Caribbean Cooking In The 18th Century - Pepperpot from the 1700's

welcome to 18th century cooking I'm your host John Townsend and I'm excited about today's episode we'll be doing a Caribbean inspired recipe right in the 18th century Pepperpot thanks for joining us today as we savor the flavors in the aromas of the 18th century this recipe comes from the lady's assistant Charlotte Mason 1777 this is an English cookbook but it has this obviously caribbean-inspired Pepperpot recipe to make Pepperpot to add to three quarts of water put in a small cabbage two large handfuls of spinach a head of lettuce two or three onions a little thyme cut them very small and let them stew let them stew with two pounds of mutton till they are quite tender boil with them some little dumplings made of flour and water and a piece of pork a little salted a half an hour before it's taken up put in a lobster or a crab picked very small and clean from the shell with a little salt and cayenne pepper so this pepper pot is really a take on a 18th century pepper pot made in the West Indies and then sort of translated into the English context you can imagine that Charlotte Mason the author of this particular cookbook she she didn't go to the West Indies and watch pepper pot being made and she probably never ate a West Indian pepper pot but someone came from the West Indies and explained this dish and maybe made it so that she had a chance to sort of interpret it so we have an interpretation an 18th century interpretation of an 18th century pepper pot probably nothing like a pepper pot is made today but we're gonna make this recipe we are gonna tweak it a little bit it seems like she's very light on the pepper of the pepper pot so we'll play with that a little bit first off though we've got a lot of greens here I've got some spinach you've got a cabbage that we're gonna cut up a little bit we've got collard greens and a little bit of lettuce we're gonna chop those up nice and small and get them going in our pot right away let's add two onions diced up nice and fine to add into our greens so the meat portion of this that we're gonna put in today is pork it's fresh pork the recipe called for mutton was probably an inexpensive cut for the time period she also calls for a little bit of salt pork we we've got a we've got an opportunity here to put in whatever we please here you could put in some beef likes to be something similar to that right here I've got some pork already diced up into nice smaller pieces that looks good it's boiling up we might leave that boil for half an hour or so but right now we're gonna work on our hard dumplings that's the next part of this recipe she doesn't say exactly when to toss these in so we're gonna make them up right now we'll probably let that boil for an hour 45 minutes and then we'll toss these in and let them cook for a little bit but let's make them up now super simple I've got flour here and I'm just gonna toss in a good bit of flour I don't know maybe I have 12 ounces of flour I'm gonna add just it just a touch of salt to that that looks good and now water and I'm gonna make this up into a hard paste it's just flour salt water add enough okay it's a nice stiff pace that's what looking for we're just gonna tear it off into say walnut sized little balls roll those up like that there are hard dumplings we're gonna make sure they're all sealed up sometimes they don't have quite we're gonna have a consistency so it all locks together and doesn't doesn't want to fall apart at all right that's that's our dumpling these are so simple and they show up in a lot of these kinds of soups and stews if you want some other kind of filler in there really really common this looks really good it's been slow boiling about an hour hour and a half the meat is wonderful and tender the other things haven't broken down too much so I don't want to let it cook too long next up in the recipe it says a half hour before serving or a half hour before you take it up you're supposed to put in either some lobster or some crab meat and it says that it should be all picked you know fine we don't want to shell we don't need big chunks this should be a fine fine crab meat here and remembering the time period that lobster and crab were probably fairly inexpensive meats here so this isn't necessarily a super fancy way to fix it up at least in the 18th century it might be today somebody put the crab meat in and now we get to the namesake of a pepper pot let's talk about the pepper this isn't black pepper or white pepper that's being used in this it's cayenne pepper sometimes called Guinea pepper because it came from the Guinea coast of South America that's what we're gonna put into this we've got a little bit of salt as it calls for and then says cayenne pepper does it mean a little bit of cayenne pepper or does it mean a lot well that's up to you isn't it let me tell you this smells great and I don't know if I have any anything quite like this can't wait to try this out lots of greens in here lots of greens and it's got pork and this crab meat and it's got the dumplings there's a lot of stuff going on in here let me find a little bit of the crabmeat [Music] mmm yes yes and I think I put in just the right amount of cayenne definitely a pepper pot not just a you know a stew we've got more things to try out the greens we want some other textures in there we have the dumpling a little bit of pork this this is great it may not be exactly like a pepper pot that you know but it is so good this really really interesting 18th century English interpretation of a pepper pot this has been so much fun this Caribbean inspired dish with oh just this right amount of kick you know if you want a very similar episode make sure to check out this Michael Twitty episode where we talk about barbecue

Channel: Townsends

Views: 509,383

Keywords: 18th century, 18th century cooking, 19th century, caribbean, caribbean cooking, cayenne pepper, crab meat, history, jas townsend and son, jon townsend, kettle, kettle cooking, pepper, pepperpot, pork, reenacting, townsends

Id: MPEZv7e5Wbs

Length: 8min 8sec (488 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 05 2019