The 1950s are not particularly known for their
quality cuisine: TV dinners, meat in jello, and casseroles galore like this fish pudding
from 1954. So thank you to Bespoke Post for sponsoring this video as we make fish pudding
and talk about the history of the kitchen stove this time on Tasting History. Welcome
to the new home of Tasting History. I am still unpacking and trying to figure out lighting,
and camera angles and sound so if things change over the next few episodes I ask for your patience as I try to figure
things out, though seeing as I was in the last place for two
years and never really figured out my lighting maybe don't hold your breath on that one. Now while this is a new space for the show
the home itself was actually built in 1952 and that is why I decided to do a recipe
from the 1950s to christen the kitchen, and being from the 1950s it is by far and
away the most recent recipe that I've actually done here on the channel, but I thought that it was appropriate
because not only is the house from the 1950s but so is the stove that came with it. Actually
I posted it on Instagram and somebody thought that he narrowed it down to being made in
1949 but I figure that is close enough and we will revisit the stove later on in the
episode. But for now let's make a dish that would
have been made just after this house and this stove were made. It's from 'The ABC of Casseroles' from 1954, and the book is cleverly set up with different
recipes for each letter of the alphabet. A is for American chop suey, J gets you Jiffy macaroni [and tuna], and T offers up tamale pie, but when they got to the letter X it seems
that it stumped the author and so they just gave up and made XYZ fish pudding. "Boil fish in salted water about 45 minutes
or until tender. Drain, skin carefully, pick out bones and flake finely. Cook rice with
water, 2 cups milk and salt for 20 minutes. Put a layer of drained rice in 3 quart casserole.
Add a layer of fish. Season with butter, pepper, salt, and continue with alternate layers until casserole
is two-thirds full. To well-beaten eggs add 5 cups milk. Pour
over rice and fish and bake uncovered for one hour in a 350 degree oven. Serves 12." I love that they consider butter a seasoning,
a recipe after my own butter clogged heart. So for this recipe what you'll need is: five
pounds or two and a quarter kilograms of haddock, or if you can't find haddock like me any
other flaky fish will work just fine. Three-fourths of a cup or 160 grams of rice,
2 cups or 475 milliliters of water, 2 cups or 475 milliliters of milk, 1 teaspoon of
salt, 4 eggs well beaten, another 5 cups or 1.2 liters of milk, and butter, salt and
pepper. So I have to be up front with you and tell
you that I really was not ready for this episode, and I don't just mean like who was ever ready
for fish pudding. I mean I was not really ready to film an episode, but I really wanted
to stay on my schedule so I am filming this episode, but I am not even close to being unpacked
in the kitchen or elsewhere in the house, and frankly for the last week I have been living out of a suitcase though
actually it's not a suitcase but a beautiful weekend bag that I got in the Weekender box
from today's sponsor Bespoke Post. Bespoke Post sends you monthly themed boxes
with really cool stuff from under the radar companies most of them
made here in the good old US of A. All you do is take a quiz to let Bespoke
Post know what you're into: clothes, outdoor gear, bar wear, and then they send you a
box with awesome stuff like this box called Brew. It's a complete brew kit to make your own
beer, so you can bet that I'm going to be doing a
beer episode pretty soon. And since I'm into kitchen goods they also
sent me this box called Chop. It's two blades from marceline kitchen alchemy
including this Alaskan ulu knife. These are great for cutting anything inside
or outside of the kitchen. I've actually been using it to break down
moving boxes. So every month you are assigned a box and
you get to review the box before it ships, and then you can decide if you want to keep it,
swap it for a different box, or just skip that month at no extra charge.
You only ever pay for what you get and you can cancel at any time. So to get 20% off of your box click the link
in the description and enter tastinghistory20 at checkout or go to bespokepost.com/ tastinghistory20.
Now let's make our fish pudding. By the way every time I say fish pudding
all I can think of is that Robot Chicken episode. "Fish pudding". So first fill a large pot with water and
salt it very well. About one and a half tablespoons for each quart. You basically want it to be as salty as seawater. Then bring it to a simmer and add the fish.
Then cover the pot and let it simmer for about 45 minutes, and you want to keep an eye on it because
yes you want it nice and tender, but you don't want to cook it so long that it falls apart
in the pot like mine did. Learn from my mistakes, they are plentiful but even if it does fall apart that's actually
okay because it's going to be the finished product anyway because you're going to remove the skin and
the bones and then flake the meat nice and fine. Also while the bulk of the meat is on
the filet don't neglect the other parts of the fish. In fact the fish cheek meat is the
best meat on the fish. I guess fish lips make for tender cheeks.
*Muah Once it's all flaked and the bones have been
discarded set the fish aside and rinse your rice. Now when I first started this recipe
I thought that there had to be a mistake because it calls for three-fourths of a cup
of rice to be cooked in two cups of water and two cups of milk,
and that is a lot more liquid than you would typically use to cook rice. Uncle Roger would
be aghast but as it turns out it kind of works, so add the rice with the water and the milk
along with a teaspoon of salt to a saucepan, and then simmer it for 20 minutes with the
lid off. And with the lid off you're going to get
a fair amount of evaporation and so you end up with something kind of like a
rice pudding. Now how that's going to actually work in the
dish is anyone's guess but what you do with it is cover the bottom
of a large casserole dish with the rice pudding, and then add a layer of the flaked fish over
it, and then a few scrapes of butter, and then sprinkle it with salt and plenty
of pepper. Then add another layer of rice, more fish,
and more seasoning. Then mix the five cups of milk into your
four beaten eggs, and pour that over the filling. Then pop it in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit
or 175 Celsius for one hour. Now you'll notice that this oven is rather
impractical for modern bakers. Frankly you could bake about six cookies at a time in
it. Rather different from your typical modern
oven, but what it does have that a modern oven also has is a thermostat to tell you
that the oven is at 350 degrees, but that was not always the case. In fact
that's rather recent in the evolution of the oven, so while our fish pudding bakes and you go ahead
and hit the Like button let's take a look at how this staple of the
modern kitchen came to be. Now I'm not going to give an entire history
of ovens or stoves because frankly that could fill an entire book, but I will give a little background of how
we got to the stove that is in pretty much everyone's kitchen today. Also the term stove or sometimes called a
range can vary from place to place, and from time period to time period, so for
our purposes I mean an oven that is paired with a stove top because for much of history those two things
didn't always go together. The stove top was usually actually the hearth
or the floor of the fireplace, or next to a fire pit. You would build a wood fire and
could have pots hanging over the flame or cook foods and pans near the flame. The oven
was generally separate and started out just as a hole in the ground that would be filled with
hot coals and then you would put the food over that
and then you would heap dirt over that, and they still do that in some places especially at
a luau in Hawaii where they make the pig that way. Then around 25,000 years ago pottery ovens that
didn't require dirt to be thrown on top of the food were developed in the Indus Valley in modern
day India and Pakistan. Mud brick ovens were developed an ancient Sumer and around 2,500
years ago they made one that had a flat top that you could put a pan or a pot on essentially
making the first kitchen stove. But the combination didn't really seem to
take off as evidenced in the beehive ovens that were common in Northern Europe, East
Asia and the Americas, or the large bread ovens of ancient Rome
which tended to be built into a masonry wall. Though those Roman ovens like the one at
Modestus bakery in Pompeii used to bake panis quadratus would basically set the standard at least
in Europe for about the next thousand years because these masonry ovens became the staple
of Medieval Europe where most towns had a communal oven large enough to bake the bread for
an entire village. And in many places you had to use that oven
as it was part of a feudal lord's rights. Everyone had to bake the bread in his oven and
he got to tax every loaf. Pretty sweet deal as long as you're the lord. Now at home most people were stuck with their
hearth to cook most of their food and the major issue with that was that the chimney
had yet to really take off. The very first ones appeared around the 12th
century but very few homes had them until the 17th or even 18th century, and without a chimney with just a hole in
the roof your house tended to be a very smoky place, so much so that you could smoke sausages in the
same room where you slept. Convenient but not ideal, but the smoke issue
led to some wonderful developments in the stove. See the first home stoves weren't just a
way to heat up food but also to heat up the actual home itself, and if you could retain the heat but get
rid of most of the smoke at the same time all the better. In Central Europe this led to clay ovens
being built indoors often with ceramic pots embedded into the clay which helped to radiate
the heat outwards. They were still very smoky but a lot less so than just an open fire in
the center of the room, and they often had a flat top so you could
warm a pot while you warm yourself. That was a far cry from central heating but
they could often heat the entire room which was called a stuba in Middle German or a stofa in Old English, and that's where
we get the word stove. Isn't etymology fun. This also makes the philosopher René Descartes
1619 claim that "I remained all day locked up alone in a stove, where I had every leisure
to entertain my thoughts." A little less alarming. Now by the 18th century most homes had true
fireplaces with chimneys, and the stove market was just primed for
innovation and expansion. There were the Jamb stoves or five plateÂ
stoves which were essentially a cast iron box that was placed at the back of a kitchen
fireplace heating the room on the other side of the wall. In France there was the Castrol
stove or stew stove and in America Benjamin Franklin developed the Franklin stove or Pennsylvania
fireplace which was meant to completely replace the home's hearth. The stove fit right into
the fireplace and was designed to siphon a greater deal of smoke up the existing chimney, though they could also be placed in the center
of the room and have a chimney of their own. The concept was improved with the Rumford
stove invented by Benjamin Thompson who earned the title Count Rumford. He also developed a fireplace called the
Rumford fireplace which many people in the fireplace industry think is actually better
than modern fireplaces, and for some reason at the end of the 19th century they just
stopped making them. Regardless his stove was a huge step in reducing
the smokiness of the food being cooked which was always an issue when you were using wood
to heat your food, and that was the primary fuel used up until the 19th century. And while that may sound charming it does
leave a smokiness, pleasant or unpleasant, to the food. And it was the same issue with a new heat
source: coal. Mott's oven, pot belly stoves, Stewart's Oberlin iron stove they all used coal or wood to heat the inside
of a box just as it had been done for thousands of years, and the only big issue with that is it's really
hard to gauge the  temperature I recently went to the Renaissance festival
near me and Garet Gardina was kind enough to walk me through the process of heating an
oven this way. Essentially you have to build a fire just
like in a fireplace, then let it heat the bricks or whatever material
the oven is made out of which can take hours. Then you would remove all the fuel and put
in the food and the food would bake using the residual
heat and this meant that you really had to time
how you were going to do your cooking. First you would start with those things that
really needed a high heat upwards of 800 degrees Fahrenheit, and often old recipes would call that a very
hot or a quick oven, and then you would move on to things like cakes and tarts that require
a little bit less heat, often called a moderate oven, and then some recipes would call for
a slow oven or a slack oven and that is basically a cooling oven and those foods need very
little heat or they don't need a long time in the oven. Now of course there were ovens that let you
add fuel while you were baking to keep the heat going but for most smaller ovens you had to take
it all out and just rely on what was there. The other big issue baking this way is to
actually know what the temperature is. One way to gauge it was to take raw flour
and throw it into the oven and see how long it took to brown. Another way the way that
Garrett Gardena and her team did was to stick your arm in the oven and see how long you could hold it there,
but the quest for relatively consistent heat and precise-ish temperatures would finally be achieved at the end of the
19th century with the advent of gas and electric stoves, and the thermostat. The electric stove was invented in 1882 and
an electric oven was exhibited at the Chicago World's fair in 1893. The gas stove was actually invented a long
time before in 1826 by James Sharp but as almost nobody had gas in their house, it
took a while to really take off. And then an oven thermostat was invented in
1899 by Frederick Robertshaw and for the longest time I thought that that
was Robert Shaw the famous choral conductor but it's not, it's Frederick Robertshaw. And by the 1920s it could not only tell the
temperature inside of the oven but it would release more gas to keep it around
that same temperature and it's a Robertshaw thermostat that I have
on my O'Keefe and Merritt oven. So let's take a look at this bad boy and
see how it's similar and different than a stove that you might get today. First of all personally I think that it's
just prettier than most modern day stoves partly because of the white enamel which
makes it a lot easier to clean. Up here we have a clock that still hasn't
switched over to daylight saving time, and it even comes with a timer that I can't figure
out how to use. Plus there is a salt and pepper shaker attached to the sides, though the
P on the pepper has worn off. Then there is this oven cover which can come
up to be out of the way or it even has arms to become a shelf. Then in addition to four of the best, most
sensitive burners I've ever had, there is a griddle which is always kind of
warm because of the pilot light, not hot but always warm and if you had a modern stove
that would be alarming. Also helpful because I'm always dropping
things inside of the burners these trays come out and can easily be cleaned. At the very bottom we have some storage and
above that is my favorite part of the stove, even though I doubt I'll ever use it The Grillevator. Essentially it's a broiler with a grill that
will elevate up and down like an elevator to get it closer or further from the flame and
of course the oven and you'll notice there is nothing inside because it turns out it's
not working properly so we had to move over to the modern oven which is bigger, and it
seems actually works here in the kitchen but I did find somebody who actually works on
these old stoves to come by and and work on it so fingers crossed but for now modern oven. And here we are fish pudding from the 1950s. I'm not gonna lie, it doesn't look too appetizing.
It kind of reminds me a quiche. I don't think quiche looks appetizing but
I do like quiche, but this just looks... less appetizing... but we're gonna try it. Here we go. [Chomp] [Chews] [Chews less enthusiastically] [Pained swallow] I don't like that at all.
Oh that does not spark joy. Okay- all right let's break this down. We
got two flavors here. Both flavors are very nice. The fish well
seasoned, good fish. Rice pudding, tasty. They do not compliment
each other at all, and even worse is the texture. It's like mushy fish, and that's not good. So yeah I can see why
you don't see a lot of fish pudding in modern day cookbooks. It's definitely something that
I feel that we've moved past and- and that's a good thing. Anyway thank you for joining me in my new
kitchen, and make sure to follow me on Instagram @tastinghistorywithmaxmiller and I will see you next time on Tasting History. At least its consistency isn't like chocolate
pudding, that could be worse. X_x
The look on Max’s face when he tries the pie is amazing! Definitely needs to be a meme.
As an Ashkenazi Jew, this seems like some WASP heard of Gefilte Fish in the pre-internet age, and having no Jews to ask, tried to recreate it, and failed hard.
I'd take a go at fixing that by doing it wholly as a baked rice dish, no pre-cooking anything and if that still didn't make it taste better then probably some cheese in the custard, which is perfectly in line with 50's recipes
Number one, that is a beautiful oven.
Number two, I think this is the first dish Max has made that he flat out didn't like. Also now I want to see B Dylan Hollis make this.
I think the 50s had far worse recipes than this, but nothing is quite as bad as bland unseasoned mushy fish pudding.
I died at “oh that does not spark joy.”
If u/jmaxmiller wants to learn more about the journey of kitchen equipment, I heartily recommend "Consider the Fork" by Bee Wilson. Very excellent read!
NGL, when I saw the video title, I felt immediately nauseous. However, I watched it anyway because 1) I love this show and 2) I know that no matter what, we get an honest reaction/opinion about whether the food tastes good or not. And who doesn't want to know whether this gross-sounding food is actually tasty or not??
edit typo
Noms