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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Cup Cookies

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Cup Cookies

Cup Cookies are a mild lemon sugar cookie with an almond, sugar & cinnamon topping sprinkled on top. This recipe is from Aunt Babette’s Cook Book from 1889, and its leavening agent is Ammonium Bicarbonate or Baker’s Ammonia.

I’ve chosen this recipe because for the last 2 years, my Ammonia Cakes recipe has been my most popular blog post by far. That shows me that there’s an appetite for information about and recipes using Baker’s Ammonia, but I’m torn, because Ammonia Cakes is not a delicious recipe at all! I had to make a second recipe, Icing for Cake to save the Ammonia Cakes so they were edible and they didn’t end up in the compost.

Cup Cookies are a much more delicious ammonium bicarbonate cookie. Stick with this recipe for the deliciousness, but head over to Ammonia Cakes for background and history about Baker’s Ammonia.

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Peppermint Whipped Cream

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Peppermint Whipped Cream

Along with Marshmallow Mint Sauce, Peppermint Whipped Cream is one of the suggested toppings for the Chocolate Mousse recipe from the 1927 cookbook Electric Refrigerator Recipes and Menus. With only two ingredients, Peppermint Whipped Cream is tasty and easy to make and is a delightful topping for the frozen mousse.

Written by Alice Bradley of the Boston Cooking School, Electric Refrigerator Recipes and Menus was a helpful resource for housewives who welcomed a General Electric Monitor Top Refrigerator into their kitchen. The Monitor Top was the first household electric refrigerator that was affordable for the middle class and it was advertised as a healthier, time-saving and money-saving option over ice refrigerators.

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Marshmallow Mint Sauce

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Marshmallow Mint Sauce

Marshmallow Mint Sauce is found in the Ice Cream Sauces chapter of the 1927 cookbook Electric Refrigerator Recipes and Menus, which contained “Recipes prepared especially for the General Electric Refrigerator”. It’s a gooey, refreshing and flavourful dessert sauce that pairs wonderfully with the Chocolate Mousse recipe from the same cookbook. It has a very sweet and candy-like flavour that I really enjoyed despite not having much of a sweet tooth.

Keep scrolling after the recipe to read a brief history of the marshmallow and find out the roots of some popular marshmallow recipes.

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Chocolate Mousse

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Chocolate Mousse

This Chocolate Mousse recipe comes from Electric Refrigerator Recipes and Menus, a 1927 cookbook written by Miss Alice Bradley that was put out by General Electric to help housewives learn how to use their newfangled kitchen appliance. It is mild and refreshing, but my batch ended up being more similar to an ice cream than a mousse (probably because my freezer is much more efficient than a 1927 “chilling unit”). Still delicious, anyhow. Top with Marshmallow Mint Sauce or Peppermint Whipped Cream from the same cookbook. Chocolate Mousse is frozen in a “refrigerator pan”, so you’ll find out what that is and I’ve also written a rant about the appalling baker’s chocolate square fiasco of 2013.

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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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Queen of Puddings

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Queen of Puddings

Queen of Puddings comes to us all they way from Toronto in 1877. The Home Cook Book is Canada’s first community cookbook with recipes contributed by women as a fundraiser for The Hospital for Sick Children. Queen of Puddings must have been popular in Toronto in the late 1870s because this recipe (with various names) was submitted by 5 different women to the Puddings chapter of the book!

I had plenty to share with friends & family and I described it to the people I gave it to as a lemony soufflé bottom with a jam layer and meringue on top. The reviews I received were: no response, that it was delightful, “it was very good and had a unique texture”, and it was weird to eat with mint ice cream.

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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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