Category Archives: 19th century

The History Dish: Buttermilk Soup or “Pop”

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Baked pears, thickened buttermilk, and fried bread.

On Sunday, I appeared on the Heritage Radio Network, chatting with Carmen Devito & Alice Marcus Krieg of We Dig Plants. We talked all about PEARS!  If you haven’t heard the show yet, go here and listen for free.   I dug up some pear recipes from the annals of history with the idea that we would pick one to try.  Well, we had a difficult time agreeing, so this week I’m going to cook up three very different 19th century pear recipes.

The first was Alice’s pick:  Buttermilk soup or “Pop.”   This recipe is odd. I’ve never seen a precedent for it: buttermilk is heated, mixed with pears, and poured over fried bread.  Check it out:

I needed some buttermilk education, so I naturally turned to that font of knowledge, Wikipedia.  I knew buttermilk as the bi-product of butter making: when cream is churned, the result is a solid (butter) and a liquid (buttermilk).  I knew that before seperation, fresh milk was often set in a cellar to seperate into milk and cream; what I didn’t realize is that this milk would also ferment because of naturally occuring bacteria.  This fermentation is what gives buttermilk its sour taste, although in modern production facilities we artificially inseminate pastuerized milk with a squirt of lactic acid bacteria.

Although the recipe doesn’t explicitly say to make a roux, I think it implies it.  The roux will thicken the buttermilk.

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Buttermilk Soup or Pop
From Practical Sanitary and Economic Cooking by Mary Hinman Abel, 1890.

2 cups buttermilk
1 tablespoon flour
2 tablespoon butter
pinch salt
2 large pears (I used Bosc)
1/4 cup sugar (brown sugar would be good; maple syrup if you’re feeling adventurous)
1/2 tsp cinnamon (or spice of your choice)

1.  Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Pare, core, and dice pears, then arrange in a baking tray (cake pan, etc).  Sprinkle with sugar and spice.  Bake for 35-45 minutes, or until tender.

2. In a large saucepan over a medium-low heat, heat 1 tablespoon of butter and the flour to make a roux.  Cook until flour begins to brown.  Add buttermilk and salt, turn heat to medium-high.  Bring to a boil while stirring constantly, then turn heat off.  Add baked pears to buttermilk mix, stir to combine.

3.  Melt remaining butter in a small skillet and fry two slices of bread.  Remove to a plate and top with pear/buttermilk mixture.

***

The original author of the recipe warns that cooking buttermilk “brings out the acid,” but I found the taste of the finished product to be surprisingly mild, either as a result of being cut by the fat of the butter or the sweetness of the pears.  And frankly, I was skeptical of this recipe, and it was not my first pick to make.  But I was delightfully wrong: this is the perfect snack.  It’s like a delicious warm yogurt treat (tastes better than it sounds): the dairy was filling, the pears sweet, and when poured over hot, buttery bread, it’s just the right amount of food.  Highly recommended, four stars, etc. etc.  Try it.

On a completely  unrelated note, I wrote this post jamming to my friend Gregg Gillis’ (Girl Talk) new album All Day, available for download for FREE.  It is really, REALLY good.

Cocktail Hour: Drink What Dickens Drank

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Oh, Dickens! Always boozing. Illustration by Peter Van Hyning.

When Charles Dickens made his first trip to America in 1842 (recorded in American Notes for General Circulation), he made certain to partake of one of the greatest American inventions: the cocktail.  While visiting Boston, he said “the bar is a large room with a stone floor, and there people stand and smoke, and lounge about, all the evening dropping in and out as the humor takes them.  There too the stranger is initiated into the mysteries of Gin-sling, Cocktail, Sangaree, Mint Julep, Sherry-cobbler, Timber Doodle, and other rare drinks.”

Dickens didn’t write down any recipes for these “rare drinks”, but fortunately some of his contemporaries did.  Captain Alexander, who toured America in 1833, recorded the directions for making The Cock Tail, along with four other drinks he had at the City Hotel in New York, prepared by a celebrity bartender named Willard.  Another English tourist, Captain Marryat, recorded his experiences with Mint Juleps after he made a trip to America in 1837.   He said: “I once overheard two ladies talking in the next room to me, and one of them said, ‘Well if I have a weakness for any one thing, it is for a mint julep!’–a very amiable weakness, and proving her good sense and good taste. They are, in fact, like the American ladies, irresistible.”  I think that quote is like the best thing ever.

Much of what we know about Victorian cocktails comes from How to Mix Drinks; or, the Bon-Vivants Companion by Prof. Jerry Thomas, published in 1862. Which, thanks to Google, is now online.

Couldn’t make it out to What Dickens Drank at apex art last week?  No worries; below, all the recipes you need to mix an 1840s cocktail at home.  Photos from the event, and more, can be found here.

Retronovated Recipes: Crockpot Beef Tongue

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Look at it.  Licking the side of the Crock-pot.

Old Stone House of Brooklyn hosted an 1864 baseball game; naturally, they wanted some 1864 ballpark treats to go along with it.  So we did some research and after looking into Victorian street fair food and picnic pickings, we decided on a menu of popcorn balls (maple, molasses, and rosewater), lemonade, and ham on cornbread.  But there was one Victorian dish that came up again and again as an all-time, picnic in the park favorite: Tongue.

We decided to go for it.  We’d strive for historic accuracy and allow tongue sandwiches to grace our menu. We were serving in Brooklyn, after all, and I trusted this borough to have some adventurous eaters. However, I had never actually cooked a tongue before.  It was time to embark on another Offal Adventure.

A cow tongue is shockingly large and floppity.  I acquired mine at Jeffrey’s Meat Market, which has been located in Essex Street Market since Essex Street had a market.  I brought it home and prepped it, and as I moved it around the kitchen, I imagined it making some kind of animate tongue sounds (mostly pppplhhhlhlllh!). I began cruising for recipes: the Victorians demanded it be “…so tender that a straw would go through it.”  Now that’s tender.  So how to get it so perfectly tender, while at the same time infusing it with all kinds of mid-century spicy flavors?  I knew what I had to do: I busted out my trusty Crock-pot.

Yes, ok, OBVIOUSLY they didn’t have Crock-pots in 1864.  But that’s not what we do on this blog; I don’t have a hearth installed in my four-story walkup.  And I love my Crock-pot; no matter what shit I throw in there, it always comes out perfectly cooked and flavorful.  I trusted it with my tongue.  So I decided to retronovate a recipe:  I used this Spiced Beef Tongue Crockpot recipe for cooking instructions, but used the spices  listed in this 1845 recipe from The New England Economical Housekeeper.

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1864-style Slow Cooked Tongue
Adapted from The New England Economical Housekeeper by Esther Allen Howland, 1845; and, Spiced Beef Tongue from cdktichen.com

3 pounds Beef tongue (phhhhffffll!)
2 quarts Water
1/4 cup brown sugar
6 whole cloves
6 black peppercorns
6 whole allspice
6 flakes mace
2 teaspoons Salt

Ground spices would be fine, too.

Combine all ingredients in a slow-cooker.  Cook on low 10 hours.

***

I pulled the tongue from the Crock-pot and it went into the fridge to chill overnight.  The next day I served it toasted on slices of molasses-sweetened cornbread.  It was indeed perfectly tender and flavorful.  And did Brooklyn live up to my expectations of being adventurous eaters?  By the end of the day, we had sold out of tongue sandwiches.

Cocktail Hour: Beef Beer

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The short story: I was doing research amongst the stacks at the New York Public library.  In the appendix of a large volume called Virginia Taverns, I found a recipe for a “American Strong Beer,” dated 1815.  I read on to discover this beer was made with mustard, rice and beef.  Interesting.

While planning for Bread & Beer, I sent this recipe to the brewers at Brouwerij Lane as a novelty; the next thing I know, they’re making it.  And it was my favorite beer of the evening.  Joshua Berstein of the New York Press just wrote about it:

But I could definitely get pie-eyed from the second beer. It was a circa-1815 American strong ale fashioned with wheat, barley, rice, dry mustard and lean beef. Yes, beef. “You use it to make a sort of broth,” Olsen explained of the cow flesh, whose proteins aid the Belgian yeast. Instead of being overwhelmingly meaty, the beer drinks dry and slightly fruity, with gentle notes of hamburger.

You can read Berstein’s full article on the Bread & Beer event here.

Brewers: give this recipe a shot.  You’ll be pleasantly surprised.

They brewed this beer in two incarnations, one of which was infused with caraway.  Below, the full menu and tasting notes for the event.

Taste History Today: Heritage Pork Belly

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You know your meat’s fresh when it still looks like an animal.  This belly’s got nipples.

Last month, I was a presenter in a very special tour of Central Park: a walk-through of the lives of the residents of Seneca Village.  Seneca Village was a rural suburb of New York until 1858, when the property owners were forced off their land in the city’s first use of Eminent Domain.  The property, which was owned largely by Irish and German immigrants and free African-Americans, was seized to build Central Park, and the town disappeared from New York City’s landscape and our collective memory. Only recently has scholarship surfaced exploring the lives of the residents of Seneca Village, and Imagining Seneca Village presented some of what we know.

The residents of Seneca Village had a huge advantage over their southern Manhattan neighbors: they could self-produce food.  Although many immigrants were coming from rural areas, once they arrived to the tenements of the Lower East Side, there was little room to grow a garden.  But according to the New York Tribune, “(Seneca Village contained homes)…of varying degrees of excellence…a number of these have fine kitchen gardens, and some of the side-hill slopes are adorned with cabbage, and melon-patches, with hills of corn and cucumbers, and beds of beets, parsnips and other garden delicacies. (1857)”

Not only gardens, but livestock as well: geese, chickens, goats and swine.  The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy lists seven American pig breeds as critically endangered; these are pigs that have been bred in the States for a hundred years or more, and are often close descendants of 17th and 18th century pig breeds.  They’re breeds that are known for their foraging skills and their mothering skills.  A mother and her brood can be released into the fields to fend for themselves with very little care.  For residents of Seneca Village, pigs represented and immense amount of food that came at very little cost: a pig’s foraging diet would have been supplemented with kitchen scraps and food waste; by fall, they would be plump enough for slaughter.  These foraging breeds also acted like early garbage disposals on the crowded city streets of New York, before public sanitation and garbage pick-up existed.  Dickens, on his 1842 trip to America, mentions the handsome pigs rooting around the streets for discarded cabbage leaves and offal.

But after WWII, pig breed preferences turned toward those who did well for mass production.  These foraging breeds did not have a high survival rate in a pen and people stopped breeding them.  But thanks to a return to all things delicious, small farms have focused on preserving these breeds; and, by creating a demand for their pork, we’re helping them survive as well.

So, at Imagining Seneca Village, I prepared a pork belly I obtained from Flying Pigs Farms, a ranch outside of New York that breeds Large Blacks, Gloucestershire Old Spots, and Tamworth pigs.  When I served it, everyone demanded the recipe.  I admit, it was crispy, salty, meaty, and just awesome.  But I can’t give credit to my cooking skills — I owe it all to the meat itself.  Covered with a thick layer of fat that kept it moist while roasting, the belly’s meat was rich with the flavors of a well-exercised pig who had grown fat on fall acorns.

To make your own pork belly, start with a slab of heritage pork.  If you’re in New York, Flying Pigs is at the Union Square Greenmarket Fridays & Saturdays.  They also sell online, as do several other heritage pork purveyors around the country, like Caw Caw Creek in South Carolina.  Then, I followed Jamie Oliver’s simple recipe available here.  I didn’t even bother with the gravy, and it came out divine.

Established Eateries: Eddie’s Sweet Shop

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Eddie’s Sweet Shop, in Forest Hills, Queens.

A couple weeks ago, I joined friends for a summer drive to Eddie’s Sweet Shop in Queens.  This soda fountain and ice cream haven hasn’t changed much since the turn of the century.  I read about it in a neat little book called The Historic Shops and Restaurants of New York; all the quotes in this post are pulled from this book.

The candy counter.  The interior of Eddie’s is “…preserved in near perfect turn-of-the-century condition.”

“The refrigerator is Frigidaire’s first electric mode, some 75 years old…”  A vintage canister filled with malt sits on top.

“Nine original wood-topped revolving stools still face the mahogany counter with its cool-to-the-touch white marble top.”  The surface of the stool has been worn smooth by the seats of many pants.

“They…serve only homemade ice cream, sherbert, syrups, and freshly whipped cream, all prepared on the premises.”  I had a chocolate malt, and a strawberry soda, made with syrup and seltzer.  Next time, I think I’ll get an ice cream float!

Crooky Prongs and Little Pickey

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Illustration by Zachariah Durr. Buy this drawing on Etsy here.

I’ve been doing a little research on early American taverns, and early American tavern food.  While reading Taverns & Travelers: Inns of the Early Midwest (yes, this is what I like to do in my free time) I came across a passage that made me bust out laughing in the middle of the New York Public Library reading room.  The room is giant and silent, so it was embarrassing.  But worth it.  Read on.

“Featherstonhaugh found the most primitive table service at an Arkansas tavern, operated by a lady whom he called a ‘she-Caliban.’  The colored servant, Nisby, had set the table, attempting to make the best of a poor situation.  When landlady Caliban inspected the result she raised her voice in apparent indignation, demanding where poor Nisby had placed the ‘new forks.’

‘I ha-ant put not forks nowhar,’ said Nisby in seeming desperation, ‘I never seen no forks but them as what’s on the table; thar’s Stump Handle, Crooky Prongs, Horny, Big Pewter, and Little Pickey, and that’s jist what ther is, and I expec they are all thar to speak for themselves.’  It was apparent that the dialogue about the new forks was entirely for the benefit of the guests.

Stump handle ‘consisted of one prong of an old fork’ with one end ‘stuck into a stump piece of wood.’  Crooky Prongs ‘was curled over on each side,’ and more adapted to catching codfish than for eating purposes.  Horny was a sort of imitation of a fork’ made out of cow’s horn.  Big Pewter was merely ‘the handle of a spoon with the bowl broken off.’  Little Pickey looked ‘like a cobbler’s awl fastened in a thick piece of wood.”

And don’t forget, this illustration is available on the brand new Four Pounds Flour Etsy page!

The Gallery: The Idea Was to Live in the Past.

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Brooklyn Sanitary Fair 1864: The New England Kitchen.

My mom was in town over the weekend, and being the history nerd duo that we are, we decided to go see “Healing the Wounds of War: The Brooklyn Sanitary Fair of 1864” at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.  I know a “Sanitary Fair” doesn’t sound like much fun, but apparently it was in the 19th Century.  From the BMA website:

“During the Civil War, sanitary fairs were held to raise money for the war effort in major cities in the Northeast. These large-scale fairs were social events that combined entertainment, education, and philanthropy…The money was used for clothing, food, medical supplies, and other provisions for the Union Army.”

There were arts and crafts for sale, “curiosities” on display, and opportunities to flirt.  But my favorite? “The New England Kitchen.”

“The idea is to present a faithful picture of New England farm house life of the last century. The grand, old fire place shall glow again; the spinning wheel shall whirl as of old; the walls shall be garnished with the products of the forest; and the dinner table, always set, shall be loaded with substantial New England cheer.  We shall try to reproduce the manners, customs, dress, and if possible, the idiom of the time…The period fixed upon is just prior to the throwing overboard of the tea in Boston Harbor.

The idea was to live in the Past, and the Present was ignominiously banished.”  From History of the Brooklyn and Long Island Fair

The Kitchen was a Civil War reenactment of Revolutionary War era foodways.  It was 1864 reenacting 1776.

Awesome. I love this. Love. It.

I really want to reenact the 186o’s  reenacting 1770’s.  I just have to figure out how.

Cocktail Hour: The Whiskey Sour

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Illustration by Angela Oster.

Whiskey is my drink of choice, so I admit I love the unintentional whiskey theme of this week.

The Whiskey Sour was invented sometime in the middle of the 19th century; Jerry Thomas describes a brandy and a gin variation in his 1862 book.  Other variations: a dash of egg white makes it into the Boston Sour, and Boston also gave birth to the Ward 8 in 1898, which adds orange juice and grenadine.

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The Whiskey Sour
From The Cocktail Book: A Sideboard Manual for Gentlemen, 1926

2 teaspoons simple syrup (or super fine sugar)
2-3 dashes lemon juice
1 tablespoon seltzer
2 ounces whiskey

1. In a rocks glass, add simple syrup, lemon juice and seltzer. Stir to combine (or until sugar is dissolved).
2. Fill glass with ice, and add whiskey.  Stir until the outside of the glass is cold.  Garnish with a cherry and orange wedge, or seasonal fruits.

***

And if you like a Whiskey Sour, try the Ward III at the 19th C. Pub Crawl’s last stop, Ward III: “Made with bourbon, strawberries, egg whites and nutmeg, it’s actually ‘a derivation of the classic Sour,’ explains (owner) Neff. A historical classic, viewed through rose-colored glasses—and given a healthy dose of red berries, too.” (Metromix New York)

For a full list of Ward III’s “exquisite libations”, go here.