HFF Challenge 2: Soups and Sauces

This challenge I completed at work. There are some pretty obvious pros and cons when it comes to working on an HFF challenge when you work at a living history museum. Pros: it ups the authenticity as I'm working with a hearth or a cast iron stove and totally period correct cookware, ingredients, etc; it's freeeeeeeeee because it's all the Museum's ingredients. Cons: Because it's a living history museum, I can't exactly pull out a proper camera and snap tons of pictures of the process and everything; the dish may not turn out as well as it might if I made it at home, because although to a lot of people it may seem like my main job is "cook", it's actually "docent." Don't get me wrong, I like to have an audience and I get very sad and lonely when people don't come to visit me, but sometimes you sacrifice a great demo because you're too busy talking to visitors and whatever you're making doesn't turn out.

For the second challenge, my entry is the oyster soup from the Williamsburg Art of Cookery. It's actually a more modern compilation of 18th century receipts, but it was printed in 1938, so I'm still safely in our time-frame. Unfortunately, I can't post the receipt, as I don't have my own copy of the cook book, and I didn't actually make oyster soup.

What? How could I enter oyster soup and not have made oyster soup?

When I looked in our cupboards, I saw that I didn't have enough oysters to make the receipt properly. In that same cupboard, however, was plenty of canned salmon to use instead. So, rather than using oysters in the receipt, I simply switched in salmon.

I hashed up the salmon until it looked exactly like a large amount of cat food, seasoned it with salt, pepper, mace and cloves (the mace and cloves are extra; I never could control myself around a spice cupboard). I heated up the salmon and....waited for someone to bring me cream. I had asked a couple people to help me out with that, since for some reason the kitchen I was working in did not have any kind of milk product save cheese and butter. I ended up having to go and borrow cream from another kitchen during my lunch break. Upon my return, I mixed in the cream, added some flour, and put it back over the fire. It was a remarkably simple soup to make, really, except for the lack of cream. I put the creamy white soup in a tureen, garnished it with some lovage, boxwood, and dry parsley, and popped it under a fly screen for visitors to admire.

Challenge: Soups and Sauces
The Recipe: Oyster Soup, Williamsburg Art of Cookery
Date/Year and Region: 18th century, American colonies (collected and printed 1938)
How Did You Make It?: Followed the recipe in the book, only changing oysters to salmon and adding in mace and cloves.
Time To Complete: Once again, I don't know. It's hard to keep track of things like that when you're working during a special event.
Total Cost: $0 for me
How Successful Was It?: The only successful thing I did that day................................
How Accurate Is It?: I'm not entirely sure about that one actually, because of my major substitution, but pretty accurate I hope.

Join me next for challenge 3, Today in History!

HFF Challenge 1: Literary Foods (Part Two)

Happy Birthday to Me!

I had really wanted to get the challenge done as soon as possible after my last (first) post, but you know how time slips by and all of a sudden my mother was asking me what I wanted for my birthday dessert. What better opportunity than today to make up the pie and have my birthday dessert and the first challenge of the HFF all in one?

I got my five d’Anjou pears pared (haha), sliced, and chored. Generally the pears are left whole and simply pared and chored with the stems cut off so that they can stand up in the coffin (pie crust) but I’m making a slight change. Since my main era of historic cooking is the mid-19^th century, we’ll just say that the recipe has been adapted for modern times. The recipe also calls for the pears to be poached in a white wine, sugar, and water liquid, but since this is only my nineteenth birthday and not my twenty-first, I had to make do with 

regular old water and sugar.

Poaching the pears in Sugar-Water.

As the pears were poaching, I preheated the oven and got to work on my pie crust. When the recipe was originally written, pie crusts or coffins as they were called, were much more of a cooking vessel than a part of the dish. Oftentimes they were elaborately decorated, as we eat with our eyes as much as our mouths, regardless of era. Most of the time when I do a standing crust pie like this one, I go with the recipe for pie crust that James Townsend gives in his blog Savoring the Past. However, this crust is the harsh epitome of a coffin. It’s not particularly flavorful, it’s a huge amount of flour, and it’s much better suited to savory pies when it is going to be eaten as part of the dish. So, my pie crust is the no-fail pie crust that I copied into my trusty Mead Composition from my mother’s trusty Mead Composition.

That big fat one on the left is hers, I haven't been collecting favorite recipes as long as she has!

The pie crust recipe makes 4 9-inch crusts, or enough for two regular two-crust pies. Standing crusts are like the deep dish pizza of the pie world, except that since my form for molding them is a spring-form cake pan, I think my pies are more deep-dish than even the deepest deep-dish you could find in Chicago. Normally I would halve the recipe, but for this special occasion, and to follow along with history as much as I can aside from my alterations, I wanted to add some pretty decoration to the crust. Cue my historic culinary hero, Ivan Day. On his blog Food History Jottings he notes some decorative pie tops found in a really, really old Austrian cookbook, namely the popular lattice pattern we're familiar with today. My pie top isn't nearly as impressive as some of these (another day I’ll make even more crust and really deck out a pie). It’s a really simple diamond shaped lattice, done by two’s and alternating sides instead of weaving them. The effect (were my attempt not so clumsy) is that it creates an illusion of depth. Then, because I don’t know when to stop when I’m ahead, I added on my initial, L, in the middle.

I think I poured too much of the poaching liquid in because it came out of the crust as soon as I cut into it, even after it had baked the full time, still, it came out beautifully and tasted delicious, similar to a mild apple pie. We ate about half of it, just the four of us (mom, stepdad, mom’s friend, and I).

The Date/Year and Region: 1623, England

How did you make it?: I followed the recipe (with a very few alterations) mentioned in my last post. The alterations that I made were: a different pie crust than would have likely been used in the 17^th century, no wine in the poaching liquid, sliced pears rather than whole, powdered spices rather than whole.

Time to Complete: Oh goodness, I forgot to time it! Well, it took maybe about two hours from prep-work to baking.

Total Cost: I purchased the pears but everything else we had on hand, so $4.99 (5 d’Anjou pears from Wegman’s Supermarket)

How Successful Was It?: I’d say about an 8 out of 10. I didn't have quite enough crust to do the decorative top that I wanted to, there was too much poaching fluid that didn't cook out, and it made the bottom crust a little soggy. 

How Accurate is It?: For 1623, probably only moderately, due to the alterations that I made and the fact that pears aren't actually in season for my area right now.

I'm so excited for the next challenge!