Rhubarb Cups

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Rhubarb Cups

Rhubarb Cups are a simple, three-ingredient, make-ahead dessert from the 1847 cookbook The Lady’s Receipt Book by Eliza Leslie. Rhubarb Cups would be a perfect dish to add to your recipe rotation if you’ve got a freezer full of stewed rhubarb! I have to admit, they don’t end up being the most visually appealing dessert, but what they lack in aesthetics, they make up for in taste. The cups themselves are very mild, but this recipe also includes a zippy and flavourful butter, sugar and lemon hard sauce. As an added bonus, in this blog post you’ll find out where you can find rhubarb growing wild in Banff National Park.

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Short or Flaky Pastry

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Short or Flaky Pastry

Every year in March for my blogging anniversary, I make a different Cheese Straw recipe and this year’s Cheese Straws called for a pre-prepared batch of pastry. I searched for a pastry recipe from the same time period and found Short or Flaky Pastry in the 1901 classic The Settlement Cook Book.

Short or Flaky Pastry is a puff pastry recipe that’s easy to pull off and it does live up to its name by producing a pastry that’s both flaky and light. It calls for half butter and half lard, but it is also delicious when made with only butter. This is definitely a recipe that I’m going to look up on my own website when I need to make some puff pastry fast.

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Cheese Straws

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Cheese Straws

It’s my anniversary today! Three years ago today, I was furiously completing my first blog post, Cayenne Cheeses, which still is one of my favourite historic recipes. Each year ever since, I’ve made another baked cheesy recipe with cheese, butter, flour, salt and cayenne pepper in the ingredient list.

This Cheese Straw recipe is from the 1903 Good Housekeeping Everyday Cook Book and it’s very simple to put together. Grate cheese and season with salt and cayenne pepper. Sprinkle on top of thin strips of pastry and bake. It’s an excellent recipe for making a delicious snack from the extra pastry when you’re making a pie. You could also make or buy pastry if you want a larger batch. They taste quite more-ish, so you might very well want to make pastry specifically for this recipe!

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Cup Cookies

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Cup Cookies

Cup Cookies are a mild lemon sugar cookie with an almond, sugar & cinnamon topping sprinkled on top. This recipe is from Aunt Babette’s Cook Book from 1889, and its leavening agent is Ammonium Bicarbonate or Baker’s Ammonia.

I’ve chosen this recipe because for the last 2 years, my Ammonia Cakes recipe has been my most popular blog post by far. That shows me that there’s an appetite for information about and recipes using Baker’s Ammonia, but I’m torn, because Ammonia Cakes is not a delicious recipe at all! I had to make a second recipe, Icing for Cake to save the Ammonia Cakes so they were edible and they didn’t end up in the compost.

Cup Cookies are a much more delicious ammonium bicarbonate cookie. Stick with this recipe for the deliciousness, but head over to Ammonia Cakes for background and history about Baker’s Ammonia.

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Fillets of Chickens, with Bechamel-ſauce and Bread-crumbs

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Fillets of Chickens, with Bechamel-ſauce and Bread-crumbs

It’s been a while since I made Fillets of Chickens, with Bechamel-ſauce and Bread-crumbs at Nelles Manor Museum. I made it twice in the summer of 2019, which was the last time that I was able to teach an open hearth cooking class there. The recipe’s from the 1781 cookbook The Practice of Modern Cookery by George Dalrymple and at this class, we made recipes that would have been popular when the house was newly constructed using fresh garden produce and some newly purchased open hearth cooking implements.

Keep reading after the recipe to learn about some open hearth cookery techniques using a salamander and a couple of different styles of reflector ovens. I also share some ideas for creating DIY reflector ovens using common items that you can use in front of a fireplace or campfire.

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Peppermint Whipped Cream

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Peppermint Whipped Cream

Along with Marshmallow Mint Sauce, Peppermint Whipped Cream is one of the suggested toppings for the Chocolate Mousse recipe from the 1927 cookbook Electric Refrigerator Recipes and Menus. With only two ingredients, Peppermint Whipped Cream is tasty and easy to make and is a delightful topping for the frozen mousse.

Written by Alice Bradley of the Boston Cooking School, Electric Refrigerator Recipes and Menus was a helpful resource for housewives who welcomed a General Electric Monitor Top Refrigerator into their kitchen. The Monitor Top was the first household electric refrigerator that was affordable for the middle class and it was advertised as a healthier, time-saving and money-saving option over ice refrigerators.

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Marshmallow Mint Sauce

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Marshmallow Mint Sauce

Marshmallow Mint Sauce is found in the Ice Cream Sauces chapter of the 1927 cookbook Electric Refrigerator Recipes and Menus, which contained “Recipes prepared especially for the General Electric Refrigerator”. It’s a gooey, refreshing and flavourful dessert sauce that pairs wonderfully with the Chocolate Mousse recipe from the same cookbook. It has a very sweet and candy-like flavour that I really enjoyed despite not having much of a sweet tooth.

Keep scrolling after the recipe to read a brief history of the marshmallow and find out the roots of some popular marshmallow recipes.

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Chocolate Mousse

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Chocolate Mousse

This Chocolate Mousse recipe comes from Electric Refrigerator Recipes and Menus, a 1927 cookbook written by Miss Alice Bradley that was put out by General Electric to help housewives learn how to use their newfangled kitchen appliance. It is mild and refreshing, but my batch ended up being more similar to an ice cream than a mousse (probably because my freezer is much more efficient than a 1927 “chilling unit”). Still delicious, anyhow. Top with Marshmallow Mint Sauce or Peppermint Whipped Cream from the same cookbook. Chocolate Mousse is frozen in a “refrigerator pan”, so you’ll find out what that is and I’ve also written a rant about the appalling baker’s chocolate square fiasco of 2013.

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Apple Sauce Cake

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Apple Sauce Cake

Apple Sauce Cake is a dairy-free apple & spice loaf, which has a dense but moist consistency. This recipe contains walnuts and raisins, but you could certainly swap in nuts, seeds and dried fruits of your choice. This recipe is from the 1946 cookbook A Modern Kitchen Guide, which was published in Chicago, but distributed by Farmer’s Advocate magazine based out of London, Ontario, Canada. Have a read to find out more about this free cookbook/promotional vehicle that ended up in kitchens all over Canada and the United States.

My original idea was that I’d use Boiled Cider Apple Sauce in this recipe, but that apple sauce was too delicious and it didn’t last until I made this cake! In my opinion, the best way to eat Apple Sauce Cake is to eat it with a fork (it is crumbly), topped with natural peanut butter and Apple Butter.

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Boiled Cider Apple Sauce

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Boiled Cider Apple Sauce

Welcome to the annual Apple Season here on my blog! From late July to the end of August, we are barraged with apples from the apple tree that hangs over into our back yard, so I usually do a couple of apple recipes this time of the year.

I’ll bet you can guess the ingredients in Boiled Cider Apple Sauce: apples and apple cider. This 1877 recipe from Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping creates a flavourful apple sauce with no added sugar or spices.

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Fresh Raspberry Water

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Fresh Raspberry Water

Freſh Raſpberry Water is a refreshing beverage with a zip. We made it at a historic cooking class that I taught last July at Nelles Manor Museum and I remember that it was very satisfying to drink after cooking over an open hearth on a hot summer day. It’s a simple recipe. Remove the raspberry seeds with a sieve, then add lemon juice, white sugar and water. I pulled this gem of a recipe from the 1790 cook book The Complete Confectioner by Frederick Nutt.

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Strawberry-fritters

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Strawberry-fritters

Strawberry-fritters is one of the recipes that we made at an open hearth cooking class that I taught at Nelles Manor Museum last summer. This class featured scrumptious seasonal recipes made with garden produce and recipes from the late 1700s, when the home was newly built by the Nelles family.

I learned when I made Apple Frazes that adding a bit of alcohol to your batter is a good idea, so I made a batch for a socially distanced outdoor Canada Day gathering. They taste like fried strawberries and white wine and I liked them so much that I wanted to make the recipe again here on this blog and share it with all of you!

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