Cider Cake is a simple coffee cake spiced with apple cider, brown sugar, cinnamon and cloves. This recipe is found in The Frugal Housewife’s Manual, which is the first cookbook compiled and published in the English language in Canada in 1840. I tested out this Cider Cake recipe when I was preparing for an Open Hearth Baking class that was to be taught at Nelles Manor Museum in Grimsby, Ontario in early April 2020. An interesting note is that The Frugal Housewife’s Manual was compiled by someone with the initials A. B., who lived in Grimsby, Ontario at the time. Conceivably, this A.B. and the Nelles family who lived at Nelles Manor would have been acquainted with each other since the both lived in the same small community.

This was one of the mid-1800s recipes that I would be preparing using Nelles Manor’s Open Hearth with the class participants using the Dutch Oven. Other open hearth baking recipes would have made by using other open hearth baking implements, such as cheese straws fried on the griddle, coconut macaroons in the reflector oven, and fritters fried on a trivet. Keep an eye out in this blog for a description of how I used the dutch oven to bake the Cider Cake, and future blog posts for how-tos for all the open hearth baking techniques I’ve mentioned.

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.

Hot Crabby Punch is a warm mulled apple cider and cranberry juice punch with cinnamon, cloves and allspice. The recipe’s got such a cute name because it’s from the 1977 The ideals Junior Chef Cookbook, which is from the first cookbook I’ve ever owned, given to me by my aunt and uncle on my 7^th birthday.

I made Hot Crabby Punch for my family when we celebrated Christmas together at my brother’s house. They seemed to like having Hot Crabby Punch around, so maybe making mulled warm beverages will become a new Christmas tradition. The most sound-bite friendly review was coined by my niece: “Tastes like pie!” I was told “That punch is good, Julie” a few times, “It would be good with vodka” and also “I don’t normally like warm beverages that much, but I liked it”.

If a sweet scone and a cookie got married and had a baby, that baby would be Albany Cakes. However you classify Albany Cakes, this sweet bit of bakery with cinnamon and rose water flavours is deelish! This was another recipe that we made at the cooking classes that I taught this autumn at Nelles Manor Museum in Grimsby. Our Albany Cakes recipe comes from The Frugal Housewife's Manual, published in Toronto in 1840, but written by a mysterious resident of Grimsby who likely would have known the Nelles family.

These Shrewsbury Cakes are one of first recipes that I tested out for the Open Hearth Cooking Classes that I'm teaching at Nelles Manor in Grimsby, Ontario in September.

They are crisp & buttery, and the flavour of caraway seeds balances out the sweetness of these cookies. Shrewsbury Cake is from the first English-language cookbook that was both compiled & printed in Canada. The Frugal Housewife's Manual was published in Toronto in 1840, but the cookbook author is credited as “A. B. of Grimsby”. I love this connection to the Nelles family, since they likely would have known this mysterious A. B. who wrote the book.