Hoopskirts

A fast and easy dish - colcannon Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge 4:6 - Erin Go Bragh! Actual Irish dishes, or those with only the most tenuous association to Ireland and/or St. Patrick's Day. The recipe comes from The Domestic Oracle:  A Complete System of Modern Cookery and Family Economy  by Alexander Murray, M.D.  (London, 1860) I was intrigued by this recipe since it gave me permission to use any leafy hardy green instead of the more normal cabbage.   This recipe, in which the only recommended green is cabbage, seemed more "normal."  ( The Practice of Cookery Adapted to the Business of Every-Day Life  by Mrs. Dalgairns,12th edition, Edinburgh, 1850) The question we should always ask ourselves in a historical context is "What IS normal?  From where am I deriving my concept for standardization?"  While modern recipes restrict their greens to cabbage, does that mean it was the same in the nineteenth century? Opinio...

Peanut Brittle - aka Ground Nut Candy This Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge (HFF #3. 3) is The Tiffany Problem: Have you ever come across a dish that is older than you expected? That seems like it should be an anachronism, but isn't? Now's the time to give it a try. Before we start, here's some background information on the term "Tiffany Problem." According to Helen Vnuk, writing on MamaMia  (April 25, 2018) "... there’s an expression coined by the fantasy writer Jo Walton: The Tiffany Problem. It describes “the tension between historical fact and the popular perception of history”. In other words, it’s when a writer who has done painstaking research puts historically correct information into a novel, and readers complain that they’ve got it wrong, just because it looks wrong, when it’s actually right. “Tiffany is a real attested medieval name,” Walton explained in an interview with the Internet Review Of Science Fiction. “It’s a vari...

Winter is such a wonderful, satisfying time for soup!  My entry for the Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge "Downstairs Dinner" is A Plain Cheap Soup. The Challenge  Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge Season 4, Number 2:  Downstairs Dinner.  Make a dish of the working classes. The Recipe This recipe comes from The Practical Cookbook (Philadelphia, 1850) What I Did / The Method Ingredients   Leftover meat bones:  I used the carcass of a roast chicken Two large carrots, peeled and chopped Three small turnips, peeled and chopped One large yellow onion, peeled and chopped 2 whole cloves salt and pepper water Method Being used to making soup from scratch on a frequent basis, this concept felt very easy and familiar.  I placed the chicken carcass in a large pot and liberally covered it with water, then let it cook for several hours until the meat fell off the bones. At this po...

The New Year!  A time for fresh starts!  And, speaking of fresh starts, to my great delight I discovered that The Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge has been revived.  Having a prompt and a challenge not only keeps you on your toes but it makes cooking historic food even more pleasurable. The Challenge:  One Last Hurrah.  Pick a holiday, any holiday, and start the New Year with some in- or out-of-season merriment. I decided to attempt New Year's Cake.  New Year's Day was a day of festivity and social visits.  The normal pattern seemed to be that the women stayed home to receive callers and well-wishers throughout the day while the men circulated from house to house.  Each hostess would give her callers some type of refreshment.  In the middle Atlantic states, particularly those of Dutch origin, the traditional pastry was New Year's Cake, but not a cake such as we think of.  New Year's cakes of this type are actual...