Cooking Marathon! - 18th Century Cooking Season 16

imagine you're a baker in the 18th century and your main ingredient is almost impossible to get what are you going to do you're going to substitute that's what we're talking about today thanks for joining us as we Savor the Flav flors in the Aromas of the 18th [Music] century bread was the most important food component of the everyday man's diet in the 18th century most everyday laborers in the 18th century they survived on nothing but beer and bread and they generally didn't bake that bread for themselves they went to the baker to get that bread they survived upon it it was so important to the diet in England that bread was regulated for hundreds of years before the 18th century bread was regulated in its price in its weight um all the price of the loaf all had to do with the price of wheat in the time period that's one of the problems that everyone in that time period was demanding white Wheaten bread that's what they really wanted they didn't want dark um household loaves the inexpensive bread everyone wanted to eat white wheat and bread what happens though when you have crop failures in the 18th century or before they had numerous crop failures the 1630s the 1690s the 1740s and the 1790s over and over they would have uh weather problems they would have very very cold summers the whole wheat crop would fail or you would lose say 80% of it and so the rich people they could still get their white bread they they could afford to buy expensive bread maybe even from wheat that was imported from the continent or even from North America in that time period so the common man he needed something else the baker had to be able to make some other bread for this Common Man to eat and we have wonderful numerous uh sources that we can rely on to see just what that Baker was doing to feed that everyday man in 1804 this little amazing book comes out it's called the Treatise on the art of bread making and the author is responding to this idea of um what are we going to do to feed the common man because bread is so important so he covers the whole art of the Baker and he spends an entire chapter on these substitute items that we need for wheat because wheat is very hard to get even in the time period 8204 wheat was still very expensive and still in great demand in that time period so the the baker has to come up with a solution so some of the ingredients that he mentions as substitutes um making bread with peas or partially made with peas doesn't make a very good bread sometimes we'll use something like oats or oatmeal that's all ground up definitely used in bread we use that today uh he talks about maze or as we call it in North America corn that is one of those things that that he talks about but it never really gets popular in Great Britain of course it's been used in North America all these hundreds of years we make lots of bread from corn and something like barley we also have uh buckwheat and a lot of things that are grain likee that are being used but some things aren't like grains at all being used in this bread and he mentions uh potatoes specifically and in other works something very very similar as turnips being used in our bread now we can't necessarily make bread completely from potatoes but we can use that as an additive to stretch the amount of wheat that you're going to be using in your loaf so today we'll be doing a recipe right out of the tretis on the art of bread making we'll be using potatoes let's get started so this Trea on the art of bread making a wonderful book not only does it have one potato bread recipe in it but it has three potato bread recipes in it and he spends a great deal of time talking about how to prepare these potatoes uh for this bread now uh we're going to use the simplest of the three cuz it gets complex and I don't think it really needs to to make potato bread pair one PEC of potatoes put them into a proper quantity of water and boil them till they are red jued to a pulp and then beat them up fine in the water they're boiled in and knead them with two pecs of wheat flour with a sufficient quantity of yeast and salt into a dough cover it up allow it to ferment for 2 hours or upwards according to the state of your weather and then make it up into Loaves and bake them pretty simple recipe as simple as uh it is basically the straight bread recipe of the 18th century which is just wheat flour and yeast and salt and water and then we add in this potato mashed basically mashed potatoes uh in a ratio of one Parts potatoes to two parts flour so we're stretching that out we're getting as much bread as we can from the wheat flour we've got so maybe one of the reasons why the author of this book stressed potatoes as much as he did is because the potatoes used in this bread continue to make a a very white Wheaten loaf in fact you might not be able to tell a difference maybe he could get away with making uh bread with potatoes and his his um customers might not even know the difference if he's using some of these other grains uh you can tell immediately by the color of the loaf by the smell of the loaf or even by the look of the crumb that hey this is substitute bread this isn't what I wanted and he might even get in trouble from the authorities because bread was regulated but these potatoes they make an almost perfectly white loaf just like a regular white wheat loaf so the recipe talked about boiling these to a pulp and uh sometimes we you know can can interpret that these uh 18th century recipes is sort of overboiling the food I don't know if they necessarily did that or was just how they described it one of the problems we have with the potatoes is we can overwork them we can trying to get them down to that very fine consistency we can get them to a gloop that we don't want and so some of these recipes talk about forcing the potatoes through a SI just like this one which is very similar to an 18 century design and it turns out that if we do that if we send that through the C it does almost exactly the same thing as a modern day potato ricer so they were doing uh basically the same operation so they would just squish this right through the SI squishes it down through that and gives it just the right consistency without us having to overwork these potatoes so I kind of peeled these off of the bottom of the uh C and they're in the perfect consistency at this point now the recipe calls for mixing up all these ingredients uh we've got our main component of flour here again we need two parts of flour to our one part of potatoes we've got a little bit of salt and we're going to use some water and here's our our main active ingredient it's our yeast today we'll use you know just active yeast we'll get a little packet from the store so just follow the directions like that this we're kind of using it as uh they would have done in the 18th century a b or a yeast that you get from the Brewer and it's a liquid yeast it's a yeast that is a byproduct of making beer and so or making ale something times uh Al's probably a little bit better it won't have the bitter hops in it or at least as much as a standard beer but that's what we're going to be using for our yeast today you can use just regular bread yeast from the store so the water and the flour those are the things you're going to adjust to get to that nice soft loaf consistency that you're shooting for if that ball of dough is too hard it just cannot grow and you'll have this dense dense loaf that doesn't do what you want it to do and then of course if it's too soft it just sags and and you have this giant flat loaf which is still good bread and it's totally worth eating it just isn't as beautiful and isn't quite as easy to use so our consistency feels really good we obviously not too hard not too soft looks good so we can set it in our Bowl going to bring that around all to the bottom and then set that in so that it can grow there we go so this bowl is still nice and warm um we're going to let it set for about that 2 hours I mean he says in the recipe it all has to do about the weather right they didn't have as much climate control as we do so they had to adjust their rise time to their weather but 2 hours should work great for this we're just going to cover this up and set it aside now we have to work on our oven getting it up to temperature so we can bake this bread for e so three things before I try this bread out I know you want me to try it out right now that's why I did not wait for the crumb to totally set up on this thing it might be a little gummy but I know you want me to try it out now number two on on something like this use the best butter you can get I'm telling you try something like carry gold or or go to the grocery store and get a specialty butter it's worth it and the third thing is we bake this in an earn oven and it definitely makes a difference if you get a chance to use an oven like this do it cuz it makes the best bread let's try this out it smells so good it is a nice and tender loaf because it's just come out of the oven it's still warm let's try it superb bread you would never guess that this bread had an additive because you were trying to Str stretch out the wheat you know it's so moist it's so tender I can't see how anyone would complain in 1804 or any other time about getting a wonderful potato bread is excellent stuff and easy to [Music] make this pork chop is so good this is the best pork chop I have ever had and it's all because of my kitchen pepper this stuff is amazing thanks for joining us today as we Savor the Flavors and the Aromas of the 18th [Music] century as far as I'm concerned kitchen pepper is an important part of any Kitchen in the 18th century it starts to pop up in cookbooks in the late 18th century this is Charlotte Mason's cookbook it's one of the first references that you can find 1777 and she gives a recipe for kitchen pepper I believe believe it's a much earlier concept we just don't see it referenced because it's something that's so common in the kitchens it's a standard spice mix and as you go through recipes through the 18th century you'll find these same spices showing up over and over and over in all these recipes so why not just put them all together in a premixed um portion and you'll even find later recipes that are used in places like uh chemist shops or pharmacies or it's almost like a general store would sell this premix of spices so it's a perfect thing to have especially in a situation like this um if you're on the frontier you don't have a lot of room for a bunch of spice jars or you're traveling and you want to bring along spice to put on your food but you don't again have a whole lot of space for that so you can bring just one jar just one file of spices and you get all the normal flavors that you're expecting so these 18th century kitchen spice mixes are that ancestor to all those spice mixes you'll find in the grocery store today whether they're Regional spice mixes or maybe they're for a particular ingredient maybe they're meat rubs they all kind of connect back to this kitchen pepper spice mix idea that shows up in these late 18th century cookbooks let me read to you this one out of Charlotte Masons the ladi's assistant this is 1777 this one's simple but I like it it's a really good mix 1 oz of Ginger and then pepper cinnamon cloves and Nutmeg half oce each and then 6 o of salt mix this well keep it dry so she definitely wants that sealed up it doesn't get moisture in it she says it's a great addition to all brown sauces but in later references to the these kitchen pepper spice mixes we see them being used in all sorts of situations in meat rubs and in other dishes where you just want to add that normal spice mix that you're used to a wonderful little spice mix let's put this together so let's look at our spices there's a lot to learn here about what's going on in the 18th century what's our base spice uh that's in this mix well it's salt salt is the least expensive item on the list here uh so we have that's making up a large portion of it more than half of our mix is salt so we've got a lot of salt in here but the next one that we've got is ginger and here's the ginger we have twice as much ginger as we have the other items now that might be because we want a lot of Ginger flavor in here but it's also because Ginger is one of the least expensive spices that are coming in in this situation so again we're being economic we're being Frugal by having a lot of Ginger flavor coming in here and that kind of bulks up our flavor we've got pepper so common along with all these other ones that show up in the recipe books but pepper is right up there with salt almost everyone says salt add pepper so Pepper's in here um we've got nutmeg it's one of the more expensive ones and some of these recipes may be nutmeg is missing because it is so expensive and they'll replace nutmeg with something less expensive called Jamaica Pepper or we call it all spice that is another um kind of brings in that same aromatic note most of these are not very aromatic um but nutmeg is so uh that one might drop out especially if we wanted a less expensive mix or maybe it's just got a little nutmeg that's the other thing about this is that these things are very very variable we can adjust this we can customize this mix for ourselves any way we'd like maybe we don't like one of these spices uh maybe we're not a big fan of cloves so we can drop cloves out add something else or leave it out all together so it's very adjustable we're very personalizable and you'll see that happening as we look at um different recipes as they go into the 19th century they adjust they get less expensive or maybe some of the flavors drop out because they're not popular anymore something like nutmeg sort of disappears after a while because it's just not as popular and we also have cinnamon and cloves in there uh all of these are nice and ground up and that's mentioned even the idea that we want to have in some of those later recipes we want to make sure everything is ground and ground finely um even before the mix and then they actually mention the idea that you want to wait until you make the final one to grate your nutmeg you don't want that grated beforehand because it's it's losing its aromatic Flavor now we can adjust these and they might have been adjusted for a lot of different reasons both economic reasons uh maybe there are cultural reasons so some spices drop out in different cultures maybe you're German and you want caraway seeds or something like some of these other spices that are more common in different uh cultures so we also have some variation from whether it's an expensive mix or whether it's got some you know some different cultural changes in it so there's a lot of variation we can do personally but this one's a nice base mix right there from the late 18th century so here is our kitchen pepper and I am so excited to try this out let's do it now I want to try this out as a rub on some pork chops and see just how it turns out let's try it out n this looks tremendous this is our pork chop rubbed in our kitchen pepper let's find [Music] out very spicy and I really love it such a wonderful complex a batch of spices and it really comes through each and every one of them kind of hits at different levels if I was going to make my personal spice mix I would take this maybe add some something like a little Cayenne I might double the nutmeg but that's just me but a little Cayenne or something else to give it a a top note you know kind of bite right at the beginning but that's the nice part about this we can customize it any way we want I love this whole concept and the ability to just bring all the spices you need right there in one jar I love this whole idea and such a wonderful addition to 18th century cooking welcome to 18th century cooking I'm your host John Townson and for the first time ever on this show we are doing 18th century pork chops and they sound great thank you for joining us today as we Savor the Flavors and the Aromas of the 18th century so today's recipe is from the universal cook this one is from Collingwood and woolams there's another Universal cook that we publish which is by John Townsen not me but somebody from 1773 this one's 1792 so it's a little bit later but it's a lot more of that sort of Tavern cooking these two gentlemen had an inn a Tavern uh and that's what these recipes are from uh this one is pork cutlets dressed another way away having skinned a loin of pork divided into cutlets strew over them some parsley thyme cut small some pepper salt and grated bread over them uh fry them up fine Brown take some of of I'm sorry take some good gravy hopefully the gravy from the cutlets and a spoonful of ready-made mustard two shallots shred fine boil these together over the fire thicken with a piece of butter rolled in flour and a little vinegar if agreeable put the cutlets into a hot dish pour the sauce over them send it up to the table it sounds like a great recipe one of the things you'll hear about in the late 18th century early 19th century are places you would get food uh sort of like primitive restaurants called Chop houses in the 18th century but they cooked something just like this let's get started so our first step let's get this seasoning onto these pork we're using pork chops instead of pork cupets basically the same thing for this kind of time period here a little bit of salt and pepper we've got our th this is dried time it's going to be a little easier to incorporate and then we have a little fresh parsley and now a little bit of the breadcrumbs there we go that's one side let's do the other side let's make sure that these are well SE seasoned uh each one of these in a nice quantity once we have these seasoned we're going to put them in the pan with some butter we want to make sure that our pan is nice and hot so we get a good sear on that [Music] bottom once our pork chops are nice and seared we can take them out of the pan set them aside keep them warm and we're going to make our gravy or our our sauce we're going to deglaze this pan so we're going to put the pan back over the fire we're going to add to that our shallots there should be some drippings here still in the pan so we're going to put these shallots in here that are chopped nice and fine if you need some extra moisture in here we're going to add broth in the time period they probably would have gotten a lot more drippings or gravy as they call it out of their pork chops even though the recipe uh talks about possibly adding some vinegar I think our mustard is going to bring enough of that acidic flavor in that it'll be just fine one of the classic things that goes in here also is a ball of butter rolled in flour to help thicken that once this is thickened up nicely it's ready to be poured on top of our cutlets or pork chops in this case there they are they look great they smell tremendous even before they got in the pan they smelled good and so now the kitchen is smelling wonderful let's give them a try let me I've got a little piece pre-cut the shallots in this sauce uh really are a perfect addition to this it's got you know it's nice and thick we've got all those wonderful spices that were in the pork chop and they of course they've come through in the gravy as well and the pork chops turned out just the right kind of you know tender really really good and I'm not a big fan of mustard but it is great in this sauce just that little bit of vinegary flavor that comes in perfect perfect finally we've gotten to do pork chops and wow they were they are definitely worth the weight you've got to try these uh this particular cookbook the universal cook from this uh 1792 time period it it is filled with very very accessible very doable um sort of hey Tavern or steakhous food we might call it today or in this case Chop House food from the 18th century the perfect combination a great wonderful cookbook and a super [Music] recipe [Music] today we're building an earth and oven we've built Earth and ovens in the past and they have served their purpose but in this situation we need to feed an entire community so we get to build a big oven something I've always wanted to do let's get started so when I say bigger I mean a lot bigger we want it to be at least twice as big as the ovens we've made in the past that means we're going to need four times as much material this is our platform we're going to build it on we're going to build it underneath this roof it's going to be a really nice setup close to the cabin and other places that we need uh this platform we're going to have to build a whole layer of cob that's going to on here plus bricks fire bricks that go on top of that to make this completely fireproof and it'll hold residual heat to help bake the bread we're going to we're going to be able to bake four or five times as much bread as we've been able to do before so that's really important this oven we're going to construct a little differently than say our first oven which we used to sand core that probably isn't a very 18th century method that's a common for today but not in the 18th century they use used more likely the basket method so we've got to build a great big basket that we're going to put all this Clay on Brandon's working on that my job today is to make the basket for this oven just a simple Basket doesn't have to be really pretty because it will get burned out it has to be strong enough however to hold the clay now the measurements that we want are 32 in in diameter and 22 in high and we're going to use these splits of Ash to bend around our cross form here and that'll give us our diameter and it'll give a nice sturdy support to that bottom ring all these splits will be just tied with some hemp twine and that'll hold it together long enough for the clay to harden up and cure and then it'll all burn out leaving just a solid shell of [Music] clay [Music] [Music] no [Music] [Music] here is a basket look at that thing it's massive so Brandon this basket looks great thank you it does exactly what it needs to do it has to be super strong we have to take a 6 in of wet clay all the way around this thing so it's got to be strong it's very very strong tying it together works really well so now uh Nicole Ryan and I can start working on putting the clay around the Dome at least the back part of it uh Brandon you got to make the door section and it need I we want a 15-inch wide door so we can get something big in there like a turkey or a big pie or a big loaf of bread that's a problem with our current oven is you can only get just a small loaf in there so we want a big door 15 in wide and the height of the door is important uh we need to have a door height of 63% of the Dome height and you do that because of the way the air flows inside of the oven if you don't make that Dome height uh this certain percentage of the door height the oven can't breathe there's no other holes for the oven to breathe it's got it you have to suck air in the bottom of the door and then the exhaust air goes out the top of the door if that ratio isn't right the oven doesn't heat up so uh that should be 15 in high so it's 15 inch wide 15 inches high you can work on that frame while we start to put the clay on [Music] this here you [Music] [Music] go [Music] so from the side view you can see that the Dome is not perfectly round anymore and we've been as we add clay to the backside it's kind of squishing this whole Dome out this direction as we add clay to this side hopefully it will turn it back into the Dome it's supposed to be even if it doesn't still going to work great don't worry it's going to work [Music] [Music] great [Music] hey Brandon come and get [Music] it [Music] [Music] this is fit and flush and good it's ready to go there's our door it's going to need a handle you usually use wood but with that new Forge in blacksmith shop I could Hammer one out real quick that would be excellent that'd be excellent for this oven door I want to make this handle a little decorative on the top but it has to have a functional foot on the bottom so it stands up right I want this to be a special handle for the special oven hey we're about there oh yeah that looks about 6 in good [Music] [Music] thank [Music] you [Music] let's just lay your on top [Music] [Music] great job on the handle I love the look thank you thank you seems like a simple door but it's got a lot of meaning to it uh the wood itself is from the same tree that we made the Dugout canoe this is an extra piece of wood from that we don't waste anything he went over and he cut the the door over at the wood shop mid handle the blacksmith's shop uh it all goes on this oven and then what the oven's made out of again it's the same clay we used for the bricks it's the same clay we used for the cabin for the chimney all that it all comes together right here in this oven I'm so excited about getting to use this oven this is going to be [Music] great that look better John it looks great one yeah I mean it still comes out just [Music] the oven is looking great that door is sitting in there perfectly we've smoothed it all out now it's time to dry we've set a couple little coals little tiny around the base of it to firm That Base up so that it doesn't sag uh but it's looking really good right now we're going to let it dry a couple of days then in this next episode we're going to burn the inside out and then bake our first meal a three course meal that is I just can't wait it is a beautiful fall day on the homestead wonderful crisp air the beautiful color starting to come out in the trees it's time to try try this oven out we have lots of hungry folks here it's time to cook an entire meal right here in the oven Ryan we've got a lot of mouths to feed what are we cooking okay so I wanted to go through old recipes and pick out things that I thought were going to be really neat in the oven that we just made so we've got the we've got the baked beans yeah that we're going to be working on and all the ingredients over here we're going to go to that Ry and Indian bread next and then we've got the beef Pasty mhm we're working that up followed by the pear tart it's like a full meal and all these things sort of they connect right here to the frontier right and they all are going to go in this one firing in the oven yes yeah so the beans will pretty much be in there the whole time and everything else will be moving in and out so we'll be able to cook multiple things at one time but also have like these four different stages of cooking which is really yeah and because we only need to do one firing we're saving time we're saving fuel this really all connects together and it's going to be a great fall meal so first thing that we're going to do is get the beans going cuz they're going to take the longest amount of time and they're going to be in there the whole time we've got a vessel here with pre-cooked soaked beans they're ready to go and it's about 3/4 of the way full we're going to add cubed pork dry mustard salt and pepper and some molasses and then a whole onion I remember from that first episode you got to butter this lid really well or or else uh it'll glue itself down you can't get it open Okay so we've been burning this oven for four maybe even 5 hours it's heated up all the way from the morning uh but we should only need to heat this once for this whole thing and it's down to Kohls and we know it's ready because if you look inside there the interior is not black so like like right here right it's already gotten so hot that it's burnt the S away so the inside is nice and well just exactly the color of the clay so perfect we know it's totally up to heat maybe even almost brick colored so we need to scrape all this fire out so we can start to actually cook in it we don't cook with the fire in it like you might think we got to drag all this fire out and then we can let it rest for a second then it's time to put things in we want to cook yeah I'm still like enamored with the sheer size of this thing it's uh it's really well insulated it's not too hot to rest your hand on it I hope it stays hot for a long long time easy easy this thing this thing will stay hot three four hours to be able to cook in it this oven is so hot I had to change from the fire egg to the longer handled Rook just because if you get your six 6 Ines inside of there with your hand it's just cooking you already you ready for me to mop this yeah sure mop that out it cleans it out cools off the floor sometimes the floor gets too hot especially for bread so we got to sort of get all that moisture in there cools off the floor um temperature we don't have a thermometer right so we reach our hand in there and you kind of got to gauge it so uh this is um we should be able to stick our hand in there for 10 seconds or so this is about a 5-second oven right now it's got to cool off it's got to get a consistent heat all the way around so we're going to put the door on it let it rest for a few minutes It'll get a nice consistent heat then we'll put the beans in the beans are in the oven and I put them on a trivet because I wanted to get those off off the floor so they didn't cook too fast on the bottom trivets can be really important in these ovens uh so we've used that trivet the problem is we're going to need another trivet now couple of months ago I would have just used some rocks and we can use that some three rocks but they you got to be really careful and Things fall off of your rocks so uh we need another trivet now we've got a blacksmith shop so we're going to have Brandon work on another trivet for us so we can use it on our next dish that is yeah so we're going to go with the Ryan Indian loaf which is just a simple three-part bread and it is cornmeal wheat flour Ry flour some yeast a little bit of water and in this particular one we're going to use a sweetening agent that's maple syrup and that's just going to make that yeast go crazy and a touch of salt cuz all bread likes we have to have salt after that I'm going to be working on this pie it's a p it's a pasty a beef pasty going to be the steak that I've cubed up I'm going to Salt and Pepper it to taste and then there's going to be a little bit of red wine that goes in I've cut a hole in the top crust for a vent and later on when we pull it out of the oven we're going to put some butter in there just to melt as it [Music] rests our bread dough is in our dish that we're actually going to bake it in this is this loaf does not hold up on its own very well so it's great if you can bake it right in a pan I've made sure to butter it well actually Ryan buttered it well so that it doesn't stick in there and now it's time for it to rise it rises a bit like normal bread what we're going to do is we're going to cover it up but it's not going to rise a whole bunch like regular bread does just a little bit when the surface cracks a little we know it's just risen enough then it's time to go in I'm going to set this aside [Music] here you go one triet perfect exactly what we need thanks Brandon that's great this pie is ready to go in let me just take it wait Did you get nutmeg in there I'm cooking with you John of course I [Music] did [Music] la [Laughter] [Music] [Applause] the all right so we've got our beans in the oven they're still cooking uh the bread's in there with it right now the pie just was taken out and it looks fantastic next we need a dessert yeah we're going to do a pear tart it's really simple we've got the crust already ready to go we're going to lay these pears in there kind of spiral and layer them with sugar put a little bit of butter and of course some nut [Music] mil and these pears are not just sliced up pear we had the par boil these pairs to make sure they were nice and [Music] [Applause] soft all right so we've got our tart in there now the bread and the beans are still in there so three things in the oven at once and this is still like I can't hold my hand there for very long it's still nice and warm in fact this is perfect we haven't had fire in this for like 4 hours and just the right heat to have the beans in right at the very beginning the meat pie is already cooked and it had to cook at a higher temperature it's sitting here cooling so that we can actually eat it doesn't isn't too hot and there's still plenty of residual heat to keep those to keep the bread cooking which it needs to do and then the tart it would have burnt if we would have put it in too soon now it's the perfect temperature maybe like 350° in there after 4 hours and it's hot on the outside it's maybe hotter on the outside now than it was when we started this couldn't have worked out better for this Homestead situation it is holding the Heat and you can cook we can cook so much in this this is amazing really after we pulled that out we could still put loaves of bread in there if we wanted to bake for for a while afterwards and and then dry herbs and then do it's amazing [Music] n [Music] there you go John the first meal out of the oven yeah I'm excited to try this out you did a great job picking out all these recipes out of the past out of the back catalog thank you perfect set those beans I think beans that was first season M mhm and they are still really good yeah I like them with the syrup in there I don't know if I've tried it I know that we did a version with molasses I don't think I tried those uh this syrup is cheating man it's really good really good you know I I think the meat pie cooked long enough I was a little worried about that bottom crust oh wow but puff paste does not do that well in the bottom sometimes it's good though that wine in the in the in the meat pie I like that a lot I like this bread it's got a lot of body it's not like a soing up the bottom of the plate bread you know it's it's it's a meal to itself almost well it's it's a lot like a cornbread but still you know fluffy enough yeah but it goes well with the beans like cornbread goes well with beans you know right I have never had a par tart you know I don't eat them that often I remember the first episode where we had this par tart and I'm going to bet that this one turned out better than that one um oh yeah um was that one in an earn oven I think we baked it in an earn oven it was in might have been season 3 I'm not sure but the the the peirs were I don't know the wrong kind or whatever they were kind of metallic which can happen with Paris you don't get that at all right now and this one's perfect so this oven gives us a chance to cook not only just for a single family or a single person but multiple families or in the case of a single family you're cooking something that's going to last you for three or four days or maybe a week right you could get a week's worth of cooking done in this and especially when you think of it like we could be putting loaves in there now yeah right and we could be drying herbs like you said earlier so it's pretty neat but all at one time like the amount of food that we cooked right now we could probably feed three or four families oh yeah [Music] definitely so Ryan the homestead cook he has a lot of stuff to bake he's in a time crunch let's go help him out okay Ryan I here you need my help yes I have a big order of bread I've got 15 loaves ready to go I've got the oven ready to go I just need hands to help me get this done okay yeah we should be able to get five in there no problem yeah I've got 15 I want to see how many we can get there at one time cuz I've got a ton of work to do after this we'll see we'll see what we can [Music] fit I think we can get [Music] more there's still some room okay two more let's do it I'm going leave this one right in by the door okay let's get it closed up we did it we got 15 loaves in there hopefully they won't all grow together and we can get it out uh so it's a challenge just to see how they're going to bake especially they get too hot in the back and oh this is going to be fun it's a challenge uh thank goodness we got all all the bread done okay what's this we got half the bread done we got to F another I told you it was a big order we got to get more of these I'm going to start splitting in the loaves it'd be really great if you could stick around I can do that okay we don't think about uh some of these jobs that are happening especially in the 18th century the baker job uh Bakers were uh they were a very needed part of the community they were uh almost a a survival aspect for a lot of people especially in the cities and the baker he had a tough job he had to come and start up this oven early early in the morning and start the dough this dough takes a lot of time cuz people want to buy their bread no not late in the afternoon they want to buy their bread in the morning you got to have the bread bread was so important in this time period that especially say in the uh late 18th century there were bread riots if they didn't have enough bread if it was too expensive it caused unrest in the society and that even happens in North America especially during the Civil War so the Bakers are a very important part of the community okay yeah we need to pull this out can you grab the peel yeah y here we [Music] go [Music] [Music] so we got our first 15 loaves out of the oven they're here they're looking fantastic I'm really excited about them the next loaves are right over here in these smaller dobles they're Rising right now the baker Ryan in this situation he's got a big challenge especially this time of year the weather has turned and it is cold especially in the morning how do we get these to rise if it's not the right temperature uh your bread just doesn't do the thing it needs to do so we could take these and maybe we could balance them on top of the oven so that they'd stay warm but not too warm we've got to take these into the cabin where we've kept it uh the fire place going big time so that it's a really warm in the cabin so that diesel proof uh properly and we need to we need to proof these up pretty quickly in our Circumstance the oven's cooling down so we need to hurry up let's get these in the cabin [Music] that was good hey hey Ryan yeah here not big enough John thank you so much I cannot believe we got all that done thank you 15 loaves in the oven I'll bet you we could have gotten one more Navy I think so if we I when we started out I thought 12's the max I did not I didn't think we're going to go 50 well and I mean they didn't grow together too bad it was just I mean the dough was just right for that so 15 worked great I was surprised I thought we would have some that were like more done on this side and more done on this they all cooked pretty evenly they were very consistent and you know we just started working with this oven I mean it looked like the floor was maybe too hot in one spot okay right we had three that were like a little darker yeah but I mean they turned out great and those you just rasp the bottom off of them sell them they're good let me taste a little bit without butter cuz that's cheating we have crumb set up perfect crust has got a great flavor to it and again this is just simple breads the same four ingredients water salt yeast and flour that's it that's bread especially in the 18th century they had fancy breads but this is what everybody's buying I could eat that bread all day long even if I ran out of butter I could enjoy that you know and this this episode's been about pushing the oven to the Limit how much can we fit in there especially in a bread situation we got two runs through no problem whatsoever we crammed that oven full of bread and I am just so excited to be able to continue to use this this size oven is perfect for this situation you can fit a lot in it but it isn't so big it takes forever to heat up which is a problem with an even bigger oven right but it was so hot that that first set of 15 I probably cooked in 12 minutes yeah it was done it was fast and cooked all the way through uh amazing and yet and yet we can still cook things in it even now nice uh you know desserts that don't need a high temperature this it is so much fun to use this oven I love it and the flavor of the bread that comes out of it is incredible nothing like your oven at home oh wood you know Wood Fired bread so good yeah there's nothing else to tastes like it pork belly is on the menu today and we have found a fascinating recipe from the 18th century cookbooks something very very different from the standard way of cooking today it's going to be amazing thanks for joining us today as we Savor the Flavors and the Aromas of the 18th [Music] century so today's recipe is fascinating not only because of the cut of meat we're using but the cooking technique and the technique here is called colloring which has to do with rolling the meat up tight and tying it and boiling it it's something that not only Cooks the meat but it's kind of a short-term uh preservation technique very very interesting so this colloring method uh is something that shows up in 17th century cookbooks 18th century cookbooks and then it kind of disappears and we don't see it today at all uh so that that's this one's from pow's book of cookery uh there's about 10 collaring recipes in here uh this one is called for colloring pork take a belly piece of pork bone It season it high with pepper salt and spice and a good handful of sage shred roll it tight as before directed boil it 5 hours in the same pickle as for the ve before serve it with mustard and some sugar that is one interesting recipe I have never seen anything quite like this this is truly fascinating let's get started so when I'm looking at these recipes uh I'm always careful about what the words are actually saying and in this recipe um it talks about the shredding of this uh Sage so you know I'm chopping it up but maybe I should be pulling it apart and and shredding it but I really like the section where it's talking about highly spicing uh this piece so part of the preservation technique is not only the the wrapping it up but it's also the high spices that is going on inside of this uh and spices it just says spice doesn't it well what they probably mean is what we made in a few episodes ago kitchen SP spice so that's what we're going to be using in our recipe [Music] today our pork belly is highly spiced it's ready for the next stage which is rolling it up and binding it and these recipes call for using tape a wide course tape not string uh we want it to sort of hold it together better so I've got my strings already laid out or my tape as it were uh we're going to set our pork belly right right on it let me arrange our tape just a little bit there we go and I'm going to roll this up okay very interesting looking isn't it now we just have to get this tied up bind it tightly before we go on any further I did want to talk about the cut of meat just for a second in the recipe she calls for boning it but she doesn't talk about taking any of the fat off she doesn't talk about taking the skin off and that's why we've left it and I think one of the reasons why we see the skin not coming off is because this colloring method wouldn't work right if we didn't have the skin on it wouldn't hold together it would just pull right through that fat um and I mean there isn't a whole lot more to a pork belly so without the skin I don't think it would work right so our pork belly is prepared it's got a great look to it it's got all those spices in it it should be incredible so our next step is our pickling solution for a pork B to boil in and it comes from a different recipe a few re Rees back uh this one starts with boil it in a white wine vinegar and water whole cloves and mace and a bunch of sweet herbs and a slice or two of lemon there we go that's our um pickling solution so we've got water we've got vinegar and we've got our sweet herbs we need to prepare our our nose gay or our little bunch of herbs that we're going to tie together so you might remember the recipe actually calls for white wine vinegar but obviously the vinegar I poured in was not white wh vinegar we are using malt vinegar which is actually very simil simar to the white wine vinegar of the 18th century that's why we used that one we want to add water in until it just covers the top and we will boil this with the top on we want to keep as much of this pickle uh here as possible so the next step is just a few more spices that we drop in then it's ready to go on the fire so the last spice we've got here mace and uh normally I would put nutmeg in at this point but I'm not going to cheat I'm just going to use the mace which is related to Nutmeg just need a little bit of that right here in the [Music] solution John the recipe doesn't call for nutmeg shh they'll never [Music] [Applause] know so this particular pork belly we boiled for about 2 hours and you know depending on the size of your pork belly you might have to boil it longer the the recipe actually mentions 5 hours I'm not sure what would have been left after 5 hours so we stopped at two hours on this one but if you got a really big one maybe it will take 5 hours uh you know and if we look at this cut of meat a pork belly or they might have referred to this as B bacon in the 18th century they Ed that term a little more Loosely than we do that was the least expensive cut if somebody had meat maybe bacon was the only thing they were able to buy pork belly here now there's a lot of fat there's a in there's skin there's fat then there's the the Meat part of this pork belly uh more most likely in the 18th century they probably would have eaten the whole thing she certainly doesn't talk about taking the fat off in our recipe or he or she the author um so we've got a choice though today we can eat whatever part we want and some people will like the whole thing I'm going to try out a piece right now so good so the spices incredible very tender a lot of really really flavorful spices coming through in this and obviously we used our spice mix and we had sweet herbs boiling with it and we've got the salt and pepper this has tremendous flavor and we would we should expect a lot of flavor all that fat brings in lots and lots of flavor so this is probably one of the most flavorful meats you will ever have it's tremendous welcome to 18th century cooking I'm your host John Townson and today we'll be experimenting with a fancy drink of the 18th century but in a very Frontier setting it's called called Cherry bounce thanks for joining us today as we Savor the Flavors and the Aromas of the 18th [Music] century Cherry bounce in this setting uh is a made wine shows up a lot in the 18th century cookbooks uh for Great Britain and undoubtedly uh in North America wine is an expensive item in the 18th century imported from France many times and they had substitutes for wine they would make wine with raisins and with other sorts of fruits in this circumstance it's a wine sort of drink made with cherries and cherries are something that is very very available especially here in North America we're going to be using sour cherries so Cherry bounce was popular and it was popular with George Washington he wrote about taking it along as provisions on one of his trips in 1784 and we find a recipe for it in Martha Washington's papers now it's not written out in Martha Washington's hand so maybe it's a recipe that someone gave to her let me read to you this recipe it's an excellent Cherry bounce is what it's called extract the juice of 20 lbs of well ripened Morella cherries those are sour cherries add to this 10 quarts of old French Brandy sweeten it with white sugar to your taste to 5 gallons of this mix add 1 oz of spice such as cinnamon cloves nutmegs of each and an equal quantity slightly bruised and a pint and a half of cherry kernels that have been gently broken in the mortar after this this liquor this whole infusion has fermented let it stand close stopped up for a month to 6 weeks and then bottle it remember to put a lump of loaf sugar in each bottle now this is a very fancy drink we're not really in a fancy setting we're on the frontier and maybe we'll have to use some different materials as we put together and uh a drink like this now uh for an example she calls for old French Brandy well we don't have access to old French Brandy but even here in Indiana Apple Brandy was a very popular drink to make um and sell it's one of those sort of Farmstead um produces that that are being made uh there are other things that might be used instead um rum or different sorts of you know whiskies that in this time period so that's going to be a perfect substitute we might not have the perfect loaf sugar uh that she talks about which is a very white sugar we might have to use something like maple sugar uh but we can still make an amazing drink we're going to take our sour cherry and these need to be fresh cherries not preserved cherries or just cherry juice we're going to put these in a bag and mash them up and squeeze out all the juices we want to get as much as we possibly can out of this even out of the original recipe the 20 lbs it might not make as much cherry juice as you want so you're going to need a lot of cherries once we get all the juice extracted you want to take a cup or two out of the mix and that's where we're going to add our spices to a cinnamon stick a couple of cloves a little bit of nutmeg it's going to go onto the fire for a low simmer low fire to infuse those spices once they're up to heat for 5 or 10 minutes let's take them off and let it cool back down after our smaller mixture has cooled off we can add that back into our main batch after that we can add in our sugar mixture now this is sort of sugar to taste we are going to add about a cup or a cup and a half of sugar to the amount that we've got here now it's time for our Brandy I've already put these into our fermenting vessels we got a couple of canning uh jars here of the time period and to the mixture that we've got out of our cherries I'm going to add about a cup and a half of Brandy now her original mixture was the juice of 20 lb of sour cherries to one quart of Brandy uh you know that's that's a kind of a hard to know mixture depends on exactly how much juice you get out of your cherries so you're going to have to guess a little bit here we had about 64 oz of cherry juice when we got done so we're going to add about a cup and a half of Brandy to our mixture now we did not um cook this whole mixture of cherry juice on purpose because this she calls for it to ferment and the only place where the the yeast is going to come from uh in this batch of uh juice is from the cherries themselves if we would have boiled it we would have killed the yeast and that means you that's the reason why we're using fresh cherries if we would use preserved cherries or cherry juice that's been pasteurized and there's no live yeast in there we want to have that uh live active yeast working from the cherries themselves to ferment this batch we've got the the canning jar here we're not going to seal this it should ferment a little bit and it should produce carbon dioxide so we're going to cover these jars uh with a cloth so that they can breathe a little bit this is a open vat fermentation so uh we're going to try to keep the bad things out and the Brandy should also uh help the right yeast work and not the wrong kind of fermentation so here is our batch it has aged it's fermented and aged about 8 weeks or so and you know in her recipe they would have gone ahead and drawn this off and then put a little sugar and bottled it we're just going to and that would have caused a a fermentation uh secondary fermentation that would carbonate the bottles uh in our circumstance we're just going to dry it like it is uh we don't have any bottles or anything like that especially in a frontier setting like this so we're going to try it just like this let's find out um wow um so this is a very very interesting complex flavor it's definitely Cherry but it's like a cherry cordial but it's not it's not quite as sweet as you might think it is it's really really good and I'm wondering how different batches are going to work out I can really see how you know one year's cherries or one you know from one Cherry treat to the next you might get some super interesting flavors but I mean I can definitely see how if you had a canteen full of this like George Washington uh you'd want to come back to this like during the whole trip cuz it's really good so we don't usually think of venison as a day-to-day meal but for the indigenous population in North America in the 18th century it was common Fair they had it each and every day and they had it for celebratory occasions thanks for joining us today as we Savor the Flavors and the Aromas of the 18th [Music] century so today's dish is from a reading out of the Journal of James Smith he was writing about his experiences in 1755 as a young man he was taken captive by the aaga tribe and after a few weeks he was adopted into that tribe through a ceremony and a feast and that's what we're going to be discussing today green corn and venison is what they feasted upon that night and these two food sources are pretty incredible as we look back upon them corn could be used in any number of ways they cooked them in their in its immature State this green corn but they could also dry it they could grind it up and use it preserved all through the year so it was one of the most important food s sources for Native Americans whereas venison well deer were plentiful in the 18th century and deer are the perfect size some a man can handle it they're fairly easy to hunt in that time period and you could still feed a lot of people with it uh so it was better than small game but it wasn't so difficult to deal with as something like a Buffalo they didn't have to worry about preserving it as much they could eat it before it went bad so these two items um are something that is very common in the diet of n Native Americans and in this circumstance a common thing for feasting upon [Music] you got is that a piece of yep n as our corn and venison is boiling let me read to you this segment of the account that we're working from here he he starts these young women then led me up to the council house where some of the tribe were ready with new clothes for me they gave me a new ruffled shirt which I put on and also a pair of leggings done off with ribbons and Beads likewise a pair of moccasins and garters dressed with beads porcupine quills and red hair also a tinsel laced cappo they they again painted my head and face with various colors and tied a bunch of red feathers to one of these locks they had left on my crown of my head which stood up five or 6 in they seated me on a bare skin and gave me a pipe and a tomahawk and a PO cat skinn pouch which was skinned pocket fashion when I was thus seated the Indians came in dressed and painted in their grandest Manner and as they came in they took their seats and for a considerable time there was a profound silence everyone was smoking but not a word was spoken among them at the time at length one of the chiefs made a speech which was delivered to me by an interpreter and was as follows my son you are now flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone by the ceremony which was performed this day every drop of white blood was washed out of your veins and you are taken into the kanaga nation and initiated into a warlike tribe you are adopted into to a great family and now received with great seriousness and solemnity in the room and place of a great man after what has passed this day you are now one of us by an old strong law and custom my son you now have nothing to fear we are now under the same obligation to love support and defend you that we are to love and defend one another therefore you are to consider yourselves as one of our people at this time I did not believe this fine speech especially that of the white blood being washed out of me but since that time I have found that there was as much sincerity in the said speech for from that day I never knew them to make any distinction between me and themselves in any respect whatsoever until I left them if they had plenty of clothing I had plenty if they were scarce well we all shared the same fate after the ceremony was over I was introduced to my new kin and told that I was to attend a feast that evening which I did and as the custom was they gave me also a bowl and a wooden spoon which I carried with me to the place where there was a great number of large brass kettles full of boiled Venison and green corn and everyone Advanced with his bowl and Spoon and had his share given to him after this one of the chiefs made a short speech and then we began to eat he goes on to describe the celebration the party that happened after the feast music and dancing he goes on to describe uh parts of this adoption ceremony uh both before this and after this it's such an important part of understanding Native American culture especially from this mid 18th century context from somebody that it's happening to them it's not a description from the outside such an important description of something that happened 200 170 years ago green corn Venison and a little bit of salt boiled it couldn't be simpler let's find out though what the taste is like let me get just the right bit so flavorful so simple the sweetness of a corn and this venison go together very very well it is I mean I am truly amazed by how simple it is and how rich the flavor is it's also got some really good texture that green corn you know hasn't broken down too far so it's not like cream corn or anything like that um and the meat has yet a different texture so it's it's great on every level and it's just so amazingly amazingly simple I really love this one this is one of those dishes where really all we have is this great description from a journal you won't find this in any cookbook of the time period because it is so simple and it's a Native American dish so we really only get sort of the descriptions of those but we get to try these things out and get a feel for the context of something like we read in a journal it really kind of fills in all the gaps for us being able to kind of grasp what was being written about in the time period welcome to 18th century cooking I'm your host John towns and we're in the wilderness we're on the frontier we don't normally think about dessert do we but we have amazing resources that are available to us especially this time of year black raspberries these things are wonderful and they make a dessert that fits the 18th century perfectly thanks for joining us today as we Savor the Flavors and the Aromas of the 18th century [Music] so imagine you're in a frontier situation maybe you are a Long Hunter and you've been out hunting for months or you're traveler traveling in the back country which is seemingly happening fairly often uh but one of the problems is is that the the provisions that you have have run out long ago and it seems like that happens so many times in these journals and they're surviving upon the land and eating uh generally meat things that they have hunted and they're they're killing and eating immediately and they've had that over and over and over again they've they are so tired of eating meat and they are craving anything they're craving bread or craving something sweet so wild fruit was written about over and over in the journals of Europeans that are traveling in the back country and writing back to the folks in Europe and they're talking about the the plentiful the abund abundance of wild fruit that is available in North America and basically it goes from season to season you know one one Berry or one kind of fruit is ripe and then that one's gone and another one is available so they are just astounded by the amount of fruit that's just available just picked on the trees it's not cultivated it's just wild anywhere you're at and it's available in most parts of North America it was amazing to them that this resource was available there's a lot of research about Native Americans also using wild fruits uh wild berries and nuts as a great part of their diet uh here in 18th century North America the berries specifically were something that was eaten fresh uh they were also dried and saved for other parts of the Year along with other items berries like this dried might even be put into pkin for a long-term storage so that they would be able to you know access this food uh months or even years into the future and so many times we we hear about um in situations where the Native American men would go out hunting and the women and children would stay behind and they would collect this these wild fruits and nuts that were available just all around them so here we are on the frontier we've gathered our berries and it's time now to fix them into something just a little special the difficulty is is most recipes in 18th century cookbooks well they just don't fit the setting do they they're they're making something like a jelly or a jam they're making a raspberry tart and we want something simple and quick and easy to make and William Bird's journal from the early 18th century describes exactly what we want he says I ate raspberries with milk and that seems just like the perfect kind of balance doesn't it's something very very simple but it adds to this Berry recipe so that's what we're going to be making today so the finishing touch on this it's super simple right but a little bit of sugar sprinkled up on top now this isn't just uh your regular sugar this is maple sugar and in a frontier setting like this uh maple sugar is the most available sugar to us because it's made right here on the frontier made by Native Americans uh made by other folks out on the frontier from the trees from the resources that we have right around us it's the least expensive and it's one of those things that was traded back into uh like trading posts like Fort Wayne where maple sugar is part of their inventory the things that they traded uh they had trade goods and they traded for maple sugar that went back East so often when we think about the frontier we don't think about dessert do we and boy if this isn't dessert nothing is there's nothing nothing quite like fresh black raspberries with milk and a little bit of sugar it's got all those all these wonderful wild flavors that come in there and it's a burst of flavor that we aren't normally used to especially in we're thinking about you know plain cooking uh on the frontier simple cooking but no this is rich rich food and a wonderful dessert for the time period I love this recipe because it's not a recipe that's out of a cookbook per se but it's actually right out of the the readings from the 18th century somebody wrote about the dish they ate that day and we get to try it out exactly the same thing they had in 1720 welcome to 18th century cooking I'm your host John Townsen and today we're cooking something that you've probably cooked many times it's got great 18th century Roots it's an omelet right out of the cookbooks of the time period thanks for joining us today as we Savor the Flavors and Aromas of the 18th [Music] century you'll find uh recipes just like this in multiple 18th century cookbooks one we're using today is the universal cook by cing wood and woolam let me read to you this recipe real quick to make an omelette take six eggs beat them strain them through a SI put them into a frying pan with um in which which is A4 of a pound of hot butter I love that uh put in a little boiled ham scraped fine some shred parsley uh and uh season them with salt pepper and Nutmeg fry it brown on on the underside lay it on your dish but do not turn it take a hold a hot salamander over it for a half a minute take to take off the raw look of the eggs stick in some curl the parsley and send it up to the table now this is a fancy recipe this is one where we're caring about presentation and the look of it obviously we're in a camp setting and this recipe you can do equally well without making it look all fancy like in this one uh they're not flipping it over they're coming in with a hot salamander to uh finish the top side to make it look just right well we don't have a hot salamander here we don't have extra equipment like that so we're just going to flip it over in the pan uh like you would probably do in your house our main ingredient eggs of course we've got this wonderful ham that we're going to put in there we've got parsley we're use in a couple of different steps of course we need A4 of a pound of butter and then some spices salt and pepper and a little bit of nutmeg let's get this mixed together [Music] n our campfire omelet is done we had to flip it over in the pan so slightly different than the recipe but easy to do out here on the campfire oh what an excellent excellent omelette there's always a special flavor that comes along a wonderful flavor that comes along when you cook things over the campfire I so enjoy uh cooking on the campfire for that reason uh adds that extra flavor to this omelette we've got the the wonderful egg flavor along with the ham this is so easy and so delicious and so much butter so last year I wanted to find an apple pie recipe for the channel uh because it's so popular today and I actually had difficulty as I was digging through the 18th century cookbooks there just aren't that many apple pie recipes that pop out now I thought that was strange at the time I did find one excellent recipe you'll want to check that one out so in recent research I found a wonderful section a giant section on apple pies in this great book it's the country housewife's family companion written by William Ellis in 1749 right there in the middle of the 18th century and he is writing to Farmers housewives in central Southern England and these are not extremely well to-do Farmers but sort of that middling sort and he's he wants to help them have a a very efficient household one of the things that's happening on these Farms is at Harvest time they have to hire workers field hands that come in and work for 3 weeks a month maybe as long as 3 months if they were having trouble getting workers and they they needed to hire them for a longer time and they would pay these men partially in their food and so there's a great section about vidding or feeding these harvestmen or field workers and that's where this section of the apple pie comes in this apple pie section in this cookbook is so big that it starts off with a well actually a huge poem let me read to you this just the very first part it says of all the Delicacies which Britain try to please the pallet or Delight the eye of all the several kinds of sumptuous Fair there's none that can with apple pie compare that's just a tiny this PO this poem goes on and on uh apple pies are really important for feeding these temporary workers you want your temporary workers to be happy but you want to feed them dessert the most inexpensive way possible and so that's where he's really digging into why he's you know talking about the apple pie over and over again he explains three or four different ways you could do it he even says you can do it this cheaply but you're your workers will be unhappy they W will not work well so it's really important to feed these workers something they're going to enjoy but to do it in the least expensive way possible so the titles of these little sections are great how a farmer disgraced himself by having Apple pasties made at a dear rate and how they how he might have had them made much cheaper and better so he really says you know you can do it wrong or you can do it right there are inexpensive ways to do that and we're looking at this this apple pie for the worker and one of the reasons why I really like this recipe is because a lot of people can be intimidated by cooking today um we have cooking shows and giant cookbooks and everything has to look perfect uh not everybody has to eat in a gourmet fashion every day and you don't have to have a very complicated Apple by you can have one that's so simple and this one is it so here's how simple this apple pie is let me read to you this uh section how another farmer has his apple pies and pasties made something better than the last farmer a farmer near me has his Apple pasties made by first pairing the apples taking away the stocks and tops of them but chops the apples with their cores very small for by being so small chopped they fill the apple crust or coffin in every part of it better than if they were quartered and the cores thereby are less perceived in the eating they're putting all of the Apple in the apple pie like some of these guys are putting the stems in and everything it's crazy how they're they're filling up their apple pie with just like filler I'm surprised they aren't sweeping stuff off the floor and putting it in their apple pie we're not going to do that quite like that but it's that simple there's the crust there's there's the Apple that you put in that's chopped the way you want it you can pair it not pair it you can take away the cores we're going to take away the cores obviously we're going to throw out the leaves and the sticks um and then he talks later on about the type of apple you use and if you use the right Apple then all you don't even need to put sugar or water or anything in the apple pie it's just the apples and the crust that's all there is to this simple apple pie re recipe we're going to take do that same recipe with just a little twist our crust for this pie is going to be a very simple crust butter flour water that's it I mean that's all it takes and you know a lot of people can be intimidated by pie crusts don't be intimidated by pie crusts just do it you don't have to go to the store and buy it they inexpensive and simple easy fast to make it home even have a little bit of Courage jump in there and make the simple pie crust it doesn't have to be beautiful we're going to rub this butter in it's cold butter we don't want to get it warm or hot so as we're rubbing it in with our fingers uh we're just doing it for a second and then moving on to another piece uh we're just just trying to break up all these butter lumps and do the smallest thing possible now that the butter is rubbed in we're going to add just a little bit of water just enough to bring it into our short paste then we can put it on our flour table roll it out again I'm not going to put the cores in there apparently apple seeds aren't actually good for you so you I mean you can have some apple seeds but the idea of having sort of ground up apple seeds and any number of them is isn't good for you because it has cyanide in there so don't don't put the apple seeds in there even if you want to follow the recipe completely if you want the stems that's probably all right you can toss those in if you really want to so one of the things that's making this cheap especially for these Farmers is they typically had apple trees right there on their land it was one of the the great resources that they had available to them so um he even talks about having so many apples that he has to use them for other purposes but he's uh definitely going to use uh all these apples or as many apples as he needs to to feed these harvestmen because it is for him the very cheapest dessert he can make so so far we've got the crust we've got the apples our final ingredient and if we use a real Sweet Apple we don't even need that uh but our final ingredient that that he talks about is a little bit just a little bit of sugar strewn on top and that's it we are not even going to add any nutmeg to this it's not even part of the recipe so we're not going to add that now finally we're going to put the top crust on this that's pretty simple um and I'm not going to do anything fancy with this I don't want to have a lot of air in it now that our pie is basically finished and crimped up it's ready to go into the oven we're going to be baking it in our earn oven that we just finished a few weeks ago you'll be doing it in your home oven so hey 375° probably and well I don't know how big your pie is so maybe it's 25 30 minutes you know what uh at least in an 18th century sense uh we don't really use timers on these we use our nose when we can start to smell it even on the outside of our Earth and oven we say wait a minute I start to smell that apple pie take a peek in there and you'll be able to tell by the top whether it's ready to come out whether it's looking right so use your nose use your eyes then you'll know when it's done and there it is the simplest apple pie ever I can't can't wait to try this it smells great right out of the oven you can smell the crust and the butter and the crust you can you know you can smell the apples in there and you know there isn't there isn't it isn't the apple pie that we are used to you know we're thinking it's got to have all those apple pie spices we even call them apple pie spices um sometimes we buy it as a mix but this doesn't have any of that in it well mostly let's try it out this is so good it's so deadly simple and so extremely good I mean the crust is dead simple the filling and we didn't have to we didn't have to put any of that filling that we normally do in a modern um apple pie you know lots of flour corn starch or you know liquids those things that have to go into an apple pie you don't need any of that the apple is going to do everything you need to do he talks about that in the recipe book it's like well they'll stew in their own ju juices and they'll give you what you need it doesn't come out quite as easy although this piece came out pretty nice and uh I mean I've made Modern pies that didn't uh come out as nicely as this one so I'm sold you can do an apple pie so immense L easy and this is right out of the cookbooks this is right out of simple simple farmer cooking I can't recommend it enough welcome to 18th century cooking I'm your host John Townson today we're doing turkey 2 totally different ways because it's Thanksgiving we have to do Turkey this is going to be a crazy experiment thanks for joining us today as we Savor the Flavors in the Aromas of the 18th century so we're joined today by Ryan the camp cook he's going to he's going to do one turkey and I'm going to do another turkey my turkey is going to be the very very right out of the 1796 Amilia Simmons cookbook kind of turkey we're going to hang it by the fire we're going to stuff it we're going to do all that normal stuff that you would expect for an 18th century turkey but ry's going to do something crazy different yeah yeah so we built this oven with a turkey in mind and that's why we made the the door the whole thing bigger right but then we went to the cookbooks and I was like they're not really baking turkeys so uh we're we're I'm winging it I'm winging it I'm basically GNA I'm basically going to salt pepper season butter tie this in paper which is a technique that you see a ton for all kinds of dishes in 18th century cookbooks but we haven't done it on this channel before so it's like this is a lot of different experiments rolled into war the papering is going to look hilarious I I just know it I can just see it it's like a gift W turkey and then put it in the oven it's just going to be hilarious so while Ryan is buttering his bird let me read to you this Amelia Simmons recipe real quick to stuff and roast a turkey or fowl one pound of soft wheat bread 3 oz of beef sew three eggs a little sweet thyme sweet margam pepper salt add a gill of wine fill the bird therewi and sew it up hang down to a steady solid fire basting frequently with salt and water and roast until steam emits from the breast pull 1/3 of a pound of butter into gravy dust flour over the bird based with gravy that sounds good doesn't it serve with boiled onions and cranberry sauce There You Go pretty simple so let me get started on [Music] this [Music] e I wanted to TI my bird up before I put it in the paper so that when I take it out and take the paper off the legs and the wings don't want to fall apart on me got that tied up then I wrapped it in several layers of paper depending on the weight of the paper that you use it it's just go by feel there's a turkey in there yeah looks good so tie it up nice and snug then it's ready to go in the oven so how you feeling Ryan good yeah I mean as far as the one in the oven I don't think we'll know anything for a couple hours we'll check it and see where're I want to peek and see it's like caught on fire or anything cuz I don't know how that paper every once in a while I just glance over to see if there's smoke rolling out of it yeah this one well I mean the whole fireplace is warm so I've had the fire going in here for four or five hours the side walls are heated up so the whole fireplace is acting like a reflector oven uh Heat's coming off that wall the back wall this wall and then we've got the fire here so when we cook turkeys today everyone thinks oh well I'm going to put this in the oven I'm going to bake it in the oven uh we might even call it a roast turkey but we bake it right so you know it's not really a roasted one um but you don't see that in the 18th century cookbooks no I mean I'm not going to say that it's not there right but I haven't found it for sure and so I I just think that for the most part they're very used to roasting meat and by roasting that's by the fire when we hear roasting we think a roast pan if you don't have this big pan to put all that in and then put that in the oven which has a fairly narrow door for most ovens then you lose all of those drippings and you lose all everything that can be made into a broth or a colis later in this case you've got a pan right underneath it it's catching all of that so I don't think that they were utilizing ovens for that kind of thing there's also the issue of temperature so the ovens today you know you turn on the oven you set the temperature at exactly 300° and it's going to bake it uh it's going to bake whatever's in there at that 300° for as long as you leave the oven on just that concept of reheating the oven I'm willing to do that in this circumstance just because it's experiment right and darn it I want to make a turkey in that oven that's one of the thoughts that we had coming into it but uh as far as sticking to Historic recipe that's really planned with with what you should be doing so [Music] n [Music] l [Music] [Applause] la [Applause] [Music] it's time to try out these turkeys they smell great we have an extra person to help us out with the taste testing Brandon the blacksmith and we're going to try out my turkey first but before we dig in I do want to talk about this Thanksgiving that we're having this year I know it's going to be weird for a lot of different people uh out there in the world because of everything that's going on um but we need to remember what Thanksgiving is about it's not necessarily about turkey it's not necessarily about getting together with family it's about being thankful for all the amazing things we do have so we do want to be thankful regardless of whether we can get together in big groups or not it's an amazing thing so we've got my turkey we're going to try out first hey cheers and Happy Thanksgiving than there we go and now the first turkey very good that stuffing wa the stuffing is really good you can taste the wine in it and strangely enough the soup which you think would give it a bad taste really gives it a really good taste I didn't get much skin on my piece of turkey and what's interesting is those The herbal flavors that he put in there are still really coming through and a lot of times what you get with a turkey or any meat really is you got you've got your rub and then you get much past the surface and you don't have a whole lot of those flavors but it really permeated well and also I think the turkey benefited from having the stuffing in it holding that moisture in right so even though we don't do that in a modern sense it's it really helps a turkey not to dry out from the center right you know yeah yeah and I don't know if there was something to the fact that it was hanging and so the moisture is kind of coming down the whole time right okay okay so that was the turkey that hung by the fire now it's time to try out the crazy experimental Ryan turkey yeah right yeah so uh at the 2hour Mark or so I took that turkey out of the oven I took all the paper off of it and I put it back in the oven for I'd say 40 minutes and then I didn't like how it was coloring up so I decided to put a little fire on either side of it so that it would Brown a little bit better and then before that fire went out I closed the door so that the whole oven would just fill with smoke and it would sit in that smoke for a little while so let's see if it tastes Smokey at all you're just cheating man I think it it um certainly stayed moiser mhm right inside that paper that whole time yeah it is very moist and it's definitely got a a different flavor profile because of that smoking and it was nuts because it was the the same spices went on both of the birds yes yes but the smoke definitely comes through so I was telling John later that I think the papering method is really great because it keeps everything moist the problem is is it doesn't do anything for the skin you're trying to keep something moist but also crisp it up and that's that's a problem so I think what happened was where the where the fire could get to it on the top on the sides the the skin crisped up okay on the underside where it was on the floor of the oven you basically just lost that portion of it because it just couldn't it couldn't crisp up for an experiment I think that this bird turned out really great I would make it like this again on purpose okay so who won Brandon who won whose turkey is better boy yeah no pressure huh all honesty I like Ryan juicy I know but no but no stuffing inside see no no he's not talking about side dishes turkey which turkey is yeah well I'm a real I I love smoked meat so yeah so yeah that's I definitely got that smoke flavor coming out of the skin in that that outer portion yeah I got to say I'm as far as the turkey goes I like my turkey better sorry John but I'm a little partial well I think it does uh that one is really really good excellent I would say it was the better Turkey Bar the idea that you can't really get a stuffing in there maybe bring it up to eat but since most people don't cook with stuffing inside the bird anymore maybe that doesn't matter yeah well I I would say as as far as like if you want the experience of an 18th century turkey the the turkey that you did is perfect I mean it's like cooking roasting it over the fire with stuffing inside and just kind of watching like watching the fire watching the bird rotating it so you're cooking it even there like a very interactive thing it's it's a fun it's a fun thing to cook and you can cook them in a in a reflector oven yeah or if you've got a fireplace like this one it almost acts like a reflector oven bringing heat in from all three sides it is an amazing experience so we've had a tremendous quantity of fun putting these turkeys together and trying them out I think we had some we learned a lot through this uh so thank you guys for helping out thank you Brandon for coming in and I know it's a it's a rough job coming in and testing out the turkey so thank you for that welcome to 18th century cooking I'm your host John Townsen and if you're like the rest of us you have mountains of leftover Thanksgiving Day food and you want to know what to do with it let's find out what they did back in in early America thank you for joining me today as we Savor the Flavors and the Aromas of the 18th [Music] century so here on the channel we just got done with the giant turkey cook off the contest between Ryan and I and so we have two turkeys to deal with uh if you haven't checked out that episode make sure to go back and check that out we had a lot of fun we learned a lot but the question is what happens in the 18th century when they've got left over parts of birds like this lots of leftovers I went through the cookbooks uh found this wonderful section here in the ladies assistant by Charlotte Mason um this one is a a late Century uh 18th century cookbook English but it's got a lot of wonderful recipes and it's got this one that just it shows up right after glazed turkey doesn't that sound good right underneath it like you just got done eating the glazed turkey now what are you going to do with it it says Turkey hashed mix some flour with a piece of butter stir it into some cream and a little ve gravy till it boils up cut the turkey into pieces not too small put it into the sauce with grated lemon peel white pepper mace pounded and a little mushroom ketchup simmer it up later on a couple Pages later there's a very very similar one that talks about fowls hashed so maybe you don't have a turkey maybe you've got duck or you've got chicken um it doesn't have the mace in it it has nutmeg in it yeah that's what we that's what we need right so that's what they're doing with these wonderful uh leftovers they're making a hash and that shows up multiple times in these 18 century cookbooks and that's what we're going to do today we're going to start off by slightly warming up our pan and putting in a ball of butter covered with flour we might have to add a little bit more flour but let's that's how we're going to start we're going to melt that in our Pan Once our butter has melted we can add cream we don't know exactly how much I'm going to start with 1/4 of a cup of cream then we'll add more if we need to now we can add gravy now it talks about ve gravy so maybe they're thinking that we don't have any gravy left over from our turkey cuz we ate it all up in the first meal right cuz we love gravy I've still got some drippings from our turkey so I'm going to use our turkey drippings or turkey gravy instead once our sauce is all heated up we can add in our turkey again uh this is turkey hash it's not big pieces and not little pieces U nice pieces that can warm up easily in our sauce here and we're going to add these up get them to uh warm up once we know that it's warmed up uh through down to the middle of that turkey uh it is ready for our spices the final stage and our spices we've got lemon zest we've got white pepper some mace which is the cousin to Nutmeg if we don't have mace we can go ahead and add nutmeg instead and then the final little touch is mushroom ketchup once we stir those spices in we let them kind of mingle just for a minute or two and then we can serve it up so the later recipe that has fowls hashed that says serve it up on sippets so that's what what I did here I toasted some wonderful bread put that on the bottom that we can pour this wonderful mixture up on top let me tell you the smell is very promising I can't wait to try this out let's do that right this second let me get a little little bit here so good so turkey by itself can be dry it can you know you can really have trouble with turkey and even when it's moist it can be a little tasteless this brings it all out it's really good you know the the gravy is all moist we brought in all those wonderful drippings then we've got the butter and the flour thickens it up so it's really nice and thick and then we've got those spices that end up on on top uh that white pepper the mushroom ketchup you won't believe it but it really uh kind of Peaks it up right at the end notice there was no salt in this because it doesn't need it it's in that mushroom ketchup it's in these other things uh so it is so very very good all by itself it's so creamy with that well like almost like cheese with the cream in there and uh we it cooked long enough to get really nice and thick went all the way through I would say I'm probably going to make some people angry here this is better than turkey by itself it's almost like forget Thanksgiving let's wait for the day after so we can make turkey hash this is so good this sequestered Glend has long been known by the name of Sleepy Hollow and its rustic Lads were called Sleepy Hollow boys throughout all the neighboring country a drowsy dreamy influence seems to hang over the land and to pervade the very atmosphere The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was written in 1820 right in our time period And I love this whole story it's such a quintessential American Tale and we all know of it or and maybe have read it ourselves what's really great about this tale of sleepy Hol is the food that it includes you can almost smell it right through the pages let me read to you about the Van Tassel feast and what was included such heaped up platters of cakes of various and almost Indescribable kinds known only to the experienced Dutch Housewives there was the Doty donut and the tenderer oie coke and the crisp and crumbling crer sweet cakes and short cakes Ginger cakes and Honey Cakes and the whole family of cakes and then there were the apple pies and Peach pies pumpkin pies besides slices of ham and smoked beef and more over delectable dishes of preserved plums and peaches and pears and quintes not to mention broiled shad and roasted chicken together with bowls of milk and cream all all mingled higgledy piggley pretty much as I have enumerated them with the motherly teapot sending up its clouds of vapor from the midst there you have a table full of food and if we want to make some of these things actually uh let's think about it we have done um roasted chicken we've done broiled Shad we've done pies Peach pies and apple pies and pumpkin pies we just did the apple pie recipe we have done donuts and ooli Coke or something very very similar to that and today we're going to dig into what was this ginger cake so we can have something right out of the feast that we can taste and try so we want to have ginger cakes exactly like gabog Crane's last meal just like the ones at this vassel Feast so what exactly would they be like he doesn't give a recipe but we fortunately have this cookbook which is really going to tell us exactly what we need now this story was published in 1820 he was talking about a generation before that so probably about 18800 plus or minus is where the story is set well American cookery by Amelia Simmons was published in 1796 so about 5 years before that and amazingly enough this this first American cookbook this one that was first written by an American she's from almost exactly that area so that this this recipe or this cookbook is going to give us recipes very similar to what these this Feast was like so it turns out ailia Simmons has a whole section of in fact a whole page of gingerbread ginger cake recipes these are really important um this recipe that we're going to be using here has a very special ingredient in fact it seems like it's almost the first time this ingredient shows up in an English um cookbook because she's actually writing about Dutch cookery here and this ingredient does not show up in English cookery in fact if you go digging for ginger cake recipes in English cookbooks they're not like this one recipe number one 3 lb of flour a grated nutmeg a whole grated nutmeg 2 oz of Ginger one pound of sugar three small spoons of pearlash dissolved in cream one pound of flour four eggs knead it stiff shape it to your fancy bake it 15 minutes so the special ingredient it's pear lash you've probably never heard of pear lash in your entire life and you'd be reading through this cookbook and you'd say peash what is this pear lash is a primitive form of baking soda so it's not uh sodium bicarbonate it is potassium carbonate so it's a primitive form it doesn't um it doesn't fluff as much as sodium bicarbonate and it it's got potassium left over instead of sodium we're used to the flavor of sodium we generally don't like the flavor of potassium So today we're going to be substituting sodium bicarbonate that's something you can get very easily it's probably in your house already we're making a 1/3 sized one here so I shrank all the ingredients one lound of flour now let's put in 6 oz of sugar here is the ginger now uh 1/3 of 2 oz is a little less than 1 o we're going to go with more than that I like a lot of Ginger here so I'm putting in extra ginger more than an ounce of Ginger and finally our nutmeg uh she calls for a whole nutmeg uh so obviously we don't need a whole nutmeg but maybe a third of a nutmeg you can use a teaspoonful if you're using preg ground nutmeg shame on you let's mix all our dry ingredients up make sure you use a bowl that's big enough this one's just barely big enough next in goes the butter but we need to have this Pearl Ash or in this case uh baking soda dissolve in our cream fur so while uh while I'm going to do the butter I'm going to get this potassium carbonate we're using probably about a teaspoon full will be plenty for this recipe make sure I got it all stir that in there so it has a chance to dissolve there we go now our butter goes in next this is going to be just like how we did that crust in the apple pie recipe just put that butter in here it's already chilled and just going to rub that in as best we can oh boy that smells good with all that ginger in there now let's work on our wet ingredients we've got two wet ingredients we've got cream and we've got eggs you know what unfortunately this recipe while it's great in every other respect with the quantities in fact really good cuz it gives us weight of flour instead of cups of flour but here we don't know how much cream so we're going to use about a cup of cream I've played around with this earlier so a cup of cream we're just going to pour that in it's already got our uh our baking soda in there and then we've got two eggs I'm going to add this maybe just a little bit more than the recipe would call for but two eggs in they go now let's all mix it up in the bowl this dough smells good and don't tell anybody even the dough tastes great these guys are rolled out they're ready to go into the oven and kind of give them a little bit of space the sheet cuz it'll probably grow just a touch this supposed to go into a slack oven so 350 maybe even 325 you don't want it to be too hot you don't want to burn them 15 minutes is what she calls for but I'm going to watch them closely they may not take that long Ginger cakes right out of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow this may have been the very last thing that ikabod crane actually put in his mouth we get to try it out recipe right here from Amelia Simmons cookbook let me tell you these smell glorious I I mean it was the smell was coming out of the oven you knew they were done uh they're cooked just the right amount you you do want to cook these in a slack oven so they don't get too hard that I I think that um putting in the double the amount of Ginger helped to them let's take a look look at that breaks perfectly nice and and uh leavened wow they taste even better than they smell they are just so wonderful and soft and you know this is completely different than those English Ginger cakes which would have been like ginger flavored leather very hard tough texture um crispy maybe but not like a Ginger Snap like snap your teeth kind of snap these are so light and Airy wonderful flavor they are amazing and so so easy welcome to 18th Century cooking I'm your host John Townsen and outside it's October beautiful fall weather crisp air the leaves are starting to come off the trees it is so beautiful it makes me think about cooking in a coffin thanks for joining us today as we Savor the Flavors and the Aromas of the 18th [Music] century so cooking in a coffin that sounds really creepy doesn't it so sometimes when you're reading in 18th century cookbooks you'll find just strange terms that just pop out and you you have to dig deeper and cooking in a coffin or baking in a coffin shows up in multiple different English cookery uh cookbooks from the 18th century sometimes they they don't talk about it for very very much they just kind of mention it and run away and you're like okay wait a minute stop explain this to me so you have to dig deeper in context in the 18th century cookbooks sometimes they'll say put this in the crust or in your coffin so we know it's something it's usually in the reference to a pie or something pie like if we really want to understand this coffin term then we have to go back further in the 17th century now obviously they don't mean a coffin that you're you know a wooden box you're going to be burying somebody in they mean something completely different Jes Markham the well-kept kitchen 1615 this is early 17th century and he really gets into this concept of baking in a standing crust and that is what a coffin is this is a standing crust uh that you're going to be baking in instead of having a pie pan with just a simple crust inside of it this is a sturdy crust made as its own um preser meat preservation or preservation box that you both bake in and store food in so it turns out that coffins are not one siiz fits all or in this case you don't use the same kind of coffin for everything you want to bake in so if you've got a huge honch of Venison and you that the problem with a huge hch hunch of venison is you you might bring that to the table uh for an entire week or three or four days to bake something huge like that you have to have a large cooking vessel and it has to be able to protect this for these 3 or 4 days so for a very large cut of meat they would make a coffin a very large cooking vessel out of very thick paste and this paste would be something inexpensive you're not going to eat it so they would use Rye flour and maybe something like SE or lard to make this really [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] egg the egg helps stiffen it up the egg isn't used in some of the other ones it's just in these sort of fancier pastes that the egg gets uh put in here and that's to help stiffen this particular style of dough while I'm mixing it here for a few minutes let's talk about this term coffin or casket uh we generally use both of those terms to mean just one thing and that is the box that you bury people in but that's not true in the 17th century of the reasons why they used it in cooking was because coffin was a generic term for a box you might have a small box on your table that you keep your important documents on and you would call that a casket or you would call that a coffin so in the case of this where we're cooking in that we're just cooking in a box that's all that really means and we're making this particular box out of pastry dough okay this is looking great it's still very pliable it's just slightly cooled off I've rolled this out into 1/4 of an inch thick uh paste I'm going to let this set for just a second and we're going to cut out the shapes we'll use to build whatever coffin or container we want to um later but I wanted to read to you about the shape that I have cut this out in and this is this is Whimsical this is a joke it's a coffin in the shape of a coffin but is that so out of the ordinary this is D's book again a few pages later just a few he talks about baking a custard which is I mean best what we're going to be doing if we skip halfway down here it says um the interior when you're done with that raise your coffins of a good tough wheat paste being of the second sort before spoke of if you please raise it in pretty works or in angular forms which you you may do so by fixing the upper part of the crust to the nether with the yolks of eggs when the coffins are ready screw the bottoms and then he goes on with that he actually talks about saying hey if you're going to make pretty forms out of these then this is the one to do it with and you can cut it into angular forms you can make it into whatever shape you wish especially if it's a seasonal decoration which is exactly what we've done here we've taken this and made a coffin shape because it's October and U that's the kind of decoration that we use these days don't we so I thought it was kind of funny to make a coffin into a coffin shape that's exactly what we're doing and that's what exactly what they did in the 18th century so our pieces are done they're set aside that we need uh we can't use them right away because this this dough as it's um as it's made right now is still very very soft and pliable so it has to set 4 6 hours um maybe more overnight would be even better in a cool place not cold but in a cool place and it will start to firm up and then it will be sturdy enough for us to build whatever shape we please so this batch I prepared earlier it's been Cooling and sort of sitting it's really got a nice you know it's still pliable enough we can work it but it's a lot stiffer it's uh probably spent about 6 hours since I I made this batch and we're just going to put our pieces together we already have all these cut out basically the right size and we're going to use um a little bit of egg yolk as our glue just like we just as if they were wooden Parts uh and this is wood glue well exactly the same thing and we could use egg white but uh Markham actually says to use egg yolk so that's I'm going to follow his directions why not um and just go around the outside edge of the bottom of our [Music] coffin we have our chocolate uh filling that's already made now this is a classic chocolate tart recipe from Hanah glasses confectionary cookbook of 1800 um your standard Custard with egg and cream and chocolate stirred over a slow fire it's got spices in it too don't forget it gets cinnamon it gets nutmeg yes yes it's a beautiful filling just for this tar we're going to fill it up to halfway full because we want to put this little decoration on the top of that so we got a little dep's head a couple little bones in here cuz that's you know it kind of fits with this Motif now we can put the lid on and I'm going to seal it just a little bit it'll help the walls uh to keep them from sort of falling out and getting rounded uh so that'll hold them together and then we're going to put a little decoration on the top of that this is made to decorate that's why we're doing this so beautiful little decoration for the top lid of our coffin once this is set up hey we're going to put a little egg wash on the outside so it Browns up nicely then it's ready to go in the [Music] oven okay this is in our oven 350° 20 30 minutes we don't have to worry about the custard cooking so much we want that our coffin to look nice and star to look Brown on the edges we'll be able to tell by what it smells like and take a [Music] [Applause] look boy this smells great out of the oven it looks fun before I try this I want to talk about the concept of uh momentto Mori we look at this and we might think well you know this is maybe morbid maybe it was morbid in the 18th century the concept of momentto Mori which is remembering your mortality or remembering your death is a very common Concept in the 17th century in the 18th century and the motifs around death death heads and skeletons it was there was very common in the imagery they they wanted to remember that they weren't going to live forever and that you might see something like this in the 18th century so we've got that out of the way it's time to try this out now I want to try the the chocolate custard first to tell you about it if you're interested in this uh making it especially there is an episode where Ivy and I made this exact uh chocolate tart you can go back and find that it is superb as a baked custard it is really good of course we see the the visuals of our crust here but what does it actually taste like is it edible now some of these weren't meant to be editable but I believe this one is meant to be that way and actually it's got a really good texture um a really good flavor we can even use it like a chip I'll bet let's find out so bust off a piece here dig it up it's like having a cookie built in this is so great and so so fun this time of year and very very really a period kind of a thing to do um you can do this other Seasons make other sorts of shapes and sizes just exactly what they would have done in the 18 Century welcome to 18th century cooking I'm your host John Townsen and today we're doing this amazing chesher pork pie it is going to be great thanks for joining us today as we Savor the Flavors and the Aromas of the 18th [Music] century this recipe is from the universal cook this is Collingwood and Willams 1792 and it is called a cheser pork pie skin a loin of pork cut it into steaks and season it with salt nutmeg and pepper make a good crust put a layer of pork a layer of Pippin paired in cord and a little sugar enough to sweeten the pie then a layer of pork put in a half a pint of white wine lay some butter on the top close your pie it will take a pint of wine if your pie be large pies uh meat pie pies like this are really common in the 18th century they had uh multiple different kinds of sort of layered meat pies sometimes there'll be different layers of meat sometimes they might have uh some some paste in there or Some Crust or in this case we've got apples layered with pork and sometimes it would make these giant pies you know really really tall with multiple layers this one just seems to have three layers pork apples and then pork again and then we've got this wonderful butter on top and we close the pie up and bake it an easy way of cooking we don't do it that often today do we this one's going to turn out great let's get started we've got some pork cutlets here that are kind of sliced up thin we don't want big thick ones it calls for apples it calls for pippens and these are sort of you know pie apples of the 18th century we don't have anything quite like that so I'll look for a uh a pie apple in your grocery store we've got some green pie apples here we've got our seasoning salt pepper nutmeg of course we need some butter we need some white wine and pie crust that's it this is going to go together pretty quickly uh first thing though I'm I'm going to go ahead and season up these pork cuts and then even though the recipe doesn't call for it I'm going to go ahead and sear them in the pan I think that's going to bring out some extra flavors for it and they might have done that in a time period without just telling us about it we're not trying trying to cook this pork all the way through we're just searing the outside to lock in that flavor we've got our pork seared it's now time to assemble our pie got a couple of pieces of pie crust here we made earlier and we're going to start off with a layer of our pork pieces after our pork we can add in our layer of apples and we've put these apples in the little bath so they didn't turn brown real quick but don't want to bring in a lot of moisture because we're going to be adding in the wine that's going to bring in the moisture so make sure your apples are as dry as you can get them so here's the Apple layer now in the 18th century so many of these recipes that have Savory in them they add sweet and mix those two flavors I mean if I was going to do this I probably wouldn't add the sugar but we're going to do it just like the recipe add a little sugar on top of the apples now we put some nice big pieces of butter on top here we go that'll add that wonderful buttery moisture before we put the top on we have the white wine that we're going to add into this now uh do we put in as much as the recipe calls for I would worry that it would be too moist if we did that so we're going to cut it back a little bit especially this isn't necessarily a very big pie it's time for the top crust I'm going to go ahead and cut some vents in this top so it can let some of that moisture out as it's baking now it's ready to go in the oven if you're in a modern setting you'll want to go for 375 for about 45 minutes or so we're going to bake this in our earn oven I've already got the fire started in that so it should be about the right [Music] temperature here we go this pie smells tremendous it is time to try it [Music] out we got the Apple flavor we got that wonderful pork flavor in there married together they go so well together I can see why they would choose a recipe like this to feature in their cookbook the nutmeg even comes through you got to put enough nutmeg in here to make a difference right but the nutmeg with the apple and then you add in the pork flavor to it such a great combination now we didn't add a whole bunch of sugar to this so it's just a little sweet it isn't you know overly sweet it's not like a you know a dessert with pork in it which doesn't sound right does it it's been a rough 2020 it's been difficult for everyone we are bombarded with news every day bad news every day well guess what it's not going to stop tomorrow it's not going to stop the next day it's just going to keep happening sometimes I've got to take a break I'll bet you need to take a break when it's time for me to take a break I come out here to the cabin I start up the fire and I cook something and I think about well anything else basically right I want to invite you to come along with me let's go to the cabin let's start up the fire let's enjoy ourselves and think about something anything different come along it's a beautiful Indiana November early November and you know the colors we still have leaves on the trees it is a it's a very beautiful time of year it's really the best time of the year because Harvest has just come in we still have you know fruit from the trees we have all this Harvest um it's time to start thinking about winter time and how we're going to feed ourselves all that kind of fun stuff but it is the rich time of year this morning we're going to cook up a little bit of hot chocolate one of the most popular morning drinks in the 18th century you wouldn't believe it but it's true so we've got our block of chocolate that's already been prepared just like they had in the 18th century drop it in our water something really simple we can really enjoy that on a cold morning like this morning not so cold that it's bitter but uh boy it's got that crisp air doesn't it so we're also going to cook up another common very simple dish great for breakfast that is scotch collops and again shows up all over in the cookbooks and it'll be great for getting that morning energy we have to take breaks now and then this is a perfect opportunity we're going to take a break we're going to cook up this food um you know our Modern Life is again is so driven um you know we're getting news constantly we can't drop out of the modern world completely even if we might want to we can't drop out of it completely but we have to take a break don't we we have to go on vacation sometimes we have to have the mini vacation the hey I'm going to watch a YouTube that is not anything else but just something that doesn't have to do with the news or what I have to do you know today or tomorrow my work whatever that is sometimes we just have to kick back we have to relax think about those folks in the 18th century some of those people they did they got all the way out of town uh Sleepy Hollow he talks about wanting to sell up everything that there was in this New York this very Posh elegant place um or at least very very prolific with lots of harvest and sell all those things and head out to the Wilderness head out to Kentucky or Tennessee or Indiana as it were uh in 17 9 that was one of those things those people thought about doing and one of the reasons was to get away from it all to get away from that hustle and bustle or the drive and to go and try something out um sometimes we just have to do that on a daily basis we don't have that you know far Frontier now to go out to to um hide ourselves away from society we have to live in this world but we certainly don't have to be driven by it every single minute of every day Scotch cups here are so simple we have some beef that is a thin cut and scotching is actually cutting across the piece to make it a little thinner so we're going to cook this in the pan until it's looking really good with a little bit of butter [Music] [Music] [Music] once that meat is cooked up we're going to take it out of the pan we're going to leave that pan by the fire we're going to deglaze it you can use brown ale you could use some cider put in a little bit of [Music] parsley also just a touch of flour and let that thicken up and that's our sauce we pour it back over the top of our finished collops and it's done it's going to be wonderful I had a little bit of the kitchen pepper to the top of this just to give it a little bit of spice great addition doesn't need a lot boy does not need very much right out of Sleepy Hollow got a apple cooking by the fire and uh that can be a dessert for any time again you couldn't get a simpler uh dish here we're just going to set this apple by the fire rotate it every once in a while and it just bakes right here by the fire we don't have to really do anything to it let it cool down just a touch slice it up great little dessert yep I know it's going to be a crazy week we all have responsibilities yes but we also have a responsibility to disconnect to unplug uh for at least part of that time and relax there's truly not a lot we can do about that outside world right but we do have the responsibility to the inside world the inside us so do what you need to do but make sure to unplug relax for

Channel: Townsends

Views: 85,479

Keywords: history, historical food, 18th century, colonial, jon townsend, john townsend, historic site, colonial lifestyle, Townsends, Potato Bread, Season 16, Kitchen Pepper, Pork Chops, Earthen Oven, pork belly, cherry bounce, venison, black raspberries, omlette, apple pie

Id: fnToh16DpDc

Length: 160min 5sec (9605 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2024