Culinary Archaeology: Toasted Cheese, or, the Art of the Rabbit

The toasted cheese sandwich is a staple long beloved by moms everywhere: quick and cheap to make, tasty, and generally acceptable to even the pickiest kid. Back in the halcyon ’80s, my grandma used to make me a toasted cheese and a cup of Mrs. Grass chicken soup and then send me outside to play with my GI Joes.

The tastiness and utility of toasted cheese did not pass unnoticed in the 18th Century, though back then the sandwich was open-faced. It still survives in the modern era under its 18th century name: Welsh Rabbit, the origin of which is uncertain. It’s possible that it might have come from “rare-bit”, since only an extremely imaginative Welshman would mistake the flavor for that of a rabbit. 

Like roast beef and plum pudding, the Rabbit was also something of a British cultural feature as well as a tasty meal. Regional variations existed for each of the three kingdoms of Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales). I decided to try all three and see which would prove supreme. Hannah Glasse’s 1745 recipes don’t need much modification; all you need to do is use your broiler or toaster instead of an open hearth.

You’ll need:

• Crusty bread, sliced. Whole wheat is both more accurate and better for you.
• Good firm English cheese, such as Cheddar, Stilton, or Lincolnshire Poacher. Parmesan, while not English, is also acceptable; it traveled and kept well, and sometimes even showed up in military stores.
• unsalted butter
• English mustard (the powdered kind)
• Red wine
• White wine 

To Make a Welch Rabbit: Toast the bread on both sides, then toast the cheese on one side, lay it on the toast, and with a hot iron brown the other side. You may rub it over with mustard.

Easier modern version: toast your slice of bread, top with cheese and sprinkle with mustard. Pass under broiler till cheese is browned and bubbly.

Verdict:The toasted cheese baseline. The main attraction of the Welch Rabbit is the sharpness of the mustard. Good if you like strong flavors.

To Make a Scotch Rabbit: Toast a piece of bread very nicely on both sides, butter it, cut a slice of cheese about as big as the bread, toast it on both sides, and lay it on the bread.

Easier Modern Version: As per Welch Rabbit, but butter your bread prior to adding the cheese for the final toast and omit the mustard.

Verdict: Even in the 18th Century, “Scotch” is synonymous with “Lots of Cooking Fat”. This one tastes the most like the toasted cheese I remember from my childhood.

To Make an English Rabbit: Toast a slice of bread on both sides, then lay it on a plate before the fire, pour a glass of red wine over it, and let it soak the wine up; then cut some cheese very thin, and lay it thick over the bread, and put it in a tin oven before the fire, and it will be toasted and browned presently. Serve it away hot.      

Easier Modern Version:As Welch Rabbit, but soak the bread in 1/4 cup red wine before toasting the final time.

Verdict: Man, this one is good. The wine gives the bread a nice chewy texture, and the flavors are a natural match. If you want a simple but period recipe to impress people with, this is the one.

Or, do it thus: Toast the bread and soak it in wine, set it before the fire, cut your cheese in very thin slices, rub butter over the bottom of a plate, lay the cheese on, pour in two or three spoonfuls of white wine, cover it with another plate, set it over a chafing-dish of hot coals for two or three minutes; then stir till it is well done and well mixed: you may stir in a little mustard; when it is enough, lay it on the bread, just brown it with a hot shovel. Serve it away hot.

Easier Modern Version: Toast your bread as per Welch Rabbit. Melt your cheese in a double boiler with about 1 tbs butter and 2 tbs white wine per 8 oz of cheese. Add mustard to taste. Pour over bread and then toast until just browned.

Verdict: The most work for the best taste. Don’t try this one without a double-boiler or you’ll be scraping burned cheese off your pot for a long time.

One nice thing about this recipe is that we have an existing modern version to demonstrate how tastes have changed or stayed the same:

Welsh Rarebit With Beer (courtesy Colonial Williamsburg Tavern Cookbook)

• 1 tbs unsalted butter
• 1 lb grated sharp Cheddar cheese
• 3/4 cup beer, divided
• dash Tabasco
• 1 tsp dry mustard
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1 large egg, lightly beaten
• 1 tsp cornstarch
• Toast

Melt butter in double boiler over hot, but not boiling, water. Stir in cheese and all but 1 tbs beer. Stir until cheese melts. Add remaining beer, mustard, salt, Tabasco, and Worcestershire sauce.

Beat egg in small bowl with cornstarch and stir into cheese mixture. Cook, stirring often, till thickened, about 3-5 minutes. Serve immediately over toast. 

 

 

Culinary Archaeology: Chicken in Verjuice

My return from Detroit happily coincided with the arrival of my long-awaited verjuice from Deborah Peterson’s Pantry. Verjuice is the sour juice pressed from unripe green grapes; in a time when lemons and their juice were crazy tales brought home by Crusaders returning from Outremer and wine was too expensive to let turn to vinegar, verjuice provided the sour/acid taste to Medieval cooking. It continued to see use in this way right up to the 18th Century, but in the end verjuice was replaced by readily available supplies of lemons and cheap wine vinegar in much the same way that sugar replaced honey as the primary sweetener of the Northern European diet. 

It’s tough to find an 18th Century British recipe that actually uses verjuice. By the time Hannah Glasse wrote her book in 1745, Britain was at the center of global trade. I would not, however, be a gamer/librarian/history buff if I didn’t have a few medieval cookbooks lying around, so I dusted them off and invited some friends.

There’s no better way to try verjuice than by using a recipe where it figures in the title. This one originates from an unsigned 14th Century Tuscan manuscript, and is reprinted with its modern version in The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy.

Gratonata of Chickens: Cut up your chickens, fry them with pork fat and with onions; and while they are frying add a little water so that they cook nicely in the pan; and stir them often with a large spoon; add spices, saffron, and verjuice and then boil; and for each chicken take four egg yolks, mix them with verjuice and then boil them separately; and beat everything together in the pan, and boil everything together with the pieces of chicken; and when it boils remove it from the fire and eat it. 

Chicken with Verjuice:

• 1 chicken
• 1 medium onion
• 2 oz pork fatback
• 10 tbs water
• 10 tbs verjuice
• 4 egg yolks
• 1/2 tsp ground mace
• 1/2 tsp ground ginger
• 1 pinch cinnamon
• 1 pinch saffron threads
• salt and pepper

Cut chicken into serving pieces, season with salt and pepper, and slice onion thinly. Cut fatback into small dice and render the fat in a heavy bottomed casserole or dutch oven. Add chicken and onion and brown on all sides. Add water and bring to the boil, then add 3 tbs verjuice and the spices. Cover and simmer for about 45 minutes. Remove from heat.

When chicken is done, beat remaining 7 tbs of verjuice into the egg yolks in a small saucepan. Bring nearly to the boil over low heat and then add to the casserole with the chicken. Mix well until sauce is thick.

This recipe reminded me a lot of chicken adobo, but with a slight fruitiness due to the presence of verjuice rather than vinegar. It’s really worth the trouble to get ahold of actual verjuice (you can use it instead of vinegar or lemon juice just about anywhere, and unlike them it doesn’t combine poorly with wine on the palate), but if you really want to try this recipe without it the book suggests using the juice of one lemon combined with 3 tbs water as a substitute. 

To go with the chicken, we made some gnocchi. The gnocchi here are the original gangstas of the pasta clan, dating from a time before either semolina or potato flour for starch. This recipe is also from The Medieval Kitchen, and is from another unsigned 14th Century Tuscan manuscript.

If You Want Some Gnocchi, take fresh cheese and mash it, then take some flour and mix with egg yolks as in making migliacci. Put a pot full of water on the fire and, when it begins to boil, put the mixture on a dish and drop it into the pot with a ladle. And when they are cooked, place them on dishes and sprinkle with plenty of grated cheese.

Gnocchi

• 1 and 1/4 lbs cream cheese
• 1 and 1/2 cups flour
• 6 egg yolks
• salt
• freshly grated parmesan cheese

Mash cream cheese into paste. Mix in flour by hand and add salt to taste. Blend in egg yolks, continuing to knead until a smooth mixture forms. Boil water in a large pot, then reduce to simmer. Drop half-teaspoonfuls of mixture into simmering water and wait until they rise to the top on their own. Drain and serve, topped with parmesan cheese.

This recipe didn’t specify the flour type, but you can’t go wrong by doing what I did and using spelt flour. It’s still historically accurate and it gives the gnocchi a slight nutty flavor. This recipe makes a lot of dough, which is not a bad thing because it stores pretty well and the gnocchi themselves are easy to make.   

But, you ask me, what’s with two Italian recipes ? Aren’t you all about British food? Fear not, gentle readers. The vegetable recipe I used is 100% English. It’s from The Forme of Cury, compiled in 1390 by Richard II’s master cooks (before all that Tragedy Of unpleasantness). The modern version here is from Lorna J. Sass’s To The King’s Taste. Since H.M.’s kitchen staff wrote in English (albeit Medieval English) the original here has a little more “flavor”:

Funges:Take funges and pare hem clene and dyce hem. Take leke, and shred hym small and do hym to seeth it in gode broth. Color it with safron, and do there-inne powder-fort.

Mushrooms and Leeks

• 8 small leeks
• 1 and 1/2 lbs large mushrooms, quartered
• 3 tbs butter
• 1 cup chicken or vegetable stock
• 1/2 tsp brown sugar (before 1492 this would have come from traders in the Levant)
• 1/8 tsp saffron
• 1/2 tsp minced fresh ginger
• beurre manie (3 tbs flour mixed with 3 tbs soft butter)
• salt and pepper

 Wash leeks and discard tops and roots. Slice white part into rings. Saute in 3 tbs butter until soft, then add mushrooms and stir to coat. Combine stock, sugar, and spices and pour over vegetables. Cover and simmer 2 minutes, and then add beurre manie, stirring rapidly until thickened. Salt and pepper to taste. 

 

Culinary Archaeology: Roast Pork

English food culture has been beef-based for a long time; at least as long as horses were able to replace oxen as draft animals. When English people came to America as colonists, they brought with them several culinary expectations, one of which was that beef would continue to be the center of their dietary experience.

Unfortunately, things didn’t quite work out that way. The cattle the settlers brought over with them had a lot of trouble adapting to the new climate and new sources of food (cows can be pickier than people when it comes to that kind of thing), and maintaining a stable cow population was rough going for a while. Instead, the settlers turned to a heretofore undervalued resource: the pig. Unlike cows, pigs really don’t care what they eat, breed quickly, and are smart and clean enough not to require a whole lot of attention. Pigs took to the New World so well, in fact, that they became something of a local nuisance with half-feral  hogs breaking down fences, digging up crops, and attacking people in the street (needless to say, early Colonial promotional literature stays diplomatically silent on the subject of vicious gangs of rogue pigs, though court documents paint a horrifying picture of the porcine criminal class).

Wether because of their reputation as violent walking garbage disposals, or simple Anglo-Norman culinary preference (food snobbery is a universal human trait, but it’s worth noting that hog is one of only eight wholly Celtic words remaining in the modern English language), Pigs were traditionally a “lower class” meat source in Britain. Fortunately, self-preservation is also a universal human trait, and pork became a staple source of meat and fat for all classes in America until beef could reliably be acquired. By the 18th Century, Americans and American foodways were undergoing a very conscious process of Anglicization as colonists tried to demonstrate their cultural solidarity with the Mother Country by buying and eating British (and as Chris Onstad says, there’s nothing more British than a man sick on beef), but pork remained a staple element of the American diet to a degree that set it apart, especially in the Chesapeake and Deep South.

As to what you’d actually be eating if you stopped for a bite back then, Hannah Glasse suggests this method of roasting:

Pork must be well done, or it is apt to surfeit. To every pound allow a quarter of an hour…When you roast a loin, take a sharp pen-knife and cut the skin across, to make the crackling eat the better…. Roast a leg of pork thus: take a knife, as above, and score it; stuff the knuckle part with sage and onion, chopped fine with pepper and salt: or cut a hole under the twist and put the sage &c. there and skewer it up with a skewer. Roast it crisp, because most people like the rind crisp, which they call crackling.

For modern purposes this version of Hannah Glasse’s original, from Lobscouse and Spotted Dog, is excellent:

Roast Pork

• 1 half leg of pork with skin, about 8 lbs
• 1 tbs fresh sage
• 1 recipe Sage and Onion Stuffing
• Flour for dredging

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Bone the pork (if necessary) and sew or skewer one end together to make a pocket for the stuffing. Spoon stuffing into the cavity and sew or skewer opening. Using twine or string, tie roast into a an oblong package. Dredge with flour and place in oven. Immediately reduce heat to 350 degrees and roast for about an hour.

Remove roast from oven and carefully score skin in one-inch squares. Tear sage into small pieces and stuff into cuts. Return to oven and roast for two more hours, or until it reaches an inside temperature of 160 degrees. Let rest at least 15 minutes before carving.

Sage and Onion Stuffing

• 1 large onion, peeled
• small handful fresh sage
• 1/4 lb stale French bread, crumbled
• 1 tsp dry mustard
• 1 egg
• salt and pepper

Blanch onion in boiling water for five minutes. Add sage and cook 30 seconds more. Strain and chop coarsely. Add bread, mustard, egg, and salt and pepper to taste. Mix well. Makes enough for an 8 lb roast.

The mustard adds a definite bite to this one. For authentic tavern fare, serve it with some applesauce or brown onion sauce, and perhaps some Carolina rice. Or cheat and use wild rice.

 

Culinary Archaeology: The Food of Love. First Remove: Fricasseed Turbot

The first remove was where the culinary big guns came out on the 18th Century British table. The biggest, the richest, the most expensive…it was all going to be here. Generally, a roast of some kind took pride of place, as well as a fish dish. Surrounding it were other various dainties such as vegetables in the ubiquitous butter sauce, smaller fricassees, roasts, or other made dishes involving game, and oysters or other shellfish which in those days were so common that the 18th Century equivalent of the modern New Orleans po’ boy  was a common tradesman’s lunch.

The tradition of fish in the first Remove has survived in the modern convention of serving fish before meat, so my mini-dinner had a fish course to represent it. The fish dish I chose had considerable celebrity power behind it, because it came from the recipe collection of Mrs Henrietta Wolfe of Westerham, whose son James became famous as victor of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and conqueror of Quebec.* Mrs. Wolfe was renowned for her beauty, and was also apparently a dab hand with fish since all of the recipes I’ve tried which came from her cookery book were excellent. This one was originally a Fricassee of Turbot, but I had to substitute halibut, a similarly firm and not “fishy” fish, instead since you pretty much have to jump the Pond to get an actual turbot. Again, you can find the modern version of the following in Michael Barry’s Old English Recipes:

To fricassee turbut: Take a turbut, cut in short slices without ye skin. Make a little batter to dip it in, of Eggs cream a little flower a little mace and nutmeg. Then fry it a dine Brown, make a few forst meat balls & some good fish sauce to serve it up in, with fried oysters mushrooms etc. around it.

This is more complicated than it sounds, in that you have to fry the fish, make and fry the forcemeat balls (which here are bread-based 18th century ancestors of hush puppies and serve the same purpose, ie to make an expensive dish feed more people), and then make the fish sauce to serve with it:

 Fish:

• 1 and 1/2 lbs turbot, halibut, or haddock
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup whole milk or half-and-half
• 2 tbs flour
• 1/4 tsp grated nutmeg
• Cooking fat. Lard, butter, and olive oil (my choice) are all period.

Cut fish into one-inch slices. Beat egg into milk and add flour and nutmeg to make a thin batter. Dip fish slices into batter and fry in oil, about 3 minutes per side.

Forcemeat Balls:

• 3/8 cup breadcrumbs
• 2 tbs chopped parsley
• 1 egg
• 1 tbs butter, suet, or if you’re desperate, shortening
• Salt and pepper

Mix ingredients together and knead until combined. Divide and roll into about 12 small balls. Fry with fish until light brown, about 3 minutes.

Fish Sauce:

• Fish trimmings, skin, bones, etc
• Grated rind and juice of 1/2 a lemon
• 3 cups water 
• 4 tbs cream
• 1 small spoonful starch (cornstarch, arrowroot) mixed with the same amount of water
• 1 small spoonful butter

Add fishy bits and lemon rind and juice to water. Boil for 10 minutes and strain. Return liquor to pot and add cream and starch. Add butter and simmer gently until thickened.

To Serve: Lay out the fish and surround it with the forcemeat balls. You can also fry up some mushrooms and oysters and use them in the ring for additional effect. Serve the sauce alongside.

It’s worth the effort. The fish has a light but crispy batter, the forcemeat balls are a nice accompaniment, and the fish sauce has a mild lemon flavor. The only thing I had to leave out was the oysters, since Cat is extremely allergic and the bed I was hoping to end up with her in at the end of the evening was not a hospital one. 

Brillat-Savarin, by the way, in his Physiology of Taste, theorized that all fish had aphrodisiac qualities, so I had late 18th and early 19th Century food science firmly on my side in this aspect of my project.

*It should be noted that the British Army’s Paymaster General was already so eager to recoup the ruinous expenses of the Seven Years War (an issue that would later help spark our own Revolution), that Mrs Wolfe was in her 80s before she saw any portion of her dead son’s pension, despite the fact that monuments and paintings to him were wallpapering two continents. Fun fact from Fred Anderson’s Crucible of War. 

 

Culinary Archaeology: The Food of Love. Soupe a la Reine

Soup was a relatively new and trendy addition to the menu in the 18th Century. Prior to its invention in France during the latter half of the previous century, people generally ate pottage, a thick, stewlike mixture of meats, vegetables, and grains that came in many different regional forms. Soup very quickly overtook pottage amongst fashionable eating circles in Europe, and by the time our period begins (approximately 1730-1820), pottage was considered to be distinctly “lower-class” and every meal began with a soup course of some kind.

For my own 18th Century mini-meal, I went with a simple cream soup called Soupe a la Reine (as befits a French innovation, most of the popular 18th Century soups had dandified French names). It appears in cookbooks  all through the period, gaining and losing ingredients depending on the author, but it’s essentially a chicken and rice soup with cream. My version comes from Michael Barry’s Old English Recipes, and it’s based on a recipe written down by the Champneys family of Lynse, England:

White Soup or Soupe a la Reine: To some good strong broth add as much Rice as will make it tolerably thick, with the white meat of a chicken pounded so fine that it may be rubbed thro’ a Strainer along with the Rice – then add half a Pint of good Cream, and after the cream is added the whole is to be put into a Vessel of boiling Water & there kept until it is wanted to be sent up. It must not on any account to be boiled over the Fire after the Cream is added to the Soup. The Rice must be well washed and blanched before it is put to the Broth.

Along with the soup, we had some good smoked Atlantic salmon. Even in the 18th Century, the Scots (or North Britons, as the patriotic referred to them) were renowned for their prowess in smoking fish, and with new roads connecting England and Scotland and plenty of Scots moving south to seek their fortune, Scottish smoked salmon began to show up on fashionable tables with increasing frequency. Sadly, real Scottish smoked salmon might as well be plated in gold regarding its availablility here, but a little Nova salmon made a decent compromise.

I think this was the most successful part of the meal. The soup has a light creamy texture, and the flavor’s complimented very well by the salmon. I’d be more than willing to make an entire meal of the two.

Soupe a la Reine:

• 1 chicken carcass, cleaned
• 1 additional chicken breast, cut into 4 pieces
• 1 leek, cleaned
• 1 carrot, peeled
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 sprig each thyme, celery, and parsley
• 2 pts water
• 3 oz (about 3/8 cup) long grain rice (brown is more hardcore)
• 1/2 pt cream
• Parsley or celery for garnish
• Salt and white pepper as needed

Put chicken carcass and vegetables in a pot with 2pts water. Bring to a boil and let simmer for about an hour. Strain the resulting broth. Add rice and quartered chicken breast to the broth and return to a boil. Simmer, covered, for 20 minutes or until rice is tender and chicken cooked. Put the whole soup into a food processor or similar instrument and blend it till smooth. If you want to be hardcore, you can force it through a sieve (I was not). Return to a pot, season with salt and white pepper to taste, and stir in the cream. Don’t let the soup boil once the cream is in there.      

 

Culinary Archaeology: Mushroom Catchup

My girlfriend Cat and I recently celebrated our first Valentines’ Day. Sadly, we did it apart since she’s currently living about two hours away from me in Harrisburg. When she came up this past weekend, I decided to do something special in order to make up for it: cook a miniature 18th Century meal for her.

To do this, I needed to get stocked up on seasonings and basics, most importantly the ubiquitous beef stock and mushroom catchup for gravy creation. Mushroom catchup, you ask? Prepare yourself, unsuspecting blog reader, for a whirlwind tour of condiment history. 

Tomato catchup, as we 21st Century folks know it, did not exist at all in the 18th Century. At that time, the tomato was the innocent victim of two vicious urban legends: firstly, that it was poisonous (this may have been the result of acidic tomatoes interacting with poorly cleaned copper and cast-iron cookware), and secondly that it was an aphrodisiac (that’s why it’s still occasionally called the “Love Apple”). These myths weren’t dispelled until very late in the period.

In the meantime, the catchup people were using was more closely connected to its roots as the East Asian fish sauce ke-tsiap, which was brought back to Britain by merchants competing in the Spice Trade. There was both a light, vinegar based variety and a darker mushroom variety, both of which were used to flavor gravies and made dishes, and in a pinch combined with hot water to form a sort of thin sauce of their own. I was able to get a bottle of the light sauce from Deborah’s Pantry, but had to make the dark stuff myself. Fortunately, recipes abound. The one I prefer is from Lobscouse and Spotted Dog, and it’s a more modest scale reworking of one of Hannah Glasse’s 1747 recipes:

To make Catchup to keep twenty years: Take a gallon of strong stale beer, one pound of anchovies washed from the pickle, a pound of shalots peeled, half an ounce of mace, half an ounce of cloves, a quarter of an ounce of whole pepper, three or four large races of ginger, two quarts of large mushroom-flaps rubbed to pieces; cover all this close and let it simmer until it is half wasted, then strain it through a flannel bag; let it stand until quite cold and then bottle it. You may carry it to the Indies. A spoonful of this to a pound of fresh butter melted makes a fine fish-sauce, or in the room of gravy sauce. The stronger and staler the beer is, the better the catchup will be.

For this recipe I had access to my reenacting buddy Dave Woolsey’s home brewed 18th Century porter, so my beer base was very strong indeed. Don’t worry…Cat and I still had a bottle each for dinner.

Once scaled down to more reasonable amounts (the original recipe is directed at ship captains and so of course makes a tremendous lot of catchup), all of these ingredients boiled together make a flavorful, spicy, and slightly fishy sauce somewhat reminiscent of the Worcestershire sauce that would usurp its place in the 19th Century. They’re so reminiscent, in fact, that you could easily make some of this sauce without ever attempting to do anything “period”, just to use it with steak or meatloaf, or whatever else you’d normally use Worcestershire sauce for. You can also, in reverse, use Worcestershire where you’d use mushroom catchup in 18th century food, though it won’t have quite the same flavor.

Mushroom Catchup

• 1 pt strong stale beer
• 10 anchovies, or 1 can anchovy fillets, rinsed
• 4 shallots, peeled and coarsely chopped
• 5 oz. large flap mushrooms
• 1 two inch piece fresh ginger
• 1 tsp pepper
• 1/2 tsp mace
• 10 whole cloves

Put everything into a saucepan, bring to a boil, and simmer gently about 30 minutes. Strain and bottle.

I should note, for those of you of the vegan persuasion, that there is an all plant/fungus product version of this recipe in Maxime de la Falaise’s Seven Centuries of English Cooking. It’s based on a later recipe (1811) and has to sit in the fridge for a day or so, but it achieves much the same effect without anchovies. 

Fish-Friendlier Mushroom Catchup

• 8 cups mushrooms
• 2-3 tbs salt
• 1 cup port
• 1/2 tsp allspice
• 1/4 tsp cloves
• 1/2 tsp mace
• 1/4 tsp pepper

Mash mushrooms, toss with salt, and leave in the fridge for about 2 days until juice is extracted, stirring occasionally. Strain juice and put in a saucepan, add all other ingredients, and bring to the boil. Simmer about 15 minutes. Bottle when cool.

 

Culinary Archaeology: Meat and Potatoes in the Eighteenth Century

Not all 18th Century cooking was needlessly complex. Hannah Glasse, the 18th Century’s Rachael Ray, gives this simple recipe for fried potatoes in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy:

To Fry Potatoes: Cut them into thin slices as big as a Crown piece, fry them brown, lay them in a plate or dish, pour melted butter and sack and sugar over them. These are a pretty corner-plate. 

You can essentially follow this recipe the same way in the modern kitchen, except that you should let the potato boil, and then simmer, in enough water to cover it until it’s tender before slicing it. You can find a more exact recipe in the extraordinarily useful Pennsylvania Housewife: English Household Receipts in the Middle Colonies.

The Pennsylvania Housewife suggests pouring your butter and wine over first, and then scattering sugar. My interpretation, however, is that Mrs. Glasse was talking about a sauce: in the preceding recipe for potato cakes, for instance, she lists the same three ingredients and specifically states that they’re to be combined. I went with sauce, using the following recipe from British Heritage’s Georgian Cookery, converted here for the convenience of my fellow Jonathans into Imperial measurements:

Wine Sauce

• 1 cup Sack or medium sherry
• 4 tbsp butter
• 1/8 cup sugar (the book uses caster, but substitute superfine for more hardcore 18th Century-ness)

Mix everything together and heat. Pour over or serve separately in a hot sauceboat.

This sauce sounds tremendously bad for you, and it is. The bright side is that you really only need a couple of teaspoonfuls of it to get the desired effect, and it does add a mild, sweet, but definitely wine-y flavor.

So what to have with potatoes? John Farley, master chef of the London Tavern (the Gordon Ramsay of his day), also recognized that sometimes the simple things are the best. From his 1783 London Art of Cookery: 

To Broil Chickens: Having slitted your chickens down the back, season them with pepper and salt and lay them on the gridiron, over a clear fire and at a great distance. Let the inside continue next the fire, till it be nearly half done. Then turn them, taking care that the fleshy sides do not burn, and let them broil until they are of a fine brown. Have good gravy sauce, with some mushrooms, and garnish them with lemon, and the liver broiled, and the gizzards cut, slashed, and broiled with pepper and salt, or you may use any other sauce you fancy.

By the way: stealing one too many napkins from Farley’s restaurant in the 18th Century could get you sent to Australia. Modern restaurateurs, take note and advocate!

 

Culinary Archaeology: A Breast of Veal, Ragoo’d

Today we’re going hardcore and and adapting a Ragoo of Veal straight out of Hannah Glasse’s 1745 classic The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. A ragoo is one of those two-step cooking processes beloved of kitchens with a lot of manpower. It’s the 18th Century precursor to the modern ragout, but with browning somewhere during the cooking process. Hannah Glasse says:

To Ragoo a Breast of Veal: Take your breast of veal, put it in a large stew-pan, put in a bundle of sweet herbs, an onion, some black and white pepper, a blade or two of mace, two or three cloves, a very little bit of lemon-peel, and just cover it with water; when it is tender take it up, bone it, put in the bones, and boil it up until the gravy is very good, then strain it off, and if you have a little rich beef-gravy, add a quarter of a pint, put in half an ounce of truffles and morels, a spoonful or two of catchup, two or three spoonfuls of white wine, and let them all boil together; in the mean time flour the veal, and fry it in butter until it is of a fine brown, then drain out the butter and pour the gravy you are boiling to the veal, with a few mushrooms; boil all together until the sauce is rich and thick, and cut the sweetbread into four. A few force-meat balls are proper in it. Lay the veal in a dish and pour the sauce over it. Garnish with lemon.

This is my bachelor, end-of-the-month budget approximation:

1. Take your breast of veal and put it in a pot big enough to hold it. Add:

• 1 onion, chopped
• 1/2 tsp each sage, parsley, thyme, and savory. If you have access to fresh herbs make a bouquet garni of 2 stalks parsley, 2 springs of thyme and savory, and 2 sage leaves.
• 1/4 tsp Mace
• 1/2 tsp each black and white pepper
• 3 whole cloves
• Lemon zest to taste

Boil a teakettle full of water and add enough to cover the veal. Boil for about 30-40 minutes or until tender.

2. When the veal is tender, take it out and bone it. This is much easier after boiling than before.

Put the bones back in the pot with:

• 2/3 cup beef broth.
• 1/4 lb mushrooms. I’d have used truffles if I’d had the money, but button mushrooms work fine.
• 3 tbs white wine
• 1 tbs English-style catchup or, as a last resort, a dash of Asian fish sauce and a little vinegar.

Let all this stuff boil for another 20-30 minutes while you cover the veal and keep it warm.

3. Put a teaspoon or so of butter into a saute pan, dust the veal with flour, and brown it on both sides.

4. Take the veal out of the pan and discard the butter. Put it back in and pour on some of the gravy you have simmering after first discarding the bones. You can also pop in some sliced fresh mushrooms. Add a little arrowroot or other starch to encourage thickening. When the sauce has a nice glossy look to it, take the veal out, put it on a serving dish, and pour the sauce over.

I was pretty pleased with this attempt. The ragoo-ing process is pretty involved, so I don’t know if I’d do it again for myself, but it would make a great main dish for a dinner with friends. Another good side effect is that this recipe makes a good amount of flavorful gravy, which is reusable with other recipes. Sadly the pudding I was making to accompany my ragoo completely failed to turn out, so I had to go with some leftover rice pilaf instead.