March Mending

I didn't have a lot of time to mend this month, what with all the new construction to complete. I did manage to patch the corded corset I'm planning to donate (and apply metal grommets over the hand-worked eyelets which had given way in the first place). And then the hem tape came off my brown calico, necessitating a quick repair.

Hem Tape and Grommets.

Parsnips Stewed Brown, 1856

 From Walsh's A Manual of Domestic Economy (1856): To Stew Carrots Parsnips Brown.

It's not quite the 'bread and butter' challenge, but it is another recipe we tried last Sunday. 

I had the last of my parsnip harvest already scraped and sliced in the freezer, so there was a little cheating in that I started by boiling the cut pieces rather than boiling the vegetables whole before cutting them. Per the instructions, I strained the parnsips after they grew tender (which was probably more than 30 minutes--it took a while to get the stove going), along with the salt, pepper, and Worcester sauce. I didn't have any mushroom ketchup at add. The gravy was quite thick and barley coated the parsnips, so I added an equal amount of water, which thinned the gravy sufficiently to stew the parsnips. I let this simmer for about 30 minutes. At that point, I should have removed the parsnips and thickened the gravy into a sauce with butter and flour; however, with how thick the gravy started, I thought instead to simply reduce the gravy back to its original consistency. Instead, the gravy seemed to get thinner the longer I cooked it, until when we served it the parsnips were fairly swimming in a thin, broth-like gravy.

Parsnips, Scotch collops, and the leftover apples all simmering.

Finished meal (with apple charlotte and whipped cream).

The flavor was fine: the parsnips varied a little in their consistency, but were overall perfectly adequate. I'm pretty excited to have found a parsnip recipe that isn't just "fry or mash with butter", so I'll likely use this one again. I intend to get the sauce consistency better, and maybe make some mushroom ketchup for the next attempt. I also intend to make my own gravy, and follow the instructions for thickening the gravy into a sauce at the end.

Long-sleeved Dress, c.1928

Back to the Women in Railroad program: a dress for a Pullman maid in the 1920s. There are actually a few decent reference images, and I was also able to access the company's guidelines for maids. It was thus clear that interpreter needed a plain black dress accessorized with a white apron, cuffs, collar, and cap/frill. 

 

Dora Holloway (center) with her recent trainees.
From The Pullman News, January 1924.

The dresses in the contemporary photographs are mostly covered by the aprons, or else have their details disappear in the grayscale. I wanted a pattern with the classic 1920s silhouette, and from the photograph we see that the maids' dresses had high necks, long sleeves, and hemlines near the lower-calf.

The pattern illustration.

I ended up using the "girls dress" from the 1928 Haslan Dresscutting Book No. 5 as the basis for this project. It had the right kind of sleeve, and I liked how the pleated insets in the skirt allow for ease of motion while preserving the smooth line of the front. By changing the self-fabric collar to a detachable white collar, I was able to make it closer to the reference: I thought this dress's collar shape looked a lot like the one worn by Nellie Davidson (front row, third from right) in the photograph above. I also changed the front buttons to hooks-and-eyes, omitted the belt, lengthened the skirt, and drafted a simple trapezoidal white cuff to baste onto the sleeves' self-fabric cuffs. While I drafted the dress, my colleague made the frill and apron (we split the dress construction).

Again, a dress I can't light.

H.F.F. 6.4: Bread and Butter

 

The Challenge: Bread and Butter: Make bread, a dish with bread as an ingredient, or any food that is a staple of its cuisine.

The Recipe: Apple Charlotte from Mrs. Hale's New Cook Book.

An Apple Charlotte.-Pare and slice a quantity of apples, cut off the crust of a loaf, and cut slices of bread and butter. Butter the inside of a pie dish, and place bread and butter all round, then put in a layer of apples sprinkled with lemon peel chopped very fine, and a considerable quantity of good brown sugar. Then put on a layer of bread and butter, and another of apples lemon peel and sugar, until the dish is full, squeezing over the juice of lemons so that every part shall be equally flavored. Cover up the dish with the crusts of bread and the peels of the apples to prevent it from browning or burning, bake it an hour and a quarter, then take off the peels and the crust, and turn it out of the dish.

The Date/Year and Region: 1857, Philadelphia

How Did You Make It: Mostly as an assistant. Quin took the lead on this one, though I did peel apples, zest the lemon, and cut bread crusts. I'm writing it up anyway, because the dish turned out beautifully, and I want to save this receipt--and it used literal bread and butter as ingredients.

We started by coring, slicing, and peeling 3 pounds of apples (this ended up being more than needed, and 2 pounds would likely be closer to the mark). We then cut the crusts off of a whole loaf of pre-sliced brioche. Quinn experimented with placing the bread (in whole slices and/or half-triangles) in the bottom of a buttered pie tin, buttering each slice in turn, while I used a tin rasp to grate off the peel of a lemon. The eventual winning pattern was to overlay the brioche triangles, fanning them out in a circle around the bottom of the tin. Narrower pieces of bread filled in the sides. Over this went a layer of apple slices, and about half the lemon zest, and a generous sprinkle of sugar and cinnamon. Then another layer of bread, another layer of apples/lemon/sugar, and a final layer of bread, with a dash of lemon juice over the whole. We actually ran low on the bread, and ended up trimming the heels to fill out the middle layer of bread (preserving the crustless pieces for the exterior parts of the charlotte). 

The apple peels were heaped upon the dish, and the pan put into the oven of an 1850s wood-burning iron stove.

To serve, Quin removed the scorched peels, turned out the apple charlotte, and garnished with lemon-balm and apple slices. We also whipped some heavy cream, which made an excellent addition to this dish.

Time to Complete: Hard to say, with no clock in the kitchen, but I'd estimate 2-2.5 hours based on when we started and when we served.

Total Cost: $6 worth of apples and lemons, other ingredients provided by others

How Successful Was It?: The texture was light and pleasing, the flavor quite palatable. I'm often skeptical of bread-based puddings, but this one suffered none of the irregularities I dislike (soggy bread, weird texture changes), and I ended up taking seconds.

How Accurate Is It?: We used a modern apple variety and commercially prepared bread [though professional bakers were selling their wares in our area in 1857], but otherwise were about as close as we could get to the 1850 receipt. The tin was a reproduction piece, and the wood-burning stove we cooked on original to the period. The whipped cream was Quinn's idea, but with examples such as trifles, I don't think it's an inappropriate serving option--and we also whipped the cream by hand using a birch whisk in a redware bowl. Looking over the receipt again, the cinnamon was not specified, though I think it was a good addition.

Assembling the layers.

Arranging the peels.

The peels worked exactly as we hoped.

The apple charlotte turned out beautifully.

Wool Crepe Dress, 1934

I'm finally catching up with documenting all the sewing projects from this month. Most of them were for a multi-era living history event about women in the railroad, so it was an exciting opportunity to branch out of my usual time periods.

First up: a 1930s dress for alleged train robber Laura Bullion. The only reference photos I could find for her were from 1901 (at the time of her arrest) or earlier, but as we needed an older impression looking back on her life, we decided to place the interpreter in the 1930s, when Laura was working as a seamstress and hiding her youthful affiliation with Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch. 

Including the pattern illustration because
the photographs really don't show the seam lines.

I chose this simple "tennis frock" from the 1934 Haslan Spring Supplement No. 4. This was my first attempt to use that drafting system for someone other than myself. I ended up needing to enlarge the sleeves (as usual), and somehow between the muslin and final fabric the bodice gained 4" around, but overall I found it much more positive experience than trying to customize a standard-size pattern.

The whole garment is made of brown wool crepe, which I think worked very well for this dress. The fabric drapes very nicely along the figure, if not on my poor dress form. I had originally intended to use a side zipper for closer fit, but found that the fabric stretches enough to fit closely without any fasteners. The one drawback was that the fabric rolled and flopped too much to construct the neck bow (even top-stitching around the edges of each tie couldn't stabilize it enough). Also the color, unfortunately, doesn't photograph well in any of the lighting I could contrive.

 

This is the best photograph I could manage.

HFF 6.3: Pie

The Challenge: Pie! [Yes, I set this challenge to fall on Pi Day.]

The Recipe: Pumpkin Pie (American) from Mrs. Hale's New Cook Book.

Pumpkin Pie (American)--Take out the seeds, and pare the pumpkin or squash; but in taking out the seeds do not scrape the inside of the pumpkin; the part nearest the seed is the sweetest; then stew the pumpkin, and strain it through a sieve or cullender. To a quart of milk, for a family pie, 3 eggs are sufficient. Stir in the stewed pumpkin with your milk and beaten-up eggs, till it is as thick as you can stir round rapidly and easily. If the pie is wanted richer make it thinner, and add sweet cream or another egg or two; but even 1 egg to a quart of milk makes "very decent pies." Sweeten with molasses or sugar; add 2 tea-spoonsful of salt, 2 table-spoonsful of sifted cinnamon, and 1 of powdered ginger; but allspice may be used, or any other spice that may be preferred. The peel of a lemon grated in gives it a pleasant flavor. The more eggs, says an American authority, the better the pie. Some put 1 egg to a gill of milk. Bake about an hour in deep plates, or shallow dishes, without an upper crust, in a hot oven.

I selected this receipt, out of several similar ones from Mrs. Ellis's Housekeeping Made Easy (1843), The Skilled Housewife's Book (1852), and Breakfast Dinner and Tea (1859), because it gave clear amounts of spice to include. The proportion of milk to pumpkin is not quantitatively stated, but compared to the other recipes it is probably around 1 quart milk to 1 quart pumpkin.

The Date/Year and Region: 1857, Philadelphia

How Did You Make It: I used pumpkin out of my garden. This batch was peeled/boiled/sieved as described in the recipe, then frozen for a few months, though I still have three other ripe pumpkins from that harvest which are ready to use, so I'm counting it as 'in season'. 

 I stirred together 4 cups pumpkin, 4 cups milk, 2 eggs, ~1/2 cup granulated sugar, 2 tsp salt, 2  Tbsp cinnamon, 1 Tbsp ginger. While the oven pre-heated, I rolled up a simple 1-2-3 pie crust, lined a pie tin with it, and filled the crust with pumpkin filling. I then baked the pie at 400F for 60 minutes.

Time to Complete: A bit over an hour, with the pumpkin processing done in advance.

Total Cost: Ingredients were all on hand.

How Successful Was It?: The pie eventually firmed up and it smelled very nice while baking. The finished product was moist, enough that I worry it might have been on the underdone side. The taste is spicy enough, but a bit bland. It's not as strongly pumpkin-flavored as most modern pies I remember.

I'll probably continue to tinker with this recipe, since I still have a lot of pumpkins that I need to do something with. I did try to drain off as much liquid as possible while mashing the boiled pumpkins, but perhaps using them promptly without freezing will make the difference in moisture content.

How Accurate Is It?: Other than freezing the pumpkin, I feel that I followed the instructions fairly well. I rounded down to 2 eggs to account for size differences from the 1850s to now, which I think is fair; even if this over-corrected the issue, the receipt allows for using fewer eggs. The texture concerned me: I know pumpkin pie filling starts out very liquid, and that the instructions said "stir round rapidly and evenly", but the consistency was closer to "soup" than "mashed turnips" (which is how the other recipes describe the intended consistency); fortunately, it seemed up bake up solid enough.

A Lace Bend Round, 15th Century

Braid and finished point.

Braid #25 from Tak V Bowes Departed. It's a two-color braid of 8 loops, in a spiral pattern which resembles a 2-ply cord. This braid wholly uses exchanges, which was good practice, since I've mostly done 5 strand braids where you pick up the active loops with an empty finger.

I worked it in gold and black beading silk (size FF), and fitted the ends with aglets to make a pair of points. I chose this braid as I wanted the cord to fit into the aglets, though it was almost too fine in this silk. However, the knotted ends of the braids fit the aglets easily and was able to I stitch them into place.

Bathrobe

This project is not of any historical import, but I always gets a little excited when I make something for daily wear. It's quite simple: I just traced my worn-out robe, and added to the seam allowances where it had gotten a little tight at the sleeve.

The finished garment is cozy and comfortable. It's fully made of purple terrycloth, with self-fabric facings are the neck, two pockets, and turn-back cuffs. The tricky part on this one finishing such thick fabric: I used French seams on the interior, and the four layers of terrycloth was about all my machine could take.

Original: Wedding Dress, 1951

 Later than I usually go, but I really like the lines of this 1951 wedding dress in the Victoria & Albert Museum:

Wedding Dress by Norman Hartwell, 1951. VAM