Some like it in the pot, nine days old

Last month I took the Regency Culinary World class offered by the fabulous Delilah Marvelle through the Beau Monde Academe program. If you are interested in food and ever have the chance to take this class, do it! I learned so much and Delilah was incredibly helpful about answering questions. Our big assignment for the class was to recreate a Regency dish. I like cooking, so I decided to do a full dinner. My menu: pease porridge, fried sausages and apples, onion pie, and potato cakes for dessert.

Me in my Agnes and the Hitman apron.

I took the recipes from Hannah Glasse's The art of cookery, made plain and easy (1774).  It's actually a pretty straightforward cookbook compared to some others I've seen from the same era; her confectionery book, which I read for Sweet Disorder, is great too.  And read her Wikipedia page, it's fascinating! (Sample: "In 1760 Ann Cook published Professed Cookery, which contained a 68-page attack on Hannah Glasse and her work. Ann Cook lived in Hexham, and was reacting to an alleged campaign of intimidation and persecution by [Hannah's half-brother] Lancelot Allgood.")

As you can see, I chose a menu that wasn't too daring, but that were still flavor combinations I wasn't too familiar with.  (I had no desire to, say, jug a hare, although I'd love to eat one if someone else did all the work!)


To make pease porridge.
         TAKE a quart of green pease, put to them a quart of water, a bundle of dried mint, and a little salt. Let them boil till the pease are quite tender; then put in some beaten pepper, a piece of butter as big as a walnut, rolled in flour, stir it all together, and let it boil a few minutes; then add two quarts of milk, let it boil a quarter of an hour, take out the mint and serve it up.
 
I've never seen milk used in pea soup before!  I chose this one first of all because of the nursery rhyme, and second of all because all the other pea soups required me to strain/rub them through a cloth.  That's a lot of work, and I really enjoy pea soup where you can taste the peas.  Fancy Regency cooking was VERY into smooth textures, I guess because it showed how much labor you could afford.  I did a half-recipe of this and ended up having to add quite a bit more water to keep the peas from sticking--just make sure you still end up with something very thick.  I added the full quart of milk and at first thought it would be far too much, but I just let it simmer for half an hour instead of 15 minutes, and it thickened up beautifully.

The flavor was a little unexpected, but actually quite good.  It was even better cold the next day--I haven't tried it in the pot nine days old however!  I guess when it was kept continuously hot in the kettle over the hearth, the risk level for food poisoning was...acceptable?


Fried sausages.
         TAKE half a pound of sausages and six apples; slice four about as thick as a crown, cut the other two in quarters, fry them with the sausages of a fine light brown, lay the sausages in the middle of the dish and the apples round. Garnish with the quartered apples.

          Stewed cabbage and sausages fried is a good dish; then heat cold peas-pudding in the pan, lay it in the dish and the sausages round, heap the pudding in the middle and lay the sausages all round thick up, edge ways, and one in the middle at length.

Peas-pudding is peas and butter boiled into a pudding shape by tying them up in a cloth while cooking, evidently.  Not very exciting.  I don't really understand these instructions for presentation, either--do you end up with sausages sticking up out of your pudding like weird little phalluses?  Anyway, I opted to just go with the sausages and apples--5 sausages plus 3 good-sized apples worked out well for my dinner for four, although I had to split it into two frying pans.

I wasn't able to find even remotely authentic sausages--everything at the supermarket was either Italian or German or standard breakfast sausage, which might actually be authentic but I'm not a huge fan and I already know what it tastes like so it wouldn't be expanding my horizons.  In the end I just went with my beloved bratwurst.  It took a little over half an hour on medium heat to get them cooked through, which was also the perfect amount of time for the apples.  I will definitely be making this again!  It was totally delicious and of course very easy.  I used my favorite kind of apple, Cameos, and the flavor combination was awesome.

To make an onion pye.
         WASH and pare some potatoes, and cut them in slices, peel some onions, cut them in slices, pare some apples and slice them, make a good crust, cover your dish, lay a quarter of a pound of butter all over, take a quarter of an ounce of mace beat fine, a nutmeg grated, a tea-spoonful of beaten pepper, three tea-spoonfuls of salt, mix all together, strew some over the butter, lay a layer of potatoes, a layer of onion, a layer of apples, and a layer of eggs, and so on till you have filled your pye, strewing a little of the seasoning between each layer, and a quarter of a pound of butter in bits, and six spoonfuls of water. Close your pye and bake it an hour and a half. A pound of potatoes, a pound of onions, a pound of apples, and twelve eggs will do.

I wasn't sure if "eggs" meant raw, or hard-boiled and crumbled.  I asked Delilah, who said definitely hard-boiled, and that for a pie like this oftentimes the different filling ingredients would be cooked in advance to ensure even cooking.  So I also sliced and roasted the potatoes on a cookie tray.

Mace is a spice derived from the dried covering of the nutmeg fruit seed; they didn't sell any at my grocery store so I just used regular old nutmeg instead.

Here's the crust recipe I used:

A cold crust.
         TO three pounds of flour rub in a pound and a half of butter, break in two eggs, and make it up with cold water.

Four cups of flour, two sticks of butter, and an egg would be plenty for a two-crust pie (I made a half-recipe even though in my heart I knew better and wound up with WAY too much dough).  On Delilah's advice I cooked the bottom crust alone for 15 minutes at 375 (actually, 400 because my oven runs cold, but whatever).  I then put it in the fridge until it was cool, filled it up with my layers, rolled out the top crust, and baked it for about half an hour at 350 (you can tell when it's done because the crust will start to turn golden; once it's completely lost that doughy, translucent look, you're done!).  

The crust came out nice and flaky, and it was super easy to roll, too, maybe because of the egg.  Next time I might chill the bottom crust before baking and then the whole pie once it's assembled, to see if I can get just a little more flake, but it's really not necessary.  I halved the recommended amounts and still ended up with a lot of leftover filling stuff, I think next time I'll start with one large potato, half a large apple, half a large onion, and four hard-boiled eggs.  But I just made an egg-salad-potato-avocado sandwich with the leftovers the next day (so awesome, will eat again!).  (I also used a lot less butter layered with the filling than recommended, probably only two to three tablespoons, and it came out well, but I'm going to be slightly more indulgent next time.)

I thought this was just okay (although my guests were enthusiastic), but when I tried it cold the following day, it was fantastic.  The flavors and textures combined really well cold and overnight. 

I put everything on the table for guests to help themselves, as would have been done in the Regency.  Classy!  You can also see the bottle of wine and our pig salt-and-pepper shakers...and that we don't own a ladle so we used a half-cup measure.  Oops!  I moved out of a shared house not that long ago, and it turned out a lot of essential cooking stuff belonged to my roommates.

(The little rolly cookies are rugelach--the u is an uh, not an oo, and the ch is a hard H like Chanukkah--a delicious Ashkenazi Jewish cookie that, while it did exist during the Regency, was unlikely to be on Hannah Glasse's radar.  I used a very modern recipe which I highly recommend, I get the most compliments on those cookies of anything I make ever.)

And for dessert: 

To make potatoe cakes.
         TAKE potatoes, boil them, peel them, beat them in a mortar, mix them with the yolks of eggs, a little sack, sugar, a little beaten mace, a little nutmeg, a little cream or melted butter, work it up into a paste; then make it into cakes, or just what shapes you please with moulds, fry them brown in fresh butter, lay them in plates or dishes, melt butter with sack, and pour over them. 

I definitely messed these up in that I added a little too much cream and they didn't cohere and flip nicely while frying, so be careful and stop while you still have a very thick texture.  They were still delicious though!  I totally recommend.

Sack is a old-school type of white fortified wine; I used the sweetest cheap sherry they had at the store as a substitute.  Make sure you boil the butter/sherry sauce mixture until it stops smelling strongly of alcohol and starts tasting really, really yummy (I added a little sugar into the sauce too although I might try without in future).

Happy new year, everyone!  I hope the coming year is full of deliciousness.

Tell me about the best dinner party you ever threw or attended!