December Mending

December was pretty busy with Christmas living history events and making presents, but I found time for some mending tasks which came up.

My long-suffering apron.

I pulled a few inches of gathering out of my print apron late in November, but re-stitched it all while waiting for a car repair appointment. Timely, now that I'm back in the Nisqually kitchen about once a month.

I also managed to tear a seam on my gray mantle, but it was a quick repair when I got home from carolling.

Small, easy to stitch, and no damage done to the fabric!

 Last item added to the pile are my red stockings, but those will have to wait until January.

Resource: Royal School of Needlework Stitch

Computer troubles have stymied my usual 'blog all 12 days of Christmas' plan, but I did find a fun new resource to share: The Royal School of Needlework's online Stitch Bank. They have a written description of each embroidery stitch, with step-by-step photographs and video of how to do it. I really enjoyed the tagging system (covering both the type of stitchand its uses), which allowed me to browse through all the early modern blackwork options.

Merry Christmas

 

The Christmas Tree, in The Children's Treasure, December 1, 1873.

Pickled Cucumbers and Radish Pods, 1845

Tidying up the blog before the year ends, and realized I never photographed my final batch of pickles last August. The last historic receipts I tried were Pickled Cucumbers and Pickled Radish Pods, based on the recipes in "Cookery Made Easy" (1845).

What an attractively arranged shelf!

As usual, I followed modern canning processes for safely, but used the historic flavor profiles with allspice, ginger, and black pepper in an all-vinegar pickle. Due to the absurd size all my cucumbers got to this year, I did have to slice them instead of using whole 3" gherkins.

Bonus round! 

Do to the aforementioned 'absurd abundance of huge cucumbers' which was summer 2025, I used the left-over 10 lbs of cucumbers to make a modern bread & butter pickle from the recipe posted by the National Center for Home Food Preservation. As that recipe calls for 6 lbs of cucumbers, I ended up making 1 and 2/3 batches to get them all used up.

This one was a bit different, in that it started by slicing up the cucumbers (10 lbs, cut into 3/16" slices) and onions (5lbs, thinly sliced), adding 5/6 cup salt, then covering them with ice in the fridge for 4 hours. I then got to boil together 6 2/3 cups vinegar, 7.5 cups sugar,  3 Tbsp + 1 tsp mustard seed, 2.5 tsp celery seed, and 1 Tbsp + 2 tsp turmeric for 10 minutes. Hot pack (add drained cucumbers and onions to the pickle, bringing back up to boiling), then put into jars and process ten minutes in the water bath. [The time varies with recipe, jar size and elevation. These instructions said to process pint or quart jars for 10 minutes at elevations up to 1000ft, for 15 min up to 6,000 ft, and for 20 minutes when working above 6,000 ft.]

My 10 lbs of cucumbers yielded 6 quarts of pickles, which is a full load in my water canner. There was actually enough material for a 7th quart jar, but rather than run a second load, I just put the rest into the fridge for refrigerator pickles.

Very exciting jar of pickles!

 

Plaid Sidelacing Gaiters, 1850s

The last part of my new winter 1850s ensemble was a pair of side-lacing gaiter to match my new basque outfit with its knit under-sleeves. I did have them finished for both Christmas events, as I had hoped. The green and purple gaiters are single-soled, so I've only been wearing them for indoor events, while the low shoes from this spring have had a busy year of wear and need some fixing, making them less than ideal for a rainy December day.

New gaiters.

I'm really happy with how these turned out, and how simple they work to make. If nothing else, this was the first time in a long while that I was able to take a pattern I'd previously used (for the re-made plaid gaiters) and just cut out a new project without needing to re-do the fitting and tweak it further.

To expedite matters, I basted and stitched the uppers on machine, with only the eyelets and binding sewn by hand. I also used rubber cement to attach both insole and outer sole, which greatly sped up the process. 

The shoes fit fine, though with the double sole I didn't have enough room to add supportive insoles. They were still a bit chilly when I had to walk over damp grass at the first event, but gave adequate comfort indoors and on pavement. I would like to experiment with adding a warmer period insole (such as the knitted one in The Workwoman's Guide), but didn't have time to make such a thing between the Nisqually and Steilacoom events. I'm also planning to make better laces, probably by dyeing some cut-down corset laces and adding aiglets, but the thick cotton cord seen above worked adequately for a single event.

Plaid Basque Ensemble, 1850s

Finally finished my red plaid wool 1850s dress. I wanted a basque bodice this time, both because they're a popular style that is not well-represented in my current 1850s wardrobe, and because they're a bit more versatile than a round dress (because contrasting bodice/skirt combinations are possible).

Probably should have pulled out the dress form for this.

The fabric is a tropical weight wool suiting that I got from Pendleton several years ago; it's lined with white cotton muslin; the skirt is faced with dark blue cotton (I think from an old sheet), and the basque with self-fabric; the hem tape is a a red wool twill tape from Burnley & Trowbridge and the skirt waistband is a white cotton grosgrain ribbon from my stash.

The skirt's just the usual rectangles, balanced at the top, while the basque bodice is draped-to-fit (shout-out to Kiki for fitting the darts and seams to me).  The sleeve's also draped-to-fit at the shoulder, but the rest of the shaping is modeled on a couple of late 1850s open (pagoda) sleeves in Patterns of Fashion I.

I like the fit of the dress, which is comfortable, particularly through the sleeves (where too-tight armcyes are a recurring problem for me). There's a slight excess of fabric at the top of each sleeve, which I might remove in future; it's not egregious, but I don't love it. On thing which did not turn out as intended is that I meant for this dress to have a shallow V-neckline, again to deal with a fitting problem area (no matter how many times I pin out the excess and swing the darts, I end up with extra fabric at the neck). Despite cutting it as a V-neck on the toiles, when I copied them to the actual fabric, it ended up looking more like normal jewel neckline. It's not gaping, so I can certainly live with it, but I'm going to need to revisit it to figure out how that managed to happen.

Mother Orne's Molasses Gingerbread

We're once again survived Christmas at Fort Steilacoom, and I have once again attempted a period gingerbread receipt to serve our volunteers. This year, I was looking for a recipe that would work well with my gingerbread mold, and really let the picture show through.

At Quin's recommendation, I tried making Mother Orne's receipt (approximately dated 1817-1840s), from Sally Fiske Rope Orne's (1795-1876) Recipe Book. The original in now in the Peabody Essex Museum, and they have a very nice blog post about Sally, her family home, and this recipe, including an adaptation for the modern cook.

Unfortunately, I like cooking on hard mode, so I attempted the original recipe as given.

Sally Orne's Gingerbread Receipt, from the Peabody Essex Museum.

My transcription of the recipe: 

Mother Orne's Receipt for Molasses Gingerbread

9 lbs flour, 1 of fat, 2 1/2 of butter, 3 pints of molasses, 1/2 a pint of milk, 1 tea cup of ginger [and?] large tea spoons of pearl ash. Rub the fat and butter into the flour, dissolve the pearl ash in a little milk, mix the molasses and milk together.

Reducing this down to 1/6 scale, that makes 1.5 lb flour, 1/2 lb butter, a bit under 3 oz of fat, 1 cup of molasses, 1/6 cup of milk (or 1 1/3 fl oz), between 2/3oz and 1 oz ginger, and an unknown about of pearl ash.

I took a tea cup as 4 oz, as given in the domestic measures section of A System of Practical Medicine (1842), however that text goes to explain that while a 4oz is the customary measure, a tea cup filled to the brim might actually contain 6 oz while one filled to normal drinking capacity might be closer 4.5 oz to 5oz. Thus the range of "between 2/3 oz" (customary) and "1 oz" (maximum) in my version.

The pearl ash is a bigger problem, because it does not appear to me to actually have an amount in the handwritten original. The "tea spoons" are definitely plural, but the word before "large" appears to be "and" rather than an amount. Furthermore, everywhere else in the recipe, numbers are written as numerals rather than spelled out, so I don't think it's meant to be "three large tea spoons" or "five large tea spoons", but rather "and [omitted number] large tea spoons." 

For comparison, the Common Gingerbread in Miss Leslie's Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastries, Cakes, and Sweetmeats (1832) calls for 1 tsp of pearlash for 2.5 lbs flour, while the Lafayette Gingerbread in the same book can be made lighter with an optional "1 small teaspoon pearlash dissolved in 1 teaspoon of vinegar" for a recipe containing 1.5 lbs of flour. It does caution that using too much pearlash will give a bitter taste, and both receipts advise that if the pearlash is "strong", half the amount will suffice. Extrapolating from these two recipes, we're looking at somewhere between 2/5 tsp and 2/3 tsp pearl ash per pound flour for gingerbread, or 3.6 tsp to 6 tsp for a full batch of the Orne receipt with its 9 lbs flour. Or half that amount.

I'm going to assume that my modern potassium carbonate is very pure and relatively anhydrous, and thus counts as strong pearl ash. So, even at the extreme end of the taking the original as calling for 6 tsp, half of that would make 3 tsp, and my reduced scale version more like 1/2 tsp. [Note: while the modern version calls for apple cider vinegar to replace the cider, I didn't see either of those items in the original. Miss Leslie's receipts calls for vinegar to use with the pearlash; as that is the role given to the milk here, it does leave me wondering whether the writer meant 'sour milk' to be understood. As it was not spelled out, however, I decided to use fresh milk this time and trust to the molasses providing enough acidity to activate the pearlash.]

Math done, I made the gingerbread by cutting the butter and fat (lard) into the flour, to which I added about 3/4 oz of ground ginger. I added the molasses to this mixture, and then the pearl ash, dissolved (more or less) in half of a 1/3 cup measure of milk. There was actually a fair amount of it left in the cup, so I used a minimal amount of additional milk to get the pearlash into the main mixture. It made a soft but workable dough, which I rolled out and then shaped with my gingerbread mold and cutter.

Plate of finished gingerbread.

The dough was much easier to work with than previous attempts. I found that rolling it out to about 1/8" worked with the mold, but I got the best results when I was aiming a bit thicker (trying for 1/4"), pressed the mold deep into the dough, and then used the cutter around the impressed shape. I didn't bother pricking the cakes with a fork, and they seemed to bake just fine (350F for 11-12 minutes). This 1/6 batch produced 49 pieces of gingerbread (3" x 2"). 

I was pleased with how this receipt worked, and with the molasses-ginger flavor. The texture of the cakes is a bit weird: it's not exactly dry, but somehow a bit gritty or powdery, even when it was fresh out of the oven. On the upside, it seems slow to get stale, and pairing it with hot tea goes a long way. I'll probably keep looking for a different receipt or a way to refine this one which gives a more pleasant texture, but to be honest, it did most of the things I wanted it to (taste fine, make a good impression with the mold).