Eggs, 19th C Style.

Today, April 12th ...

Here is a selection of recipes for ‘other’ eggs, as you may be getting bored with the hen variety. They are all from the exhaustive and ever-reliable Cassells Dictionary of Cookery (1870’s).

Eggs, Plovers.
These eggs are much esteemed for their rich flavour, and the beautiful colour of the white part, which is much used for decorating salads. When boiled hard they are eaten hot or cold; but with a good brown gravy or some béchamel sauce they make a dainty breakfast dish.

Eggs, Swan’s (en Salade).
Cut the eggs, when boiled hard (see Eggs, Swan’s to Boil), in halves, pound the yolks with an ounce and a half of good fresh butter, and season with minced herbs or shallot, cayenne, and salt; add two teaspoonfuls of essence of anchovies, and the same of chili vinegar. Fill the white halves with this mixture, and set them in a bowl of prepared salad, or ornament a lobster or German salad with them.

Eggs, Swan’s, To Boil.
Put the eggs into quite boiling water and let them stay without boiling for twenty minutes. See that the water quite covers them, then boil slowly for a quarter of an hour. Let them rest in the water five minutes before removing them, and cover them up while cooling. Swan’s eggs retain their heat a long time. They should not be cut until quite cold, and should then be divided into halves lengthwise.

Eggs, Turkey’s, To Dress.
Choose those of the young bird for cooking in the shell. They may be known by their pale, almost white colour. The larger ones are excellent for poaching, and to serve in the composition of any dishes where eggs are required. Time, six minutes to boil, four to poach.

19th C Egg recipes from previous stories:

To dress a Military Omelet (c. 1845)
To cook eggs in the shell, without boiling them. (1845)
Eggs with Burnt Butter (Soyer, 1853)
To Roast Eggs. (1875)
Eggs en Surprise [1832]
Birds’ Nests (same as Scotch Eggs) [1893]

Last year on this Day ...

We found out about the first pressure cooker.

Good Friday Buns

Today, April 6th …

Hot cross buns are traditionally eaten on this day wherever there is a historically Christian culture. The cross is intended to symbolise the crucifixion, and in their purest form the buns have no butter or milk or eggs, as befits the season of Lent.

As with so many traditional foods, a large number of myths abound, and these range from the amusing to the ridiculous. One story insists that the buns date back to pagan rituals, but as the first recorded us of the phrase ‘cross buns’ was in 1733, this seems a tad unlikely.

Some foods never date, and sweet, fruity bread buns are one of them. I give you this recipe from the ever-reliable Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery (circa 1870’s). Vary them at your whim. I believe some people even put choc-chips in them.

Good Friday Buns (commonly called Hot Cross Buns)
Rub a quarter of a pound of butter into two pounds of flour. Add a pinch of salt; then mix a wine-glassful of fresh, thick yeast with a pint and a half of warmed milk, and stir these into the flour till it forms a light batter. Put the batter in a warm place to rise. When sufficiently risen, work into it half a pound of currants, half a nutmeg, grated, and a quarter of an ounce of powdered mace. Knead these well into the dough, make it up into buns, and place them on buttered baking tins. Make a cross on them with the back of a knife, brush a little clarified butter over the top, and let them stand a quarter of an hour before the fire. Bake in a good oven.

Monday’s Story …

Next week as befits the Easter Season, we will have an Egg Theme. We will eat our way through five centuries of Egg Recipes, starting with the 16th C on Monday.

A Saintly Weed.

Today, January 19th …

After the previous two days of heavy-duty menus, it is a relief to return to some delicate plant cookery. The mediaeval monks’ saintly calendar of flowers comes to our rescue today. The plant of the day, which is dedicated to St Martha, is the White Dead Nettle.

The stinging nettle is a weed, an invalid food, or a spinach substitute, depending on your point of view, state of health, and finances. Its medicinal use goes back many centuries, and we have already met the hymnist John Byrom, who used ‘nettle broth’ for some unspecified malady in 1728. Nicolas Culpeper in his famous herbal the English Physitian (1652) gave a list of medicinal actions of the nettle, noting among other things that would:

“ … open the Pipes and passages of the Lungs … and helpeth to expectorate tough Flegm, as also to raise the impostumated Pleuresie, and spend it by spitting; .. killeth the Worms in Children, easeth pains in the sides, and dissolveth the windiness in the Spleen, as also in the Body, … Remedy against the stinging of Venemous Creatures, the biting of Mad Dogs … ”

Culpeper’s contemporary, Samuel Pepys, recorded taking nettle porridge on a number of occasions. We know he suffered from ‘the stone’, so perhaps the nettles helped, for Culpeper also said of it that “the Seed provoketh Urine, and expelleth the Gravel and Stone in the Reins or Bladder.”

Aside from its medical use, the nettle is a most useful culinary plant. It can be used to make tea or beer, depending on inclinations and brewing skill, but it is less well known that it can be used as a sort of vegetable rennet (vegetarians take note). Cassells’ Dictionary of Cookery (1870’s) says:

Nettle, Rennet of.
In the Western Isles of Scotland a rennet is prepared by adding a quart of salt to three pints of a strong decoction of nettles, a table-spoonful of which is said to be sufficient to coagulate a bowl of milk.

The most usual use of course is as a pot herb. Given that the usual consumers of the nettle are the peasants and the poor, it is not surprising that there are almost no recipes for it in cookbooks – if one could afford to buy a cookbook, and had an education that enabled one to read it, presumably one would not be eating wayside weeds. Alexis Soyer, the most famous chef of the Victorian era did however include instructions for cooking nettles it in his Shilling Cookery for the People, published in 1854. He did not have a recipe for them in The Modern Housewife (1853), which was clearly written for a better class of reader.

Here is the recipe from Soyer’s book, whose full title is: Shilling Cookery for the People: embracing An Entirely New System of Plain Cookery and Domestic Economy (1854). He addresses the recipes in the book to ‘Eloise’.

“I herewith send you the receipts I promised you on Nettles which I tried while in Norfolk”

Nettles.
Wash them well, drain, put them into plenty of boiling water with a little salt, boil for twenty minutes, or a little longer, drain them, put them on a board and chop them up, and either serve plain, or put them in the pan with a little salt, pepper, and a bit of butter, or a little fat and gravy from a roast; or add to a pound two teaspoonfuls of flour, a gill of skim milk, a teaspoonful of sugar, and serve with or without poached eggs.
This extraordinary spring production, of which few know the value, is at once pleasing to the sight, easy of digestion, and at a time of the year when greens are not to be obtained, invaluable as a purifier of the blood; the only fault is, as I have told you above, Eloise, they are to be had for nothing; it is a pity children are not employed to pick them, and sell them in market towns.

Monday’s Story …

The Death of a Queen.

A Previous Story for this Day …

A story about the avocado, which grows on 'the Testicle Tree'.

On this Topic …

Other recipes for flowering plants are:

15thC Almond and Rose-petal sauce for Loche [fish]
17th C Minnow tansie with primroses and cowslips (same site as the above)
18th C Syrup of Violets.
20th C Eggs cooked with Marigold

Quotation for the Day …

Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food. Hippocrates.

Papal Pasta.

Today, December 27th …

Giovanni Angelo Braschi was born into a wealthy aristocratic family on this day in 1717 in Cesena in northern Italy. In 1775 he was elected Pope as a compromise candidate after four months deliberation, and took the name Pius VI. He did not let his new role get in the way of the life of luxury to which he was accustomed – in fact he almost bankrupted the country partly on account of the magnificence of his entertainments.

A cookbook (Il Cuoco Maceratese) was published during his Papacy by Antonio Nebbia, which is famous on a number of counts. It documents the upper class cuisine of the time, and included mention of the fine French sauces developed by La Varenne. It also included a recipe for the famous lasagne-style dish of the Marchese region now called vincisgrassi (although he called it princisgras) which contains chicken livers, truffles and prosciutto.

The name of Nebbia’s dish is the cause of some controversy, with the popular theory that it was named for the Austrian General Windisch Graetz being impossible because the Napoleonic Wars which caused him to be in the region did not happen until long after the book was published. There are other mysteries in the world of pasta words - the origin of the word ‘lasagne’ itself for example. The first written Italian recipe occurs in a fourteenth century cookbook from Naples. However, something pasta-like called ‘loseyns’ is described in The Form of Cury – the late fourteenth century cookbook of the master chefs of King Richard II of England. An even more intriguing (but less likely) contender is a Viking-era dish called ‘langkake’. Naturally the Italians wont listen to any of these other theories, and probably count it treason against the state to do so.

A third pasta-naming mystery occurs in our recipe of the day. There is absolutely no clue in the late Victorian English tome ‘Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery’ as to why this dish is styled “à la Pontiffe’. The ‘macaroni’ is in the form of ‘long ribbons’ too, which sounds closer to lasagne noodles than the small tubes that have the name today. Which is a fourth pasta-naming mystery, if my counting is correct.

Macaroni à la Pontiffe.
Boil eight ounces of long straight ribbon macaroni in the usual way, but fifteen minutes will be enough to swell it, which is all that is needed. Drain on a sieve, and when drained put a neat layer of it as a lining over a well-buttered mould; cover next with a quenelle forcemeat of fowl or rabbit, and full the mould with game or poultry, boned and filleted, some larks, also boned, and rolled with thin bits of bacon inside each, and some delicate strips or pieces cut into rounds about he size of a shilling, distributed with egg-balls and button mushrooms, previously simmered in gravy in the mould. Thicken the gravy, a littlr of which use to moisten the whole, cover with macaroni, and simmer, but do not boil, for an hour.

Tomorrow’s Story …

A terrible sea cook.

A Previous Story for this Day …

We had a story about Jane Austen on this day in 2005.

On this Topic …

Food for Cowboys and Popes.

Quotation for the Day …

Life is a combination of magic and pasta. Federico Fellini.

The Fish & Chip Shop.

Today, December 20th …

A most unpretentious fish and chip shop opened near Bradford, in Yorkshire, England on this day in 1928. The proprietor was Harry Ramsden, and somehow his little shop became the most famous fish and chip shop in the world.

It wasn’t the first fish and chip shop in England, although a believable rumour says that the phenomenon did start in the North of the country. At the risk of starting the Wars of the Roses all over again, this honour may in fact go to Lancashire. The true history of the classic combination will, like that of the hamburger in the USA, almost certainly never be proven to the satisfaction of every stakeholder, but we must not let this put us off considering the factoids as they currently appear.

Fried fish (no chips) was being sold as a street food in the 1840’s, and there were several ‘Fried Fish Shops’ in London in the early 1850’s. As for the chips, the claim by the town of Mossley in Lancashire is that sometime in the 1860’s the owner of a shop selling pigs’ trotters and pea soup noticed a vendor at a nearby market selling “chipped potatoes in the French style”, and subsequently added them to his repertoire, thus creating the first Chip Shop.

The true inspiration of course lies in the combination of these two fairly pedestrian victuals. The town of Oldham, also in Lancashire, claims that one of their own, a tripe-dresser (a singularly uninspiring-sounding profession) named Dyson was the genius to whom an entire class - Nay! an entire Nation - has reason to owe their undying gratitude.

‘Fish and Chips’ is now a classless classic, but it certainly began life as a cheap working class meal. How did something clearly associated with France and therefore according to definition in England, with ‘fancy food’, come to be a low-class meal? My own theory is that it is all the responsibility of that champion of the English downtrodden, Charles Dickens. The OED gives the first reference to “chips of potatoes” as ocurring in his novel ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. Perhaps his widely-read and much-loved books had something to do with it? I welcome comment.

Here are a couple of Victorian recipes for fried fish, from Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery (1870’s)

Fish, Fried.
Fish to be nicely fried should be wiped very dry, and floured before being put into the pan of boiling fat. Next to oil clarified dripping is the best. Shake the pan gently till hot through. If you want the fish to look very nice, dip it into egg, and sprinkle with breadcrumbs before frying. Drain before the fire, and dish on a hot napkin. The time required for this mode of cooking will vary according to the size, quality, and thickness of the fish.

Fish, Fried (Jewish Fashion).
The Jews, like our continental neighbours, use oil for frying. Soyer gives the following excellent recipe for cooking fish: - Lay one or more pounds of halibut in a dish, with salt over the top, and water not to cover the fish. Let it stay one hour for the salt to penetrate. Drain and dry it; then cut out the bone and take off the fins. Divide the pieces into slices half an inch thick. Put a quarter of a pound of oil, butter, lard, or dripping into a frying pan. Dip the fish into a batter, and fry till the pieces are of a nice colour, and all sides alike. When quite done, take them out with a slice, drain, and serve with any sauce liked. All fish, especially those containing oil, are improved by this method – the oil is absorbed by the batter.

[Unfortunate inclusion, that lard, in a Jewish recipe. I blame the editors.]

Tomorrow’s Story …

Pig, with Onions.

A Previous Story for this Day …

Preserved potatoes aboard ship featured on December 20th 2005.

Quotation for the Day …

And then I saw the menu, stained with tea and beautifully written by a foreign hand, and on top it said - God I hated that old man - it said 'Chips with everything'. Chips with every damn thing. You breed babies and you eat chips with everything. Arnold Wesker ; Chips with Everything.

Misunderstood, misused and misliked?

Today, January 23rd …

On this day in 1889, an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford, wrote a letter of complaint to the Steward:

“I wish to mention that I have twice been sent Rhubarb tart when I have ordered apple, as I have a particular objection to Rhubarb tart I hope it may not occur again. I also wish to mention that the food in Hall is not what it should be.”

Poor rhubarb! If ever there was a food that should suffer low self esteem and an identity crisis, it is rhubarb. It is a plant that has been misunderstood and misused all of its life. For starters, it is a vegetable that we have used as a fruit since we stopped using it as a medicine - and a purgative medicine at that.

Its very name means “food of the barbarians” (the people who live beyond the Rha, now the river Volga), and to add insult to insult, the name has since been hijacked by the theatre industry as a background nonsense word. Its riches to rags life history hasn’t helped either: once a desirable medicine worth more than opium and saffron it is now easily grown in anyone’s back yard. The dried root was used medicinally, and now we cook the fleshy stems, but early consumers mistakenly ate the leaves which was unfortunate as they contain oxalic acid which is poisonous. Although it would take 5 kg of leaves to kill, the confusion did nothing for rhubarb’s reputation.

It must have been a brave cook who first offered rhubarb in a pie, even allowing for new hybrids and cheaper sugar, considering its medicinal use as a purgative. Instead of pie, I offer you this rhubarb dessert, while sincerely hoping that our poor veggiefruit does not take further offense at the name.

Rhubarb Fool.
Wash, and if necessary, peel the rhubarb, and cut it up into small pieces. Put as much as is to be used into a jar which has a close-fitting lid, with as much sugar as will sweeten it. Set this jar in a saucepan of boiling water, and keep it boiling until the fruit is quite soft. Rub it through a sieve with the back of a wooden spoon, and mix with the pulp as much cream, milk, or thin cold custard as will make it of the consistency of gruel. Serve cold in a glass dish (1870).

Tomorrow: A revolutionary dish.

An old take on seafood extender

Today, November 2nd …

If you were a second-class citizen in 1911, and were aboard the SS “Majestic” on this day, this would have been your dinner:

Consomme Diablotins

Boiled Cod, Cream Sauce

Salmi of Ducking with Turnips

Roast Lamb, Mint Sauce
Sirloin of Beef, Browned Potatoes

String Beans, Fried Oyster Plant
Boiled Potatoes

Plum Pudding
Scotch Shortbread

Ice Cream

Oranges Plums Assorted Nuts

Would the hoi-polloi in first class get real oysters? The “vegetable oyster” served to you in second class was salsify, or perhaps its black-skinned Italian cousin, scorzonera, which taste like oysters (a bit, with a touch of asparagus, or maybe coconut?), and which were popular root vegetables until they became victims of food fashion. Or perhaps it was our need/desire for all foods quick to prepare that pushed it off the dinner list, for salify needs to be peeled (and immediately dropped in acidulated water to stop it discolouring) then pre-boiled before being used.

Once all that kitchen-hand labour was out of the way, salsify could be sent to the table in a number of guises. Most easily, this would be “with whatever sauce you think proper”, but battered and fried rounds were particularly popular. They were “often served round boiled fish”, where the chef presumably hoped they would have looked, as well as tasted, for all the world like fried oysters. Was anyone fooled?

If you want to test out the theory of taste, here is a recipe from Cassell’s “Dictionary of Cookery”, published in the 1870’s.

Salsify, Fried, or Salsify Fritters.
Boil the salsify till tender, or, if preferred, take the remains of dressed salsify. Drain and dry the roots by pressing them in a soft cloth. Make a little frying batter, dip each root separately into this, throw them into the hot fat, and fry them till they are lightly browned. … No sauce will be needed for them when dressed in this way. Sometimes the salsify is dipped into egg and bread-crumbs instead of batter before frying.

Maybe vegetable oyster isn’t such a nuisance after all: it can be prepared in advance (keep in the acidulated water), pre-boiled in advance (keep in the water), and the leftover boiled bits can be recycled as mock oysters next day.

How useful is that?

Tomorrow … Green peas from Adam and Eve.