Month: August 2014

When in Doubt, Bake

On By kittycalashIn Food, History, Living History, Reenacting3 Comments

There was a Very Bad Summer when much was awry at work, the flat we were living in was for sale, my father was moving far away, and the Howling Assistant was sick. In response, I baked.

Things are roiling in the world of late, both at work and in the wider world (I am from St. Louis, and cannot ignore the news from Ferguson), and so again, I turned to baking. Eggs, flour, sugar: what could be sweeter?

A friend tried Amelia Simmons‘ Diet bread a few years ago, with limited success, but the simplicity of the receipt has always appealed to me.

recipe for diet bread
Diet Bread

Once again, I risked early morning baking, but I think this has turned out OK. I had to leave for work before it was cool enough to really eat, but a corner was delicious! The intense amount of sugar– a full pound!– was intimidating, the rose water curious when tested, but combined with the cinnamon, seems to have a pleasant and slightly exotic flavour.*

The simplicity of the ingredients was encouraging, but I probably would not have jumped into this had I not found someone else had leaped before me.

Kathleen Gudmundsson on the Historical Cooking Project blog tackled diet bread in May. From her work, I took the tip to use only six eggs.

Following Gudmundsson thoughts at the end of her entry, I beat the egg yolks separately, intending to add the stiff-peaked whites at the end. Half way through adding the flour, the batter became extremely stiff and sticky, and nearly unmanageable, so I beat a whole seventh egg and added that, followed by a little flour and 1/4 of the beaten whites. I alternated flour and egg whites, finishing with egg whites, and found the mixture retained pliability and texture.

Like Gudmundsson, I also lined a glass pan with parchment paper, but my (electric, rental-quality) oven runs a little slow, so baked for 30 minutes at 400F.

diet cake made of sugar, flour and eggs
Diet Cake, from American Cookery by Amelia Simmons.

The results look like hers, and since she thought the cake was as good or better three days after she’d made it, my hopes for an interesting dessert remain intact.

The other, less distracting, project I’ve taken on this week is a set of bags for coffee and food stuffs.

handsewn linen bags in white and check
Linen bags for foodstuffs

After all, there are no ziplock bags or plastic tubs in 1777, and full complement of graduated tin canisters seems unlikely to plummet into my lap anytime soon. The two slender bags are for coffee: tied at the neck, they’ll hold enough for cold coffee and fit the slender tin coffee pot we have, sparing the larger cloths, wrangling grounds, and giving us clear, cold, caffeine. Another is for flour, one could be for oatmeal, another for sugar. In any case, things to eat are getting wrangled in a way that can remain visible in camp.

I know: a trifle mad, but the time I spend now makes living in public so much easier when there’s less to hide. And yes, before you ask: that will be a real fire.

*Fellow eaters, you’ve been warned.

Measure for Measure

On By kittycalashIn Fail, Food, History, Living History, Reenacting5 Comments

or, a boiled Flour Pudding in two tries.

Tablespoons and Cups

Alone in my Ossining ca. 1962 kitchen, I decided to tackle Amelia Simmons. The first task seemed to be to establish measurements, and then proportions, so I took stock of the tools and containers I would have in a typical camp. Spoon, mug, half-pint: these are plausible items, though we have tin cups that hold exactly 8 ounces, so the measure is unnecessary. The spoon was cast from a 1780 mold, so it seemed like a reasonable place to start for “how much is a spoon?” It will hold exactly one tablespoon if you scrape it flat across or are measuring liquid. Handy to know.

Next, I checked the recipe again.

A boiled Flour Pudding.
One quart milk, 9 eggs, 7 spoons flour, a little salt, put into a strong cloth and boiled three quarters of an hour.

This is not a popular receipt, so you won’t find it on History is Served, nor will you find this version on other popular sites; you can find a boiled pudding with suet, but that’s not what I’m after: I’m after a receipt that starts with a portion of the ration of flour soldiers received, and adds only eggs, milk, and available seasonings.

You have to remember that Simmons corrected the 7 spoons to 9 spoons of flour and increased the boiling time; you also have to remember that eggs were smaller then.

redware mug and wooden bowl with egggs
Halfsies.

I thought I’d try a half receipt first. There are no directions as we think of them– American Cookery sometimes has that “put your lips together and blow” feeling–but this is not too complex. The eggs and milk must be beaten together, and then combined with the flour. For this first attempt, I got it a bit backwards, adding the spices to the eggs, which I beat in the large wooden bowl.

That left me scooping the egg-and-milk with the measure into the flour, which I had in a smaller wooden bowl, remembering too late the method for scones.

egg and flour mixing in wooden bowls
Fuzzy photo, fuzzy logic.

And then it was really too late: I added just too much egg-and-milk, and it became more like batter than dough. This was not correct, and I knew it, but I didn’t dump it and I didn’t add more flour. Now it’s clear that 7:00 AM is not my best time for baking experiments (it was also quite early the day I made gingerbread without any eggs).

pudding mixture in cloth
Well, it took a decent photo.

I buttered and floured a cloth anyway, and poured the mixture into it. After tying the gathered neck of the cloth with string, I boiled the whole business for 45 minutes.

I did not take a photo of the mess I found when I unwrapped the bag. It wasn’t pretty, and it was clear that while some portions of the pudding were ‘done,’ they constituted about 5% of the whole, which otherwise resembled steaming cottage cheese. Really, truly, awful.

But from time to time I am undeterred by my failures, and instead of consigning the mess to the trash and sticking with store-bought bread*, I rinsed the cloth and regrouped.

This time, I went smaller: 1 cup of flour (about five spoons), two eggs, and a scant two spoons of milk. I also managed to put the flour, salt, and allspice in the regular sized wooden bowl, crack the eggs into the mug and beat them there with the milk. When I mixed the egg-and-milk into the flour, the mixture was far too stiff, so I added more milk, but kept the mixture stiff.

pudding bag in boiling water
Patience is required for pudding

Once more into the buttered cloth, once more into the water, once more boiling for three-quarters of an hour. This time was better, though. The results actually looked and tasted much more like what I’ve had before.

sliced boiled flour pudding
A boiled Flour Pudding

So, where does this leave me? Knowing that I’m the only documented fan of this in the regiment, I’ll stick with the smaller receipt: five spoons flour; two eggs, beaten; and three or four spoons of milk.

My plan is to boil this in whatever stew or stew-like device we have for supper on Saturday, and then eat it sliced with the stew. The plain flour-egg-milk mixture will pick up some of the flavors of the stew (think dumplings), but these could also have been served with a sauce, if made at home.

I’m also going to go back to the Experienced English Housekeeper, and see what she has to say.

* Years in ceramics classes taught me to knead all the air out of plastic material, so my bread tends to be better for building than eating. Even the dog wouldn’t eat the biscuits I made while in grad school…

Coats and Cooking

On By kittycalashIn Clothing, Events, Food, History, Living History, making things

And happy not to be walking to Walloomsac, since we can’t leave till Friday.

Before we leave, there’s plenty to done, of course, and most of it in men’s wear.*

The first piece on brown linen

The Young Mr needed a new jacket, a proper one, with pockets and everything, correct for a scalawag. So that meant patterns and muslins and fittings and questions, until neither of us could really stand the other and his father called me an ambush predator of fittings. The only way to fit these wily creatures is, as they amble through the room, to leap out and toile someone.

With the pattern more-or-less fitted to the wiggly Young Mr, I cast about for fabric: there was not enough of a striped piece for both waistcoat and jacket; waistcoat won, because matching stripes on a jacket seemed too risky in this great a hurry. Instead, I sacrificed the last yardage once meant for a gown.

The Stocking Seller, by Paul Sandby, 1759
The Stocking Seller, by Paul Sandby, 1759

This is the inspiration for the kid’s new garment, along with Sandby’s fish monger. It seems a plausible garment to work from, and the brown linen is in keeping with the brown linen jacket at Connecticut Historical Society and the unlined linen frock coat recently sold at auction. It will also match his trousers, but this is what happens when you sew from the stash.

One pair of breeches altered, one waistcoat wanting the last seven newly-made buttons, one waistcoat in production, one jacket in production: you’d think that would be enough to get done. But I’m also working to expand my cooking repertoire, as bread and cheese gets tiresome and scrounging broken ginger cakes from the Sugar Loafe Baking Co.— while potentially good theatre–is not a solid plan for sustenance.

half pint and spoon measures
Half-pint and spoon

Boiling food in summer- sounds awful, right? But it’s an easy and correct way to cook,once you translate recipe measures and control the amount you’re making. I like to use Amelia Simmons’ cookbook, because it is specifically American, and my more skillful friends cooked from it at the farm.

From Enos Hitchcock’s diary, I know that he ate a boiled flour pudding with some venison stew (near the Saratoga campaign, I think) so I consider this a plausible recipe for the field, pending eggs, of course.

A boiled Flour Pudding.

One quart milk, 9 eggs, 7 spoons flour, a little salt, put into a strong cloth and boiled three quarters of an hour.

Simple enough, though Simmons later corrected the receipt to 9 spoons of flour, and boil for an hour and a half. I got out the spoon, and looked online at modern boiled pudding recipes, and will give a modified version a whirl sometime this week (always better to fail at home than in the field). Boiling the pudding in a linen cloth in a stew would make a savory bread substitute…and I really liked the one we had at the farm. Will the gentlemen at Bennington like it? Perhaps we’ll find out. If we’re not cooking with hosewater, almost anything should be edible.

*Yes, it’s a terrible and terribly dated show, but I always hear  this in Mr Humphries‘ voice from Are You Being Served?

Who do you play with?

On By kittycalashIn Living History, Philosophy, Reenacting4 Comments
sad light infantry private
Don’t just sit there pouting…

Solving romantic troubles is not my forte, but just as your first crush may not be the person you spend your life with, the first living history/reenactment group may not be your last.

Some folks are serial joiners, just as there are people who engage in a series of medium-term relationships: as long as everybody knows what’s going on, things should be fine and no one will be set anyone else’s goldfish free and leave each other twisting in the wind. But some of us want a long-term home in history: what should we consider?

In no particular order, I offer the follow areas to examine:

Communication Style & Frequency
Surprised to discover members of your group at an event you thought they weren’t attending, so you went with someone else? Find yourself alone at an event that people said they were attending, but dropped at the last moment? Just because all life is like middle school, there’s no need to recreate scenes from Gidget in historic clothing: communicate.

Everyone requires different amounts of information, but after considerable time working, I think it’s hard to over-communicate. Folks, if it’s too many emails, hit the delete key. But if you do not get the basics– a list of events and potential attendees, reminders as the event approaches, coordination of food, canvas and powder supplies– and end up powderless and alone at an event, you may want to reconsider your allegiance.

Level of Activity & Engagement
“It’s just event after event after event,” whined the Young Mr last summer, and I hadn’t even made him march to Fort Ti and sleep under a brush arbor. Some people need to mix primitive camping in funny clothes with a few days at the beach, others spend their entire summers living life as old-school as they can. Some perform the classic turn-your-back maneuver described on Peabody’s Lament (pro tip: don’t do that!) while others actively seek opportunities to engage the public. Some like to be in first person, and others are always and only in third person.

Mummers at Major John Buttrick House
How many activities can you fit into your year?

What’s your preference? If you want to try immersive, first-person interpretations, you need a unit that will support that, and opportunities to try it out. And if you want to go out often, you may need some flexibility in time period and activity.

But even beyond the times when you’re dressed in historic clothing and working with the public, you want to be with a group that includes people who are set a variety of RPMs. If you’re all super-intense original garment/gear/methods copying maniacs, you might not be balanced. As a newcomer, you need an environment that mixes challenges and support– like a good kindergarten.

Authenticity Standards
On that super-intense original garment/gear/methods copying theme, if the group doesn’t manage to meet a certain level of authenticity, or is not striving to improve, and to learn and try new things, is that the right group for you? I find that a curious mind is a necessity, one willing to accept that research advances and what we thought was right in the past may be proven wrong.

The other key here is, how does the group help you meet standards? Are there workshops to help you make up kit or improve what you already have? How deep do the standards go: clothing only, or to camp set up? What about how you cook, what you eat, and what you eat it with?

Colonial breakfast on a rock
“Furniture”

Are the compromises people make balanced and understood? My family and I ar among the people who go to events in “wearable but not done” clothes, and that’s OK in our world. While we have period shoes, they are not always perfectly correct: the gents wore buckles in 1812 and the Young Mr definitely doesn’t get a second pair of shoes until we know his feet won’t grow larger than they are now….

Interpretation and Imagination
Did you have one, maybe two, really-really best friends in grade school? Did you play dress-up, imaginative games, engage in narrative play? Did you enjoy the school play (and insist on leading the writing of a research-based script)?If you did, you are probably looking for folks who played the way you did as a child.

Esther takes Mr Herreshoff's case to his room
What kind of interpretation do you prefer?

Good interpretation requires that someone in the group have an active and vivid imagination, and that people are willing to take risks. Interpretation is a risk: will this portrayal of a captain’s death, a washerwoman’s trial, a wayward apprentice’s punishment, actual work? Do we trust each other enough to slip into new roles?

Trust is key: will the other people in the group bail you out if you freeze, encourage you if you run with an idea, and meet you in the same moment? You will have to spend time with people to find out how well you can all play together but, happily, you will quickly learn if you cannot. If your questions about who you are, why you are in a place, and if you should be wearing a 1781 coat at a 1777 event are rebuffed, you may need to consider other options.

Another time: What are your options?