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Holiday Entertaining:
Or, Cookbooks We Can't Possibly Recommend
by
Kirsten Berg
The winter holidays are here, along with the season of family dinners and entertaining. While there are thousands of cookbooks available that will help you entertain successfully, here are a few that we thoroughly recommend you don't consult this season:
English Housewifery Exemplified in Above Four Hundred and Fifty Receipts... 14th Edition
by Elizabeth Moxon
Elizabeth Moxon's highly popular, all-encompassing guide to the domestic arts includes the secrets to creating such culinary gems as Hunting Pudding, Sago Custards, and Marrow Tarts. The recipe for the tarts calls for "some beaten mace and cinnamon, a little salt and some sack, set on the fire with a half a pound of biskets, as much marrow, a little orange peel and lemon peel."
While mace is still sold in specialty grocery stores and is used in cooking today, "some sack" might be harder to find. Mrs. Moxon's Turbot Head Pie doesn't have much to recommend it, either: "Take a middling turbot-head, pretty well cut off..."
English Housewifery Exemplified does contain over four hundred and fifty recipes, most involving dubious ingredients that are probably not approved by the FDA.
The Practice of Cookery, Adapted to the Business of Every Day Life
by Mrs. Dalgairns
Fish Pudding is a dish that calls for "two fresh haddocks, pounded in a marble mortar and rubbed through a hair sieve." It's unlikely to become a family favorite. You could serve Shrub to your guests instead: "One measure of lemon juice to five of rum to every gallon, six pounds of loaf sugar, strained through flannel." With everyone reeling from the rum, bring on the main course of Stewed Pigeon, seasoned with pepper, nutmeg and cloves.
A nice blancmange would round out the meal, if the three quarters of an ounce of isinglass it calls for can be found. Isinglass? This might have been hard to come by even in 1829, as Mrs. Dalgairns provides a substitute of cow-heel stock in her recipe.
New System of Domestic Economy
by Maria Eliza Rundell
Maria Rundell lives up to the no-nonsense title of her book by not only listing recipes, but also dispensing practical information, such as how to determine the "sweetness" of venison, how to make hens lay, and how to make ink. "The ink powder sold in Shoe Lane," she writes, "is one of the best, and a packet of six papers bought together costs only eighteenpence." It is obvious that those who spend more upon their packets of ink are earn Mrs. Rundell's disapproval.
Though the New System of Domestic Economy sounds more like a textbook than a cookbook, it is full of recipes we cannot possibly recommend that you try, such as Walnut Ketchup, China Chilo, and "gravy to make mutton eat like venison."
Cook and Housewife's Manual
by Margaret Dods
Mistress Margaret Dods ventures into the rarified world of "French Cookery..., Fashionable Confectionary, Preparations for Invalids, a Selection of Cheap Dishes, and Numerous Useful Miscellaneous Receipts..." in her classic book. With the importation of French cooks such as Louis Eustache Ude into England from the kitchens of King Louis XVI, this type of fare became very popular. "It will save much trouble to admit at once," writes Mrs. Dods, “that the French are the greatest cooking nation on earth. They, at least, insist that it is so."
While Mrs. Dods and M. Ude predate the Food Network's "Iron Chef" series of televised kitchen battles, one gets the sense that both of them would be ready and able to compete. The secret ingredient for their battle? "French Forcemeat" might give the advantage to M. Ude, but it's plain from her recipe for "Boudins a la Richelieu (Puddings of Rabbits or Poultry)" that Mrs. Dods would likely hold her own, and make England proud.
These receipt books went through dozens of printings during the nineteenth century and influenced the culinary habits of thousands of families. A high percentage of the copies available now have been repaired or rebound – a testament to their usefulness in the kitchens of the 1800s.
Almost utterly devoid of standardized weights and measures, written well before the advent of refrigeration and the ability to control oven temperature with the simple twist of a dial, as cookbooks they are now practically useless. As cultural, culinary, and economic history, however, they are absolutely delicious.
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