History in the Baking

Last summer I accidentally got really into reading historic cookbooks. I know, that’s totally happened to you too, right? You just start by lightly browsing some 15th century French macaroon recipes and suddenly you find yourself ordering volume after volume of household management guides from the turn of the century and Googling the average temperature of double chambered wood-burning stoves. Haha, just kidding, I’m a freak. But what makes it even weirder is that despite my affinity for these cookbooks, I’ve never actually cooked anything from them. That’s right, I just flip through and admire the recipes like a sad single lady on the J. Crew wedding dress website thinking, “Maybe one day.” (I’ve never done that, shut up).

I decided to cook something from Eliza Acton’s cookbook Modern Cookery which was first published in 1849. Acton is sort of a hero of mine, she wrote the first cookbook that listed out ingredients and measurements in the recipe and she was one of the first cooks who tested recipes specifically for the cookbook rather than just collecting a series of recipes she already knew. She also was a poet and often wrote poems about cooking. I bet if Acton was alive today, she would have a kick ass food blog.

I started my process by picking out a recipe from Acton’s not-so-brief cookbook. There are probably over 1,000 recipes in this book. She has an entire chapter devoted to mutton. I picked a sponge cake because it only had four ingredients and all of them were already in my kitchen: flour, sugar, eggs, and a lemon. That’s all. She had two recipes for sponge cake, one was a large sponge cake and the other was a small sponge cake, which in parenthesis she noted was “very good,” so on the basis of only having two people to feed and Acton’s confident recommendation of her own cooking, I went with the small one.

All four of my ingredients.

            The first thing I noticed was that there was a list of ingredients, but this particular recipe had no measurements. The recipe stated that the sugar should be “equal to the five eggs” and the flour should be “equal to about three of the eggs.” I thought this was weird at first until I really thought about it. We are used to having our eggs from the grocery store where they come in a neat little pack, all in perfectly equal sizes. But I’ve seen the eggs my friend Chrissy’s chickens lay, and they are not always exactly the same size. So in 1849, if you were baking, your eggs would probably be of different sizes, so it would make sense to measure your recipes according to the size of the eggs rather than a standardized measurement. Luckily, I happened to have a scale (let's pretend for the sake of authenticity that it is not digital) because measuring cups wouldn't be invented for another 47 years in 1896. Although I wasn’t entirely sure if this meant with shells or without, but I ended up weighing them with their shells because it was neater and I like the way eggs look all in a bowl like I just collected them from my backyard instead of where I actually collected them, which was Trader Joe’s. 

The flour ended up being about 1 1/8 cup (or hedgehog as the case may be). The sugar came out to about 1 1/2 cup.

            After I weighed out the ingredients, the recipe said to “Rasp on some lumps of well-refined sugar the rind of a fine sound lemon, and scrape off the part which has imbibed the essence, or crush the lumps to powder.” (I told you Acton was a poet). I had no idea what this meant, so I tried Googling the phrase “rasp lemons” which just led me to the exact same recipe I was using on Google Books. In the end I interpreted “Rasp on some lumps of well-refined sugar the rind of a fine sound lemon, and scrape off the part which has imbibed the essence” as “zest” and hoped for the best. 

Is this rasping? Who knows.

            Next the recipe wanted me to separate the eggs, which I did, and then it wanted me to beat the yolks for ten minutes. By hand. I was trying to be authentic, so I decided I would actually do it by hand and without watching TV even though I could have watched 1/3 of an episode of The Nanny in that time, and I bet The Nanny was on TV somewhere. I gave up after 6 minutes. Apparently every housewife of the 1840s was a secret bodybuilder because that’s all my arms could take. Yesterday I lifted a 30 pound barbell 40 times at the gym but beating eggs for ten minutes put me to shame. I did cheat a little on the historic front though, but not without still attempting to be authentic: I listened to a Pandora station based upon the 1850 hit song “Camptown Races.” It was the weirdest Pandora station I’ve ever created, a strange mix of old Irish love ballads, Johnny Cash, Nat King Cole, and Disney sing-along songs.

            I combined the eggs and the sugar, which was already rasped with lemon, because the recipe told me to, “strew in the sugar gradually, and beat them well together.” Then it instructed me to “whisk the whites to quite a solid froth,” which I did so happily, with no time limit I gave myself a break and only whisked for 3 or 4 minutes. Then I combined the whites and the egg mixture and then finally added the flour.

The KitchenAid is sad that electric mixers won't be invented until 1885.

            I buttered a cake pan at Acton’s suggestion, although the practical person in me who has worked in a cake bakery wanted so badly to put down parchment paper. (I know they had parchment then because Harry Potter uses it and they don’t even have electricity.) But I was trying to do what Acton said. I went to set the oven but her only suggestion was the bake the cake for an hour in a “moderately hot” oven, which strangely enough was not a pre-set on my oven. I went with 350 degrees, since that seemed pretty moderate to me, but I knew an hour would be way too much so I set my timer for thirty minutes. It occurred to me as I placed the cake in the hot oven that there was no baking soda in it, and I wondered if it would rise. It then also occurred to me that was probably why beating the eggs for so long was important and maybe I should have toughed out the last four minutes but my arm really hurt and it was too late now. 

The robot timer helped me keep track of baking time even though he was not invented in 1849.

         After 30 minutes the cake was baked perfectly but it had, as I’d suspected, not risen very much in the oven. But I cut myself a slice and threw some strawberries on there. By itself, the cake tasted a little bland, very dense, a little gummy, not nearly as sweet as we might eat cake today, especially since the recipe didn’t come with any icing suggestions, but not awful. If I had been allowed to use my KitchenAid, I would have made some fresh whipped cream, but my arm wasn’t feeling up to any more beating, so I just ate it with the strawberries and with their added sweetness it was pretty good.  

I love that cooking is always evolving but because it must constantly be reproduced, we keep records of the dishes we are leaving behind. Matt and I watched an episode of Seinfeld yesterday in which George complains that every restaurant in New York is suddenly serving pesto and “where was pesto ten years ago?” It’s funny because that joke could be replaced with a different food every ten years or so. (Where was coconut water ten years ago? Or maybe Acton would say “Where were mutton cutlets ten years ago?”) For me, cooking from a historic cookbook is like using instructions to create a physical piece of history, like pulling a dinner through a time machine. When I ate a bite of my cake, it was fun to imagine another 25 year old woman like me making and tasting this same thing over a hundred years ago. I wonder if we’d have anything in common, and if maybe we could swap recipes over a cup of coffee, ice our whisking arms, and catch an episode of The Nanny. 

"Let them eat sponge cake"-Marie Antoinette, after her creative writing workshop told her she should be more specific.