Straight to the recipe Mrs Beeton’s recipe Trifle is built on a layer of sponge cake. Since I have used Mrs Beeton‘s recipe for trifle from the Book of Household Management (1861, it was logical to use her recipe for sponge cake too. She even states explicitly that ‘leftover’ sponge cake can be used for trifle and pudding. The cake…
19th century
Sauce espagnole
Straigh to the recipe The first new historical recipe of 2018 concerns small chicken pies from nineteenth-century French cook Carême. The stuffing is seasoned with one spoonful of sauce espagnole. That will be easy, I thought, just look up what Carême has to say about this sauce and prepare it. But things were slightly more…
Carême on puff pastry and shortcrust
On this page is a short overview of what the French cook Antonin Carême (1784-1833) had to say about puff pastry and shortcrust in his book Le patissier royal (1815). He bakes his soufflés in a pie crust, that was the reason that I looked into this matter. Puff pastry There is quite a difference in making…
Ratafia
For Victorian trifle, but also excellent with tea or coffee Mrs Beeton uses two kinds of cookies with almonds in her recipe for trifle: macaroons and ratafias. Macaroons only contain sweet almonds, ratafia also contain a portion of bitter almonds. She provides recipes to make these at home in her Book of household management (recipes 1744 and 1745, on p.851…
Smoking bishop
Straight to the recipe With Seville oranges Today many people have lost all feeling for what food is seasonaland what is not. Everything is available throughout the year. The bitter or Seville orange is one of the few exceptions. Its season is short, from mid-December to February, and even then this fruit is hard to find…
The original Waldorf Salad
Straight to the recipe An American classic from the nineteenth century Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, cooks and maître d’s who served at the courts of kings and nobles set the tone in culinary developments. But this all changed with the rise of restaurants and -later- hotels. Who today knows the men or…
Cook’s Salmon Salad
Straight to the recipe Simply delicious A delicious recipe amalgamated from two nineteenth century cookbooks written by ‘kitchen maids’. In eighteenth century England the housewife or her housekeeper ruled the cookbooks, in The Netherlands it was the keukenmeid (litt. kitchen maid), which is not quite the same as the housekeeper but more a female cook. However, I will use that in the translations…
Red cabbage the Dutch way
Straight to the recipe A nineteenth-century recipe with apples and apple syrup Originally I had planned a completely different recipe for this month, but then I noticed this old-fashioned recipe for red cabbage in a Dutch cookery book from the middle of the nineteenth century: Betje, de goedkoope keukenmeid. (Betje, the Cheap Cook). It is the…
Jane Austen’s Apple Pie
Straight to the recipe Or: Plagiarism and Hackwork Who does not love apple pie? At least, good apple pie, because there are tearooms in museums or train stations where I have seen very sad, sometimes even partially defrosted prefab apple pie. Like apple sauce, apple pie is one of the basic, primeval dishes of European cuisine (here is a medieval…
Mint soufflé
Straight to the recipe The introduction to the recipe is on this page, about Antonin Carême and the history of soufflés, together with the recipe for strawberry soufflé. This recipe for mint soufflé is very long in its original version, so it got its own page. It is a soufflé à la française, which means it is…
Strawberry Soufflé
Straight to the recipe Just a puff of hot air Dessert is the triumphant closure of an elaborate dinner. It must be something special to capture the attention of the already sated eater. Hunger has long since dissappeared, all that is left is gratification of the senses. On this page is the recipe for strawberry soufflé…
Stuffed oranges
Straight to the recipe A feast for the eye This recipe is from the great Antonin Carême, the Frenchman who started as street urchin on the streets of Paris and became a cook for kings, czars and other great persons. More information on Carême is on the page with the recipe for soufflé. And like the…
Fish curry from Mauritius
Straight to the recipe “You ate all the dodo’s!” I’ve heard that remark several times in the summer of 2006 during my vacation on Mauritius. It was said with a smile, by friendly people, but still … Yes, I am Dutch, and “we” Dutch people are responsible for the extinction of that peculiar flightless bird…
To make a trifle
Straight to the recipe Mrs Beeton’s calorie bomb Our Christmas dinner from 2011 was themed Austen and Dickens. The recipe on this page was the dessert: trifle. An enjoyable dish to prepare, but a veritable mountain of sugar and liquor at the close of the meal. The dish can be prepared almost completely in advance;…
Rhubarb, the reverse tomato
Two recipes for early summer Straight to the recipe Rhubarb is a culinary eccentric, the counterpart of the tomato. Much like the tomato is a fruit that we treat as a vegetable, the rhubarb is actually a vegetable that we treat as a fruit. However, this has only been the case since the last two…