Almond Milk Anyone?.

Yesterday’s recipe for ‘Brewet Of Almony’ reminded me that I have been intending to talk about almond milk for some time. It is difficult to imagine today how important almond milk was in medieval times in the kitchens of the extremely wealthy. It is also difficult to imagine what it must have been like for the lowliest kitchen workers of the time to be faced with a sack of expensive imported almonds and a mortar and pestle and to be told to get them all ground up and made into almond milk in time for the dinner shift to use!

Almond milk has been an ingredient in many of the recipes given in this blog over the years – in a fragrant fish dish, a risotto-like rice dish, and a dish of eggs for Lent, for example. It often seems to be suggested that almond milk came to the fore during Lent, but in fact, in the kitchens of the wealthy, it was prized above ‘cow mylke’ for many reasons – its fine flavour and fragrance of course, but also the labour-intensive production method itself presupposed sufficient wealth to be able to support a great kitchen, making it a desirable quality product by definition. After all, any lowly peasant could get access to rough farm animals such as cows.

But judge the method for yourself. How would you like to make many gallons of almond milk by this method, without a food processor?

Almond Milk.
Take blake sugre, an cold water, an do hem to in a fayre potte, an let hem boyle to-gedere, an salt it an skeme it clene, an let it kele; than tak almaundus, an blawnche hem clene, an stampe hem, an draw hem, with the sugre water thikke y-now, in-to a fayre vessel; an yf the mylke be noght swete y-now, take whyte sugre an caste ther-to.
Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books; Thomas Austin.

Almond milk also had medicinal uses, as this early eighteenth century recipe-remedy shows:

Almond Milk
Take Barley-Water one Pound, sweet Almonds blanch’d; make an Emulsion (to which add Barley-Cinnamon-Water one Ounce, a little Sugar,) of which drink plentifully.
‘This is a cooling and diluting Drink, and serves to quench the Thirst of Persons in Fevers, as well as to nourish ‘em; and when there is Danger of the Fever’s turning up to the Head, it cools that Fervor, and keeps ‘em sensible.’
Pharmacopoeia Radciffeana: or, Dr Radcliffe’s prescriptions … (1716) by John Radcliffe

We must not forget the culinary use of almond milk of course. I am not entirely sure that I should include the following recipe as the almonds are ground in a bit of water before being added to the cream, but are not actually made into milk – but the grinding being the difficult part I am going to include it as I absolutely love the recipe.

My Lady of Exeter’s Almond Butter .
Take a good Handful of Almonds blanch’d in cold Water, and grind them very small in a stone Mortar; mingle them well with a Quart of sweet Cream, and strain them through a Cushion Canvas Strainer; afterwards take the Yolks of nine or ten Eggs, the Knots and Strings being taken away clear, and well beaten; mix them very well with the Cream and set it in a silver Skillet on a quick Fire, stirring it continually till it begins to curdle; then take it off the Fire, put it into your Strainer, and hang it up that your Whey may pass from it; that done break the Curd very well in your Dish with a Spoon, and season it with Rose water and Sugar to your Taste.
The Housekeeper’s Pocket-book: and compleat family cook (1739), by Sarah Harrison.


Quotation for the Day.

Blossom of the almond trees,
April's gift to April's bees.

Sir Edwin Arnold, Almond Blossoms

Polite Management of the Kitchen.

I have been revisiting one of my favourite cookery books recently. It is A collection of above three hundred receipts in cookery, physick, and surgery, for the Use of all Good Wives, Tender Mothers, and Careful Nurses, by Mary Kettilby, published in 1714.

Now there is a book title we are not likely to see recycled any time soon - the modern ‘good wife or tender mother’ would not find much medical or surgical advice in the modern cookery book!
The lengthy preface includes the following insights:

The Directions relating to COOKERY are Palatable, Useful, and Intelligible, which is more than can be said of any now Publick in that kind ; some great Masters having given us Rules in that Art so strangely odd and fantastical, that 'tis hard to say, Whether the Reading has given more Sport and Diversion, or the Practice more Vexation and Chagrin, in spoiling us many a good Dish, by following their Directions. But so it is, that a Poor Woman must be laugh'd at, for only Sugaring a Mess of Beans ; whilst at Great Name must be had in Admiration, for Contriving Relishes a thousand times more Distastful to the Palate, provided they are but at the same time more Expensive to the Purse. 

The author hopes that the book will instruct ‘Young and Unexperienced Dames’ in ‘the Polite Management of their Kitchins, and the Art of Adorning their Tables with a Splendid Frugality.’ What a marvellous sentence, and a marvellous sentiment! Methinks the world would be a better place for the reinstatement of the concepts of polite management of the kitchen, and adorning the table with splendid frugality.

From the book, my recipe choice today is:

To Dress Hogs Feet and Ears, the best Way.
WHEN they are nicely clean'd, put them into a Pot, with a Bay-leaf, and a large Onion, and as much Water as will cover them; season it with Salt and a little Pepper; bake them with Houshold-Bread; keep them in this Pickle 'till you want them, then take them out and cut them in handsome pieces; fry them, and take for Sauce three spoon-fulls of the Pickle; shake in some Flower, a piece of Butter, and a spoon-full of Mustard: lay the Ears in the middle, the Feet round, and pour the Sauce over.

Quotation for the Day.

No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.
Laurie Colwin.

A Curious Recipe for Butter.

There is avery curious recipe for butter which I have been meaning to post for some time, in the hope that your comments will enlighten me as to how it actually ‘works’. I have never tried to roast butter, but the amazing Hannah Glasse describes the method in her wonderful The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (1774). The intention seems to be to make a buttered breadcrumb topping for oysters, but I really don’t understand why it would not immediately melt off the spit and drip into the ashes – even over the very low fire she suggests. If buttered crumbs are needed, why not simply melt the butter in a pan and then toss in the breadcrumbs?

To roast a pound of butter.
Lay it in salt and water two or three hours, then spit it, and rub it all over with crumbs of bread, with a little grated nutmeg, lay it to the fire, and as it roasts, baste it with the yolks of two eggs, and then with crumb of bread all the time it is a roasting; but have ready a pint of oysters stewed in their own liquor, and lay the dish under the butter; when the bread has soaked up all the butter, brown the outside, and lay it on your oysters. Your fire must be very low.

I have searched for other recipes for roasted butter, in the hope of gaining some insight, but without success. That is not to say there are not any interesting variations of the idea however. Firstly I give you a version from The Country Housewife’s Family Companion, by William Ellis (1750), which was sliced and eaten as a sort of snack.

TO roast a Pound of Butter or more the Irish Way. Take a pound of butter, season it well with salt, and put it on a wooden spit; place it at a good distance from the fire, let it turn round, and as the butter moistens or begins to drip, drudge it well with fine oatmeal, continuing so to do till there is any moisture ready to drip, then baste it, and it will soon be enough. A certain Irish woman told me this eats very nicely, insomuch that she has done on a Christmas eve twenty-seven different pounds so, at a farmer's house in her country, where it has been kept all the holidays, to accommodate a friend with a slice or two, as we do cakes or minced pies here.

The following recipe, from a century and a half earlier, is quite different and obviously intentionally sweet – but I still don’t understand how, even with the sugar and the repeated dredging with breadcrumbs, it would stay on the spit. Do you? The recipe is from Gervase Markham’s The English Housewife (1615), and he describes how to roast the butter ‘curiously and well’. The word ‘curiously’ had different meanings in the past – it could mean ‘carefully, attentively’, ‘skilfully, exquisitely, cunningly’, and ‘finely, handsomely, beautifully’, and (but perhaps not until after Markham’s time), ‘in a way that excites interest or surprise.’

To roast a pound of butter curiously and well.
Take a pound of sweet butter and beat it stiff with sugar, and the yolks of eggs; then clap it roundwise about a spit, and lay it before a soft fire, and presently dredge it with bread crumbs; then as it warmeth or melteth, so apply it with dredging till the butter be overcomed and no more will melt to fall from it, then roast it brown, and so draw it [from the spit], and serve it out, the dish being as neatly trimmed with sugar as may be.

Quotation for the Day.
Butter is "...the most delicate of foods among barbarous nations, and one which distinguishes the wealthy from the multitude at large."
Pliny

A Brief History of Cakes.

In the past, when I have posted a recipe originating from before the mid-nineteenth century for ‘cake’, I have often gotten a query from a reader who is confused either about the use of the word ‘cake’ for what appears in fact to be a yeast-risen sweet bread, or about the nature of ‘saleratus’ or ‘pearl ash.’ I hereby give you a very brief summary of the history of ‘cake’ as we know it.

I understand that the word ‘cake’ comes to us from the Vikings – an ancient and allegedly tough and manly race who we would hardly associate with something fluffy like Angel Food Cake. To the ancient Vikings, and to many generations of their descendants, a ‘cake’ was a slab of bread, baked hard, and by extension came to refer to a hard slab of anything – such as a ‘cake’ of soap.

How did this dense, hard bread develop into the lightest of light sponge cakes? The dough had to be lightened somehow, and the first method was with the use of yeast. Yeast has been used since the time of the ancient Egyptians, who probably discovered it by accident when some dough was accidentally left aside and became contaminated with local wild varieties. The yeast cells produce carbon dioxide as a by-product, and it is this gas that ‘rises’ the dough.

As time progressed, the basic bread dough was enriched with eggs, butter, spices and fruit, and sweetened with sugar for special occasions such as feast days. For many centuries this sweet yeast dough was the only sort of ‘cake’. Here is an example from a cookbook published in 1596 – which specifies the use of ‘Gods good’ (an obsolete word for yeast).

To make fine Cakes
Take fine flowre and good Damaske water you must have no other liqueur but that, then take sweet butter, two or three yolkes of egges and a good quantity of Suger, and a few cloves, and mace, as your Cookes mouth shall serve him, and a lyttle saffron, and a little Gods good about a sponfull if you put in too much they shall arise, cutte them in squares lyke unto trenchers, and pricke them well, and let your oven be well swept and lay them uppon papers and so set them into the oven. Do not burne them if they be three or foure days old they bee the better.

A soft dough can also be ‘risen’ with eggs. The protein from the egg encloses bubbles of air produced by the beating process – which was very arduous in the days before food processors. This recipe from the famous Mrs. Raffald required well over an hour of hand-beating of the mixture.


To make Queen Cakes.
Take a pound of loaf sugar, beat and sift it, a pound of flour well dried, a pound of butter, eight eggs, half a pound of currants washed and picked, grate a nutmeg, the same quantity of mace and cinnamon. Work your butter to a cream, then put in your sugar, beat the whites of your eggs near half an hour, mix them with your sugar and butter. Then beat your yolks near half an hour and put them to your butter, beat them exceedingly well together. Then put in your flour, spices, and currants. When it is read for the oven, bake them in tins and dust a little sugar over them.
The Experienced English Housekeeper. Elizabeth Raffald. 1769

Sometime near the end of the eighteenth century, in America, baking soda and powders were developed. Sodium and potassium bicarbonates (baking soda, ‘saleratus’, and pearl-ash or potash) had been known about for a long time - they were used in soap-making, in curing hams, for softening the tough skins of beans, and for preserving the colour of green leafy vegetables. These alkaline agents produce carbon dioxide gas when they are mixed with an acid (such as in buttermilk) – and someone obviously got the idea that the gas might lighten a cake mixture. Here is a nice example:

Shelah, or Quick Loaf Cake.
Melt half a pound of butter - when cool, work it into a pound and a half of raised dough. Beat four eggs with three-quarters of a pound of rolled sugar, mix it with the dough, together with a wine glass of wine, or brandy, a tea-spoonful of cinnamon, and a grated nutmeg. Dissolve a tea-spoonfu1 of saleratus in a small tea-cup of milk, strain it on to the dough, work the whole well together for a quarter of an hour, then add a pound of seeded raisins, and put it into cake pans. Let them remain twenty minutes before setting them in the oven.
The American Housewife … An Experienced Lady, 1841

Baking powder came about when someone thought to pre-add the acidic component to the soda, in a form that was released in contact with the ‘wet’ ingredients. It was a good advance, but the mixture had to be got into the oven quickly before the gas-production ceased. Finally, in 1889 double-acting baking powder was invented, with a slower-acting acid which hardly worked at all at normal temperatures, but was much quicker in the higher temperature of the oven.

Of course, the several methods of leavening remained in use simultaneously – and the yeast from the manufacture of ale was always popular. Here is an early nineteenth century recipe that uses ale-yeast as well as eggs.


Plum Cake.
Flour dried, and currants washed and picked, four pounds; sugar pounded and sifted, one pound and a half; six orange, lemon, and citron peels, cut in slices; mix these.
Beat ten eggs, yolks and whites separately; then melt a pound and a half of butter in a pint of cream; when lukewarm, put it to half a pint of ale-yeast, near half a pint of sweet wine, and the eggs; then strain the liquid to the dry ingredients, beat them well, and add of cloves, mace, cinnamon, and nutmeg, half an ounce each. Butter
the pan, and put it into a quick oven. Three hours will bake it.
A New System of Domestic Cookery … By A Lady. New York, 1814

The final recipe I give you today uses another type of baking powder that I have not mentioned: bakers ammonia, also called sal volatile, or sal ammonia – the main ingredient in smelling salts. I leave you with the knowledge that in really old times, sal volatile used to be made from stale urine.

Pound Cake.
Take one pound of flour toasted, one pound of grated loaf sugar, and one pound of butter beat to a cream ; separate one dozen of eggs, the yolks from the whites, beat up the yolks with one half of the sugar, the other half with butter ; then put them together
and beat well, you cannot beat it too much ; put in the fourth part of a tea-spoonful of sal volatile; have the whites beat to a snow upon two dinner plates ; they should be as thick as to carry the fork; sift in the flour amongst the yolks and sugar, with a little of the whites ; mix it lightly, do not stir it much, and when the flour is all in, add the whites, and an ounce of carraway seeds ; have your pan or hoop buttered and ready. It will take one hour and three quarters in a moderate oven.
Practice of Cookery and Pastry,... Mrs I Williamson. Edinburgh. 1854

Quotation for the Day.

Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we're here we should dance.
Anon.