Fried Beets 1723

This early beet recipe with a lovely wine and cloves flavor is a delicious and different way to use beets this fall.  An earlier post details various ways to prepare beets from 1717 to 1916. HERE

Rumford Baking Powder recipe slide, Count Rumford taped talks and Hot Milk Cake

This recipe pull out card (recipe slide) of 1926, included 25 recipes for cakes and cookies, one being Hot Milk Cake, by Mrs. Lily H Wallace for Rumford Baking Powder. Two early Hot Milk Cake recipes are from church cookbooks c1900.

Click to enlarge and see how the ingredients are listed.
Several taped talks on Count Rumford

Passing on your family recipes

It's Family Stories Month, so talks on kitchen tales (show and tell), share family traditions and recipes, Holiday Foods and Your Family History, Christmas festivities and family traditions, and talks on doing your family history. Its never too late to start collecting recipes and stories from relatives and writing them down.

Historic cooking at home - Benjamin Franklin's recipes

The American Philosophical Society, founded in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin in 1743, houses his papers, which include recipes in French. The APS “invited scholars, public historians, and chefs with a range of interests to share their reflections on Franklin, his recipes, and the culture of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World over the coming weeks” on their BLOG.  Other sites offer videos or old recipes, below.

Volunteer to transcribe manuscript cookbook recipes

Handwritten documents - recipes, letters - are important for research.  You can help other researchers and libraries from your home computer by transcribing digitized manuscript cookbooks; thus making them easier to read and able to be searched.

Other Black eyed Susan recipes for the Preakness

The Preakness Stakes, "second leg" of horse racing's Triple Crown, features Maryland's state flower as the winner's horse blanket and a drink (though not as famous as the Kentucky Derby's Mint Julep).  An 1827 pudding from Domestic Economy and Cookery... receipts for sea-faring men... was probably named for a 1720 poem and later song about a sailor's goodbye.

Mary Randolph's Peach ice cream

Mary Randolph's Virginia Housewife, first published in 1824, included many ice cream recipes - peach, vanilla, coffee, chocolate, cocoa nut, iced jelly, strawberry, raspberries, lemonade iced, citron melon, almond and... oyster.

Alligator Pears since 1600 (Aguacates, Alvacatas, Avocados)

The avocado, once called the Alligator Pear, appeared in books since the early 17th century, and by mid 1800s in London was "much eaten by all classes of people."  In 1696 Hans Sloane was able to cite numerous names for the fruit from books. Originally from Mexico, it was grown in the West Indies, St Augustine (1766) Florida, and California in the later part of the century. Claimed to taste like chestnuts, was "superior to the peach" and often served as a salad with French dressing (recipes below).

S'mores

For Girl Scouts, and now most campers, s'mores are THE summer campfire treat.  And no, you can't eat just one.  From the 1965 official GS calendar - "'S'mores'... that favorite campfire dessert."  The recipe "Some More" is from a 1927 GS book, and "S'mores" started appearing by the 1940s.  

Artificial crab, lobster and even anchovies

Richard Bradley's 1727 cookbook had several fake/mock crabs using liver or chicken & potatoes, anchovy liquor, lemon and placed in cleaned crab shells.  In the 1870s cheese became a primary ingredient for mock crabs.

Barley Lemonade

Generally found in the foods for the sick section, barley water was often flavored with lemons and sugar, but this recipe was actually named lemonade by famed chef Alexis Soyer.  The pearl barley is boiled in water, strained and added to the sugar water and lemon. Then the lemonade is strained.

Nott's Barley Gruel

John Nott's The Cook's and Confectioner's Dictionary went through four editions from 1723-1733.  His gruel is enriched with cream, wine, sugar, currants and egg yolks. A rather fine gruel!  Other barley recipes in Nott's book are broth, cream, pottage, posset, pudding, and barley sugar.

Pickled bamboo or elder tree recipes

In 1756 Mrs. Bradley included a recipe to imitate pickled bamboo using the tender spring shoots of the elder tree with wine and beer vinegar in her The British Housewife.  Pickled bamboo had the "appearance [of] pickled yellow cucumbers cut in long slices."

Fried cucumbers

Cucumbers were fried in round slices, cubed or stuffed whole.  Hannah Glasse's Art of Cookery had cucumbers sliced and a whole one stuffed with fried onions then fried and put into a flavor-full sauce of the frying butter, flour (to thicken), water, wine, catchup, mace, cloves, and nutmeg. 

Pickled Seckel Pears

What a fun name.  The mini Seckel pears are at the farmers markets now, so I tried a recipe from the 1800s to preserve Seckel pears. Very sweet. The pears pictured are from a different recipe using vinegar, cloves, cinnamon, and allspice.

Spare ribs

Instructions on how to butcher, cook and carve a spare rib of pork from an 1831 Cincinnati cookbook is below.  During this time, the city contained large hog packing operations, shipping the meat to the eastern markets.

4 French mustard recipes, 1725

Dijon mustard or Anjou mustard, mustard seeds soaked overnight in water, dried mustard cakes and a mustard lasting eight days were four recipes from a French book revised by Richard Bradley in 1725.  And the source of the name 'moutarde' or 'moult tarde'? An article related a story of the Duke of Burgundy in 1382 and mustard, by an author who jested that the Dijonese didn't know Latin... 

Mrs. Goodfellow - Lemon Pudding before the Meringue

Mrs. Goodfellow (1767-1851) made a lemon pudding (pie) at her cooking school and shop in early Phila. (more HERE).  I've not found any proof that she created the first lemon meringue pie, as some claim - unlikely since she used whole eggs and first claim (no source) was in a 1987 book. Her lemon pudding was popular and copied into several local authors' cook books.  More details and three recipes are below.

Rice Flour

Racahaut, blanc mange, snow-balls, flummery, breads, cakes, cookies, puddings, custard, waffles, journey cakes, slap jacks, fried bread and more could be made from rice flour.  Who knew??

Puddings and Potatoes as Dripping pans

A pan was placed under meat roasting on a spit to catch the drippings. Some, such as the one at Windsor Castle, were quite large.  Below are three Georgian and Federal recipes.