An Easy, Elegant Dessert

Need a simple dessert for a dinner party?  Try syllabub!  It's very easy to make, but feels very fancy.  Everyone will be impressed.  There are about fifty different syllabub recipes, but my favorite is a mix of white wine, cream, lemon juice, and sugar.

Again, I'm not great with exact modern measurements since that's not really our thing in the eighteenth-century kitchens, but to make enough for four I would suggest that you take about one and one-half cups of white wine, two and one-half cups of cream, two lemons, and sweeten it to your palate (I like maybe 1/2 or 3/4 cups of sugar?  Test it for yourself). Then get out a large mixing bowl.  Juice the lemons into it and grate a bit of the peel into it, too.  Then add your wine and sugar and mix until the sugar has dissolved.  Then pour in your cream and whip it until it's of a whipped cream consistency.  Pour into shrub glasses (or any kind of clear glass-- a champagne flute, perhaps), and after a couple of hours the wine and cream will separate from each other.  On top you will have a light, sweet, lemony whipped cream froth to eat, and underneath a wine punch to drink.  Enjoy!

Note: don't whip it too long or it turns into butter, as I found out the hard way.  If you do turn it into butter, it goes well on bread.  Syllabutter!

Potato Balls: A Personal Favorite

One of my favorite eighteenth-century recipes is for making "Potatoe Balls."  Here's the recipe, from Mary Randolph's The Virginia Housewife: "Mix mashed potatoes with the yelk of an egg, roll them into balls, flour them, or cover them with egg and bread crumbs, fry them in clean dripping, or brown them in a Dutch oven. They are an agreeable vegetable relish and a supper dish."

(Om-nom-nom!!!)

First, use russet potatoes to make mashed potatoes, however you best like to eat them-- with garlic, onions, cream, butter, etc.  If you leave the skin on when you boil your potatoes the starch will help hold a ball shape later, but it's not necessary to do this if you really don't like potato skins, or if you're using leftover mashed potatoes.  I would also suggest roughly mashing for this recipe: if you have super silky potatoes they won't form balls very easily.  After you've made your mashed potatoes, let them cool until you can work them with your hands.

Once your potatoes are cooled, mix in an egg yolk (to help hold the potato balls together), then use your hands to roll them into golf ball-sized balls or a little larger.  Next, roll the balls in a beaten egg, then roll them in breadcrumbs and fry until they are golden brown and crispy on the outside.  You can add herbs and seasoning to your breadcrumbs, too.  I like to add some sea salt and parsley.  And I suggest frying in butter or lard for added flavor.  You can also bake these, according to the recipe.  I haven't tried baking them, as I prefer frying, but I would imagine you would bake at about 325° F or 350° F for maybe 20 minutes, until golden brown.

I think this is a great dish for Thanksgiving leftovers.  If you're like me, you always make too many mashed potatoes and have leftovers for a few days.  After two days you're a little sick of mashed potatoes, right?  So, roll them in balls, roll them in breadcrumbs, and fry!

...or just go ahead and make these instead of mashed potatoes because I promise that you won't regret it.  This is seriously one of my favorite dishes to prepare and eat.  Yum!

Ice Cream Sunday

I had great plans on Sunday to make an onion soup, but when I arrived Dennis suggested that we make chocolate ice cream instead.  How could I say no to that?!  Chocolate ice cream!  

(Oh hey, it's me in eighteenth-century garb!)

Many of you will say, "Ice cream?  In the eighteenth century?  I don't believe you."  Well, believe it!  The Governor's Palace has an icehouse-- a twenty-foot deep hole made for keeping ice.  The Governor (and other wealthy Virginians with icehouses) would have had ice shipped down from the northern colonies in the dead of winter and would have packed it into their icehouses.  Ice was cut from lakes and packed with salt and sawdust for shipping, so it wasn't the kind of thing that you would mix in with your drinks.  Nor was this a refrigerator-- foods were much fresher then and bought and consumed daily, so there was no need for refrigeration of vegetables, fruits, or meats.



Ice was shipped almost specifically for ice creams, and occasionally for putting around (not into) drinks for a cool treat during the hot summer months.  "During the summer months?" you might ask.  "Wouldn't the ice have melted?"  No.  Reports suggest that ice could remain, well, ice, until September or October in the ice house, even if it had been brought in the previous December or January.  A test of the Governor's Palace icehouse a decade ago or so confirmed these reports.

Their iced creams, however, differ slightly from our ice cream.  Theirs was more like frozen custard.  To make eighteenth-century ice cream, you must start out by making a custard.  You can flavor it however you want-- fruit ice creams were especially popular with denizens of the eighteenth-century.  Since we made chocolate ice cream, we started by grating some pure chocolate that we had made in our chocolate program.  We then got together about a dozen egg yolks and five pints of cream in a pot over the fire, taking care not to let it boil.  As it heated, we added in the grated chocolate, along with sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and a dash of cayenne pepper for a bit of a kick.  Once the mixture had thickened, we took it off the fire and set it to cool for several hours.  We had to cool it, because to make eighteenth-century ice cream you put the custard into a metal canister, set the canister in a bucket, and pack ice around it.  If we had put the custard into the canister hot it would have simply melted the ice.  Useless.

As it was, we put the cooled custard into the canister, canister into bucket, ice packed around it, and spun.  Yes, we spun the canister in the ice, by hand, for two hours.  You notice the handle on the lid?  It's for spinning.  You can also just use your hands and turn the whole canister (as I am doing in the first picture, above).  You spin.  And spin.  And spin some more.  As the ice melts you drain it from the bucket, and add in more ice and rock salt-- the rock salt makes the ice colder.  We spun for two hours before it was time to clean up the kitchen for closing, and it probably could have used another hour of spinning to harden completely.  But ta-da!  We made ice cream!  Since it melts we can't display it, so I just had to take some home with me.



And it was delicious. :)

Eleanor the Armoury Cat

Yesterday I worked at the Anderson Armoury kitchen, instead of at the Governor's Palace.  The Armoury kitchen is part of the Armoury complex, operated by James Anderson during the American Revolution.  When Anderson got the government contract to be the Public Armourer he expanded his blacksmithing operations and hired about forty workers for his forges.  He also hired a man named William Parker to cook for them all.  Each man would get a ladle of stew and a pound of bread each day, so long as food supplies held out.  Soon I'll post about making stew in a pot and bread in our military grade outdoor brick bread oven, but today let's talk about the best part of working at the Anderson kitchen: Eleanor the Cat.

Eleanor is the Armoury cat.  She was found in a woodpile as a kitten, and years ago one of the employees took pity on her, got her up to date on her shots, gave her a name and a collar, and started a savings account for her food and vet visits.  So, when I arrive in the mornings at Anderson I'm greeted by a little ball of tortoiseshell love.  Yes, she's only loving me because her food bowl is kept in the kitchen and she wants me to open the door and feed her, but it's still love.  She rubs against my legs, sits on my lap, purrs.  She's an independent little thing, though, who comes and goes at her will during the day.  She can be moody, too.  But I think she can sense that I love her.

She might be playing me, actually.  Ah, cats.  So cute and manipulative.



One time it was raining, so we were making "muffins" (recipe in Hannah Glasse) on a dry pan in the kitchen, since we couldn't use our outdoor bread oven.  I was sitting in a chair waiting for a muffin to brown on one side, when Eleanor hopped up on my lap and slept there for about half an hour, purring.  Seriously, isn't this the best job ever? 

Pineapple Fritters

Today at work I made a very tasty dish: Pineapple Fritters!  Pineapples would have been consumed by Americans in the eighteenth-century, but they were a very, very expensive fruit.  Only the richest could afford to purchase and eat them.  If you visit Williamsburg you will see images of pineapples everywhere, for the fruit came to symbolize hospitality to Virginians in the eighteenth-century.

I used a recipe from "The French Family Cook" for strawberry fritters, but I prepared it with pineapple since we had one available in the kitchen (and it desperately needed to be used before it went bad).  The recipe reads, "Make a paste with some flour, a spoonfull of brandy, half a glass of white wine, the whites of two eggs beat and green lemon shred fine. Mix it well, neither too thick nor too thin. It should rope in falling from a spoon. Dip some large strawberrys in to it, fry them and glaze them with a salamander."

So, I got out some white wine (you will need quite a bit more than half a glass of wine), brandy, flour, and eggs-- remember to use only the whites.  Since we had no "green lemons," or limes, on hand, I grabbed a lemon, too.  I mixed all the ingredients, except the lemon, together as the recipe says until I got something like the consistency of pancake batter, maybe a little thicker.  If you've made onion rings at home, that's a good consistency to have in mind while mixing this up.  Finally, I cut the lemon in half, squeezed in just a little juice for flavor, and grated in a bit of lemon zest. Then I took my whole pineapple, peeled it, cored it, and cut it into rings.  I placed a frying pan full of lard over the fire, waited for it to heat, then dipped my rings into the batter and put them into the lard.  Once they had cooked to a nice golden brown on each side I took them out.

The next step was challenging for me, but will be easy for you.  Spinkle sugar over each fritter, the finer the better. I suggest castor sugar.  Once you have on the sugar, put it under the broiler until it carmelizes, and then you're done!  This was challenging for me because electric broilers didn't exist in the eighteenth-century.  I had to use a device called a salamander.  A salamander looks like this:

You put the round part in hot coals until it's red hot and shimmering with flame, then use the rod to hold it steady over the items you want broiled.  It's not exactly light-weight either, and I had to return it to the fire multiple times to keep it hot enough to achieve the look I wanted for these fritters.  Some have little legs to set them down, as in the illustration, but mine did not.

Once done, serve immediately.  And enjoy!


(Salamander illustration found here)

The Most Expensive Dish in Virginia

On Saturday at the Governor's Palace I prepared the most expensive dish available in eighteenth-century Virginia.  To prepare it I used three different cooking methods!  What could it possibly be?

Macaroni.  With cheese.  Yes, my friends, our ubiquitous mac 'n' cheese cost a pretty penny back in the day for those of us in the southern colonies.  We can only verify that this dish was prepared at the Governor's Palace.  Dunmore imported 25 pounds of macaroni noodles from Italy and cheese from Italy and England.  Because the macaroni noodle-making machinery lived in Italy and had not yet made it to Virginia-- or even England-- and the Virginia climate is not suited to producing hard cheeses, the Royal Governor imported every ingredient in this dish.  By the nineteenth century it's gotten a bit cheaper, but as of c.1774, having macaroni with cheese on the table meant you were very wealthy indeed.

To prepare this dish eighteenth-century style, I first boiled the hard noodles in water and a little milk, then drained them off and layered them in a rounded dish-- you could use a deep pie pan.  I put slices of Parmesan and hard English cheddar over top with a little salt, then added another layer of noodles and repeated the process until the bowl had been filled to the top, with pasta as the top layer.  Then, bake it in a "quick" oven, so, perhaps around 350 or so for 20 minutes, until the cheese has melted and the noodles have browned a bit on top.  Then take out your dish, let it cool a few minutes (but not too long) and flip it upside down on a plate so that you get a molded effect-- mine was domed.  Then grate some cheese on top, broil for minute or two, until the cheese bubbles (but not til it's brown and burned), and ta-da!  You have eighteenth-century macaroni.  Enjoy!

Almond Custard, Like Macarons

Today, I shall tell you about Almond Custard from Hannah Glasse's cookbook!  Don't confuse this one with her Almond Creams (which I'm sure are quite good, but these were magnificent).  The recipe reads, "To Make Almond Custards: Take a pint of cream, blanch and beat a quarter of a pound of almonds fine, with two spoonfuls of rose-water; sweeten it to your palate, beat up the yolks of four eggs, stir all together one way over the fire til it is thick, then pour it out into cups; or you may bake it in little china cups."  It's really quite simple.  The recipe is pretty straightforward.

First, you need to powder almonds, add in some rose water (let's say two tablespoons), about a half cup of sugar (more or less, depending on how you like it-- feel free to taste test), and a pint of cream.  The longest part was powdering the almonds into a flour, but nowadays you can actually buy almond flour/almond meal, and that will save you about two hours of time.  After you've mixed together your powdered almonds, rose water, sugar, and cream, put in the beaten yolks of two or three modern eggs (Hannah Glasse's eggs were smaller than ours), mix altogether, and set it in a sauce pan over a low heat.  Stir constantly, but don't whisk in air (which is, I think, what she means by "stir one way"-- don't beat in air, just stir in even circles).  Because you have egg in this, if you don't stir constantly you might end up with lumps of scrambled egg.  It will bubble a very little around the sides when it's hot, and that's when you must start stirring.  It will thicken, too, but not to a pudding consistency.  The spoon will begin to pull slightly as you stir; no more.  It will be liquidy after you take it off the stove, though it will set a little in a glass or if you put it in your fridge.  Still not quite pudding-like.  I've not tried baking, but I imagine it would be at a very low heat and very tasty.  I think this could also be a custard for an ice cream, if you like making ice creams.

To enjoy this custard, you must like rose-flavored dishes: I do.  To me, this custard tasted like the cream inside a rose macaron from Laduree.  It tasted like Covent Garden, sitting and watching the street performers.  If you don't like rose-flavored dishes, I suggest substituting orange-blossom water for the rose-water, perhaps, or use a few drops of lemon extract.  Get creative!  Word of caution: be careful when using extract, as it's extremely potent.  If you do substitute extract for rose/orange-blossom water, DO NOT use two tablespoons.  Taste test as you go along to see if you want more of the flavor.  Remember, you can always add more, but can't take any out.  Also, rose-water might be difficult to find.  If you do find it, make sure it's edible.  They do make skin-toner rose-water that is inedible.  You should be able to find it at specialty food stores, and it's a popular ingredient in Middle Eastern cooking.  If you're really adventurous, you can make your own with rose petals!

I just love this custard, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

Grace and Chocolate Making

The first Tuesday of each month, except July and August because of the heat, we make chocolate.  Chocolate equals Jim to me, and since I haven't made chocolate in Foodways since Jim passed away last year, yesterday was a little emotional for me.  Everything about the program remained essentially the same, except Barbara roasted the beans instead of Jim.  But, just like always, we shelled the nibs and I dipped my finger in some sugar when I ate them and it was like a mix of roasted coffee and chocolate with the sweetness of the sugar mixed in, cutting the bitterness.  We winnowed out the twigs and leaves in our big basket, which I'd never done myself, and then ground the nibs into a powder with our mortar and pestle.  Next, we got out our chocolate stone, heated a bit with some coals in a brazier under it, and a big metal rolling pin and rolled and rolled the powder until it became liquid and chocolate.  Then we got out our saddle stone and rolled some more until it was very smooth and added spices-- mace, nutmeg, cayenne, cinnamon-- until it became flavorful and good.  It's a very labor-intensive, long day, but in the end you have a bowl of chocolate.

Only once, Barbara asked if I was alright and I realized I'd been thinking of Jim.  I read a poem the other day, though, that helped.  I was thinking about Foodways, and my job, and the value of it all, and I read the editor's welcome in my most recent Southern Living and it had reprinted a poem called "Grace,"-- grace, how providential-- by Jake Adam York and it partially read,

"Because my grandmother made me
the breakfast her mother made her,
when I crack the eggs, pat the butter
on the toast, and remember the bacon
to cast iron, to fork, to plate, to tongue,
my great grandmother moves my hands
to whisk, to spatula, to biscuit ring,
and I move her hands too, making
her mess, so the syllable of batter
I’ll find tomorrow beneath the fridge
and the strew of salt and oil are all
memorials...

I think of my uncle, I think of my uncle
rising, not falling, when I raise
the buttermilk and the cornmeal to the light
before giving them to the skillet
and sometimes I say the recipe
to the air and sometimes I say his name
or her name or her name
and sometimes I just set the table
because meals are memorials
that teach us how to move,
history moves in us as we raise
our voices and then our glasses
to pour a little out for those
who poured out everything for us,
we pour ourselves for them,
so they can eat again."

And suddenly it all made sense and I felt connected again to the meals I prepare, taking recipes from old cookbooks and making them live again, making Mary Randolph and Hannah Glasse and all the women and men who used their recipes once more come alive.  And when I rolled the ground cocoa beans on the stone that Jim hand-carried to the States from Mexico I realized that he was right there in the kitchen still making my hands move as I made his hands move again and I felt both happy and sad at once, and it's still his chocolate as much as it's mine and Barbara's and Anna's and Kimberly's and all of the chocolate makers who perfected this process going back centuries and centuries.  All of us making each other's hands move, taking part in a universal process.

A Real Weekend

I have weekends again now that I'm working, although starting next week they will be on Tuesday and Wednesday instead of on Saturday and Sunday.  But this weekend I had a real weekend-- a break from work, at the proper time and everything.  Predictably, I spent it with Zan.

I drove to the mountains Friday evening, arrived at his home in time for dinner, and we had an Indian take-away feast that his dad had picked up: perfect, after making my curried rabbit that I could only taste, but not eat.  We had chicken tikka masala with naan, a lamb curry, paneer and peas, samosas, and poppadums.  We sat out on the porch in the perfect evening air-- warm, with a hint of a breeze, so no mosquitos or gnats or flies.  We talked about tennis, and the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra's son, and when someone thought Lydia was the kidnapped Patty Hurst and her cat went mysteriously missing.  We looked at the sheered sheep in the fields and the blue water of the pool that will feel so good later this summer.  The next day Zan and I headed to town to see Love's Labours Lost at the ASC.  We sat on the stage, and since we knew several of the cast members we got singled out quite a bit for attention during the show.  I kissed one actor on the cheek and another gave a bit of love to Zan.  Alas, no surprise ending (no surprise), thus Jack had not his Jill.  Ah, well.  It was a very good play.  We had dinner again on the porch, and afterwards watched Doctor Who and now we're all caught up just in time to hear that Matt Smith is leaving the role.  Late last night, after we had gone to sleep, Lys and Zach arrived, so today we got to see them, and spent the morning with mugs of tea and coffee, chatting away about life and their upcoming wedding.  Then, home again, home again, to go to work tomorrow and, hopefully, to receive my costumes.  I'm itching for my shifts and jumps; they'll be much nicer and cooler to work in than my modern clothes with my too-large Historic Trades polo.

Now the challenge is to coordinate weekends with Zan so that we might take fun trips and see plays and go on winery tours and do summer things despite both having full-time jobs and different weekend days.