Sweet potato bake

The very first time I tried sweet potato was at a Thanksgiving dinner hosted by friends in Newcastle.  They baked it with sugar and cinnamon and topped it off with mini marshmallows.  They served it right next to the turkey and potatoes as part of the main course.  Then they sat back and played an amusing game of watching the English woman be really polite and try and eat it.  It wasn't that I didn't like their sweet potato dish, it was just that it needed to be in a bowl of its own and served with a good dollop of cream.

I am telling you this so all forgive me for cheating in my latest experiment and intentionally leaving out the sugar.  Not only did I know that I wouldn't like it with extra sugar added but also I wanted to feed it my children for dinner and they don't need any more sugar in their diet.

So, buttered sweet potato, another recipe from the ever reliable Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book.  By 1604, the date at the start of her book, the potato had arrived in Britain but it was the sweet potato that people were eating.  Elinor suggests that this mix of potato, sugar, orange peel, orange juice, butter and rosewater can either be boiled or baked in a pie crust.  I baked mine in a dish (not having time for pastry making today).

 

I have to say that this tasted lovely.  Not only will it be making a star appearance at my Forty Hall demonstration but will also be finding its way into our family menus as well.  The orange flavour worked so well with the sweet potato although I am not sure that I could taste the rosewater.  It is easy too, just needs a bit of planning.   Could easily be made in advance and reheated.

And as to the sugar?  Well, I think I will be making a version with sugar and serving it as a pudding in a sweet pastry case, topped with cream. 

Green Pudding

For 2 weeks now I have been trying to write a post about green pudding.  This is a funny little boiled cake recipe that I want to do at the Forty Hall demonstration.  It tastes nice or at least it will taste nicer next time with less nutmeg and more sugar.  It is easy to make and comes out a bright green colour.   The colour comes from spinach, and when I manage to grow some, marigolds as well.  This adds a little bit to the flavour.  What I like about the recipe is that boiling the cake means you can make them without an oven.  i might even try them next time I am camping. 

Unfortunately, every time I try to load a picture to Blogger, it crashes my computer.  I have put the photo of the finished product up here:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=168693689961428&set=a.129968603833937.29726.121042111393253&type=1&theater

So the main point of my post is to ask a question.  If you were going to a historical food demonstration would you rather taste the food exactly as the recipe states (as far this is possible), even though it is really horrible, or would you rather have the flavours toned down and balanced for a modern palate so you can actually eat it?

Friendship cake

A long post but with lots of information, I hope.

This post is for anyone with a friendship cake, it went around our village 2 years ago so I am not sure that many people will still be faithfully keeping theirs going.  I was given mine by a friend and it came with a full page of care and cooking instructions, copied by a very wobbly photocopier.  The instructions were clear, concise and worked, which when all is said and done, is what you want in a recipe.  The best bit was that the cake tasted lovely, not too sweet and with some real depth of flavour.  I managed to keep it up for about three weeks before I decided it was too much effort and that it was time to start experimenting with the instructions. 

After lengthy stays in my fridge and freezer and a varied diet of every sort of milk, flour and sugar that I have had in the house I can now say that my friendship cake, otherwise known as Herman, is nowhere near as delicate or fussy as the original instructions suggest.   It is possible to leave it alone for a long time with no dire consequences, you can adjust the quantities to make a lot less.  Lastly, it is possible to use this not just as a flavour enhancer, there is enough yeast to use the starter as a sour dough and use it to leaven your cake without any other rising agents.  Here goes.....

Original Recipe
To feed cake mix
Day 1
Take 1 starter (I can provide some if you are local to Surrey)
Add 1 tea cup each of flour, sugar and milk
Stir well
Leave for 3 days, uncovered on the side in kitchen
Day 4
Add another tea cup each of flour, sugar and milk
Stir well
Leave for another 5 days
Day 9
Add another tea cup each of flour, sugar and milk
Divide your mixture into 4 equal amounts
Give 3 away
Keep 1 and use it to make the cake on day 10

Day 10 - Cake day

Stir your cake mix and add
1 cup sugar
2 cups plain flour
2 heaped tsp baking powder
2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla essence
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
2/3 cup cooking oil
2 apples cut into small chunks
1/2 cup walnuts optional
1 cup raisins (optional)
Mix it all together, pour into a well greased cake tin (I use a small, square roasting tin that measures about 8 inches on each side)
Sprinkle 1/4 cup fo brown sugar over the top
Bake for 45 minutes at about 170 to 180 degrees C.

My version of the sour dough recipe

First up, some notes.

• This is a live yeast mix, it is not killed by cold temperatures in the fridge or even the freezer!  You can put it in either with no ill effects as long as you don't leave it too long.
• You can cover it up for a few days as long as your pot is big enough to allow for some spare air space.
• If you are in the habit of using anti bacterial sprays, spray polish or any other chemical sprays then I would strongly recommend coving your cake sour dough.  All these cleaning sprays are poisonous to you and your sour dough.  
• You don't have to make the large quantities in the recipe above, yes I know it is nice to give some away sometimes and that is fine but if you start to see friends running in the opposite direction every time you take out a lunch box then it is time to take the hint :-).
• Yeast is killed by alcohol and carbon dioxide.  This is a problem as when yeast feeds on the sugar it produces alcohol and CO2.  If you leave the cake mix too long between feeds then it effectively poisons itself.  However, once you have got used to the normal smell and taste of your mix there is nothing to stop you experimenting with how long you can leave it between feeds to build up a nice, beery flavour which will add depth to your final cake.
• I have fed the sour dough with wholemeal flour and rye flour, with no problem,  I have also used oat milk or soya milk instead of cows milk.  It all seems to work just fine.  The only thing to remember is that traces of the flour and milks will remain in your sour dough even after a few cycles so be careful with allergies.  
• When you are fed up with it all then feed the mix one, last time and pop it in the freezer.  The longest I have frozen mine for was 14 months.  When it came out it was very beery smelling indeed.  I fed it again (although signs did not look at all good) and left it alone.  It took four days for bubbles to start to appear again but the mix recovered very nicely indeed and is the same one as you can see in the pictures here.

So, with all this in mind....here are my suggested instructions for Herman, the Friendship Cake

Day 1  Receive your lovely new pot of cake mix, bubbling away merrily and giving off a fainly sour, beery smell.
Put it in the fridge, covered for a few days until you have time to sort it all out.
Take it out of fridge and leave overnight, still covered, in a warm kitchen.

My sour dough after it has been in the fridge for a week.  At the top you can see the smooth surface and below, where it has been stirred, the lovely, bubbly texture that shows it is still alive with plenty of gluten in the flour to hold the bubbles.

 Feed with 1 tea cup each of flour, sugar and milk.
Cover again and leave somewhere warm for at least 3 days to ferment.
It will bubble up quite a lot so make sure it is in a large enough tub.
Weigh out around 200 grams of mix and use this to make the cake.
Leave the rest in the tub or pot, feed again with more milk, flour and sugar and pop it in the fridge again.

To make a cake without added raising agent..
Take your 200g of mix and add 1 cup of flour,
Stir well (it will be quite stiff)
Cover with a tea towell and leave for a few hours or over night.  This is making a sour dough sponge where the yeast is multiplying in the flour.
Next day add all other over ingredients, stir well and put in a tin.
Leave to rest somewhere warm until you see some bubbles coming to the surface, this will take about an hour or two.
Then bake as normal.
If all goes well, then the cake should rise in just the same way as if it had baking powder added or was made with self raising flour.

Plum jam 1604

This is for the ladies of the Christ Church Ladies Group, and anyone else who would like to try a new way for making jam.

In 1603 a Lady called Elinor Fettiplace started a recipe book for own use.  It included recipes for medicines as well as food, many of which were donated by her friends and relatives. In the mid 1970's it was discovered by Hilary Spurling in an attic belonging to her husband's aunt.

After years of tracing the family right back to Elinor, although I think not directly, and cooking the recipes, Hilary Spurling published "Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book."  I have taken this jam recipe from Elinor and have used it so far for black currents, strawberries and plums.

"Take to every pound of plums a pound of sugar, then beat it smal, & put so much water to is as will wet it, then boyle it till it bee sugar againe, then put in the plums, & let them boile very softlie, till they be doone, then when they bee cold put them up, if they begin to grown then set them where fire is in a cupboard; you may doe respis this way & gooseberries, but you mush boyle them verie soft, & not put them up till they bee cold, & likewise may Cherries bee doone as your gooseberries & respis."

After the sugar has melted from the juice flowing out of the warmed plums

In other words,
Take 1lb of plums, wash, dry, chop up and de-stone
Mix 1lb of sugar with 1/4 pint of water
Gentle heat and stir until all the sugar has dissolved
Then turn up the heat and boil rapidly until it is 115 degree Celsius or until a small amount dropped into a glass of water forms a soft ball with very little or no tail.
Take of the heat and stir hard until the sugar crystallises.  If necessary put your saucepan in a large bowl of sink or cold water and keep stirring, that will cause the crystallisation you want.  
Add you plums
Put back onto a very low heat
The still hot sugar will gently warm the plums and cause the juice to flow
As more juice flows, the sugar will dissolve again
Stir gently from time to time (or chip away at the sugar) and gradually you will get a jam like mixture
Keep going with the gentle heat and stirring until a setting point is reached.

To check setting point:
Drop a small amount onto a cold plate and leave for a minute or two. Gently push the jam with your finger.  If it wrinkles on top then it is ready to set.  If it doesn't, boil or in this case warm gently, for another 5 minutes.

Notes:
If it doesn't set quick enough then you can bring it to the boil but that might depend on how much time you have.
Once it is bottled I found that larger jars can take up to several days to set fully while smaller ones should set overnight.  I don't know why.

If it doesn't set in the jar then you can empty them out and re-boil, or store the jam jars in the freezer until you are ready to use them

One day I will try and do a post of ways to you can use up jam that has gone wrong, or rather still tastes fantastic but hasn't reached a perfect setting point.

Pastry case, plum jam, sponge cake nearly ready to go on top.

Reference:
Spurling, Hilary, "Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book," Penguin Books 1987

Grow your own ingredients

You don't have to read very far through a 17th century cookery book to realise that if you want to try out some of the recipes then you are going to have to get your gardening gloves on. 

This year I am hoping to try pickled nasturtium buds and green pudding with marigold flowers.  I have bought the seeds.  I managed to dig over a flower bed during a freak afternoon when the sun actually shone and both my children played nicely for 2 whole hours.  All I need now is a bit of warmth! Hear that weather, we need sunshine and heat or else gardeners and farmers in this country are not going to be growing very much at all.

I did want to try preserving broom flowers, the local garden centre had some nice, compact plants that were about to come into flower some weeks ago now but there was no point buying one as the ground was way too cold to dig.

Sour dough

I learnt how to make sough dough on a very nice training course at a Yorkshire cafe a few years ago.  Their in house baker (who had previously won baker of the year so really did know what he was talking about) was passionate about pure, natural bread with nothing added and nothing taken away. 

He led us through the intricacies of making a rye flour starter, keeping it alive and using it to make some very tasty bread indeed.  Since then I have sucessfully made the starter, kept it going for weeks or months or, more honestly, until I got bored, and used it to make bread.  I followed the precise ingredients and instructions to the letter and it worked very well.

Not once, in all of this did it occur to me how many different ways there are of making sour dough until I started researching historic recipes for earnest.

Now, the more I read the more I realise that there are as many different recipes for sour dough as there are cooks and most of the recipes make it clear that theirs is the best and only way to make it work.

This set me to thinking that as long as you mix flour and water together then in the end it will go off and the chances are that as long as you don't leave it until it is actually mouldy then you may well have a good sour dough. 

This naturally led to a spot of experimenting.  First up, the leave a bit of dough from the last batch method.  Gervase Markham (1616) advises leaving a bit of your batch of bread, filling it well with salt and using it for your next loaf of bread.  It must be noted that he does include yeast or at least ale balm in the next batch.  Darina Allen of the Ballymaloe cookery school advises leaving some dough in a jam jar in the fridge and using it to flavour your next batch.

I took 2 lots of dough and left one in the fridge, nice and easy.  The other one I mixed with a tablespoon of salt and left in a plastic box in a cool pantry.  I left both of them for about a week.

 This is the fridge one, it is just a piece of knocked back dough, a bit grey but close up you can see that it has an open texture.  It smelt sour but not bad or off. 

Following the modern instructions, I made the weight up to a pound of flour, added a teaspoon of salt and sugar and warm water as if making ordinary bread but without any added yeast.

This is salted one and at first glance it looks healthier, a more natural flour colour and it didn't even smell that sour.  A closer glance shows that it had gone a bit hard in the middle but not bad.  It hadn't risen at all and it looked like a pretty nasty lump of dough. The box was very wet where the salt had drawn moisture out of the bread.  This pictures really don't show it well at all, but this one definitely looked dodgy. 
I first rinsed off as much surface salt as possible and then followed the 17th century instructions.  I ripped the dough into small pieces, covered it with warm water and left the water to stand.  A couple of hours later I strained the water and used it to make the bread.  I used 1lb of flour, 1 tsp of sugar but no salt.

I left both sets of dough to rise overnight.  It will probably come as no great surprise that the salted dough did not rise at all, not even a small amount.  The salt had completely killed the yeast, even though it had stopped the dough going bad in storage.  The fridge batch had risen quite well.

I mixed some instant action yeast into the flat dough, left them to prove in the tins and then baked them.

They were both slow to rise but they came out of the oven looking remarkably similar, there really was nothing to choose between them and more importantly they tasted pretty much the same as well.  I would really have struggled to tell them apart, both had a subtle, sour flavour.  Same result in flavour but one was a good, if slow, way of raising the bread, the other just added flavour.

A more interesting experiment that would take some years to do is Markhams recipe for course, brown bread for servants.  This recipe is a mix of  flours from different cereals and peas.  He says to make especially sure to use boiling water to mix the dough as this stops the peas making the bread taste rancid and then he says to mix it and leave it in your sour trough over night.  I am assuming that using the same wooden trough (and it must have been large for the quantities he was using) would have built up a yeast culture all of its own.  He adds that if your trough is not sour enough then you can add some leaven or let it lie longer in the trough. 

I am now going to be on the look out for people who have tried this.  Any method that involves not washing all your equipment in antibacterial washing up liquid (which would kill the yeast) would not make the Environmental Health Department happy so I have to be a bit careful, still one day....

Tortelleti of Green Pease

In July I am going to have the huge privilege of cooking in a real Jacobean kitchen at Forty Hall in Enfield.  They have asked me to cook vegetable recipes from the period using food from the allotments on site.  I am very excited about all of this, my family are getting to try out some interesting recipes and anyone reading this page should be warned that there may well be a distinct vegetable theme as I practice recipes to find ones that are safe ( a lot call for raw egg, not happening in my kitchen,) seasonal (a lot use veg that are not in season in the summer) and edible. 

My first one is Tortelleti of Green Pease by Robert May.

Robert May wrote his book, "The Accomplisht Cook" in 1660.  He was trained in Paris before the civil war and returned to England after the restoration bringing with him all the fashions of the court in exile.  His book gives a wide range of recipes including ones that would not have been out of place at a medieval feast to the latest fashions in French and Italian cookery.  From the books of Jacobean cookery I have read so far, he gives quite a lot of recipes for vegetables. Only Evelyn's book on salads seems to have more.




"Take pease green or dry, French beans, or garden beans green or dry, boil them tender, and stamp them: strain them through a strainer, and put to them some friend onion chopped small, sugar, sinamon, cloves, pepper, and nutmeg, some grated parmisan, or fat cheese, and some cheese-curds stamped.
The make paste, and make little pasties, boil them in broth, or as beforesaid, and serve them with sugar, cinamon, and grated cheese in a fine clean dish."
 
This recipe could be interpreted as either a savoury main course where a pinch of sugar and spice brings out the flavour of the peas or you can see the peas as simply a food colouring and bulking agent.  Cooks of the time were proud of being able to produce elaborate desert tarts with many different colours of filling.  In a previous recipe he directs that the pasties be boiled in either strong broth, milk or cream.  I chose to make a savoury version this time.
 

 I like recipes with no quantities, I don't feel like I am cheating when I decide how much to put in!  I must say that I went for 2 handfulls of peas to one medium chopped onion, a handful of grated cheddar, 2 tablespoons of yoghurt (instead of cottage cheese as I didn't have any in) and a small pinch of each of the spices and sugar.

May doesn't give a pastry recipe but in a previous recipe he says to make the paste with hot water.  I used one for Chinese dumplings which is basically flour and water.  I did this because I knew it would work and I have actually learnt how to do it properly.  I am going to try Italian pasta in the future.

I know these are wobbly looking.  In an earlier recipe for a meat version the author suggested that the cook might like to make the pasties in the shape of stars, fish, rolls or bean and peas.  I have a long way to go, clearly. I think I probably would also need unlimited time and some well trained staff before I manage star
shaped ravioli.

 

As shapes go these are not that bad for Chinese dumplings.  They may not be even but they didn't leak their filling and in the eyes of my friend Mrs Jao that is pretty important. 

 Serving, I have to admit that I left out the sugar and cinnamon and just went for the grated cheese. 

You don't need to taste or even read many 17th century recipes to see that our ancestors did not share our distinction between savoury and sweet food.  Many recipes that we would see as main courses are actually quite sweet.  Recipes frequently say that meat or vegetable pies should be served with "great store of sugar strewed over."  Actually, given the hugs amount of hidden sugar in our food today you could argue that the Jacobeans were more honest about their sweet tooth.