English Heritage
Published 23 Nov 2018📖 Order your copy of Mrs Crocombe’s cookery book here: http://bit.ly/2RPyrvQ 📖
Join Mrs Crocombe as she makes a traditional plum pudding at Audley End House. This recipe comes from Modern Cookery by Eliza Acton, who is understood to have been the first person to call it “Christmas Pudding”.
Plan a visit to Mrs Crocombe’s kitchen: http://bit.ly/2BtBzoO
Discover the history of Christmas pudding: http://bit.ly/2Bu2WyS
(more…)
December 23, 2024
How to Make Christmas Pudding – The Victorian Way
December 22, 2024
Chocolate Bark – Holiday Gift Idea – Food Wishes
Food Wishes
Published 15 Dec 2017Learn how to make Chocolate Bark! This easy recipe is perfect for enjoying yourself, or to use as an edible holiday gift. Visit https://foodwishes.blogspot.com/2017/… for the ingredients, more information, and many, many more video recipes. I hope you enjoy this Chocolate Bark recipe!
In addition to sharing an easy, and beautiful edible holiday gift idea, I wanted to make this chocolate bark so I could test a simplified technique for tempering chocolate without a thermometer. It sounded too good to be true, but worked fairly well, which is the problem. Is fairly good, okay?
Properly tempered chocolate will snap when broken, and retain that gorgeous glossy sheen. Poorly tempered chocolate is sort of dull grey, and the texture is soft, and waxy. This was somewhere in the middle.
Using this method, you will get close to properly tempered chocolate, and you might get lucky, and actually end up with perfectly tempered chocolate, but in hindsight, since using a thermometer isn’t really hard, and the extra steps required not that strenuous, I’ll probably just do it the right way next time.
December 21, 2024
Alton’s Eggnog | Food Network
Food Network
Published 1 Dec 2014Alton’s making eggnog, the drink that thinks it’s a custard pie.
Get the recipe: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/al…
(more…)
December 20, 2024
The Murder of Egypt’s Forgotten Queen – Shajar al-Durr & Om Ali
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Aug 13, 2024The national dessert of Egypt: bread pudding made from crisp flatbread, pistachios, almonds, sultanas, spices, and rose water
City/Region: Egypt | Baghdad
Time Period: 10th-13th CenturiesOm Ali is the national dessert of Egypt, and its roots go back at least to the 10th century, when we get the base recipe for my version. I took inspiration from other medieval recipes and added the nuts, sultanas, and spices, though they would also use ingredients like camphor, chicken, poppyseeds, and musk.
I really like the flavors, and the dish is sweet without being too sweet, but the bread gives it a kind of noodle-like texture which is a bit odd. Modern versions often use dry croissants, so I won’t judge if you use them or something like phyllo or puff pastry in place of the homemade roqaq.
Take semolina or white bread and soak it in milk until saturated. Then, take half a pound of sugar, or as much as is needed for the amount of bread, crush it, and mix it with the bread. Then, take a clean and shallow pot … add the soaked bread, milk, and sugar … Return the pot to slow burning coals. When the filling is cooked and set, remove the pot from the fire, turn it out onto a wide bowl and serve, God willing.
— Kitab al-Tabikh by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq, 10th Century
December 15, 2024
Cooking on the American Homefront During WWII
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Aug 6, 2024T-bone shaped seasoned ground beef with Wheaties
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1943Rationing didn’t begin in the United States until May 1942, and in order to buy certain foods, you used a combination of stamps and money. Better cuts of meat required more stamps, so there came a slew of recipes that either replaced meat, or made lesser cuts seem like better ones, like this recipe.
This “emergency steak” is actually very nice. It’s essentially a kind of meatloaf, and is surprisingly flavorful given the scant ingredient list. Is it like a T-bone steak? No. Is it tasty? Yes.
Emergency Steak
(1 lb.—serves 6)
Mix …
1 lb. ground beef or hamburger
1/2 cup milk
1 cup WHEATIES
1 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. pepper
1 tbsp. chopped onion
Place on pan, pat into T-bone steak shape, 1 in. thick. Broil 8 to 15 min. at 500° (very hot). Turn once.
Meats … 7
— Your Share by Betty Crocker (General Mills), 1943
Comments Off on Cooking on the American Homefront During WWII
December 4, 2024
The Disturbing Origins of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Jul 30, 2024A bowl of the original Corn Flakes made with only corn.
City/Region: Battle Creek, Michigan
Time Period: 1895Dr. John Kellogg was all about health, and when his brother, William (the financial brains of the operation), wanted to add sugar to the very bland original Corn Flakes, he flat out refused. Eventually, William bought the rights to Corn Flakes, changed the recipe, and the rest is history.
I don’t have the industrial rollers that the original recipe for Corn Flakes used, so I made a dough. The flakes turned out nice and crispy, but they are very bland. I would recommend using stone-ground cornmeal and adding some sugar and salt to make the whole process easier and the end product tastier.
Excerpt from Patent No. 558,393 [for] Flaked Cereals and Process of Preparing Same.
First. Soak the grain for some hours — say eight to twelve — in water at a temperature which is either between 40° and 60° Fahrenheit or 110° and 140° Fahrenheit, thus securing a preliminary digestion by aid of cerealin, a starch-digesting organic ferment contained in the hull of the grain or just beneath it. The temperature must be either so low or so high as to prevent actual fermentation while promoting the activity of the ferment. This digestion adds to the sweetness and flavor of the product.
Second. Cook the grain thoroughly. For this purpose it should be boiled in water for about an hour, and if steamed a longer time will be required. My process is distinctive in this step—that is to say, that the cooking is carried to the stage when all the starch is hydrated. If not thus thoroughly cooked, the product is unfit for digestion and practically worthless for immediate consumption.
Third. After steaming the grain is cooled and partially dried, then passed through cold rollers, from which it is removed by means of carefully-adjusted scrapers. The purpose of this process of rolling is to flatten the grain into extremely thin flakes in the shape of translucent films, whereby the bran covering (or the cellulose portions thereof) is disintegrated or broken into small particles, and the constituents of the grain are made readily accessible to the cooking process to which it is to be subsequently subjected and to the action of the digestive fluids when eaten.
Fourth. After rolling the compressed grain or flakes having been received upon suitable trays is subjected to a steaming process, whereby it is thoroughly cooked and is then baked or roasted in an oven until dry and crisp.
— John Harvey Kellogg. United States Patent Office, 1895
Comments Off on The Disturbing Origins of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes
November 28, 2024
A thought about “Second Thanksgiving”
Real Thanksgiving happened over a month ago, but our American friends constantly mis-read the calendar and schedule their event near the end of November instead. Just another one of those minor differences between the two countries, I guess. One thing that is similar, regardless of the month the holiday is celebrated, is the eternal Thanksgiving dilemma: is it best to be a host or a guest?
I don’t know what’s better: hosting Thanksgiving, or being a guest. And I don’t know which is worst, either. Each has its perils and pleasures.
Hosting: it’s so draining, so exhausting. I mean, watching your wife work so hard, it just takes it right out of you. Kidding: I help as best as I can, but it’s with the non-food jobs. My Thanksgiving culinary skills are limited to spanking the cranberry cylinder out of its can. I do the Cleaning. I make sure the wine glasses out, and the right ones — can’t have people drinking red out of white glasses, or the world as we know it would come to an end. I get the water pitcher down from the top shelf. No, not that one, the good one. The other good one. I vacuum and dust, in case guests want to push the piano away from the wall and check out our housekeeping.
[…]
Being a guest is hard because you just sit and wait and talk, and periodically say “anything I can do?” No. There is nothing you can do. So you drift to the living room where the kids are playing – all these small children, where did they come from? Just a few years ago their Mom or Dad was at your house at the kid’s table. And now they’ve reproduced. Hey, there’s football! You sit with the other guys and share the overhanging cloud of guilt — the womenfolk are doing everything, and you’re in here watching the Lions (why is it always the Lions). Occasionally one of the sisters or daughters who’s not doing anything at the moment wanders in and requests that someone explain football to her, and then she picks a team and gets excited when a player makes a great catch. Then she goes back to the kitchen and will not think about football for another year.
If I had to choose, I’d host, rather than be a guest. For some odd reason my wife at this point in life probably thinks the obverse. But I’ve noted over the years that even if you’re a guest at a family member’s thanksgiving, all the women end up in the kitchen anyway, talking amongst themselves about mysteries no man will ever know.
There’s a third option between guesting and hosting. For a few years we drove up to Fargo and had Thanksgiving Buffet at the Holiday Inn. Nothing to clean up. Turkey galore and unstinting stuffing. The hall was loud with communal consumption, and that somehow felt marvelously America. When you were done you just … got up and walked away and left the dishes where they were. Nothing more to do but digest, which brings an entirely new quality to the idea of gratitude.
Anyway: Happy Thanksgiving, be you guest or host. Here’s to lumpy potatoes and slabs of noble fowl. Gratitude is one of those things we figure we’ll get around to, and it’s marvelous to have a day where it’s absolutely required.
Comments Off on A thought about “Second Thanksgiving”
November 27, 2024
The Deadly Job of Royal Food Taster
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Jul 23, 2024Sautéed mushrooms in a honey, long pepper, and garum glaze
City/Region: Rome
Time Period: 1st CenturyFood tasters checking for poison aren’t around so much anymore, but it was an important job for thousands of years. But what happens when the food taster is the one adding in the poison?
Emperor Claudius found this out the hard way when he supposedly ate some of his favorite mushrooms, and then became the victim of a double-poisoning by his taster and his physician.
We can’t know for sure what Emperor Claudius’s favorite mushroom dish was, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was this. I don’t care for the texture of mushrooms, but the flavor is excellent. The sweetness from the honey, spiciness from the long pepper, and the earthiness of the mushrooms combine for a complex dish that is delicious.
Another Method for Mushrooms
Place the chopped stalks in a clean pan, adding pepper, lovage, and a little honey. Mix with garum. Add a little oil.
— Apicius de re coquinaria, 1st century
Comments Off on The Deadly Job of Royal Food Taster
October 29, 2024
Halloween Ham & Cheese Board | Food Wishes
Food Wishes
Published Sep 29, 2023Ideal for Halloween, this “horrible hand” ham and cheese board will be the life (or death?) of your party. This exceptionally creepy skinned hand is easy to make, and the cheese spread inside can be customized in countless ways. Fake blood and dagger sold separately. Enjoy!
For the fully formatted, printable, written recipe, follow this link: https://www.allrecipes.com/horrible-h…
You can also find more of Chef John’s content on Allrecipes: http://allrecipes.com/recipes/16791/e…
Comments Off on Halloween Ham & Cheese Board | Food Wishes
October 20, 2024
The True History of Deep Dish Pizza
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Jul 2, 2024Deep dish cheese pizza with a bready crust
City/Region: Chicago
Time Period: 1945 | 1947The unsung hero of deep dish pizza is a woman named Alice Mae Redmond, who was the head chef at famous pizzerias like Pizzeria Uno and Gino’s. It seems like wherever she went, that was the best pizza place in town. She’s also the one who changed deep dish pizza crust from the bready version in this recipe to a butterier, more biscuit-like version that is found in modern deep dish.
This crust is still delicious, and the sauce is super flavorful. Be sure to cook the sauce down enough so that it’s nice and thick (mine was a bit too watery for my taste). In the 1940s, you could get cheese OR anchovies OR sausage, but not any of them together. I made a cheese pizza with my preferred ratio of about 50/50 cheese to sauce, but feel free to change things up however you like. You could even add more than one topping, though it won’t be quite as historically accurate.
(more…)
Comments Off on The True History of Deep Dish Pizza
October 19, 2024
QotD: From blackberry picking to Bible verses
Last spring, my oldest daughter and I set out to tame our blackberry thicket. Half a dozen bushes, each with a decade’s worth of dead canes, had come with our house, and we were determined to make them accessible to hungry children. (Do you have any idea how much berries cost at the grocery store, even in the height of summer? Do you have an idea how many hours of peaceful book-reading you can stitch together out of the time your kids are hunting for fruit in their own yard? It’s a win-win.) But after we’d cut down all the dead canes, I explained that we also needed to shorten the living ones, especially the second-year canes that would be bearing fruit later in the summer. At this point, scratched and sweaty from our work, she balked: was Mom trying to deprive the children of their rightful blackberries? But I explained that on blackberries, like most woody plants, the terminal bud suppresses growth from all lower buds; removing it makes them all grow new shoots, each of which will have flowers and eventually fruit. Cutting back the canes in March means more berries in July. At which point I could see a light dawning in her eyes as she exclaimed, “Oh! We’re memorizing the Parable of the True Vine in school but I never knew why Jesus says pruning the vines makes more fruit …”
It’s pretty trite by now to point out that Biblical metaphors that would have made perfect sense for an agricultural society are opaque to a modern audience for whom vineyards are about the tasting room and trimming your wick extends the burn time of your favorite scented candle. There’s probably whole books out there exploring the material culture of first century Judaea to provide context to the New Testament.1 But at least pruning is a “known unknown”: John 15:2 jumps out as confusing, and anyone who does a little gardening can figure out the answer. Plenty of things aren’t like that at all. Even today, few people record the mundane details of their daily lives; in the days before social media and widespread literacy it was even more dramatic, so anyone who wants to know how our ancestors cleaned, or slept, or ate has to go poking through the interstices of the historical record in search of the answers — which means they need to recognize that there’s a question there in the first place. When they don’t, we end up with whole swathes of the past we can’t really understand because we’re unfamiliar with the way their inhabitants interacted with the physical world.
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-22.
1. Are they any good? Should I read them? I’ve mentally plotted out a structure for one of my own, where each chapter is themed around the main image of one of the parables — oil, wine, seeds, fish, sheep, cloth, salt — and explores all the practicalities: the wine chapter would cover viticulture techniques but also land ownership (were the vintners usually tenants? what did their workforce look like?), seeds would cover how grain was planted, harvested, milled, and cooked, etc. The only problem is that I don’t actually know anything about any of this.
Comments Off on QotD: From blackberry picking to Bible verses
October 18, 2024
Accidentally creating an epidemic of food allergies, from the best of intentions
Jon Miltimore discusses how the unintentional outcome of professional organizations making recommendations to the public without proper scientific understanding created so many of the allergies that now plague youngsters:
“Peanuts, LEAP study (Learning Early About Peanut allergy)” by jlcampbell104 is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0 
.
In 1992, with the help of a grant from the National Institutes of Health, The New England Journal of Medicine published a report on a rare phenomenon: fatal or near-fatal anaphylactic reactions in young people due to food allergies.
Examining a period of 14 months, researchers identified thirteen cases, twelve of which involved asthmatic youths. Six of the thirteen anaphylactic reactions resulted in death, and each case had involved a young person with a known food allergy who had unknowingly ingested the food.
“The reactions were to peanuts (four patients), nuts (six patients), eggs (one patient), and milk (two patients), all of which were contained in foods such as candy, cookies, and pastry,” researchers wrote.
The paper said nothing about banning these foods, but concluded that “failure to recognize the severity of these reactions and to administer epinephrine promptly increases the risk of a fatal outcome”.
Nevertheless, food bans followed, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began to encourage educators to “consider possible food allergies” during food preparation.
By 1998, the New York Times was reporting on the rise of peanut allergies and the measures school districts were taking to stop them.
“Prodded by parents warning of lethal allergies, by the contentions of some researchers that peanut allergies are on the rise and, not least, by a fear of litigation, growing numbers of public and private schools across the country, including many of New York City’s most selective independent schools, have banned peanut butter from their cafeterias,” wrote Anemona Maria Hartocollis.
“The Biggest Misconception”
When the Times published its article in 1998, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) was not yet issuing recommendations about peanuts or food allergies in infants. But as public concern grew, they decided they had to offer guidelines of some kind.
“There was just one problem,” Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins University surgeon, noted in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. “Doctors didn’t actually know what precautions, if any, parents should take.”
Instead of remaining mum, the AAP followed the lead of the United Kingdom’s Committee on Toxicology and recommended that mothers avoid peanuts during pregnancy and lactation, and that children avoid peanuts until the age of 3.
The decision to make such a sweeping decision in the absence of compelling scientific evidence was a mistake, allergists say, and runs counter to basic immunology.
Dr. Gideon Lack, an allergist at King’s College London, says the collective effort to cocoon children from peanuts and other foods is responsible for what has been described as a “food allergy epidemic”.
The data suggest Lack is right.
In the 25 years since the AAP issued its recommendation, the US (like the UK, which also advised peanut avoidance) has experienced an explosion of food allergies, especially peanut allergies. Data from Mount Sinai Hospital System in New York show that peanut allergies more than tripled in the decade and a half following the AAP’s guidance. In 1997, peanut allergies affected 1 in 250 children in the United States. By 2002, this rate had risen to 1 in 125, and by 2008, it reached 1 in 70 children.
Anecdotally, I only remember one kid in my middle school who had food allergies … and poor Rusty had ’em all. He was known as the “Kid with a thousand allergies” and had to be so careful of what he ate and even what he touched. but this was the mid-1970s and there weren’t formal school guidelines on what we could bring in our school lunch bags or use scented things like deodorant. (It was the 1970s, and a lot of us were just hitting puberty and many of my classmates were new Canadians from poorer countries … we needed the deodorant!)
Comments Off on Accidentally creating an epidemic of food allergies, from the best of intentions
October 12, 2024
QotD: From conspicuous consumption to junk science
Buck Throckmorton, “Organic Food & Anti-Vaxxers – Does The Fear of Safe Food Lead to Fear of Safe Vaccines”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2019-12-08.
Comments Off on QotD: From conspicuous consumption to junk science
October 8, 2024
Making the Black Mead of Medieval France – Bochet
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Jun 25, 2024Black mead, or bochet, made with spices and wood chips
City/Region: Paris
Time Period: 1393Mead was very popular from Russia to England, but started to lose favor in part due to the rise of cheaper brews like vodka and hopped ales. Mead was often still drunk for its medicinal properties, especially when it was infused with herbs and spices.
This mead has some of those wonderfully warming spices, and I added wood chips from the local brewing store to mimic the wood barrels that it would have been fermented in. The burnt caramel scent softens and mellows out during fermentation, and the resulting mead is not sweet at all and is more complex than many meads I’ve had.
To make six sextier of bochet, take six pints of very sweet honey, and put it in a cauldron on the fire and boil it, and stir for so long that it starts to grow, and you see that it also boils with bubbles like small blisters which will burst, releasing a little bit of dark smoke. Then add seven sextier of water and boil so much that it reduces to six sextiers, and keep stirring. And then put it in a vat to cool until it is lukewarm; then strain it through a cloth, and put it in a barrel and add a pint of yeast from ale, because that is what makes it piquant, (though if you use bread yeast, it makes as good a flavor, but the color will be duller), and cover well and warmly so it ferments.
If you want to make it very good, add an ounce of ginger, long pepper, grains of paradise and cloves in equal amounts, except for the cloves of which there should be the least, and put them in a cloth bag and toss it in. And when it has been two or three days and the bochet smells of spices and is strong enough, take out the bag and wring it out and put it in the next barrel that you make. And so this powder will serve you well up to three or four times.
— Le Ménagier de Paris, 1393.
Comments Off on Making the Black Mead of Medieval France – Bochet
October 4, 2024
QotD: Farmers and slaves in ancient Mesopotamia
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Against The Grain“, Slate Star Codex, 2019-10-15.
Comments Off on QotD: Farmers and slaves in ancient Mesopotamia
