Unmentionable pies.

Some long time ago I included a sixteenth century recipe for a ‘Pie of Bulls’ Testicles’ in a story. Perhaps you couldn’t source the main ingredient. Perhaps you didn’t fancy the dish.

Today I give you another rather unusual pie. ‘Muggety Pie’ is made, as its name suggests, from ‘muggets’ or ‘muggities. Calves’ or sheeps’ entrails, in other words. Offal is making a come-back, I hear.

Muggety Pie.
Take the long cord [small intestine] of a calf, clean it, soak for an hour in salt water and then boil a short time. Cut core lengthways with a pair of scissors. Cut into convenient lengths, place in a pie-dish with pepper, salt, and flour to taste. Add onions, if liked, and a white sauce. Cover with pastry and bake.

I am embarrassed to admit that I have mislaid the source of this recipe. I will find it, I promise, and amend this post. In the meanwhile, some real work threatens, so I must away. Before I leave, by way of compensation I offer you another pie: quite elegant, if you can be bothered, and if you can avoid the members of the Nice Little Songbirds Protection League.

Lark Pie.
Pluck, singe, and flatten the backs of two or three dozen larks, draw them, throw away the gizzards, and pound the trail in a mortar with scraped bacon and mixed herbs; fill the larks with this, and wrap each one in a slice of bacon. Line a plain mould with paste, fill it with the larks, sprinkle them with salt and pepper, spread a thick layer of butter over them, add two or three laurel leaves, and a pinch of mixed spice; cover with paste, and bake for two hours and a half. Turn out of the mould, and serve cold.
366 Menus and 1200 Recipes of the Baron Brisse, 1868.

Quotation for the Day.

Men may come and men may go.....but Pie goes on for ever.
George Augustus Sala, British journalist. 'America Revisited' (1882)

More Science in the Kitchen.

I want to briefly continue the theme of science in the kitchen today. Some time ago I gave you some of the ‘original, palatable, and wholesome recipes’ from a book with the actual title of Science in the Kitchen, published by Ella Kellogg, the wife of John Harvey Kellogg in 1893. A book that could just as easily fall under the heading of ‘High Moral Tone in the Kitchen, and certainly No Sex Anywhere Near It’, and a book based rather more on opinion than science. The nineteenth century was a time of increasing interest in science, so surely, I thought, there must be more ‘cookery’ books with a science spin?


I give you a short extract from The Scientific Phenomena of Domestic Life familiarly explained, by Charles Foote Gower, Esq., published in London in 1847. The book contains two chapters which may be relevant to us: Chapter III, The Breakfast Parlour, and Chapter V The Kitchen. Here is the author’s scientific advice in relation to fruit pies.

“ ... it appears that there are many of the operations of the kitchen conducted on solid philosophical principles; but we now come to one of which the benefit is less apparent, although from the universality of the practice one is inclined to fancy there must be some advantage derived from it. I allude to the custom of placing an inverted cup in a fruit pie, as the cook will inform us, to contain the juice whilst the pie is baking in the oven, and prevent its boiling over; and she is the more convinced in her theory because when the pie is withdrawn from the oven the cup will be found full of juice. When the cup is first put in the dish it is full of cold air, and when the pie is placed in the oven this air will expand by the heat and fill the cup, and will drive out all the juice, and a portion of the present air it contains, in which state it will remain till removed from the oven, when the air in the cup will condense and occupy a very small space, leaving the remainder to be filled with juice, but this does not take place till the danger of the juice boiling over is past. If a small glass tumbler is inverted in the pie its contents can be examined into whilst it is in the oven, and it will be found what has been advanced is correct. Our own cook was very sceptical on this head till she tried this experiment.”

Mistress Meg Dods (aka Christian Isobel Johnstone) does not consider an inverted cup necessary: from her The Cook and Housewife’s Manual (1847 edition), we have the following simple instructions.

Ripe Fruit Pies.
Black cherries and currants, damsons, plums of all kinds currants or raspberries and cranberries, apricots and gooseberries suitably mixed or alone, are all made into fruit pies. Place the fruit picked and washed in a flattish pie dish raising it high in the middle. Allow enough of sugar and cover with a rich light paste which fruit pies require more than those made of meat.


Quotation for the Day.

I prefer Hostess fruit pies to pop-up toaster tarts because they don't require as much cooking.
Carrie Snow

Huff Paste.

There is to be found in cookbooks of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, something called huff paste (or pastry). The Oxford English Dictionary does not acknowledge it, which is rather remiss of that marvelous reference, but nevertheless huff paste did perform a useful role in the kitchen in times past.

Huff paste was a mixture of flour and enough water to bind it to a thick, elastic dough, and was used to wrap a large joint of meat (especially a gammon) before boiling or roasting, or to tightly seal a baking dish in lieu of a lid. Sometimes fat was added, making huff paste similar to suet crust or hot water paste, but regardless, the resulting dish was essentially the same as a medieval pie or bake-meat, with (it is usually said), the pastry being discarded when the dish was served at table. This is not to say that it was not eaten by someone , somewhere in the pecking order – it is difficult to believe that the meat-juice soaked crust was thrown out to the pigs or dogs, is it not? Occasionally the crust was removed and broken up and added to the contents of the cooked pie to thicken the gravy - a fresh ‘proper’pastry lid then put on, and the pie briefly returned to the oven.

Most sources refer to huff paste as a particularly northern British concoction, although the recipe I give you today is from Devizes, a market town in Wiltshire in the South of England.

Devizes Pie.
Thin slices from a boiled calf’s head with the brains and tongue cut into strips. Also slices of cold cooked bacon and lamb and rounds of hard-boiled eggs. Salt, pepper, and ground allspice and cayenne. Brown gravy that will form a jelly when cold. A flour and water paste, and sprays of parsley.
Arrange the prepared meat, &c. in a pie-dish, adding plenty of spice and seasoning. Pour in enough gravy to cover and put on the paste. Bake in a slow oven (325 deg F) for an hour, take out and leave till cold and the gravy set. Now discard the crust and turn the jellied pie out onto a flat dish. Garnish with the parsley and the eggs, shelled and halved.
[The Times, Nov 19, 1956]

Quotation for the Day.

Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
…………….

Pigeon Pies and Miss Austen.

The final extract from this week’s source – the charming little Books and My Food (1904) - is particularly appealing to me personally as it includes two of my favourite things - Jane Austen’s novels, and pies.

The entry for January 8th reads:

 “Mrs. Elton was growing impatient to name the day, and settle

with Mr.Weston as to pigeon-pies and cold lamb.”

Jane Austen (“Emma”)

For an excellent pigeon-pie for a small family singe and draw three birds, split them down the back, wipe with a clean cloth, but do not wash. Fry half a dozen slices of salt pork and brown the pigeons in the pork-fat. Then put them in a deep baking-dish, slice a small onion, brown in the hot fat and add a pint of stock and a tablespoonful of flour. Stir until slightly thick, then strain over the pigeons. Cover them tightly and cook for two hours in a moderate oven. Remove the cover and replace it with one of pie-crust. Bake until brown.

Quotation for the Day.

Onion soup sustains. The process of making it is somewhat like the process of learning to love. It requires commitment, extraordinary effort, time and will make you cry.

Ronni Lundy.

A Thanksgiving Breakfast to Prepare.

In a certain large continent in the northern hemisphere today, all thoughts are undoubtedly turned to the preparation of tomorrow night’s big turkey dinner. The danger is that the focus on dinner will be so great, that breakfast will be poorly planned – and you know how important a good breakfast is, don’t you?

A nice book called What to get for breakfast: with more than one hundred different breakfasts, and full directions for each (1882), helps with fine suggestions for several Thanksgiving breakfasts.

Modern Thanksgiving Breakfast.

Chicken Pie

Baked Potatoes Warm Biscuit

Apple Sauce Coffee.

Chicken Pie.

Cook the chicken as for the ancestral chicken pie [below]. When done, remove all the meat from the bones and flake it. Do not have it like mince, but in long, thin and manifest pieces. Line a large, deep soup plate with a thick paste, made per ancestral chicken pie rule. Fill the plate with chicken, sprinkle a little flour through it, adding butter, salt and some of the liquor in which it was boiled. Cover with a thick paste and bake a nice brown. Be sure you brown the under crust. Serve with a gravy made from the liquor in which the chickens were boiled.

Chicken Pie [Ancestral].

For a pie boil the chickens in water enough to barely cover them. Skim them. When tender or done take them out into a platter and carve them the same as if to be served on the table. Remove the skin if very thick. Have ready a deep baking dish, lined with a thick paste. Have the dish proportioned to the quantity of chicken you wish to
use. Arrange the chicken so tiiat the same kind of pieces may not come out together, when served. Sprinkle each layer with a little flour and salt. Fill the dish nearly full with the liquor in which the chickens were boiled, but not so full as to be in danger of boiling over. Cover with an upper paste and close the edges very carefully. Bake nearly an hour, or till the crust is handsomely done. The crust for chicken pie should be twice as thick as for fruit pies. Use butter in the liquor if you prefer it.


Paste for Chicken Pie.
One quart of flour.
One teaspoonful of salt.
Two teaspoonfuls of cream-tartar.
One teaspoonful of soda.
One pint of sweet milk. *
One cupful of butter.
Mix these ingredients the same as for short cake, avoiding too much flour. This makes a nice and tender paste.


Quotation for the Day …

Do we need to have 280 brands of breakfast cereal? No, probably not. But we have them for a reason - because some people like them. It's the same with baseball statistics.
Bill James

Any Apple in That?

Our sugar-saturated society sees a clear divide between “sweet” and “savoury” dishes - and we wrinkle our noses in distaste, and puzzle over the odd taste preferences of our medieval ancestors when we read ancient recipes with sugar and fruit included in predominantly meat dishes. The crucial point of course is to do with quantity. A small amount of sugar, used in the way of an exotic, expensive, imported spice, was the medieval way. And we have not abandoned the idea of fruit with meat completely, have we? We have apple sauce (or prunes) with pork, cranberries with turkey, and pineapple in some of our interpretations of “Chinese” sweet-and-sour dishes for example.

A week or two ago, we looked at bananas in savoury dishes. A year or more ago we had William Ellis’ mid-eighteenth century Onion Pye made by labouring Mens Wives, - which was as much apple as onion, and was clearly meant to be a “sweet” (i.e “dessert”) dish to rival pumpkin pie. Today I have for you a recipe for a “savoury” pie with apple, to remind you of the almost infinite adaptability of the fruit. It is taken from The English Art of Cookery, by Richard Briggs (1788) - but plagiarism was rife in those times, and the exact same recipe appeared in a number of popular cookbooks of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is called “onion” pie, but has equal amounts of potato, apple, and onion.

Onion Pie.
Pare a pound of potatoes, slice them thin, peel about a pound of large onions, and slice them, pare the same quantity of apples, core and slice them likewise, boil six eggs hard, take off the shells,and cut them in slices; lay a thin sheet of puff-paste over the bottom of the dish, put on a quarter of a pound of fresh butter, mix a quarter of an ounce of beaten mace, a tea-spoonful of pepper, and three of salt, strew some over the butter, then lay in a layer of potatoes, a layer of onions, a layer of apples, and one of eggs, strew some seasoningon, and so on till all the ingredients are in; strew the remainder of the seasoning on top, put on a quarter of a pound of butter, and our in half a pint of white wine; put a thin puff-paste over it, and bake it one hour and a half.

Quotation for the Day.

The onion being eaten, yea though it be boyled, causeth head-ache, hurteth the eyes, and maketh a man dimme sighted, dulleth the senses, ingendreth windinesse, and provoketh overmuch sleepe, especially being eaten raw.
John Gerard (1545-1611)

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

Kissing Crust.

Were you ever, as a child, sent to buy a loaf of bread, and were unable to resist gnawing off one of the crusty crunchy corners on the way home? I was, and I did. I was reminded of it when I came across a definition of the phrase ‘kissing crust’ recently. I always understood the ‘kissing crust’ to be the soft part of the crust of a loaf of bread that happens when two loaves touch in the baking. The OED agrees with me on this, which is always nice. The great lexicographer Samuel Johnson agrees too, in his famous dictionary of 1755, and I am also delighted that the great man and I see eye-to-eye on the issue.

Dictionaries do not always agree however, and according to the Glossary of Northamptonshire Words and Phrases (1854), what I was chewing off as I meandered home with the bread was in fact the kissing crust, which it defines as “the bottom crust, or the small crusty nob at the corner of a loaf.” Perhaps occurring where the bottom of the loaf is extra-crusty from where it “kisses” the oven floor”? The very opposite idea indeed!

That is not all! Another work (Howitt’s The Rural Life of England, 1838) has “ … the rich curly kissing-crust, that hangs like a fretted cornice from the upper half of the loaf.”

The OED does add that the kissing crust can also be ‘the under-crust in a pudding or pie’. Perhaps because it is soft and sloppy? It gives as support for this a quotation from the story of Nell Cook, in The Ingoldsby Legends, by Richard Harris Barham (1840’s) – “A mouldy piece of kissing-crust as from a Warden-pie”.

I stick to my opinion that the OED, Sam Johnson, and myself are correct on the kissing crust, but there is no reason why I cant be inspired by the warden pie idea.  Wardens are olden-day pears, used mainly for cooking, but there is also no reason why I cant give you a slightly more modern version of the pear pie.

From Domestic economy, and cookery, for rich and poor, by a lady (1827)


Pear Pies.
Bake the pears, with a little water, and a good deal of sugar, under a coarse paste; or put them into the oven or bain-marie, or upon a hot hearth, in a well-covered baking-pan, and leave them till they soften; cut in quarters, and core them; sheet a dish, dress them in, strewing them with cloves, cinnamon, and lemon, or orange zest: they may be coloured in the first doing with beet-root, or cochineal; or they may be made to retain their white colour by lemon-juice.
Pears require zest and wine, as they are very insipid; therefore, acid apples are put into the juice, or quinces, a little rough wine, brandy, or lemon-juice. Every thing is good when properly managed : they require a great deal of sugar, but care must be taken not to overcome them.

Quotation for the Day.

Will fortune never come with both hands full
But write her fair words still in foulest letters?
She either gives a stomach, and no food, -
Such are the poor in health; or else a feast.
And take away the stomach, - such the rich,
That have abundance, and enjoy it not.
William Shakespeare, King Henry IV.

Thanksgiving Pie No. 5

The final pie in the Thanksgiving series is mincemeat pie – the  pie which is equally appropriate for the Christmas season, which approaches with great haste.

Mincemeat pies were around for a long time before they were called mincemeat pies. Meat with fruit in pies goes back to medieval times, and there were many names for the end result (see the 15^th C recipe for Chewetys). It seems that the specific name ‘mincemeat’ referring to a mixture of minced meat, sugar, fruit, and spices is a late eighteenth or early nineteenth century phenomenon – but don’t quote me on that as I can hardly claim to have investigated it exhaustively! The OED gives the first known use in print as in 1824 in The Virginia Housewife, but I seem to remember seeing earlier uses - let me know if you know any, please!

Mixing meat (or in later times just suet) with sugar and dried fruit was a convenient way of pre-preparing rich pie fillings as the mixture would keep a very long time – an important attribute before canning and refrigeration. The dried fruit, sugar and spices were expensive imported items, and meat (and fat) was always prized, so the mix of “the goodly litter of the cupboard" was standard fare at any special occasion. We have long since lost the meat from mincemeat, but what remains still has a faint echo, if you listen carefully, of its medieval heritage.

The Vintage Christmas Recipes Archive contains a number of mince pie recipes dating from 1588, and includes mincemeat without meat, without intoxicants, with eggs, and with beets. In the link above is a recipe for Queensland Mince Meat (with mango), and elsewhere there is Mock Mince Pie and Eliza Acton's Mincemeat Pudding. There is always room for one more idea however, and the following is from ‘a married woman’ in 1847.

 

Mince Pie.

Parboil a beef's heart, or tongue, or a fresh piece of beef. When cold, chop very tine two pounds of the lean; chop as fine as possible, two pounds of the inside of beef's suet, and mix the meat and the suet together, adding a teaspoonful of salt. Take four pounds of pippin apples, pared, cored and chopped fine, two pounds of raisins stoned and chopped, and two pounds of currants, picked, washed and dried, and mix the fruit with the suet and meat. Add two pounds of powdered sugar, two grated nutmegs, half an ounce of powdered cinnamon, a quarter of an ounce of cloves, a quarter of an ounce of mace, and the grated peel and juice of two large oranges; and wet the whole with a quart of white wine, a quart of brandy, and a wineglass of rose-water, mixing them well together.
Make a paste, allowing for each pie eight ounces of butter and twelve ounces of sifted flour. Lay a sheet of paste all over a soup plate; fill it with mince meat, laying slips of citron on the top, in the proportion of half a pound for the entire mixture. Roll out a sheet of paste for the lid of the pie; put it on, and crimp the edges with a knife ; prick holes in the lid, and bake half an hour in a brisk oven.
Meat will keep good for pies, several months, if kept in a cool dry place, and prepared as follows. To a pound of meat chopped fine, and four ounces of suet, put an ounce of cinnamon, an ounce of mace, a quarter of an ounce of cloves, and two teaspoonfuls of salt, add, if liked, eight ounces of currants, eight of raisins, and four of citron. Add too, a tumbler of brandy or wine, three spoonfuls of molasses, and sugar enough to make it quite sweet. Put all in a stone pot, and cover it with a paper wet in brandy. In using it, take equal weights of meat and apples pared and chopped fine. If not seasoned enough, add to the taste. If the apples are not tart, put in lemon juice or cider.

The Improved Housewife, by A. L. Webster, A married lady (1847)

Quotation for the Day …

Thanksgiving is America's national chow-down feast, the one occasion each year when gluttony becomes a patriotic duty (in France, by contrast, there are three such days: Hier, Aujourd'hui and Demain).

[i.e Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow]
Michael Dresser

Dishing up an Insult, Part 2.

My lovely friend Marisa sent me an email in response to the idea of giving a name to a dish that is also an ethnic slur (or comment). She is an expert in Sicilian food and is writing her own book on it, and tells me that there is a Sicilian dessert called Testa di Turco (Turk's head) which is made of pastry and “in most parts of Sicily it is fried , and layered/topped with custard - cream.” Methinks it sounds good enough to move to Sicily for.

Ever since the crusades the Europeans have enjoyed eating Turks’ or Saracens’ heads in one form or another. There is a wonderfully apocryphal story about Richard I keeping a supply of Saracen’s handy, in case of a hunger attack. He had them apocryphally served

“soden full hastily
With powder and with spysory,
And with saffron of good colour.”

Ridiculous story of course, proving the inverse law of fakelore - the popularity of a story is inversely proportional to the amount of true fact in it.

Medieval folk who could not lay their hands on a real Turk made due with symbolic ones, and often they were glorified pies. Here are two examples from the thirteenth century (from Two Anglo-Norman Culinary Collections, edited by Constance Hieatt), one for fast days and one for meat days.

Turk's head.
How to make the dish called Turk's head from a fish day or in Lent. Take choice rice and wash it and dry it; then grind it thoroughly, mix with thickened almond milk, and put in spices and saffron, as directed below, and sugar. Make a pastry case; then scald eels and remove the excrement; then cut them up; and take parsley, sage, and some broth, and grind it in a mortar, and put in saffron and mixed ground spice; then cover [with a pastry lid] and put it in the oven.

Turks head. [2]
A sheet of pastry well filled with rabbits and poultry, dates, peeled and sweetened in honey, new cheese, cloves and cubeb; sugar on top, then a generous layer of ground pistachio nuts; the color of the ground nuts, red, yellow, and green.The head (of hair) should be black, arranged to resemble the hair of a woman, in a black bowl, with the face of a man set on top.

There are other Turks’ Heads too. A large variety of pumpkin, and a metal turban-shaped mould for desserts or ices very popular in the nineteenth century.

There are other Cannibal ideas too. (Warning: Shameless Plug Alert) If you are interested in cannibalism (the theoretical aspects of course), you may be interested in Human Cuisine, or part of Gary Allen’s Master-Work in Progress on How to Serve Man.

Quotation for the Day …

Playwrights are like men who have been dining for a month in an Indian restaurant. After eating curry night after night, they deny the existence of asparagus. Peter Ustinov.

Red, red, food.

Before there was artificial red food colouring, there was an amazing natural red food colouring. I love/hate that word natural in relation to food. I do wonder how many people over the years actually knew that the cochineal used to make pretty pink icing for their cupcakes came from a natural insect.

The cochineal insect (Dactylopius coccus) lives on a cactus plant in South America and Mexico, and it was once the focus of a huge and very lucrative industry. Specimens of Prickly Pear along with insect inhabitants were collected by Captain Arthur Phillip en route to settle the first batch of convicts in Australia in 1788, the intention being to break the Spanish monopoly on the trade. I don’t know how much effort went into early attempts were to cultivate the insect (another story to research!) but the prickly pear certainly thrived to pestilential proportions.

It takes about 70,000 cochineal insects to produce one pound (about 500 grams) of cochineal, and and harvesting them is very labour-intensive. It is of course more expensive than synthetic colouring – at least five times as expensive – but it is natural (but not vegan-natural).

Most of the cochineal of course was used to dye fabric, but some found its way into kitchens. Cooks have always liked to play with colours in food, and there have been some pretty scary ingredients and methods used in the past – one has only to think of the deliberate use of copper pans to make pickles nice and green, the colour coming from the toxic copper salts produced by contact with the vinegar. The use of cochineal caused a verb to be invented – scutchanele, meaning to colour with cochineal (or to simply colour red, perhaps.)

I have chosen a pie recipe for you today. It is is an out-take from my Pie Book, which is inching closer to production, thank goodness. I have no idea why it is called Scotchineal Pie, but presumably it is reddish in colour.  I think the ‘roots’ are sweet potato.

To make a Scotchinear (or Scotchineal) Pie.

Boil the Roots tendre, and peel them, and season it with Nutmeg, Cloves, Mace, Cinamon, Sugar and Salt, then lay it in your Pie, and put to it a good quantity of Marrow, Limon-peel cut small, and some slices, strew in near half a poun of Currans, candid Citron, Limon and Orange-peel, cut in thin slices, Barberries, Grapes or Gooseberries as the time of Year afford, when the pie is filled put in some Sugar and wring in the juice of two good Limons.

For the Caudle take a quart of White-wine or Sider, a little Sack and thicken it up with the Yelks of 6 Eggs, and sweeten it to your Taste; if the Wine or Cyder be no sharp enough, put in a little Vinegar.

The Pastrycooks Vade Mecum, 1705  (Anonymous)

Quotation for the Day …

I prefer Hostess fruit pies to pop-up toaster tarts because they don't require as much cooking.  Carrie Snow.

The Aftermath of a Wedding.

A wedding sets up a train of events. Bliss, sometimes. Divorce, often. Children, frequenty. Queen Victoria referred to childbearing as one of the ‘unavoidable inconveniences’ of married life. Nevetheless she did her wifely and royal duty and provided her husband and the nation with nine heirs, and the royals of most of Europe with spouses.

Apple pie is the universal Western symbol of motherhood, for reasons, I suppose, that apples and mothers are everywhere. In the case of my young friend who has inspired this week’s stories, it should be apricot pie – for reasons that I wont explain because no matter how funny they are, some stories should be kept within the family circle. Or at least not made public on the eve of the Bride’s Big Day.

The apricot originated in China, and was enjoyed (but probably not cultivated) by the Romans, and found its way to Europe in the mid-sixteenth century. It required some clever horticultural work before it could be grown well there, and apricots did not become easily available in England for another two hundred years. The name of the apricot seems to come from its early ripening, and is derived from the Latin word praecox (from which we also get precocious). Perhaps a nice symbol for a young woman in the prime springtime of her life, pre-motherhood?

The recipe for apricot pie is not a secret, so here it is. The pie in the family story was a double crust pie – a ‘real’ pie, in my eyes, not a wimpy pot-pie style. And it was also made from canned apricots, for reasons that I wont go into, because that is part of the story. I know, because I made one for the girl-who-will-be-bride.

Apricot Pie.

Pare, stone, and halve the apricots. Place them in a pie-dish, piling them high in the middle. Strew over them a little sifted sugar, and a few of the kernels blanched and chopped small. Cover them with a good light crust, and bake in a moderate oven. Time to bake, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 2s. for a moderate-sized dish. Sufficient for four or five persons.

Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery, c1870’s.

Quotation for the Day …

Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine – good god, how fine. It went down soft, pulpy, slushy, oozy – all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like large beatified Strawberry. I shall certainly breed.  John Keats.

"The Fourth"

July 4 ...

Today being ‘The Fourth’, I have a Civil War era menu for you, my American friends. It is from the town of Prescott, Arizona – a town of the very young age of 35 days when it held its Independence Day celebrations at the ‘Juniper House’ in 1864. The restaurant itself being still in a state of construction, the dinner was held in a makeshift tent under a large juniper tree. Presumably many of the 400 party-goers (almost all male, there being a terrible dearth of women in the fledgling mining town) did not manage to fit inside the ten by fifteen foot space but stayed outside – where they could watch the food cooking on campfires.

The Juniper House Bill of Fare' July 4, 1864

Breakfast until 9 o'clock

Beef Steak Fried Liver

Venison Steak Mutton Chop

Tea and Coffee, with Milk

Dinner from 12 to 3

Beans Mutton Broth Bean Soup Beef Stew

Venison Barbecued Beef Barbequed Beef Potpie

Venison Potpie Mutton Barbequed Beef Potpie

Apple Roll, with Sauce.

Tea and Coffee, with Milk

Supper from 4 o’clock.

And here is how to cook any one of those pot pies without an oven.

Pot Pie.
Take raised pie-crust, line a pot, or small Dutch oven, or a very deep stewpan, bottom and sides, with one-half an inch thickness; lay your fowls and pork, or veal, in very small pieces, (the pork is always best boiled first,) in, with salt, and pepper, and small pieces of butter, then potatoes, cut in very delicate slices, then a layer of crust, one, again, of meat, then potatoes, then crust. Then pour in the water in which the pork has been boiled, through a hole in the top crust. The pie must be baked very judiciously, or it will be a failure. It is, therefore, always best to cook the meat and fowl, unless they are very young and tender. Lay a sheet of foolscap over the top, to keep it from baking too rapidly.

This is a most excellent dish for a harvest-party, or log-rolling; it can be made at any season of the year; in winter they are very fine, made of sweet-breads, tender-loins, and spare-ribs, finely sliced, or cut up.

The Great Western Cook Book, or Table Receipts, Adapted to Western Housewifery.New York: A.S. Barnes & Company, 1857. c1851

Monday’s Story …

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Quotation for the Day …

“If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girl friends. And they tolerated it and let us go ahead and play with our toys.” Orson Welles.

Raisins of all sorts.

February 14

An article in the Scientific American on this day in 1852 set me off on a few thinking tangents.

Skins of Raisins.
We see it stated in some papers, that Dr Devees, of Boston, has said that raisin skins are indigestible, and that nothing but the stomach of an ostrich can master them. He mentions the deaths of three children, caused by skins of raisins not digesting in their stomachs. Well, Dr. Devees, what about their digestibility when cooked? Raisins are fruit, which from time immemorial, have been used as a nourishing and healthy food by all Orientals.

I was glad to see the silly Dr Deeves taken to task so promptly. I would have asked him if there was the same risk with currants and sultanas, just to see how he responded. They are all dried grapes, after all. ‘Raisins’ were once specifically called “raisins of the sun”, to indicate that it was the dried variety of grape that was meant. "Raisins of Corinth" were from a small variety of grape, and ‘Corinth’ eventually became corrupted to ‘Currants’, sultanas are from Sultana grapes, and muscatels from the Muscat grape. It is quite OK to substitute freely. A Raisin cake will be fine if you use sultanas or currants. I promise.

Today’s recipes are below.

Today’s sermon is below the recipes. Just letting you know so you can skip it if you wish.

The recipes are (1) a fifteenth century version of little mincemeat pies – with veal, pork, eggs, spices and dried fruits (including of course raisins), baked in pastry ‘coffins’, (2) and a nineteenth century sweet, fruity ‘baba’, because I have been neglecting one of my favourite sources lately – the incredibly comprehensive Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery.

Chawettys.
Take buttys of Vele, and mynce hem smal, or Porke, and put on a potte; take Wyne, and caste ther-to pouder of Gyngere, Pepir, and Safroun, and Salt, and a lytel verous [verjus], and do hem in a cofyn with yolks of Eyroun [eggs], and kutte Datys and Roysonys of Coraunce, Clowys, Maces, and then ceuere thin cofyn, and lat it bake tyl it be y-now [enough].

Baba with Raisins.
Mix half an ounce of German yeast and four ounces of sifted flour with warm water to a soft dough, and put it near the fire to rise. Rub twelve ounces of butter into twelve ounces of flour, work it into a smooth paste with eight well-beaten eggs, one ounce of pounded sugar, and a little salt. When the paste is ready and the sponge sufficiently risen, blend them well together and mix in two ounces of finely-minced candied citron-peel, two ounces of well-dried currants, and three ounces of stoned raisins. Butter a mould fill it about half full, and allow it to rise until it is nearly at the top, when it may be baked at once in a moderate oven. Time to bake, one hour and a half.

We live in an era when it seems that fewer and fewer of us cook less and less. There are many reasons quoted – but two of the commonly given reasons do not strike very true, really, when you think about it.

One is that we have “no time”. But legally we have a mere five eight hour days in which to earn our living. And we have labour-saving gadgets to take the work out of kitchen chores such as chopping and kneading and. And we buy our raisins pre-stoned. And in any case the “time” of rising of yeast dough is not our time - we can watch a lot of U-Tubes while the Baba dough does its silent thing.

The other “reason” (excuse, I call it) is that we have lost our skills (because our mothers didn’t cook, and maybe even our grandmothers, and it is always the mummy’s fault anyway). If this is true, it is also true that now have cookbooks with easy-to-follow, accurate instructions - none of this “take some wine and cast some spices thereto”, and “cook it till it be enough”. AND our ovens have temperature regulators. AND they have timers. AND we no longer believe that raisins kill little children. Progress seems to have offered a few pretty reasonable trade-offs to me.

We should quit whingeing and have more home-made fresh buttery Babas in our lives. Sweet yeast dough is pretty forgiving stuff.

Tomorrow’s Story …

All in a stew.

Quotation for the Day …

The past is always a rebuke to the present. Robert Penn Warren

Pork Pie, without the Pork.

February 8

The Internet firmly believes that Cape Breton Island was granted to Sir Robert Gordon of Lochinvar by Charles I, on this day 1631 – which was going to lead me to an anniversary exposé of the strangely porkless ‘Cape Breton Pork Pie’. I fear that The Internet has it a little wrong however, as in the fine print elsewhere it claims that Sir Robert died in 1628, and that he received the gift in November 1621. Any Scots or Nova Scots historians who can clarify, please do let us know the real truth.

A little factual confusion must not be allowed to get in the way of a good story however – so the famous pies it is. The Internet is strangely silent on the story of the porkless pork pies, save that they exist, and contain dates where the pork would be expected to be, and sugar, which would not be expected at all. The provenance is in great doubt, with a number of alternative myths where the history ought to be.

Cape Breton was settled by the Scots, then the French, then the Irish, then there was a second wave of Scots immigration in the first half of the nineteenth century. There is no doubt that the island culture proudly reflects its Scots heritage, and it is assumed (where any assumptions are made at all) that the porkless Pork Pies are a legacy of that heritage. To me, this seems unlikely. Pork in any form is not writ large in Scotland’s culinary history. Surely Cape Breton Pies with a Scots history would be muttonless mutton pies?

Perhaps they once did have pork in them, in the grand tradition of medieval mincemeat pies, and they kept the name after they lost the pork? Perhaps there used to be pork fat in the pastry? Perhaps they are so called because they stand up proudly like little raised pork pies (the same rationale for the naming of pork-pie hats)? Maybe the name is – like that of Welsh Rabbit (poshly called rarebit) – an ethnic slur by outsiders or a bit of self-mockery by insiders?

The Internet has many recipes for the date tart that fancies itself as a pork pie, and I invite you to ask Google to show you some Cape Breton Pork Pie instructions. If a definitive, historical recipe with provenance turns up, please do announce it to us all. In the meanwhile, there is a Scottishly frugal recipe for apple pie in Cookery and pastry. As taught and practised by Mrs. Maciver, published in Edinburgh in 1787.

An Apple Pie with Potatoes.
Boil some potatoes; pair [pare] and cut some apples; lay a row of apples in the dish, and a row of potatoes above them; then put some pieces of fresh butter above the potatoes; put apples, potatoes, and butter alternately until the pie is filled up; sweeten it to your taste; take rather more apples than potatoes; it is much better of having a little citron and orange-peel in it; put at little water in all apple pies; cover it with puff’d paste.

(Presumably this refers to sweet potato at this point in history.)

Monday’s Story …

The Other Mrs. Child.

Quotation for the Day …

Man who waits for roast duck to fly into mouth must wait very, very long time. Chinese Proverb

Mrs. Pepys’ Pies.

December 24, Christmas Eve.

Samuel Pepys arrived home from the office on this day in 1663 to find his wife making mince-pies. The traditions of mince pies for Christmas was already well established by the mid-seventeenth century, and Pepys mentions them in other diary entries – noting, a few years later when he was more prosperous, the servants (“my people”) helping his wife with this project.

Mince pies originally contained meat, as we found out in our December 2005 story – which also touched on the symbolic meaning attached to the making and eating of pies. There is an almost infinite variety of recipes for mincemeat – even “mock” mincemeat – and several appear in the Vintage Christmas recipe archive.

The cookbook of Robert May – The Accomplish’t Cook – was very popular in Pepys time and I like to think that perhaps Mrs. Pepys knew of it. May gives several recipes for mince pies, with “French” and “Italian” versions included. There are no caraway seeds in these “foreign” recipes as there are in two out of three of the pies of unspecified heritage (caraway seeds were particularly beloved of the English): the “Italian” version presumably gets its nationality from the use of saffron, but I cant hazard a guess as to what makes the other one “French”. Elizabeth Pepys was of French Huguenot stock, so she might have been able to tell us.

Minced in the French fashion, called Pelipate, or in English Petits, made of Veal, Pork, or Lamb, or any kind of Venison, Beef, Poultrey, or Fowl.
Mince them with lard, and being minced, season them with salt, and a little nutmeg, mix the meat with some pine-apple-seed, and a few grapes or gooseberries; fill the pies and bake them, being baked liquor them with a little gravy.
Sometimes for variety in the Winter time, you may use currans instead of grapes or gooseberries, and yolks of hard eggs minced among the meat.

Minced Pies in the Italian Fashion.
Parboil a leg of veal, and being cold mince it with beef-suet, and season it with pepper, salt, and gooseberries; mix with it a little verjuyce, currans, sugar, and a little saffron in powder.

[Remember – traditions says it is good luck to eat one mince pie on each of the twelve days of Christmas, to bring good luck for each of the succeeding twelve months.]

Tomorrow’s Story …

Alternative Christmas Menus.

Quotation for the Day …

It is a great Nostrum the composition of this Pasty ["Christmas Pye"]; it is a most learned Mixture of Neats-tongues, Chickens, Eggs, Sugar, Raisins, Lemon and Orange Peel, various kinds of Spicery, etc. M. Mission, French visitor to England in the late seventeeth century.

Monsieur Buffet.

Today, October 18 …

Monsieur Pierre-Aphonse Buffet did not exist. Or if he did, he lived and disappeared with no obvious trace in the late seventeenth or first half of the eighteenth century. Even if he did exist, he certainly did not give his name to the word “buffet” in any of its incarnations.

“Buffet” means three things, according to the OED. It means a blow or punch (did you play ‘Blind Man’s Buff’ as a child?), a three-legged stool (on which Miss Muffet probably sat - rather than a tuffet - eating her curds and whey, which were probably cruds and whey), and of course a sideboard or cabinet (and ultimately the food served from it).

The OED does not even venture a guess as to the origin of the word, and I therefore hold it partly responsible for the perpetuity of the myth of Pierre-Alphonse. It is a colourful myth, reminiscent of the one about the English Earl of Sandwich giving his name to sandwiches. It says that the usage came about because he was a Parisian gambler-gourmet who ensured that food was laid out on his sideboard so that he and his guests did not need to leave the gaming table in order to eat.

There are faint suspicions that the word is French in origin – and the custom of using a sideboard or cupboard to make an ostentatious display of one’s gold and silver knick-knacks probably did start in France, maybe in the sixteenth century. It became an obvious location for the placement of elegant filled dishes of fine food when one entertained, and eventually, by the early nineteenth century, the word came to apply to the meal served from it.

Once upon a time, buffet parties were elegant and refined. Now we have the ‘all you can eat’ kind, which have inspired the invention of elastic-waisted ‘buffet-pants' and may have played their own small part in the obesity epidemic.

From ostentation to elegance to gross in a mere few centuries. Mrs. Beeton lived in the time when a buffet was on the cusp between ostentation and elegance. She thought they were very appropriate for suppers.

“Where small rooms and large parties necessitate having a standing supper, many things enumerated in the following bill of fare may be placed on the buffet. Dishes for these suppers should be selected which may be eaten standing without any trouble. The following list may, perhaps, assist our readers in the arrangement of a buffet for a standing supper.

Beef, ham, and tongue sandwiches, lobster and oyster patties, sausage rolls, meat rolls, lobster salad, dishes of fowls, the latter - all cut up; dishes of sliced ham, sliced tongue, sliced beef, and galantine of veal; various jellies, blancmanges, and creams; custards in glasses, compotes of fruit, tartlets of jam, and several dishes of small fancy pastry; dishes of fresh fruit, bonbons, sweetmeats, two or three sponge cakes, a few plates of biscuits, and the buffet ornamented with vases of fresh or artificial flowers. The above dishes are quite sufficient for a standing supper; where more are desired, a supper must then be laid and arranged in the usual manner.”

Her suggestion of sausage rolls seems a little out of place to me; sausage rolls may be delicious, but they are hardly elegant. Here is her recipe for them.

MEAT OR SAUSAGE ROLLS
1 lb. of puff-paste No. 1206, sausage-meat No. 837, the yolk of 1 egg.
Make 1 lb. of puff-paste by recipe No. 1206; roll it out to the thickness of about ½ inch, or rather less, and divide it into 8, 10,or 12 squares, according to the size the rolls are intended to be. Place some sausage-meat on one-half of each square, wet the edges of the paste, and fold it over the meat; slightly press the edges together, and trim them neatly with a knife. Brush the rolls over with the yolk of an egg, and bake them in a well-heated oven for about ½ hour, or longer should they be very large. The remains of cold chicken and ham, minced and seasoned, as also cold veal or beef, make very good rolls.

1206. PUFF PASTE.
To every lb. of flour allow 8 oz. of butter, 4 oz.of lard, not quite ½ pint of water.
This paste may be made by the directions in the preceding recipe, only using less butter and substituting lard for a portion of it. Mix the flour to a smooth paste with not quite ½ pint of water; then roll it out 3 times, the first time covering the paste with butter, the second with lard, and the third with butter. Keep the rolling-pin and paste slightly dredged with flour, to prevent them from sticking, and it will be ready for use.

TO MAKE SAUSAGES.
(Author's Oxford Recipe)
837. 1 lb. of pork, fat and lean, without skin or gristle; 1 lb. of lean veal, 1 lb. of beef suet, 1/2 lb. of bread crumbs, the rind of 1/2 lemon, 1 small nutmeg, 6 sage-leaves, 1 teaspoonful of pepper, 2 teaspoonfuls of salt, 1/2 teaspoonful of savory, 1/2 teaspoonful of marjoram.

Chop the pork, veal, and suet finely together, add the bread crumbs, lemon-peel (which should be well minced), and a small nutmeg grated. Wash and chop the sage-leaves very finely; add these with the remaining ingredients to the sausage-meat, and when thoroughly mixed, either put the meat into skins, or, when wanted for table, form it into little cakes, which should be floured and fried.

Tomorrow’s Story …

A Nut by Any Other Name

Quotation for the Day ...

I went to this restaurant last night that was set up like a big buffet in the shape of an Ouija board. You'd think about what kind of food you want, and the table would move across the floor to it. Steven Wright

Dumplings for Eccentrics.

Today, January 10th …

It is universally acknowledged that the British have more eccentrics per capita than any other nation on earth. A superb British example of Extreme Eccentricity was born on this day in 1716, to die wealthy but alone and miserable a long, cold, hungry 78 years later.

That person was the most miserly of a famous family of rich misers, a man called Daniel Dancer. In spite of his fun-sounding name, he lived the life of a recluse, wore rags until they fell off him and slept on a bed of sacks and straw. He ate a single meal a day of a bit of meat and a single dumpling – apart from the glorious brief two weeks when he ate mutton pies made from the decomposing flesh of a dead sheep which he happened upon and did not want to waste. A little embroidery rarely hurts what is already an apocryphal story, and one version of this tale says that rather than waste fuel he heated his dinner by putting it between two plates and sitting on it.

The OED defines a dumpling as “A kind of pudding consisting of a mass of paste or dough, more or less globular in form, either plain and boiled, or inclosing fruit and boiled or baked.” In other words, they are the plainest of plain food, their sole purpose being to take away hunger as cheaply as possible.

Daniel came from Harrow in Middlesex, and Norfolk is the English county most proud of its dumplings, but in reality - a dumpling is a dumpling whichever county it hales from. The OED definition is almost a recipe, so here, in Daniel’s honour, I give you a couple of another alternatives suitable for “poor people”, from William Ellis, a Hereford farmer who lived at the same time as Dancer and wrote a manual of domestic and farm management in 1750.

How Water Pancakes are made by poor People.
This pancake is made by many poor, day-labouring mens wives, who when they cannot afford to make better, make this; by stirring wheat flower with water instead of milk, for if they can get milk, they generally think it put to a better use when they make milk porridge of it for their family. The flower and water being stirred into a batter consistence, with a sprinkling of salt and powder'd ginger, they fry the pancakes in lard, or other fat, and without any sugar they and their family make a good meal of them.

How a poor Woman makes palatable Mince-Pyes of stinking Meat.
This is a poor industrious woman that rents a little tenement by me of twenty shillings a year, who for the sake of her poverty is every week relieved, with many others, by the most noble lord of Gaddesden Manour; who killing a bullock almost every week for his very large family, he has the offald meat dressed, and is so good as to have it given away to the poorest people in the neighbourhood. But it sometimes happens, through the negligence of careless servants, that this charitable meat is apt to stink in hot weather, for want of its due cleaning, boiling, and laying it in a cool place: However, the poor are very glad of this dole, as it does their families considerable service. And to recover such tainted meat, this woman, after boiling and cleansing it well, chops and minces it very small, and when mixed with some pepper, salt, chop'd sage, thyme and onion, she bakes it: This for a savoury pye. At another time she makes a sweet pye of this flesh, by mixing a few currants and plumbs with it. But in either form the taint is so lessened that it is hardly to be perceived.

Tomorrow’s Story …

Hardy’s Ale.

A Previous Story for this Day …

Getting the Sauce on Vegetables, a story about the complexities of EU regulations, was the story for this day last year.

Quotation for the Day …

The fricassee with dumplings is made by a Mrs Miller whose husband has left her four times on account of her disposition and returned four times on account of her cooking and is still there. Rex Stout (1886-1975), creator of the fat detective, Nero Wolfe.