Hoopskirts

It's been such an incredibly busy and fulfilling summer, so I am far beyond in posting.  Let's swing back into action with a cider cake! Cider cake just sounds so very autumnal.  Since the recipe calls for sweet cider, there does seem to be a reason for that feeling. I've had mixed luck with various cider cake recipes.  While they taste nice, the resulting cake is heavy and dense.  Period cakes are much denser than our modern taste expects, but my results were heavier than normal. Today's version comes from The Kentucky Housewife of 1839 The Recipe What I Did I decided to apply what I have learned about period cake baking technique to this recipe and beat the egg whites and yolks separately, rather than adding the eggs in whole, as I usually would. I have a kitchen scale (highly recommend one!), so I weighed out my sugar. Separate the whites from the yolks of 6 eggs.  Beat the egg whites until stiff.   In a separat...

Continuing with my harvest of rhubarb, I tackled a new type of preserve Rhubarb Orange Marmalade.  Yes, you heard me right. The Challenge Historical Food Fortnighly Challege 12. In A Jam...or Jelly, or Pickle  (June 3 - June 16)  In a world before refrigeration, preserving food was an important task. For this challenge, make your favorite preserved food - bonus points if it’s seasonal! I have discovered how much I enjoy period jams and jellies made without pectin gelling agents.  They are so easy to make and so delicious!  Strawberries would be the logical seasonal fruit in early June in northern Illinois, but I still have a surplus of the last strawberry jam I made.  Since my rhubarb was still hardy, I thought I should take advantage of its abundance.  And, I have loved rhubarb since my childhood. The Recipe Rhubarb is not the normal stuff of jams and jellies, modern or period.  As I researched, I did start finding recipes for a c...

A Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge  Having missed a couple of challenges, it's time to catch up.  For this challenge, I made Asparagus Omelet The Challenge:  Breakfast Foods (May 6 - May 19) It’s simple - make a breakfast dish. Get creative, but make sure to provide your documentation for its place at the breakfast table! "A Good Breakfast" by George Goodwin Clonney   I set myself some additional criteria for this challenge: I knew that I would be making it at a reenactment (Greenfield Village's Civil War Remembrance weekend), so it had to be something I could prepare over an open fire. I wanted something on the simpler side, without a large number of specialized ingredients.    Surrounding myself with food and material culture appropriate to the time and season is important to me, so whatever I made had to use seasonal ingredients appropriate to late May in the upper Midwest.    The third additional criterion was that the...

Rhubarb is full and lush in my garden, and the reenacting season is starting here in the North, so it's time to harvest some and bake a rhubarb pie! And my need for a pie ties in nicely with Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge #11: Picnic Foods I have fallen behind on the challenges, but with every intent to catch back up, I thought I would get a head start on this challenge. The Challenge Picnic Foods  (May 20 - June 2)  Some foods are just meant to be eaten in the outdoors! Concoct a dish that is documented for al fresco dining, or foods that might particularly lend themselves to eating at a picnic. Bonus points for putting it to the test! A pie might not seem like the logical thing to bring to a picnic, used as we are to paper plates, sandwiches, and disposable ease.  But picnics in the antebellum period were often far more elaborate.   "The Pic-Nic" by Thomas Cole, 1846, in the Brooklyn Museum of Art.  My photograph of work in the museum ...

Time for a Do Over! Sally Lunn with butter and raspberry jam I was really unhappy about the bread failing (see previous post), so I decided to try again.   Challenge 7: Pretty as a Picture I'll be honest - at this point I didn't care how pretty the result was or not - I just wanted the bread to rise and have an acceptably light but not over light texture. We could discuss variations on Sally Lunn ad infinitum - I've seen batter versions that are poured into the pan, shaped buns, and bread loaves.  The recipe I selected suggests it can be griddle cooked, resulting in something similar to an English muffin. We could discuss who Sally Lunn was and trace the recipe from England to America.  But, you know what?  Perhaps another time.  I'm just fighting mad after the last challenge failure.  We are just going to focus on this bread and getting it to come out (it's baking as I type) The Recipe, Year, and Region This version of Sally ...

Baking Bread (in which we experience a failure.  You might want to grab some hankies) It's time for another Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge : Pretty As A Picture  Challenge 7:    If you're a fan of cooking competition shows (like I am!), you know how the saying goes:  we eat first with our eyes.  Make a dish that looks just as spectacular as it tastes.  Extra points for historically accurate plating - and don't forget to post pictures! This is a tale of dashed expectations and hopes.  Sorrow and woe!  I had debated long and hard over what to make that would be pretty and realized that prettiness would be complex to achieve.  Some Victorian food sounds rather amazing, using complex pudding or ice cream molds, which I do not own.  Looking at a simpler food, such as a roast, I realized that the various accompanying sides are what brings color to a table.  Wanting to limit my challenge food to one item, I kne...