This video is brought to you by Squarespace. Last year I recreated several dishes from the last dinners aboard the Titanic, but I completely neglected the most important meal of the day, breakfast! So today I am recreating
a first class breakfast aboard the Titanic. So my Tastorians I ask you, are you ready to go back to Titanic? This time on Tasting History. First class meals aboard the Titanic were
opulent and plentiful. Dinner could be up to 11 courses if you considered the post dessert fruit and cheese of course, which I do of course, and while breakfast wasn't as regimented or as robust as dinner there was still a lot of food on offer. The menu presented had dozens of options and you could order whatever you liked. Personally I've decided on a first class breakfast of baked apples, smoked salmon, shirred eggs, buckwheat cakes with blackcurrant conserve and Oxford marmalade, and a bit of watercress at the end to aid in digestion. Now there are no actual recipes from Titanic but we do know that especially for the first class much of the food was based on the recipes of Auguste Escoffier. One of his greatest cookbooks 'Le Guide Culinier' has recipes for most of the dinner and lunch menu but fewer recipes for breakfast but he does have one for the baked apples as well as one that describes how to present the smoked salmon. For that he says to cut in very thin slices, trim, roll into cornets and arrange on a dish with a little parsley. Super easy, and his baked apples are pretty simple as well. He just says to core them leaving a bit of core at the very bottom, and then cut a thin line through the skin around the middle of the apples then set them in a tray and "fill the center of each with a mixture of butter and caster sugar, add a little water to the tray and cook the apples gently in the oven." So take four tablespoons of softened butter and
beat in a half cup of super fine sugar for the filling. Another contemporary recipe from Fannie
Farmer actually says that that is all that you need in the fall but "towards Spring theybecome somewhat tasteless and spice is an improvement." So she suggests adding a half teaspoon of cinnamon as well and as Titanic sailed in the spring that is what I did. Then fill the apples with the filling then pour some boiling water into the dish just enough to cover the bottom, and set the apples in the oven at 375 Fahrenheit or 190 Celsius for about an hour or until they're nice and soft but not mushy. Now Escoffier does not have recipes for either the buckwheat cakes or the shirred eggs but luckily Fannie Farmer whose cookbook was selling off the charts when the Titanic sailed does have recipes for those so that's who I'm going to look to for those recipes. And speaking of cookbooks flying off the shelves my cookbook comes out in one month and my publisher is sending me on a book tour so if you are inclined to have your cookbook signed then come on down and and hang out for a while. So the cities that I'm currently going to are LA, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Phoenix but hopefully more cities will be added soon so I will definitely keep you up to date with with how that's going. But for now I will put links in the description
to where you can sign up for those cities right now. Now Fannie Farmer's buckwheat cakes are very
similar to modern pancakes but yeasted so instead of using baking powder to to give them a rise they use yeast. So to make these you'll need two cups or 475 milliliters of milk and then scald it. Then pour it over a third of a cup of bread crumbs and let it soak for 30 minutes. Then once the mixture has had time to cool add in a half teaspoon of salt and two teaspoons of dried yeast and stir until dissolved. Then add in the buckwheat flour. Now Fannie is not specific on exactly how much buckwheat to add. She just says "Add buckwheat to make a batter thin enough to pour." For me that was about a cup. Then cover the batter, let it rise overnight then she says "In the morning, stir well
add molasses and cook as griddle-cakes." So stir in one tablespoon of molasses, then pour a bit of
the batter onto a hot griddle over medium heat, and let them cook for about a minute, to a minute and a half, before flipping them over and letting them cook for another minute. And you can make them any size that you want but the larger they are the harder they are to flip. Now the last thing we have to make is the shirred eggs but before we do so I wanted to point out a couple of interesting little things that are on this menu for breakfast from the Titanic. First, there is a typo. The word marmalade is spelled "mramalade" and the mistake was not replicated on the second class menu so I like to imagine that the typo was actually very much on purpose. A passive aggressive action taken by the
steward who had had to spend the days working with the first class who I assume are rather
insufferable on the Titanic and uh yeah. I have no evidence to back that up but that's
what I like to imagine. Second interesting thing is the date, April 11 1912 and that's different
from most of the menus that we have which are from April 14th the day that the Titanic
hit an iceberg. And once you hit the Like button and Subscribe to Tasting History, I'm going to let you know why that is. Numerous menus survived from the Titanic and most
of them are from the day of the sinking because people were still carrying them in their jacket pockets when they were taken out of the ocean and saved by the Carpathia. So for third class we have the entire day because the entire day's meals were laid out on one menu but for first and second class different menus were printed for different meals so most of what we have are from dinner that
night and then we have a few from luncheon that day, but they'd likely left their breakfast menus in their staterooms which are now at the bottom of the Atlantic so both the first and second class breakfast menus that survived are actually from Thursday April 11th because that was the day at 11:30 AM that Titanic arrived at Queenstown Ireland, its last stop before heading to New York. There RMS Titanic being a Royal Mail ship took on a lot of mail destined for America but there were also a few pieces of mail that got off. These were the last postcards and letters that passengers aboard Titanic ever sent to their loved ones, and a few of them included little souvenirs some of which were the menus from breakfast that they had had that morning. And what's cool is that besides the menus this is really the only time that we get a glimpse into the passenger experience aboard the Titanic without the taint of the events that would happen a few days later. Like one from 20 year old Alfred Nourney who had actually purchased a second class ticket but he complained about his cabin and as people complaining often get he got upgraded up to first class, so he was able to send a giddy postcard to his mother from Queenstown. "Dear mother, I am so happy being first class! I already know some nice people! A diamond king! Mr Astor, one of the wealthiest Americans is on board! Thousand kisses, Alfred." A less giddy letter was sent to a friend by eminent American painter writer and curmudgeon Francis Millet. "Queer lot of people on the ship. There are a number of obnoxious, ostentatious American women, the scourge of any place they infest and worse on shipboard than anywhere. Many of them carry tiny dogs and lead husbands around like pet lambs." And he wasn't wrong, there were a number of first-class ladies who did bring their little dogs with them. There were actually 12 dogs on board, most of whom spent their days in the kennel on F deck though four of the smaller dogs would stay in the cabins with their owners. Now three of these dogs being kept in the cabins were the only dogs to survive the sinking and even then in one case of the Pomeranian lady,she was only able to get onto a lifeboat because her owner wrapped her up like a baby, and the crew member thought it was a little baby she was carrying. "I have a child!" And supposedly when saved by the Carpathia those crew members didn't want at least one of the dogs to come aboard but luckily all three dogs did get off the lifeboats and onto the Carpathia and survived but the fourth dog Frufrou who did stay in a cabin he did not survive because his owner Helen Bishop later wrote
"The loss of my little dog hurt me very much. I will not forget how he dragged on my clothes. He so
wanted to accompany me... but there would be little sympathy for a woman carrying a dog in her arms when there were lives of women and children to be saved." There's a sad story, the veracity of which
is somewhat suspect, of Anne Elizabeth Isham. Now she had gotten into a lifeboat and the lifeboat
was ready to go down when she got out to go to the kennel to save what in most stories is a Great Dane, and she never made it back to the lifeboats and whether or not it's true, again suspect, but it
is true that she is one of only five female first class passengers to have died on the Titanic. Now if one did decide to bring a dog on board they had to pay. You basically had to buy a ticket at a lower price for your animal. There was even a 25 penny fee paid for a canary that sailed from Southampton to Cherbourg and got off at Cherbourg... surviving the Titanic. Now whether or not you had a dog or a canary with you if you were an early riser you could have tea and scones brought to your stateroom but for most meal time was served from 8 AM to 10 AM but where you enjoyed your breakfast was very much up to you. "In the first class dining room over 550 passengers can dine at the same time, and a feature of the room is the arrangement of the recessed bays where family and other parties can dine together in semi privacy." And hopefully you would've thought ahead and decided where you wanted to sit before you boarded but "Passengers who have not previously arranged for seats at table to be reserved should apply for same to the Second Steward. Children are not entitled to seats in the Saloon unless full fare is paid." Now if you wanted something a little more elite you could take your breakfast in the À la Carte Restaurant on B Deck. Now meals at the À la Carte Restaurant were not included in the price of your ticket breakfast costing an additional three shillings, but the food and experience were supposed to be exquisite and more importantly exclusive because you did have to have reservations made ahead of time, as Lady Duffgordon said "Fancy strawberries in April, and in mid ocean. The whole thing is positively uncanny. Why, you would think you were at the Ritz." And many passengers did refer to the À la Carte Restaurant as the Ritz but if the Ritz was still a little too public for you or if you'd simply had too much brandy in the smoking room the night before, and just couldn't be bothered to drag yourself down to the Dining Saloon you could take a full breakfast in your room, or if you had one of the two deluxe parlor suites on B Deck like Rose from Titanic you could dine on your own private Promenade Deck. One thing that made this possible aboard Titanic was the advent of these silver plate food warmers, along with hot water sleeves that would kind of go around the the food trays to keep things warm, similar to those insulated bags your pizza comes in when you order delivery. And if you were dining in your room you'd likely be ordering from the menu that we are using today, and that menu along with all of the menus would have been put together by the Chief First-class Steward Andrew Latimer along with the chefs on board. Now we obviously know about the dishes that we are making today but there are a few other things on the menu that I kind of want to point out. First Quaker Oats and puffed rice, both of which were made by the Quaker Oats Company, an executive of which Walter Donald Douglas was traveling aboard Titanic. I can only assume that when he saw his company's product on the menu he would feel obliged to order it as long as he had room after eating all of the meat that was provided on this menu. Grilled mutton, kidneys, and bacon, grilled ham, sausage, sirloin steak, mutton chops, and of course lamb collops: slices of meat, in this case lamb, that was served with a sort of brown gravy and mushrooms very often but there are different ways to make collops. Also in
England the Monday before lent Ls known as Collop Monday and that's a day that everybody would eat collops though I prefer the following day which is Pancake Day, thank you very much. Other breakfast options were eggs made most any way, as well as potatoes mashed sauteed or jacket, that is baked potatoes. And for bread, which there was plenty of, you could have scones, cornbread, or Vienna, or Graham rolls. And Vienna rolls were only called that in England. Most other places called them Kaisersemmel or Kaiser rolls and that's because the design on them looked like the Kaiser's Crown. They can be made in all sorts of ways but the shape is really the important thing and today usually they're quite large, and we eat them for sandwiches or hamburgers but most of the older recipes that I was looking at call for rather small tight buns like- meant for breakfast. That-
There you go. Now Graham rolls were also on the smaller side and were made of Graham flour which today is mostly just used for graham crackers. And all of these would have been baked daily aboard
Titanic by the Chief Baker Charles Joughin and his team of bakers, and I did a whole video on him and how he survived by getting drunk and then riding the stern down. Again alongside Rose from the movie. Now to accompany the bread you had the options of black currant conserve, basically jam, Oxford marmalade sometimes written as 'mramalade' at least on the menu and that was on the ship, it was Frank Cooper's Oxford marmalade and you can actually still buy that today, I did. What I did not buy was the Narbonne honey. The real Narbonne honey which is made in a specific region in southern
France, it's a white honey. It's supposed to be wonderful but it's really, really expensive I found it for like $70 dollars for a little jar like that, so one day I'll get it but not today. And while $70 dollars for a jar of honey is a little out of my budget range right now it'd be nothing if you were say worth a billion dollars, like the only Spanish couple in First Class, Victor Peñasco and Maria Josefa Peñasco, 'Pepita' to her family. And while their story really has nothing to do with breakfast other than the fact that they would have eaten it while aboard the ship I really wanted to tell their story because I think it's fascinating and it's definitely one of the lesser known stories from the Titanic so please indulge me. The couple were married in December of 1910
and this was followed by a year-long honeymoon traveling around around the capitals of Europe
while they waited for their mansion in Madrid to be readied for them. Now they did stay in Europe the entire time because Victor's mother who lived in Madrid, who was footing the bill for most of the trip, told them that they could not get on a ship to cross the ocean as it was bad luck to do so on a honeymoon but when the couple found themselves in Paris in early 1912 advertisements for Titanic were plastered all over the city and the allure of riding on the Ship of Dreams, the Unsinkable Titanic to New York City was just too much and so they did book passage but how to tell mama? Well they didn't. See Maria Josefa's maid would go along with them but Victor's butler was to stay in Paris along with a stack of pre-written postcards. Postcards from Paris telling about all the wonderful romantic adventures that they were having. Then the butler could send these periodically to Victor's mother to keep her in the dark. So with their plan in motion they
boarded Titanic at Cherbourg. Now the couple who spoke little to no English were nonetheless a hit. A fellow first class passenger wrote "the little Spanish bride... and her husband were just like little canaries. They were so loving and were having such a happy honeymoon that everyone on the Titanic became interested in them..." Well after enjoying a lavish dinner in the first class
Dining Saloon on the night of April 14th the couple went back to their room too ready for bed
while Fermina their maid was in her cabin mending a corset, and while she was doing her needlework
she felt a slight vibration and then the engine stopped . And so she decided to go to her employer's cabin and see if they had felt anything. People were starting to stir out in the corridor and even though the staff told them that there was nothing to worry about Victor who was still dressed decided to go up onto the boat deck just to check it out. When he went up there he saw crew members
readying the lifeboats... so he immediately went back down to his cabin and told both of the ladies to get dressed and head on up. Now when they arrived up on deck the band which had been playing at their dinner just a couple hours earlier had come out onto the boat deck to play some upbeat music
to alleviate the worries of anxious passengers and Victor tried to figure out exactly what was going on and how to get them to a lifeboat but he didn't really know English, and so it was very confused and frankly even if you did know English the entire situation was very confused. Luckily the nearby Countess of Rothes who knew some French was able to lead them through the crowd to lifeboat 8. Of course at this time it was still very much women and children first and so Victor knew that he could not accompany his wife into the lifeboat, so he embraced her and then in Spanish said 'Pepita
may you be very happy' and he put his wife and her maid into the lifeboat with the Countess and stepped back onto the deck, and then he watched as lifeboat number 8 which was less than half full lowered into the sea. The Countess of Rothes who took control of the tiller in the lifeboat later wrote "Then Signora de Satode Peñasco began to scream for her husband. It was too horrible. I left the tiller to my cousin and slipped down beside her to be of what comfort I could. Poor woman! Her sobs tore our hearts and her moans were unspeakable in their sadness... When the awful end came, I tried my best to keep the Spanish woman from hearing the agonizing sound of distress. They seemed to continue forever, although it could not have been more than ten minutes until the silence of a lonely sea dropped down. The indescribable loneliness, the ghastliness of our feelings can never be told." But it was actually after the sinking that two more tragic events took place. First, the butler did not know of his employer's fate and so continued to send postcards that
had these fictitious stories of their wonderful life and honeymoon, and romantic adventures in Paris, and he would send these to his mother... and even weeks after his mother found out that her
son was dead postcards kept coming in the mail. The second tragedy was that according to Spanish law at the time without a body Victor could not be declared dead for 20 years. That would put his wife in her 40s before she could get any inheritance of hers or his or until she could remarry, so Victor's family did what I think any of us would have done and bribed someone who was part of
the effort to get the bodies out of the Atlantic. It was all happening in Canada and they basically
found a body that hadn't been identified, and paid someone to let the maid go and identify that body as Victor. This allowed Maria Josefa to remarry a few years later and her maid actually stayed with her throughout the rest of their lives pretty much and they both lived long and happy lives. And I just love these little stories from from that event and that's why I keep returning to Titanic. All through my life I keep returning to Titanic but that's why I'm returning to it here on the show just for one episode right now but if you're not sick of Titanic then maybe I'll
do it once or twice a year. A lot of food, a lot of stories from Titanic to cover, or if there are any other topics that you want me to cover, any events that you want me to talk about I will gladly add those to the list, but for now it's time to make some shirred eggs. So the recipe for shirred eggs that I'm using comes from Fannie Farmer and she says to mix some melted butter with breadcrumbs. Then line the bottom of a ramekin with a bit of the breadcrumbs. She also says you can actually scoop out a tomato and line the bottom of that with breadcrumbs. Either way gently slip one or two broken eggs into the cup then sprinkle with salt and pepper, cover with buttered crumbs and bake. I put them in the oven at 375 degrees Fahrenheit, 190 Celsius for about 15 minutes, but it's gonna kind of depend on the eggs and and what they're in so you're just looking for a slight wobble. Then we add that to the rest of our breakfast and here we are, a first class breakfast aboard the RMS Titanic. So I'm just going to kind of go in order of the menu so I'm going to start with the baked apple. Let's try it. I mean- my God that's good. What is not to like? It is apple and sugar and butter and cinnamon. It basically- it tastes like an apple pie without any crust and now I just wish I had made like a dozen of these. That's wonderful and I could eat that for
breakfast every day. And for these smoked salmon coronets, I love smoked salmon. What's not
to like? It's delicious. Nice and cold. I like it when it's very cold. Yeah fantastic. Now unfortunately the next thing I should eat is the shirred eggs but I tried them right as they came out of the oven because she says to to eat them right when they come out so I figured I would try them and it turns out my at one time very mild allergy to egg whites has become a not so mild allergy to egg whites and I'm not going to put myself through that again. So I'm not going to try it. Suffice it to say they were creamy and kind of had a wonderful crunch
from the bread crumbs and then my mouth swelled up so I couldn't eat anymore but they were fantastic. Not entirely sure how I'm going to tackle things going forward because while I was planning on doing deviled eggs soon but maybe I can just eat the inside. I don't know and it's weird because if it's like baked in a cake it's fine but when it's just the egg white bad things happen. So instead I'm going to move right to the buckwheat cakes and traditionally these would be served with syrup but I want to just try it without anything just to get the flavor because
they look very different than a normal pancake. They taste very different from a
normal pancake buckwheat is such a- 'healthy' flavor, we'll say that. What I do love
though is that little bit of sourness from the yeast that rose overnight and so I would
definitely make these with- I would just use regular flour. I don't like buckwheat flour all that much, it's just such a strong flavor. It would take a lot of syrup to kind of overcome that
but I know some people that really love it, so if you love it then make buckwheat cakes. Now I do also want to try both the black currant conserve and the vintage Oxford marmalade. And this is
actually the brand that they had on the ship. This one is not but this is the brand that
they had on the ship and you can get it still and it says vintage Oxford marmalade. They have different types. The vintage kind it's much darker than modern marmalade tends to be. Here I can- well you can see the color but it's it's very dark and it's very bitter. At first it's like really sweet but then it becomes bitter and it's the bitterness that stays in your mouth and I wish it was the other way around. It was like bitter and oh then it's pleasantly sweet. It's the other way around so it kind of becomes a little bit of a punishment in my eyes at the end but this on the other hand I mean I could have that on bread three meals a day. Fantastic. The seeds definitely get caught in your teeth. Yeah they're going to be there all day
now but- that was just a little bit too. It's so good. It has this slight- what I associate
with medicine like a medicinal flavor, but in the best possible ways I don't mean that in a bad way at all. It's more of like it recalls medicine but delicious. Now at the very end of the meal they would have some watercress. It was thought at that time, and I think it still is, to
help with digestion and it was very popular. Tastes like watercress. You know kind of a wonderfully earthy green. I don't know how they would have had it but I think just plain. Sometimes they would put in a salad in other
in other recipes but I think here it would just be plain. It's interesting, there's also like a spiciness to it that took a second. So overall everything was delicious but the baked apple kind of takes the takes the cake, or the pie, for me. You should definitely make that one. Everything else wonderful, the smoked salmon and everything but yeah the baked apple definitely make that. It's really easy. And I am hoping that that recipe along with many others from the show will very soon be up on my new website which isn't up yet but we'll be very
soon, it will be tastinghistory.com and I am making it through the help of Squarespace who is sponsoring this video. Building a website with Squarespace is astonishingly easy. It is dynamic and you can basically make anything that you want with their many, many tools. And they have tons of options to make your site more robust like their powerful blogging tools, and their e-commerce extensions that help manage inventory and promote products and to help connect directly with your audience which is so, so important. They have email campaign tools and the ability to create gated members only content to help you generate additional revenue. So if you are looking to build a new website or just to retool an existing one check out squarespace.com/tastinghistory and get a free trial plus 10% off of your first purchase of a website or a domain and I will see you next time on Tasting History.
Has it already been a year since Titanic month? Feels like only yesterday, how the time flies by.
Tight buns.
u/jmaxmiller - It's very possible that your allergy only applies for not-fully-cooked eggs, since you said that eggs in baked goods are fine. If it's one of the enzymes in egg that you're allergic to, cooking will denature it and you'll be fine. The dish in this episode wasn't fully cooked through by design, but hard boiled eggs, as for deviled eggs, are.
Of course, be careful testing this - if you're allergic to something other than an enzyme then the above won't apply at all. Definitely have an epipen handy just in case.
For your egg white allergy: Show José tasting the deviled eggs!
It was a lovely video, length no matter. And the look on your face really tempts me to try the baked apples. Do you have a recommendation on variety?
I saw people were suggesting things like the Hindenburg for you to look into, but I would like to suggest a disaster a little nearer to my heart, and it even has a slight Titanic connection. If you're looking for disasters, anyway. If not, no worries.
In July 1915, what still stands (AFAIK) as the US's worst maritime disaster happened, right in the heart of Chicago. The SS Eastland turned on its side in the river and killed almost 850 people, including 2 great-aunts of mine. Western Electric had chartered ships to take their employees across the lake for the annual picnic. The Eastland was unstable to begin with, and after the Titanic disaster, extra lifeboats had been added, leading to even greater issues.
I don't know what (corporate) picnic food would have been like--hot dogs? Cold salads? Hamburgers don't seem likely. Probably ice cream for dessert. So far I have not turned up a menu, although I'm almost positive it exists somewhere. But I'm curious in the interest of getting a better idea of what my relatives' lives were like back then. Food is, oddly enough, not a major part of my heritage.
Loved this episode! The stories of the dogs and the star crossed lovers were so interesting and had me all choked up.
Also for your egg allergy, you might try duck eggs. Many people who are allergic to the proteins in chicken eggs can tolerate duck eggs (just go easy, they're so rich they can cause tummy upset).
Loved this episode and that you came back to the Titanic - the series that caused me to first find your channel and subscribe. Consider this another vote to keep going with it, and other 20th century events as well. You do such a great job finding a unique way to make the people at the center of these stories more human - more relatable, and I really appreciate it.
Loved this episode! The previous titanic series are some of my favourite videos to have on in the background for some reason, I was so pleasantly surprised to see another!
One thing I've never seen discussed before is the lives and stories of the many Arab passengers on board the Titanic. Talking about them could be an interesting segue into traditional/historical Levantine foods, something like like awarma and kishk maybe (preserved lamb and dried fermented bulgur and yoghurt, often eaten together as a sort of porridge while travelling).
r/vintagemenus