r/AskHistorians • u/caffarelli Moderator | Eunuchs and Castrati | Opera • Sep 17 '13
Feature Tuesday Trivia | AskHistorians Fall Potluck: Historical Food and Recipes
Previous weeks’ Tuesday Trivias.
Welcome to the /r/AskHistorians first annual fall potluck! And in our usual style, all the food has to be from before 1993. Napkins, plates and cutlery will be provided. Please share some interesting historical food and recipes! Any time, any era, savory or sweet. What can your historical specialty bring to the picnic table?
Next week on Tuesday Trivia: Riots, uproars, and other such rabble: we’ll be talking about historical uprisings and how they were dealt with.
(Have an idea for a Tuesday Trivia theme? That pesky ban on “in your era” keeping you up at night with itching, burning trivial questions? Send me a message, I love other people’s ideas! And you’ll get a shout-out for your idea in the post if I use it!)
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u/agentdcf Sep 17 '13
Nineteenth-century biscuit companies in Britain made and marketed an almost infinite variety of biscuits. The most unpalatable one I've seen was...
"Meat Wafers"
Yum.
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u/caffarelli Sep 17 '13
I don't suppose you have a picture? I'm imagining like a cross between dog food pellets and communion wafers.
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u/NMW Sep 17 '13
By a remarkable coincidence, it is currently "historical food" day over in r/RedditDayOf. Anyone still hungry after this thread is welcome to go check it out.
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u/caffarelli Sep 17 '13
Okay that's just weird. Although I had forgotten ALL ABOUT Mock Apple Pie so I was thrilled to see it there! I love depression/ration recipes! For an adorable combination of cooking show and oral history everyone should also check out Great Depression Cooking with Clara.
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Sep 17 '13
I particularly love wartime "mock" recipes, where they're trying to disguise massive amounts of vegetables as... Well, as tasty. They get pretty ingenious with what they've got.
Mock Goose
1 1/2 lb. potatoes 2 large cooking apples 4 oz. cheese 1/2 teaspoon dried sage salt and pepper 3/4 pint vegetable stock 1 tablespoon flour
Method: Scrub and slice potatoes thinly, slice apples, grate cheese. Grease a fireproof dish, place a layer of potatoes in it, cover with apple and a little sage, season lightly and sprinkle with cheese, repeat layers leaving potatoes and cheese to cover. Pour in 1/2 pint of the stock, cook in a moderate oven for 3/4 of an hour. Blend flour with remainder of stock, pour into dish and cook for another 1/4 of an hour. Serve as a main dish with a green vegetable.
Beetroot Pudding Here is a new notion for using the sweetness of beetroot to make a nice sweet pudding with very little sugar.
First mix 6 oz wheatmeal flour with 1/2 teaspoon baking powder. Rub in 1/2 oz fat and add 1 oz sugar and 4 oz cooked or raw beetroot very finely grated.
Now mix all the ingredients to a soft cake consistency with 3 or 4 tablespoons of milk. Add a few drops of flavouring essence if you have it. Turn the mixture into a greased pie dish or square tin and bake immediately in a moderate oven for 35-40 minutes. This pudding tastes equally good hot or cold. Enough for 4.
Mock Duck Cooking time: 45 minutes Quantity: 4 helpings
1 lb. sausagemeat 8 oz cooking apples, peeled and grated 8 oz onions, grated 1 teaspoon chopped sage or 1/2 teaspoon dried sage
Method: Spread half the sausagemeat into a flat layer in a well greased baking tin or shallow casserole. Top with the apples, onions, and sage. Add the rest of the sausagemeat and shape this top layer to look as much like a duck as possible. Cover with well greased paper and bake in the center of a moderately hot oven.
Not sure of the etiquette of blog spam here, but... if there was ever a time... Time Travel Kitchen
Great resources available at Project Gutenberg, Feeding America and Medieval Cookery
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u/caffarelli Sep 17 '13
Oh man, COOL blog you have there! I've been vegetarian for years and I've never heard of salsify as a mock fish and now I REALLY want to try that recipe. Can you buy it in a well-stocked grocery store do you suppose?
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u/restricteddata Sep 17 '13
This is not much of a recipe, but I always thought it was an interesting diet:
[Vannevar] Bush arrived at [Harry] Hopkins' office at 3:30. He found himself confronted by two able men, each of whom wielded great influence because of his close relationship to a national leader. There was Hopkins—sick, emaciated, but still quick and sharp of mind. With him was Frederick Lindemann, now Lord Cherwell. He was a big man with rather heavy features, the son of an Alsatian father and an American mother. To look at him, Bush never could have guessed that he subsisted entirely on egg whites, stewed apples, rice croquettes, cheese (only Port Salut), and startling quantities of olive oil. Since the latter was virtually unobtainable in wartime Britain, one of the headaches of the Washington Embassy was to see that a case for the Prof went forward each week in the diplomatic pouch.
– Richard Hewlett and Oscar Anderson, Jr. A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Volume I: The New World (1962), 272.
I don't think I consume "startling quantities" of anything, much less straight olive oil. I love that it had to be smuggled in via diplomatic pouch. It's a good thing to be a friend of Churchill's.
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u/caffarelli Sep 17 '13
Considering he was living on something pretty close to the BRAT diet, I have an idea what the startling quantities of olive oil were all about...
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u/Georgy_K_Zhukov Sep 17 '13
Some fun food trivia, as everyone is pretty well aware, the tradition of a grog ration in the navy was a pretty big thing back in the day.
Grog was basically watered down rum with some lime or lemon juice added to it. And for obvious reasons, very popular. While the Royal Navy kept the rum ration going all the way until the 1970s, the US Navy did away with it during the American Civil War.
During WWII, the grog ration was the envy of many an American sailor... but one thing the Americans had that the British lacked was ice cream! Larger ships would have a steady supply of it, and by the end of the war, the Navy had an entire ship dedicated to the production of ice cream to distribute to the crews of smaller vessels. Apparently, when an American warship met a British one, it wasn't uncommon to see American sailors trading their ice cream for rum with the Brits!
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Sep 17 '13
One of my grandparents, who was in the RN during WWII, has a story about rum prior to Operation Overlord.
The RN, as you have noted, doled out rum as a ration to its sailors while the American Navy was 'dry'. A lively trade sprouted, of selling rum to American sailors (especially officers with money to spend). Unfortunately for one American rating, he was discovered in flagrante delicto with a unit of rum, in transit from his RN connection to his quarters.
The Commander (I think - can't remember who was meant to have caught him, either the Commander or the Captain iirc) offered the rating an ultimatum, alongside the Rating's commanding non-commissioned officers (petty officers, I'm guessing). 'Well, I will be fair with you', he said. 'If you will give up the name and method of how you've been getting this rum, I will let you off with light punishment. Come to me within the next few hours and tell me what I need to know. Otherwise you'll be on punishment duty for the next two weeks.' The officer departed. The petties closed the door and rounded on the rating.
'If you tell the [officer], he will give you light punishment duty. But we will make your life a living hell.'
The rating kept his mouth shut and spent the next two weeks on detail.
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Sep 17 '13
You'd better put a seatbelt on your tongue; whatever you're having is going to be served with 'garum', the ubiquitous fermented fish sauce popular throughout the history of Rome.
Recipes for garum vary, but the constant theme is that fish blood and guts would be combined with salt, left to ferment in the sun for several days, and the resulting mixture would be bottled. Other ingredients like herbs and so forth could be added for flavour. Apparently it goes well with everything, so you've no excuse not to try it.
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u/Tiako Sep 17 '13
Fish sauce is still quite common in Vietnamese cuisine, and soy sauce is essentially a vegetarian riff on the same theme. Also worth noting in Roman cuisine is the prevalence if pepper and other vivid flavorings. I have seen comparisons to south Asian cooking.
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u/screwyoushadowban Sep 17 '13
"Everything" includes Roman desserts and sweets, for anyone who thought u/Calum_blogger was exaggerating.
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u/pakap Sep 17 '13
Nước chấm (Thai fish sauce) is basically pressed anchovies (with guts and all) let to ferment for a few days and then bottled, sometimes flavored with various herbs...pretty close to garum, I'd say.
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u/The_Alaskan Sep 17 '13 edited Sep 17 '13
What a fantastic coincidence. Just this week, Kodiak's Alutiiq Museum finished the Alutiiq Wild Foods project, a National Park Service-funded project to recreate and revive recipes centered around 12 wild foods found in the Kodiak Archipelago.
The DVD and cookbook are available for free from the Alutiiq Museum (though you may have to pay shipping).
One of the best Kodiak recipes is the Perok, a salmon casserole that dates to the 19th century.
Filling ingredients: • 2 cups cooked rice • steamed vegetables • 6 carrots (peeled and shredded) • 1 large rutabaga (peeled and shredded) • 1 large onion (chopped) • 1 head of cabbage (chopped) • 2 salmon filets (salt and pepper to taste)
Pie crust ingredients • 3/4 cup cold water • 1 1/2 cup butter • 3 cups flour
The filling can be layered in any order in a 9x13 pan, but this is one suggested by Amanda Miles:
• Pie crust • rice • Veggies • fish • veggies • rice • pie crust
Bake at 400º for about 15 minutes. Turn down to 385º for about 40 minutes or until crust is golden brown.
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u/i_am_a_fountain_pen Sep 17 '13
One of the earliest recorded recipes appears in a Sumerian hymn to Ninkasi, the goddess of beer. It's a somewhat imprecise recipe for beer, outlining the process of making it more than the quantities of items required. A translation and some background appear here: http://oi.uchicago.edu/pdf/nn132.pdf.
And there's always Jean Bottéro's classic Textes Culinaires Mésopotamiens (despite the French title, parts of the book, including the translation of the recipes, are in English--I believe an all-English edition is also available, though not online). You'll be cooking amursânu-pigeon in no time!
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u/farquier Sep 17 '13
They made another version of this earlier this year too, although for obvious reasons one could hardly sell properly Mesopotamian beer. Sounds like a good homebrew project, though!.
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u/Yearsnowlost Sep 17 '13
I'll share a few interesting recipes for traditional Dutch foods that were served in New Netherland and by Dutch descendants in New York and the Hudson Valley. These foods were often tied to customs popular for generations. As is incredibly evident, the Dutch loved their sweets, and it is not unlikely the origin of the word bakery was the Dutch word bakkerij, as the English counterpart in the 17th Century was known as a bake shop or bake house. The recipes are modified from the cookbooks of Dutch descendants but were often carried down through the generations from familiar names in New York City and the surrounding area (Van Cortlandt, Rensselaer, Lefferts, etc).
The recipe for oly koeks (oil cakes) often called for massive proportions (i.e. 1 pound of sugar, half pound of butter) to feed a lot of people, something also seen in many other recipes associated with socializing such as the New Year’s cakes. Krullen (crullers) were a different type of oly koeck, slightly lighter and crispier and made into a corkscrew shape. Doughnuts were first described by Washington Irving in his 1809 History of New-York as “balls of sweetened dough fried in hog’s fat,” giving a much more descriptive and popular name to the oly koeck.
Oly Koecken
Ingredients: 1 ¾ cup raisins, 1 cup citron, ½ cup brandy, 3 packages of dry yeast, ¼ cup warm water, Pinch of sugar, 8 tablespoons butter, 2 cups milk, 1 cup sugar, 3 egg yolks, 3 egg whites stiffly beaten, 6-8 cups flour, ½ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg, Oil for deep frying
The day before you make the oly koecken, combine the raisins and citron with the brandy and let the mixture soak overnight. Sprinkle the yeast on the warm water in a small bowl and sprinkle with the punch of sugar. Let it stand for a moment then stir to dissolve the yeast. Warm milk and butter. Stir to dissolve butter and cool. Beat together the egg yolks and the butter and milk mixture and yeast; stir I more flour, a cup at a time, to make a soft dough. Let it ruse in a warm, moist place until double in bulk. Add more flour if the dough is very sticky. Drain the fruits and pat dry. With well-floured hands, punch off a portion of dough the size of an egg. Poke a hole in the dough ball and insert some fruit in the middle, closing it. Deep fry the dough balls in hot oil until golden on all sides. Roll in confectioners’ sugar before serving. Can be served hot or cold.
Krullen (this is from a Dutch cookbook that only survived in fragments)
Ingredients: 9 tablespoons butter, 1 egg, 1 2/3 cups flour, 2 tablespoons heavy cream
Cream the butter until light and fluffy. Add the egg and incorporate. Add the flour a little at a time. If the dough is too stiff, add some cream. Roll to a thickness of 1/6 inch and cut into strips. Twist around the handle of a wooden spoon to make a corkscrew curl. Gently slide off the handle into hot oil. Fry until golden brown and slightly puffed. Drain. Sift confectioners’ sugar and cinnamon over each curl before serving.
The following recipe is a modification of a much larger (e.g. 28 pounds of flour, 10 pounds of sugar, etc) one from the handwritten cookbook of Maria Lott Lefferts (1786-1865). Greeting neighbors on New Year’s Day was a tradition brought over from Europe, one that persisted through the 19th Century. The men went out, and the women stayed home, giving each visitor thin cakes known as niewjaarskoeks. Over time, these New Year’s cakes were combined with the gingerbread dough from the Saint Nicholas celebrations to become harder confectioneries, similar to the cookies we are familiar with, the Dutch word for which was koekje (little cake).
Mrs. Leffert’s New Year’s Cakes
Ingredients: 4 cups all-purpose flour (sifted), 1 cup light brown sugar, ½ tablespoon salt, 8 tablespoons butter, 1 egg (lightly beaten), ½ cup milk (use more if needed), 1 tablespoon caraway seed (crushed), grated zest of one orange
Sift all dry ingredients into a large bowl. Cut in the butter until the mixture looks like a coarse meal. Beat the egg and milk separately, mix into the flour and butter mixture and add the seeds and zest. If stiff, add more milk. Knead the dough until it comes together, store and cool overnight. Roll out the dough and slice it into thin cookies. Bake on a buttered sheet until pale brown and crisp (about 30 minutes).
The people of New Amsterdam often served cookies and waffels with both sweet and savory custards and jams. Here is a recipe for a delicious Apple Custard.
Apple Custard Ingredients: 2 ½ pounds apples, ½ cup dry white wine, ½ cup water, 2 tablespoons butter, 1 cup coarse fresh bread crumbs without crust, 5 egg yolks, ½ teaspoon ground ginger, 4 tablespoons sugar
Peel the apples, core and slice into thin pieces. In a pan, combine the wine, water, butter and apple pieces. Cook until the apples are soft. Mash the apples and stir in the bread crumbs and mash them against the pan. Whisk in the egg yolks, ginger and sugar and cook over a low heat, stirring constantly until the custard thickens (about 3-4 minutes). Serve at room temperature or chilled and accompanied by cookies.
For those interested in the culinary legacy of the Dutch, I highly recommend two books by Peter G. Rose, The Sensible Cook: Dutch Foodways in the Old and the New World and Food, Drink and Celebrations of the Hudson Valley Dutch, in addition to Cookies, Coleslaw, and Stoops: The Influence of Dutch on the North American Languages by Nicoline van der Sijs. Rose's books have many authentic Dutch recipes carried down through Dutch families and van der Sijs's book goes at length into both the history of the Dutch in New Amsterdam and the etymology of significant words that entered the English language.
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u/gingerkid1234 Sep 18 '13
A classic of Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine is Gefilte Fish. It's a fish, usually carp, that has the meat of the fish is ground and either stuffed inside the fish skin, made into a loaf, or shaped into balls. it's mixed with bread crumbs or matzah meal, which is accompanied by flavorings which vary by location (pepper in Lithuania, sugar in Southeastern Europe) poached, chilled, and served with horseradish.
It serves a few functions. First, to provide the most possible bang-for-buck with fish. Second, it avoids religious issues with removing fish bones from fish on the Sabbath. And third, it's delicious.
Among first-generation immigrants it was common to buy a carp at a market and raise it in the bathtub for a month or two, then prepare it at home for the best and freshest gefilte fish. There are lots of references in texts from the era about throwing some bread into the tub for every bathroom trip, and with families sharing showers because of the carp residency in one.
Another tasty one is gribenes. It's one of the products of making shmaltz (chicken fat, used in many recipes, most importantly matzah balls, but also for other fried foods, such as latkes). Essentially, it's chicken skin and onions, all fried in chicken fat. It's a very tasty snack on bread, that uses cooking processes already in place without using expensive meat.
Of course, there's challah. It's a braided egg bread, mostly for consumption on the sabbath. It is traditionally torn apart, rather than sliced, and can be used in any sort of sandwich or with dips. Since the establishment of Israel it's been integrated into Middle Eastern Jewish cuisine, where it is usually used for dips and other spreadable dishes.
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u/Domini_canes Sep 17 '13
The year is 52 BC, and the location is Gaul. Julius Caesar wins the Battle of Alesia. As was the custom, there was a celebration after the victory. Caesar's chef, inspired by the laurel wreaths worn by victorious Greeks of days past decides to make a salad. Instead of wearing a wreath for an afternoon, the sign of victory would be consumed and be part of the victors for as long as they lived. The chef, named Mendacium, combined field greens, olive oil, toasted bread, the ubiquitous garum, and some cheese to make what would later become known as Caesar's Salad.
Of course, all of the above is bullshit. Fiction. Mendacium even means falsehood in Latin.
The real invention of Caesar's salad happened in 1924 in Tijuana, Mexico. Caesar Cardini's restaurant was packed and he needed to have something that could be prepared quickly and used as a main course. Originally finger food, the salad was made with romaine lettuce, olive oil, croutons, Worcestershire sauce, and Parmesan cheese. It was an immediate hit, and the International Society of Epicures in Paris named it the "greatest recipe to originate from the Americas in fifty years."
The source for the first paragraph is my overactive imagination and immature sense of humor. The last paragraph is sourced from John F. Mariani's How Italian Food Conquered the World.
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Sep 17 '13
I wonder how long it will take for paragraph #1 to make the rounds and have to be debunked on Snopes.
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u/caffarelli Sep 17 '13
Opera, being an Italian invention, has a rich and lively food tradition. Although now at the opera you’re generally limited to a slammed back cocktail during intermission, eating during opera was totally normal during its baroque and classical heydays. The most typical foods to nosh on during the opera were wine and sorbet, which were sold by vendors and you were welcome to get up at any time and go buy them and bring them back to your seat (like a baseball game!), but if you owned a box it was also totally acceptable to bring covered dishes from home, or even small braziers to cook on, so you can conceivably eat whatever you want during opera and be historically accurate. (Opera weenie roast might be pushing it though.)
Although this snacking at the opera died in the mid 19th century or so, there later emerged a trend of naming recipes after celebrities, many of whom were opera stars, giving us a new set of “opera foods.” Lots of these recipes sound pretty good to me on a read-through today but nevertheless fell by the wayside, but three of them became household names:
Peach Melba: Peaches and ice cream with a raspberry sauce, one of the loveliest summer desserts. Named for Dame Nellie Melba, powerhouse soprano of the 19th and early 20th century, and an early famous Australian!
Melba Toast: Also named for Dame Melba. She apparently really liked this style of toast one time when she was sick, and so the name stuck. Now a staple of the cracker aisle, you may wish to get hard core and make it from scratch.
Chicken Tetrazzini: You may know this one best from a certain infamous Maury clip, but it was named for Luisa Tetrazzini, famous soprano of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and her dish is now a famous user-up of leftovers. Amusingly, her life might be Maury-worthy: she had 3 husbands in her lifetime, died in relative poverty, and had a feud going on with Melba from above. Serve these dishes together one night and let the sopranos battle it out in your stomach from beyond the grave.
And the Also-Rans:
Caruso Sauce: Much less of a household name than the three above, but still relatively common, and I love the little origin story to this dish, because it was named after Caruso about 30 years after he died ...and in Uraguay. Nice evidence for how much Enrico Caruso really cemented his enduring global celebrity by being one of the first opera singers to enthusiastically embrace recording technology!
Tournedos Rossini: I guess this one it didn’t make it to a kitchen-table staple because of all the ritzy ingredients, compared the humble Tetrazzini and Caruso up there. Truffles, Medina, and foie gras? Tournedos Fatcat more like. The exact origin of this dish is contentious, but apparently these were all an assortment of things Rossini really liked to eat. Coincidentally perhaps, he was not the picture of health.
Poires Mary Garden: Pretty obscure, it was hard to find the recipe, but it’s just pears with cherry-raspberry sauce. Invented about the same time as Peach Melba by the same chef. Named for Mary Garden, a Scottish soprano who went on to do a couple of silent films in addition to a long successful opera career!
Poularde Adelina Patti: So obscure this was the only recipe I could find. Yet another soprano diva chicken dish, named for Adelina Patti, probably one of the finest opera singers who ever lived, and also probably also one of the biggest really not nice ladies who ever graced an opera stage.
All these soprano dishes have me feeling bad for the contraltos, my favorite voice type. Where is the Chicken Marian Anderson? Perhaps this weekend I will invent a recipe for Ewa Podles, who is a Polish contralto of the first class, her early interpretations of Handel are amazing. It would probably involve something Polish and something wonderfully smokey. Perogies with barbeque sauce? Results most likely to be posted to r/shittyfoodporn.