Garlic Butter.

You might not think that you do, but you probably do some historical cookery from time to time. Take garlic butter for example. Garlic butter = garlic + butter, Yes? The recipe has remained unchanged for at least a couple of hundred years. Hasn’t it?

Beurre d’Ail was mentioned by the famous French chef Antoine Beauvilliers, in Le Cuisinier Royal (1814). In the English translation of 1837, the recipe read:

Garlic Butter - Sauce au Beurre d’Ail.
Take two large heads of garlic; beat them with the size of an egg of butter; when well beaten rub it through a double hair search [searce or sieve] with a wooden spoon; gather it, and use, either with velouté or with reduced Espagnole.

Popular stereotyping has it that the English have (or used to have) a notorious disgust for the French appetite for garlic, while at the same time being somewhat in jealous awe of their culinary reputation and skills. How would a nineteenth century foodie-cook cope with the paradox of wanting to cook like the French, but without so much garlic?

In French domestic cookery, by an English physician (1825), the recipe asks for two large cloves instead of two large heads of garlic to the egg-sized nut of butter. I really don’t know if this is an error of translation, or was an intentional adaptation to suit English readers – do you?

Beurre d’Ail (Garlic Butter)
Take two large cloves of garlic, pound them in a mortar, and reduce them to a paste, by mixing with a bit of butter about the size of an egg. This garlic butter may be put into any sauces you think proper. Those who like the taste of garlic, season their roast or broiled meats with it.

However good and simple a basic recipe might be (and you cant get much better and simpler than garlic + butter), there is that irresistible human urge to fiddle, isn’t there?

In Charles Ranhofer’s The Epicurean (New York, 1893), an even greater reduction in the pungency of the garlic is effected by a previous blanching, this then being offset to some extent by the heat of the red pepper.

Garlic Butter (Beurre d’Ail)
Blanch one ounce of garlic in plenty of water, drain and pound it well, adding half a pound of butter and seasoning with salt and red pepper.

Personally, I like it made with roasted garlic.


Quotation for the Day.

Garlic used as it should be used is the soul, the divine essence, of cookery. The cook who can employ it successfully will be found to possess the delicacy of perception, the accuracy of judgment, and the dexterity of hand which go to the formation of a great artist.
Mrs. W. G. Waters

Pudding Sauces.

Yesterday we looked at some slightly different ideas for Christmas pudding and mince pies; today I want to offer you a couple of slightly different sauces for your chosen pudding.

Teetotal Pudding Sauce.
is made with melted butter, to which a little cream has been added, sweetened to taste, and flavoured with any of the favourite spices.
The Corner Cupboard, Robert Kemp Philp, 1853

Orange Sauce.
½ cup orange juice
2 teaspoons orange marmalade
1 teaspoon grated orange rind
1 teaspoon lemon juice
½ cup sugar
4 eggs separated
⅛ teaspoon salt
Cook orange juice, marmalade, rind, lemon juice, sugar, and egg yolks in a double boiler or a heavy saucepan over low heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens. Beat egg whites with salt until they hold firm peaks. Fold egg whites into orange custard mixture before serving.
Life, Dec 8, 1961

Or how about this rather tropical idea from, of all people, the very English Eliza Acton, in 1845? One shudders to think of the availability (and price) and quality of pineapples at the time.

A Very Fine Pine-Apple Sauce Or Syrup, For Puddings Or Other Sweet Dishes.
After having pared away every morsel of the rind from a ripe and highly flavoured pine-apple, cut three-quarters of a pound of it into very thin slices, and then into quite small dice. Pour to it nearly half a pint of spring water; heat, and boil it very gently until it is extremely tender, then strain and press the juice closely from it through a cloth or through a muslin strainer* folded in four; strain it clear, mix it with ten ounces of the finest sugar in small lumps, and when this is dissolved, boil the syrup gently for a quarter of an hour. It will be delicious in flavour and very bright in colour if well made. If put into a jar, and stored with a paper tied over it, it will remain excellent for weeks; and it will become almost a jelly with an additional ounce of sugar and rather quicker boiling. It may be poured round moulded creams, rice, or sago; or mingled with various sweet preparations for which the juice of fruit is admissible.
*It is almost superfluous to say that the large squares of muslin, of which on account of their peculiar nicety we have recommended the use for straining many sweet preparations, must never have a particle of starch in them; they should he carefully kept free from dust and soil of any kind, and always well rinsed and soaked in clear water before they are dried.
Modern Cookery, Eliza Acton, 1845

From a previous post: Honey and Butter sauce.

Quotation for the Day.
A lovely thing about Christmas is that it’s compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together
Garrison Keillor

The Hazards of Gravy-Making.

The English may only have two sauces, if the old saw is to be believed - but as one of them is gravy, and the other one is custard, and both of these are infinitely variable - no higher number is needed.

I understand that some of the hopeful ‘cookstove artists’ amongst you are afraid of gravy-making. Today we are blessed with an elegant sufficiency of instant everything and anything for the kitchen, including of course sauces, including gravy, in many forms – powder, cube, jar, or resealable plastic packet. Many of these will be purchased in the ensuing weeks to enhance or disguise the Thanksgiving roasts and Christmas puddings, so in view of my promise yesterday, I thought it might be fun to look back to a time when instant gravy was a novelty. Here are the enthusiastic words of a columnist in the New York Times of May 13, 1941.

Ready-to-Cook Gravy Latest Addition to Quick Aids for Harassed Housewife.

We are in a perpetual state of amazement these days over the endless parade of culinary short-cuts constantly coming into view. If things keep up at this rate much longer, filling the water glasses will be the most taxing part of preparing a full-course feast. Latest addition to the time-saving collection is a base that is said to eliminate the hazards of gravy-making – that Armageddon in which many a hopeful cookstove artist has gone down to a disgraceful defeat. The gravy base is the inspiration of a transplanted California couple who, in the little shop adjoining their Long Island home, have confined their previous experiments to herbs and new uses for them. Now, thanks to them, we can eliminate fussing with a pinch of salt, a tablespoon of flour, a dash of pepper – all these are right in the preparation. Included as well are a variety of herbs and spices that lend a full-bodied flavour to both soups and gravies. The sponsors of this newcomer declare that with very little effort you can produce at will a thin white sauce, a brown gravy, or a cream gravy. The cost of the preparation is 30 cents for a seven-ounce jar.

Gravy for Roast Meat.
Ingredients:- Gravy, salt.
Mode:- Put a common dish with a small quantity of salt in it under the meat, about a quarter of an hour before it is removed from the fire. When the dish is full take it away, baste the meat, and pour the gravy into the dish on which the joint is to be served.
Mrs. Beeton’s Dictionary of Everyday Cookery; Isabella Beeton, 1865

Quotation for the Day.

"....grease is not gravy. How often I have wished, from the depths of a loathing stomach, that certain well-meaning housekeepers - at whose boards I have sat as guest or boarder - who fry beefsteak in lard, and send ham to table swimming in fat; upon the surface of whose soups float spheroids of oil that encase the spoon with blubber, and coat the lips and tongue of the eater with flaky scales-that these dear souls who believe in 'old-fashioned cookery,' understood this simple law of digestive gravity!"
Breakfast, Luncheon and Tea, Marion Harland, (Mary Virginia Terhune) (1875)

Sauces Galore.

I thought it might be interesting to look briefly at some of the ‘traditional’ sauces served with certain foods, and see how many have stood the test of time. It was tempting to go back as far as possible, but I decided on the seventeenth century as the recipes and ideas seem more accessible to many of us.

An interesting book called Panzoologicomineralogia, or, a Compleat History of Animals and Minerals … published in Oxford in 1661 gives us an interesting perspective. In the chapter on animals the author includes their use as meats, even going so far as to tell which sauces were considered appropriate for each. The specific choices were in accordance with the prevailing medical opinion of the day, which was still largely rooted in the ancient humoral theory.

As for Sawces therefore, they are either hot, serving, if the stomach want appetite, by reason of cold and raw humours furring it, and dulling the sense of feeling in its orifices, &c; are made of dill, fennel, mints, organy, parsly, dried gilliflowers, galingal, mustard seed, garlick, onions, leekes, juniper-berries, sage, time, vervain, betony, salt, cinamon, ginger, mace, cloves, nutmegs, pepper, pills of citrons, limons, and orenges, grains, cubebs, &c.mixe 1.2. or 3. of them, as need requireth, with wine or vinegar, made strong of rosemary or gilliflowers: or cold, helping the stomach and appetite, hurt by much choler, or adust and putrifyed phlegm; as those made of sorrel, lettuce, spinache, purselane, or saunders; mixt with vinegar, verjuice, cider, alegar, or water; or the pulp of prunes, apples, and currens &c. some help also for slow digestion, which is caused by coldnesse of the stomach or hardnesse of the meat, and helped by hot things; mustard therefore is to be used with beefe, and all kinds of salted flesh and fish; and onion sauce with duck, widgin, teal, and all water foule; salt and pepper with venison, and galingal sawce with the flesh of cygnets; garlicke or onions boiled in milk with stubble goose; and sugar and mustard with red deere, crane, shoveler, and bustard; and others are for temperate meats, and speedy of digestion; as pork, mutton, lamb, veale, kid, hen, capon, pullet, chicken, rabbet, partridge, and pheasant &c these therefore must have temperate sauces; as mustard and green-sauce for pork, verjuice and salt for mutton, juyce of orenges or limmons with wine, salt and sugar for capons, pheasants and partridges; water and pepper for wood-cocks; vinegar and butter, or the gravet of rosted meat with rabbets, pigeons, or chickens; for such meats, their sawces being too cold or too hot, would quickly corrupt in the stomach, being else most nourishing of their own nature; but others are to be corrected by artificial preparation, and appropriated sawce, which nature has made queazy or heavy to indifferent stomachs. These are the chief meats, sawces, or matter of Aliment ……

Now, isn’t that an impressive repertoire of sauce ingredients and sauces? There certainly some good ideas back in the good old days. Why have we forgotten some of them? Galingal doesn’t figure large in too many English recipes nowadays. And when did you last use gilliflowers in your sauce?

The recipe for the day is from Gervase Markham’s The English Housewife (1668)

To make an excellent Sauce for a rost Capon, you shall take Onions, and having sliced and peeled them, boyl them in fair water with Pepper, Salt, and a few bread crums: then put unto it a spoonful or two of claret Wine, the juyce of an Orange, and three or four slices of Lemmon peel: all these shred together, and so pour it upon the Capon being broke up.

Quotation for the Day.

What is sauce for the goose may be sauce for the gander, but it is not necessarily sauce for the chicken, the duck, the turkey or the Guinea hen.
Alice B Toklas.

Beer recipes, Part 3.

The United Brewer’s Industrial Foundation produced a recipe booklet in 1937 to promote the use of beer in cookery. A beer-themed luncheon menu based on recipes from this book was mentioned in a recent blog post (and a follow-up here), and regular readers will remember that I determined to find enough of them (or suitable alternatives) to make it possible for you to hold your own beer-based lunch. I have been unable to find an actual copy of this recipe book, but luckily, some of the recipes are quoted elsewhere.

At the end of the two posts we had recipes outstanding for ‘melon balls with beer dressing, beer bread, sweet potatoes in beer, beer sauce on asparagus, potato salad with beer dressing, jellied vegetable salad containing beer, beer with eggs.’ Some of these are still proving elusive, but today I offer you beer soup (not in the menu quoted, but why not?), and a fine alternative for the fish course.


Bohemian Beer Soup.
2 cups beer (room temperature)
2 cups milk
2 tablespoons white sugar
2 whole eggs
Little grated nutmeg.
Get the milk very hot and then add to it eggs, sugar, and nutmeg beaten together. Stir until thickened then pour in the beer. Then pour all the mixture back into the kettle from which you poured the beer. Try this pouring back and forth for 4 to 6 times and serve immediately – to six of your best friends.
[From the United Brewers’ Foundation beer cookery book; quoted in a New York Times article of September 1937]

Fish Sauce [with beer].
5 ounces shallot onions, cut fine and braised.
2 ounces gingersnap crumbs
1 stalk celery, finely cut
Parsley
Put in a fish kettle the desired fish, add the onions, celery, gingersnap crumbs, parsley, salt. Cover the whole completely with a light bottled beer and cook slowly till done.
To prepare the sauce, use the fish broth, cook it down to two-thirds of its volume and put thru a sieve, add 5 ounces of fresh butter, beat lightly, and pour over fish.
[From ‘Joseph Happle, chef at Schroeder Hotel in Milwaukee’, quoted in the New York Times of April 27, 1934]

Quotation for the Day.

I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.
Brendan Behan

Carach Sauce.

Last week I was confused over ‘corach’ sauce. Thanks to pointer from a regular reader and commenter (see the post here), I am now a little clearer. The name is sometimes spelled ‘carach’ and sometimes ‘carachi’ – knowing alternative spellings helps when researching old recipes, and sometimes the only way to start off is by trying various phonetic variations of the word! One theory is that name is related to the city of Karachi (Pakistan), and suggests that it was believed that the sauce originated there. An alternative theory is that the sauce takes its name from Carache in Venezuela.

One early recipe is from that marvellous book, The Cook & Housewife's Manual (1826) by Mistress Margaret Dods (the pseudonym of Christian Isobel Johnstone). The recipe is uber-simple:

Carach-Sauce
Mix pounded garlic, Cayenne, soy, and walnut-pickle in good vinegar.

For those of you who prefer more exact measurements, a slightly earlier book - Five Thousand Receipts in all the Useful and Domestic Arts, (1825) by Colin MacKenzie has a more detailed version:

Carach sauce.
Take three cloves of garlic, each cut in half, half an ounce of Cayenne pepper, and a spoonful or two of Indian soy and walnut pickle; mix it in a pint of vinegar, with as much cochineal as will colour it.

A more elaborate version is in one of my favourite Victorian sources - Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery (c1870’s):

Carachi.
Pound a head of garlic, and put it into a jar with three table-spoonfuls each of walnut pickle, mushroom ketchup, and soy, and two tea-spoonfuls of cayenne pepper, two tea-spoonfuls of essence of anchovies, and one of pounded mace. Pour onto these one pint of fresh vinegar; let them remain in the liquid two or three days, then strain, and bottle it for use.

Note: After partly solving the ‘corach’ mystery (with a little help from my friends), I am now left with the concept of ‘Indian’ soy. Please do continue to share your insights, and to watch this space.

Quotation for the Day.

On England and the English: As a rule they will refuse even to sample a foreign dish, they regard such things as garlic and olive oil with disgust, life is unliveable to them unless they have tea and puddings.
George Orwell.

An Actionable Sauce.

The Women’s Christian Temperance Union of Norfolk, Virginia, were outraged and ‘congregations horrified’ when it was rumoured that the local Protestant pastors had rum sauce on their banana fritters at an annual dinner in December 1904. Rumour and accusation were quickly followed, as they almost inevitably are, by denial on the part of the perpetrators. The shocking story was seen to be worthy of reporting in no less than the New York Times a few days later.

RUM SAUCE AT PASTOR’S FEAST.

-

Served with Banana Fritters and

Congregations are Horrified.

Norfolk, Va. Dec. 18 – “Banana fritters with rum sauce” served at the annual dinner of the Tide Water Ministerial Association, composed of the leading Protestant ministers of Southeast Virginia, has caused a sensation in church circles, and the revered gentlemen have been upbraided by the members of their congregations, especially the women. It is expected at the meeting tomorrow of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union that the matter will be brought up for action.

Some of the ministers, in defense, say they were not aware of the rum sauce being on the bill of fare, while one preacher declared that no rum sauce was on the table, because he would have been able to smell it.

Sadly, it appears that the New York Times did not see fit to follow up the story, so we are left with the issue unresolved. Whom do you believe? What action did the good ladies take against the naughty pastors?

There are many variations on a theme of rum sauce. I give you a selection, with varying amounts of alcohol, from which to make your choice.


Rum Sauce.
½ cup sugar, 1 cup boiling water, ¼ cup rum or wine.
Make a syrup by boiling sugar and water five minutes; add rum or wine.
Boston Cooking School Cook Book, Boston, 1896.

Rum Sauce.
Boil one cup of milk with one cup of sugar, and wet a teaspoonful of arrowroot or cornstarch with a little cold milk and add. Just before removing from the fire, add a teaspoonful of rum. Serve hot.
Aunt Babette’s Cook Book, Cincinatti, 1889.

Rum Sauce.
Beat yolks of two eggs with a tablespoon of sugar and a small cup of cold water, a wineglass of rum, and the juice of a lemon, and bring to boiling point, stirring all the time. The two whites of eggs may be whipped very firm and spread over the pudding just before serving.
The International Jewish Cook Book, New York, 1919

Quotation for the Day.

RUM, n. Generically, fiery liquors that produce madness in total abstainers.
Ambrose Bierce, Devil’s Dictionary.

Fear of Bacon.

It seems to me that the citizens of the world are divided into three groups when it comes to bacon:

- Those who eschew it for religious reasons.
- Those who love it madly, deeply, unreservedly and unashamedly.
- Those who fear it.

The groups are not completely exclusive of each other of course. Strange though it may seem, some of those in the second group also belong to the third group – and how sad is that?

There are many things about bacon that can be a source of anxiety for those who are susceptible. There is the kidney-destroying salt used in curing, the potentially carcinogenic smoking process, the worrying preservatives – some ‘germs’, maybe, in spite of that salt, smoke, and chemicals. Most of all there is the FAT. Fat gives flavour of course, but we are talking here about fear, not flavour. Supermarket bacon can now be found which has so little fat it looks like oval slices of uniformly pale pink luncheon meat, and tastes about as delicious. Bacon so low fat it might as well be rhubarb.

How refreshing to go back to the days when bacon was loved for its fat – the days when every drop of it was saved to add flavour to another dish. How marvelous to find an author who positively glories in bacon fat – and the author of a book on salads too. The book is called Two hundred recipes for making salads with thirty recipes for dressings and sauces, (Olive Hulse, 1910). This author is so fearless she is even able to refer to it as ‘grease’- a word not normally welcomed in the modern kitchen in any context.

“One can always rely on the best quality of olive oil for salads, but there are those who prefer the flavor of smoked bacon fat. This is particularly true of people living in hot climates.”

The author particularly likes it with Dandelion Salad.


Dandelion Salad.
First remove all dead leaves and root, and wash thoroughly. Take a small handful at a time, shake free from water, and cut up fine into a mixing bowl. When all is used – have enough to make about two quarts when tossed lightly into a bowl – sprinkle over one teaspoonful of salt, one of sugar, and a pinch of mustard. Have ready as much fat bacon cut into bits as will fill a small teacup, fry to a light brown; remove the bacon and into the hot grease mince a small onion, if onion flavor is not objectionable; fry lightly; then add to the hot grease, one-half cup mild vinegar, and pour it over the dandelions and mix well. Garnish with hard-boiled eggs sliced, and serve at once.

And here is another version of bacon dressing – a proudly, fearlessly named sauce that can be “thinned” with …… cream!


Bacon Fat Sauce.
Heat five tablespoons of strained bacon or ham fat in a saucepan: add two tablespoonfuls of flour and stir to a smooth paste. Add one-eighth of a teaspoonful of paprika and one-third of a cup of vinegar diluted with one cup of boiling water, stirring constantly. When the sauce begins to boil, remove to the side of the range, and beat in two yolks of eggs. Add more salt if necessary. Do not allow the sauce to boil after the eggs are added. Chill thoroughly and serve with spinach or dandelion, endive or lettuce. The sauce may be thinned with cream if too thick.

Quotation for the Day.

We plan, we toil, we suffer -- in the hope of what? A camel-load of idol's eyes? The title deeds of Radio City? The empire of Asia? A trip to the moon? No, no, no, no. Simply to wake up just in time to smell coffee and bacon and eggs. And, again I cry, how rarely it happens! But when it does happen -- then what a moment, what a morning, what a delight!
J. B. Priestley, (1894-1984)

Enough Mace.

How often do you use mace? A reader asked about its apparent decline in popularity recently in response to the recipe of the day.

Mace is, to quote the OED “An aromatic spice consisting of the fleshy aril or covering surrounding the seed in the fruit of the nutmeg tree, Myristica fragrans, dried and used (chiefly in powdered form) to flavour savoury dishes, sauces, etc. (the kernel of the seed being the source of nutmeg).” Mace was certainly known and used in medieval Britain and Europe – but although we still use nutmeg itself, and other sweet spices such as cinnamon and cloves, methinks mace nowadays has been relegated towards the back of the mental pantry (at least in ‘English-speaking’ kitchens that is.)

I wondered just what have we lost, or mislaid, in our apparent modern neglect of mace, so set out (briefly) to find out. Historically there is no shortage of meat dishes flavoured with mace, and of course there is the inevitable fruit cake, and perhaps mulled wine, but surely there are some different ideas begging revival?
Chocolate and mace – now that sounds like a combination I could learn to love. The author of The Complete Confectioner, Pastry-Cook, and Baker, Plain and Practical (Philadelphia, 1864) gives mace double duty in the following recipe – the ‘basic’ or vanilla version of chocolate has mace, and more mace is added to the ‘mace’ version.

Cinnamon, Mace, or Clove Chocolate.
These are made in the same manner as the last* using about an ounce and a half or two ounces of either sort of spice in powder to that quantity or add a sufficiency of either of these essential oils to flavour.

*Vanilla Chocolate.
Ten pounds of prepared nuts, ten pounds of sugar, vanilla two ounces and a half, cinnamon one ounce, one drachm of mace, and two drachms of cloves, or the vanilla may be used soley. Prepare your nuts according to the directions already given**. Cut the vanilla in small bits, pound it fine with part of the sugar, and mix it with the paste, boil about one half of the sugar to the blow before you mix it to the chocolate, otherwise it will eat hard. Proceed as before, and either put it in small moulds, or divide it in tablets, which you wrap in tinfoil. This is in general termed eatable chocolate
[**the cacao nuts are pounded in a warmed mortar until they are reduced to an oily paste which is then sweetened if desired.]

And I like the next idea – clotted cream delicately flavoured with mace - which does not need a spice bag, the ‘blades’ being lacy enough to allow string to be easily threaded through for easy retrieval.

Clotted Cream
String four blades of mace on a string, put them to a gill of new milk, and six spoonfuls of rose water, simmer a few minutes, then by degrees stir this liquor, strained into the yolks of two new eggs well beaten, stir the whole into a quart of good cream, set it over the fire and stir till hot but not boiling, pour it into a deep dish and let it stand four and twenty hours, serve it in a cream dish; to eat with fruit some persons prefer it without any taste but cream, in which case use a quart of new milk, or do it like the Devonshire cream scalded; when done enough a round mark will appear on the surface of the cream the size of the bottom of the pan it is done in, which in the country they call the ring, and when that is seen remove the pan from the fire.
The Illustrated London Cookery Book, Frederick Bishop (1852)

And finally, an interesting mac-based sauce which just might ring the changes for your next roast turkey or chicken.


Sauce for Turkey or Chicken.
Boil a spoonful of the best mace very tender, and also the liver of the turkey, but not too much which would make it hard; pound the mace with a few drops of the liquor to a very fine pulp; then pound the liver, and put about half of it to the mace, with pepper, salt, and the yolk of an egg boiled hard, and then dissolved; to this add by degrees the liquor that drains from the turkey, or some other good gravy. Put these liquors to the pulp, and boil them some time; then take half a pint of oysters and boil them but a little, and lastly, put in white wine, and butter wrapped in a little flour. Let it boil but a little, lest the wine make the oysters hard; and just at last scald four spoonfuls of good cream, and add, with a little lemon juice, or pickled mushrooms will do better.
The Lady’s Own Cookery Book … by Lady Charlotted Campbell Bury (1844)


Quotation for the Day.
Once you get a spice in your home, you have it forever. Women never throw out spices. The Egyptians were buried with their spices. I know which one I'm taking with me when I go.
Erma Bombeck.

Plum Duff to Go.

Buying take-out on the way home from work is not a twenty-first century idea. The workers of Victorian London could buy a great variety of cooked food from street vendors who cried their wares from their regular pitches around the city. Make no mistake, this was not the gourmet end of the food spectrum. The arrangement was strictly for the “poorer sort” – which included the vendors themselves. The day to day life of these folk was a constant struggle to maintain a viable business, and the details are told most poignantly in an amazing sociological work by Henry Mayhew published in 1851. The full title is:

LONDON LABOUR

AND THE

LONDON POOR;

A

CYCLOPAEDIA OF THE CONDITION AND EARNINGS

OF

THOSE THAT WILL WORK,

THOSE THAT CANNOT WORK,

THOSE THAT WILL NOT WORK.

Many of the street sellers of food are described in Mayhew’s work. In a previous post we learned something of the sellers of hot cross buns, but there are many more. Amongst them are the vendors of curds and whey, hot elder wine, cakes and tarts, fried fish, hot eels and pea soup, rhubarb and spice, roasted chestnuts and apples, sheeps’ trotters, hot baked potatoes and pickled whelks. Today, to follow-on from yesterday’s story, I want to give you some of the details of the life and business of the street sellers of Plum “Duff” or Dough. It was very much a case of niche-marketing in those days – the Plum Duff vendors were separate from the vendors of “Boiled Puddings” (i.e meat puddings “which might perhaps with greater correctness be called dumplings”.)

Mayhew’s words on the plum duff sellers includes a “recipe” and costings:

“Plum dough is one of the street-eatables – though perhaps it is rather a violence to class it with the street-pastry – which is usually made by the vendors. It is simply a boiled plum, or currant, pudding of the plainest description. It is sometimes made in the rounded form of the plum-pudding; but more frequently in the "roly-poly" style. Hot pudding used to be of much more extensive sale in the streets. One informant told me that twenty or thirty years ago, batter, or Yorkshire, pudding, "with plums in it," was a popular street business. The "plums," as in the orthodox plum-puddings, are raisins. The street-vendors of plum "duff" are now very few, only six as an average, and generally women, or if a man be the salesman he is the woman's husband. The sale is for the most part an evening sale, and some vend the plum dough only on a Saturday night. A woman in Leather-lane, whose trade is a Saturday night trade, is accounted "one of the best plum duffs" in London, as regards the quality of the comestible, but her trade is not considerable.

The vendors of plum dough are the streetsellers who live by vending other articles, and resort to plum dough, as well as to other things, "as a help." This dough is sold out of baskets in which it is kept hot by being covered with cloths, sometimes two and even three, thick; and the smoke issuing out of the basket, and the cry of the street-seller, "Hot plum duff, hot plum," invite custom. A quartern of flour, 5d.; ½ lb. Valentia raisins, 2d.; dripping and suet in equal proportions, 2 ½d.; treacle, ½ d. ; and allspice, ½ d.—in all l0½ d. ; supply a roly-poly of twenty pennyworths. The treacle, however, is only introduced "to make the dough look rich and spicy," and must be used sparingly.

The plum dough is sold in slices at ½ d. or 1d. each, and the purchasers are almost exclusively boys and girls - boys being at least three-fourths of the revellers in this street luxury. I have ascertained - as far as the information of the street-sellers enables me to ascertain - that take the year through, six "plum duffers" take 1s. a day each, for four winter months, including Sundays, when the trade is likewise prosecuted. Some will take from 4s. to 10s. (but rarely 10s.) on a Saturday night, and nothing on other nights, and some do a little in the summer. The vendors, who are all stationary, stand chiefly in the street-markets and reside near their stands, so that they can get relays of hot dough.

If we calculate then 42s. a week as the takings of six persons, for five months, so including the summer trade, we find that upwards of 200 l [pounds] is expended in the street purchase of plum dough, nearly half of which is profit. The trade, however, is reckoned among those which will disappear altogether from the streets.

The capital required to start is: basket, 1s. 9d. ; cloths, 6d. ; pan for boiling, 2s.; knife, 2d. ; stock-money, 2S.; in all about, 7s 6d."

The recipes for the day are taken from yesterday’s source, Camp Cookery, by Horace Kephart, (1910).


Sweet Sauce for Puddings.
Melt a little butter, sweeten it to taste, and flavor with grated lemon rind, nutmeg, or cinnamon.

Brandy Sauce.
Butter twice the size of an egg is to be beaten to a cream with a pint of sugar and a tablespoonful of flour. Add a gill of brandy. Set the cup in a dish of boiling water, and beat until the sauce froths.


Quotation for the Day.

It's not improbable that a man may receive more solid satisfaction from pudding while he is alive than from praise after he is dead.
Anon?

The Finishing Touch.

There are lots of options to gild the lily that is your Christmas pudding. For many of us, it is custard, pure and simple. For many of you, it may be ice-cream. For some, it is the ‘traditional’ brandy butter’ (or ‘hard sauce’) that featured in yesterday’s post.

If none of these please or excite you, I give you a selection of pudding sauces from The Times of October 17, 1928.

Brandy Sauce.
Cream together two ounces of butter and two ounces of sugar and add very slowly two tablespoonfuls of brandy. Beat very thoroughly and then add the well-beaten yolks of two eggs and a quarter of a pint of cream or milk. Cook in a double saucepan or over hot water until it thickens, then pour on to the beaten whites of the eggs and serve immediately.

Caramel Brandy Sauce.
This is prepared in the same way, but with brown sugar instead of white.


White Wine Sauce.
Cream together four ounces of butter and the same quantity of fine white sugar. Gradually add three tablespoonfuls of sherry or Madeira, stirring it very carefully. Pile it up in a glass dish and sprinkle it with nutmeg. Keep it in a very cold place until it is to be served.

Rum Syrup.
This is made by simply boiling half a cupful of sugar in a cupful of water for five minutes, and then adding a quarter of a cupful of rum. This sauce is excellent served with omelettes and soufflés.

Maraschino Sauce.
Boil two thirds of a cupful of water and then add two tablespoonfuls of cornflour mixed with two tablespoonfuls of sugar. Boil well, stirring until the mixture thickens and cooks. Then add two ounces of Maraschino cherries, chopped, and a half a cupful of Maraschino syrup. A tablespoonful of cream may be added at the last, if liked.


Apricot Sauce.
Put three tablespoonfuls of apricot jam into a saucepan with half a cupful of water. Boil, remove from the stove, and add a wineglass of sherry. Rub through a sieve or strainer and bring once more to boiling point. Add a dessertspoonful of cornflour mixed to a paste with cold water. Stir until the sauce thickens.


Coffee Sauce.
Boil half a pint of black coffee with two ounces of loaf sugar to make a syrup. Then add a dessertspoonful of cornflour, mixed as before with cold water. Stir until the sauce thickens and cook. Strain and serve.


Quotation for the Day.

Always serve too much hot fudge sauce on hot fudge sundaes. It makes people overjoyed, and puts them in your debt.
Judith Olney.

Brandy, Rum, or Hard?

I was asked recently about the history of Brandy Butter in its role as a traditional sauce for Christmas Pudding. Those of you who are regular readers will be aware that I have trouble with the concept of ‘traditional’ in relation to the foods that we eat at particular times or in particular circumstances.

How long does something have to been happening for it to become ‘traditional’? We have a tradition in our family of having red sparkling wine at brunch on Christmas morning (a token drink only, along with the customary berries in some form or other, - it is, after all, very early in the day!) This custom was begun by my son-in-law (knowing my great love of sparkling reds),who has been part of our family for something over a dozen years. Is a dozen years long enough for something to become a tradition? Of course it is!

The ‘traditional Christmas dinner’ (the formula of turkey, ham, flaming Christmas pudding etc) is largely a nineteenth century English construct, for which many historians blame Charles Dickens. Not an ancient tradition at all.

So – what of brandy butter (or ‘hard sauce’, in the US)?

In a previous series on English sauces, we found that for many cookery book writers of olden times, the signature English sauce was ‘melted butter’ (although the phrase often referred to a béchamel type sauce, not simply butter, melted.) Although this perhaps establishes butter as a favoured ingredient in sauces, this is, however, the complete antithesis of hard flavoured butter (which seems to me to be more like butter icing – or frosting, if you prefer.)


The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first written reference to ‘brandy butter’ as occurring in 1939, which is clearly very belated. Although the citation (which is also a recipe) occurs under the listing of ‘brandy butter’, it primarily references ‘hard sauce’:

In the USA, a Hard Sauce is made with one measure of fresh butter to two of castor sugar... In England, a similar sauce is called Brandy Butter or Rum Butter.’

Strangely, there is no entry under ‘hard’, but under ‘rum’ we have 'Rum butter, a hard sauce made from rum and butter', with the citation coming from an English cookery book of 1889.

Certainly rum butter (heavily nutmeggy in flavouring) has been considered a specialty in Cumberland (the Lake District) of England since at least early in the nineteenth century. I have no idea why this lovely English region should have a local specialty containing a Caribbean liquor – perhaps some early smuggling pursuits? (Cumbrians, come for the with your theories, please!)

Some by-no-means exhaustive research has uncovered the following snippets, which I give you for your consideration and delectation.

Brandy Butter Sauce For Plum Pudding.
A quarter of a pound of butter to be beaten with a wooden spoon all one way till it looks like thick cream; then add a quarter of a pound of loaf sugar (less is better) a glass of sherry, and a small glass of brandy; mix well with the butter and sugar adding only a small quantity at a time.
Dainty Dishes, by Lady Harriet Elizabeth St. Clair, 1866

Hard Sauce.
Two tablespoonfuls of butter.
Ten tablespoonfuls of sugar.
Work this till white, then add wine and spice to your taste.
Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt Book, (American) 1848

Rum Butter.
Warm a pound of butter and a pound of brown sugar in a basin. Beat it to a cream, and add three ounces of rum and a grated nutmeg to taste. It must be quite smooth. Then put into a jar and cover.
The Times, July 25, 1938

P.S The Times gave this recipe as a summer picnic suggestion, for spreading on bread and butter or biscuits instead of jam. Sounds like a good idea to me. How about on scones?

Quotation for the Day.

The chief fuddling they make in the island [Barbados] is Rumbullion, alias Kill-Divil, and this is made of sugar canes distilled, a hot, hellish, and terrible liquor.
From a manuscript of 1651.

Thanksgiving Food: Turkey Dressing.

Today we focus on the dressing (or “stuffing”, if you prefer, which I do) of the turkey. Browsing historic recipes gives me the impression that the Big Three turkey dressings are cornbread, oyster, and chestnut. What other alternatives are there?

The Burlington Daily Hawk-Eye (quoting the Detroit Free Press), of November 26 1876 opined that “Roast turkey stuffed with nice rich mashed potatoes is admired by many”, but went on to give some recipes, including this one, for a basic bread dressing.

“Take three pints of bread crumbs for a medium-sized turkey: chop finely, with one-quarter pound of salt pork, a good lump of butter, salt, pepper, sauce and savory, and break in two or three eggs to make it of the right consistency. Fill both the breast and body and sew up.”

From the simple we go to the extravagant with the following idea from The Wellsboro Agitator, of December 24, 1878

“There is one ingredient here I would like to have – but you must leave it out if the object is to be economical. A dozen or so of truffles, finely chopped, half inside the stuffing and half outside in the gravy will add a crowning and superb relish to your roast turkey – but I warn you that the dozen of truffles will cost you an extra five dollars.”

How about one of the “new style stuffings” discussed in an article in the Wisconsin State Journal of January 1938?

Mushroom Stuffing.
8 cups breadcrumbs, 1 egg, beaten, 4 slices bacon, salt and pepper to taste, ½ teaspoon poultry seasoning; milk to moisten, 1 small can mushrooms.
Dice the bacon and pan broil, then brown the mushrooms in the drippings. Mix all together lightly.

As for the Big Three, we have had recipes for all things cornmeal in many previous posts, oysters are now too expensive to stuff inside a roasting bird, but chestnuts still seem like a good idea, if you can get them where you live. Here is a recipe is from the Fort Wayne Daily Gazette of November 24, 1881.

Chestnut Sauce.
One pint of shelled chestnuts, one quart of stock, one teaspoonful of lemon juice, one tablespoonful of flour, two of butter; add salt and pepper. Boil the chestnuts in water for about three minutes, then plunge them in cold water and rub off the dark skins. Put them on to cook with the stock and boil gently until they will mash readily (it will take about an hour) mash as fine as possible. Put the butter and flour in a saucepan and cook until a dark brown. Stir into the sauce, and cook two minutes. Add the seasoning and rub all through a sieve. Use large chestnuts.


Quotation for the Day.

The funny thing about Thanksgiving, or any huge meal, is that you spend 12 hours shopping for it and then chopping and cooking and braising and blanching. Then it takes 20 minutes to eat it and everybody sort of sits around in a food coma, and then it takes four hours to clean it up.
Ted Allen

Thanksgiving Food: Cranberry Sauce

The idea of a sharp fruity sauce served with rich meat is an old one which we explored very recently. Today, of course, we have to consider cranberry sauce,

The following article found in the Southport Telegraph of Wisconsin, in 1846, might explain (at least in part) why and where the tradition of cranberry sauce with turkey really became established.

Economy In Cooking Cranberries.
Owing to the scarcity of apples, pears, peaches, &c., prevailing throughout the states, as well as to the great abundance and excellent properties of cranberries, the latter are much used for sauce. In preparing them for the table, hundreds of dollars may, no doubt, be saved by the people of Michigan, by observing the following directions, and that, too, without causing the sauce to be made any less palpable.
To each quart of berries, very shortly after the cooking of them commenced, add a tea-spoonful of pulverized saleratus. This will so much neutralize the acidiferous juice, which they contain, as to make it necessary to use only about one fourth part as much sugar would have been requisite had they been cooked without using saleratus.

Indeed, the simplest recipe for cranberry sauce is “take cranberries and stew with sugar.” There are of course variations on even this most simple of themes. Here are my selections for your enjoyment.

Cranberry Sauce [Moulded]
Wash, and pick over one quart of cranberries, put them to stew with a little water, and a pound of sugar, in a porcelain-lined sauce-pan. Let them stew slowly, and closely covered for an hour, or more. They can then be set away ready for use, or they can be put into a mould and turned out in form the next day.
Another, and nicer way is to stew them soft, then strain off the skins, add pound of sugar to quart of fruit, and boil all up together again for fifteen minutes. This will make a fine jelly for game, if put into a mould.
Jennie June's American Cookery Book, 1870.


Cranberry Sauce
Wash and pick a quart of cranberries; put them into a stew-pan, with a teacupful of water, and the same of brown sugar; cover the pan and let them stew gently for one hour; then mash them smooth with a silver spoon; dip a quart bowl in cold water, pour in the stewed cranberries, and leave till cold. Serve with roast pork, ham, turkey or goose.
La Cuisine Creole, by Lafcadio Hearn, 1885

Frozen Cranberry Sauce:
Gives a new tang to game, roast turkey, capon or duck. Cook a quart of cranberries until very soft in one pint water, strain through coarse seive, getting all the pulp, add to it one and a half pints sugar, the juice – strained - of four lemons, one quart boiling water, bring to a boil, skim clean, let cool, and freeze rather soft.
Dishes & Beverages Of The Old South, by Martha McCulloch-Williams, 1913


Cranberry Jelly.
Cook until soft the desired quantity of cranberries with 1 ½ pints of water for each 2 quarts of berries. Strain the juice through a jelly bag.
Measure the juice and heat it up to boiling point. Add one cup of sugar for every two cups of juice; stir until the sugar is dissolved; boil briskly for five minutes; skim and pour into glass tumblers or porcelain or crockery moulds.
8 lbs, of Cranberries and 2 ½ lbs. of sugar makes 10 tumblers of delicious jelly.
Winnipeg Free Press, October 3, 1919.

Quotation for the Day.
It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.
Alistair Cooke

Why Apple With Pork?

Today I want to follow-on from the ideas posed in yesterday’s story. As we discussed in that post, in medieval times there was no clear distinction between ‘sweet’ and ‘savoury’ dishes, and sugar was used as an expensive imported spice (and medicine) rather than primarily as a sweetening agent.

In the time of Henry II (who reigned from 1154-1189), even the king’s household was only able to buy 4 pounds of sugar at a time. Accounts from the Durham Cathedral Priory in the late sixteenth century show that the consumption of sugar was only 8.5 ounces per monk, per year. Although sugar refining began in Europe in the first half of the sixteenth century, it was not until well into the seventeenth century that sugar started to become significantly cheaper. By the end of the seventeenth century the distinction between ‘sweet’ and ‘savoury’ dishes had become much more distinct, and along with it an apparent enjoyment of an actual sour note.

What has this to do with the topic of the day, you may be asking? Well, humans are not entirely stupid about food. If you are onto a good thing, stick to it, and it seems that perhaps we were reluctant to completely give away this idea of fruit (‘sweet’) with meat (‘savoury’). But why particularly apples, with pork, you may be asking?

The association of pigs with apples is obvious at one level – pigs were often let to graze in apple orchards, where they could feast on the windfalls, so the fruit was converted by the pig’s metabolism into pork, instead of rotting into compost and being ‘wasted’ as a food source. Perhaps a concept of terroir is relative here – the pig meat being intrinsically compatible with the apple? Or maybe even flavoured with it, in a very subtle way? I did read some years ago of an artisan producer in Australia who was rearing piglets exclusively on a diet of blemished or othewise unmarketable apricots, which supposedly gave the flesh a particularly delicate and presumably fruity flavour, for supply to trendy restaurants. I wonder if this still happens?

On with our topic. Apples are ripe in autumn, which was also the traditional time for culling the surplus stock that could not be overwintered. The pig was the victim of choice here as much of it was eminently preservable for winter use in the form of sausages, ham, and bacon. The offal and fresh cuts were enjoyed at the time (traditionally at Martinmas) in a fresh meat feast which would be the last for a long time – and as the apples were ripe and in abundance at the same time ….. apple sauce with pork made sense.

Even when animal husbandry improvements began to facilitate the over-wintering of stock, thanks to gentleman farmers with an experimental bent, such as ‘Turnip’ Townshend, the tradition of apple with pork remained. This is beautifully illustrated in The House-keepers Pocket-Book, published in 1760. Amongst the dishes suggested by the author for ‘the Second Course, in January’ are:

Hog’s Head roasted.
To be served with a little warm Claret and Water in the Dish, and Apple Sauce in a Plate.

Hog’s Hearslet [harslet] roasted, with Spices and Sweet Herbs, to be served with Claret and Water in the Dish, and Apple Sauce in a Plate.


Hind Loin of Pork roasted, to be served with Claret and Water in the Dish, and Apple Sauce in a Plate

Pigs were not the only animals culled in late autumn. The goose was another victim, and not surprisingly, apple was also a traditional accompaniment to goose. The author of our book for the day also recommends, as ‘a first course in September’

Geese roasted, and served with a little warm Claret, pour’d through their Bellies in the same Dish, and Apple Sauce on a Plate.

We must have a recipe for the sauce itself, and here it is, from The Lady’s Assistant for Regulating and Supplying her Table (1777) – and, like the mint sauce yesterday, it shows that some recipes have not changed at all.

Apple Sauce.
Pare, core, and slice some apples, put a little water into the saucepan to keep them from burning, a bit of lemon-peel; when they are enough take out the peel, bruise the apples, add a lump of butter, and a little sugar.

Quotation for the Day.

If you want a subject, look to pork!
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

The Drug Trade, on Sauces.

I never tire of the ‘food as medicine’ theme. It is an ancient theme indeed - and one which has been undergoing something of a revival over recent decades. The modern thrust tends to be deconstructionist - promoting nutrients rather than food, or at least single specific foods such as the supposed ‘superfoods’ (avocado, berries, etc). The pity is that very little of the advice distributed by professionals in the health and nutrition fields is recipe driven. With many folk feeling themselves de-skilled in the kitchen arts, or time-poor, or just not interested, the default meal is often purchased pre-prepared and its ingredients (and their health-impact) are slightly mysterious.

I love it that the ‘Rx’ symbol used to indicate a medical prescription is actually an abbreviation of the Latin for ‘recipe’(or ‘receipt’). Not so long ago, the medicinal ‘recipe’ aspect was more obvious, and in fact druggists manuals were quite like cookery books, even to the extent of overlapping content. I live in hope of the day when the friendly neighbourhood pharmacist will provide recipes for the daily dinner.

We have touched on this issue before, with selections from the Druggists General Receipt Book (1850) [here, and here]. Today I want to give you some recipes from Pharmaceutical Formulas - A Book of Useful Recipes for the Drug Trade, (the ‘Drug Trade’ – now there’s a phrase with an entirely different connotation today!) published in 1898. It is a book that would be quite at home on your cookery book shelf. It includes recipe for almost 30 sauces of the bottled kind! In some, the measurements are apothecarial (is that a word?), so I have selected those with more accessible units of measurement. Beware – they make industrial quantities!

Newmarket Sauce.
Shallots 40 oz.
Capsicum 1 lb
Cloves 3 oz
Celery-seed 2 oz
Mace 1 oz
Walnut Ketchup 2 qts.
Indian Soy 3 qts.
Beafoy’s acetic acid 1 gals.
Water 6 gals.
Salt 2 lb.
Peel and slice the shallots, bruise the capsicum, cloves, celery-seed and mace, and pour on the other ingredients.

Penny Sauce.
Sauce gruffs* 6 lb.
Vinegar 2 gals.
Sliced garlic 2 oz.
Treacle 3 lbs.
Soy 2 lbs.
Salt 8 oz.
Capsicum ½ oz.
Caramel 1 lb.
Essence of anchovy 8 oz.
Boil the gruffs with the vinegar, garlic, and salt half an hour; strain, add the rest of the ingredients, and boil for another half-hour, and bottle when cold.

*“the accummulated remains of chutney or any kindred sauce preparations.”



Quotation for the Day.

The longer I work in nutrition, the more convinced I become that for the healthy person all foods should be delicious.
Adele Davis.

English Sauces.

I thought that it might be fun to have a week of on the topic of English sauces, for no other reason than I will be in the country for a little while longer yet, and the local cuisine is on my mind. I also want to question the idea that England did not (and does not) do sauces well. We are all over-familiar with the variations of the hoary old sayings about the inverse number of religions vs sauces in England compared to France [England has fifty religions and one sauce, France has one religion and hundreds of sauces]. Is it true? That is my question.

All of the ‘experts’ seem to agree: the signature English sauce is made from melted butter:

“Melted butter, we are indeed told, plays in English cookery nearly the same part as the Lord Mayor’s coach at civic ceremonies, calomel in the practice of medicine, and silver forks in fashionable novels. Melted butter is to English sauces what stock is to French soups – melted butter and eggs, melted butter and parsley, melted butter and capers, melted butter and anchovies – it is still always melted butter.”

The New Monthly Magazine, London, 1866.

Mistress Margaret Dods (the pseudonym of Christian Isobel Johnstone), in The Cook and Housewife’s Manual, (1832) was of the opinion that there were several basic classes of sauce in England, but the most important were based on butter or gravy.

On English sauces in general.

The basis, or, more correctly the vehicle of plain English sauces, is butter, whether melted, oiled, browned, or burnt; or gravy either clear brown or thickened; also water, milk, cream, and wine or some substitute. A numerous class of sauces is composed of vegetables and green fruits, another of shell fish, and a third of flavoured meat gravy.

Her contemporary, Dr William Kitchiner, in The Cook’s Oracle, (1822) agreed on the importance of butter, and gave his recipe, from which we see that he refers to what is essentially a classic white sauce started with a roux.

GOOD MELTED BUTTER cannot be made with mere flour and water; there must be a full and proper proportion of Butter. As it must be always on the Table and is THE FOUNDATION OF ALMOST ALL OUR ENGLISH SAUCES I have tried every way of making it, and I trust at last that I have written a receipt which if the Cook will carefully observe she will constantly succeed in giving satisfaction.

Melted Butter.

Keep a pint stewpan for this purpose only. Cut two ounces of butter into little bits, that it may melt more easily and mix more readily; - put it into the stewpan with a large teaspoonful (i.e. about three drachms) of Flour (some prefer Arrow Root or Potatoe Starch) and two tablespoonsful of Milk.

When thoroughly mixed, - add six tablespoonsful of water; hold it over the fire, and shake it round every minute, (all the while the same way) till it just begins to simmer , then let it stand quietly and boil up. It should be of the thickness of good cream.

Obs. This is the best way of preparing melted butter; - Milk mixes with the butter much more easily and more intimately than water alone can be made to do. This is of proper thickness to be mixed at table with Flavouring Essences, Anchovy, Mushroom, or Cavice, &c. If made merely to pour over vegetables add a little more milk to it.

N.B. If the BUTTER OILS put a spoonful of cold water to it and stir it with a spoon, - if it is very much oiled it must be poured backwards and forwards from the Stewpan to the Sauceboat till it is right again.

MEM. Melted Butter made to be mixed with flavouring Essences, Catsups, &c. should be of the thickness of light Batter, that it may adhere to the Fish &;c

Quotation for the Day.

In England three are sixty different religious sects, and only one sauce.
Francesco Caracciolo, Neapolitan Ambassador to London, attributed, c1790

Eating in the Air, Part 2.

Today I will be travelling to London after a couple of days in Singapore, so my thoughts are on airline food. I do hope Singapore Airlines does not disappoint me.

We have had a previous post on the topic of early airline food, so today I want to continue the theme with an advertisement (circa 1967) from Trans World Airlines (TWA). Clearly, the airline knew that food was a big drawcard for customers.

Only on TWA: a choice of 7 great dinners … with the world on the side.

The TWA Royal Ambassador First Class menus are something to behold. On transatlantic flights: Broiled Filet Mignon, Curried Squab Chicken, Roast Sirloin of Beef, Roast Rib of Lamb, Poached Turbot in mushroom sauce, Maine Lobster Newburg, Sautée Chicken in sauce suprême. On non-stops coast to coast, another chance to chose from seven gourmet specialities. On all flights, the entrees are cooked to your order, right on the jet.

Robust, rich fare for the seat-bound, don’t you think? What would you have chosen?

The recipe for the day is for the classic Sauce Suprême, from one of my favourite resources - The Book of Sauces, by Charles Herman Senn, c1915

Suprême Sauce.
1 oz. butter, 1 oz. flour, 1 pint chicken stock, 1 small onion, 1 clove, ½ bay leaf, 3 oz. fresh butter, 1 tablespoonful cream, 1 yolk of egg, ½ lemon.
Make a white roux with the butter and flour, and dilute with the chicken stock. Boil up add the onion, clove, half bay-leaf, and let it simmer for fifteen minutes. Skim well, and work in the butter, cream, yolk of egg, and the juice of half a lemon. Whisk well, and pass through a tammy cloth.

[P.S. There is a 1994 menu from Air Force 1 here]


Quotation for the Day.

SAUCE, n. The one infallible sign of civilization and enlightenment. A people with no sauces has one thousand vices; a people with one sauce has only nine hundred and ninety-nine. For every sauce invented and accepted a vice is renounced and forgiven.
Ambrose Bierce, Devil’s Dictionary.

Reassuring Roux.

Monday 19 ...

Nora Ephron the screenwriter, novelist, and director for whome we have to thank Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally, Silkwood, and soon Julia on Julia has a birthday today. Nora is also passionate about food. I love this particular quotation from her:

“What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It’s a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles”

What Ms. Ephron is referring to of course is a roux, a word meaning red, or browned, but which clever classical cooks also make in a blond version. Before the roux was developed in about the middle of the seventeenth century, bread (or bits of pie-crust) was the universal thickener. A roux is far more elegant. The tricks are: to use the same amount by weight of flour and butter, cook it just long enough for the flour to lose its raw taste, cook it a bit longer if you want it blond, a bit longer again if you want it brown, then add your desired liquid slowly, stirring as you go. Reliable magic, as the lady says. Hardly changed from the original, which is

Thickening of flowre.
Melt some lard, take out the mammocks; put your flowre into your melted lard, seeth it well, but have a care it stick not to the pan, mix some onion with it proportionably. When it is enough, put all with good broth, mushrums and a drop of vinegar. Then after it hath boiled with its seasoning, pass all through the strainer and put it in a pot. When you will use it, you shall set it upon warm embers for to thicken or allay your sauces.
The French Cook, Francois Pierre La Varenne, 1653.

I feel the need to give Ms Ephron an equally simple recipe for her birthday, although methinks she is unlikely to ever be aware of it, so we must enjoy it on her behalf. She wrote about the strange phenomenon of egg-white omelettes some time ago – a concept that I too find difficult to reconcile. By way of compensation, I offer her this extraordinarily simple eggy delight, from another Frenchman, M. Menon, from his The French Family Cook .. Adapted to the Tables not only of the Opulent, but of Persons of moderate Fortune and Condition (1793).

Eggs à la Crème.
Put a gill* of cream into a dish for table, let it boil till half is consumed; then put in eight eggs, with salt and large pepper; let them boil, and pass a salamander over them.

*a gill is a quarter of a pint.

Tomorrow’s Story ….

Tarts for Travellers.

Quotation for the day ...

My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you. Nora Ephron.

A little Soy.

May 15 ...

Dr. William Kitchiner and his Magazine of Taste is our inspiration for the week. It proves that spice mixes are not a new idea. It is probably fair to say that Dr. Kitchiner was the inventor of the concept in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. The box itself is an even more impressive idea and has a lot of appeal in this plastic world – in fact I would quite like one myself, if I could find someone to make it for me out of mahogany (another beautiful timber would do), with the correct number of compartments.

It has not been easy to decide which recipes to include this week, but I found myself slightly intrigued by ‘Pea Powder’. I assumed it must consist of dried peas, simply pre-ground to speed up the cooking process. It is not. It is a flavouring powder (of course) with the most amazing power of suggestion.

Pea Powder.
Pound together in a marble mortar half an ounce each of dried Mint and Sage, a drachm of Celery Seed, and a quarter drachm of Cayenne Pepper; rub them through a fine sieve. This gives a very savoury relish to Pea Soup, and to Watergruel, which, by its help, if the eater of it has not the most lively imagination, he may fancy he is sipping good Pease Soup.

Another essential sauce in Dr. Kitchiner’s box is Soy (position 15 in his box) and he uses it in many recipes. He does not attempt to fake it, which is surprising, given that he does not hesitate to tell how to make all manner of other sauces and catsups. Luckily, one of his contemporaries gave instructions for the genuine article:

SOY, is a liquid condiment, or sauce, imported chiefly from China. It is prepared with a species of white haricots, wheat flour, common salt, and water ; in the proportions respectively of 50, 60, 50, and 250 pounds. The haricots are washed, and boiled in water till they become so soft as to yield to the fingers. They are then laid in a flat dish to cool, and kneaded along with the flour, a little of the hot water of the decoction being added from time to time. This dough is next spread an inch or an inch and a half thick upon the flat vessel (made of thin staves of bamboo), and when it becomes hot and mouldy, in two or three days, the cover is raised upon bits of stick, to give free access of air. If a rancid odor is exhaled, and the mass grows green, the process goes on well; hut if it grows black, it must be more freely exposed to the air. As soon as all the surface is covered with green mouldiness, which usually happens in eight or ten days, the Cover is removed, and the matter is placed in the sunshine for several days. When it has become as hard as a stone, it is cut into small fragments, thrown into an earthen vessel, and covered with the 250 pounds of water having the salt dissolved in it. The whole is stirred together, and the height at which the water stands is noted and the height at which the water stands is noted. The vessel being placed in the sun, its contents are stirred up every morning and evening ; and a cover is applied at night, to keep it warm and exclude rain. The more powerful the sun, the sooner the soy will be completed ; but it generally requires two or three of the hottest summer months. As the mass diminishes by evaporation, well water is added; and the digestion is continued till the salt water has dissolved the whole of the flour and the haricots ; after which the vessel is left in the sun for a few days, as the good quality of the soy depends on the completeness of the solution, which is promoted by regular stirring. When it has at length assumed an oily appearance, it is poured into bags, and strained. The clear black liquid is the soy, ready for use. It is not boiled, but is put up into bottles, which must be carefully corked.
[A Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures, and Mines: Containing a Clear Exposition ... Andrew Ure, 1847]

Dr Kitchiner’s Magazine of Taste - impressive as it is - contains only a small fraction of the essences, quintessences, sauce bases, and powders on his book. Tomorrow we will enjoy some of its omissions.

Tomorrow’s Story …

Out-takes.

Quotation for the Day …

A well made sauce will make even an elephant or a grandfather palatable. Grimod de la Reynière.