Challenge #9: The frugal housewife. Cabbage soup (1917)

(Scroll down for the short version!)

I always knew I wanted do make something from WWI for this challenge. Since this year marks 100 years since the war broke out, that's not so very remarkable. But I had had war time recipes on my mind since last year when I did a project for my history course about a particular event that took place i Stockholm in 1917. While researching that event, it was hard not to notice the many references to the food shortage in Sweden at the time.

Queuing for bread in Stockholm. 1917-18. Stockholms Stadsmuseum.

Sweden was a neutral country during WWI and was thus spared most of the horrors that the warring nations endured. Food shortages did however become more and more dire as the war progressed, especially in urban areas. By 1917/1918 almost everything was rationed and the things that weren't were mostly unavailable anyway. As you can imagine, frugality was not just a virtue but a necessity.

Park turned into potato field close to where I actually live now. Stockholms Stadsmuseum.

I couldn't get hold of the cookbook I wanted to look at (a 1917 book with war time recipes sent in to a newspaper by the readers!) because it was presently on display at the National Library - in a small exhibition about WWI from a Swedish perspective! How's that for coincidence!

I did however find two other books about cooking in "expensive times", both from 1917, and had a good look at them.

"The home and the expensive times", L.D. Lagerström, 1917.

I felt kind of bad about it, but my initial response was to feel... disappointed. Most of the recipes in the book didn't feel that different from other "everyday" cookbooks of the time. I had kind of expected things like "hedgehog stew", "grass bread", and "chicken feet pie" (well, maybe not exactly those, but you get my drift I hope!). Here were recipes mostly based around meat, although often with a meat-saving aim, and butter, sugar and eggs were not at all excluded.

It made me wonder how useful these books were to the struggling housewife at the time? And who bought these books? Surely not the poorest of the poor, who might have had the most use for extremely frugal recipes. My belief (although they're mostly speculations) is that these kind of books were targeted against a middle class that until these hard times hadn't really felt the lack of good food. These books picked up on what the poor/working class might have eaten under normal circumstances and made it available to the classes that suddenly found themselves lacking food even though money wasn't the biggest issue. Kind of like a reversed "trickle-down theory", whatever that's called.

But I digress. Whatever did I take back into my own kitchen from these books?

I picked a soup, simply called "Cabbage soup", mostly because it really felt like a "poor" recipe. No meat, hardly any fat, just cabbage, carrots and a lone onion. Very sad. But cheap, at least today and probably one of the cheaper meals you could imagine even in 1917.

The recipe is as short as the soup is meager: Clean and chop one small cabbage and fry in fat until brown. Add stock made from the root and the tough pieces of the cabbage, 4-5 carrots and an onion. Salt and pepper to taste. Cook for a long time on a slow fire or in a haybox.

The ingredients (salt, pepper, sadness and poverty not pictured):

I started with the stock and I guess this picture says it all:

I then ignored it for a few hours and did other things. When everything felt like it was more liquid than solid, I strained it and began frying the cabbage. It was quite a lot of cabbage, though I picked a small one...

I fried it in  lard and  margarine. I decided that butter was off-limits for the purpose of accuracy, but most fats were scarce at the time. Perhaps some bacon-fat-from-last-night would have been more accurate, but I didn't have any saved. Anyway, I fried it until golden brown-ish (and a bit burnt here and there, but this is war. We can't be too picky here).

Then I added the stock and some salt and pepper, and left the soup to it's own devices for several hours (this is about 1,5 hours in). It just said to cook "for a long time". A haybox would have been neat indeed, as the recipe suggested, and oh so accurate! All sorts of fuel-saving methods were tested and tried since coal and fire wood got more and more expensive along with everything else. I have a household book from the 1930's which goes a great bit into the virtues of hayboxes, so it was not just a wartime fad but were apparently in use until the mid-20th century when electricity and gas stoves became common and affordable enough.

Anyway. It did cook for a long, long time - I lost track, but probably close to 4 hours (I had things to do, such as laundry, so time flew away, and the end result looked pretty much like in the picture above.

But here's a picture of the final product, just because.

No, it's not a pretty soup but it tasted better than it's appearance suggests. Then again, I like cabbage, so it was pretty much what I expected. Cabbage. Mushy cabbage, with a sweetness to it, as cabbage tends to become rather sweet after a long cooking time. Exciting, no. But completely edible. A piece of sausage or something would have helped, and I'm not the kind of person that absolutely must have meat with every meal, but it could have helped this soup become "nice" rather than just "okay".

But I have at least three more servings of it left, so I have plenty of opportunities to experiment with leftovers in days to come...

Bonus pictures from the exhibition at the National Library in Stockholm:

1918 magazine. The people are praying to the angel of Peace - with a flour sack for body, cheese for a head, wings made from sausages and legs in the shape of butter barrels...

Ration cards - butter, coffee, sugar, bread, peas... 

The facts!

The Challenge: The frugal housewife


The Recipe: See above. Cabbage soup from a Swedish cookbook on economic housekeeping during WWI.


The Date/Year and Region: Sweden, 1917.


How Did You Make It: See above, but in short: a vegetable stock made from cabbage scraps, carrots and an onion, and chopped cabbage, fried brown, then put together for a looong simmer.


Time to Complete: Ouch! Allowing for cooking time for the stock and the soup itself, at least five hours! This recipe is not frugal in a 'time' sense.


Total Cost: This is so cheap. One cabbagae, four carrots and one onion. That's the cost!


How Successful Was It?: Considering the few, bland ingredients, not bad. It's not a gourmet's meal but it's a somewhat nourishing soup made on the cheap and that's what it's supposed to be.


How Accurate Is It?: The ingredients and the prep work is as accurate as could be. My pots and pans are of a modern variety, and a gas-top stove may not have been too common in 1917 (but not unheard of).

Recipe source: 

• Lagerström, L.V. (1917). Hemmet och dyrtiden: råd för dyrtidshushållningen ...(2. uppl.) Tingsryd: Nordiska konstförl..

Challenge #7: The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread. Nougat Pudding (gelatin)

Oh well! This challenge turned into one of those adventures where the ready dish didn't turn out the way you imagined but still tasted good – but at the same time looked so bad you wouldn't want anyone to see it. You who have ventured here will still get to do that as long as you stay around…

But first thing’s first. This challenge is about inventions and improvements, and I decided rather swiftly that I wanted ’my’ invention to be gelatin. And by that I mean processed, store-bought gelatin as opposed to the more old-fashioned way of acquiring jelly, since boiling bones and skin isn't something I’d like to do (and I hardly think my kitchen is equipped for such an enterprise).

Besides – I learned during my research that my native country Sweden is home of the largest pigskin gelatin factory in the world (if that doesn't make you feel peckish, I don’t know what will) so it must have been written in the stars!

When I embarked on my research, I thought the history of processed gelatin would be pretty straight-forward, as in: ”It was invented by So-and-so in 18XX”, but that wasn't quite the case. Many online articles stated that modern gelatin began when the American brand Jell-O was introduced in the 1890’s, but when I looked in cookbooks older than Jell-O I realised that that couldn't be the case (I think Jell-O was the first flavoured, and granulated, gelatin product to hit the market and that’s why there’s some mix-up).

I was curious when the gelatin leaves I’m used to were introduced and also what the product may have looked like before that. After some fruitless searching I eventually found the wonderful 'Gelatin Handbook: Theory and Industrial Practice' on Google Books (you can read most of it and fortunately the history chapter was more or less complete) and most of my inquiries were put to rest.

To put it shortly: gelatin is produced the way glue is produced, because (if I understand correctly) gelatin is animal glue in it’s most purified form, so it was the glue producers who eventually started to produce gelatin for distribution to consumers.

At the beginning of the 19th century large-scale production of edible gelatin was not yet in existence, but that would change rapidly during the century. Plants started to operate in France, England and America, and Germany seems to have been extra industrious in this regard, not least since gelatin started to be used in photography! During the mid-19th century and up to about 1880-1890, the purchasable gelatin was in the shape of ”thick gelatin plates, like those of chocolate” as ’Gelatin Handbook’ describes it. Things started to fall into place for me at that point, since some recipes I looked at talked about ”slices” of gelatin, as if you were to cut a piece from a block or something. Many recipes also advised to soak the gelatin for much longer than what I’m used to before melting it, which would make sense if the gelatin came in thick pieces (in advertisements from the 1850’s and upwards I also found many mentions of red or white gelatin, and the French variety seems to have been regarded as the best).

There appears to have been a veritable gelatin boom in Europe and especially Germany after ca. 1865 which makes sense if you look at those fantastic jelly moulds from the Victorian kitchens – you need a lot of gelatin to fill those up! Somewhere around the 1880s, the thin gelatin leaves that I’m unfamiliar started to come about, and also the powdered form. What I haven't yet figured out is how expensive gelatin was at different points during the 19th and early 20th century, but I may try to find that out later on. Or maybe you can tell me?

And with that, I’ll end this brief history of gelatin (but I do recommend the ’Gelatin Handbook’ if you want to learn more about gelatin and it’s uses besides the culinary) and go straight to my little disaster of a recipe:

Nougatpudding. Iduns Kokbok, 1911.

Nougat made from almonds, hazelnuts and sugar? Yummy! Cream as well? Even better. It can’t fail, right?

Well…

Honestly, I’m usually the first to blame myself when my cooking endeavors fail but there were a couple of things about the instructions in this recipe that bugged me… But, I had decided to halve the recipe and maybe you weren't supposed to do that. Who knows.

The first thing that irked me was that it said to ”chop” the nuts. Not grind them, but chop.

So i chopped them the finest I could, even though I thought to myself: ”Why not just grind them?”. But perhaps this nougat was supposed to be more chunky? What did I know.

Then I melted sugar, carefully, in a greased frying pan as per instructions.

My own fault in this may have been that I used a too wide-bottomed of a frying pan for that amount of sugar (I did halve the recipe after all), because when the sugar had melted, there wasn't a whole lot of it, which became very apparent when I added the chopped nuts. The recipe suggested that this mixture would be rather liquid since it was supposed to simmer for a bit. Liquid? Not a chance! I had a hard, chunky dough on my hands. Which smelled delicious, but I was thinking about abandoning it all by this point. But I didn't because those nuts were expensive, dammit!

So I warily mixed the paste/dough with 1 egg plus one yolk and three leafs of gelatin, rinsed in water and melted in a few tablespoons of warm water, and let it chill. Then I stirred in 2 deciliters of whipped cream and mixed gently.

All that was left was to put it all in a jelly mould in shape of a pineapple (because that was the only one I had of the right size and I didn't really care at this point anyway), said a prayer and banished the pudding to the fridge for a few hours.

Those hours flied by and it was time for the test. After some wrestling, I managed to get the pudding out of the mould and was greeted by...

...this..?

You can all laugh, gag or whatever now. I know. I know. "Cat food" is the nicest thing I can compare this pudding's appearance to. I could say something else as well, but I won't. Because we all know.

Maybe from another angle..?

NO!

This may have been one of the grossest-looking things ever to have come from my kitchen (and I did 1970's recipes at least one a week as an experiment for two years so I've seen some things).

Of course, this terrible presentations doesn't help a bit. If I had made an effort with some berries or whipped cream or something, maybe it would have looked... Nah, who am I kidding!

But how did it taste, you must ask. Actually quite good. I was right about the nuts, though: in my opinion, they should've been ground, not chopped. I would have liked a smoother pudding. The taste was still quite nice, if a little bland. The cream made it more like a thick mousse than a jelly (and there were only three gelatin leaves in it after all) which was nice. With some experimentation, this could perhaps become a hit. Next time: smaller frying pan. More sugar or less nuts. Grind those nuts.

The nitty gritty:

The Challenge: The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread.

The Recipe: Nougat pudding, from Iduns Kokbok, 1911 (Idun was one of the biggest magazines for women in Sweden in the late 1800s and a better part of the 1900s).

The Date/Year and Region: Sweden, 1911.

How Did You Make It: Chopped almonds and hazelnuts. Melted sugar and mixed in the nuts. I halved the recipe, and I don't know if that screwed it up or if the recipe was off, but it appeared to be too high a nuts to sugar ratio. I mixed sugar/nuts with eggs and gelatin and added whipped cream and allowed to set in a mould in the fridge for a few hours.

Time to Complete: The preparations, maybe 30 minutes, but it needs a few hours to set.

Total Cost: The nuts were the expensive part. At least $10/7 EURO (but I didn't use all the nuts I bought).

How Successful Was It?: Appearance: 1/10. Taste: 7/10.

How Accurate Is It?: I used modern kitchen aids like an electric chopper and whisk, other than that nothing too out of place.

Recipe source: 

• Östman, E. (1911). Iduns kokbok. Stockholm: Ljus.