Rhubarb Cups

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Rhubarb Cups

Rhubarb Cups are a simple, three-ingredient, make-ahead dessert from the 1847 cookbook The Lady’s Receipt Book by Eliza Leslie. Rhubarb Cups would be a perfect dish to add to your recipe rotation if you’ve got a freezer full of stewed rhubarb! I have to admit, they don’t end up being the most visually appealing dessert, but what they lack in aesthetics, they make up for in taste. The cups themselves are very mild, but this recipe also includes a zippy and flavourful butter, sugar and lemon hard sauce. As an added bonus, in this blog post you’ll find out where you can find rhubarb growing wild in Banff National Park.

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Apple Sauce Cake

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Apple Sauce Cake

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.

My original idea was that I’d use Boiled Cider Apple Sauce in this recipe, but that apple sauce was too delicious and it didn’t last until I made this cake! In my opinion, the best way to eat Apple Sauce Cake is to eat it with a fork (it is crumbly), topped with natural peanut butter and Apple Butter.

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Boiled Cider Apple Sauce

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Boiled Cider Apple Sauce

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.

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Fresh Raspberry Water

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Fresh Raspberry Water

Freſh Raſpberry Water is a refreshing beverage with a zip. We made it at a historic cooking class that I taught last July at Nelles Manor Museum and I remember that it was very satisfying to drink after cooking over an open hearth on a hot summer day. It’s a simple recipe. Remove the raspberry seeds with a sieve, then add lemon juice, white sugar and water. I pulled this gem of a recipe from the 1790 cook book The Complete Confectioner by Frederick Nutt.

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Strawberry-fritters

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Strawberry-fritters

Strawberry-fritters is one of the recipes that we made at an open hearth cooking class that I taught at Nelles Manor Museum last summer. This class featured scrumptious seasonal recipes made with garden produce and recipes from the late 1700s, when the home was newly built by the Nelles family.

I learned when I made Apple Frazes that adding a bit of alcohol to your batter is a good idea, so I made a batch for a socially distanced outdoor Canada Day gathering. They taste like fried strawberries and white wine and I liked them so much that I wanted to make the recipe again here on this blog and share it with all of you!

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Pineapple Nut Stuffing

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Pineapple Nut Stuffing

Pineapple Nut Stuffing will probably be the recipe I select the next time I make a Christmas or Thanksgiving turkey. The earthiness of the walnuts and the sharpness of the celery would complement the additional flavour of the turkey juices and the pineapple in the recipe is only perceptible by a slight sweetness.

This recipe is found in the 1950 The American Woman’s Cook Book and the introduction to the chapter on Stuffings for Fish, Meat, Poultry and Game lists alternative ways to prepare stuffing. Instead of cooking my stuffing inside of a fowl, I decided to try three of the methods listed in this paragraph: baked, steamed and fried in croquettes.

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Hot Crabby Punch

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Hot Crabby Punch

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 7th 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”.

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To make fine pippen Tarts

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To make fine pippen Tarts

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.

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Apple Leather

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Apple Leather

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.

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Rhubarb and Banana Fool

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Rhubarb and Banana Fool

One evening recently, I found myself driving home from visiting my Mom with a small harvest of fresh rhubarb from her garden in the passenger seat. Basically as soon as I set foot in my door, I searched for a historic rhubarb recipe that wasn’t Rhubarb Jam, Stewed Rhubarb or Rhubarb Pie (the things I do for fun!). Rhubarb and Banana Fool, from the 1900 cookbook Mrs. Beeton’s Cold Sweets, was the most intriguing to me.

A good description of this recipe in today’s terms would be a low-sugar banana and rhubarb smoothie, with a suggested whipped cream topping. Discovering the Rhubarb and Banana Fool recipe made me wonder: “When did people start eating bananas in North America?”, so I delve into answering that question by having a look at American and Canadian cookbooks and the establishment of the Boston Fruit Company. You’ll also find a bit of bonus info about Cochineal, an insect used as a red dye.

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Apple Butter

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Apple Butter

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, so you'll find a bonus Apple Water recipe in this blog post.

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!

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Orange Drops

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Orange Drops

I wanted to make a candy recipe in honour of Halloween this year, so I did a search on my favourite place to discover new old cookbooks, the Internet Archive, and found the 1788 gem A new collection of receipts in confectionary.

Orange Drops are a candy made of a dehydrated purée containing orange peel, white sugar and a bit of orange juice. Depending on how you dehydrate them, Orange Drops can be crispy or soft like a jujube. If you love Candied Orange Peel, you'll probably enjoy these Orange Drops! They’re less sweet than Candied Orange Peel (probably because they don't have the white sugar coating found on candied peels), so expect a balanced sweet & sour citrus flavour.

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