HFF 5.8: Literary Food

 

The Challenge:  Literary Food. Make a dish mentioned in a novel, story or song.

I encountered the aphorism "Fine words butter no parsnips" in Vanity Fair (1848), and thought it too amusing to ignore--especially when I had a garden full of parsnips to cook up. It shows up in a smattering of other sources (like so), variously phrased by always referring to parsnips with butter. The cookbooks bear this out as the standard method of serving parsnips: 

"They are boiled and otherwise treated exactly as carrots. Melted butter is their usual accompaniment." (2500 Practical Receipts, 1837)

The Recipe: Parsnips/ Mashed Parsnips from Good Plain Cookery (1882) by Mary Hooper

PARSNIPS. These are usually served boiled plainly like carrots; they take from two to three hours to boil. Mashed, as in the following recipe, parsnips are excellent .

MASHED PARSNIPS. Wash and scrape a large parsnip, cut it into eight lengths and having divided them in half, put them into a quart of boiling water with a teaspoonful of salt and an ounce of good dripping. Boil the parsnip until perfectly tender; it will take about two hours to cook. Take it up, drain, and press the parsnip in a colander to get out as much moisture as possible, and with a wooden spoon mash it quite smooth, and then put it in a clean stewpan with an ounce of fresh butter, or a tablespoonful of milk and cream, add salt and pepper, and stir the parsnip over the fire for five minutes, and take care to serve hot.

The Date/Year and Region: British, 1882

How Did You Make It: Both ways. I started by peeling and slicing one of the large parsnips from my garden, then put it on to boil. I added the salt, but forgot to collect the drippings in time. I found that after 1 1/4 hour, the parsnip pieces were soft enough they were nearly falling apart, so I drained them. I set seven pieces aside, and mashed the rest with 2 Tbsp unsalted butter, and a dash of salt and pepper. I put the mashed parsnips back on the stove, stirring on med-low heat for another ~3 minutes. I melted 1 more Tbsp of butter to pour over the unmashed pieces.

Time to Complete: ~90 minutes

Total Cost: Used ~25 cents worth of butter, parsnip was homegrown

How Successful Was It?: Very tasty. The mashed parsnip had the texture of a well-mashed potato, and the incorporated butter really cut the sharp parsnip taste. The boiled parsnip was also good, and the parsnip's sharp flavor came through more clearly. I didn't put salt and pepper on the non-mashed parsnips, and comparing between the two, I think the salt and pepper is a pleasant addition, though not strictly necessary.

I've made the mashed parsnips twice more (having a ton of parsnips to use), and while neither time needed the full 2 hours to boil, the parsnips definitely work best when they are thoroughly softened before mashing. Thirty minutes isn't quite enough, but with small pieces the parsnips can definitely be cooked through in under an hour. 

How Accurate Is It?:  Other than forgetting the dripping, I thought this went fairly true to the recipe. I confess to using the microwave to quickly melt one tablespoon of butter. I grew heirloom parsnips this year in order to try cooking with them, and this is tasty enough that I plan to continue growing them next year as well.

The hollow crown parsnips are supposed to date
to the 1820s, not sure of a date on the turga parsnips.

Parsnips boiled and mashed.

HFF 5.7: Offal-ly Good

 

The Challenge: Offal-ly Good. Make a dish with offal or using parts of an ingredient that you normally wouldn't cook with. Watermelon rinds, seed pods, or anything edible-but-unexpected is on the table.  

The Recipe: Garbage from Harleian M.S. 279 "Potages Dyvers", as printed in Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books 

xvij Garbage Take fayre garbagys of chykonys as þe hed þe fete þe lyuerys an be gysowrys washe hem clene an caste hem in a fayre potte an caste þer to freysshe brothe of Beef or ellys of moton an let it boyle an a lye it wyth brede an ley on Pepir an Safroun Maces Clowys an a lytil verious an salt an serue forth in the maner as a Sewe. 

In more modern spelling: 17. Garbage. Take fair garbages of chickens, as the head, the feet, the livers, and the gizzards, and wash them clean and cast them in a fair pot, and cast thereto fresh broth of beef or else of mutton and let it boil and allay it with bread and lay on pepper and saffron, mace, cloves, and a little verjuice and salt and serve forth in the manner as a sewe [stew?].

The Date/Year and Region: English, c.1430-1440

How Did You Make It: I saved the organs from the 4 boyl'd chickens made the previous night, as well as the remnants of one carcass (to substitute for the head/feet, which my cooking mentor recommended). Not being able to find any beef or mutton bones in the store(s), I used beef bouillon cubes for the beef broth. The meat and bones were added to the broth, and then boiled over the fire by my kind and able assistant. I added the pepper, saffron, mace, cloves, and salt just before serving. The bones were also removed prior to serving.    

Time to Complete: No time pieces were available, but it seemed ~ 1 hour-ish.

Total Cost: Unsure. The bouillon was about $2, but the chickens were purely left-over.

How Successful Was It?: It tasted great, though I still don't care for the texture of chicken hearts. I'd be tempted to copy the flavor profile for a chicken stew without organ meat. The spices were lovely with the chicken.

How Accurate Is It?: I purposefully substituted the carcasses of the left-over boiled chicken for the head/feet, after a long discussion with Friend-Who-Raises-Chickens. The reasoning is that the bones and cartilage and scraps of meat in the carcass should provide a similar flavor/thickening property as the head/feet, without the necessity of cleaning blood and feather off a fresh-killed chicken head (or assorted-barn-yard-matter off the feet). I'm also still working on the whole 'cooking with meat' thing, so I think this was the right choice for me. I omitted the bread on purpose since some of the diners need to avoid gluten/carbohydrates, and the verjuice on accident (I'd brought apple cider vinegar as a substitute for it). On the other hand, I couldn't find my ground cloves, and so used my mortar and pestle to grind up whole cloves, which was very fun. 

Garbage (pottage)

HFF 5.6: Luncheon

Still writing up the backlog....

 

The Challenge: Luncheon. Make a mid-day meal from your preferred era.

[I sorta cheated on the spirit here, since the mid-day meal of the 16th century is still dinner, aka the main meal of the day.]

The Recipe: "To boyle a Capon" from A Book of Cookrye

Take your Capon and boyle it tender, and take out a little of the broth and put it in a little pipkin with whole mace and a good deale of ginger, and quartered Dates, and boyle your corance and prunes in very faire water by themselves, for making of your broth black and thicken your broth with yolks of egges and wine strained togither or a little Vergious, and let your broth boile no more when you have thickened it, for it will quail.  Then cut sippits in a platter, and lay in your Capon, and laye your fruite upon it, so dooing serve it out.

The Date/Year and Region: British, 1591 (First edition 1583)

How Did You Make It: Over an actual fire!

I started by bringing a cauldron of water to boil over the fire, then adding a whole (pre-cleaned) chicken, and letting it continue boiling ~90 minutes. At that point, I cut the dates and prunes, and put 1/2 cup of each into a sauce pan with ~1 cup of the chicken water, and set it to boil on a trivet (which happened almost instantly--it was a very fast fire). Having misread the recipe, at this point I also the added 1/2 cup zante currants, 1/4 tsp each of powdered ginger and mace [the prunes and dates should have boiled separate first, then been combined with the broth and everything else]. Once the sauce had started boiling, I pulled it off the fire, added 1/2 cup white white and 1 egg (beaten well together), and stirred the sauce near-but-not-on the fire until it thickened, which took about a minute. Once the sauce was done, I confirmed the chicken had reached 165F, then removed it from the cauldron. 

To plate, I cut sippets of bread, arranged the chicken on top, and poured the sauce over all.

Time to Complete: About 2 hours. It would have gone ~30 minutes faster if I'd started the sauce earlier, since the fixed minimum time is "how long the chicken needs to cook through". 

Total Cost: About $25. 

How Successful Was It?: Needed a bit of salt. but otherwise good. The sippets got soggy fast, so using toasted bread would have been better there. When I made this again (with 4 birds, for an event) the next week, I added some salt to the boiling water, which improved the flavor to both bird and sauce. That second time, I used only 3 eggs instead of 4 in the sauce, and whether due to insufficient egg or less heat, the sauce never really thickened nicely. In both cases, I ended up boiling the chicken longer than needed, such that the bird started falling apart when I dished it up. I'm still getting used to the fruit+meat flavor combinations of the medieval and renaissance periods, but this one does work in my opinion.

How Accurate Is It?: One of my more accurate attempts, what with actually cooking it on a fire both times. I even used a ceramic pipkin for heating some of the second-attempt sauce next to the fire--and the first time, ate it with period-appropriate utensils, ie, the hand. The usual zante-currant-for-currant substitution was used, and the proportions in the sauces were all a fortunate guesses from my first attempt. I don't have an accurate 16th century cauldron or cooking pot, so 20th century cast iron was used. Also, I used a general grocery store chicken, not a real capon (though I'm given to understand that modern meat birds are closer in size to capons, ie neutered roosters, than to other historic birds). 

Sauce and boiling chicken (with bonus 20th century
dessert in the dutch oven).

Boyl'd Capon.

H.F.F. 5.5: Save It For Later

Believe it or not, I actually have been keeping up on the cooking part of the HFF. It's the writing that's fallen so far behind...

 

The Challenge: Save it for Later. Try to preserve a food for later use, or make a dish with preserved ingredients.

The Recipe: 

Pickled Nasturtiums (a very good Substitute for Capers)

To each pint of vinegar, 1 oz of salt, 6 pepper corns, nasturtiums. 

Gather the nasturtium pods on a dry day, and wipe them clean with a cloth; put them in a dry glass bottle with vinegar, salt, and pepper in the above proportion. If you cannot find enough ripe to fill a bottle, cork up what you have got until you have some more fit: they may be added from day to day. Bung up the bottles and seal or rosin the tops. They will be fit for use in 10 or 12 months and the best way is to make them one season for the next.

Look for nasturtium-pods from the end of July to the end of August.

The Date/Year and Region: British, 1861

How Did You Make It: I picked about three dozen nasturtium seed-pods ( I grew the "dwarf jewel mix" from Baker Creek, and have been getting red, orange, yellow, and particolored blossoms since June, with seed pods from late July to October), rinsed them with water, and patted dry.

I put 1 oz white vinegar, 1/2 oz pickling salt, and three peppercorns in the smallest canning jar I had, then added the nasturtiums. Since there was still space, I threw in a few radish seed pods that I'd picked as well. Following modern safety standards, I processed the jar for 10 minutes in a boiling water bath, rather than corking it.

Time to Complete: I spent about 10 minutes picking all the nasturtium pods I could find, <5 minutes to assemble all the ingredients, and 10 minutes processing the jar. Bringing the water bath up to boiling took a bit longer, though I did not time it.

Total Cost: $0, everything was from my garden or out of the pantry.

How Successful Was It?: I haven't tried it yet, but the jar appears to have sealed successfully.

How Accurate Is It?: I really should do more research into period vinegar varieties, but other than the modern safety measures, there were no known inaccuracies.

Nasturtium pods (and a few radish seed pods).

Having extra produce, I mixed up some of Beeton's Universal Pickle at the same time, and used it on the radish pods out of my garden and some cucumbers that a coworker grew. I made it at 1/6 scale, using 1 qt vinegar, 3 oz salt, 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper, 1 tsp mace, 1.5 tsp tumeric, 2 tsp mustard seed, and a small amount of coarsely chopped fresh ginger and small onions. This filled two quart jars, with a bit of the pickle left-over. If I make this again, I would not actually boil the mixture together before canning, as the vinegar vapor quite overwhelmed the kitchen, even with windows opens and fans at top speed (whereupon I stopped boiling it after ~10 minutes rather than 20, and promptly fled outdoors.)

Original: Green Silk Pelisse, 1828

 Did I select this one just for the color?

Silk Pelisse, English, c.1828 in LACMA.

Mostly. I also like the scalloped trim. I wonder whether the two silks faded the same, or if they originally had more (or less) contrast...