Dining with the Victorians: A Delicious History by Kay Emma

Dining with the Victorians: A Delicious History by Kay Emma

Author:Kay, Emma
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Amberley Publishing
Published: 2015-10-13T16:00:00+00:00


Recipes

Cheesecake (like that served at Vauxhall gardens)

This is actually an American recipe, but cheesecake recipes were so adulterated, mixed, morphed and influenced by numerous cultures over the centuries, that there was never one model recipe.

The basis of cheesecakes is professedly the curd of milk as turned for cheese, but many are made entirely without it. The following recipe is much approved: Take the curd of eight quarts of new milk; rub the curd in a coarse cloth till quite free from whey, then work into it three quarters of a pound of butter, three biscuits, and an equal quantity of bread crumbs, a little salt, and such spices as you choose, finely powdered. Beat ten eggs (half the whites) with three quarters of a pound of fine loaf sugar, a wineglass full of brandy or ratafia, and a pint of rich cream. Having well mixed all these ingredients, rub them with the hand through a coarse hair sieve; then add a pound of currants rubbed, in a coarse cloth and picked and an ounce of candied citron, cut as small as possible. Line tin patty pans with rich puff paste, put in the mixture, and either entirely cover with paste or put on only bars or leaves. They will take about twenty minutes to bake in rather a quick oven. By substituting half a pound of sweet almonds for currants, and half an ounce of bitter, blanched and beaten to a paste, almond cheesecakes may be made, or lemon orange cheesecakes, by substituting for the currants two or three candied lemons or oranges, pounded in a mortar.30

One of the dishes on the 1895 Harrod’s Stores menu was a dozen ‘Best Whitstable Natives’. Whitstable Natives or oysters were considered some of the best in the world and still are I believe. Hints for the Table, an 1866 book of helpful cookery advice and recipes, recommends the best way to cultivate oysters, by placing the live molluscs flat side down in a tub filled with water and salt. The water should be changed daily and the oysters ‘fed’ with a handful of flour, barley-meal, or oatmeal and wheaten-bran. After five or six days, it was said the oysters would be nice and fat and ready to eat.

The Georgian author and politician Jonathan Swift recorded a recipe for boiling oysters within the long series of letters that he compiled over the years:



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