Hoopskirts

Chocolate Cream Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge #2 - Culinary Vices! The Challenge :   Culinary Vices (January 15 - January 28)   Some foods are really, really naughty. Globs of butter, lashings of sugar and syrup, decadent chocolate and wine. Bring out your naughty, indecorous side with foods associated with all the bad things, in the best ways. Being a child of the twentieth century, I know what I consider to be decadent (chocolate!  whipped cream!  rich creaminess!) and being a student of the nineteenth century, I know that my tastes do not necessarily align with theirs.  Many of their desserts are not as sweet and naturally, few rely on refrigeration - I do qualify "few," because there are desserts, such as ice cream, which require chilling. Boiled puddings there are aplenty on both shores of the Atlantic Ocean, as well as cakes like our fruit and pound cakes.   Mrs. Isabella Beeton That type of dessert didn't strike me as decadent.  I needed

Today, I take on another Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge (#1 of the new series) Baked Beef with white and sweet potatoes The Challenge 1. Meat-and-Potatoes    They’re a staple for the tables in the most rustic cottages as well as the fanciest banquet tables - and it’s also an idiom meaning a staple or the most basic parts of something. Make a historic “meat-and-potatoes” recipe - however you interpret it. I decided to work with the narrow, classic definition of meat as beef/veal, pork and mutton/lamb.  Game, poultry or fowl, and fish/shellfish form their own categories.  Not having to rely on seasonality of period storage options, I decided on beef - roast beef in particular.   Selection of a recipe proved harder than I expected.  Wanting to keep 1865 as my end limit, I found that many cookbooks had rather small sections on beef cookery.  Most of the ones I examined advised boiling the beef for an hour or two before transferring to the oven.  Being a fan of rare beef,