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.

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.

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 you have a look at all the recipes in the “Fruit” category on this blog, you’re going to notice that most of my fruit recipes feature apples. I just did the math, and as of today, we’re talking 62.5% of my fruit recipes. Here’s the reason why: when we moved into our current home in Hamilton, we didn’t realize that the giant tree in our backyard was in fact a very prolific old apple tree!

August is my unofficial Apple Month, when I try to keep as many apples out of the compost bin as possible. Do you want cooking apples next summer? Let me know if you do and they are yours! This Apple Leather recipe is from one of the Victorian cookbooks that I turn to again and again, Miss Leslie's Directions for Cookery from 1851.

To make fine pippen Tarts is a handwritten recipe from an early 1700s English manuscript in the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. It’s a recipe I’ve wagered in the battle to use up apples from the gargantuan apple tree in my back yard, and also a recipe that was interpreted in 2017 on the food history blog Cooking in the Archives.

On this blog, Dr. Marissa Nicosia recreates Early Modern recipes from 1500- 1800 for the contemporary kitchen, and she is also one of my most enthusiastic supporters on twitter! You’ll find Cooking in the Archives at https://rarecooking.com/ and on twitter and Instagram as @rare_cooking.

Besides the fact that Apple Butter is very delicious, I had an ulterior motive for making this recipe. I made Apple Butter because I wanted to make use of the discarded apples from the historic cooking classes that I taught at Nelles Manor Museum this fall.

Our Apple Butter recipe is found in Miss Leslie's Directions for Cookery, published in Philedelphia in 1851. Making Apple Butter is much, much easier in our era because we're able to cook down our apples in a slow cooker, without having to stir the apples " nearly all the time with a stick" in a kettle suspended over a fire!

Apple Frazes are a tasty apple pancake from the 18th-century classic: The art of cookery made plain and easy by Hannah Glasse. Through making this recipe, I've learned that adding little bit of sherry to your pancake batter is a very good idea!

I had the pleasure of frying my Apple Frazes over an open hearth built in the 1780s at Nelles Manor Museum (www.nellesmanor.ca), where I'll be teaching Open Hearth Cooking Classes. The September Classes have sold out, but we've added a third class on November 4^th at 1:00. At this class we'll be making the same Autumn recipes as the classes in September, only at the end of the Fall season rather than the beginning.

In my backyard is a giant apple tree, so for as long as I call this house my home, you'll find apple recipes on this food history blog this time of year.

Apple Bread is surprisingly not sweet. This bread is very flavourful thanks to a longer prefermentation process and the apples add a little je ne sais quoi to the complex flavour of this moist bread. I took both the very large loaves this recipe yielded to a gathering along with some butter. I thought that there would be leftovers and there most definitely were not!