Cooking Marathon! - 18th Century Cooking Season 2

puddings many people hear the word pudding today and what do they think about they think about some little custardy stuff in a cup or something you buy at the grocery store in a box mix it up with some milk pudding has a much deeper richer history today we're going to look at boiled puddings from the 17th and 18th century foreign [Music] so the word pudding is based on the old English words for gut over stomach and the original puddings were actually meat or organ Meats mixed with grains and cooked in stomachs or in intestines so much more like say modern day sausage or if you've ever heard of a Scottish haggis haggis are like a true old pudding so these original puddings had their ingredients stuffed in the stomach and then that tied off and they will put in boiling water and they were boiled for many hours it wasn't until the 17th century the early 17th century when there was a there was a change there was an evolution in this pudding they started making these puddings in cloth sacks instead of in stomachs and we started seeing the ingredients change a lot too some of the the meats were taken out and more grains and some other things put in there so we're starting to see an evolution in puddings and pudding started to become very popular in the 17th and 18th century most of those puddings in the 18th century cookbooks call for four main ingredients they called for flour they called for milk they called for eggs and they called for some kind of fat usually suet is the one that's most often referred to in the cookbooks so it can be very hard to come by in the United States it's not commonly used in cooking So today we're going to substitute butter for the suet So today we're going to be working on on a a simple boiled plum pudding let's get started so in addition to our four main ingredients we've got some other smaller ingredients that we're going to talk about now the uh we've got salt which is in most recipes we also have a nutmeg we're going to grate into that which nutmeg is in all the different pudding recipes we've got some may switches in most of them which is related to Nutmeg we've got ground ginger or ground ginger it was inexpensive in the time period a very commonly used spice uh it's a plum pudding and the plums aren't plums but they're raisins in this these have regular raisins we also have some currants and currants in English cookbooks from the time period are actually just miniature uh seedless raisins from the Corinth region and we also have some sugar that we're going to add into this recipe so before we get going start mixing things we need to have some things happening in the background I've got some water boiling here we're going to need a pot at least a gallon or so so that we can boil our Pudding we also need a pudding cloth a piece of tightly woven fabric something not soapy but nice and clean I'm going to toss this in the pot and then we can start mixing I'm just going to toss this cloth in we're going to leave it in here until I've got the batter all mixed up and ready to put inside of it so let's start getting our ingredients mixed up let's start with our wet ingredients we need two eggs and we don't want both all of both of them we want actually one whole egg and then just the yolk from the other one uh this egg let's separate out we just want the yolk so I'm gonna split this open and separate it there we are so with our egg and a half here we're going to add about four ounces of milk it's about right that's half a cup let's whisk this up get these uh mixed well okay once we've got that mixed well we're going to set these uh wet ingredients aside so for our dry ingredients we need our mixing bowl we're going to add about four ounces of flour should be about a cup and this is just plain rough ground wheat flour we're going to add some salt not any great quantity of teaspoon full or so we're also going to add our mace again about a teaspoon full the recipes aren't real specific so it's really uh flavor how much you want how much you like so and some of the ground ginger now let's put in let's grind up some of our fresh nutmeg okay looks about right and finally we have about a tablespoon of sugar now it's time to go time to get the butter into these dry ingredients this can be a little bit tricky I've already chopped this butter up and I'm just going to put it in here and then use the spoon mushed around and then crumble it up to get it in there [Music] in the period recipes they uh when they're using suet they may they may actually were specific about not getting the the suet too well mixed so that the suit would end up being a little uh in little pockets in the finished pudding and not spread completely throughout it this we want to get the butter pretty mixed up in here we're going to use about four ounces of butter okay that looks pretty good now it's time to mix in our milk and our eggs now it's time to add our final ingredient here we're going to add our raisins and currants okay [Music] here we are and we're going to mix those in well so we want to get a consistency that's sort of a stiff battery kind of uh kind of a drop biscuit consistency not not too stiff and not so runny that it runs around if it's too runny add a little bit of flour if it's a little too stiff add a little bit more milk you'll get to about this consistency let's get the bag ready to put this in foreign we just brought it out of the hot water I'm going to be kind of careful if it's too hot we're going to lay it out on a bowl here and we're going to flour the inside of our bag for our piece of cloth so I'm going to take some flour and I'm going to make sure that pull inside of this is nice and flour here we are now we can get our our batter here and put it in now let's wrap it up and we just need to tie this off I've just got a little piece of a little strip of fabric I'm going to use to tie it so when we're ready to put the pudding in you want to make sure that the water is fully boiling we're going to drop this pudding in this is a smaller size pudding it's about a quarter of a normal recipe so this one should take about two hours and maybe as much as three hours to cook I wouldn't cook it any more than that two hours is about right you don't really have a good way to know exactly when it's done I mean it's not a good way to check it so you just have to know that this size takes about two hours that's about it usually if it's a full recipe size like most of the ones use a pound of of flour and a pound of suet those are much bigger almost a soccer ball size those take quite a while to bake or crack quite a while to cook four hours at least and probably more like five or six when our pudding is about done it's time to work on the sauce portion and uh we've got a a nice redwear Pipkin that we're going to prepare our sauce in our sauce has three components we've got some sack wine which is a white wine from Spain commonly known today as Sherry we need some sugar and then we're going to add some butter but first let's put together the sack and the sugar and warm them up so let's warm up our Pipkin we're going to add about a cup of our Sac wine there we go and we're going to start to put in sugar this is about two tablespoons of sugar we're gonna add in and let's get these mixed up and warmed up so let's take our sack and our sugar off the fire now and now that it's warm we're going to take and we're going to add our buttering a little bit at a time we're going to stir it in whisk it in it's best if your butter is cold and that way it won't separate we're going to add about three tablespoons of butter just a little bit at a time and keep whisking it up so you want to keep whisking and slowly incorporate the butter one piece at a time as it gets incorporated then you add the next little piece and just keep whisking the whole time that's going to taste really good on this pudding our sauce we're going to set that away from the fire so it doesn't heat up and separate let's get this pudding out okay there it is okay we're gonna put this in cold water here just to cool it off now we can open it up okay let's uh crack this open now turn it out onto a plate let's see I'll hear a scissors [Music] thank you [Music] and now a little sauce hmm this pudding is really great that sauce really lifts it up and the raisins are really really good in this uh ready kind of a pudding mix very nice you know I've prepared some variations on the same basic recipe here's a cornmeal pudding this one's uh got butter but it's a plain cornmeal pudding like a cornmeal dumpling here's a a pudding that I did with it's a plain bread pudding it's got carrots in it though and then here's a final one over here here's a suet and um oatmeal so that's a there's a lot of different interesting variations you can do plain ones that go along with different meats you can add vegetables and you can change the grains so there's so many interesting things you can do with boiled puddings I really encourage you to to try one of these boiled puddings out very popular for an 18th century dish [Music] so in last week's episode we covered a simple boiled Plum Pudding which consisted of equal parts flour milk eggs butter and the plums or raisins in that case but I thought we would look at the boiled puddings and explore this idea a little bit farther I think there's a lot more to learn [Music] so here's a little piece that I ran onto while I was doing research it's from a 1780 gentleman's monthly Intelligencer and action on diet it says there is at this time residing in Essex a person famed for his mode of living being formally reduced to a state of General weakness from free and luxurious living He took up a resolution of dieting himself thus he has a pound of flour and a pint of cold water mixed and then tied up in a cloth and boiled and on this food he's lived entirely for many years though he is old he is hearty strong vigorous and active I thought that was very interesting somebody uh living on nothing but flower a flower pudding boiled and then I always thinking about soldiers living on nothing but their meat and a simple flower ration also many period recipes cover putting apples inside of a of a pudding and boiling that those two ideas I thought we put together and make a simple Soldier style pudding nothing but flour and an apple off of a tree and wrapped in a little bit of scrap cloth just what a soldier might be able to make so let's make up a very simple nothing but flour and water paste we're just going to take about two handfuls of flour we're going to add in this is just some nice cool water and then mix that up you kind of want it to be um not very stiff kind of a paste here okay so not too stiff we want to be able to form it around it without it fighting once that's ready we need to take our apple and I've already quartered this we're going to take out the seeds and the stem let's take our quartered apple and put it back together into an apple shape and then take our paste it's thickened up a little bit as I was working on it we're just going to wrap it around that apple so it's all about a quarter of an inch thick it grows as it Cooks so it doesn't need to be terribly thick and there we can see now we can put this inside of our floured cloth and let's flour this up [Music] and now it's time to wrap it up in that cloth I'm just going to set it in the center gather it up you definitely want to give it a little bit of room so that it can grow while it's cooking not not too tight let's go toss it in let's make sure our water is boiling and should take about an hour for this apple pudding while this is cooking we're going to cover a quaking pudding those don't take very long to cook either so quaking pudding is much more like that modern day pudding idea that we have in our heads let's take a look at the ingredients so let's put together this pudding we're going to uh put together our dry ingredients first and then our wet ingredients we're going to need about a half a cup of flour now we don't have to be precise this is definitely different than the plum pudding the ratios are are much different well a lot less flour and a lot more liquid Parts about a half a cup of flour uh now let's put in our we need about two tablespoons of sugar I got that pretty much pre-ground up and there we are um we need some some salt maybe a half a teaspoon of salt we're definitely going to need some of those same kind of spices we've got some mace here a teaspoon full we've got some ground ginger same amount so you'll need a quarter to a half of a nutmeg great enough depending on your wrap your taste for our last uh dry ingredient I have some some almonds here I've got maybe a half a cup of slivered almonds we're gonna Mash these up so once these are good and mashed up you can add these to our ingredients or the rest of them here [Music] now we need a cup of heavy cream and four eggs we actually want two whole eggs just the yolks of the other two then we're going to whisk these together so there are eggs and our cream I want to get these whisked really well now that we've got these all mixed put our wet and dry ingredients together we are and once these are well mixed we need to get our pudding cloth ready okay now we've got our cloth but instead of putting it in the boiling water and then flouring it this one we want to seal a little tighter so we're going to butter it first and then flour it get it to smear all the way into our fabric there now once it's buttered we can just put our flour on just like before now we can take our buttered and flour and put it in a bowl and pour our pudding mix in there we are and tie it up this is another pudding that you want to give a little bit of room to grow and there we go and it's ready to go in let's make sure that water is boiling okay this uh quaking pudding should take about a half hour to cook now that that quickie pudding is a cooking we're going to make a quick sauce with some butter and some sugar [Music] when you use these pipkins you want to make sure that you don't put them on direct heat with flames you want to use them only on coals you want to make sure that you always have something in them or else they'll get too hot and they'll crack and use them gently with gentle Heat it's been about a half hour for the quaking pudding and about an hour for the apple one so both of those should be ready to come out I'm gonna open this uh apple pudding or Apple [Music] and there pulling let's slice it see how it turned out look at that [Music] you'd be amazed with nothing but a little bit of flour and of one apple what you can turn out is really good so I haven't found much about soldiers doing boiled puddings yet but there is a piece in Joseph Plum Martin's book about soldiers coming and stealing a woman's food including her pudding bag and all enough for our quaking pudding this one's a little bit more you have to be more gentle with it now let's dress this up with a few slivered almonds and then pour the sauce on top [Music] wow that's delectable you'll love this wonderful quaking pudding a lot more custardy than the other ones not nearly as bready and that butter and sugar on top with the almonds it looks beautiful and it tastes good we've had a number of inquiries for information about the new background setting that we've been using in our cooking series I thought today I'd give you an introduction to the new Test Kitchen here at Jamestown foreign setting like this has really been on my list of sort of once for 20 some years and while we were doing the cooking series uh outside the first cooking series when it got to be winter time we couldn't do them outside anymore it seemed to be the perfect opportunity to put together a project like this in preparation for this project I spent several months studying thousands literally thousands of period paintings and pictures of historic sites looking for just the right sort of kitchen the kitchen that would give it a period feel but would also make it much easier to photograph the kind of things we were cooking really the heart of a kitchen is the Hearth let's take a look at this hearth [Music] for a hearth we've chosen a raised Hearth design it's not nearly as common as the floor Hearth that you see in in most paintings but you do see these in northern Europe places like Germany and Sweden and then even in North America where immigrants had come from northern Europe and they were used to this sort of design now this gets all the cooking up off the floor makes it much easier to see along with the Hearth here we also have an oven that opens right out into the heart the oven that we've built right here on the Hearth is exactly like the Earthen oven that we built in our first video series this one we built on the back side of the Hearth wall and we've connected it right into the Hearth area so that we can take coals out of the oven put them on our Hearth use them for cooking ovens built into the hearts very common feature in 18th century households thank you Ivan was very specific about our windows and walls I really wanted to have a good 18th century look this uh little episode has been a bit of a departure because we're working really hard on the print catalog it's going to be huge it's got a lot of great new products in it so bear with us while we take time to work on that catalog we also want to thank you for all the great suggestions and ideas that are coming in on Facebook and and on the contact page of the website keep those ideas coming all the things you've seen here today all the items and the clothing these things are available in our catalog on the website and don't forget to follow us on Facebook [Music] if you seek the advice of 50 different people about seasoning cast iron wear you'll likely get 52 answers today we're going to look at how to season your cast iron wear before you can cook with ironware it has to be seasoned and the seasoning does several different things first of all it keeps your ironware from rusting it also creates a non-stick surface so that makes it much easier to clean after you're done cooking and it also separates your food from the metal so you don't get a metallic taste in your food when it's done so the idea of seasoning is to get multiple layers of carbonized oil on the metal the real questions are what oil do we use and how do we get it carbonized foreign so the first question what oil you're going to get a whole lot of different answers about what kind of oil to use and most oils are going to work just fine some better than others in the time period most people probably used animal fats like lard or beef Tallow most people today they use vegetable oil today we're going to be using flaxseed oil flaxseed oil seems to give the hardest non-stick surface of any of the vegetable oils it does go rancid rather rapidly so you want to make sure to use fresh flaxseed oil once it's been carbonized on the surface we don't have to worry about it going rancid so as for the how we're going to do two different methods of seasoning today and which one you choose really depends on the tools you have available to you and how the how big the piece is that you need to do today we're going to season a small cast iron pot now this guy's small enough that he'll fit in our oven so we can simply bake the finish on the pot we're using today is a brand new one so it doesn't have any coatings on it at all if you have a pot that has any kind of wax coating or old seasoning on it you want to make sure to wash these off even new ones like this wash it off to get any Coatings at all make sure you get any soap residues washed off completely and then as soon as it's out of the water you want to warm it up and dry off the pot to make sure it doesn't rust [Music] our pot is now dry and it's warm it being warmed up is really going to help the oil soak into the pores let's get some oil onto this we're going to put oil on the inside and the outside of the pot we want to get a nice thin coating all over the inside and all over the outside you want to make sure to have your work surface uh protected because this is a messy job once we've got the oil completely covering this pot on every surface then we can take a rag we can wipe it off making sure that we don't have any excess oil we don't want it to pool up and get thick any place we're gonna have just one thin layer so I've got the oven fired up it's five or six hundred degrees in there now you may not have an oven like this you can do this in a regular home oven just set it for 450 or 500 whatever the maximum temperature is for your home oven but be aware that this is a smoky and smelly operation if you do it in your home you're going to need the windows open the door's open foreign while that's baking we're going to season another method if your object is too large to bake or if you want to do it outside on an open fire where the smoke won't harm your house you can do the seasoning on an open fire and what we're going to do is we're going to take one of these little folding frying pans and we're going to season this on an open flame our fooling frying pans come pre-seasoned but if you want them to work better it's best to get another couple Coatings of seasoning on the pan I've got this pan heated up just like I heated up the other piece and we're going to put oil on it [Music] we want to get a coating on this pan exactly like the other pot you want to get a nice thin layer on all the surfaces on the outside and the inside let's put it on the Fire now let's heat the pan up until we start to see some smoke so as this heats up it's going to start smoking and it's going to start turning black and what we want to do is make sure that we don't get it too hot it's a bit of a fine line if you get it too hot it'll actually burn the seasoning off you don't want to do that but as soon as that turns black it starts smoking up we're going to put another thin layer on it you also want to hit the bottom so that it gets a good layer on it and then we just put it back on again for a minute or so we want to have a lot of layers on this at least a half a dozen as you can see for a job like this a good pair of leather gloves it's a must looks like the pan is done I've got a good half a dozen coats of seasoning on this it's a nice even black color on the inside it hasn't gotten too hot it hasn't burned the seasoning off so this pan is done now it's time to look to see how our pot is doing in the oven this pot has just a single layer of seasoning on it so we're going to need to do the same thing we're going to need to put use our cloth put on more oil nice thin coat put it back in the oven foreign seasoning it's a simple but necessary task for your cookware when you're taking care of this seasoning you want to make sure that when you wash out these pots you don't leave them soaking a long time don't use harsh detergents or those will go into the coating and make your food taste like soap the next time you use it and you want to make sure to store them so that they stay nice and dry [Music] it's springtime it's time to pick stinging nettles so you can make nettle soup stinging nettles hold a very special place in 18th century food and Medicine medical books from the time period mention these stinging nettles as good for stopping hemorrhages and promoting urine flow John heckelwelder was a missionary in remote Pennsylvania in 1756 and in this journal he writes this we live mostly upon Nettles which grew abundantly in the bottoms and of which we frequently made two meals a day that's amazing you know I think we've got enough medals let's head to the kitchen foreign bunch of nettles gathered here these are early Springtime Nettles the best ones right after they come out of the ground you want to get the first half of the plant or first three or four inches you don't want any of the hard stock or any of The Roots You might want to wear gloves when you pick these because they they sting a little bit but in the early spring it's usually not too bad wash these off like you would lettuce for a salad now let's work on the base of our soup we need to get some water boiling here in our kettle I got about a quart and a half or so here [Music] and while that's heating up we're going to saute some onions and a little bit of butter of butter and a glasses recipe for meager soup calls for the butter to be cooked until it's done making noise and then you add the onions I'm going to use about three medium onions while our onions are Browning let's chop up our Nettles nice and fine you can take our chopped Nettles now and put it right into our Browning onions foreign well we stirred these for about five or ten minutes and now it's time to shake on about a quarter of a cup of flour into this [Music] and a little salt and pepper so now it's time to add the contents of our pan to our boiling water [Music] [Music] foreign soup recipes call for a chopped up stale bread crust to be added to the soup [Music] we're gonna let this simmer for another 10 minutes and then as an optional Finishing Touch we're going to add a little bit of this mushroom ketchup that we've made in an earlier episode [Music] this soup is excellent if you've never had Nettles before nettle soup or any other kind of nettles it's the perfect time of year right now to go out and pick them [Music] a lot of people have expressed interest in the Earthen oven that we did in our last series in an earlier episode today I want to take that idea to its most simple and extremely primitive form I want to make an oven out of the least quantity of materials in the shortest possible times [Music] we're going to use the most basic and easy to obtain materials possible for the clay in this oven we're going to use kitty litter plain unscented clumping cat litter you're probably going to need two bags or 50 pounds I'm also going to use some play sand this is just simple play sand you can get at your hardware store at the building supply store either place I've got about four bags and they're about 25 pounds so about 100 pounds of sand we're going to need a few other things you're going to obviously you're going to need some water uh I've found some straw here on the site a straw or dried grass I've got some sticks here some dried sticks we're also going to need some bendy sticks so earlier I cut up some some light green saplings you need something that can bend in that kind of a form nice tight Bend you'll need a shovel and uh to fill in the gaps on our on our um on our frame we're going to use a little bit of a scrap or old fabric you'll probably want something that's not synthetic so it doesn't smell too bad when it burns up and we're going to need our mixing tarp also you're also going to need some firewood something that's split up nice and fine to burn in your oven you're going to need a good little bit of it and as an option if you want a nice flat floor you'll want a sacrificial board this is about a one by eight or a one by ten about 18 inches long this will burn away but it'll leave a nice flat floor in your oven let's get started you need to make sure to pick a spot that's nice and level and not too close to tents or buildings first thing we're going to do is make the floor of our oven I'm going to take sticks just dry sticks about half an inch or three quarters of an inch diameter these sticks should give us a little bit of an insulating layer underneath our floor on top of this we're going to lay down a quick Cobb slab about an inch thicker so right on top of these sticks we're gonna make the cob just like last time I've got about two scoops of sand down here on my tarp and here's a scoop of uh the clay that's already been pre-moistened [Music] okay I think our floor cob is ready to go uh it's uh it'll still break apart but it forms up nicely not like just plain sand we're gonna make the floor about 15 or 20 inches in diameter here where the oven body is going to be and maybe about 10 inches or 12 inches wide here at the mouth of it so all we're going to do is take our pre-made cob here we're going to just lay out okay this is going to be the floor and here's our sacrificial board we're just going to set it right on here right now this is going to be the very back of the oven and this will be the door as it comes out now it's time to take our bendy sticks and make our basket frame that's going to be the inside shape of our oven let's make our our basket work interior uh in a previous episode we made our oven with a sand Dome now that works really good if you've got a lot of time this one we want to burn right away so we're going to make it with the twig basket work instead of the sand Dome we're just going to take our sticks I've already kind of pre-cut them in somewhat of a right shape and we're going to drive them into the ground hopefully it's soft enough and just sort of build a basket around our oven here and that might be a little short so I'm just going to shorten it up a little bit there we go that looks good we're just going to play this by ear [Music] obviously I didn't make this for a neatness or Perfection all this interior work is going to burn away so it's just quick and dirty now it's time to make some cob and then we can start putting it on the frame [Music] there the body of the oven is all done we used exactly the materials we brought two bags of kitty litter four bags of sand and it's a about inch and a half to three inches thick all the way over the body of it I've paid special attention to the door area uh trying to get that this is going to be the weakest part so you want to be careful about how you form this so that it stays strong enough you know usually we would let this oven dry a day to several weeks even before we fired it up but we want to cook in this oven right away and we're willing to break it so let's start a fire in it right now to get this dried out foreign going in this is that we want to start off small we don't want to burn away our basket that's holding this up before this starts to get some dry strength so we're going to start off with a small fire there we go we got a good small fire going in that as as the oven warms up we're gonna make the fire just a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger it's going to take six to 12 hours to dry this oven out so that it's ready to bake in [Music] had this thing cooking for a couple of hours and it's really starting to dry out pretty rapidly in this bright sunlight already the very top here is dry you can tell by the color of it it's a nice light gray the sides are still soft so they're going to take a good bit more fire in here before the sides start to dry out but it doesn't take much effort just Chuck some firewood in it every a little while and uh it'll keep drying out our oven uh it baked overnight with coals in it and I got to it this morning and it was stone cold but it looks very dry other than some very minor spots on the very back side everything's dry on the oven so it's ready to bake in I went ahead and restarted the fire this morning it's been going about an hour I got some nice hot coals in there in the ovens already feels like it's pretty much up to temperature nice and warm on the top now what we have to worry about is a door now you could come prepared with a door all ready to use you can build your oven and have the door made so that it'll it'll fit right up against the door you don't want to build it uh your oven so the door fits on the inside because it'll shrink just a little bit and then your door won't fit but if you build it so your door will fit right up against the mouth of the oven that'll work if you come with a pre-made door now if you don't come with a pre-made door then you can use something else something on hand I've got here a Bannock board likely work as your door or if you don't have that maybe a big split of firewood will work as your door it's time for me to get this thing ready and put some bread dough in it and see if we can bake some bread everybody it's been about 15 minutes and that bread looks just right [Music] that's great 18th century cookbooks abound with recipes for simple biscuits something we might call a cross between a cookie and a cracker today we're going to bake some simple biscuits [Music] today's recipe is based on a recipe out of Eliza Smith's cookbook and let me read you the recipe it says to make biscuits to a quart of flour take a quarter of a pound of butter and a quarter of a pound of sugar one egg and what caraway seeds you please wet it with milk as stiff as you can and then roll them out very thin cut them with a small glass and bake them on tin plates your oven must be slack prick them well just before you set them in and keep them dry when baked today's simple biscuit recipe has flour butter some eggs a little bit of sugar milk and caraway seeds for flavoring caraway seeds are a favorite flavoring for biscuits and cookies in the 18th century [Music] I've got my oven preheating and while that's preheating I'm going to set four ounces of butter here in a skillet right at the edge of the oven to melt it we're going to start with four cups of flour and into that I'm gonna mix up a half a cup of sugar now is a good time to add our caraway seeds to our mixture and you just add as many as you think is fit for your taste now it's time to take one egg whisk it up and add it to our flour let's get this whisked here it doesn't need to be done extremely well this is a just to get it mixed up let's put that into our flour and now our pre-melted butter we can add that right into we want to make sure it's not too hot we don't want to cook our egg with that let's get this mixed up the recipe says to mix these in and we will get too stiff of a paste and we add the milk in to get to the right consistency we're just gonna go a little bit at a time just a little bit more should bring us to our rights dinners okay let's turn this out onto a floured surface and we can start to work it into a flat sheet I've got some flour here and just get a nice surface turn out our dough here let's pull this out recipe calls for it to be very thin there I've got that rolled out nice and thin probably about an eighth of an inch thick and we are going to now uh cut these out and put them on our baking tin [Music] [Music] I've got the oven cleaned out and I'm going to make sure to put a trivet in that in the oven so that the biscuits don't burn on the bottom I've got a well-greased uh baking tin here let's uh put our biscuits on there and we don't have to worry about these growing on the sheet so we can we can put these right up against each other there's no leavening in this they're almost a bit more like a cracker than they are a biscuit uh all we need to do is place them on the tin and then right before we put them in the oven we're going to follow the directions in the book and poke little holes in them [Music] foreign calls for a slack oven so under 300 degrees 250 to 300. and this is going to take depending on the temperature of your oven 7 to 15 minutes 18th century cookbooks are chock full of really interesting recipes they're a great way to kind of dig back into history and find out what it was really like through taste now I can smell those uh biscuits cooking so they're probably just about right they're one of those kinds of things you really have to watch them to make sure they don't burn you don't want to get these all black on the bottom let's go check these out it looks like they turned out just perfectly uh very light golden brown nice and crispy they should be uh something that's kept dry they're meant to be a crispy dry Snappy kind of a cookie almost um across between a cracker and a cookie very good tinned and soldered cooking vessels were extremely common in the 18th century you can see them in in all sorts of cooking situations Hearth settings or in at campsites today we're going to talk about how to take care of and use your tinned or soldered cooking vessel so it'll last a lifetime [Music] whether you're using a tin cooking pot a brass trade Kettle or one of these beautiful pieces of copper there are certain very important things you need to be aware of about how to use them and how to clean them 10 cooking pots like this are the most common cooking Implement for soldiers during your revolutionary wartime period really the only thing that was issued to them for cooking in now the first rule on all these pots this one included is that a pot like this put over the fire when it's empty might ruin the pot in seconds it'll start to melt the joints if it doesn't have any contents in it the same can be said for these tin lined cooking pots uh the the tin melts at about 450 degrees so if you sit this over a fire empty the tin will immediately start to melt and run down the sides of the vessel by the way these brass trade kettles are exceptional reproductions beautifully handmade they're perfect for 17th 18th and 19th century great for the Hearth and really good for the field too the purpose of tin lining the copper and brass vessels is to to create a protective Coating in between the food that's been cooked and the outer cooking vessel the the copper and the brass some foods especially acidic foods will cause some of the copper to leech out and react with the food historically many of the brass and copper pots in the time period were untinned they didn't have any tin lining in them and it Cooks in the time period knew exactly how to cook in them so that they didn't get poisoned but Thin Line pots are very common easily documented for the time period and many of the period texts that talk about cooking specifically refer to making sure your pot has a good tin lining within them so the tin inside these tinline pots is a much safer metal to work with but it is soft and you have to take a lot of care of it when you're using it the the metal as you use these pots may start to turn a darker color that is a perfectly normal reaction in the tin and it doesn't really change its protective qualities after long use you may notice the lining starting to wear away and if you see large spots of brass or copper exposed it's time to have your pots relined to prolong the life of the tin lining in your cooking pot you really need to make sure to use a wooden cooking implements don't use anything that's hard any kind of metal instrument at all or you'll scratch the lining of your pot foreign cooking with these tin lined cooking vessels you need to make sure that you have as much fluid in them as possible if you have less than a full amount you have to be careful if you put this over a roaring fire it will start to heat up the areas above the spot where the food is at and it'll start to melt the tin away from that area so you want to use just as much fire as you really need to get the cooking done these transfer the heat very quickly and so it does not take a roaring fire to cook with these vessels and the less fire the better the longer your tin lining is going to last when you're done cooking and it's time to clean the inside of your pot you want to make sure to use only a mild detergent and a cloth on the inside when you're cleaning don't use any sort of scouring pad you don't want to wear away the surface if you have cooked on food that's difficult to remove just soak it overnight maybe you can warm it up a little bit and then that will will break will come off very easily an excellent way to clean the outside of your copper pot is to use a lemon wedge you dip that in a little bit of salt and then you just rub it on the outside of the pot if you don't have a lemon wedge then what you want to use is a little bit of vinegar as a substitute there are also numerous commercial copper cleaners available on the market now regardless of which method you use you need to make sure to rinse off the outside of your pot completely to get rid of all the cleaner and then dry it off before you store it foods of the 18th century were often very Regional take for instance this little dish it's a sweet it's buttery it's custardy and it's bready it's a bready little dessert it's also got raisins and dates in it in many places this might be called a bread pudding but this Regional variation is famously known as white pot [Music] thank you we found a number of white Pot recipes some as early as the 16th century and others right on into the 18th century the term weight pot is a provincial phrase originating from Southwest England specifically the Devon area and it simply means white pudding recipes for white pot change varied a little over the years they primarily consist of bread sometimes rice sugar eggs usually cream some spice and sometimes a little bit of fruit let's get started the first thing we need to do is preheat our oven we're going to be using a dutch oven today if you're you going to use a dutch oven you need to get an ember bed ready for that if you're using a Wood-Fired oven that needs to be fired up but you'll need to let it cool down a little bit to get to the right temperature and if you're using a regular home oven you need to preheat it to 350 degrees we're using our averted saucepan today you could use a Pipkin or a boiler or whatever you have available we're going to begin by placing a pint of cream in our saucepan now let's place a stick of cinnamon in that a pinch of salt here a little bit of Mace and now let's grind some fresh nutmeg it begins to simmer you're going to need to remove it from the Heat and let it cool down now let's take care of our eggs we need two whole eggs in this and we need one egg yolk okay and now we need a two to three tablespoons of sugar now we have to do is whisk this together now that our cream is simmering let's go ahead and take it off and let it cool down I'm going to take some nice white bread now and I'm going to slice it very very thin and then take off the crust so I'm left with nothing but the crumb we'll need enough crumb to fill up our baking dish in this case I'm using one of our tin eating bowls you can also if you wanted a larger one use one of of these milk pans but you definitely need about twice the amount of ingredients and you need to increase the baking time each one of these slices I'm going to butter quite liberally on one side I'm going to end up using about a half a cup of butter one stick while we got our butter out it's time to butter our Pan the bowl needs to be buttered liberally or the sugar that's in our white pot will make it very difficult to release and now our cream has cooled a bit you can take out the cinnamon stick and now we're going to add just a little bit of the warm cream mixture into the eggs while we whisk it just a little bit first to temper the eggs so that the eggs don't curdle once we've got a little bit in we've got that totally whisked in you can start adding the rest little by little now let's get started with our layering we're going to start by putting in bread in the bottom of our Bowl we want to put it the butter side down we're going to put in two pieces here that'll cover up the bottom of the bowl and now let's put a layer of raisins and dates in on top of that that's good we're going to do another layer butter side down of the bread so we want to make sure that there are no air gaps so if you need to tear your bread up a little bit to fill in the gaps do that or raisins and dates again once we've got our second layer here we can start to add some of our custard mixture now we're going to just pour in enough that it soaks into these two bottom layers but doesn't come up above the top of that bread so that looks pretty good [Music] foreign [Music] let's put our custard mixture in until it fills it right up and soaks in but that looks good I think we'll be able to use just about all of it that looks good now we're going to take our final pieces of buttered bread that we're just going to fill up the top we're going to put this in butter side up instead of butter side down fill that top and oh yeah there we go we're going to Tamp that down just a little bit so that it soaks up from the bottom and now we're going to add some sugar to the top of it we've probably got another tablespoon here or so now that ready to bake now it's time to bake this guy we're going to be using this Dutch oven I've got it already preheated some and we're going to set it on our ring of coals that we've got already set up here now let's place our trivet inside and then we can add our pudding putting our white pot in right up on top set our lid on I'm going to put some coals up on top again usually we just need a ring of coals that go around the outside edge here okay we've got our ring of coals up on top so I'm gonna keep watching this and at times I'll have to renew the coals up on top and maybe even tuck a few more in the bottom while white pots originated from the Devon area they were certainly well known to Colonial Cooks as well while they might not have kept the same name they kept the same construction bread puddings are become popular again today and some chefs have even discovered this interesting variation starting to smell really good and it's only been about 35 minutes now let's take a quick look at this as you can see this already well on its way so we're going to take this out this is done we're gonna let this cool and then turn it out onto a plate [Music] if you happen to have a salamander you can heat it up very hot then sprinkle some sugar on top of your white pot and brown it you can also do that with a kitchen torch or with a broiler just be careful not to burn your white pot a nice Finishing Touch would be some fresh cream poured on top or maybe a little sack which is what we call Sweet Sherry it's very common in 18th century recipes wow that is excellent It's buttery the sweetness of the sweet meats and the custard really sets it off it's delicious you're gonna love this [Music] today I'm going to be preparing a couple of very easy 18th century side dishes using asparagus now for those of you who don't like asparagus well frankly you just leave more for the rest of us but I suggest you give these a second chance for those of you who like asparagus you're gonna love these dishes [Music] asparagus has been a springtime delicacy for thousands of years the Romans went to Great Lengths to extend its season they even sent asparagus up into the high Alps so it would be frozen so I could have it later on in the year for various ceremonies likewise 18th century Europeans used greenhouses so they could enjoy it more often asparagus is native to Western Europe but it was imported into North America by early colonists it's a vegetable that Colonial Cooks were very familiar with the recipes for today are from the 1774 edition of Hannah glass's cookbook the art of cookery made plain and easy let's get started our first recipe today is called asparagus forced in a French roll the word forest in this setting means stuffed previously I've got a a pot of water salted water over the fire to boil asparagus needs to be prepared for our recipe here it calls for only the edible head not the inedible stock or the Woody stem to be eaten and there's an easy way to to figure out where that break is you just take your your asparagus and you bend it and it'll snap this lower half we're going to discard and the upper half we're going to keep the recipe today calls for the stems to be scraped so you can take a knife or something and and just take the very surface off the bottom end here I got a small French loaf here I'm going to cut the top off making sure that I can put it back on as a lid when we're done [Music] I'm going to take most of the crumb out leaving about a half inch to three quarters of an inch of crust all the way around sort of creating a boat [Music] if we manage to pierce the bottom of it by accident or someplace we can take some of the crumb and press it into place to fill the hole I'm also going to cut some small holes in the top of the crust trust me this will make sense later I'm going to start with about four tablespoons of butter and when that's melted and done frothing I'm going to fry up our bread crust I need to be careful as I'm frying up my bread crust that I want to break it also you want to watch it to make sure it doesn't burn there that's perfect before we put our asparagus in the boiling water we need to start working on our sauce the sauce in the recipe here is sort of a custard sauce we'll start by placing a cup of cream over low heat to bring it to a simmer next we're going to beat together four egg yolks a little salt pepper and not my once our cream has come to a simmer it's time to start adding it to our egg yolks we do that by adding just a tiny bit at first and whisking it in completely I'll keep doing this until all the cream is incorporated into the egg yolks before we continue with the sauce let's put our asparagus into our boiling water you want to boil your asparagus for about eight minutes you don't want you want to watch it you don't want to get too limp and now it's time to put our sauce on low heat we're going to put it on low heat and stir it until it thickens our asparagus is now done you need to reserve enough of the tops to fill in as a garnish uh the top of your bread let's put this all together we're going to fill our fried French roll here with a layer of asparagus [Music] now we're going to put in the sauce on top now we can put in another layer of asparagus let's top it off with the rest of our custard sauce and now we can put on the lid and now the garnish [Music] there a beautiful side dish of asparagus forced in a French roll it's easy to go to the grocer today and purchase asparagus just about any time of the year but in the 1700s the window of opportunity for enjoying this vegetable was very narrow since asparagus was available for such short periods of time or it couldn't be eaten was either pickled or it was allowed to go to seed seasonality was a way of life in Early Times food and food preparations were connected with holidays so that the the activities of the holidays were always associated with the foods that were available St Martin's day for instance is in the middle of November a time when winter wheat needed to be planted and it was also the perfect time to slaughter livestock the cooler temperatures led to less spoilage and higher quality meat it seems that many of us today have become disconnected with the rhythmic effect of the seasons on our daily lives but for the person in the 18th century the ebb and flow of the seasonal factors would have been an inescapable way of life our next rest is an asparagus Ragu this is going to be very easy we're going to use about 20 stalks of asparagus about one inch lengths here we also need one large onion that's coarsely chopped and one small head of lettuce chopped up too instead of lettuce you could use any spring greens spinach and dive stinging nettles or even dandelion I'm going to start with about four tablespoons of butter once that's melted we're going to put in our asparagus and our onions we'll saute that for about five minutes once your onions are translucent it's time to add the lettuce we're going to season this with a little bit of salt and pepper now that our lettuce is wilted we can add in some flour about two tablespoons we're going to sprinkle over the top and stir that in let it brown with the butter foreign broth you could add chicken broth if you'd like this is going to work with the flour and thicken right up and make a really good gravy [Music] problem moving it's just a little bit more salt [Music] foreign let's give these dishes a try [Music] the nutmeg is a perfect compliment and then you get The Buttery sauce soaked into that bread very good [Music] the Ragu is excellent the nuttiness of the sauce really mixes very well with the asparagus you can still taste it in there it's very good even if you're someone who's finicky especially about asparagus you should try this it's really very very good throughout history bread has been a vital staple of Life archaeological evidence suggests that pre-neolithic cultures baked a very simple flat bread on hot stones and sourdough breads have been made for millennia first century Romans observed the Celts of Gaul skimming the foam off of beer to create a lighter kind of bread by the 13th century bread became highly regulated as an early form of wage and price controls unscrupulous Bakers who cut Corners to increase profits faced potentially heavy punishment such regulation was common throughout Europe and early documents show that at least an attempt was made for doing the same thing in 18th century colonial America over the coming weeks we're going to focus on 18th century breads we're going to begin our journey with one of the simplest forms the ship's biscuit [Music] foreign [Music] this biscuit is known by many names most of the time it was called just biscuit sometimes it was called hard biscuit or brown biscuit a Sea Biscuit and ships bread now many today might want to call it hard tack but hardtack is really a 19th century term that was popularized during the American Civil War these 18th century biscuits they're not like today's buttery flaky version that we serve along with sausage gravy for breakfast these biscuits were not made to be enjoyed they were made out of necessity so ships captains faced a continual challenge of having enough food on board to feed a large crew for a long journey food spoilage was really his greatest concern fresh bread rapidly became moldy on long trips and so did stored flour which would go rancid and Bug ridden so uh hard biscuit is really born out of necessity it's a means of food preservation if it was prepared properly and stored properly it would last for a year or more in addition to preservation the biscuit form also helped in portability and in dividing the rations when it came time Soldiers and Sailors typically got one pound of bread a day and the biscuits were usually made in about a four ounce form so when it came time to distribute them each sailor or Soldier would get four biscuits biscuits from London were considered to be the highest quality the most resistant to mold and to Insects they were really the standard by which all the other biscuit makers aspired to but not all biscuits were the same quality in a book called Adventures of Roderick random from 1748 we read this little section here every biscuit like a piece of clockwork moved of its own internal impulse occasioned by myriads of insects that dwelt within it there are other counts of sailors opening up barrels marked sea biscuits and only to find them filled to overflowing with roaches the sea biscuits having long since disappeared biscuits were not only used by Sailors but also soldiers and travelers Travelers of just about any sort Traders many times use them to bargain with the Indians and they were also thought to have medicinal properties they used them in treating edema and indigestion and gout just as biscuits had different names and different uses they were also made in different ways the term biscuit has its origins in the word twice baked many 18th century recipes call for bread rolls to be baked sliced into slices and then baked again these are also known as the rusks Ben Franklin in his Memoir also called this type of biscuit the true original biscuit much superior to the unleavened variety but it's this unleavened variety that we're going to do today we've preheated our oven and allowed it to cool to a medium-low heat if you're doing this in a in a home oven about 300 to 350 degrees our ingredients for these biscuits very simple we've got some whole wheat flour you're definitely going to need some salt and then we need enough water to make a very stiff dough so let's get these mixed up we're gonna probably work with about two pounds of flour here enough to make eight four ounce biscuits we're gonna just uh gas our amount of salt and get that mixed in and now pour in that water until we get a good stiff dough I've got this larger loaf needed here now it's time to break this up into the individual approximately four ounce uh portions for each biscuit and then I'll form those up individually each one of these I'm going to need just a little bit more and get it into its Patty or biscuits final biscuit Shake these biscuits are ready to go on the baking tray here we're going to arrange them they're not going to rise up so we can put them right next to each other we want to make sure they're the final proper thickness about a half an inch maybe a little thinner and we need to prick them so that they don't puff up too much okay these are ready for the oven we're gonna put these in and they're going to bake for two to three hours at that low temperature uh you want to watch them to make sure they don't burn it's been three hours these should have baked long enough uh many times in the time period these would be baked and then pulled out they'd let them cool and then they'd bake them again the next day probably at a lower temperature to drive out any excess moisture and for very long-term storage they might bake these three or four times let's take a look oh hard biscuits could be eaten just as they are but it was never thought of as an enjoyable event many times they were soaked in wine brandy or sack to soften them up a little Cooks would also take the biscuits and they would grind them up or powder them by putting them in a bag and beating them with a hammer then take that the crumbs that are left over and use the mic flour this crunched up biscuit tastes a lot like Raisin Bran without the raisins while this isn't the most flavorful recipe that we've done so far it's certainly a very significant food source for people in the 18th century bread was an important food source in the 18th century Not only was it a staple in and of itself but it was also an important ingredient in many other Foods it was known to many as a staff of life bread played such an important role in the nutritional needs of society that when there were shortages in the supply of wheat other grains had to be used to avoid Mass starvation today we're going to be making a multi-grain loaf that would be very similar to the kind of bread used to feed common people in the 18th century during the latter half the 18th century Western European country saw a massive increase in population England itself saw a 70 percent increase in its population during that same period this expansion had a dramatic effect on the demand and availability of food wheat for instance doubled in price in this time period the result was an important trade link between the American colonies and England wheat became the largest export crop for the Mid-Atlantic colonies in the 1700s when George Washington decided to diversify away from tobacco he chose to cultivate wheat and consumer goods that were imported into the colonies were often paid for in wheat flour back in England wheat was so important in feeding the populace that the British government enacted laws regulating the production of bread these ordinances fixed the price of the bread while controlling the weight of each loaf all according to the price of wheat flour commercial baking became highly regulated the types of bread that Bakers could bake the grains to be used and even their salaries were decreed by law for centuries white bread was revered by the public as the best bread to eat the white bread flour came from regular flour it was bolted or sifted many times through cloth to get the finest flower available originally this flower was separated out and used only for sacramental bread or for bread for the Gentry but over time the regular public started to demand to have this white bread too members of the medical community and government did their best to encourage the consumption of whole wheat or brown bread as it was thought that it was much more healthy than the white bread that the common people demanded but these claims were met with General resistance these Mixed Grain breads were made with a combination of grains wheat barley oats and rye and it other times other things were included potatoes rice beans even peas mixed breads were generally considered far inferior in taste and in texture to wheatened breads this is a loaf that's made from a regulated ratio of two parts green pea flour to one part wheat flour [Music] this is not the bread we're gonna make today instead we're going to be making this mixed bread it's made from wheat flour Rye flour and barley flour it would have been a much less expensive loaf to produce intended mostly for commoners would have been found in England and the American colonies let's get started let's start by talking about yeast Bakers in the 18th century got their yeast from the Brewer the Brewer collected the yeast by skimming the croissant or the foam that is uh on the top of a fermenting batch of Ale Bakers would then cultivate this yeast it was called Barm and it was in a liquid form here's how to make your own Barm you need some ale either a home brew or a good imported ale you could use water but ale makes up a better product a more authentic flavored bread when you're finished we've got a bottle here with about a half a cup of wheat flour in it and to that I'm going to add one and a half teaspoons of dry active yeast and to that I'm going to add this 12 ounce bottle of imported ale [Music] and we need to give this a really good shake and get all the dry ingredients mixed up once you've got it all good and mixed up you can set this aside give it 15 or 20 minutes to activate our dough is fairly simple we've got three kinds of flour I've got a a wheat flour a rye flour and a barley flour because the flowers have differing densities we really it's best to weigh them but in this case it turns out to be about a cup and a half of wheat flour a cup and three quarter of rye and two cups of barley flour that's about eight ounces of each one of these flowers because we're using both wheat flour and Rye flour this is sometimes called masalin bread all these flowers are usually available at your local grocery store in the specialty baking section to this we're going to add about a tablespoon of salt and now we can mix it up [Music] now let's add our bomb we're going to add that with about four to six ounces of water we're going to mix this and should make a nice sticky but firm dough [Music] foreign [Music] we're going to need this quite a while until the dough becomes very elastic now I'm going to form this up into a loaf we're going to take our redware pie pan and sprinkle it with a little bit of flour and we can put our Loaf in there and cover it with natural linen natural linen is something that we offer in on our website and in our print catalog this is a whole grain dough it's going to take quite a while to rise several hours even overnight we want it to rise to us about twice as big as when it started we want to make sure to preheat our oven if you're using an Earthen oven you want to get that up to full temperature and then let it cool down to bread temperatures if you haven't got your Wood-Fired oven yet you can use a standard home oven you want to make sure to preheat it to about 400 degrees [Music] for more information about baking in an Earthen oven like this you want to make sure to check out our video baking bread in an Earthen oven part two we're going to transfer our dough onto our peel first we sprinkle a little cornmeal and now we can turn our dough out onto the peel foreign 's going to take 30 to 45 minutes to bake depending on the temperature of your oven [Music] well this looks done it should sound hollow when tapped and you should let this cool at least an hour before slicing you know the crust might be tough but for all their complaints about this not being white bread this mixed grain bread is very good in our last episode we covered mixed breads these Mixed Grain breads were made with other grains in addition to wheat to make a cheaper loaf for Laborers these breads were promoted to ease the demand on wheat in Great Britain and Western Europe as we discussed this demand for wheat created an important trade link between the Mid-Atlantic colonies where wheat was grown in Great Britain the majority of wheat that was grown in these colonies was exported this created a void of sorts in the food supply for the colonists it was only natural for this void to be filled by something that was native to the Americas corn in our recent episodes we've taken a closer look at breads of the 18th century in this episode we're going to be looking at an early cornbread [Music] for common people in 18th century Great Britain and the American colonies there existed three main dietary pillars bread pottage and Ale people depended on these three things for survival while there were many similarities between English cooking and that of the colonies there were also some vast differences as well using corn was one of them now before we proceed let's clarify the word corn corn used in the 18th century meant a kernel or granule of something like a grain of wheat or rice or barley or even gunpowder when we say corn we usually mean yellow corn field corn or sweet corn but in the 18th century they always use the term Indian corn or Maize in Great Britain the common perception was that Indian corn was unfit for human consumption they considered it animal fodder you simply won't find recipes that use corn in the Old English cookbooks of the 18th century there's a passage in Joseph Plum Martin's Revolutionary War Memoir that that expresses this sentiment when they speaking of British soldiers could find none to wreak their vengeance upon they cut open the knapsacks of the Guard the Continental guard that is and strewed the Indian meal about the floor laughing at the poverty of the Yankee soldiery who had nothing but Hog's father as they turned it to eat the earliest European settlers to the Americas were introduced to this grain this corn by the Indians they'd been cultivating and eating this corn for thousands of years so as demand grew for wheat in growing Western Europe more and more of it was exported away from the American colonies corn grew in importance in the diet of the colonists especially for the rural and the poor so interestingly the three dietary pillars of porridge bread and Ale they remained the same but with variations a porridge that was traditionally made with oatmeal is made with cornmeal in the colonies the wheat and bread that was eaten in Europe gets made into corn journey cakes or Johnny cakes and of course ale sometimes replaced by corn whiskey in our research we did find a number of 18th century experimental recipes for a yeast-based bread using Indian corn these British recipes used a combination of cornmeal and wheat flour very similar to the Mixed Grain breads that we made in the last episode now it makes a very delicious loaf but it appears like that it was very unpopular here's one author's appeal he says this makes a very cheap and flavorful and nourishing bread the color of it is true is very different from that of common bread but we often eat by choice cakes and other kinds of confectionary as deep colored as this and provided that what is set before us is palatable and wholesome we must not in times of scarcity object to it because it may not be altogether pleasing to the site now when you think of cornbread you probably think of something like this these modern day mixes depend on baking soda or baking powder to give it a light and Airy texture but the earliest forms of cornbread in colonial America were of an unleavened type very similar to the oat cakes a organic bread that you'd find in the Scottish Highlands it wasn't until the early 19th century that chemical leavening agents like Pearl Ash or salaradis were introduced and used to make a cornbread that we might be used to the earliest cornbread recipe we have so far is from Amelia Simmons in 1796. let's make some we'll start with about a cup of milk I'll put this in a saucepan over a low heat to scald to this I'm going to add three tablespoons of butter a tablespoon of molasses and a pinch of salt now let's stir this around in a separate Bowl I've got three cups of cornmeal and a half a cup of wheat flour [Music] after the milk is heated I'm going to add this to our cornmeal and mix it well [Music] now we've gone ahead and made a second batch so that we can cook it in two different ways we're going to take this second batch and pour it into an already greased uh pie pan and we'll bake this when it's done in this method it's called a common loaf we're just going to settle that into our pan evenly and put this into the oven already preheated so for more information about how to cook with one of these Earthen ovens make sure to check out our building and Earthen oven part 2 baking bread that'll teach you how to use this if you're going to be using a regular oven at home you can bake this at 375 degrees for about a half an hour while our common loaf is baking we're going to make up some Journey cakes or Johnny cakes I've got our other batch of dough here and I'm just going to form up some patties about a half an inch thick or so and three or four inches around and these we can fry in our pan if we're going to use these as Journey cakes take them with us in a haversack we want to cook them dry without any oil or butter in the pan if you're going to eat them right away you can use butter or grease in your pan and they are really tasty laborers and slaves would bake these cakes on their hose right over an open fire thus the name hoe cakes they could also be baked on a Bannock board right before the fire foreign simple adaptation of bread made with corn in a North American kind of way I've got a sauce here it's uh something I ran into an old cookbook it's got molasses butter and a splash of vinegar let's try this out with a little bit of our cornbread here this is make a great meal in and of itself and also very good with soup or beans as we continue our series on 18th century breads we feel we've only just begun to discover the complex role bread plays in history today we'll take a closer look at 11 in the 18th century how to preserve it and then how to use it [Music] first we need to make a distinction between the word leavening and the word leaven the word leavening is a generic term meaning anything that you add to dough that creates a a lighter and fluffier loaf when you're finished leavening can be mechanical we can whip air into egg whites creating a meringue that we fold into batter to make a lighter bread we can also use a chemical agent such as pearlash or salaratus similar to the modern baking soda and baking powder these create a chemical reaction carbon dioxide bubbles are formed and this creates a quick bread a lighter and fluffier sort of bread then there's yeast which is a biological agent the word leaven at least in the 18th century means a lump of old dough we know from archaeological evidence that yeast has been used for thousands of years for brewing beer and for baking bread by the mid 1700s two strains of yeast had been domesticated ale yeast used for brewing beer and from baking bread and lager yeasts which the Germans had developed for brewing beer at cooler temperatures for longer periods of time by the late 18th century ale yeast had been further refined by the Dutch for commercial sales specifically to Bakers now wow modern commercial baking yeasts have been cultivated into various strains they still remain the same species of Ale yeast now there's a third species of yeast we have yet to mention that's wild yeast wild yeast exists everywhere it exists in the air on your skin even on the grains of wheat themselves many 18th century bread recipes call for the use of Barm which is that soupy yeast mixture that skimmed off the top of a fresh batch of Ale in our mixed bread episode we showed you how to make a modern equivalent to Barm for the British palette Barn was the preferred form of yeast they like this lighter sweeter bread in fact there were laws passed that prevented professional Bakers from recycling or reusing their yeast this old dough which resulted in a much sharper flavor in contrast to the British up until 1670 the French outlawed the use of bomb yeast in making bread in favor of the much more flavorful and acidic old dough or leaven method we talked about our generic term of leavening and the term 11 which means old doe after our initial batch of bread dough is yeasted we save back a piece of this dough for our next batch whether it's the next day or the next week and as this process continues each time we make the dough we save some back for the next batch it turns into what we call sourdough but I'll explain that more in a minute now there were many reasons to use this old dough or leaven the first one was flavor it gave a much more rich and kind of sharper flavor to the bread but there were other reasons also not only in France but in Great Britain and America because of the importance of Ale in the 18th century diet virtually everyone had access to Ale yeast or barn but there were circumstances when the supplies were very limited take for instance William Ellis who wrote the 1750 book country housewife family companion and in it he mentions a shortage of yeast during the Great Frost of 1740. this year marked the coldest period during what is now known as the little Ice Age yeast was very scarce during that time in Europe because of the extended period of frigid temperatures that prevented it from being cultivated when Barn was in short supply Levin was used to replace it but there was another reason to use leaven and that was to preserve yeast from one session to the next frequent use of a Wood-Fired oven was Impractical and inefficient for the home Baker so there needed to be a way to preserve yeast from one baking session to the next [Music] now we have to remember that in the 18th century No One fully understood yeast how what it was and how it worked any of these things it wasn't until the mid-1800s that yeast was proven to be a living organism now the difference in taste between bread made with balm and that made with leaven has a lot more to do with bacteria than it does with the yeast that's involved bacteria lives along with yeast inside of every ball of dough it converts sugars that are in the dough into lactic acid so if you let your dough ferment long enough it doesn't matter whether you start with a wild yeast culture or a barn your dough will begin to sour it'll begin to take on those those characteristics of sourdough bread and so your dough may not taste exactly the same as some regionally famous sourdough breads it will be a sourdough bread nonetheless for the first part of our demonstration today we're going to make a very simple bread dough I've got four cups of a simple bread flour here unbleached and I'm going to add to that just a a teaspoon of kosher salt and now I've got some yeast I could mix up Barm but since this isn't really the main part of what we're doing here this is just a start we're going to use dry instant yeast it'll end up being exactly the same in the end so that's what we're going to use here so I'm going to use a packet of instant yeast foreign about a cup and a half of warm water [Music] should make just about the right consistency [Music] now we've got this mixed let's turn this dough out onto a floured surface here we'll get that mixed up and we'll need this until it's ready until it's uh nice and soft [Music] okay this dough is ready to let it set and Rise but now's the time I'm going to extract a piece of dough to use for the next time I'm going to bake bread so here we go here's a piece of dough we're going to save this for later and we're going to take this reform it up into our shape let's put it in the dough Bowl and let it set for baking we'll let this set an hour or two and then we'll bake it in our oven now here's our our dough that we've taken off for the next baking if we're going to use this dough tomorrow or if we were going to use it maybe the day after we can just take this ball and put it into a little pile of uh um flour and and save that for later on but if we aren't going to bake for seven days or ten days we need to a way to preserve this for later use so what we can do is we can store that in some salt to preserve this properly what we're going to do is we're going to punch a hole in our dough we're going to take that and fill the hole with salt so that it's got salt in the middle of it once this is salted we're gonna make a little cavity in our in our salt canister and we're gonna pour salt right on top and fill that up so it's covered up with salt and this will dry out it'll be it'll be a little hard lump when it when it comes out of here in a week or 10 days in our next episode we're going to take this preserved dough ball and we're going to wake it back up we're going to use it to bake some bread we're also going to start a wild yeast culture in our last episode we made 11 11 is old dough that you uh save back and you use it to inoculate a new batch of dough with yeast we took our leaven and we uh we preserved it in Salt today we're gonna wake this leaven back up and use it to make a new batch of bread [Music] last week we prepared a dough and then we saved off a little piece the leaven to use this week this is the dough that it was sitting in the salt what we need to do now is to scrape off as much salt as possible we put the salt on earlier because we wanted it to be dry we wanted it to slow down the yeast activity now that we want to wake it back up we need to get as much salt off as possible I'm going to chop this leaven this dried leaven up into the smallest pieces possible we're going to dissolve this in water so the the smaller the particle size the better when we're done with this we can add about a cup of nice warm water so we can get this to dissolve [Music] now I'm going to keep stirring this so I can get as much dissolved as possible I need to strain out as much of this crusty material as possible it really doesn't dissolve so I'm going to strain it through this cloth we're going to end up with about three quarters of a cup of liquid yeast now I'm going to make a sponge I'm going to add about a cup and a half of good quality bread flour and stir this in and it's going to make a it's going to make a very soupy mixture this is where the yeast is really going to come alive we're gonna cover this up and set this aside it may take as much as overnight for this to wake back up you'll want to cover it with either some wet cloth or some plastic now we prepared a sponge last night let's have a look at this when this is ready you're going to see large bubbles starting to form it'll have a very spongy texture let's make our dough I'm going to start off with about three cups of bread flour in a bowl to that I'm going to add about two teaspoons of salt now let's put about a cup of this sponge into our a flour now that we've got this sponge in here I'm going to add a cup of nice warm water and then mix this into our dough this dough looks a little wet so I'm going to sprinkle it with a little extra flour before I turn it out and knead it [Music] I'm going to knead this until it's nice and smooth and soft at this point it's time to take another piece of dough off of this to save it for our next batch of bread I want a a piece that's about a half a cup or maybe a whole cup of dough and we'll put this in salt just like we did before now back to our bread dough let's put it in a dough bowl and cover it with a cloth we want this to double in size it may take an hour it may take a couple of hours depending on the temperature and and your yeast just how active it is and this dough has risen I'm going to go ahead and lightly punch it down and reform it back into our loaf put it back in the dough bowl and let it rise for the final time now we could bake this bread in our Earthen oven but today we're going to use our Dutch oven there seems to be a modern Resurgence in baking in Dutch ovens but this technique has really been used for hundreds of years dutch ovens were commonly used in 18th century kitchens they were known by various names and they took on various forms but they were known throughout Great Britain France and the American colonies dutch ovens play an important role in the American colonies as well as the later on western expansion Lewis and Clark took numerous dutch ovens Along on their Western Expedition these vessels were favored by 18th 19th and even 20th century cooks and sojourners for their versatility they could be used for Soups and stews for frying as well as for roasting and baking even bread we found one early 19th century source that used the term Dutch oven and bread oven interchangeably when it came to baking for a single meal these were much more efficient than a Wood-Fired oven because of their versatility and efficiency they were also highly valued you could frequently find them in Old 18th century last will and Testaments and in household inventories James Townsend and son offers three different sizes a four quart an eight quart and a 12 quart model while our lows are rising we started a small fire to preheat our Dutch oven and then we can use these Embers when it's done to help bake this this dough is ready to bake let's prepare our Dutch oven we had this oven over the fire and it's warmed up don't skimp on preheating this you want it to be nice and hot when you get started I'm going to go ahead and sprinkle some cornmeal into the bottom of that this will keep the Loaf from sticking just a very thin layer here looks good and it should Brown up just a hair so you can see that the oven is getting the right temperature now we can slip this loaf in I'm going to make sure that it's Loosely in your bowl so you can just uh just nudge it in there so here we go okay it goes I'm just gonna get it into shape here this turned over but that's all right and now we're gonna slice the slit the top here so it can grow a little bit you want a nice sharp knife for this and then you can slice it and slice it the other way too there we are nice and deep that looks really good now we're going to close this up and I've already got our bottom coals going I got a nice ring there's an open Center here we don't want to get too too hot and we're going to set that on put our lid on now we're going to bring in and put more coals up on top of the oven I got a good layer of coals up on top now we're going to let this cook it should cook about 30 minutes until it's a really nice golden brown for a nice even baking you want to pick this up and rotate it a quarter of a turn every five or ten minutes after 15 minutes you want to take the lid off and take a peek to make sure this thing isn't overcooking then you can adjust the heat accordingly we took a quick look at 15 minutes and it was progressing rather well I'm sure now that it's about 30 minutes in that this is ready to take a look and we're gonna take the lid off here we can see that it really is looking quite nice and golden brown sourdough bread is a much more dense bread so it can take a little bit more cooking than you might think don't don't worry about possibly overcooking it a little bit it's going to need a little bit of that to get the heat all the way into the inside so let's get this out of here and there we have it bread uh baked from leaven or old dough this uh we even baked it in a dutch oven and we've saved off dough for the next time we're going to bake bread you know each time you repeat this process and save back dough you get a little bit more flavor each time it's it's going to keep developing and make a a wonderful tasting bread for a couple of weeks now we've been anticipating doing an episode on cultivating wild yeast to make an 18th century sourdough bread but the more we did research the more it became apparent that this was not something that they did in the 18th century [Music] now today if you ask 50 people about how to start a wild yeast culture for making sourdough bread it's likely you'll get a hundred different answers but in reality all it takes is a little bit of flour and some water and some thyme now the question remains did people in the 18th century knowingly and intentionally propagate wild yeast are initial conclusion was yes due to the frequent references to sour bread but as we dug deeper we found only three references to propagating wild yeast none of those prior to 1790 they were either examples of scientific experiments or they were from non-european cultures interestingly the typical response to this these experiments is astonishment let me read to you this a little excerpt or a little piece from a journal this is dated 1790 and it's from the transactions of this Society for the encouragement of Arts manufacturing and commerce and they this is in context to about a contest the society had a contest about the manufacture of yeast this is a man writing about experiments that he's doing to make yeast here the man writes about his uh his assistant he accordingly brought me some small vessel with a full head of yeast upon it assuring me with some degree of exaltation that neither oil of vitriol with chalk nor any portion of old yeast had been employed on that occasion this greatly surprised me and I desired he would proceed with the experiment so his experiment had to do with having a boiled water and malt and nothing else and just letting this set over time he was cultivating a wild yeast you didn't even know it now there are many 18th century recipes for making yeast and circumstances when yeast was in short supply now other than these experiments that I've already mentioned they all had to do with propagating yeast from a little bit of pre-existing yeast so it was very surprising for these experimenters to find that you could make a yeast slurry without adding any pre-existing yeast so it's apparent that these experiments flew against the conventional wisdom so what does this mean for the 18th century reenactor or Historic Site she would be using a bread baked with balm or sourdough bread made with leaven well it really depends on who we're trying to portray what our culture is what our class is what our climate is the one thing we can seem to draw from this information is is that propagating wild yeast in the manner in which we do today to make sourdough bread is not an historically accurate option it's been a very interesting bread baking technique that's been floating around the internet since about 2007. it's called No need bread it uses a very simple dough high moisture content and is baked in a dutch oven I would encourage you to watch the video sometime it's very worthwhile no need bread because of its Simplicity and its great flavor is a very Innovative technique compared to Modern bread baking methods but I'll let you in a little secret this is not a new idea in fact no need breads have been around for hundreds of years today I'm going to show you how to do an 18th century version of no need bread we're going to bake it in an 18th century manner we're going to use that Old Dutch oven that so many modern Bakers are falling in love with foreign [Music] kinds of Breads in the 18th century some of them were baked from a very fine white flour others made from very coarse flower still others were made with wheat flour mixed with other grains but today we're going to focus on a bread known by the 18th century British and North American colonist as French bread now when I say French bread what one might think is a baguette a batard or brioche most people think of a French bread as a firm white bread with an open crumb structure and a crispy crust numerous 18th century English cookbooks contain recipes for French bread but this French bread is nothing like the modern French bread modern breads made with just flour water yeast and some salt no these French Breads in these 18th century cookbooks are always made with milk and sometimes eggs and butter this English version of French bread was made into a loafs or into rolls the rolls were sometimes referred to as magic bread which can mean the quality of a bread or sometimes its size and shape this French bread had its crust either rasped away or chipped off with a knife 18th century French bread was commonly used as an ingredient in other dishes the bread crust was often used in porches soups even in other breads let's make some of this French bread foreign Bowl let's put three cups of flour bread flour or all-purpose flour will do and about one and a half teaspoons of salt that's it for the dry ingredients let's do the wet ingredients the original recipe calls for Barm and since nobody has Barn which is the foam from the top of beer instead we're going to make a substitute Barm let's start with a half a cup of water to that I'm going to add a heaping tablespoon of flour foreign and then we need some yeast we're going to use instant yeast you need about a quarter of a teaspoon to a half a teaspoon and then we can stir this all together now for the rest of the wet ingredients I'm going to take just one egg white let me crack this egg and we're going to add that to three quarters of a cup of milk and whisk that together now I've got here two tablespoons of melted butter and I'm going to put that in with two egg yolks and we're going to whisk those together now let's add this all together and we can put in our Barm mixture too and that's it for our wet ingredients now mix the wet ingredients with the dry ingredients and I will mix them with these [Music] as soon as the dough is formed and all the flour is absorbed it's time to stop mixing now one of the interesting things about the 18th century recipes is they call for this dough not to be needed it makes a very wet and sticky dough they call it in the recipe a very light paste we'll cover this with a damp cloth and set it aside 12 to 24 hours we could divide this dough up and put it into smaller well floured bowls to make rolls now we've prepared this batch ahead of time and it's been rising about 18 hours it's got a very nice spongy texture so it looks like it's time to start preheating our Dutch oven we're going to be baking our bread in a dutch oven today baking bread in Dutch ovens is very common in the 18th century Although our recipes don't call for that specifically we had this oven over the fire and it's warmed up don't skimp on preheating this you want it to be nice and hot when you get started I'm going to go ahead and sprinkle some cornmeal into the bottom of that this will keep the Loaf from sticking just a very thin layer here good and it should Brown up just a hair so you can see that the oven it's getting the right temperature now it's time to look at our dough I'm going to turn this out onto a liberally floured surface now your dough may be a lot stickier than this but that's okay it'll help to flour your hands so that it doesn't stick now let's Pat this down a little bit Let's Fold it once Let's Fold it twice three times and one last time four times we're going to fold this now let's put it in our Dutch oven you want to keep a close eye on this while it's cooking it's going to take 25 to 30 minutes you want it to be a nice deep golden brown without burning on the bottom foreign oven you're going to want to set your oven to 450 degrees there that looks perfect I'm going to take it off and there it is an 18th century enriched no need bread something that they called in the time period French bread we want to make sure that our bread is completely cooled before we wrap or chip off the outer crust the the crust and also this the French bread as it is is used in many 18th century recipes hmm who doesn't like a nice big plate of French toast nice firm bread soaked in eggs with milk maybe garnished with a little bit of fresh fruit some cinnamon and slathered over the top with maple syrup have you ever wondered where this dish came from what genius mind created it and who throughout history savored this delectable dish well that's what we're going to look at today an 18th century cooking with James Townsend and son [Music] we're wrapping up our second series of 18th century cooking with James Townsend and son most recently we've been looking at 18th century Breads and we thought it would be appropriate to conclude this series with a little sweet treat made with bread the earliest recipe for French toast can be found in the epicus it's a fourth and fifth century collection of Roman recipes the dish is simply titled a sweet treat and the translation reads thus break a slice of fine white bread crust removed into rather large pieces soak in milk and beaten the eggs fry in oil cover in Honey and serve bread was known as a staff of life it was a dietary pillar but what does one do when one's bread goes stale in an Old English cookbook from about 1430 we find a recipe for bread that's sliced dipped in eggs fried in butter and then sprinkled with a little bit of sugar the name of this recipe was pan Perdue a French word that means lost bread dead or wasted bread suggesting that this recipe was meant to use up stale bread Karen has to transcribed Martha Washington's book of cookery has this to say in a recipe after Pam Purdue it says the English early took to pan Purdue and made it their own it was rarely omitted from a cookbook usually listed under made dishes made dishes are any dish that amuses the Cook or shows off her skill let's make French toast or pan Purdue in a true 18th century fashion [Music] we're going to start off with a nice enriched bread the no need French bread like we made in our last episode would be perfect if you want to use a more modern bread you can use a challah bread or a brioche any firm bread will do you cut the crust off this and we let it set out overnight so we're starting off with a nice stale bread I'm going to start off here with about eight egg yolks do that I'm going to add about a cup of a cream and I'm also going to add some wine some sack here we're going to use about a quarter of a cup now I'm going to add about two tablespoons of sugar and finally I'm going to scrape in a little bit of nutmeg [Music] and we'll whisk this all together [Music] now let's take our individual bread pieces and put them in the batter [Music] I'm going to let these set for maybe 15 minutes or up to an hour to get this a real good chance to soak in really depends on how stale your bread is while these toasts are steeping I'm going to go ahead and start on our sauce because we want to have the sauce ready to put on it as soon as they're cooked we're going to start off with about four tablespoons of butter and then once that's melted let's add in about two tablespoons of sack and after the sack we're going to add about a tablespoon of sugar now you want to whisk this all together and you want it to get nice and warm but we're really not cooking it we're just really mixing it together so what I'm going to do is set this aside where it'll stay nice and warm waiting for us to put it on got the butter going in the pan let's put in our toasts if your Bread's really stale sometimes it can be very fragile so you don't have to be careful as you're putting it in the pan [Music] [Music] these look done let's get them out of here all right here's our pan Purdue an early version of French toast let's give it a try foreign excellent this topping is a little different from what you and I might expect or what we're used to very nice right out of the 18th century cookbooks maple syrup as a topping is a perfect North American variation on that same theme their substitute for sugar maple syrup excellent

Channel: Townsends

Views: 67,220

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

Id: vQhJ-xYelxE

Length: 129min 15sec (7755 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 23 2022