A Ketchup Adventure--Part II

This past weekend, I heated my 20 ounces of mushrooms in the slow cooker pot, after salting them.  I started the pot on low heat, and after about an hour changed over to the "keep warm" setting.

About three hours later, there seemed to be a considerable puddle of liquid in the pot.  I dumped that liquid into a saucepan, put the mushroom onto a cloth which I placed inside a large bowl, and squeezed the mushroom through the cloth till I was only getting drops.  Like Hvitr, I ended up with about 220 ml or one cup (8 ounces) of mushroom liquid.  Then I added spices as per the recipe Hvitr used.  I tried to keep the pan on a "simmer" but even when I turned it down, it bubbled.  After 15 minutes, I strained the liquid into a bowl to cool, wetted a clean spoon in it, and tasted it. 

It tasted mostly of salt, rather the way soy sauce does, but without the sour note that I've never liked in soy sauce.  I didn't detect any of the spices, but that may be due to the amount of salt I used (I didn't really measure), and the fact that the liquid hadn't yet cooled when I tasted it.  I also failed to remove the stalks from the mushrooms; it's not yet clear what effect, if any, that might have had.  

The slow cooker worked well to heat the mushrooms for purposes of extracting the liquor, but I may want to experiment with other spice combinations.  There are a fair number of mushroom ketchup recipes on the Internet, including modern ones, and every recipe I've read so far is different.  The spices in the 18th century recipe Hvitr used are common, but others occur too, including garlic, cayenne,  nutmeg, allspice, and mustard seeds.  I have not found all of those spices in any one recipe, though some modern recipes have a very long list of ingredients (such as this one).

What all of this says to me is that there's no common factor among mushroom ketchup recipes other than the fact that your mushrooms need to be salted somewhat and given time, or heat, or both, in order for their juices to leach out before you proceed further.  To a modern cook, I'd simply say to read a bunch of mushroom ketchup recipes and pick the procedure, and the spices, that suit your needs and resources best.  As an amateur food historian, I throw up my hands and say probably every cook had a different recipe, and only a fraction of those variations made it into the cookbooks. But I suspect that the recipe Hvitr used is pretty typical for the 18th century except for the absence of nutmeg (nutmeg was a very popular spice during that period).

After I've had a chance to use my ketchup, I'll comment further.  In the meantime, I encourage my readers to experiment, and have fun.

(EDIT:  5/22/2019)  My ketchup turned out way too salty; I can't taste any other flavors.  But there's a good umami quality with the saltiness, and as a flavoring for stew it would be useful.  I should use less salt next time.

(EDIT:  5/26/2019)  On the other hand, I sauteed the squeezed mushrooms along with some fresh ones and some leeks, and the result tasted quite good!  So I'm not afraid to try this one again, sometime.  Probably I'll use less salt, and more spices.  

A Ketchup Adventure--Part I

My friend Hvitr recently blogged about making an 18th century recipe for mushroom ketchup. Her blog post about it may be found here.

It happens that I have been curious about how one makes mushroom ketchup for a while, but had not gotten around to tracking down a recipe and trying it.  Apparently the process is simple; you sprinkle salt on raw mushrooms, heat them gently, squeeze all the liquid out of them with your hands, add spices to the liquid, simmer the liquid for 15 minutes or so, and then bottle it.  

I have a slow cooker, which seems ideal for the gentle heating part.  Moreover, mushrooms are cheap and easy to find in supermarkets here, since Kennett Square, often called, with only a bit of exaggeration, the "Mushroom Capital of the World," is only about 10 miles from here.  My husband and I both love mushrooms; we may well find that this ketchup is just the thing to use for flavoring our stews and soups.

This weekend originally looked like a good time to perform such an experiment.  Until my car's alternator died on Monday, during the very last leg of our trip home from Michigan, where we had been spending a few days at a science-fiction convention.  And until the car developed an engine problem (still undiagnosed, because the mechanics won't be able to look at it until Monday at the earliest).  And until my husband discovered, while trying to install his shiny, brand-new super-computer, that his beloved desk, which he's had from childhood, is missing a leg and may be unrepairable.  Which will require a desk-shopping expedition, after his medical appointment.  On Monday, of course.

So I may not be able to get mushrooms, let alone have time to experiment with them, until sometime next week.  When I do, I'll blog about what I find.

EDIT: (5/16/2019) Got the car back yesterday and bought a bit over a pound of mushrooms for this project.  Possible ketchup making this weekend: stay tuned.

An Old Foodway Preserved

From the Colonial Williamsburg foodblog comes this interesting article observing that our Thanksgiving feast comes much closer to the way our 18th century ancestors served and thought of food.  It's a fairly short post, and well worth reading, but the following passage from it sums up the gist rather nicely:

To the modern diner a dish such as an apple pie or a custard tart would be a dessert item.  Modern folks think - first your savory then your sweet. 18th century people see no need for that distinction. They think - heavy first, then light. Thus, that apple pie goes right alongside the roasted beef and potatoes, or THE PUMPKIN PIE next to your TURKEY. That’s right!

Or to put it another way, candied yams and pumpkin pie are both sweetened vegetable dishes, so why not serve them with the main meal?

Happy New Year, since I have not said so on this blog sooner.  Hopefully, I'll be able to fit in, and write about, a food experiment or two in February.

How did the Indians "pop" corn?

One of the characteristic American foods is popcorn--a treat made by heating kernels of certain species of maize, which quickly release their stored water and turn into white, fluffy, and tasty inside-out morsels.  We're told that American Indians treated the early settlers from England to popcorn and showed them how to make it.

But how did they make it?  I didn't start to think about that until I saw the Townsend video to the left of this post.  

I thought about the different ways I've made popcorn.  

Most of the ways I've used to pop corn involved heating popcorn in oil inside a covered pot.  The very first popcorn I made was "Jiffy Pop"--sealed popcorn inside a tinfoil pieplate with a wire handle attached.  One shook this tin plate periodically while heating it over a stove burner (it had a wire handle attached).  Today's Jiffy Pop uses partially hydrogenated soybean oil, and maybe the original did as well, for all I know. "TVTime" popcorn gave you a tube containing a combination of solidified palm oil and (I think) coconut oil that could be dumped into one's own pot to heat.  Microwave popcorn works on the same principle, except the corn and solidified oils are placed inside the microwave inside a sealed paper bag.  Later I found, by experiment, that heating popcorn in just enough olive oil to cover the bottom of the pot works well too, and gives a more pleasant flavor to the finished product.  Electrical hot air poppers were invented in the 1970s, but did not become as widespread as one might expect, possibly due to the greater convenience of microwave popcorn.

But the American Indians didn't have electric hot air poppers.  They also didn't have soybean oil, coconut oil, palm oil, or olive oil--none of those plants originated in the New World.  I don't know whether they had butter, but even if they did, using too much melted butter on popcorn--let alone popping the corn in it--tends to make the final product soggy.

So what did they use?  Animal fat is a possibility, I suppose, though wild game--which is what the American Indians ate when they ate meat--isn't particularly rich in fat.

The Townsend video above suggests, and demonstrates, a plausible answer, which it credits to a pamphlet published by, of all people, Benjamin Franklin.

According to Ben, popcorn can be made by heating the corn in a dry kettle filled with clean sand or salt!  First you heat the kettle with the sand or salt in it.  When the sand or salt is hot enough, you stir the popcorn into it, continuing the stirring until the corn is mostly covered by the sand/salt.  Continue heating the filled kettle.  The heat in the sand or salt will transmit itself to the corn, popping it.  When you judge the popping process to be done (judging in part by how many kernels pop through to the surface), you remove the pot from the heat, filter out the sand (or salt) with a fine-mesh metal sieve or, failing that, a wide-mouthed basket.

The advantage of this method is that you don't need a lid to confine the corn--the sand or salt works well for that.  And if you use salt, it's not a problem if some of it sticks to the finished product (unless you're watching your sodium intake).
 
I enjoyed this tiny exercise in attempting to deduce how the first Americans might have made popcorn.  It's a good illustration of how one has to consider technologies that would have been available to a culture for cooking in attempting to deduce how foods were made.  

18th Century American Cuisine

From Jas. Townsend & Son, a shop that sells clothing and other useful items to 18th century reenactors, comes a series of videos on 17th and 18th century American cuisine. 

Each video demonstrates how to make a particular item from a period cookbook. The embedded video here shows the viewer how to make fried chicken 18th century style, with a vinegar marinade. Both are recipes I wouldn't mind making sometime. Other videos in the series include, "1792 Apple Dumpling", "1796 Pound Cakes", "Pain Perdu--Historical French Toast", "Pemmican--The Ultimate Survival Food", "Orange Fool" (an 18th century custard), and "Switchel--18th Century Energy Drink." 

For people who find period cookbooks to be weirdly typeset or otherwise hard to follow, this series looks like an easier entry point into the mysteries of Colonial American cuisine. If you want an easy way to find more of Jas. Townsend's videos, this page collects approximately three years of them. Or you can check out the "Townsends" channel on YouTube. 

N.B.: Apologies to anyone who tried to view this post yesterday! I was having trouble with formatting this entry, and took it down planning to finish revising it. 

EDIT: (8/21/2017) I don't know why the video is not showing up on the post today--it shows for me in editing view, and I didn't change anything in the post until AFTER I noticed the problem. Perhaps it's a Blogger bug and will be fixed shortly. this page collects three years of them. Or you can check out the "Townsends" channel on YouTube.

EDIT: (8/24/2017)  The problem appears to be a bug in my html that I can't figure out how to fix. The post will have to look like this for now.

EDIT:  (8/25/2017)  Solved the problem by changing to a more modern theme for the blog. 

Oldest Surviving Pretzel!

 From the "Hortus Deliciarum" c.  1190*

Pretzels from Nancy (Jacob Foppens van Es) 17th c.*

Modern Philadelphia soft pretzels*

A few weeks ago, in Regensberg, a city in Bavaria, archaeologists made a fascinating discovery--the burnt but otherwise intact remains of a pretzel from the 18th century.  You can read about the discovery and see a photograph of the 250-year-old pretzel chunk here. 

Interestingly, the pretzel was not the only baked good found at this site.  The archaeologists also found a bread roll and a croissant in a similarly burnt but recognizable  condition. They theorize that these items must have failed  the baker's quality control standards and were consequently tossed into the fire to dispose of them.  Fortunately for archaeology, the long-term effect was to preserve these rejects instead.

The origins of the pretzel go back to the Middle Ages, when monks supposedly twisted salted bread dough into a shape resembling praying hands and baked them as a reward for children.  Supposedly the name derives from the German word Bresel which allegedly derives from the Latin word meaning "little arms" or "having branches like arms" (no two sources I've looked at on line cite the same Latin word or gives the same definition).  No one is quite certain of the exact circumstances of the pretzel's invention (which monastic order was involved or the country in which said order was located, for example), but the Wikipedia article on the subject lists some of the more notable and interesting theories.

The original pretzels were more like today's "soft" pretzels--breadlike instead of crunchy.  The modern-style hard pretzel is credited to Pennsylvania, particularly to the Lancaster County region near me where many Amish and other German-speaking farmers settled.  The frustrated baker whose pretzel the archaeologists discovered may have missed making the discovery of a lifetime by tossing out that pretzel, though his act will help contribute, in a small way, to our knowledge of the history of food.

*    All photographs in this article from Wikimedia Commons.

"American Cookery"

Last weekend, I bought a paperback facsimile edition of a cookbook originally published in 1796 entitled, "American Cookery":  or, the Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry and Vegetables, and the Best Modes of Making Puff-Pastes, Pies, Tarts, Puddings, Custards and Preserves, and All Sorts of Cakes, From the Imperial Plumb to Plain Cake.  Adopted to This Country and All Grades of Life".  The book was written by a woman named Amelia Simmons, "An American Orphan."  It  is plain, both from her grandiose title and her Preface that she meant to write a truly American cookbook, one that took British food traditions and adapted them to life in America.

I think she succeeded.  I am convinced of that point primarily because some of the recipes are oddly modern, even familiar, in content.  Consider, for example, her first recipe for pound cake (quoted here without the curious f-shaped characters used for medial "s" in period):

One pound sugar, one pound butter, one pound flour, ten eggs, rose water one gill, spices to your taste; watch it well, it will bake in a slow oven in 15 minutes.

Except for the rose water (a survival from the medieval period), this is  modern pound cake--which, as Wikipedia points out, got its name from the fact that its basic form required one pound each of flour, sugar, eggs, and butter. Even in Ms. Simmons's time, however, there were variants with differing amounts of these basic ingredients--she provides three alternative recipes.

Ms. Simmons is also interested in the proper preparation of meats, particularly roasts, and these sound even more modern, including her recipe for stuffed turkey ("one pound soft wheat bread, 3 ounces beef suet,  3 eggs, a little sweet thyme, sweet marjoram, pepper and salt, and some add a gill of wine;  fill the bird therewith and sew up, hang down to a steady solid fire, basting frequently with butter and water, and roast until a steam emits from the breast....").

To be sure, there are modern foodstuffs that do not make an appearance in Ms. Simmons's work.  There are no french fries, no green salads, few "side dishes" in the modern sense. On the other hand, she pairs roast beef with potatoes--a common dish in America, even now, and includes cayenne pepper in a few dishes (notably her recipe for cooked turtle, and her "turtle style" calf's head).

Ms. Simmons's little cookbook, written a little over 200 years ago, is true to its word.  It really describes American cuisine, even now.  That makes it more than a historic curiosity; it provides genuine insight into the American dietary heritage.  It has given me much to ponder for its $9.95 USD cover price.

EDIT:  I forgot to mention the impressive amount of sugar in many of the recipes.  The pound cake recipe is not atypical of the ratio of sugar to starch to fat in many of the cake, pudding, and cream recipes in Ms. Simmons's book.

Revolutionary Dining

Today, I had the opportunity to dine with one of our clients.  A colleague of mine selected the restaurant:  City Tavern.

City Tavern operates in a rebuilt American Revolutionary War era tavern, the original of which was a nexus for social and political activity at that time.  The building was damaged by fire and demolished in the mid-19th century, but was rebuilt in time for the Bicentennial, thanks to the discovery of a copy of the original building plans; the decor is authentic, so far as I can tell, and the tableware includes pewter water goblets and tureens as well as china and glass.  The staff wear better-than-average (but far for museum-quality) versions of mid-18th century costume, and the menu includes many 18th century dishes.  I had the Pepperpot soup, a kind of spicy beef-and-cabbage soup that looked scary but tasted wonderful.  The bread basket thoughtfully provided by the restaurant included some small, delicious scone-like biscuits that were identified as cinnamon pecan biscuits and supposedly were made from a recipe by Thomas Jefferson.

It would have been nice to linger, particularly since it was a gray rainy day, but all of us had other places to go and tasks to perform, so we parted after a pleasant meal.  Although I've had better and more exciting cooking elsewhere, City Tavern will give you good hearty food that at least evokes the general air of the period.  Its prices are at least reasonable (about $10-$25 for an entree) for a "nice" city restaurant in the Northeastern part of the United States.  It makes a nice start to a ramble around the historic parts of the Old City area of Philadelphia.

EDITED after the fact to correct typos and refine language. (Most notable change; the original City Tavern was demolished in the mid-19th century, not the mid-18th century as the post originally read.)