Hoopskirts

Pancakes for Shrove Tuesday, from Mr Francatelli's recipe Shrove Tuesday or Fat Tuesday - traditionally a day of fried cakes, doughnuts, and pancakes, all ways to use up fats before the 40-day fast of Lent.  I did not grow up celebrating the day, and, as a result, have no traditional food associations.  When my children were little I started looking for ways to celebrate ordinary and traditional days.  Shrove Tuesday seemed like a fun thing to celebrate!   Not being much of a Mardi Gras person and being a huge fan of breakfast, I settled on pancakes.   When I moved to the Chicago area I had discovered puffed pancakes  - the German apple pancake and the Dutch Baby, and over the years my Shrove Tuesday dinners moved in that direction. This year I was thinking a Dutch baby pancake sounded about perfect for our meal.  AND THEN... .... I read a cookbook by Mr. Charles Francatelli.  If you have watched the PBS series Victoria,  the...

Stewed tomatoes for breakfast - a very British thing.  Also a very breakfast thing in nineteenth-century America.  Eggs and Tomatoes comes from Mrs. Bliss's 1850 volume, The Practical Cookbook  (Philadelphia).  It's not a seasonal thing for me right now, since, being April, it's not tomato season. The Recipe To facilitate peeling the tomatoes, I put them into boiling water to blanch them.  Once the skins split, I removed them with a slotted spoon, removed the skins, halved them, removed the seeds, and then rough chopped the remainder Blanched tomatoes I melted two tablespoons of butter in a frying pan, added the chopped tomatoes, and let them cook.  I added salt and pepper to taste. Since the tomatoes were already warmed from the blanching, this didn't take very long.  I beat six eggs with a fork as if I was making scrambled eggs. Pour the eggs into the stewed tomatoes and begin stirrin...

A good breakfast egg is a delightful thing!  And, evidently a controversial one as well.  Inspired by the dust-up over Alice Water's wrought iron egg spoon (for a mere $250), I decided to take a look at some period egg recipes. Today we look at the coddled egg.  I love eggs prepared in all ways, but coddling is not in my normal repertoire, somehow seeming fussier to prepare, although it really isn't.  To coddle is to pamper, to protect to the point of overprotecting.  A coddled egg is cooked out of the shell, gently and slowly, in water rather than over direct heat in a frying pan.   I've made coddled eggs in my modern life but was curious how a period recipe might vary. A Period Version The Praire Farmer, July 1852, p 331 I found this recipe copied verbatim in many cookbooks. The difference that stood out when I compared it to modern techniques, was that pouring boiling water on the eggs was the preferred method.  Every modern re...

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...