Historic Cooking: Fourth of July Pudding from 1916.

Fourth of July Pudding.  Photo: Liz Raven.

The Redone Challenge: Today in History (June 29-July 12, 2014) Make a dish based on or inspired by a momentous occasion that took place on the day you made it. Get creative - you would be surprised by all the interesting things that happened every single day!

The Recipe:

A Fourth of July Luncheon. To be served buffet style or on the porch.  By Cora Farmer Perkins.

FOURTH OF JULY PUDDING: Pick over, wash and hull one quart box of strawberries.  Sprinkle with one cupful of granulated sugar, cover, and let stand two hours.  Mash, squeeze through a double thickness of cheesecloth, and add one cupful of cold water, and lemon juice to taste.  Turn mixture into a brick mold.  Beat one pint of heavy cream until stiff and add one-half cupful of powdered sugar, one-half tablespoonful of vanilla, a few grains of salt, and two thirds of a cupful of rolled dried macaroons.  Pour cream mixture over fruit mixture to overflow mold.  Cover with buttered paper (buttered side up) and adjust cover, when mixture should be forced down sides of mold.  Pack in rock salt and finely crushed ice, using equal parts, and let stand three hours.

            Remove to chilled serving dish, garnish with selected strawberries, and cut in slices for serving.

--from _Woman’s Home Companion_, July 1916. 

The Date/Year and Region: the United States, 1916. 

The new year approaches!

clipart from Webweaver.nu

Well, Christmas Day has come and gone, and I don't know about you, but I'm never ready for it to be over!  It's always a let-down to me, when all the preparation and holiday spirit is finished after one day; I much prefer the older tradition of 12 Days of Christmas!  It's not like there's not enough treats to last at least half that long, plus, I always run out of time to make all the things I wanted to make, and then I have the week between Christmas and New Year off from work, with some actual time to make things ... and no celebrations to make them for!  Thankfully, my family is spread out over the United States, and so we always end up having more than one Christmas celebration anyway, trying to see as many people as possible.  This year, I'm going to think of the whole time until January 4 (when I go back to work) as the Christmas season, still, and try to get in as much cooking and sewing as possible.

Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge #13 -- Ethnic Foodways: my great-grandmother's biscotti.

Soft Biscotti.  Photo: Elizabeth Urbach.

The Challenge: #13 – Ethnic Foodways. Foodways and cuisine are at the heart of every ethnic group around the world and throughout time. Choose one ethnic group, research their traditional dishes or food, and prepare one as it is traditionally made.

My family is half Sicilian and a quarter Calabrese (from Calabria in southern Italy), and traditional (for us) Italian holiday food includes a few types of cookies.  When my grandmothers were alive, we usually bought our cookies at the Italian bakery, or from the supermarket (Stella D'oro brand used to carry some of our favorites), but now, purchased cookies are less available to us, so in the last several years I've started researching and making some.  This has also helped me enjoy all our Italian cookie favorites, since my nut allergies have made most traditional Italian cookies not an option for me (lots of almonds and hazelnuts). 

The issue with re-creating historic Italian cookies is the fact that literacy has not been a common skill in Italy and Sicily for many years – really only since World War 2.  My own grandparents were the first literate generation in their families; their parents were illiterate, and so was the rest of that generation, so their recipes have been passed down by mouth and by example, rather than being written down.  With that oral tradition comes the tradition of each person making the recipe slightly differently, according to their own tastes, which makes it hard to trace it back to the "original" version! 

Busy days.

Christina and I making the tea. 

Oh my gosh, it's been something like a month since I last posted!  A lot has been going on.

First, we had our 6th annual Cat Rescue Tea in San Jose, and it was another success!  We served about 120 people over 2 days, and raised close to $5,000 for 13th Street Cats!

I made 8 batches of Meyer lemon curd, and coordinated a bunch of other things, including jam donations, tea donations (from Satori Tea Bar and Thompson Tea Company), and put together 2 afternoon tea baskets for the silent auction, as well as collected a bunch of other tea things for the raffle for both days.  I also helped make tea sandwiches, served the lemon curd, jam, and butter, and with my friend Christina, made all the tea that was served at the event.

Christmas preparations.

Italian cuccidate.
Photo: Elizabeth Urbach

I'm gearing up for my annual holiday baking marathon.  I usually make one or two types of traditional Italian cookies, fruit cakes, and gingerbread to both serve and give away as gifts to family and friends, along with homemade jam.  I also like to make at least one historic recipe as well.  I've tried Mrs. Beeton's Seed Cake and Currant Cake with good results, but this year I think I'll try her Christmas Cake.  Here is the recipe:

Mrs. Beeton's Christmas Cake

Gluten-free, vegan, cane sugar-free, nut-free, corn-free and soy-free roll-and-cut cookies!

Multiple allergy-friendly cuccidate!

O.k., I made the attempt yesterday to create traditional Italian cuccidate that my aunt and cousin (who are allergic to wheat, gluten, corn, milk/cream, egg, cane sugar and nuts) could eat.  I especially wanted the result to be tasty, and not weird-tasting or have a too-strange texture, and I think I can call the following recipe a success!  My relatives could already have the fruit filling from my regular cuccidate recipe: dried fruit, orange zest, spices and a little bit of honey all ground to a paste.  All I needed was the cookie dough to roll it up in.  I found several possible recipes, but this is the one I tried, from the Jules Speaks Gluten Free Blog, because the author said it could handle being rolled and cut out like regular sugar cookie dough.  I had to adjust it because my relatives couldn't tolerate all the original ingredients, and my adjustments still need a few tweaks, I think, but the result smelled good while mixing it, rolled out fairly easily (was very crumbly when I tried to form the cookies, though), smelled good while baking it, and tasted pretty good, too! 

Allergy-friendly Cut-out Cookies (adapted)
½ cup shortening or solid fat (butter, coconut oil)
1 cup palm, date or maple sugar (or 1/3 cup to ½ cup agave or honey)
½ mashed banana (or egg substitute equal to 1 egg)
1 tsp. vanilla extract or orange or lemon zest
2 ¼ cups gluten-free flour mix (if using a mix without xanthan gum, add 1 tsp gum for every cup of flour mix), plus extra for rolling
2 ¼ tsp. gluten-free baking powder
½ tsp. salt
¼ cup non-dairy milk (as needed to make the dough moist)

Another Regency recipe: Shrewsbury Cakes.

Homemade Shrewsbury Cakes.  Elizabeth Urbach.

San Jose's South Bay Ladies' Tea Guild recently enjoyed afternoon tea at their Regency Tea and costume workshop, with a menu that featured recipes from Jane Austen's lifetime.  Afternoon tea as a codified meal wasn't known in her day, but tea was a very popular beverage just the same.  It was served in the morning with breakfast, after an early dinner at 5 (as part of evening entertainment), or with a late supper (after a ball or late night party).  Antique cookbooks mention many recipes as "good to eat with tea" so these were featured for the tea guild's menu.  While some flavors are an acquired taste today, here is one item that tastes as good to our palates as it did to Jane Austen's: Shrewsbury Cakes.

“To make Shrewsberry Cakes.—Take two pounds of fine flour, put to it a pound and a quarter of butter (rub them very well) a pound and a quarter of fine sugar sifted, grate in a nutmeg, beat in three whites of eggs and two yolks, with a little rose-water, and so knead your paste with it, let it lay an hour, then make it up into cakes, prick them and lay them on papers, wet them with a feather dipt in rose-water, and grate over them a little fine sugar; bake them in a slow oven, either on tins or paper.”
-- from Project Gutenberg's English Housewifery Exemplified, by Elizabeth Moxon (1764)

Cuccidati for Christmas!

Homemade cuccidati!

I remember having a huge pink bakery box of Italian Christmas cookies at my grandma's house every year.  Being allergic to nuts, I couldn't eat many of those cookies, but I remember how good they looked and how everyone enjoyed them.  I've been making more of an effort to research Italian and Sicilian traditions, especially holiday and food traditions, and re-create them.  This year, it was Sicilian Spiced Fig Cookies, or Cuccidati.  Instead of the traditional filling of spices, dried fruit and nuts, I left out the nuts and made a cookie that I could eat!  Here is the recipe that I used:

Holiday baking.

Cuccidati (but they're missing their sprinkles) from Wikipedia. 

I'll be working on some holiday baking this afternoon before I sing my last two gigs with the Lyric Theatre Victorian Carolers later today, so we'll see how much I can get done.  On the schedule: Sicilian cuccidate, more gingerbread (cake) and gingerbread cookies, and possibly some Italian anginetti and/or anise toast. 

The gingerbread cake will be for gifts, along with jars of homemade jam.  The gingerbread cookies will be made in two shapes: houses and donkeys.  The gingerbread houses will be decorated as Victorian houses, and the donkeys will be decorated like Italian donkeys (with red saddle and blue bow around neck).  The other cookies will be for the family.  There is a lot of advance preparation, and chilling of the dough, so I'd better get started!

Italian wine cookie update

image from Antiqueclipart.com

I put together the dough for version 1 of my Italian wine cookie recipe, using a variation of the antique Cinnamon Biscuit recipe, and although I haven't baked the cookies yet, I can tell the recipe needs more work. Here is the composition of the dough that's hopefully going to be baked today:


4 cups flour
1 1/3 cups white sugar

2/3 cup honey

1 pound unsalted butter, softened

2 tsp. ground cinnamon

zest of 1 orange

1 tablespoon orange flower water

1/4 cup marsala wine

The dough ended up being really soft; I was aiming for a stiff dough that I could roll out and cut with cookie cutters. I started out with only 2 cups of flour with the rest of the ingredients, but I got more of a batter than a dough; the addition of 2 more cups of flour, 1/2 cup at a time, resulted in a soft dough that would work for drop cookies. I chilled the dough overnight and now it is very stiff, like a shortbread dough. I have let the bowl of dough sit on the counter all morning, hoping to soften it enough to roll out, but I'm not sure if the flavor is going to be right when baked. Too bad I made the whole recipe instead of halving or quartering it! I'm almost out of flour now, so it will be a few days before I can get some more flour and try another batch ... And I'm still looking for the right cookie cutters ... Oh well.

"How To Keep Warm In Winter": Bake Cinnamon Biscuits.

image from Grandma's Graphics.

I have been wanting to experiment with some Italian cookie recipes -- using wine as a flavoring -- and create a cookie in between the hard and crunchy cookies meant for dunking in coffee (as Italian cookies tend to be), and spicy gingerbread. A cookie that is slightly spicy and firm enough to roll and cut into shapes, but not tooth-breakingly hard and dry. Below is a vintage recipe that I found in the May or June 1860 issues of Godey's Lady's book, that I will be working with.

Cinnamon Biscuits
"Half a pound of dry flour, one pound of lump sugar finely sifted, one pound of butter, powdered cinnamon to taste; the whole to be mixed with a glass of brandy or rum, then rolled very thin, and baked in a quick oven." Original wording from Godey’s.

Translation:
2 cups white flour
2 cups granulated sugar
1 lb. butter
powdered cinnamon to taste
¼ to ½ cup brandy or rum
Mix all ingredients except brandy or rum; add liquor gradually to make a stiff dough. Roll the dough thinly, then bake at around 450 degrees F.
-- from Godey’s Lady’s Book, June or May 1860.

I will be using honey for half of the sweetening, and hopefully it will help soften the texture. I will also be dividing the spices between cinnamon, ground anise seed, and orange zest, and I'll be using marsala wine and orange flower water for the liquid. I hope it works!

Another addition to the tea table: Mincemeat Cookies

I felt the urge to bake yesterday when it was cloudy and raining, and I chose this recipe to use up the rest of the mincemeat in the jar (leftover from having made mincemeat custard tarts a few weeks ago). These are soft, fruity cookies, with plenty of flavor from the mincemeat. When making this recipe, I only had about 1/3 cup of shortening, so I used that, plus about 2/3 cup of butter, and the cookies are very soft and tender. I also used granulated white sugar, but brown sugar would be really delicious, as well. These cookies are really good with a nice cup of hot tea (and they're disappearing fast!).

Borden's None Such Mincemeat Cookies (from the label on the mincemeat jar)
3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking soda
1 cup vegetable shortning
1 1/2 cups sugar
3 large eggs
1 1/2 cup mincemeat

Combine the flour, salt and baking soda in a medium-sized bowl. In a large bowl, cream the shortening, add the sugar and beat until fluffy. Add the eggs to the sugar mixture, and beat until smooth. Stir in mincemeat. Gradually add the flour mixture to the sugar mixture in the large bowl, mixing well. Drop the batter by teaspoonfuls about 2 inches apart on a greased baking sheet. Bake at 400 degrees F for about 12 minutes. Loosen from baking pan while warm and cool on wire racks. Makes about 48 cookies.