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...

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...