Hoopskirts

Today, March 14th,  is the whimsical "holiday" known as Pi Day.  Such a fun excuse to make a pie, as if one truly needed an excuse to so so! I was torn between two historic pies - cranberry and coca-nut.  Both are still seasonal, cranberries starting to show up less frequently in my grocery stores of choice, and coconut being something I remember only appearing in the winter when I was a child.    Because of the path of my errands, I went to a grocery that I frequent less often and that store's stock made the decision for me.  No cranberries, either fresh or frozen.  Coconut it is! I had already selected my recipe: Cream Cocoa-nut Pudding from Miss Eliza Leslie's 1854 edition of New Receipts for Cooking  (Philadelphia).   Since I planned on making this recipe as a pie, I decided to cut the quantity in half so I would wind up with only one pie.  Preparing the Coconut In this part I was ably assisted by my hus...

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...

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 th...

The Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge #8 "It’s harvest time in the northern hemisphere, and springtime in the southern hemisphere. Make something either to preserve that produce that you’re harvesting, or replenish your supply after the winter! Fruit and vegetable jams, jellies, and preserves are the focus!" Northern Illinois in late August and early September has seen some sudden rainstorms with very strong winds  During one of these storms, the crab apple tree in front of our church building was toppled.  While accompanying my husband, who is the congregational president, to look at the damage, I noticed the crab apples had ripened to a brilliant glossy red. I had toyed with the idea of making a historic preserve with crab apples for a long time but it kept getting pushed to the back of my "to do" list.  All of a sudden, it was now or never.  The organic supplies were lying on the ground in front of me in easy reach (our congregation does not spray th...