Fruitcake

The holiday wouldn’t be complete without a fruitcake recipe!  And this recipe actually doesn’t sound half bad!  No candied cherries!  Just good wholesome ingredients!

Fruitcake

Take one pint of light dough; one tea-cupful of sugar; one of butter; three eggs, a teaspoonful of saleratus, one pound of raisins; nutmeg or cinnamon, to the taste, bake one hour.

Let it stand and rise a little before baked.

From The Skillful Housewife Book: The Complete Guide to Domestic Cookery by, Mrs. L. G. Abell, 1852

Fruitcake was also called “Wedding Cake” and The American Frugal Housewife published this version of the cake:

Four pounds of flour, three pounds of butter, three pounds of sugar, four pounds of currants, two pounds of raisins, twenty-four eggs, half a pint of brandy, or lemon-brandy, one ounce of mace, and three nutmegs. A little molasses makes it dark colored, which is desirable. Half a pound of citron improves it; but it is not necessary. To be baked two hours and a half or three hours.

The modern version of the above recipe is as follows:

1/2 lb. raisins
1/4 cup brandy
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon mace
2 teaspoon nutmeg
1lb. currants
3/4 lb. butter
1 1/2 cups sugar
6 eggs
2 tablespoons molasses to 1/2 cup
2 oz. citron

Soak raisins in brandy overnight. Preheat oven to 350. Sift flour before measuring. Sift flour with spices. Add currants and citron, if desired. In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar. Add eggs one at a time, beating to blend after each addition. Stir in molasses and any brandy that was not absorbed by the raisins. Stir in sifted flour with spices and fruits. Grease two 5″ x 9″ loaf pans, three 8-inch round pans, or one 10-inch tube pan. Pour batter into greased pans and bake about 45 minutes to an hour.

The above translation was provided by Old Sturbridge Village (from their Christmas by Candlelight program). I can attest to this recipe. It’s really quite good!

Are there plums in Plum Pudding?

How many times have you read a Christmas scene in a historical book where the family was enjoying their plum pudding (often referred to as Christmas pudding)?  Did you know exactly what plum pudding was?  Did you ever wonder if there are plums in plum pudding?  And better yet, how did they get plums in December?  My curiosity finally got the better of me, and I looked up the recipe!  There are many versions of this recipe.  This one was taken from Seventy-five Receipts for Pastry Cakes, by Miss Leslie of Philadelphia.

And no, there are no plums in plum pudding!

PLUM PUDDING

One pound of raisins, stoned and cut in half.
One pound of currants, picked, washed, and dried.
One pound of beef suet, chopped fine.
One pound of grated stale bread, or, half a pound of flour and half a pound of bread.
Eight eggs.
One pound of sugar.
One glass of brandy.
One pint of milk.
One glass of wine.
Two nutmegs, grated.
One table-spoonful of mixed cinnamon and mace.
One salt-spoonful of salt.

You must prepare all your ingredients the day before (except beating the eggs) that in the morning you may have nothing to do but to mix them, as the pudding will require six hours to boil.

Beat the eggs very light, then put to them half the milk and beat both together. Stir in gradually the flour and grated bread. Next add the sugar by degrees. Then the suet and fruit alternately.

The fruit must be well sprinkled with flour, lest it sink to the bottom. Stir very hard. Then add the spice and liquor, and lastly the remainder of the milk. Stir the whole mixture very well together. If it is not thick enough, add a little more grated bread or flour. If there is too much bread or flour, the pudding will be hard and heavy.

Dip your pudding-cloth into boiling water, shake it out and sprinkle it slightly with flour. Lay it in a pan, and pour the mixture into the cloth. Tie it up carefully, allowing room for the pudding to swell.

Boil it six hours, and turn it carefully out of the cloth.

Before you send it to table, have ready some blanched sweet almonds cut into slips, or some slips of citron, or both. Stick them all over the outside of the pudding.

Eat with wine or with a sauce made of drawn butter, wine and nutmeg.

The pudding will be improved if you add to the other ingredients, the grated rind of a large lemon
or orange.

Results of the Gingerbread Contest

For all that were wondering…I got a call this afternoon and our Gingerbread Gristmill won the OSV Building category AND the Best of Show category!  Audry and I had a blast making it and are so glad so many people enjoyed it!

Cooking advice!

With the holidays fast approaching, you’ll find my kitchen in constant use and filled with the aroma of holiday baking.  From cookies, to cakes, to breads, I love it when Christmas comes around and I can pull out all my holiday recipes.  So I thought while we’re on hiatus that I might share some cooking advice and recipes from a couple of early 1800s recipe books.  We’ll start today off with some basic baking advice.

From Seventy-five Receipts for Pastry Cakes, by Miss Leslie of Philadelphia, the following preparation advice is offered:

In making pastry or cakes, it is best to begin by weighing out the ingredients, sifting the flour, pounding and sifting the sugar and spice, washing the butter, and preparing the fruit. Sugar can be powdered by pounding it in a large mortar, or by rolling it on a paste-board with a rolling-pin. It should be made very fine and always sifted.

Sugar Nippers mounted on a stand to make cutting the sugar easier. (Image from OSV's Facebook Gallery page)

Washing the butter and powdering the sugar? Just two examples of the extra steps women had to go through when it came to baking in the early 19th century. Remember, butter was made fresh, and the buttermilk had to be removed from the freshly churned butter by washing it with cold water. Also, salt was added to the butter to preserve it for longer periods of time, and often some of the salt needed to be removed before the butter could be used.

Powdering the sugar? If you went to the country store in the 1800s to purchase some sugar, you’d notice that sugar came in large cone shaped loaves. Sugar nippers were used to cut smaller pieces off the cone. That sugar then had to be powdered for use in baking.

And then there is some advice that seems to stay the same no matter what century it is given in:

The eggs should not be beaten till after all the other ingredients are ready, as they will fall very soon. If the whites and yolks are to be beaten separately, do the whites first, as they will stand longer. Eggs should be beaten in a broad shallow pan, spreading wide at the top. Butter and sugar should be stirred in a deep pan with straight sides.

Break every egg by itself, in a saucer, before you put it into the pan, that in case there should be any bad ones, they may not spoil the others.

 

Sugar Nippers - Image from OSV Facebook Gallery

So how did we do?

Pretty close match wouldn’t you say?

Things we intentionally left out:

• The stairs up to the porch (we ran out of time!).
• The chimney.  (Our roof was already having sagging problems.  Adding a chimney would have made matters worse).
• Some of the fences. (It got too busy, so we simplified a few things.)

Back View

Front View

Side View

Waterwheel View

The Gingerbread Gristmill (Part 3)

The Gingerbread Gristmill
Jennifer: I arrived at Audry’s in-laws at 8:05 AM. I left at 9:35 PM. We had a short break for lunch and dinner but otherwise worked the entire day through without stopping.

Audry: By late afternoon, both our backs were killing us, but we kept on. By 8:00 we were getting loopy (and we didn’t partake in the wine the in-laws and husband were enjoying either!) Finally, we called it done and took about 1078 pictures.

Jennifer: I think we were high from the smells of sugar! That house is one yummy smelling creation!

Total Time Spent: 12 hours
Completed On: November 26th, 2010

Total Estimated Time Spent on Project: Approx. 50 hours

The Gingerbread Gristmill (Part 2)

To continue where we left of yesterday…

Siding, Stonework and Shingles
Step 1: Apply the frosting on the walls to mimic wood siding.
Jennifer: A slightly tedious process, that left my hands very tired. Try applying frosting evenly on four 12” plus high walls! Overall I was quite pleased with the results.

Step 2: Add the glass to the windows.
Audry: This step actually started the night before. After Thanksgiving dinner was cleaned up, I followed a recipe for hard candy by boiling water, sugar, and corn syrup to the “hard-crack stage” – 300 deg F. This mixture was originally meant to be poured into the pond and waterway of the base, but it was so hot and thick and syrupy that I was afraid of the potential mess if something went wrong. The mixture also turned yellow as it started to caramelize, so I decided at the last minute to just pour it onto greased aluminum foil and score it while it was hot. We broke the candy along the score lines once it cooled, into rectangles that I then glued over the backs of the window openings with icing. One of the windows fell off when we were assembling the walls, but luckily none fell off after the roof was on and we couldn’t reach the inside!

The Gingerbread Gristmill (Part 1)

The Gingerbread Gristmill
By Jennifer and Audry

What happens when you put two architects together to build a miniature “gingerbread” replica of a building at OSV?

This is what happened!

Brainstorming
Jennifer: I think we lost track of the time it took to brainstorm, talk about, draw, and visit stores after around thirty hours. Needless to say it was a lot of fun filled hours.

The Gristmill

I know! You were all excited to see our gingerbread gristmill, weren’t you? Well, you’ll have to hold out for one more day. Today, I wanted to take a quick moment to tell you about the real 1800s gristmill our gingerbread one is modeled after. (Told you I’d throw in a history lesson on Monday, now didn’t I?)

OSV Gristmill - This is the building we replicated in gingerbread.

The waterwheel is our favorite part of the building and our GB house.

Grist is grain, or the starchy seed of certain grasses, that has been separated from its chaff in preparation for being ground for use as food. Wheat, oats, rye, corn, Indian corn, and provender were all grains the 1800’s farmer harvested for use, either to feed his family or his animals. By the 1840s, the United States had over 23,000 gristmills. Some were commercial flour mills, but most were neighborhood gristmills that sold their service to nearby farmers. Law in the 1800s stated that a miller could charge a “toll” (or a fee) of 1/16th of the grain brought to him as payment for milling the rest of the grain. However, by the 1830s this practice of charging a toll was changing with the rest of the economy, and millers were starting to charge cash fees in replacement of the traditional tolls.

The gristmill used water power to grind grain into meal. The process was fairly simple and straightforward. When a sluice gate was opened, water would be filtered from a lake (or other water source) to a waterwheel. There were different types of waterwheels, but the one in this example was a “low breast” wheel because water filled the troughs on the wheel’s rim just below the midpoint. The 16 foot high waterwheel’s troughs would fill with water and the weight would cause the wheel to turn, which in turn turned the gears and shafts in the mill’s basement, transmitting power to the millstones.

While the gears and shafts turned in the basement, the millstones were at work on the first floor area of the mill. The gears rotated two 54 inch diameter 3,000 pound millstones. A “runner” stone rotated a slight distance above a stationary “bed” stone in the floor. Both stones had a pattern of grooves cut into their faces. As the runner stone turned above the bed stone, their grooves acted much like scissor blades. Grain was poured into a funnel-like wooden hopper above the millstones. It would filter down through a hole in the spinning runner stone, into the space between the two stones where it would be sheared into meal. The meal then fell into a meal chest in the floor. From there, the miller would scoop the fresh grist into his customer’s bag or barrel.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how many words is a video worth? Enjoy the following videos of a gristmill in action.

Part 1: Inside

Part 2: Continuation of Inside

Part 3: Outside/Waterwheel

A Week of Gingerbread

Get ready for a week dedicated to gingerbread! Yes, you heard me right, a whole week on gingerbread! Okay, okay, I’ll explain. My friend and I entered a gingerbread contest…and, well, since it’s “historically” related (I’m not kidding you!) we thought over our little hiatus that posting pictures of our gingerbread house would be fun…and then it just morphed from one (very long) post into a week long series of posts. Some fun historical facts, a history lesson, and pictures of our historical gingerbread house!

Now, before I get to the pictures (yes, yes, go ahead and groan) I have to share a little bit of gingerbread history and an old-fashioned gingerbread recipe with you (this is a historical blog after all!). Without further ado…

Why do we call it gingerbread?

“The cakelike consistency of gingerbread bears little resemblance to bread, so it comes as no surprise that gingerbread has no etymological connection with bread. It was originally, in the thirteenth century, gingerbras, a word borrowed from Old French which meant ‘preserved ginger’. But by the mid-fourteenth century, -bread had begun to replace -bras, and it was only a matter of time before sense followed form. One of the earliest known recipes for it, in the early fifteenth-century cookery book Good Cookery, directs that it be made with breadcrumbs boiled in honey with ginger and other spices. This is the lineal ancestor of the modern cakelike gingerbread in which treacle has replaced honey.”
—An A-Z of Food & Drink, John Ayto [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 2002 (p. 142)

About gingerbread shapes:

“The first gingerbread man is credited to the court of Queen Elizabeth I, who favored important visitors…with charming gingerbread likenesses of themselves…After the Grimm Brothers’ tale of Hansel and Gretel described a house “made of bread,” with a roof of cake and windows of barley, German bakeries began offering elaborate gingerbread houses with icing snow on the roofs, along with edible gingerbread Christmas cards and finely detailed molded cookies. Tinsmiths fashioned cookie cutters into all imaginable forms, and every woman wanted one shape that was different from anybody else’s…Most of the cookies that hung on nineteenth-century Christmas trees were at least half an inch thick and cut into animal shapes or gingerbread men…”
—“Gingerbread,” Karen S. Edwards & Sharon Antle, Americana [magazine], December 1988 (p. 49+)

A little bit of research through my 19th century recipe book collection also proved that gingerbread was eaten in America in the 1800s and that there were quite a few variations. I found recipes for Sponge Gingerbread, Soft Gingerbread, Ginger-nut Bread, Baker’s Gingerbread, Lafayette Gingerbread, and the following recipe for Common Gingerbread.

Common Gingerbread

A pint of molasses.
One pound of fresh butter
Three pounds of flour, sifted
A pint of milk
A small tea-spoonful of pearl-ash or less
A tea-cup full of ginger or more if it is not strong.

Cut the butter into the flour. Add the ginger. Having dissolved the pearl-ash in a little vinegar, stir it with the milk and molasses alternately into the other ingredients. Stir it very hard for a long time, till it is quite light. Knead it a little.

Put some flour on your paste-board, take out small portions of the dough, and make it with your hand into long rolls. Then curl up the rolls into round cakes, or twist two rolls together, or lay them in straight lengths or sticks side by side, and touching each other. Put them carefully into buttered pans, and bake them in a moderate oven, not hot enough to burn them. If they should get scorched, scrape off with a knife, or grater, all the burnt parts, before you put the cakes away.

You can, if you choose, cut out the dough with tins, in the shape of hearts, circles, ovals, etc. or you may bake it all in one, and cut it in squares when cold.

If the mixture appears to be too thin, add, gradually, a little more sifted flour.

From Seventy-five Receipts for Pastry Cakes, by Miss Leslie of Philadelphia

NOTE: Pearl-ash is an impure form of potassium carbonate. I found this bit of interesting info: “Pearl-Ash is a kind of fixed alkaline salt, prepared in various parts of Europe, and also in America, by melting and extracting the salts from the ashes of burnt vegetables.”