Cooking Marathon! - 18th Century Cooking Season 12

welcome to 18th century cooking I'm John Townson and we're doing a wonderful dish today we're actually doing something that seems very modern but actually works perfectly for 200 years ago we're doing macaroni or we might call it today macaroni and cheese thanks for joining us [Music] today macaroni is a really interesting topic especially in England and the 18th century it shows up in like 1760s 1770s not for the pasta dish specifically but for fashion which sounds kind of strange uh young gentlemen in the 18th century they would take a continental trip uh English gentleman they would take this Continental trip they would travel through Europe and they would go to Italy and they would get ideas for interesting ideas for fashion and for food and all kinds of of things they'd come back to England they'd bring these ideas with them and many times they wore sort of over-the-top extravagant clothing and they would call these guys macaroni or they would they would uh say they were part of the macaroni club right and part of that is because they went to Italy and they enjoyed macaroni the dish the food but the reason why they were called macaroni was because of what they were wearing now the macaroni the dish The food doesn't really show up in English cooking or at least in the English cookbooks until a little bit later into the 18th century you really start to see these show up into the cookbooks in the 1780s 1790s it gets much more popular so the recipe we're doing today is from 1784 it's John Farley's London art of cookery and this one's just titled macaroni let's get started so the pasta we're working with today here is a small tube pasta It's hard to guess exactly what they're macaroni was like there are some other recipes though that that talk about small pipe um macaroni that you cut into pieces so apparently was rather long tubes uh so today we're working with this which about inch and a half Small Tube let's get this 4 oz of pasta into our boiling water so our macaroni has boiled up nice and tender and I've uh put it in the Sie to dry it off well and now it goes into a tossing pan or into a frying pan along with our macaroni goes a uh a gill of cream so I've got a gill of heavy cream here we're going to pour that in and uh and a gill is about a half a cup and this is a a balll of butter rolled in flour that goes in here as well and then onto the fire for about 5 minutes after the 5 minutes it comes off of the fire and here we add a lot of Parmesan cheese and as the as the recipe says toasted all over it I'm coming in here with a salamander and toasting the top of this to Brown it lightly wow that looks so good well again this germ dish looks tremendous with that nice Brown uh cheese up on top and I'm going to add just a hair of uh pepper to my my uh macaroni cheese because that's the way I like it let's find out how this particular batch turned out I really enjoy parmesan cheese it's one of those uh cheeses that shows up many times in 18th century recipes a few of the macaroni and cheese recipes that you see at the late 18th century instead of Parmesan they have uh cheser cheese which is a common one that you'll see in the cookbooks also uh one of the things it talks about is that this cools off very rapidly and that you should serve it on a water plate in the 18th century they had these uh plates that were sort of like double plates put together that you could pour hot water into the center of them to keep your dish nice and warm so that it could come to the table hot and it would stay hot that's one of the dishes several of the recipes talk about that that you want to put it in a water plate to keep it warm but tremendous flavors a wonderful fairly simple recipe to put together and right out of the 18th century so there you go 18th century macaroni and cheese great flavors simple dish to do today we're going to be making a green sweet meat we're going to be candying lime peel I went back into the cookbooks uh looking at candied peel or citrus peel recipes there were many of them uh they range from very very complicated like uh Hannah glass's recipe for Candy lime peel it takes 7 Days of soaking etc etc some of the the recipes are actually very simple we'll be kind of meeting halfway in between with this recipe let's get started uh before we start cut cutting up limes let's talk about the lime just a little bit these uh you want to pick the right lime and I first started off with these sort of like extra large key limes to experiment with turns out that they have very little rind uh they're just if if you peel take the peel off of these there's there's no like pth there which is actually what turns out to be what we're candying find a nice thick peeled lime something that looks a lot more like a lemon than one of those little tiny limes right so I've got a good big lime here cut it in half cut it in quarters and then we can start to uh to get the peel off of it you want to keep this white pith on there so we can kind of shave this excess off a little bit if we need to I'm going to take the peels slice them into kind of thin slivers and then we're we're going to pop them into this Pipkin here pour some water over them and get them steeping the directions call for switching the water out three times so once these come up to boil for 15 minutes or 20 minutes or so pour the water off start it boiling again so we're trying to achieve two things while we simmer these in the water we're trying to take away the bitterness and we're trying to make them very tender so so you can test these out with your fingernail when they don't have that leather hard peel flavor anymore peel texture and they've softened up they're ready to go so these guys are ready to come off the fire and we will just get those out of the pan and now that these are nice and tender ready to go we can start the candying process this one's really simple it's a 50/50 mix between water and I've got about 8 ounces of water here and sugar so I've let me get about 8 ounces of sugar that should be about right doesn't doesn't have to be totally perfect let's get this on this fire and uh dissolve the sugar then we'll put in a peel we're going to simmer these up in our sugar bath until they become transparent and then they are basically done we can take them off put them on a little a bed of sugar and sprinkle sugar over the top then they need to dry so there there is our garnish they look great they'll make a beautiful garnish a look on the plate the question is what do they taste like we want these to taste good too so let's find out exactly how our lime peel turned out wow they still have you know after you would think after boiling in water for you know a long time to get rid of all that bitterness and then boiling in the sugar that there wouldn't be no lime flavor that came through but these have a wonderful little lime flavor I mean I guess if you're kind of connect this in a modern context sort of like a little gummy bear um kind of but lime flavored really really [Music] good welcome to 18th century cooking we'll be doing an episode today that uses beets but it's not exactly probably what you're thinking we're going to be making pink pancakes thanks for joining us [Music] today now this recipe is from Hannah glasses the art of cookery it isn't in the early edition that we published this one's actually from the 1803 Edition but it's a great recipe and it's perfect time of year for it so we're going to do it this one's really easy to get started uh we just need one of these beats and it's really simple here we're just going to cut off the very top and the very bottom and we're just going to boil this guy for about 45 minutes I think our uh beet has boiled long enough we need to get the skin off of it if it's cooked long enough the skin will probably just pop right [Music] off we'll just chop these up into a few uh a bit smaller pieces and then they can go into our large bowl beat these up into a fine [Music] texture okay so I think I got most of it uh this is really really hard to do to get this beet down into basically a beet puree uh doing it with the classic mortar and pestle which is what calls for in the recipe can take a long time it's very laborious you and your modern kitchen will likely use something like a mixer um or a a blender maybe to get this into uh into its Real Fine consistency but once we're there it's time to start adding in our regular ingredients so uh I've got she calls for four egg yolks uh whisked up so I've got four egg yolks here three spoonfuls of cream and I'm not sure exactly where where this Spoonful is so you know I'm just going to kind of guess a glass of Brandy and this isn't a big glass this is one of these little glasses also calls for ground a nutmeg probably quarter of a nutmeg now she calls for just two spoonfuls of flour there's not a lot of flour here so we're going to add two spoonfuls of flour and I will add flour to this as I feel like we've gotten to the consistency now we've got all these things in our Bowl now the directions are to um whip this for a half hour so you see me back in a half hour uh so as you get started whisking this uh it's time to taste it she says sweeten to taste and I suppose that uh you know without any sugar here there's it doesn't have any sweetness uh they don't have syrup to pour on these pancakes so we do want them a little sweet we don't want to go nuts with that so you want to add a little bit of sugar as you're whisking this together okay we've whisked this for something like a half hour and kind of beat in um a lot of air and that's the point that's the leavening for these pancakes it's a real typical leavening for the late 18th century early 19th century we're not using anything like baking powder baking soda we're whipping air into those eggs into our mixture that's what's going to leaven this this batter is ready to go we need to get it on uh the fire and start cooking these up in a pan now the the real thing here is we want to have pink pancakes not brown pancakes uh we need to lightly butter this pan so I've got a a bowl of butter inside of a linen rag here so that we can lightly butter this uh pan to cook it in and now let's uh we don't want it to be too hot we got our batter we don't want it to sizzle cuz we'll have a brown pancake for sure and we'll just get three going here we're not going to make them too big cuz we we want these to be easy to turn over there we go there are a beautiful pink pancakes she talks about having these on the table maybe as a side piece not of course is the main thing but this is to go into a large dinner where you have lots of fancy dishes and we have pink pancakes here they've got their green garnish this is all about the color that's what these beets aren't here for the flavor they're here for the color they look great but let's find out what they taste [Music] like a lot of pancake there really really interesting especially with the sweet meat garnish um we would be used of course to eating our pancake with a syrup or something else this um this doesn't have anything like that but the garnish here or the sweet meat sets off these pancakes perfectly and they're really nice thing is at least for me is that the beets aren't a strong flavor component they're down there they're buried uh that beet flavor the beets are here to turn it pink um but they have a wonderful great uh pancake flavor these are high-end pancakes with sugar in them and they've got uh Brandy in it and nutmeg in it so this is a fancy dish meant for a fancy dinner party they look great they taste great this would make a wonderful addition of course this time of year they kind of fit well too so this one turns out really really good and it's one of those kind of you know recipes that's uh hidden inside of uh Hannah glass's cookbook so it's a fun one that as you're digging through that cookbook you find uh little nuggets like this that we don't have in our modern repertoire so the recipe today is from the uh recipe book of Harriet pikney hary uh this she started her recipe book in 1770 and she continued to add to it uh through the late 18th century and the very early 19th century this is a very uniquely uh North American recipe because it's an adaptation of a cornbread recipe so if you take uh one of the traditional cornbread recipes of the 18th century and you change it into rice this is what you get this is a rice recipe and it starts off very simply let's get a little bit of rice flour cooking right now so we're going to start off with by uh getting a little bit of water boiling here I probably got I don't know two cups or so of uh hot water going and then we're going to start boiling that and this recipe the main ingredient here is rice flour and that's pretty interesting we don't see rice flour showing up in a lot of these recipes um she actually calls for uh rice to be pounded up and sifted which is very simil simar to what they would have done with corn and cornmeal many times instead of grinding corn at a cornmeal they would uh they would pound it up and sift it so we've got pounded up and sifted or in this case just plain uh rice flour from the store we're going to let our water get hot we're going to take a quarter of our full batch of rice flour so the whole recipe will use one pound we're using a/4 pound of uh rice flour and we're going to slowly introduce it here into this hot water and get it all all boiling and make it into a sticky sort of Hasty Pudding of the time period I'm just going to uh add this a little bit at at a time because I don't want to Clump up and uh cause a lot of trouble so we're just going to keep adding this until this gets to a nice thick um let's say a gelatinous goo I'm not sure how to explain this a well but we're just going to keep cooking this up and it actually it goes really quickly as soon as we get to a certain critical mass uh this will thicken right up and um get like a lot like a really thick oatmeal okay it looks plenty thick I'm going to go ahead and get this off the fire and we need to let it cool so our rice mixture has cooled off we need to bring this down to at least blood temperature uh let's say 100° 105 degrees you can just stick your finger in there if you if it feels hot at all it's still too hot but you don't want it to be cold necessarily we're going to put this into a mixing bowl uh yours might be a little thicker than this this is just slightly runnier than I usually do it um now we need to mix a we need to mix yeast into this because this is a yeast risen bread I've got some uh yeast back here some B actually some ale B I recently was brewing a batch of of uh of Ale and so I've got some of this B left over here and I've made sure it's kind of active and going um you'll probably be using a a regular bread yeast that you get at the store you'll probably get one of those little packets right so put it into let's say a cup of very slightly warm water uh let that kind of percolate for 10 or 15 minutes dissolve and do all its thing and start getting active U but since I've got this B I'm going to go ahead and put it in here um again about a Cup's worth we're going to get this mixed in to our current lump here okay now that we've got that mixed in I'm going to go ahead and start adding this uh this other rice flour back into the mix so remember we started off with a pound complete and now we're adding um first we used a quar of a pound to make that that's uh first uh boiled mixture and now we're taking the rest this 3/4 of a pound and adding it in I'm going to go ahead and at this point too add in a little bit of salt this is going to inhibit the the yeast a little bit um but but it kind of needs a little salt the salt isn't necessarily in the recipe and of course we could add this um add whatever that is to the topping this bread is meant to be kind of plain uh it's a filler for other parts of the meal uh so here's our mixture uh I've got all that flour incorporated into that and this is um this is probably a little I mean I've done several batches of this this is a little softer than what I've done before but I still think it's going to turn out just just fine uh so what we're going to do now is uh prepare a bowl that we're going to bake this in now you could bake this in a p pie plate um so that's it's kind of thin it might be a little easier to get this baked up properly in that but um I've got here these tin bowls they make a really nice loaf pan and so let me get this buttered up and then we'll put our uh dough right into this so we do want to give this a little bit of room to grow so I left just a little bit let me smooth this out on top because uh we want to let this rise now and to get it to rise uh we're going to let it be in a warmer spot and to know when it's done Rising instead of like regular BR bread that's going to you know raise up like two times or whatever and get huge this is just going to raise a little bit and the the key just like on uh corn breads the key to this is to look for a little bit of cracking when we see that ball open up a little bit and start to crack we know okay it's risen enough it's time it can go in the oven so I'm going to set this aside in a nice warm place and watch for the cracking it might take 45 minutes it might take 2 hours depends all on the temperature and on your yeast and all that good stuff so let me set this aside we can see the cracking has appeared on the outside of this loaf depending on how soft it is or hard it is you'll see more or less of that cracking it's time for it to go into the oven and I would say this is best to bake at say 400° for I don't know it really depends 25 35 minutes depends on the temperature of your oven I'm cooking this in the earn oven so it's going to be a little bit hotter probably about 450 when I start to bake this well our finished product our rice bread and um you can see here we've got we got some decent structure out of something that has even though it's called you know uh gelatinous or gooey or whatever it doesn't have any gluten in it so um this actually has a pretty normal kind of structure compared to something like a cornbread that's made in exactly the same manner and again I I this is a seemingly a exact um adaption of a period cornbread to Rice so um I'm I'm going to try this just like it is first and really there's not much here there's rice there's water there's a little bit of B there's a little bit of salt that's it it's as simple as can be and it tastes like what you would expect it very plain this is the filling part of the meal well we can add a little bit of butter to this I think that's a obvious um thing we could do we could probably put all kinds of different um um items on top of this as a as an additional flavor we can heat this up we could cut it in slices like this and fry it in the morning morning I bet that would be really good such a unique recipe using rice as a substitution for cornmeal to make this cornbread type product out of rice uh very popular here this cookbook was from South Carolina where rice was very very popular so you can see this is um really it is a unique one there is one other rice bread recipe in that same cookbook but this one was so quick so simple uh I loved it and right out of the h 18th century welcome to 18th century cooking I'm John Townson and with us today we have a special guest Michael Dru and we we're going to be doing a recipe which one is it today it's called a scotch cop by Eliza Smith thanks for joining us [Music] today so Michael tell us about Scotch cops and this recipe in particular well we just start out with the with the title Scotch CBS from my past or slices of meat4 in to half in thick um but scotching from my the recipes I've done in the past um it means to coat or to cover like a scotch egg but in this time period Scotch can also mean scoring the meat hacking scoring in fact in the recipe there's the word hack which I think is she's referring to the the scoring particularly this recipe Right comes from uh Eliza Smith complete housewife 17 30 1730 so it's early this is a wonderful cookbook uh that has tons tons of recipes in it this is one of the new ones that we are reprinting if you're interested in this uh cookbook there'll be a link down in the description section so how do we get started what's our main ingredient here obviously well it's it's um they're using beef it can be a young it can be V or it can be a more mature I I've got a a piece of of beef here and I've cut it into my uh into my olps already and I'm just going to Scotch it so what cut of meat are we using here yeah this is just a roast I'm just going to I'm going to Scotch these up okay but while I'm doing this while I'm scotching this beef if you want to mix up our uh start our dredge it's just some it's four egg yolks and some melted butter okay so into this mixture we put in nutmeg which the recipe calls for and a little bit of salt it goes into the liquids here not into what we would have guessed into the flour but now what uh we're just going to dredge the cops in the egg mixture and then the flour and then we're going to fry them [Music] up first we put a little butter in the pan just to fry up our cops we're going to get them about halfway to 2/3 of the way through once this beef is uh cooked to taste to your preference uh we're going to add a a good gravy a rich gravy and we're going to add some mushrooms this gravy consists of really whatever you want it to it can be bones left over from a previous meal it's carrots celery I've got some parsnips I've mixed up uh onion it's it's whatever you wanted it to be and once again if you like your meat pink you'd pull it out a little sooner if you'd like it cooked through you just leave it a little later well there we are they it looks fun looks smells great y now we're supposed to squeeze a little bit of orange over the top of this so we're going to do that uh there we go what kind of oranges would they have had then these Chinese oranges or right so if you look in the cookbooks they mentioned two different kinds of oranges uh China oranges and civil oranges most of the time they were probably referring to civil oranges so this would have been a bitter orange likely I'm guessing she doesn't necessarily pick can we get those today anywhere um sometimes you're can to find them they're not easy to find so you ready let's give this a try oh let's give this another try what that wasn't the it's going to be better yeah so this is the egg was very thick so we've got that kind of egg set on the outside of this kind of like a Swiss steak with the flour but right there's more depth of flavor here with the um with this gravy well that gravy's killer I mean anytime you do that you're going to make this you know Wonderful it's got some man uh the mushroom flavor is in there you know all that gravy of course course you can taste that nutmeg it just comes right out so do you think that they were scotching this to get it more tenderized or to get the flavor more in the well probably both but I mean and so that it so that it grips onto that breading as we put it on there so that really gives it a a way to adhere to it that's excellent that's really good yeah excellent excellent recipe uh Eliza Smith did a wonderful job again though yes she did uh Scotch Cops show up so often in a Century cookbook so uh this is one of those just standard recipes that that you should [Music] expect welcome to 18th century cooking I'm John townsand and we'll be starting a short series on rice pudding today we'll be working on the rich version thanks for joining us rice puddings are very popular in the 18th century cookbooks whether they're English or the cookbook we'll be using today you'll find multiple recipes so today we might open up a recipe book and we'll find what one or maybe two uh rice pudding recipes but if you look in these old cookbooks uh they'll have three four or in the case of today's cookbook Amilia Simmons's a little tiny American cookery cookbook it's got six different versions of rice pudding in it so I picked out one that was the sort of fanciest one and later on we'll be doing the one that she calls a cheap one but today we'll be working on this Rich version of a rice pudding let's get started let's talk about the rice number one this is rice pudding uh we're using recipe number four in Emilia Simmons's cookbook and recipe number four starts off with boil in water a half a pound of GRA ground rice now if you're in the UK this might ring a bell with you ground rice here where we are ground rice you can say that and we have no idea exactly what is meant by ground rice does that mean um flour like rice flour does it mean sort of uh partially ground um or does it mean something different even like polished rice it could mean a lot of different things well apparently in this context uh ground rice in this period and still is in the UK sort of a partially ground rice um granulated I guess might be another word not pulverized not turned into a flower but sort of half ground and here in the United States the closest thing we've got to that is cream of rice that you can find in the grocery store at least I can find at my local grocery store and this is sort of a I don't know rice ground up into say maybe a fifth of its normal size but not into powder that's what we're going to be using for this EP for this particular uh recipe so for the next step we're going to take our ground rice and we're going to put it in uh we're going to actually boil it in milk and we have to boil this really slowly I've halfed this recipe so here I've got 4 oz of this ground rice and in our U cooking vessel here I've got one quart of milk and I'll just take this in and I'm going to take this over the fire and we're going to heat it up and slowly cook it while stirring it so it doesn't turn into one big Clump so let's get this on the fire our mixture is off the fire it's really nice and thick at this point you can see how thick it is um it's got uh still got a lot of heat into it one of the next ingredients here is butter and since we want it to get mixed in nicely we're going to put the butter in while this is still warm although we're going to let it cool off I've got 3 oz of butter we'll put this in get it mixed up and I'm going to set this aside for a few minutes to melt the butter and to cool off a little bit so let's come back in a second so our mixture is cooled off enough now that we can start to mix in our other ingredients we can put in three eggs these have been uh whisked up nicely let's put in some salt probably about a teaspoon or so this recipe also calls for the expensive versions of the spices that we go in one of these so we've got nutmeg of course this one one she calls for an entire small nutmeg to be put into that this is a half recipe so I don't need quite that much nutmeg but but uh yep we got some good nutmeg in there uh some cinnamon that's another one of these expensive spices that go in this so we got some cinnamon here most of the recipes call for some sort of sweetener in this one the sweetener is raisins the recipe calls for a full pound we're going to put in a half pound cuz of the half recipe now for this fancy version of the rice pudding we're doing something a little special we've got a puff paste in a pie pan and we're going to go ahead and just put our filling in here we don't want to overfill it too much cuz it might grow out and cause us trouble I think that's probably about enough I can probably uh do another little mini pie or a mini pudding with what's left over here okay okay and since this is one that's a little fancier let's go ahead and put some puff paste decoration up on top so there it is it's all decorated it's time for it to go in the oven you'll probably bake this at a typical 350° the recipe calls for 2 hours this one might not take quite as long as that but let's get it in the oven we'll watch it and see just exactly how long it [Music] takes here is our fancy our well to-do rice pudding definitely has lots of different ingredients in it the expensive ingredients the puff paste the everything else let's see what it tastes like well this one is very thick and Rich because the the rice is a finer grained here it's much uh the consistency is very kind of thick throughout so a very interesting texture and a good one uh the of course I love it with the raisins in it the raisins are perfect in here and having that crust that whole puff paste really kind of sets it up another notch and makes it look very beautiful compared to other kinds of rice puddings that you know just kind of of um cook up in a pot they don't look quite like this one does this one's got a wonderful flavor the kind of complexity of flavors and the raisins and the looks of it that it's definitely for a bit more of a well-to-do table than a standard rice pudding that might come so uh even then even at this it's not a very expensive dish and obviously it's showing up in this um American cookery cookbook uh and it's not really filled with with really expensive things this is down home cooking in this cookbook this is just fancier version of that same thing so a wonderful recipe um really still very easy to pull off takes a couple little extra steps and has um several more ingredients uh than your typical uh rice pudding but still just a great recipe hey we're here today with Dan woak of uh coal cracker Bushcraft we're going to be talking about Woodland cooking systems explain yeah so we're going to make a variety of different cooking systems when you're around camp and you have just that campfire going rather than sticking a piece of meat on a stick and struggling with it or bur I do that so rather than doing that you can make different cook systems with what's around us here in the environment to really make cooking more pleasurable make your food better not only make rotisseries but we can make tripods so we can make better stews and and really control what we're doing because we need to think about the long Hunters out there they had very limited meat at certain times so they didn't have an option of burning the meat or absolutely dropping it and losing it in the fire so they had to be a little bit more particular so if you make a nice cook system you can not only feed yourself better but you have multiple men you could set up cook systems so everybody can do what they need to do around that campfire so what do we need for getting this done a variety of different branches out here so we're going to go pick some and then we'll get started with the systems so what kind of species and type of wood were we looking for here so it depends on the cook system species doesn't matter too much as long as it's Greenwood we don't want any type of dead wood for the simple fact it's going to be exposed to heat at some point so we don't want that actually catching on fire so Greenwood's going to be best for the tripod which I really feel is a quintessential Camp tool because not only can we cook with it but we can use it for a smoke system to smoke meat but we can also use it for shelters smoking hides it's very important so with something like this we want long straight sticks about an inch in diameter okay is good enough that's going to be good and strong if it's Greenwood and about 5 to 6 foot in length is most optimal you can make them shorter but this longer length just seems to be a little more options yes exactly so the process can be very simple or very complex we're going to take the middle of the road we're going to put a proper lashing on this so if cordage was at a very minimum out in the field you can just use one or two wraps and make it sort of work but we'll put a good lashing on here and then the way we're going to lash is we can always remove that cording that cordage when we're done so it's a very simple thing can reuse it yeah yes so first thing we want to do is get the bottom of our sticks lined up and again I cut all of these very close to the same length Okay so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to get the sticks where they lay very evenly yep and I'll take a piece of cordage that I have now how you start this can vary there's no really proper way so I'm just going to put a loop on here that has a slip knot okay and start to tighten this down now anytime we W wrap around the sticks this way is a lashing and the wrappings inside are the frapping okay so first we're going to put a lashing so we're going to begin to just wrap this around these sticks and just take your time with this and get it to lay in there properly so we looking to bind these up really tight well you can it depends on what project if this was a shelter I would really want to bind these up good and tight so it doesn't move one option you could do to bind these up tight is take just an extra piece of stick that I gathered while I'm out there and use it as a toggle just to tighten that up now you see how that bunched up we don't want that to happen so we're going to just open that back up a little bit and use our knee right here to keep that in line and I'm just going to tighten that down so for every three lashings one frapping is a good idea so it doesn't have to be exact but as long as we're close with that I think it's going to hold up just fine for us so I'm done my lashings there I will grab my toggle again just to put a little bit of tension on that M now I'm going to begin my frapping so I'm going to go in between right each of this and around and this is really what's going to bind up and make this work more properly now you might have to play around with this a little bit to get it to fit between yeah yep and I'm just going to continue I'll put two frapping okay around in between each one of those in between each one of [Music] those and really that'll be it then at this point so we made our L our lashings and our frapping now to finish this off you could do several different things we're just going to put a half hitch in here just to hold it simple just something simple to hold it in place and we will be set to go so should we give this a try now over the fire all right so B very simple just open it up and you can feel it's a little bit tight now but that will adjust over time as we loosen up on that and this is our leftover yeah so we always want to make sure that we have leftover cordage because it's very simple then we take that toggle I was using to tighten down that lashing and with just a very simple slip knot so I place that simple toggle on if you'd like grab that pot and then we just use that bail to hold our pot in place look at that now the beauty of this system is number one we can make very fine adjustments by just sliding our tripod in see we got some height or if you want to grab that leg and open that up we can even get lower and then if we need other type of adjustment we can also always wrap this over the top sure and we can really get that high off of the fire and that way if we need to simmer something it works really well so you can see how well this works with something yeah it's so simple and so versatile yep yep so what have we got here so we're going to make a pot suspension system and the beauty of this system is that you can put multiple pots on the campfire you can make it as big as you would need so if you have a real big long fire in multiple minute Camp everybody can use the fire equally so what we're going to need to do is we need two uprights that are y branches okay now these can vary in length I like to say around 3T in length is best with a Y on top and then on the outside of your fire pit you're going to just push them straight down inside so if you want to give a little push down to that one get them as level as we can and then what we're going to do is just take a straight Branch that's long enough to go across both of them just like that and you can level this system out as much as you would need to but it looks pretty good right now so you might be thinking what actually are we going to do with this I mean we just have a bar hanging there well we make hanging Sy hangers so there's different types of hangers we can make this hanger right here is just a y Branch so it was growing up this way we trimmed it here and I put a notch up top right but we're actually going to flip that to use it so when we hang our pot we use that Notch and we can hang it this way over the fire you can put multiple notches up on here and that will allow the pot different heights depending what you need sure then we can also take two wide branches if we have some extra twine or cordage with us and tie them off so I have one wide branch that was growing this way and another one that was growing this way lashed them together hang that on here right and you can hang your pot on there right also so as you can see we're a little close to the fire there so making multiple hangers is going to be most beneficial and again you could take this up as high as you would want or as low as you want depending on what your actually doing and we could hang other things on this other than the pots we could probably you could even hang a piece of meat on that if you needed to or if you took sliced meat and you skewed it through you can hang it almost like a kebab and then just cut it as it Cooks right so what do we' got here well this is very similar the setup to the last pot suspension system so we still have the Y upright branches but you can see that I lowered them a lot okay and the reason I lowered them is we're actually going to make a rotisserie so if we have any type of meat Source we can actually rotisserie it over the fire now to do that rather than just that single straight stick I took another y branch and then I lashed a smaller Branch onto that and the reason for that is if we put just a piece of meat on a round Branch it's going to spin and we can't get that rotisserie effect so this is going to work as a clamp once we skewer our meat and tie it down then the meat's not going to go anywhere we can lay this across the y Branch just like this and the reason this is a y is because we can then use that to incrementally rotate it yes yep so we're going to do that and we can just turn it around that way now this morning I actually harvested a rabbit so we can put the rabbit right on the skewer and take a look at what it looks like okay so I now have this lashed on and you can see as I rotate this it's not sliding on the spit itself so we can set it right in place here like this and then as we need to rotate that we would just do so so it works really well this way to just constantly keep rotating that and get a good nice even roast all around it well we've got meat we got the the The Cooking System I suppose we should get a fire going and uh cook this rabbit up this reminds me so much of what's going on in Nicholas creswell's journal they're traveling into the back country they don't have very many provisions and many of the provisions they have with them get spoiled along the way um they are eating off the land as they travel you know whatever game they can get a hold of that's what they're cooking they're eating in the most simplistic way possible so the rabbit has been cooking now for about 25 to 30 minutes and in a spirit of Long Hunter we're just going to eat right off the stick here so we'll cut ourselves a little section I'm going to cut some of this back strap off for us right through here get you some meat right off that hey it looks done yeah yeah I'll give it a little taste here smoked rabbit yeah rotisserie style yeah really good and if you were hungry and didn't eat for a couple days it'd be really good yeah and no gaminess at all on this thing no it's wonderful um basically chicken flavor really yeah in this episode we'll be demonstrating a food preservation technique that is really meant to show historical methods but is not meant to meet modern food safety standards I'm here with Dan wowak of coal cracker Bushcraft and uh we've been talking a little bit about well a lot about Nicholas creswell's Journal Nicholas Creswell was a young Englishman he was touring North America looking about what his future life was going to be like he's wondered if this was where he wanted to settle and he he had some adventures in the back Country and let me read this particular journal entry and we're going to try to reproduce this uh this is May 18th 1775 and he's probably in what is now Kentucky he says all hands are employed in curing our buffalo meat which is done in a peculiar manner the meat is first cut from the bone in thin slices like beef steaks then four sticks are stuck in the ground in a square form small sticks are laid on these Forks to form a grid iron about 3 ft off the ground the meat is laid on this and a slow fire put under it and it is turned until it is done and then he says this is called jerking the meat that's what they referred to it during the time um it answers very well well where salt is not to be had and will keep a long time if it is secured from the wet so does this sound like a typical you know like cooking method you would do yes so anytime you're going to preserve meat smoking is a great resource to do that and you can use just about everything in the environment to help us get that and he and he describes method just like we've kind of done a little bit earlier so we're going to reproduce that what do we need for this so we're going to get the four sticks that have y's on the top so four sticks and then we'll get a bunch of straight sticks that are going to create that Grill top in a sense right and then once we lay that over we're going to take it one step further though we'll put a tripod over it and then wrap it with some extra material that we have here and that's going to help trap the smoke in and allow it to cure a little bit quicker so I got our buffalo meat that we H cut up earlier if you're going to do try this at home make sure to try to get this cut across the grain as much as possible uh this is regular Buffalo and we're just going to lay it out on our our grid iron here have a there you go have a piece here some of these pieces aren't beautiful but um you know sometimes the Buffalo fights you so now we're smoking the meat so we have the meat set on our rack that we built what we're going to do is take just an old scrap of cotton canvas and we're going to wrap around this tripod it's going to help block that smoke right now we don't have a lot of smoke but we have a good bed of Ember so we can feed that with drywood we don't want a lot of flame and heat so we'll feed that with not only drywood but then Greenwood cuz that Greenwood's going to give a nice smoke and we really want this to get super smoky in here and dry this meat out so we'll just take this old canvas and wrap it carefully around this tripod to start to trap in all that smoke when you're doing this you always also want to be careful that none of this is down too low that it's going to actually catch fire so we can just fold that up the best we can and that's going to help trap a lot of that smoke inside to dry out that meat so let's get that fire stoked up and we'll be good to go a lot of the skills that I have learned were passed on from many different individuals over the years if it was not people who directly spoke with me it's from their writings and teachings that they have written in books and journals I would like to pass a lot of this information on to my son so he is a better understanding of what it took for individuals to come to this new land and prosper and make lives for them and their own [Music] families here is our dried buffalo meat kind of smoked and dried and this is what they would have been doing on the on the trail uh to preserve their buffalo and you know crestwell talks about this completely gives us this whole process so we tried this out it took longer than I expected uh you know we we dried it for several hours and then we kind of basically had to let it go all night long before it really got nice and dry and really what we're looking for is drying it not cooking it and you can see by these finished pieces they're kind of black and they kind of crack open they're they're not real soft if they're soft they're going to rot and and he talks about how if you keep them dry they're going to last a long time now maybe for a long time for him was you know a couple of weeks or a month but now the question is what do we do with these now we can try eating these just like they are here you go Dan you give one get a try pick one out there um in it in this state you know it's tough It's dry it's meat yeah it's meat if you're hungry it would be great right it's it's good definitely I mean with the buffalo meat got a little different flavor y than than beef nicely smoked though got a little smoke flavor nice little smoke flavor to it they wouldn't necessarily just eat it like this so they might use this reconstitute it in a stew you know put it in the in the boiling water kind of let it you know uh uh kind of reconstitute itself expand a little bit it's going to probably make a really really interesting stew mix it with some of your other ingredients because you don't want to just be eating this on the trail all the time you want to mix it up right yep and I think too we need to realize that they were eating the survive yeah so many times now we think about eating for pleasure where they were eating cuz they needed to eat to live so something like this is a pure survival food a lot of protein a little bit of fat in there it's great to get you through and get you to the next meal on it gives you energy and all that really the kind of more fat the better really in this kind of circumstance um he he even you know Creswell talks about he complains that these guys don't want to stick around to take the time to make these Provisions to dry this stuff out but uh if you have this dried ready to go when you're you know headed out to your uh event you can have this perfect uh if you're doing something like Long Hunter where they would have had this sort of provision with them so what would you need a little bit of this a little bit of flour or cornmeal and I think you really have a full setup of able to go out and then hunt for the rest of your food fish and then have this as a backup all [Music] right last week we dried and smoked bison meat this week the simplest bison soup just like last week the ideas for this episode actually come from the Journal of Nicholas Creswell 1774 to 1777 and here's a little bit from his journal Kentucky River Saturday June 10th 1775 the people at the camp we lodged at last night gave us some smoked meat on inspecting our flow we found it does not amount to a hole to more than 15 lbs amongst five people must have no more bread but save our flour for soup so this week we're going to be using some of that same smoked and dried bison meat that we actually smoked up last week and it tasted so good it's so wonderful for something that you can just put in your mouth and eat right away but sometimes you want a real meal and so we're going to take just a little bit of flour just like Nicholas Creswell had just a little bit of flour um that that they decided that they would no longer go ahead and make the little bread cakes right there on the fire like they were before that was a waste of the flour they we're going to spread it out and then we're going to use it in soup so we're going to take a little bit of our bison here and a little bit of flour and make some soup I want to give this bison time to kind of steep and expand a little bit in my night hot water and instead of just throwing in these whole strips I'm going to cut these down into nice edible little pieces so let's cut this up so I'm cutting this at a diagonal I want this uh to definitely break apart as much as possible to make it a lot easier to eat and for that water to get all the way in there and make it into a nice soup we're going to let this meat sit in there and stew a while we want that flavor to to get all the way out and into our soup while that's cooking let's talk about flour flour was a uh a ration one of the provisions that they brought along with them on this journey and it was of a great concern about what happens to this ration we they didn't bring enough and some of that gets damaged along the way he writes in May 25th 1775 on inspection we find our flower much damaged we're obliged to come to an allowance of a pint a man per day had we come to this resolution sooner it would have been better great quarreling among the company and then later on the next day he writes our company still continues to be crabbed with one another and then I believe it will grow worse as the bread grows scarce and of course he does find that to be true the whole group of people they get very upset with one another their quarrels they have fights and they break apart at different times and the ration continues to grow scarcer and scarcer and then of course I read the earlier piece which comes later on in the book where he says that they have to stop making that bread by the fire and they have to start using it just in their soup to make that ration spread out even farther our bison has stewed up here for quite a while you know longer is probably better in this kind of situation it really takes quite a while for that boiling water to break down the meat and get it to be soft this one's cooked up about 45 minutes or maybe it's been an hour or so I'm not really sure uh but it's starting to definitely soften up a little bit and uh depends on how long you know you want to take this to cook um I'm going to go ahead and let this cook qu for quite a while but now I can go ahead and add a little bit of my flour into this I you know I'm only just going to use a little bit of flour here just to thicken this up because obviously I've got a very small rash in here and it has to last a long time so I'm going to put this in and stir it up so that it doesn't kind of of uh turn into little dumplings it'll try to do that anyway and that's you know that's all right but if it boils for a little while it'll break up and get a little bit smoother and uh even Nicholas crestwell he did have at times something just a little bit more just a little bit more flavorful he talks about um when they're drying the beef if you've got salt with you it makes it much more flavorful and I just have this tiny little supply of mushroom powder which is a lot like salt but a lot more flavorful and I'm just going to put in just a smidgen of this mushroom powder you know he really talks about that that people get really really bored with the same thing over and over again and it doesn't take much to make something really really special when you're on the [Music] trail well there's our soup it's thick up nicely it's made of just water and the uh the Bison dried up and just a little bit of flour and of course the tiniest bit of flavoring uh let's see what how it tastes that is extraordinarily good for as simple as this is we get this wonderful smoked you know bison flavor in there m that hint of mushroom powder if you make mushroom ketchup make sure to save the mushroom powder it's one of the best parts very concentrated wonderful flavors so if you haven't uh seen the episode where we dried this bison meat over the fire make sure to look that one up such a wonderful episode and it's really so very very interesting uh to look back into these journals read about them and then to actually live this out right dry that bison meat exactly the way they dried it and then eat these rations the same way they did uh really you learn so much by actually doing history living it out such wonderful uh tastes flavors right out of History it's so much fun uh this American uh Frontier Series has really been uh a great series to work on uh we've got more episodes coming up with Dan woak and episodes in the future so make sure to stay tuned I want to thank you for coming along today as we Savor the Flavors and the Aromas of the 18th century in this episode we're going to be cooking a venison heart why are we using venison why are we using a heart so venison would have been something that the frontiersmen would have been able to hunt and we're using heart meat because while at Camp if we ran out of the good meat that we wanted maybe them backstraps and hind quarters if we ate all that and the weather became in climate or we were locked into a location that we couldn't move from and game just wasn't available for us to hunt at that time or we had no luck while we were out there we're still going to want to eat so those organs are still a viable option and it's food until we can get something a little bit better right there's some great stories in Nicholas crestwell some really interesting Parts where they're hunting Buffalo they'll kill a buffalo and then a day later two days later they're out of food again they're moving they're eating the best parts of the animal and then they're probably leaving all the rest behind but then later on they're starving and boy they'll eat anything they can get even if it's a deer heart so that's what we're going to be cooking up today we're using some of of the simplest utensils today along with simple Provisions that we would have along with us obviously we've got the deer heart we've got a little bit of uh fat here it's actually a little bit of SE from the animal and um the other common ration or or provision that we would have along with us is cornmeal so we got a little bit of cornmeal that's about it all we need is a frying pan just a few little utensils so let's get this cooking up we've got some slices of heart here uh nice and thin this can cook up tough so we want to make sure to toh slice it nice and thin and we're just going to bread it in a little bit of cornmeal pop it in the frying pan I've already got the sew going so heart does show up in regular 18th century cooking but not quite like this this is so simple um in 18th century recipe books generally heart shows up they talk about cooking the pluck of an animal and the pluck is things like uh the heart the lungs and some other components you might have chitterlings other parts of the awful of an animal but they they called it the pluck which I think is a nice term for it um and they would use those in things like hagges and other cooking methods like that where you would sort of hash it up and um boil it in an animal's stomach or even in a pudding bag so there are several different recipes that use pluck but it doesn't show up a lot in that regular kind of fancy cooking in the cookbooks well our uh our heart is off the fire it looks like it's cooked through doesn't take very long with nice thin strips like that um so what do you think is this ready I think it looks good but I think a little bit of nutmeg would set this off I you know I just happen to have my uh my uh little pocket spice kit here it's basically full of nutmeg there's a little bit of salt and pepper in there too but we can try just a little bit of not make to just set these off there you go can't wait to try this I'm worried that's going to be way too tough we're going to find out hey I going to taste that nutmeg mhm it's actually really good it's not too tough no it's not tough at all the cornmeal and sew I think also give it a good taste it just rather than just grilled meat it tastes a little bit more different than grilled Meats right now you could take these and you know kind of brown them up you could put these in a stew you know in this circumstance in fact Nichol Creswell talks about times when he's got just a little bit of flour and he doesn't want to waste them making bread he wants to use them in a soup to kind of thicken it up he would do the same same thing slice up the meat small cook it a little bit toss it in there make a stew with water a little bit of flour kind of thicken it up this hey it turned out really good for such a simple quick way of cooking almost no ingredients whatsoever we just need a little bit of frying pan couple little eating utensils that we would have with us anyway as as tools when we're out here in the woods so wow you if you get a chance try something simple like this Dad Dad we have a parcel from aand house in England a parcel this is in response to that letter I sent to Lord braybrook let's go see what's [Music] inside well let's see what's in here here's the letter uh May 1881 odley end house Essex Dear Mr Townson I hope this letter finds you well and enjoying Pleasant weather here in Essex a little north of London we have suffered Heavy Rain of late but look forward to more delicate Spring weather I've been handed a letter from Yourself by lady braybrook who has asked that I send you a taste of England that must be what this is and in particular dishes she enjoys here at odley and house I've tried my best to send you items that I have read are not commonly eaten or indeed cooked in America please find within a fruit cake often called a plum cake this cake is much loved by all in England and the recipe I've used comes from a very special cook Mr Frank Telly that is the cook to Queen Victoria and therefore could be used for any special occasions if probably or if properly decorated ah I've enclosed some tea as I believe we're famous for our tea drinking and lately we have seen an explosion in India teas finally I enclose a seed cake a plain but popular cake uh it's from an old recipe and I believe in history they coated the caraway seeds in Sugar today it is often enjoyed with uh fortified wine and I've also included for your reference the recipes for each of these cakes I hope you enjoy them if you have a moment to send me a few lines to say that you've received the parcel in good order I would be grateful yours respectfully Mrs Croom uh cook to lady braybrook that is special and look there are the recipes wow a package from Essex what do you think she said there was uh a plum cake a seed cake and some tea obviously this is a tea um I suppose we should open these up and see what they're like I'll cut this smaller one open you open up that let's see if they survived the trip this one is obviously the plum cake or the fruit cake looks like it survived the trip quite well very beautiful and that one must be the seedcake look at that that is beautiful this smells really good let's open up the tea it's loose and ready to go in yep smells smells very nice M yes all this looks and smells so wonderful I'll cut into some cake we'll make some tea and we'll have a picnic down by the pond well I guess we're going to give these things a try obviously we've got this beautiful delicate Spring weather they were talking about hopefully in Essex they've got this nice weather too I'll pour you a little bit of tea we've got the uh the seed cake and we've got the plum cake let's see how they turned out so these these have been traveling for quite a while over the ocean to us Yep this smells very good you can taste all those fruits and nuts I'll have to see I'll have to check the recipe and find out what sort of nuts they used in this particular recipe but you can imagine it decorated um maybe uh for um 12th night they would Frost this and have little little things put on it m it's really good a very nice tea very good let's see what happens with the seed cake now this one I'm not sure if it traveled so well but uh let me try out a bit you want to try a little piece from the outside there you go let's try this you can taste that little car away seed in there mhm nice and sweet even the crust on the outer side is good mhm yeah it's still really really moist and good especially after the long trip the caraway seeds had something that I've never had before that food was so wonderful what do you think Ivy it was really good we should send them something we'll have to put together a letter and some items to send them I really want to thank the folks at the oddly end house everyone this is so wonderful uh Mrs kroam thank you for this wonderful letter and if you're interested in English Heritage if you're interested in uh especially this odley end house this is uh late 19th century so like a hundred years after the things we do definitely you want to check out their YouTube channel they got some wonderful videos for odley end house and other sites that English Heritage uh takes care of so make sure to check out their YouTube channel some beautiful videos [Music] we've got this wonderful recipe today from the universal cook 1773 is for a very interesting dish called a spring greens pie and it's really good thanks for joining us [Music] today so in the recipe book uh this one's actually titled an herb pie and but it starts off with spinaches and lettuce and since it's springtime it's time to go out and gather uh different kinds of greens this was a perfect opportunity for this time of year for us to do a little substitution I do have some spinach in here but I've also got stinging nettles a wonderful green to put in a pie this time of year uh you want to get these stinging nettles before they bloom or else they don't taste nearly as well get those nice tender tops and if you can get a brand new just outs sprouted out of the ground stinging nettles even better better and if you have if you find them difficult to find you might be able to find them at a local farmers market I've also picked a little bit I don't have very much growing around here but uh some ramps those will be a wonderful addition we might might not want too many ramps in here anyway um dandelion greens another great green to put in here uh there's a little bit of plantain uh we've got some parsley from the from the grocery store along with uh spinach lettuces so any kind of spring greens that you have available to you you can mix and match here um to your heart's delight and make a wonderful pie and you can that way you can change the flavors a little bit uh this pie is going to be really easy to put together uh first I'm going to take our greens here and I'm going to wilt them in a little bit of butter uh in the frying pan let me get these wilted up real quick now this pie is technically called an herb pie and it also has some sweet herbs in it I got some Sage some Rosemary you could add some other sweet herbs if you'd like make sure to have plenty of greens for this they're going to wilt down as we cook them so you'll we're going to fill up a decent Siz pie so have a good pile of greens another one of the ingredients in this uh herb pie are Force meat balls and force meat is a bit like ground meat actually in the 18th century they pulverized it until it was a paste and this is another opportunity for us to spice this up a little bit so I'm going to go ahead in my Force meat balls um and add a little bit of nutmeg maybe some mace some some black pepper um into these into this and this is um half pork half beef again that's you know the force meat was this opportunity for you to kind of uh take your hand in and change the SP the uh Taste of this by spicing it up we could even put some herbs in our Force meat if we'd like and these should be rolled up into little balls so I am going to pre- Brown These sort of precook them uh because they're going in a pie we're not sure exactly how much it's going to get cooked we want to make sure they're at least cooked all the way through I'm going to go ahead head and Brown These in a little bit of [Music] SE now it's time to assemble our pie uh I've got some a couple of pie crusts here we're going to need a top and a bottom and this is just a regular short paste uh we do have an episode where we make short paste if you're interested in making your own pie let's put some Greens in and then we'll distribute our Force meat around it got our Force meat balls here we are and you can put in as more or less depending on how you want your herb pie let's put in the very last of our herbs on top and it also says to have a good store of butter up on top here we can add just a touch of our um nutmeg uh maybe some clove some salt and pepper up on top of this probably don't need a a lot and now we want a top crust on this and I've got another crust here but we want to prepare this top crust with a little hole in the top put our top crust on we will go ahead and and put our little piece there but we wanted to pre-cut that out and now of course we're going to do our outside crimping there we go this is ready to go into the orn oven if you're baking this in a modern kitchen you'll want to bake it at 350° probably about 30 to 35 minutes watch it it's really going to depend on how big your pie is if you're baking this in an earn oven about the same time maybe a half hour or so it depends on the temperature of your oven make sure to swab the bottom and put this on a trivet so you don't burn the bottom of your pie make sure this oven isn't too hot the last component of this pie is a Lear and it's made from three egg yolks and about the same amount of cream or milk we're going to whisk these together once the pie is basically done we're going to take it out of the oven pry that little top off and pour this into the pie put the little cap back on and then set it back in the oven for maybe 5 or 10 minutes it won't take that long and this will solidify well we took the pie out of the oven after it's 5 or 10 minutes with the Lear in there it probably could have stayed a little a little bit longer to solidify that it depends on how hot your pie is and what you really want here that that leer really um keeps it nice and moist so the pie is done though it looks really good smells wonderful right out of the oven I let it cool down enough so that I could slice it and it wouldn't just fall apart so let's give this a try and of course we've got our uh our meatballs in here we've got all these different kinds of greens mixed in uh some wonderful um herbs so let's see what it tastes like this is tremendous there so many different layers of those greens and their flavors in there so you know maybe if you want um some kind of flavors more than another you can you can arrange those that green mixture the different kinds of greens um the stinging nettles are wonderful in here and they're actually so very good for you they can sound scary that they're stinging nettles but they are very tasty and you get these wonderful every once in a while you get that um that little Force meat meatball in there uh that kind of surprises you if you really want to make this without it you definitely could there's there's so much here uh flavor-wise that those aren't necessarily needed but they're like a little surprise as you're as you're [Music] eating [Music] so the recipes we're doing today are probably actually more closely related to Medicine probably medicines of the 16th and 17th century than they are to the idea of candy but they turn into candy as time goes on uh this these are probably the very simplest of the candies they hardly take any cooking at all they're so simple to do and they're fun to do you can do them with kids it's great uh and play around with the flavors let me read to you this uh this first one um we'll be doing two different kinds this particular recipe is from Eliza Smith's cookbook from the called the complete housewife I think this is about 1734 or so and you can tell it's actually related to a 17th century uh recipe this one says to make pastels take double refined sugar beaten and sifted as fine as FL flour perfume it with musk and ambigous that's the 17th century part uh then have ready steeped some gum arabic in Orange flour water and with that make sugar into a stiff paste drop into some of it two or three or four drops of oil of mint oil of cloves oil or oil of cinnamon or what oil you like and then it says let's uh some only have the perfume so they're talking about the Amber grass then roll them into your hand like little pellets and squeeze them flat with a seal then dry them in the sun actually very very simple if we kind of understand some of these have you ever heard of Amber Gris before Ivy no so amberr you're probably you might be familiar with amberr which is uh sort of what happens when a whale gets an upset stomach and they they uh they they get rid of they throw up ambigous and it ends up floating on the ocean and sometimes it'll actually wash up on the shore it's whale vomit or something like that and they actually used it in the 18th century they still use it for perfumes things like that and this one also has mentions the idea of musk again a perfume ingredient now these are 17th and 16th century things they were really big into that idea of musks and Amber grass and even this uh it says Orange orange flour water all those are perfume type ingredients today we don't expect to have perfumey kind of smells come off of our food in fact that kind of makes us think of something like soap uh when we smell them so we're actually going to well number one we're not going to get amberr this stuff costs something like $10,000 a pound so I doubt you're going to get any amber grass uh musk isn't so maybe easy to come by you can get orange flour water um and do I have I I don't think I've got any with me today we're going to we're not going to use those components because we want just a flavor of these we want a simple one um all we really need here is a little bit of water um and some of these oils flavorful oils and uh then some sugar and we can turn this into these little pills or little seals what kind of flavor do you think would be most interesting Ivy I thought that the mint sounded very interesting okay so a mint that one's easy I don't know there's I like this one it says or what oil you like what do you think oil of nutmeg yeah oil of nutmeg guess what I've got another recipe book that does have a recipe for making oil of nutmeg if we really wanted to try that maybe sometime in the future all we need for this recipe is sugar water and our flavor Oil we're going to start out by adding just a little bit we need very little unless you want to make a giant batch of uh water here and so just about I don't know a teaspoon of water now this oil here this flavored oil it's just standard extract this is mint extract here we only need two or three drops of this oil so make sure not to put in too much or you'll have way too much Flavor now we're going to start adding some sugar into it and you'll be amazed how much sugar this takes uh this sugar is actually just granulated sugar that's been powdered a little bit it's not powdered sugar we could use powdered sugar it just takes a little bit longer go ahead and dump a whole bunch more in there yeah there we oh keep keep going keep going okay there we go and it'll start to turn into a paste okay so I think we're almost there uh really we want almost it seems like too much sugar and not enough water when it's we got a very crumbly mixture we can see that it's kind of very crumbly um now it's now we can do is take this and kind of knead it so go ahead and grab a little little bit of that we want to kind of knead it together until it turns into a paste uh one of the ingredients that we kind of got rid of that we might that might help us with that is gum arabic and gum arabic can be a little difficult to find you can order it online um I have tried some with gum arabic and it and it does help make a really hard uh pill but we can just do this with sugar also that's why I sort of took out some of the ingredients and you'll see in in our next um recipe that we do after this one that that one doesn't actually call for any of those kind of ingredients um we could also use as a substitute for that gum arabic a little bit of corn um starch and that also helps stick together but you can see there we can make them into a little pill we can make them into a little flat lozes like that we have a lot of options um now what we're going to do let me go let me get a little uh tray so that we can dry these out now this next recipe is very related it's from a cookbook 20 years later this is Hannah glass and her complete confectioner 1765 or so it's it's called something completely different but it's very very related this one's really simple it says to make pepper cake right take a/4 of an ounce of whole Pepper and a half a gill of Sac mix and boil them together A4 of an hour then take the pepper out and put in as much double refined sugar as will make it like a paste then drop it in what shape you please and on plates and let it dry so what she's actually doing now this is called pepper uh cakes it's actually little pepper pastels the same uh kind of thing here now you can see she's gotten rid of the ambergris she doesn't have the the um musk she doesn't have the gum arabic she's just relying on the sugar to basically make its own little cake and the oil remember that other one had like oil of nutmeg or oil of mint she's basically making oil of pepper in this so it turns out to be a real interesting uh recipe so all we have here our three simple ingredients we've got our whole peppercorns uh here in uh we could use any kind of basically alcohol in this case even the oils that we were looking at earlier if you look at like mint extract it's actually got a bunch of alcohol in it we're going to cook all that out cuz obviously it's going to boil our simmer for a quarter of an hour but we need to carry those flavors out so here we can basically use anything um we could use a whiskey or a wine in the case of this one um or even something like rum they carry their own flavors and I found that the sack really brings a strong wine flavor in that I thought was too strong so I'm using here uh a rum instead and then uh then we have sugar just to make it up so let's now she says put these whole pepper corns in it doesn't bring enough flavor in you really got to crack these Peppers so that it brings that pepper flavor out so let me Crack these Peppers up so I've got my Cracked Pepper here we don't want it to grind it too finely because we wouldn't need to get the pepper back out so that's going to go into our little cooking vessel um now we've got our our in this case uh rum we're going to put in it's just a half a gill so we only need a couple of ounces and this gets cooked for um a quarter of an hour or so now this is the fast way to do it if you're doing most of these other oils you'll steep them in this for several days maybe and then you'll extract that maybe heat that heat it up at that point to get all those flavors out but in this one we're going to speed this up just like she does in the recipe and just simmer this kind of almost boil it for a quarter of an hour so here's our mixture after a quarter of an hour of simmering uh just a half a gill which is A4 of a cup of um our alcohol it's almost all gone and almost just kind of turns into a sludge when you're done um so you might have to add a little bit of water back in just to get enough liquid to do this we only need a tiny bit um depending on how big a batch we're going to make uh but now we need to get the pepper the hard pepper out of here so I'm going to go go ahead I've got my uh my strainer here and the bowl we're going to make our final mix in so I'm just going to dump this in and just a little bit is going to come out as a liquid so basically we can just come in here and kind of smoosh it down and get some of that liquid to fall through again we probably w't end up with more than I don't know teaspoonful so this is our speed version basically of oil of black pepper um we just have a little bit of liquid here so we're going to add just a go ahead and add a little bit of sugar to it just a little hand just put a little bit of Handful in there okay so let's see how that mixes in let see how that kind of holds together [Music] here might just kind of sit there and knead that up these can be pretty powerful there you know depending on how much you like pepper flavor these can be kind of powerfully flavored so uh they can be rather small and still have a kick whoa see I told you the next step is to put these out in the sun to dry or if you want to kind of speed these up and you're at home you could put them in your oven at the very very lowest temperature you know even under 200° if you can get your oven to turn on like that and leave them for an hour or two and though they should get nice and hard especially after you take them back out and they cool off so I'm going to go ahead and set these out to dry and I'll bring back in some we've already done well there are our finished uh little candies and there's a couple different kinds here we've got the peppermint uh type that we made first off uh these little guys uh actually have gum arabic in them so they're a little bit harder and you can see that some of these we flattened out with a seal so we used a a letter sealing Wax Seal to flatten them out so you could put a little design on them if you want to um some of these are the these are the little pepper candies and um I guess we're going to have to try these out you going to which one you going to start off with you're going to start off with the pepper one yeah okay uh try try the try one of those there you go let's try the pepper one whoa so the pepper would sneak up on you you're like oh this is uh sweet and this is sugary then it kind of breaks down and you get a blast of pepper flavor yeah and then it just keeps going so you might want to have something to drink with you know some water or something to go long with your pepper flavor Mint or pepper flavor candy I think I'm going to go straight to uh one of these peppermint style ones these uh these little guys and there's a reason why they're small you know you don't want giant big candies they're all sugar anyway right yeah those are definitely mint yeah a nice mint flavor and I mean obviously depending on what um flavors you might be interested in you can make these up any uh particular way I mean some of these it will work with just sugar and your flavor you can add corn starch or you can use um powdered sugar that might help a little bit in getting them to form up the right way if you really want to try uh Gum arabic uh that will make them a little bit harder you can you know these ones I used a gum airc with they don't break nearly as easily they still break but not nearly as easily um and remember these are these are related to uh pills of the 18th century 17th centur the doctors would have made the same thing instead of the instead of the flavor they would have put medicine in there so whatever they thought might be medicine I'm not sure if it would be good for you or not but it was medicine nonetheless well there it is really really simple it's really fun to go back dig back into the history books uh back into 18th century cookbooks and find out what candy and those kinds of things were really like and it's a little tricky in some of these you know they're not called exactly what we expect them to be called and they have this very interesting um history that that the idea whole sugary thing is actually comes from medicine and turns into candy and things like that in the 18th century so both of these cookbooks are available on our website uh the complete housewife and the complete confectioner and I'll make sure to put a link down in the description section what' you think iy did you have fun yeah yeah I had fun we had fun we made a bunch of different flavors and different kinds experimenting to see how this worked out and uh I can't wait to try um oil of nutmeg and make my own nutmeg candies that'll be a lot of fun welcome to 18th century cooking I'm John Townson and we'll be doing a let's call it a misleading title a rice soup right out of the 18th century thanks for joining us [Music] today today's recipe is out of the universal cook by John Townsen this is 1773 I believe uh John Townsen in the 18th century he was the owner of the Greyhound Tavern and he created this cookbook a lot of fun uh this recipe is called a rice soup but I don't think it's going to turn out like a soup at least when you read the recipe it doesn't seem like that but there's only one way to find out with some of these recipes we have to make them to figure out what they're actually going to turn into so let's get started on this one in the recipe he actually says uh if you're going to be using a pound of rice you'll need two quarts of water I'm using a half a pound of rice so we need one quart of warm water um I've got a rice and he calls for a cinnamon stick to be put in at the same time and it's supposed to uh uh cover it and let it simmer until it's soft so our rice has is done it's cooled off I need to get the cinnamon stick uh out of this and now the recipe calls for adding nutmeg it says great half a nutmeg of course we uh we don't have a full recipe here so we don't need a full quarter or a full half a nutmeg that should be plenty there we go and it says sweeten to taste now this is light and fluffy is uh rice at this point but not anything close to a soup um and soups we don't generally consider very sweet anyway so I don't think this is actually going to turn out to be a soup at all I'm going to go ahead and add some sort of muscovado sugar in here I don't know what sweetened to taste I don't know what it's supposed to taste like yet so I'm just going to there there that's what I'm going to call um sweetened I just wanted to uh I don't want to break this uh this rice up too much but I just want to get these things mixed in I don't know why he called for to be put in at this point especially the nutmeg I might have put that in a little bit sooner maybe it would have been overpowering if it was you know kind of cooked into it um even the cinnamon we took out so it it lends that wonderful cinnamon flavor without you know putting it directly in there um now we need a um this mix of egg yolks he calls for three egg yolks so I cut this down to basically a full egg and an egg yolk um because I I still think it needs more liquid right so we're going to whisk up this egg and egg yolk there we go and we're going to add to it some wine and he doesn't say what kind of wine I'm guessing a Sac this is like a cooking Cherry of the time period very very popular um so we're going to add some Sac possibly if we don't want it to be too much of a whiny flavor um we might use water here instead you might want to use a spark grape juice uh depending on on the flavor you want in this but the the traditional the authentic flavor is a wine flavor so that's what we're going to put in maybe a white wine would be a little less you know uh intense but that's all the liquid I've got to put in there that's all I've got to make it into a soup so I don't think it's going to be a soup I think it's like the uh steaks fried in ale that weren't actually fried so let's try this let's add this into our mix and we'll pour this in there we are and it really just kind of moistens it and now this goes back over the fire and he says uh bring it to a boil or until it's the right consistency well we've got some egg yolks in here we want to get this cooked up anyway we're probably not going to bring in anything too like a boil but let's get it heated up anyway okay let's get this egg mixed cooked up obviously we wanted to cool that Rice off so that it didn't cook the eggs and make this into sort of scrambled eggs and that's the one thing we are concerned with here the recipe calls for it to be slowly heated and bring it up to a slow heat so right now it's uh you know it's almost liquidy enough I'm afraid that uh that when it starts to actually get the heat it's going to it's going to get very uh thick so the recipe says to heat this until till it gets to the proper thickness of course we don't know what the proper thickness is so my rule of thumb here is uh get this to the point where and I might have to cool this down a little bit uh get this to the point where the eggs I know are not raw and then I'm going to call that good enough because it's already pretty thick especially way too thick to be called a soup well there is our completed rice soup uh again as you can see its consistency is nothing like a soup now I'm not sure how much liquid you would have to add to this recipe to get to a soup consistency at least what we would call a soup um a lot a lot more and of course it's uh it's sweet it's not Savory so uh it's certainly not what we generally would consider a soup I suppose uh so I'm just going to say it is what it is now maybe 18 century rice was different enough that it didn't absorb all that water but I don't believe so I think it was almost exactly like uh what I used for this particular recipe so but let's see what it tastes like that's the important part right well um we have the we have this um wonderful cinnamon and Nutmeg flavoring in here and sweetness you know if I wanted this to be a sweet thing I might add more sugar to make it uh sweet sweet but I don't know I I think it's one of those things I have to let it grow on me I'll have to try it out a couple different times I don't think he had any salt in this this might could might use a little bit of salt to bring out some of these flavors welcome to 18th century cooking I'm John Townsen and today we're going back to 1730 to uh Eliza Smith's cookbook the complete housewife we're doing one of the recipes that's called carrot Puffs thanks for joining us [Music] today so here at Townsen we've been working on a new project where we're bringing many of these old uh 18th century cookbooks and some other books back into print so people can read them because it's many of these you can find online as a PDF version but it's so much nicer to scroll through these books in a printed format so we're printing these with a modern binding and uh printed though as the original cookbook was you can find this cookbook on our website I'll put a link down in the description section so today's carrot puff episode let's get started so this recipe starts off with carrots or parsnips they need to be scraped and boiled I've already got some carrots here that have been boiled and they need to go into some kind of vessel that we can mash them up we need to turn these into a fine pulp so we're looking for about a pint of our finished pulp and this looks about the right amount here next up we need to crumb of a penny loaf so uh breadcrumbs in about a a penny loaf is about a 6 oz loaf of bread they're a little kind of bun things uh so we've got some breadcrumbs here it also says you could use some stale biscuit if you've got that but we've got some breadcrumbs we're going to mix into that there we go our breadcrumbs are kind of mixed in there next up we've got eggs now the funny this recipe it's got a lot of actual measurements but when it comes to eggs it just says some eggs but for whites in other words uh eggs and then minus four of the whites very weird so I've got six eggs in here six eggs which which two two whole eggs and four egg yolks I whis whisk them up and in go the eggs I love this recipe we're going to add some cream we don't have it just says a little cream so there's I don't know a tablespoon of cream um it calls for Sac wine which is a kind of a cooking Cherry of the 18th century or a Sherry of the 18th century that was used in a lot of cooking um so we've got a little bit of Sac it doesn't call for very much it does call for nutmeg which is the only spice that's in this recipe so I've got some ground nutmeg got to have it right it's an 18th century recipe um and it's calls for some orange flour water now typically I would just not put orange flour water in a recipe like this because boy it's just overwhelming perfume kind of uh smell but I just happen to have some orange flour water here in the kitchen so I'm going to add a little bit it also calls to add sugar to taste but I don't think this I I don't want to mix the Savory and the sweet in this one and I don't think it's intended to be necessarily sweet so we're going to not put the sugar in because you know carrots have um carrots have a lot of sweetness that they carry in anyway so there we go um Maybe I'm Wrong maybe sugar is what's going to need what this is going to need but we're going to try it without it and see what this goes cuz I I actually haven't tried this one out yet so we're going to find out just how this turns out let's get this all mixed up well we got our pan ready to go with hot oil this is actually hot SE is what the recipe calls for and it's hard to tell whether she wants to Deep Fat fry these or just pan fry these I think it's deep frying so we've actually just got a pan uh with a lot of SE in it I haven't gotten a big you know pot here now obviously caveat as usual I've got hot oil cooking over an open flame this is something you got to be very very careful with uh you probably would do this on a in a different setting where isn't it quite as dangerous as this is uh but this oil is nice and hot that's what it calls for have this oil hot and ready to go and let's put in our uh our mixture by a spoonfuls so obviously we need to sort of turn these over making sure they cook to a nice light golden brown if they're really thick though they might not cook all the way to the internal inside so you're going to have to experiment with exactly how long they need to fry so they cook all the way through well there are our little carrot Puffs uh Eliza Smith's very interesting recipe I'm still not sure whether I've got it figured out completely cuz this was really an experiment on this one um let's find out what they taste like they've got a nice little color here like broke this one in half you can see it's like kind of like a little orange on the inside darker on the outside really really interesting little um flavor to them uh you know I I tried the first one out of the batter a little bit of it decided that it did need sugar that this was intended to be a sweet dish not a Savory dish CU they don't really explain themselves in the cookbooks many times you're not really sure what it's supposed to end up like so I went ahead and added some more sugar to the batter and fried these guys up it certainly was a challenge getting them to fry up um possibly maybe some more breadcrumbs would help them hold together a little bit better still very very interesting and um a a fun little flavor these carrots uh bring some nice color and they bring their own sweetness along and you get some of that carrot flavor and then the rest of it is like a puff it's meant to be sort of a dessert like so very very uh interesting something I certainly haven't seen uh before so a fun fun experimental dish and maybe one that I would continue to tweak and see if I could you know what it kind of turns into not sure exactly what she was intended but a great recipe nonetheless hi I'm John Townson welcome to 18th century cooking we've got a special guest today Michael Dro he's back again for a couple of episodes and today we're doing what are we doing we are going to freaka see a pig freaka see a pig this one sounds really good thanks for joining us [Music] today so Michael tell us a little bit more about this particular recipe oh sure this is they're right around the 1750s 40s we start to see um precursors to um what we would refer to as Virginia or North Carolina Barbecue where it's a vinegar based or there's always vinegar in it it's got that kind of Tangy it's not a mustard it's not a sugary thing it's U and this is one of those recipes this thing is from 1730 right this particular recipe comes out of uh the complete housewife 1730 uh Eliza Smith this is an English cook book uh right from the time period and it's it's really one of my go-to cookbooks really enjoy this one we are offering this cookbook now it's available you can find it down in the description section of this video if you're interested in getting a copy so how do we get started on this recipe what do we need uh she has roasted a whole hug I've used a a shoulder a front shoulder a Boston butt and um boneless in my case a bone would add a little more flavor it's just a low and slow recipe just like today and low very generally is 190° to 225 mhm and slow is about an hour hour and a half per pound okay so no matter where you are in the country that's about it your internal temperature needs to get to 165 however you're doing it so in a modern kitchen you might do this in a slow cooker easily you could do in a slow cooker you could smoke it part of the time and then bring it in you could put it in the oven just as long as you get the thing maybe in a dutch oven or something like that absolutely just keep checking on it and keep basting it Y and in the time period this would have been roasted probably over and open fire yes as a matter of fact she tells us to take the outer layer off the skin and all off because in this case what we're doing you don't want that hard crispy so we have this partially cooked meat now what do we do we're going to take it over to the skillet and start introducing some new ingredients to okay so once we've got the meat in here what comes next uh we're going to add some uh chicken broth it just says a a strong broth we've going to put some white wine in and a little vinegar just a little vinegar we're going to add an onion that I've uh stuck a bunch of cloves in and now just a little bit of lemon peel we're going to add some salt and a little mace and we're just going to let that that simmer for a little bit so maybe 10 minutes I would say 10 to 20 and then we've got a bundle of sweet herbs so what did you put in for the sweet herbs uh Sage uh rosemary thyme and uh some basil good we just got a couple more ingredients to add uh We've uh beat beaten an egg yolk in with some cream and I'm adding that now then we're going to add some mushrooms that have just coarsely chopped so that's going to thicken this and make it kind of creamy [Applause] yes all righty to frazy a pig okay I will admit that this does not look beautiful I think it looks great would this go over did she talk about exactly how this was served or what it goes over nope no I'm eating okay oh woo I'm eating more wow that vinegar just brings up yeah brings it right up you don't go nuts with that and it's nice and uh nice and creamy wonderful um nice little bit of saltiness there people are always asking what the measurements would be and and this has no measurements whatsoever really depends on what you're working with so right welcome to 18th century cooking I'm John Townsen and today we're doing something a little bit different fried tripe and if you don't know what that is you'll find out in in just a moment thanks for joining us this recipe is again from the universal cook or the lady's complete assistant by John Townsen probably one of my deep ancestors hundreds of years ago anyway he wrote this good book in 1773 he was the owner of the uh Greyhound Tavern yeah so uh he had a lot of experience cooking for folks and this one is a recipe that's called red tripe and tripe is a cow stomach it could be other animals but generally cow stomach is what we're going to be using uh here this is white tripe it's already been cleaned um I'm not sure which one of the stomachs I think this is from the first stomach in the cow there's different kinds of tripe depending on a cow has like seven stomachs so there's multiple different kinds of tripe that people eat um it's not popular in today's United States but it was popular in England in the 18th century and probably in 18th century North America as well so this one starts out very simply our first step is to take our tripe now this tripe is already sort of sliced up but he calls for it to be cut up into thin slices three or four fingers long so just a couple inches long now it's time to bread this and I've got some breadcrumbs here I've got some um egg yolk mixed up and I'm going to go ahead and add some spices he doesn't necessarily talk about adding spices directly to his breadcrumbs but it's that's where I would add them uh maybe a little nutmeg maybe a little salt and pepper uh whatever strikes your fan fancy can go in there and we'll start off with our uh our tripe pieces I've got three egg yolks in here there's nothing uh Magic here we just want to get them totally coated with our uh breadcrumbs okay these are all breaded up now I'm going to get a frying pan going with some uh SE let's fry these up looks like we're good and hot and I think we're ready to fry it's smoking just a little bit let's see what one piece there we go yep let's get some in the pan and the direction say to fry these up until they're a nice golden brown and then set them off to uh to dry off on a [Music] plate our fried tripe is ready to try now he actually calls for a couple of dipping sauces doesn't that sound interesting dipping sauces in the 18th century he says um plain melted butter for one and then he says there's an you should have another sauce at the table which is melted butter mixed with mustard and so I've got a melted butter mixed with mustard if you want to try out an 18th century Style mustard the gray Pon must mustard is actually probably pretty close to an 18th century Style mustard so got those guys mixed up and I'm going to go ahead and try one little piece here without any of the sauces because that's cheating right little chewy what would I what I would expect out of tripe um but it's tastes good of course it's fried and it's got breading so how come we go wrong um let's try it with a little bit of butter of course you know we already fried it so the best thing to do would be to add butter to that right that's good now hm let's see what happens with our um mustard sauce never been a big fan of mustard myself but maybe this is the best way interesting mustard flavor but not overpowering at all which has always been my problem with mustard melted butter is actually a real good way to kind of balance that out so I really enjoy that um yeah that turned out really good you know I was really worried about uh tripe you know being difficult now obviously it's kind of chewy so he had us cut them into very small slivers uh so that it was more easy to uh get these cooked up well and um wow turned turned out really good I'm not sure if I'm going to eat fried trape every day but uh certainly for and you can imagine can't you Greyhound Tavern right and you're eating in there 1775 or even before that because all these recipes are pre 1773 and somebody um they they want something fried up they they order up fried tripe and this is what they've got would have have gotten and these two little sauces so uh really really a fun recipe and fun to try welcome to 18th century cooking I'm John Thompson and we're dipping back into 1787 and we're doing a fun recipe called an asparagus omelette thanks for joining us today so this recipe is from the London art of cookery by John Farley this is 1787 and um let let me read this this was a nice short recipe I'll read this one to you it's called um an omelette of asparagus beat up six eggs with cream boil some of the largest and Fin asparagus and when boiled cut off all the greens into small pieces mix them with eggs put in some salt H put in some pepper and salt make a slice of butter hot in the pan put them in serve them up hot on buttered toast uh I found this one kind of interesting uh this recipe is in the the ma dishes part of this cookbook where they you'll find recipes that are kind of like this madeup things eggs um right before The Omelette section there's the macaroni um a few months ago we did the macaroni and cheese episode there's a Solomon Gundy here in fact there's a lot of um recipes in this section that are obviously foreign influenced and uh this omelette one is probably a French influence and right here at the latter part of the 18th century uh English cooking especially this higher end English cooking definitely influenced by these Continental cooking things that are coming over from France and from Italy so this is a very simple recipe with only a very few ingredients really we've got some eggs here I've got a half a dozen eggs I've got a little bit of butter uh that we're going to end up cooking them in we've got our asparagus of course and I've just got a nice uh big bundle of asparagus that really is up to you about how much you want to put in here we got a little bit of salt and pepper I've got about a cup of cream I'll kind of Judge that as I put them into the eggs and of course we're gonna serve this up on toast so I've got some bread sliced up and yeah no unfortunately uh there is no nutmeg in this particular recipe let's get started the first thing we need are our eggs we need a half a dozen eggs if you want to go with more of an 18th century equivalent you might want to use mediumsized eggs I'm going to use regular large eggs here let's get these into a bowl whisk them up along with about a half a cup of cream he doesn't say how much cream to E use so I'm just kind of playing it by ear here we're going to pour in our cream next comes the asparagus now the asparagus um he says to boil it uh a more modern interpretation might be to just steam our asparagus we don't want to lose all those nutrients b or you can just lightly boil them that's going to work too um and now cut them up into nice small pieces now he's he refers to the green part maybe he's just talking about the very very tips or the heads of these I'm going to go ahead and do about the top half the nice tender part of the asparagus that's what we're going to be using in here and this is obviously already boiled we're going to chop these up add them right into our mix along with a little bit of salt and [Applause] pepper now it's time to get the pan ready on the Fire okay our butter looks good it's not too hot uh but it's nice and melted and we've got our mixture here of eggs and asparagus and in they go so this recipe isn't maybe all that it seems uh or there's a little bit more to it let's say that there's H in one or two recipes back there's another omelette recipe and the directions are pretty interesting it says fry it up till it's brown on the bottom but don't turn it and put it on the dish and then Brown it over the top with a salamander so they they kind of want to cook it all from the bottom side and just a little bit on the top to take off the rawness I'm going to experiment with this one and uh very gently kind of slow cook it so instead of flipping it over uh I think I will go ahead and flip it over but I want to very slow cook this like you would scrambled eggs we don't want to overcook this we don't want to Brown it on the bottom really at least that's not how I want it so I'm going to let this cook rather slowly and kind of watch it cook all the way up to the top we're going to see how it goes so I put our omelette pieces on the toasts and they're ready to eat they look good and of course they they uh smell wonderful now you probably like hey John this didn't have nutmeg in it well it turns out if you go back that page and you look at the other omelette recipe it did have nutmeg and mace so it is totally all right to put nutmeg and mace in the recipe it's very 18th century for these omelette recipes to have that in it this particular one didn't so I didn't put it in here maybe while you're not looking I put some in but uh let's let's find out what these tasted like this is a really really good combination um asparagus by itself can be a little too much sometimes um and be bitter or have different kind of flavors that I don't necessarily care for this mixed in with the eggs with these spices and of course topped off with toast makes sort of like the perfect combination now I would probably add a little mushroom ketchup but that's just me a little bit of Mace would or or nutmeg would be a wonderful combination but as it stands this is a great combination uh and actually one one of the best so would make a wonderful breakfast but I'm not sure that it was this was necessarily just a breakfast dish in the 18th century uh this likely might have shown up at the table at any of the standard meals so a perfect 18th century especially late 18th century combo uh for English cooking and in likely would have shown up in uh North America in the very later part of the 18th century and the early 19th century when some of these same kinds of influences show up in North America so uh a wonderful combo and asparagus especially in England was grown out of season so this isn't necessarily a really really seasonal dish either so perfect perfect 18th century uh very tasty recipe

Channel: Townsends

Views: 212,703

Keywords: Nutmeg Tavern, townsends, history, historical food, 18th century, colonial, jon townsend, john townsend, historic site, colonial lifestyle, Thanksgiving, Watches, pocket watches, historic time pieces, antique watches

Id: puB05g5rlCY

Length: 125min 25sec (7525 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 03 2023