Egg Sauce for Roast Chicken (1856)

From Modern American Cookery (1856):

Egg Sauce for Roast Chickens

Melt butter thick and fine, chop two or three hard boiled eggs fine, put them in a basin, pour the butter over them, and have good gravy in the dish. 

Lest this appear too easy (though it was), there's actually instructions for melting the butter:

To Melt Butter 

Mix a quarter of a pound of butter with a large teaspoonful of flour, place it in a saucepan with four tablespoonfuls of good milk, boil it quick, and shake it continually till the butter is melted.

Not a bad little sauce.

I basically did what the instructions said: I boiled 2 eggs, peeled them, and mashed up the yolks with a fork; then melted a stick of butter with a teaspoon of all-purpose flour in a saucepan (on medium), added 4 Tablespoons of milk, brought up to a boil; and finally poured the melted butter over the egg yolks. I omitted the gravy, as I didn't have any on hand, and I did take of the liberty of adding a dash of salt and back pepper (since without the salt, the sauce is incredibly insipid).

Re-reading, I'm not convinced that I should have used only the yellow yolks rather than the whole (though the texture might be a bit lumpier in that case).

The sauce mostly just tasted like butter. It reminded me of parsley-butter sauce (which I apparently never wrote up, so I'm linking this similar sauce), but with the advantage of not being seasonal. The sauce was pleasant enough over some chicken and mashed potatoes, and while it's certainly worth adding to my repertoire, it's not a show-stopper. It's fine for personal use, though I'll probably try work-shopping it a bit before serving it to others.

To Preserve Roses or Any Other Flowers (1656)

 

From A Book of Fruits & Flowers:

To Preserve Roses or any other Flowers 

Take one pound of Roses, three pound of Sugar, one pint of Rose water, or more, make your Syrup first, and let it stand till it be cold, then take your Rose leaves, having first clipt of all the white, put them into the cold Syrupe, then cover them and set them on a soft fire, that they may but simper for two or three hours, then while they are hot put them into pots or glasses for your use.

In choosing this receipt for my excess marigolds, I accidentally conflated it with the preceding "A Conserve of Roses", which indicates that the method works for any flower conserve, such as violets, cowslips, marigolds, sage, and something I've never heard of which looks like "seavoise." However, this one claims to be good for "any other flowers" so I figure it's a fair play.

At any rate, the main difference between the two recipes is that the "preserve" receipt involves making a syrup, while the "conserve" has the liquid added first to the flowers, followed by dry sugar.

 

Ingredients

To make on a 1/8 scale, I started with 2 oz of marigold flowers, 6 oz granulated sugar, and 1 fl oz of plain water (having run out of rosewater momentarily). The differentiation between roses/rose leaves [petals?] in the instructions led to me weighing the whole flowers, but then removing and using only the petals. I think it can be read either way (use 2oz of petals, or use the petals off of 2 oz of flowers), and thus is open to experiment. 

 

Probably my most successful attempt at boiling sugar...

I combined the water and sugar in a saucepan on "medium" (on a burner that runs hot), and boiled a syrup for some 15 minutes. Meanwhile, I removed the petals from the flowers. After letting the syrup cool about 20 minutes, I stirred in the petals, and set it all to simmer on med-low for about 3 hours. This produced a reddish, viscous syrup that I poured into a pipkin for storage.

Thick texture, weird taste, did not immediately balance my humors.

The preserves taste... not great and honestly less sweet than I'd expect for something well over 75% sugar by weight. So far as I can tell, marigold's use in the 17th-18th centuries is largely medicinal, so perhaps taste isn't a high consideration. I think next time, I'll just keep the flowers for dye, or maybe distill some marigold water and see if it really does cure headaches.

Original: Late 1850s Wedding Dress

In honor of Candlelight Tours (this year being the 1857 wedding scenario):

Wedding Dress, c.1856-9, The Met.

 

First Pair of Socks

I finally knit my first pair of real socks on the Autoknitter (also ever), using Roxy's "10 Minute Socks" pattern/recipe. It took me a bit longer than 10 minutes, but I found it a really useful live-trial of working increases/decreases for the toe and heel (not to mention kitchener-stitching the toe).

Et voila:

Socks! In 2-1 mock rib.

I used the 80-cylinder for these. The yarn is Aktiv's "Finnmark" self-striping sock yarn.

Onion Bags

Did some multi-tasking: I have onions that need to be stored after harvest, and an Autoknitter that I needed some practice on. The obvious solution was to knit small onion bags out of scraps of crochet cotton.

Onion socks! And two proper net bags.

I used the opportunity to mess around with the machine's tension, hang hems, learn mock ribs, and do a lot of kitchener stitch on the closed ends. My favorite onion sock is the one knit plain on the loosest machine tension (left of center), which produced the most open web.

Before jumping over to the machine, I did try to hand net bags for all the onions, but found that even with a generous mesh it simply took too long. I'll need to try this again when there's more time and the onions in question haven't already been harvested, cured, and in need of storage bags.

Early Harvest: Summer & Winter Squash

It's been a weird (unusually dry and warm) summer in the garden, which I assume is the reason that several of my winter squash reached their full color and size before most of the summer squash reached edible size. 

 

I expect my plants to be a little idiosyncratic and not always optimized for the climate I'm in: I focus on growing mid-19th century and earlier heritage varieties, because that's what I want to cook with. For instance, my only pumpkin to produce fruit last year (a Connecticut Field pumpkin) was still green when I had to clear my plot. It ripened off the vine, and I ended up saving seeds from it. This year, two of its four offspring had produced orange pumpkins by early September (one of the other two is larger, but dark green, and the fourth plant still only has a tiny fruit on it).

First haul of squash from the garden: two pumpkins, two Boston Marrow (winter) squash and a yellow crook-neck (summer) squash.

 

Original: Fancy Plait Straw Bonnet, c.1855

Bonnet, c.1855. From The Met.

 I've been looking for straw hat ornaments in situ, and this fancy-plait bonnet is one of the better examples. "Better" in the sense that I could see myself attempting to copy at least some of the brim elements, especially if I can get a higher resolution image...