The Magic of Fire : Traditional Foodways
It is blackberry season and I just came across this amazing USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) website containing images in high resolution scans of of 7,300 fruits (mostly apples). Enjoy!
Here is an article, The collection of pomological watercolors at the United States Department of Agriculture, published in 1982 in the Journal of Botanical history by Carnegie-Mellon University. And, also, a recent article in Slate.
In most of Europe, bread made from bark was a famine food. It was more regularly eaten Europe’s far North. The “bark” in bark bread is actually the cambium layer that grows under the bark. Pine was a common tree to use for bark breads. The cambium layer is pealed from the tree, dried, and ground into a flour. If used alone then it makes a cake — an unleavened bread — and if mixed with flour — rye would be a good choice in keeping with the breads of the Northern Europe — it bakes into a loaf bread.
I have never done this. The author of this video suggests tasting the cambium before stripping the tree to be sure it has a good taste. Taste is apparently variable.
If you have made bark bread, please leave your report in the comment section, below.
Tart Paste
Commonly called Short Paste.
To one pound of flour, rub in a quarter of a pound of butter; make a whole in the middle; put in a little water, and two yolks and one white of an egg; put the other white of an egg on a plate, to beat up, and put over the tart, when finished; work it up to a proper stiffness, and roll out for use.
N. B. There should be about to table spoonful[s] of sugar in the paste, when for tarts, or any other think sweet. This is the proper kind of paste for meat puddings, only leave out the sugar.
From, A Complete System of Cookery, on a plan entirely new. By John Simpson. 1816 edition published in London. Page 508.
Implicit in this recipe is that the tart has a top crust. Top crusts were standard in British tarts until the last decades of the nineteenth-century. In British cooking, the topless tart was associated with France. In the American cooking tradition, one of the ways in which we seemed to have set out in the early nineteenth-century to differentiate our American culture from British was our early adoption of the topless tart as the standard for tarts and the renaming of the British covered tart tradition as “pie.”
Americans in first decades of the nineteenth-century were, of course, close to France. France had helped the British Colonists overthrow British rule while it had remained an enemy of Britain until the final defeat of Napoleon in 1814. It is thus not entirely unexpected that American’s might have adopted a Francophillic tart style a bit earlier than the British.
When I tested this recipe the first time my daughter, age ten, didn’t want me to put on the top crust because, as she said, “Tarts don’t have a crust.”
This dough, with sugar, is intended for a covered dessert tart and without sugar for a covered meat tart. While the recipe doesn’t call for it, I suggest that you add salt when making this as a savory crust.
There is relatively little fat and relatively more water than in a modern “short paste.” The crust is therefore not light and fluffy. This is a crust from a different tradition and as such ads variety to your pie crust repertoire.
Dessert Tart: Add the sugar to the dough and fill with any fruit filling.
Savory Tart: Replace the sugar with salt. Fill with a vegetable, meat, or fish filling.
You need a pastry brush to brush the egg white onto the top crust. Besides the shiny top-crust, this is a classic American fruit pie.
450g flour
110g butter
60g sugar if being used for a dessert tart
[5g salt if being used for a savory tart]
90g to 110g water
1 egg plus 1 yolk
1 egg white set aside in a small plate
Bake in a moderate pre-heated oven, 350F or 180C.
Who doesn’t love a madeleine? The recipe I’ve used since I first bought the New Larousse Gastonomique (1977) is its recipe for plain madeleine. that makes it almost 40 years since I bought the book new when it came out. What I like about the New Larousse Gastonomique recipe is its utter simplicity. It’s a poundcake. You mix equal parts by weight of sugar, flour, melted butter, and eggs and that’s it. Continue reading “A Fine Basic Madeleine Recipe from 1893”
This is an eighteenth-century print of a flour mill floating on the Seine with Notre Dame in the background. Until well into the nineteenth century mills were attached bridges that crossed the Seine and smaller mills, like the one in this print, were actually small boats, or barges, attached to shore or anchored in the river. The infrastructure for producing bread was everywhere.
Paris, in 1800 had a population of 540,000 compared to today’s 2,300,000. This refers to the city itself, not environs If you estimate per capita bread consumption in 1800 at 900g per person and use today’s figure of 130g per person it would seem that approximately 40% more bread was consumed in Paris some two-hundred years ago —490 230 000 grams versus 299 000 000 grams today. Just accepting these as rough figures it suggests the huge number of vehicles — on land and water — that must have been needed to move the grain, the flour, and the breads.
Paris did not produce all of its own bread. Demand from Paris fostered a plethora of bakeries in villages circling Paris, with Gonesse, now a suburb of Paris more or less between the two airports, Orly and Charles de Gaulle, being the most famous of the supplier villages. It is known for the quality of its white bread. Even English-language atlases tie Gonesse to its bread.
Here is a text sent to me by Jean-Philippe de Tonnac, founder of the extraordinary Facebook Group, Universalbread, and editor of the Dictionnaire universal du pain (2010) from his dictionary. This was written by Jean-Pierre Blazy, the current mayor of Gonesse.
“Le pain de marché, qui était en grande partie le pain des forains, assurait les deux tiers des ventes de pain consommé à Paris en 1727, un peu moins six ans plus tard, selon les registres Delalande conservés à la bibliothèque de l’Institut. Les boutiques progressent sans menacer la prépondérance des marchés. Les estimations concernant le nombre des boulangers forains dits de deuxième classe, ceux qui transformaient les blés qui n’étaient pas entrés à Paris avant d’être convertis en pain, demeurent incertaines. En recoupant les différentes sources (Traité de la Police de Nicolas Delamare et registres Delalande), Steven L. Kaplan estime qu’il y avait au total une majorité de boulangers de marchés sur les 2 000 boulangers qui s’activaient dans la capitale, mais les chiffres très variables du seul corps des forains (900, 850, 650…) lui paraissent excessifs. En 1727, sur les 927 boulangers fournissant les
douze marchés (et non plus quinze), il y avait 369 forains, soit près de 40 % ; et sur 747 enregistrés en 1733, on relève 298 forains, soit toujours près de 40 %. La boulangerie foraine s’inscrivait dans une couronne d’approvisionnement s’étendant de Saint-Germain-en-Laye et de Versailles à l’ouest, de Sceaux et de Villejuif au sud, de Créteil et de Vincennes à l’est jusqu’à Goussainville et Roissy-en-France au nord. Les boulangers du Pays de France, ceux de Gonesse et du village voisin de Bonneuil-en-France étaient alors les plus nombreux et les plus actifs en quantités de pain vendu.”
From Dictionnaire universel du pain, Bouquins Laffont 2010
Jean-Pierre Blazy is also the author of “Gonsesse, la terre et les homes: Des origines a la Revolution” (1982)
This post provides references to three works mentioned in my talk to the Farm to Table New Orleans International Symposium, August 204, 2013. If you attended my talk I do encourage you to write to me with questions and comments.
The French Gardiner by Nicolas de Bonnefons, translated by John Evelyn, 1654. This is the edition of the French Gardiner at Google Books. If you are not familiar with 17th century printing, there is a “long s.” This letter looks a lot like an “f”. You quickly get used to it. I have prepared annotated edition of the work. If you’d like a PDF of the manuscript please write to me: william@williamrubel.com.
Aceteria, John Evelyn’s work on salad is available from Project Gutenberg. This is the HTML version, but you will find other versions at the Gutenberg website.
Every Man His Own Gardener by John Ambercrombie was first published in the 1770s. It remained in print in many editions long after he died — far into the 19th century. This is the 1809 edition, but you can go to Google Books and find editions that are both earlier and later. This is much less romantic a writer than Bonnefons or Evelyn. But I think it is a good book and shows you the work-a-day kitchen garden at the turn of the 19th century.
I’ve been reading the bread section from The Thrift Book: A Cyclopaedia of Cottage Management, a British book published in the 1880s. It is interesting for being written during a transitional period in home baking when bakers were shifting to tinned breads. The recipe for a cake couldn’t be more different from modern bread and cake recipes with their hyper precision. As the author makes clear, the only important ingredient is sugar.
PLAIN SWEET CAKE.
It is convenient, when making bread, to appropriate a portion of the dough for a sweet cake. After fully kneading the dough, set aside enough for the desired cake, and as soon as the bread is baking, add to the reserved dough a liberal quantity of good moist sugar currants, raisins free from stones, caraway seeds, spices, all or any to taste, the sugar being the only essential. Thoroughly knead the whole into the dough until a complete mixture is effected, and leave the whole to rise afresh, which it will soon do very freely. If there is a tin at liberty it is best to let the cake rise in the tin, and then to bake in a moderate oven for an hour or 1 1/2 hour according to size.
