To make an Orange Pudding

This exquisite pudding attracted a lot of interest. The taste is not what we are used to in the 21st century, it's not overly sweet and very rich and spiced. It has all the favourite 18th Century flavours in it : Roses, orange blossoms and sack. You close your eyes and take a bite, let the different tastes open themselves to you and you are nearly back in the age of enlightenment. I would have stayed if I could!

To make an Orange pudding

TAKE the yolks of sixteen eggs, beat them well, with half a pound of melted butter, grate in the rind of two fine Seville oranges, beat in half a pound of fine sugar, two spoonfuls of orange-flower-water, two of rose-water, a gill of sack, half a pint of cream, two Naples biscuits, or the crumbs of a halfpenny roll soaked in the cream, and mix all well together. Make a thin puff-paste, and lay all over the  and round the rim, pour in the pudding and bake it. It will take about as long baking as a custard.

Eggs are larger than they were in Hannah Glasse's day, I suppose they were the size that Bantam's eggs are now. For the pudding I used the yolks of twelve large eggs and it was really more than enough.

 A gill of sack (sherry)  - a gill is about a quarter of a pint. It seems like a lot really and I sloshed in most of it but was a bit concerned that the pudding would be too runny but Hannah knew what she was doing and it turned out fine, the consistency was pleasingly solid. I had made several batches of Naples biscuits for the banquet itself so I used two of them instead of a halfpenny roll soaked in cream, the rosiness was just right and complemented the orange blossom beautifully. The recipe for Naples biscuits is one of my previous blog posts, they are very quick and easy to make.

I rolled out ready made puff pastry ( don't look at me like that, my pastry is rubbish and this pudding had to work, otherwise think of the egg waste, also the guests were arriving in a matter of hours), until it was a thin soft sheet and lined a flan tin with it. I I followed the instructions for cooking exactly, apart from the amount of egg yolks and I used ordinary oranges not Seville, which are notoriously bitter, but if you want to try them please do - If you love marmalade you should be fine. I put it in the oven at 180 degrees and kept an eye on it. It swelled like a souffle while cooking and then when I took it out of the oven it subsided to the way it looks in the photograph.

 It's rich, so best served in thin slices.

To Roast a Fowl with Chestnuts

The fowl (it was a chicken) eaten the quickest of all the dishes I prepared, save the Orange Pudding.

To roast a fowl with chesnuts.

First take some chesnuts, roast them very carefully (make sure you make crosses in the skin that go through the skin, some of mine exploded in the oven and all over the kitchen) so as not to burn them, take off the skin,and peel them, take about a dozen of them cut small, and bruise them in a mortar; parboil the liver of the fowl, bruise it, cut about a quarter of a pound of ham or bacon, and pound it;then mix them all together, with a good deal of parsley chopped small, a little sweet herbs, some mace, some pepper, salt and nutmeg;mix these together and put into your fowl, and roast it.  The best way of doing it is to tie the neck, and hang it up by the legs to roast with a string, and baste it with butter.  For sauce take the rest of the chesnuts peeled and skinned, put them into some good gravy, with a little white wine, and thicken it with a piece of butter rolled in flour:then take up your fowl, lay it in the dish, and pour in the sauce. Garnish with lemon.

In Georgian kitchens they cooked over the open fire in a big fireplace, kitchen ranges were not invented until the end of the eighteenth century or thereabouts so when Hannah Glasse wrote this book she was speaking from her experience of cooking in the only way she knew how which was over the roaring open fire. There were ovens built into the side of the fireplace, for bread and so on, but most of the dishes in her book are cooked over the flames - that's why the fowl had to be strung up by it;s feet ( so the stuffing didn't fall out), something I couldn't really recreate so I put it in the oven.  I followed her recipe exactly even down to the roasting of the chestnuts and bruising things in the mortar ( that was the fun part).
When the chicken had done in the oven, I made the sauce from the gravy that came from the roasting with all the butter and different flavours in it from cooking and added some sliced mushrooms and Madeira and a bit of salt and cracked pepper ( in the mortar again) with the essential mace and nutmeg. It was very good, and a good one to remember for Christmas.

The banquet recipes...Cheshire Pork Pie.

Cheshire Pork Pie.

To make a Cheshire Pork Pie.
Take a loin of pork, skin it, cut it into steaks, season it with salt, nutmeg and pepper; make a good crust, lay a layer of pork, then a large layer of pippins pared and cored, a little sugar, enough to sweeten the pie, then another layer of pork;put in half a pint of white wine, lay some butter on the top, and close your pie. If your pie be large, it will take a pint of white wine.

I mustadmit I was very wary of tipping in a pint of wine. I was sure that my 'good crust' would not stand it, and the lot would be a soggy mess. My good crust was frozen puff pastry that I defrosted and rolled out into a sheet. Hannah Glasse has recipes for all kinds of crust, but they usually call for large amounts of lard. I preferred a buttery puff pastry that I knew would work, but just on the top.  So I covered the pie with a lid of puff pastry ( and some fancy cut out leaves) and didn't encase it, and it was all the better for that.

Cheshire Pork Pie before the crust is added.

I used pork chops and cut out the bones, seasoned them according to the recipe, then I added the thick layer of peeled apple slices ( Cox's Orange Pippin or Elstar are especially good for this) and sprinkled a bit of sugar on them. Then came another layer of pork chop slices. I didn't put in a pint of wine, but just a couple of good glugs of it so the pork chops simmer in a thin layer of white wine. I then added the butter and closed it with the puff pastry. Put it in an oven at 180- 200 degrees for about forty minutes or so, half way through I covered it loosely with tin foil to make sure the pastry didn't blacken too much and that the pork chops were thoroughly cooked.

It was well received!

The Banquet

Gentle reader, it was a delightful evening. The eighteenth century briefly resurrected. The smells and tastes of the food along with the scent of wood smoke from the fire and the autumnal twilight outside.I felt back in a time I belonged - I even got the hairstyle right and it took me about ten seconds to do. I tell you 1789 lived again that evening. Some of my friends wore hired costumes which looked terrific by candle light, and their efforts on behalf of Miss Posset were much appreciated!

The menu was altered and changed a fair bit but that was because I had overdone things as usual, as my sister informed me when I asked why I do this sort of thing to myself, she replied succinctly ' I don't know, you're a doughnut'.

The menu I had originally thought up was far too large and complicated (the stuffed cucumbers were so stuffed with ingredients and sauces that the cucumbers themselves merely served as limp, greenish holders for the complicated fricassee of meat and butter and cabbage within) and I could certainly not have done it alone. This menu was in the realms of one woman's achievement  and after having contemplated the task ahead with my morning pipe,a cup of tea and a linen apron covering my dress by the kitchen fire, I roused myself to cook and create all Saturday, The cooking was not finished on Saturday and I continued until mid- afternoon on Sunday when I was pretty sure my feet would drop off and I would burst into wracking sobs.

 As it was a scullery maid was much needed, especially when the chestnuts exploded and covered the kitchen in tiny pale granules as Miss Posset removed them from the oven.

I was going to add broccoli done the french way but to be honest when all the dishes were on the table, no one was that bothered about the vegetables. 

The menu was as follows:

On the evening of October 4th 17-

Miss Posset had prepared for her guest's delight the following

:

Onion Soup - a deliciously done up in the Georgian style
Salmon pie
Cheshire Pork Pie
Roast Chicken with Chestnuts
Orange pudding
 Naples biscuits
Stilton and Cheddar with Chutney
Plenty of Sack and Burgundy

and a Sack Posset by the fire for the guests that stayed 'til late.
 I'll write the recipe for each dish I haven't written about before in separate posts.

The old fashioned french way of eating Broccoli, according to Madam Glasse

                              

To dress brockala.

Strip all the little branches off till you come to the top one, then with a knife peel off all the hard outside skin, which is on the stalks and the little branches, and throw them into water. Have a stew-pan of water with some salt in it: when it boils put in the brockala, and when the stalks are tender it is enough, then send to the table with butter in a cup. The French eat oil and vinegar with it.

The butter in a cup was not really something I wanted to do, these warm summer months -so I followed her instructions exactly, and it is true the stalk is quite delicious and lends a lovely vegetable flavour to the water it is cooked in. So I cooked it to nice fluorescent green, just past al dente,( four or five minutes is about enough) and then drizzled a bit of good white wine vinegar on it and some mild olive oil.

It was so good we decided we're always going to eat Broccoli this way. I served it like this Roast beef that I fried in a lump of butter rolled in flour, when I took the beef out I added a splash of red wine to the pan and drizzled it over the beef, Then I served it with Horse Radish. Ms. Glasse thinks Horse radish on roast beef is enough.

Miss Posset Caters a Banquet.

It's always nice to have something to work towards, when painting I love to imagine my work when it's hanging in a gallery or having an agent really like my novel I just wrote and take me on ( am in the process of approaching agents, gearing up for endless rejection and hoping just once to strike gold). SO with this in mind I have visions of an eighteenth century banquet that I want to prepare for my birthday. My birthday falls this year exactly on a lunar eclipse which is an irrelevant detail but seems portentous of time travel via cooking or magic of some sort. However, I sent out all my invitations and no one can come on that particular weekend so that was that. It's now on the 4th of October, which has all the mysteriousness of autumn, mists and mellow fruitfulness and I can include recipes with Chestnuts and Spicy Possets. Maybe a syllabub or two but definitely plenty of sack and champagne.

I am going to choose the menu and then try out the dishes one by one beforehand. Seems like the most fun.
Miss Posset's Birthday Banquet:

Farced Cucumbers
Almond Rice
Brockely in a Salad
Ragoo of Beans/Peas
Fish pasties the Italian way
Roasted Turkey with mock oyster sauce
Roasted Chicken with chestnuts
Cheshire Pork pie
Lemon Tart
Orange pudding
Sack Posset
Cheese with chutney
Naples Biscuits
Sack, Canary,Light Ale, Claret.

The meat I use will be meticulously sourced from free range, organic farms that have been approved by Animal Protection ( In the Netherlands there is a special cruelty- free stamp)

The Idea is, that  most of the dishes are simultaneously at the table, so the meat dishes will be all on the table and the rice and vegetables, then everything is cleared and desserts are brought in.
Followed by Possets and biscuits and cheese, chutney and crackers and more Claret/Sack etc.

I hope it's 18th Century enough. The decoration of the table and the room will of course be terribly important as well, Candlelight and someone playing Mozart or Vivaldi on our piano. Will try the Cheshire Pork pie recipe first.

Miss Posset's Beetroot Chutney- Georgian Style.

Madam Glasse says nothing on chutneys, even though in the 18th century they were quite popular. At first they were called ' mangoed ' fruits or relishes before the term chutney or chutni was widely accepted. Apparently they made their presence as a condiment felt in the 17th Century when they were brought back from India. They are incredibly easy and satisfying to make and are utterly delicious. I had a lot of different vegetables in surplus at my allotment, primarily beetroots and purple carrots, and I made a chutney that echoes some of Hannah Glasse's favourite flavours.

We tried it fresh with some Gorgonzola cheese, and it will also taste amazing in a few days, the orange comes more to the fore as do the other spices. It's perfect for strong cheese or as an accompaniment to meat dishes.

Miss Posset's Chutney.
You will need;
Some beetroots - more beets than carrots if you can manage it.
Some carrots ( sweet little carrots, not big bruisers)
A couple of tomatoes
I had a yellow courgette as well,
Red wine vinegar ( organic)
Brown sugar (fair trade raw cane)
Zest and juice of an orange or two depending on how much you have chopped, or to your taste.
A slice of fresh ginger
Cloves
Mace
Bay leaf
Cinnamon and Cardamom. 

Chop the vegetables into chunky little pieces and put them in a big saucepan with a thick bottom, I used one of those cast iron stewing pans, and then pour in enough vinegar to cover the vegetables, add the zest and juice of the orange and then add sugar to taste, I usually use equal amounts of vinegar and sugar but you may adjust this to your taste. Simmer gently for around and hour and a half to two hours, until the consistency is thick and jam-like and allow to cool.
Let the aroma of orange and spices waft gently around the house while cooking, but if cooking in August - as I was - close the windows because the fermenty vinegar-sweet smell brings every wasp into the kitchen within a 20 mile radius.

To make a Salmon Pie

- 

This salmon pie was really good and very easy to make. I cheated a bit with modern conveniences such as ready made pastry, and the lobster was from a can but that all makes it really simple, I served it up as part of a dinner party and 'twas well-received accompanied by a glass of Sack on ice.

To make a salmon pie.

MAKE a good crust, cleanse a piece of salmon well, season it with salt, mace and nutmeg, lay a little piece of butter at the bottom of the dish, and lay your salmon in. Melt butter according to your pye; take a lobster,boil it,pick out all the flesh, chop it small, bruise the body, mix it well with the butter, which must be very good; pour it over your salmon, put on the lid and bake it well.

funny thing is, she spells 'pie' with an i in all the titles of the pie recipes, but in the body of the recipe it's spelled 'pye'. Odd quirky spelling was usual in the 18th century, Samuel Johnson did his best to homogenise spelling but it took a while before it caught on.

For this recipe I lined a terracotta oven dish with puff pastry sheets and then put in the butter. I used two salmon fillets, seasoning them as Hannah says to. I don't want to boil a lobster because it's really cruel, so I decided a can of lobster meat would be better. Then I don't have to ' pick out all the flesh' and 'bruise the body'  - that's been done for me by the brave fisher folk. If you can't find a can of lobster meat then red crab meat is just as good. melt butter in a pan and fry lobster/crab briefly, add a bit of creme fraiche or ricotta or perhaps a little white sauce to make it a little softer and accentuate the taste, otherwise you will need a LOT of butter.

Or this way, beans ragoo'd with cabbage

Stuffing a huge cabbage in the middle of a heatwave.
I had to do something with this cabbage, I had grown it in my allotment and brought it home and since it was too big for the fridge it just sat there on the counter wilting depressingly in the heat. I found this recipe among the bean recipes and I thought it sounded pretty and would make good use of a cabbage. It's intended as a side dish, flanking the inevitable five-dish Georgian meat extravaganza, but it good on it's own too.
 I adapted this recipe at certain points to a more modern taste and adjusted the vegetable to what was growing and ripe in my allotment, but basically I followed the instructions set out by Hannah two hundred and something years ago.
God it was hot yesterday. My brain has turned to Apple Pupton.

Take a nice little cabbage,about as big as a pint bason; when the outside leaves, top, and stalks are cut off, half boil it, cut a hole in the middle pretty big, take what you cut out and chop it very fine, with a few of the beans boiled, a carrot boiled and mashed, and a turnip boiled; and mash all together, put them into a saucepan, season them with pepper, salt and nutmeg, a good piece of butter, stew them a few minutes over the fire, stirring the pan often. In the meantime put the cabbage into a sauce-pan, but take great care it does not fall to pieces;put to it four spoonfuls of water, two of wine, and one of catch-up;have a spoonful of mushroom -pickle, a piece of butter rolled in flour, a very little pepper, cover it close, and let it stew softly til it is tender;then take it up carefully and lay it in the middle of the dish, put your mashed roots in the middle to fill it up high, and your ragoo around it. You may add the liquor the cabbage was stewed in, and send it to the table hot. this will do for a top, bottom, middle or side -dish.

I used different vegetables for my ragoo, I used what I had harvested from my allotment and what was in season. I had turnips, courgette, broccoli, broad beans and peas, I boiled the turnips and broccoli and beans first and then put all of them together in a frying pan with the cabbage I cut from the middle, until it was soft enough to be mashed. I steamed the cabbage in a tall pressure cooker pan which worked very well, and instead of catchup (I will be trying to make this at some point, it's a kind of strong tasting mushroom chutney) and mushroom pickle I used bouillon cubes and a splash of balsamic vinegar and two fat cloves of garlic. The liquor the cabbage was boiled in was very good and gave a great taste to the ragoo when it was poured all over it.

It's spectacular when it's served and the taste is very good- different to what we're used to and  evocative of a different age.

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!

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

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

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

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