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Showing posts from May, 2016

Asparagus Omelet

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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 breakfast had to be

Rhubarb Pie from 1850

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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 I lov