; put in the syrup and cook till the spoon coats over when you dip in; then cool and beat in the whipped cream and serve very cold.
A Cookbook for a Little Girl, 1905

Quotation for the Day.

Life is like a grapefruit. Well, it's sort of orangy-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It's got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have a half a one for breakfast.
Douglas Adams.

Stick-jaw.

I always thought that ‘stick-jaw’ was toffee. I was right, but only partially. It seems that before it was toffee, stick-jaw was a pudding. Not a delicious pudding, but a pudding whose sole purpose was to occupy space in the digestive system and provide calories – especially to those living in institutions of various kinds. It was apparently ranked alongside scrap or resurrection pie as the bane of the nineteenth century boarding schoolboy’s life.


The dictionary describes stick-jaw as “a pudding or sweetmeat difficult of mastication’. To a schoolboy it was “pudding crammed down our throats to take away our appetite for the meat to follow.”

Sometimes it was a simple boiled pudding with the solidity and flavourlessness that only large amounts of suet and completely absent fruit (sugar, butter, eggs, spices) can provide. Often, like resurrection pie, stick-jaw pudding was made from scraps – in this case the scraps of bread accumulated over the course of the week.

Bread pudding, properly made, has a lot going for it of course. Here is a nice version from The Accomplished Housekeeper, and Universal Cook (1717), by T. Williams

A Bread Pudding.
Boil half a pint of milk with a little cinnamon, four eggs well beaten, the rind of a lemon grated, half a pound of suet chopped fine, and as much bread as necessary. Pour your milk on the bread and suet, keep mixing it until ocld, then put in the lemon peel, the eggs, a little sugar, and some nutmeg grated find. You may either boil or bake this pudding.

Quotation for the Day.

Books cannot always please, howver good;
Minds are not ever craving for their food.
George Crabbe (1754-1832), The Borough Schools.

Darkie Pickle, Darkie Pie.

An atmosphere of political correctness makes us shudder at some phrases – food phrases included – nowadays, doesn’t it? Ugly phrases with nasty connotations. Makes one reluctant to mention them. Fearful of being labelled oneself as something equally ugly and nasty. Nevertheless, the names, the phrases, and the concepts all have history, and we cant pretend they don’t.

I give you two recipes from the 1930’s from The New York Times’ column Recipes for Small Households. The common ingredient is Demarara (or Demerara) sugar, which is raw or unrefined sugar named for the colony of Demarara in Guyana.

Darkie Pickle.
Throw salt over half a peck of green tomatoes. Let them stand overnight. Then rinse out the salt and put them into the preserving pan. Now mix in a bowl half a pound of demarara sugar, half an ounce of ground cloves, the same quantity of ginger, pepper, and allspice, and one ounce of dry mustard. Sprinkle the tomatoes with this mixture. Add sufficient vinegar and let it boil for five hours, stirring frequently to avoid burning. Then cool and put into jars. The vinegar must completely cover the pickle. It will keep for a long time.


Darkie Pie.
Cut eight bananas in thin slices lengthways. Place a layer in a buttered pie-dish, sprinkle with Demarara sugar, a little powdered cinnamon, a squeeze of lemon juice. Dot with small pieces of butter. Repeat the layers, finishing with butter, sugar, and lemon. Add a tablespoon of water and bake in a moderate oven for about 45 minutes. Serve hot with whipped cream and brandy snaps.


Quotation for the Day.

Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.
Proverbs xv. 17

Jaune Mange

You have all heard of blancmange – the dish literally translated as ‘eat white’ that once upon a time (in the Medieval era) was the pale and elegant fusion of chicken, almond milk, and fragrant spices which somehow over the centuries morphed and degenerated into the artificially coloured and flavoured chilled gelatine and cornflour ‘thing’ served at children’s parties.

Perhaps, like me, you have never heard of jaune mange (eat yellow) before? I love it when ignorance is exposed. Especially my own. I came across the phrase somewhere in my recent wanderings, and want to share my findings with you.

Without searching exhaustively, the first reference I came across is in Charlotte Mason’s The Lady’s Assistant for Regulating and Supplying Her Table, in 1777.

Charlotte gives general directions on how to colour blancmange green (juice of spinach), red (cochineal, steeped in a bit of brandy), and yellow (saffron). She also gives a specific recipe for Jaune Mange – a delicious sounding orange custard set with isinglass (the old-fashioned gelatine).


Jaune Mange.
Boil one ounce of isinglass in three quarters of a pint of water, till melted, strain it; add the juice of two Seville oranges, a quarter of a pint of white wine, the yolks of four eggs beaten and strained, sugar to the taste; stir it over a gentle fire till it just boils up; when cold put it into a mould or mould: if there should be any sediment, take care not to pour it in.

Quotation for the Day.

Chopsticks are one of the reasons the Chinese never invented custard.
Spike Milligan.

All Ahead for Independence Day.

I was going to do an extra Saturday post tomorrow especially for my American friends on their national day, but I realised that I will be having far too much fun at my sister’s wedding. So here is my offering, posted well ahead of time (especially as it is almost two days ahead in my target country) - which makes sense anyway as it gives you chance to plan ahead for a retro feast.

Here, for your delectation, are a couple of patriotic salads to go alongside your barbecued steaks and sausages, from the wartime book (1918) Wheatless and Meatless Days, by Pauline Partridge.

Stars and Stripes Salad.
3 cold cooked beets
1 small onion finely chopped
¼ cup chopped nuts
½ cup chopped celery or 1 teaspoon celery salt
6 chopped radishes
2 sliced hard cooked eggs
lettuce
French dressing.
Slice the beets and mix with onion, celery, nuts, radishes and eggs.
Arrange on lettuce, pour on French dressing, and serve.


Salad Independence.
3 small tomatoes
2 small green peppers
¼ cup chopped celery
½ small can pimentos
lettuce
French dressing
Wash tomatoes, pour boiling water over them and allow to stand one minute, drain, and slice. Pour boiling water over peppers, allow to stand 5 minutes, drain, remove seeds and cut peppers into strips. Chop the pimentos very fine and mix with the celery. Put slices of tomato on the lettuce, sprinkle with celery and pimento mixture, garnish with strips of green pepper, add French dressing, and serve.

Quotation for the Day.

Salad freshens without enfeebling and fortifies without irritating.
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)

A Dime A Day.

These challenging economic times are a boon for food magazine editors and writers it seems. Every mag, blog, and paper has ‘new’ ideas for eating, decorating, entertaining, and generally having a good time on less income. Why should this blog be any different?

Truth to tell, food literature has always found domestic economy to be a sound subject, with managing on a specific weekly or monthly budget to be a particularly popular theme. Some advice comes in a nice book published in New York in 1860 with the full title of How to Live: Saving and Wasting, or, Domestic Economy Illustrated, and the glorious continuing blurb of:

by the

Life of two families of opposite character, habits, and

Practices, in a pleasant tale of real life, full of useful

Lessons in housekeeping, and how to live, how to

have, how to gain, and how to be happy;

including the story

of

A Dime A Day.

This calculator suggests that a dime in 1860 had the purchasing power of a bit less than two dollars and seventy cents today. The honourable mother who provides the author’s role model in this book tells how she feeds her family of four children for that amount .

“I had, said she one day last week, only one Dime in the world and that was to feed me and my four children all day, for I would not ask tor credit and I would not borrow, and I never did beg. I did live through the day and I did not go hungry. I fed myself and family with one Dime.”
“How ?”
“Oh that was not all. I bought fuel too.”
“What with one Dime?”
“Yes, with one Dime!1 bought two cents worth of coke because that is cheaper than coa,l and because I could kindle it with a piece of paper in my little furnace with two or three little bits of charcoal that some careless boy had dropped in the street just in my path. With three cents I bought a scraggy piece of salt pork half fat and half lean. There might have been half a pound of it - the man did not weigh it. Now half my money was gone, and the show for breakfast dinner and supper was certainly a very poor one, With the rest of my Dime I bought four cents worth of white beans. By-the-by, I got these at night, and soaked them in tepid water on a neighbor's stove till
morning. I had one cent left. I bought one cent's worth of corn meal and the grocery man gave me a red pepper pod.”
“What was that for ?”
“Wait a little - you shall know. Of all things peppers and onions are appreciated by the poor in winter because they help to keep them warm. With my meal I made three dumplings and these with the pork and the pepper pod I put into the pot with the beans and plenty of water (for the pork was salt) and boiled the whole two hours and then we had breakfast, for it was time for the children to go to school. We ate one of the dumplings, and each had a plate of the soup for break fast, and a very good breakfast it was. I kept the pot boiling as long as my coke lasted and at dinner we ate half the meat, half the soup, and one of the dumplings. We had the same allowance for supper and the children were better satisfied than I have sometimes seen them when our food has cost five times as much. The next day we had another Dime - it was all I could earn for all I could get to do - two pairs of men's drawers each day at five cents a pair and on that we lived - lived well”

The woman goes on to describe how she makes a dime feed her family each day for the next few days - manageing some variety too. The next day they have ‘a sort of chowder’ made from scrap pieces of lean beef, potatoes, and more dumplings (made this time ‘about as big as grapes.’)

An interesting story? An inspirational lesson? A project to try out?
Here is a recipe from another book on domestic economy from the same year – hardly a frugal effort however!

A Beef Stew.
Take two or three pounds of the rump of beef, cut away all the fat and skin and cut it into pieces about two or three inches square; put it into a stewpan and pour on to it a quart of broth; let it boil; sprinkle in a little salt and pepper to taste; when it has boiled very gently or simmered two hours, shred finely a large lemon; add it to the gravy and in twenty minutes pour in a flavoring composed of two tablespoons full of Harvey's sauce, the juice of the lemon, the rind of which has been sliced into the gravy, a spoonful of flour and a little ketchup; add at pleasure two glasses of Madeira or one of sherry or port a quarter of an hour after the flavoring, and serve.
Practical American Cookery and Domestic Economy, Elizabeth M. Hall, 1860


Quotation for the Day.

Without frugality none can be rich, and with it very few would be poor.
Samuel Johnson