HFF 6.5: Faux Food

The Challenge: Faux Foods. Try a recipe or use an ingredient that imitates, replaces, or tastes/looks like a different food. 

The Recipe: I wanted to try a "mock gooseberry fool" alias "spring cream" alias "rhubarb fools", but there was to be had so early in the season in this clime (no, not even in the frozen section of the grocery store). Next time. 

 

Instead, at the last minute, I substituted jumbles from Eliza Leslie's Sevety-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats. I selected this recipe, intending to use the suggested substitution of lemon essence for rosewater, only to find myself out of lemon essence and substituting lemon rind for the substitute lemon essence. 

JUMBLES.Three eggs. Half a pound of flour, sifted. Half a pound of butter. Half a pound of powdered loaf sugar. A table spoonful of rose water. A nutmeg, grated. A tea spoonful of mixed mace and cinnamon. 

Stir the sugar and butter to a cream. Beat the eggs very light. Throw them all at once into the pan of flour. Put in at once the butter and sugar, and then add the spice and rose water. If you have no rose water, substitute six or seven drops of strong essence of lemon, or more if the essence is weak. Stir the whole very hard with a knife. Spread some flour on your paste board and flour your hands well. Take up with your knife a portion of the dough and lay it on the board. Roll it lightly with your hands into long thin rolls, which must be cut into equal lengths, curled up into rings, and laid gently into an iron or tin pan, buttered, not too close to each other, as they spread in baking. Bake them in a quick oven about five minutes, and grate loaf sugar over them when cool.

The Date/Year and Region: 1830, Boston

How Did You Make It: In the period kitchen, which is usually fun and always an adventure. I started by creaming the butter and sugar (half pound of each, the sugar measured on the beam balance), which on this cold damp day meant 'beating the hard butter and sugar with a wooden spoon until they incorporated'. I then beat the three eggs (yokes and whites) with a birch whisk in a tapered redware bowl. I then combined all three, adding a half "teaspoon" each of powdered mace and cinnamon, and grating about 1/3 of a nutmeg (because I've been having trouble sourcing them and was running low). I grated the lemon (basically zesting it) with a replica tin rasp, and added it as well.

 

This made a really thin, sticky dough (perilously close to a batter). The first four jumbles, I tried rolling them in flour to make rings, but they just weren't looking nice. At my friend's suggestion, I then tried piping the rest of the dough (which made lovely rings on the tin, at least). I baked them in a slower-than-desired oven (cast iron wood-burning stove), on a replica tin baking sheet, which was buttered per the instructions.

 

The jumbles spread out paper-thin while baking. Though they tasted fine, they did not look well at all.  

Time to Complete: Unsure, as I was in the period kitchen without a clock. Less than 3 hours, if only because I know I spent more than an hour fighting the stove before any cooking started.

Total Cost: $1 for lemon, other ingredients on hand

How Successful Was It?: Tasted fine, but the texture was a mess. The lemon worked well with the spices, and none were overwhelming. Our verdict after the first pan was that more flour was needed, but we were so short on time that I just decided to bake what we had left (and still ended up throwing out the last pan worth of batter, because there just wasn't time). I'd like to revisit this recipe with more flour at some point in the future--I think that I need to really work a lot more flour in during the rolling step.

How Accurate Is It?: There were lots of little details here which got me closer to 'accurate' than usual. I used eggs from a friend's heritage-breed chickens (closer to the right size), a beam balance (for weighing ingredients), tried the divided spoon method to measure the spices, got to grate my substitute lemon rind on a reproduction tin grater (which works REALLY WELL), baked the jumbles on a reproduction tin cookie sheet, and did all of this in a (freezing cold) period kitchen with a wood-burning stove.

Jumbles. Very flat jumbles. Edible, though.