I ran across this line today in an article I was reading: “A great deal is being written now… about provisioning our households with an eye to the nutritive value of what we buy.” Ain’t that the truth? Hang on, though: This was 1915, and “nutritive” didn’t mean what you think it means.
What’s really in the molasses?
Sometimes the things that are ostensibly the simplest turn out to pose the most interesting problems. Molasses, for example, which I’ve been using by the gallon to bake all this gingerbread. In an age when practically everything Americans use in the kitchen is constructed to industrial specifications — unless, like farmers market produce, it’s specifically branded and marketed in opposition to that sort of standardization — it’s surprising to find that a packaged, branded product has enough variation to fundamentally changed the character of baked goods, but that’s exactly what I’ve found with molasses.
Turducken: The untold story
A lot of people claim to have invented turducken, or to know who did. Everybody puts its origin in Louisiana. Those crazy Cajuns! A boneless chicken inside a boneless duck inside a boneless turkey! Who else would do something like that?
Prince Albert, apparently.
Receipt for dressing a salad
Sometimes the best part of doing hsitory is the flotsam and jetsam that washes ashore. While looking for a copy of an 1855 cookbook I found this poem appended nonsequitorially to a “Notices of New Books” column in the New York Times, and it was so charmingly bizarre I felt I had to share it.
Crisp gingerbread biscuits
There are countless recipes for gingerbread in 19th-century cookbooks, most simply called “gingerbread” (or, to distinguish them, Gingerbread No. 1, Gingerbread No. 2, and so on), but most of the recipes fall into a few types. There’s soft gingerbread, which is what we’d call a cake. There’s “common gingerbread,” which is typically a soft cookie and always contains molasses — which is what made it “common,” molasses being cheaper than even brown sugar. “Sugar gingerbread,” by contrast, used sugar. And then there’s hard gingerbread, which was designed to keep well.
I assumed that hard gingerbread would give me something like a gingersnap (or, I hoped, like Sweetzels Spiced Wafers). But this recipe, at least, turned out completely different from what I expected — somewhere between a cookie and a cracker, rather like an English biscuit. Which is, as they say, why you play the game.
When we are not looking
Four deer are nosing through the pine straw for acorns the squirrels might have missed, barely shimmering against the background of russet-brown and dappled snow. Where have they been all week? I expected to see them out in the snow, but maybe some instinct tells them to stay hidden when the ground is pure white. What do they do, then? Huddle in the deep woods? Stare dumbly at the white stuff, trying to remember where they’ve seen it before? Sit by the fire, the bucks watching basketball on TV and the does working on their knitting? Grumble to each other that the weather is proof that global warming is just a liberal conspiracy to take everybody’s SUVs? Which would be a good thing for deer, because the small cars can more easily dodge them, but being only ruminants they are easily swayed by cable news reports?
I imagine up north they just suck it up. Like everybody else.
Early American gingerbread cakes
In researching 19th-century American cooking I started with gingerbread — why, exactly, is a long story — and in researching gingerbread I started with Amelia Simmons’ 1796 American Cookery. This was the first cookbook written by an American author and published in America, and although nearly all of the culinary influence is (unsurprisingly) English, there are American touches, such as recipes for cornbread and cranberries.
One American influence on Simmons’ cooking is the use of a chemical leavener, pearlash, for baking.
More tender morsels
The matter of grass-fed beef and dental hygeine has me thinking some more about the connection between cuisine and agriculture, or between what we might think of as personal or cultural preference and the on-the-ground facts of how food is raised.
A couple of weeks ago Melissa Clark had a recipe in the New York Times for boneless chicken breasts — essentially chicken cordon bleu with sauerkraut, which cries out to my Alsatian-Rheinischer soul, but equally interesting to me was her hand-wringing about white meat.
Tender morsels
James McWilliams writes today in the Freakonomics blog that advocates of grass-fed beef are mistaken in asserting that until very recently, all beef was grass-fed. He’s right, as far as he goes: Agriculture experts advocated raising beef cattle on corn as long ago as the early nineteenth century. As one commenter pointed out, advocacy and practice are not the same thing. But they’re not always that far apart, either, and so I think it’s worth thinking about why progressive nineteenth-century agriculturalists thought corn-fed was better.
Pounding ginger
I have been researching historical gingerbread lately, for a probable book project on nineteenth-century American cooking. The first part of the research involves cataloguing recipes. So far I have thirty-eight recipes for gingerbread published in the United States prior to 1832, all neatly stored in a database and assigned appropriate metadata. Don’t panic: I’m not going to tell you all about the metadata. I’m going to tell you about spices.
As a cultural historian I’m interested in the deeper meanings and broader implications of everything, and I know that often people eat what they eat and cook the way they cook because of tradition or philosophy or politics. But as a cook and a craftsman I know that sometimes people have more practical reasons for doing things that are almost impossible to discover unless you actually try to do them. I’m interested in not just inner feelings and amorphous notions but in the sounds and smells and tastes that were the fabric of life in other times and places, the constant movements and sensations without which culture is just a topic for anthropological discourse. It seems to me that if you want to research the history of food, you need to get in the kitchen.
So I started baking gingerbread.