Alternative Christmas Menus.

December 25, Christmas Day.

I hope you, my hungry readers, all have a safe and happy Christmas season, however you celebrate it. I hope your Christmas food is sufficient in amount and superb in quality. While you enjoy your meal(s), consider these alternative Christmas dinners, taken in wild and far-away places.

1803: The Lewis and Clark expedition party were at Camp River Dubois (near present day Hartford, Illinois). They had just finished constructing the camp on Christmas Eve. Clark
wrote:

“Christmas 25th Decr: I was wakened by a Christmas discharge found that Some of the party had got Drunk (2 fought) the men frolicked and hunted all day, Snow this morning, Ice run all day, Several Turkey Killed Shields returned with a cheese & 4 lb butter, Three Indians Come to day to take Christmas with us, I gave them a bottle of whiskey …. ”

1815: In Australia, Capt. James Kelly, in the newly discovered Macquarie Harbour:

“Christmas Day. Strong gales from the westward, and a heavy sea heaving into the cove. This day we had a 'glorious feed' for dinner - two black swans; one roasted (stuck up), the other was made into a sea-pie - a three-decker, in a large iron pot, - a first-rate Christmas dinner on the west coast of Van Diemen's Land. After dinner we named the cove 'Christmas Cove,' by throwing a glass of brandy into the salt water, and giving three hearty cheers upon the occasion.”

1908: Shackleton en route to the South Pole:

“From Nov. 14, 1908 to Feb. 23, 1909, our party was always hungry, except on Christmas Day when we divided a four-ounce plum pudding into four parts and licked the spoons. We had another luxury that day in a tin of frozen sardines, which contained seventeen fish. After taking four each we tossed our knives on the ice for the odd one. We started to take a tin of jam with us, but as it weighed two pounds we left it 121 miles from base, which was 750 miles from the pole. Our breakfast consisted of pony steaks.”

A couple of extra side-dishes would have gone down a treat for any of these intrepid, and hungry, explorers.

New York Cranberry Sauce.
Wash 1 quart of cranberries, put them into the kettle with 1 pint of water and four cored and sliced tart apples. Cover and cook for twenty minutes; press through a colander.Add 1 pound of sugar, boil five minutes and take from the fire.
[Galveston Daily News,dec 17, 1911]

Creamed Chestnut Pates.
Shell a pint of chestnuts and peel off the brown skins. Wash In cold water and boil in milk until very tender. Drain and sprinkle over them half a teaspoon of salt. Keep hot. Add to the milk in which the chestnuts have been boiled sufficient cream to make a pint, and thicken with a teaspoon of corn starch mixed with a little cold milk: stir in a double boiler until boiling, then add a teaspoon of butter and a little grated onion; let boil up, add the chestnuts; when steaming hot spoon into hot pate shells. One has to gauge the amount of sauce to the size of the shells. Serve garnished with parsley and sliced lemon.
[The Fort Wayne Sentinel, (Indiana) dec 21 1903]

Tomorrow’s Story …

A Foodie’s Twelve Days of Christmas.

Quotation for the Day …

Christmas is not a time nor a season, but a state of mind. Calvin Coolidge.

First catch your cockatoo.

Today, December 12 …

An Australian Christmas theme today, by popular request. We have met Ludwig Leichhardt before, on his overland expedition across the continent. Ludwig was very mindful of maintaining morale amongst his men, and always attempted to mark special days, no matter how difficult the circumstances.

On this day in 1844 he wrote:

Our meat was all consumed; but we wished to reserve our bullocks for Christmas, which was, in every one of us, so intimately associated with recollections of happy days and merriment, that I was determined to make the coming season as merry as our circumstances permitted.

A few days later, he decided to take advantage of the good weather and killed the beast early. While the flesh was drying, he and several of his party went off on a reconnoitering expedition. When they returned on Christmas Day his companions were just sitting down to their Christmas dinner of “suet pudding and stewed cockatoos”.

Parrots and cockatoos were a common bush food for early explorers and settlers, with varying degrees of enthusiasm: “Parrot-pie is as much esteemed in Australia as rook-pie in England” – which gives you some idea of the esteem level. More likely it was felt that “Parrot pie is pretty good; at least, it may be so when other animal food is scarce”. Parrot stew became a bush joke, with many variations of the recipe “take a parrot and an axe-head, boil them until the axe-head is tender, throw the parrot away and eat the axe-head.”

Very oddly, later editions of Mrs. Beeton (after her death in 1869) had chapters on “General Observations on Australian Cookery”, no doubt on the assumption that copies would be taken to the colonies, which they were.

Parrot Pie
Ingredients: 1 doz. paraqueets, a few slices of beef (underdone cold beef is best for this purpose), 4 rashers of bacon, 3 hard-boiled eggs, minced parsley and lemon peel, pepper and salt, stock, puff-paste.
Mode: Line a pie-dish with the beef cut into slices, over them place 6 of the paraqueets, dredge with flour, fill up the spaces with the egg cut in slices and scatter over the seasoning. Next put in the bacon, cut in small strips, then 6 paraqueets and fill up with the beef, seasoning all well. Pour in stock or water to nearly fill the dish, cover with puff-paste and bake for one hour.

Tomorrow: Minding the belly.

Politicians don't write cookbooks anymore

Today, November 21 …

Ludwig Leichhardt was a Prussian botanist and intrepid explorer of inland Australia in the1840’s. Other adventurers of the time took familiar food supplies on their expeditions, but Leichhardt planned to learn from the Aboriginal people, and live off the land. He has been criticised since as being a poor bushman, and he and his men did indeed spend a lot of time very hungry, but he would try any food once, and never repeated a mistake. On November 21st 1844 he reflected on the situation, and his journal reads:

“ … Iguanas, opossums, and birds of all kinds, had for some time past been most gladly consigned to our cooking pot, neither good, bad, nor indifferent being rejected. The dried kangaroo meat, one of our luxuries, differed very little in flavour from the beef, and after long stewing afforded us an excellent broth, to which we generally added a little flour. It is remarkable how soon man becomes indifferent to the niceties of food; and when all the artificial wants of society have dropped off, the bare necessities of life form the only object of his desires.”

Kangaroo might have been a staple for indigenous people and bushmen, but the representatives of the “upper ten thousand” who had the dubious fortune to find themselves in the farthest and wildest reaches of the Empire never embraced it. They were quite able to ignore an available and nutritious food precisely because it was enjoyed by “the many”, and because they too wanted familiar food from the the mother country, no matter how inappropriate for the new living conditions.

The first Australian cookbook was addressed to both groups and was published in 1864 by Edward Abbott, a Tasmanian politician passionate about all things Australian – which was not an desirable eccentricity in the colony. The recipes are an odd mix of local and British ingredients and dishes, interspersed with anecdotes and testimonials. It was a resounding failure, and never had a second printing. It was just too “colonial”.

Or perhaps it was some of the more outlandish recipes that frightened the expatriates off:

Slippery Bob.

Take kangaroo brains, and mix with flour and water, and make into a batter; well season with pepper, salt, &c; then pour a table-spoonful at a time into an iron pot containing emu fat, and take them out when done. “Bush fare” requiring a good appetite and excellent digestion.

Tomorrow … Propaganda and puddings.