Monday 29 June 2015

To dress Beans in Ragoo

I'm used to eating broad beans just boiled or fried with butter and some mint perhaps, or in a creamy sauce - but this made a feature of the beans in their own right. It was delicious. My girls LOATHE Broad Beans, but this they ate quite happily and wanted more.Honest. 
...Well okay the eldest did, the youngest refuses to eat anything that may originally have been a growing plant. Which is a bit upsetting for me with my passion for allotments. Still - really good Georgian Beans to convince those who are sort of unconvinced about the fabulousness of Broad Beans.One does it thusly:

To dress Beans in Ragoo

You must boil your beans until the skins slip off ( or until you think they are done). Take about a quart, season them with pepper, salt and nutmeg, then flour them, and have some butter ready in a stew pan, throw in your beans, fry them of a fine brown, then drain them from the fat, and lay them in your dish. Have ready a quarter of a pound of butter melted (I didn't use as much, I skimp on the butter and use half fat cream in these recipes because otherwise it's the road to RUIN) and half a pint of blanched beans boiled ( I just took that to mean cooked - boiled) and beat in a mortar ( means squash them with a pestle in a  bowl, or mortar if you have one), with a very little pepper, salt and nutmeg;then by degrees mix them in the butter(I added creme fraiche as well), and pour over the other beans. Garnish with a boiled and fried bean and so on until you fill the rim of your dish. They are very good without frying. and only plain butter melted over them. (only partly true, the frying in flour makes them so delicious)

 

A delicious Pupton of Apples

I love the name of this recipe - a Pupton. (I've started calling my youngest daughter my little Pupton, but I won't make it a permanent thing).
When I first read the recipe I though it was a sort of pudding because you can mould it, but it actually only really err... stiffens up, when it is cooled off completely. Then you can mould it into a ramikin shape, or cup cakes, or whatever you like I also thought you can put the mixture in a muffin tine and make little puptons. I served it warm from the oven with a sprinkling of cinnamon. We had Salmon Pie that night and I thought it was a pleasant summery side dish, it would be a good accompaniment for a Pork Roast as well, but that is personal taste, it's a sweet and delicious thick apple pudding in it's own right.

A Pupton of Apples.
Pare some apples,take out the cores, and put them in a skillet ( I used one of those cast iron deep pans with a lid):to a quart-mugful heaped,put in a quarter of a pound of sugar,and two spoonfuls of water. Do them over a slow fire, keep them stirring,add a little cinnamon;when it is quite thick ,and like a marmalade, let it stand till cool. Beat up the yolks of four or five eggs, and stir in a handful of grated bread and a quarter of a pound of fresh butter; then form it in what shape you please, and bake it in a slow oven,and then turn it upside down on a plate, for a second course.

I turned it upside down too soon, and it looked like the picture below. Again, if you let it cool completely then it may be moulded into what shape you please!

Thursday 25 June 2015

Sack Posset is amazing

The recipe I had given in my previous post is perfect. It's a warm, milky,nutmeggy, rosescented, drunken treat. Also because the bisuits are crumbled in it, it's quite filling. So next time I will serve it in smaller cups. I filled up cappucino cups with it and I felt very full and couldn't finish.

It is more of a Winter thing though, so later on in the year when the nights draw in and the frost rims the hedgerows,and the birds head south then we'll talk about Possets again.
 O my they are good.
X

Wednesday 24 June 2015

more Naples Biscuits

I baked another batch of Naples Biscuits for the Sack Posset I'm going to make, and they turned out so beautifully browned and fluffy and crisp - everything you could want in a little sponge biscuit,I had to share.
My two little girls discovered I had made a fresh batch and they were all gone in seconds( the biscuits, not the girls). I have kept two on a shelf for the Posset- out of reach. X

Sack Posset

Posset and Sack  - or Posset with Sack, is the ultimate eighteenth century drink. The word itself is so evocative: ' Sack Posset' if you say it a couple of times to yourself it has the pleasant hiss of a log on a fire on a winter's night.You can sip your Posset before retiring to bed with your feet in puce satin slippers up on a footstool, wrapped in a brocade dressing gown, candlelight reflected in the gleaming oak panelling. The stars in the sky above your house shining brightly down because there is no light pollution, a fox barks in the forest beyond the garden wall and your dear Leveret raises his head... I'm getting carried away, sorry.

Sack came from Spain, and the origin of the word is debated, some historians think the word comes from the French ' sec'  which sounds reasonable, except the wine is Spanish. Sack itself came from several places but the most famous came from Jerez dela Frontera and they made a type of sack called Sherris Sack which eventually morphed into what we now know as Sherry. So the closest we can come to drinking Sack is a good, dry Sherry from Jerez dela Frontera.


I'm going to make the middle recipe 'To make another Sack Posset' The recipe for ' an excellent Sack Posset' sounds a bit overwhelming - fifteen eggs, three quarters of a pound of white sugar and a pint of Canary - which is wine from the Canary Islands, it's like Madiera wine -sort of sweet. I can already feel my stomach disagreeing with this recipe's ingredients.  The 'another sack posset' is far simpler in taste and contains crumbled Naples Biscuits, which sounds rosy and lush.

Sack Posset
A quarter of a pint of milk (I used semi-skimmed, but I'm sure full milk is creamier)
Four crumbled Naples Biscuits (I made these beforehand - see my post Naples Biscuits)
Pinch of Nutmeg grated in
A little brown sugar or honey to sweeten
Half a pint of dry Sherry

Bring the milk gently to a boil and add the crumbled Naples Biscuits, add a grate of nutmeg and some honey or sugar to taste, keep stirring and add the Sherry.
Drink while warm and at the end of the day because it's guaranteed to put you to a rose scented sleep
And so to bed.
X


Tuesday 23 June 2015

Naples Biscuits

Naples Biscuits were incredibly popular in the 18th Century, Hannah uses them in several recipes as bases for puddings or other dishes, for example as a base for a trifle. They also pop up in literature from time to time:
  • 1749, John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Penguin 1985, p. 66:
    After saluting her, he led her to a couch that fronted us, where they both sat down, and the young Genoese helped her to a glass of wine, with some Naples biscuit on a salver.

is one example, And I know that Samuel Richardson mentioned them too, but can't find the quote.It matters not, they were widespread and much loved and surprisingly easy to make. They taste richly of roses that linger in your mouth long after the biscuit is finished. Which is quite nice and made me wonder if they were eaten as breath fresheners as well. But maybe that's just me.
Anyway, since they are a Georgian staple ( Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft and Fanny Burney must have eaten them ALL the time) I really wanted to give them a go. Hannah doesn't give a recipe, possibly because they were such a standard that she didn't feel the need to ('surely everyone can make these?') but there are actually a fair few recipes on the internet and I found a suitably historical one and tried it out. The results are exquisite and have an authentic taste to them that is a bit different from the cakes and biscuits we are used to,they are less sweet and sort of eggy. This is because there was no baking soda then, that was a Victorian invention, and the lightness of the cakes came from beating the eggs briskly until fluffy which made them rise.


2 eggs
25g / 1/4 cup granulated sugar
rose water
100g / 1/2 heaped cups flour
salt
'Separate the two eggs—whites in medium size bowl, yolks in small bowl / cup
In medium sized bowl, whip (by hand with a whisk,it's not too hard and good for your arm muscles) the egg whites until frothy and continue to whip, gradually adding in the sugar. After the sugar is all added, preheat oven to 180C /350F
Turn to the small bowl/cup with egg yolks. Beat the yolks gently, then stir in several ample glugs of rose water and salt to taste, beating in gently.
Pour the egg yolk mixture into the medium bowl with egg white mixture and whip together. Sift in the flour in one go and stir gently to combine, being sure to scrape the edges of the bowl to get it all in'.
I poured spoonfuls into a Madelaine tin, which I found suited it perfectly, and was just enough for 12 biscuits
(I found this recipe on the historical fiction blog of Alexa Chipman - imaginationlane.net)

They were quickly made and my daughters liked them so much I have been requested to make them again tomorrow X

Monday 22 June 2015

Broiled Trout with ale and mustard sauce



Thankfully I didn't need to scale and gut my Trout, the fishmonger had done it. Still, he lay there in his beautiful rosy grey scales, staring at me.  I really am very squeamish and felt a little ill. I had to cut off his head which I eventually did, with gritted teeth sawing away through gristle and bone until the head was free. Hannah says to mash the heads ( in my case head) but a Trout head is bigger than a Herring's and I think boiling it until soft was perhaps a better option. I plopped the head into a saucepan I had poured a a bottle of Ale in. It was dark sweetish Ale with a mild flavour and soon it was boiling and foaming around the head,I thought it looked rather lovely and very Georgian. I added a small bunch of Thyme and Sage from the garden and some sliced garlic instead of onion,and a bouillon cube and very little water. The smell was heavy and delicious. Hannah says fifteen minutes for the head but I let it simmer for half an hour while I broiled the fish exactly as Hannah says to. In a special fish broiling pan, all I did was coat the fish's body in flour and score it across and then broiled it in fresh butter and pepper.Love the word 'broil' completely sounds like what it is.

When it was done I strained the sauce through a sieve and the result was a beautiful clear brown gravy



two small spoonfuls of mustard -not too much although Hannah says ' a good deal of mustard' if you put too much in it reacts oddly with the beer and becomes bitter. Sieve some flour in and butter 
(hen's egg size lump or more if you want) and then whisk it through until it becomes a smooth caramel coloured sauce. I laid the fish in a dish and poured the sauce all over it. It was delicious!!

It did sort of fall apart, so it isn't very photogenic. But it was so good.
 We ate it, deboned, on a nest of Linguini, which complemented it very well. I can imagine that this could combine with other dishes beautifully.


Broiling Trout


I've tried a couple of recipes already and they tasted rather good, if incredibly rich ( Hannah starts out nearly everything with butter rolled in flour, sack and cream). So I've practised a bit, but today I want to prepare a trout. Oddly Hannah has no Trout recipes, but she does have a fun one for Herrings, so I will use that one. She says it can be used for other small fish as well, and this trout is rather small - more importantly it still has it's head on which is what I will need for the sauce.

To Broil Herrings ( or in this case Trout they are seasonal at midsummer)
Scale them, gut them, cut off their heads, wash them clean and dry them in a cloth, flour them and broil them, but with your knife just notch them across: take the heads and mash them, boil them in small beer or ale, with a little whole pepper and onion. Let it boil a quarter of an hour, then strain it, thicken it with butter and flour and a good deal of mustard. Lay the fish in the dish, and pour the sauce into a bason, or plain melted butter and mustard.

In my next post I'll tell you what happened ...

To the Reader



My copy of 'The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy ' has an inscription on the flyleaf. I have a ninth edition, published in 1775, but Miss or Mrs Williams used it intensively from 1789 onwards
 ( there are two hundred year old gravy stains and and smears on the pages, and it's falling to pieces)

I've been fascinated by this book since I found it among a lot of other books at my mum's house in a cupboard ( rather aptly, it's a 16th Century Suffolk cottage) and took it home with me ( I did tell her afterwards,she's fine about it). To me it's the easiest form of time travel; to taste what would have been eaten two hundred years ago, it gives an idea of their lives, the everydayness of it, the way the pre industrial revolution world worked. We are wrecking the earth at such speed and with such a industrial inefficiency, that the idea that I could make a cowslip pudding or a parsnip and cucumber soop or a ragoo in the slow pre industrial revolution style, is attractive. Not that the world was that different then as far as human nature is concerned of course. 1789 was a significant year, ushering in a horrific amount of bloodshed and terror that shook the western world but you know, there was  Enlightenment, human rights and the age of sensibility too.

 The book says it is written ' by a lady'  and that lady was Hannah Glasse,I want to explore her recipes, the weird and archaic ingredients people cooked with, and the techniques they used.  As I try out the different recipes I'm going to find out more about her and write a bit about her. Her writing style is crisp and easy to understand, and in the preface she explains that she's simplified what she's written so that serving girls and cooks can understand her, she won't tax their brains with writing in the high style, which is a good move and it made her cook book a runaway best seller - even in the colonies!. There are no amounts specified further than ' the size of a hen's egg' or a 'peck' ' a handful' or my favourite 'as much as you please' 
There is also a huge emphasis on meat, and I will write about some of these recipes and maybe try a few out. Some of the recipes call for endangered species ( fillet of Bittern anyone?) or other to us - most of us -  at any rate,deeply unappetising birds: Swans, Snipe, Herons (what meat could there possibly be on a Heron??) Quail (otherwise known as a bundle of toothpicks held together with a bit of string). Other recipes are fond of the ' recognising what you eat'  approach, to whit - boiling the hairs off a calf's head, preparing a rabbit and splitting the head down the centre to garnish it - I will be giving those a miss as well. I may do a chicken or pheasant though. (only if free range and had a good life)
The fish chapter is alright, until you reach the recipe for Turtle Soop - ' keep the turtle in a barrel of water overnight then before cooking slit it's throat or cut off it's head and allow the blood to drain'
I won't be doing this, it's not even allowed anymore thank God. The eighteenth century was obsessed by meat  and it wasn't unusual to have two or three different animals in one dish, or stuff a goose with forcemeat made from three different animals and smothered in bacon. Happily for me though there are plenty of recipes for good cakes, vegetables, soups and sauces, salads and puddings. In my allotment I am going to grow the sorts of vegetables that Ms Glasse would have used and I will learn to like nutmeg and mace, because they were excessively fond of it in 1770's. 
 I can't cook that well, so will have to have Hannah Glasse teach me as we go. x