Challenge #5: Pies! Tart of Strawberries and Ice Cream

Hello! Hope everyone is enjoying Summer. I'm starting to do that just now as I've been working for most of June and July, hence my hiatus form the latest challenges.

So I'm happy that I finally could participate in the pie challenge. Although 'pie' might be a bit of a stretch, as you shall see, I'm still happy that I tried a new recipe the best I could (even though the result was semi-successful at best...). I had fun and learned a few things (but have SO MUCH to learn still!).

(As usual, scroll to the bottom for the short version).

The recipe:

which called for an additional recipe:

Both recipes from The Professed Cook[...] by B Clermont, the 1776 edition. I can't find this edition I have as a pdf online but here's an 1812 edition on Google books.

It all sounded pretty straight-forward, and not too complicated for the novice, right? Well...

It started out with scalding and peeling of 400 grams of sweet almonds:

Those almonds were then turned into a kind of course almond meal with the help of two different kind of blenders/kitchen aids, because this stuff was tough! The recipe called for adding some egg white to prevent oiling, which I vaguely recall from other recipes involving almonds so I did that.

The result above. The meal lumped together but was otherwise quite even (those are lumps you see, not large pieces of almond). According to the recipe, you should beat the almonds in a mortar and the end result may have been very different Had I done that. Unfortunately I must admit that I don't own a mortar (I know, I know. I'm on the look-out for one but I'm too cheap to buy a new one and I've yet to find a suitable one in the thrift stores I trawl) so that option had to be ruled out.

Above is the almond paste after some time on the stove with sugar mixed in.It did indeed get a bit firm and pasty (you can see a little ball I kneaded with my hands to test the texture) but I started to get wary by this point...

It was pliable and knead-able, and you could flatten it with a rolling pin, as the recipe suggested, but it was so, so brittle. The smallest flattened pieces could carefully be picked up and put into a tin, but a piece large enough to line a larger pie tin? No way!

I had already decided to bake the crust in smaller, individual tins so that wasn't a biggie, but it was still pretty hard to force the paste into place in a somewhat aesthetically pleasing manner (and I didn't quite succeed with that either to be honest...).

The recipe suggested low heat for a short amount of time so I baked a test run on my oven's lowest setting (165 Celsius).

This is the result after a whopping 20 minutes. I think that was too long. It became hard and dense - too hard and dense, I think. I may have had a too thick layer of paste in the tins but a thinner layer would probably have made it impossible to get the crust out of the tin. I baked the rest of the batch for a shorter amount of time and they became a bit chewier, i.e. less hard, but a few of them broke fatally when I tried to remove them from the tins. Damned if you do...

Anyway, they still tasted nice. I mean, almonds and sugar, how could they not. But the consistency was way off - in no way could this paste of mine been served as a tart and pie where you cut and serve pieces. It was just too hard and dense.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm not a great cook! I know when I mess up, but I don't know why and how I did so. Any suggestions? 

Thankfully, the ice cream part of the recipe was a huge success in comparison!

I have never made ice cream the old school-way with ice and salt so it was a very exciting experiment! I don't own a sabotiere (no, really!) so I just used two bowls - one big plastic bowl with ice and salt and a small metal bowl with the ice cream ingredients - cream, sugar, orange flower water and egg yolks. These were mixed and heated onthe stove, then I let them chill over night and made the ice cream the day after.

Here it is when almost done. Like with so many things, at first nothing happened for a looong time, and then everything happened at once! Towards the end you had to stir like a madman to stop the ice cream to set at the edges of the bowl to make it somewhat smooth and even. I'm happy to say that I managed that pretty well. I served the ice cream when it was a bit more firm than soft serve.

Then me, my husband and his daughter devoured these treats in quite a rush, because they melted fast! There was literally no time to arrange the strawberries in a neat manner, as you can see.
Unfortunately, strawberry season is over here in Sweden so I had to use boring, watery imported strawberries, lightly sweetened.
The almond crust served mainly as a bowl at this point. You could take a bite out of it but no spoon or fork could best those things.

But the ice cream was yummy , yummy - how could it not be, it's cream! The orange flower water just gave a hint which was fine with me since I was afraid it would taste too much of perfume but it was fine. Lovely.

So the ice cream really saved this one. I'm a little bummed about the crust still, though, because I really liked the concept. I would like to serve something like this again, but I would use a different recipe for the crust in that case. Again: any pointers very welcome!

The short version

The Challenge: #5: Pies!

The Recipe: Tart of Strawberries and Ice Cream from The Professed Cook by B Clermont.

The Date/Year and Region: England, 1776.

How Did You Make It: For the crust, I mixed ground almonds and sugar in a pan on the stove which I then put into small pastry tins that I baked in the oven. The ice cream was made with the ice and salt method with two bowls.

Time to Complete: The crust: 1+ hour. The ice cream: About one hour.

Total Cost: Almonds, cream, strawberries and salt were ca $12.5/9,2 EURO. Sugar, eggs and orange flower water I already had on hand so a bit more if you have to buy those too.

How Successful Was It?: The crust wasn't too successful. The taste was nice but it was too hard to serve as a crust for a tart. The ice cream, on the other hand, was delicious!

How Accurate Is It?: The ingredients were fine, I think. The heavy cream may have been too fat for the 18th century - I think I've learned that our high-fat cream became possible after the separator was introduced but I may be wrong. The strawberries I used is of course of a modern variety that may have been very different to the types that were cultivated in the 18th century. I use dmodern kitchen appliances for most tasks involved, including a modern gas range, but I'm going to give myself some credit for making ice cream with salt and ice, dammit!


Source: The Professed Cook[...] (1776) by B. Clermont. An online 1812 edition is available courtesy to Google Books.

A brief introduction and a recipe tested and tried!

Hello, and welcome!

I have made this blog with the intention of documenting my participation in the Historical Food Fortnightly, which started just a couple of days ago. If you haven't heard about it - find out more here!

I'm a 30-something Swedish female with a life-long interest in history, especially cultural and social aspects of the 17th, 18th and 19th century. My interest in the history of fashion have fore some years manifested itself in historical costuming and I participate in reenactment groups in Sweden. I used to blog about my costuming here, but that blog is more or less defunct for now.

When I heard about the Historical Food Fortnightly, I was very thrilled. I have been curious about historical cooking (mainly 18th and 19th century) for a long time, but haven't really pursued that interest, but hopefully these upcoming challenges will spur me to explore and experiment with recipes, techniques and flavours of the past.

That said, I have to admit that I'm not a very good cook even by modern standards, so I don't expect to become a very accomplished historical cook by any means. I have close to zero practical experience when it comes to food history and my only tools for now is an average, modern kitchen, for better or worse.

But my main goals are to have fun, hopefully learn and amuse readers of this blog and other participants in the challenge, and I think that will do for a rather good start.

Anyway! The following recipe is not part of the challenge, but since I remembered to take some pictures, I thought I'd write a few words about it, so without much further ado, I give you:

TUNNRÅN

I guess you could translate this to "thin wafers" and that's exactly what it is. I don't have a date for this recipe, but I would wager late 18th century or early 19th century. It's from a scanned pdf version of a Swedish 1786 cookbook I've had for ages, but only last week I realised that there were lots of handwritten recipes in the very back of the book. How wonderful!

When, and by whom, these recipes were written we'll never know, but fortunately that's not necessary for trying them out.

This recipe had at least some exact measures (which was very appreciated by me, used to modern, exact recipes!) to help starting out, and they were:

• 1 qvarter (ca 33,3 cl) cream
• ½ stop (ca 6,5 dl) water
• 1 egg

After that, intuition and common sense had to be employed! The recipe instructed to add sugar  "to taste", then flour until the mixture slightly stuck to the whisk. Lastly some cinnamon and cardamom. 

I really should have taken note of how much sugar and flour I used, but I completely lost track. I added the flour little by little until I thought the batter was not too runny, not too thick.The finished batter was something akin to pancake batter and slightly sweet but not overly so. I was generous with seasoning but I can't say how much I used.

This is the finished batter. It was. A. Lot. of batter.

Since I hadn't tried this recipe before, I had planned to make half a batch, but decided against it since half an egg seemed silly... Well, I regretted that a bit. Here's hoping it wasn't going to be a disaster...

The recipe didn't have any instructions at all in regard to how to use the batter, probably since it was a no-brainer to the cooks of the time, but the go to method was to use a wafer iron, perhaps like this one:

Wafer iron, undated. Vänersborgs Museum via Digitalt Museum.

Another kind wafer iron could look like this

Wafer iron, undated. Vänersborgs Museum via Digitalt Museum.

but from what I can gather, the first kind was used for tunnrån ("thin wafers") and the latter for gorån. Gorån may have been a thicker variety, I don't know since I haven't seen an example in person, but I think they're still popular in Norway for instance. I have to research more later on (I took a look in a Swedish mid-18th c. cookbook* and for some recipes the author called for a tunnrån iron, and for others a gorån iron, so there was apparently an important difference but I'll leave it at that for now).

I own a tunnrån iron myself, albeit of a rather modern kind. I'm not sure about the material, but it's obviously not cast iron like the examples above. 

Still very pretty, no? I had only used it once before, so i was a little nervous. Last time I tried it I had OK-ish results considering being a total beginner, but that time I used a modern recipe that several other persons had vouched for. Now, I was completely on my own!

The iron is greased with some butter in the picture above, though it might be hard to see. I re-greased the iron between each and every wafer. I don't know if it's necessary but I didn't want to risk having to scrape burnt batter from every little crease, the mere thought was painful... I used approximately a teaspoon of butter, for the whole iron, each time.

I recalled from the first time I tried the iron that is was hard to determine how much batter each wafer demanded and I had forgotten any conclusion I might have drawn, so for the first wafer i used a full tablespoon measure of batter. The batter is semi-thick so it will cover more of the iron once the iron is closed...

...like so! 

Another difficulty I remembered from my first experiment was that you had to fidget around until you found the optimal combination of heat vs time, i.e. when to flip the iron over and when to remove the baked and hopefully finished wafer. If the iron is too hot, it is of course easy to burn the wafer, but if it's too cold or if you remove the wafer to early, the pretty pattern won't be very noticeable on the wafer. Tricky!

Wafer # 1. The colour was nice but I used way to little batter! For the next wafer I used a ½ deciliter measure...

...which of course was way too much! Look at that mess.

I kept using the ½ deciliter measure but only filled it up a little more than halfway which worked OK.

But more importantly, the batter seemed to behave very nicely right from the beginning! It didn't stick, the wafer seemed to harden quickly after being removed from the iron and the flavour was nice. Hooray!

These kind of wafers aren't too common nowadays, but not completely forgotten either, and those who make them usually roll them up on the iron while they're still hot and pliable (because they harden very quickly once removed). You can use a special little tool for this, but I don't have a such and use a chopstick and a fork instead.

I don't have any evidence for shaping the wafers in this way in the 18th & 19th century. The mid 18th c. cookbook I mentioned above does give some directions for shaping the wafers, but not to what size and by what means (or rather: i don't know how to interpret the instructions!). It may have been like this, or not. I would like to research that more as well. 

You don´t have to do anything at all either, but rolling them up like this makes them easier to store and somewhat less likely to break (they're quite fragile). You can shape them into bowls or cones, like ice cream cones, as well.

They're quite fun to make - but messy!

That's melted butter, and this is only the beginning...

...because this is what it looked like in the end! It does seem fitting to the name of this blog and the image in the header though!

This really was a huge batch! I kept baking wafers for hours and let's say that is was a bad idea to start this project late-ish in the evening. Good thing I'm a night owl. But I did use all of the batter, which resulted in...

...58 wafers! Most of them turned out OK, but I really haven't perfected the technique by any means yet. Those in the front got too dark and I got rid of most of them, but that still leaves me with 45-50 wafers. 

I don't know how well they keep and for how long: The recipe instructed to keep them between two plates/dishes with paper under and above - and lemon peel... I decided to put them in cookie tins with paper towels between each layer, but without lemon peel (simply because I didn't have any lemons). I wonder if the lemon peel was meant for additional flavour or some other reason? 

I'm going on an event on Friday so I will bring as many wafers as possible and force them upon people!

But - how good were they?

Well, I can only compare them to the ones I made  before, from a modern recipe, but I would say that they compared very, very well. The texture was very nice and crispy once the wafers cooled off, but I think that the modern variety had a slightly better crispiness and were slightly lighter since they had a bit of potato starch in them in addition to the flour. The flavour was nice, although I could have used a little stronger hint of the cinnamon and cardamom, though I thought I was very generous with both (maybe they had spent too long time in the spice rack - I should be more ambitious and use whole spices freshly beaten next time...). I used some lemon zest when I made the modern version and I missed that touch a bit - but the recipe did call for lemon peel for when storing the wafers, so I may have missed out by omitting that step.

But overall, I'd say that this was a very good recipe that worked very well in a modern setting without any adaptations. The only drawback may have been that the full recipe makes for a huge batch - half of it would have suited me better, but that's easy to fix next time.

Recipe Source: Handwritten recipe by Anonymous in the back of 

Rückerschöld, Anna Maria, En liten hushålls-bok, innehållande säkra underrättelser, om rätta beredningen af hwarjehanda äteliga waror, unga matmödrar til tjenst, af Anna Maria Rückersköld. Stockholm, tryckt hos J.C. Holmberg, 1785., Stockholm, 1785

Link to Pdf version. The recipe can be found on page 57.

* See Cajsa Warg, Hjelpreda I Hushållningen För Unga Fruentimber pages 689-690. Unfortunately, no online version exists.