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.

Challenge #2 - Vaniljsås (a kind of custard)

For the second challenge - Soups and sauces - I took a very easy route. I initially wanted to make a soup of some kind, but I didn't really have the energy to look for a recipe that seemed doable skill-wise and fitted my, for the moment, very restricted budget. So I settled on a sauce, and a very easy recipe at that. But it was a recipe I hadn't tried before and it came from a cookbook I hadn't used at all yet, so I still felt like I achieved something!

The recipe was for vaniljsås (literally 'vanilla sauce' but basically a custard but with potato starch as a thickening agent) and it came from this lovely 1945 cookbook that I was gifted by a friend last year:

It's called Billig mat ('Cheap food') and was first published in 1913. This is a 1945 edition though, published the same year that WWII ended. Sweden was a neutral country but food (and many other things) very rationed and scarce, but this book doesn't seem to take rationing into account at all. But it is supposed to be a frugal cookbook ('for the simple household', as the title says) and it is interesting to see how some things have shifted over the years: food that used to be regarded as cheap is now expensive, and vice versa.

But - onward to the recipe!

It was a very easy recipe with few ingredients.

Rough translation:

(For 6 persons)

4 dl milk/cream or cream

2 tblsp vanilla sugar

3/4 tblsp potato starch

1-2 egg yolks

Heat milk and sugar to a gentle boil. Mix the potato starch with a little bit of water and add to the milk while stirring. Allow to boil for a short while.

Remove the sauce pan form the stove and stir in the egg yolks, return the sauce to the stove and allow to simmer while stirring briskly until thick enough. Continue to stir until the sauce is completely cool.

I used dl of milk and 2 dl of cream, and three egg yolks because my eggs were very small. The vanilla sugar I used contained 'real' vanilla, not the synthetic kind, but either would have been correct in a 1945 context. 

Milk/cream and vanilla sugar on the stove (vanilla sugar also pictured in the small jar), potato starch + water in the bowl and egg yolks.

It was very quick to put together; the potato starch was a powerful thickening agent and the egg yolks helped as well. It felt like it was done and ready in no time at all!

I wanted to quicken the cooling-off process so I placed the pan in a bowl filled with cold water and continued to stir until the sauce was room tempered.

After some additional chilling in the fridge, I served the sauce to a modern rhubarb crumble, and it was very well received and I was rather pleased myself. I'll add some notes below!

Just the facts

The Challenge: #2 -Soups and sauces

The Recipe: Vaniljsås (a kind of custard) from a 1945 cookbook that I own (recipe can be found above).

The Date/Year and Region: Sweden, 1945.

How Did You Make It: See above!

Time to Complete: 10 minutes tops.

Total Cost: Not very much. I had all of the things already so it was basically 'free'. Should be a very cheap recipe wherever you are.

How Successful Was It?: Very. I really liked it. Before I chilled the sauce in the fridge, I thought it had a too distinct taste of 'warm milk' but it wasn't noticeable afterwards. It was thick and nice, almost a bit on the thick side, at least after a day in the fridge but still totally edible (and it was still yummy even after two days!). It was very rich - you could tell that it contained cream. I think using only cream (as the recipe suggested) would have been too much. I could have used a stronger vanilla flavour, but adding more vanilla sugar would have made it simultaneously sweeter, so next time I might add some extra pure vanilla for a little boost.

How Accurate Is It?: All the way, I guess. Even my gas stove would have been similar in 1945 (my non-stick IKEA pan not so much, on the other hand). 

I'm definitely making this again. In fact, I'm having people over in a few days and I need to serve something sweet, so I think I'll make another crumble with berries or fruits of the season and make this sauce again!

Source:

• Friberg, Elvira (1945). Billig mat: Fullständig kokbok för det enkla hushållet. [Ny uppl.] Stockholm: Bonnier

Challenge #1 - Literary food. 'Meat pie', or Pastej af stek.

Literary Foods - Food is described in great detail in much of the literature of the past. Make a dish that has been mentioned in a work of literature, based on historical documentation about that food item.

For the short write-up, scroll directly to the bottom!


Carl Michael Bellman (1740-1792) is perhaps as close as we get to a national poet in Sweden. His songs and poems are still well-known and sung here and are to me (and many others) a magical portal into 18th century Stockholm, to the gutters, public houses, bed chambers, pastoral picnics and all the other places Mr Bellman panted with words. A treasure indeed.

Source: Wikimedia

I chose one of the many drinking songs that Bellman wrote as my inspiration for this challenge (Fredmans sång N:o 14: Hade jag sextusende daler/If six thousand dalers they gave me). This one is about all the things you could do if you, somehow, got hold of a lot of money. The persona in this song will buy a great house with tonnes of servants, hold magnificent parties, buy beautiful things, keep a beautiful mistress or two and gamble among other things - but more than anything else: drink, drink and drink!

In the second verse below, something called Nubben's kräftpastejer (crayfish pies) are mentioned. That was my starting point. But minus crayfish. So, pies.

||: Löpare och kusk och lakejer,
     som jag säjer,
skulle jag också ha,
mumsa Nubbens kräftpastejer,
     jag ej väjer :||
ropa natt och dag hurra.
Men framför allt så skulle jag dricka.
     och så nicka
     och så hicka
     och så dricka,
glömma världens små besvär.
(Martin Best recorded an English version of this song in the 1970s, but the verse with the pies is omitted from his version that is based on a translation by Paul Britten Austin. You can listen to the song on Spotify among other places).

 I'm going to be honest here! I force-fitted the following recipe into this challenge's theme. That is, I decided on the recipe first, and then tried to squeeze it into the theme. The key word here is pastej. In the Swedish language of today, pastej typically refer to a pâté-like dish. But back in the days, a pastej meant some kind of savoury filling inside a crust of dough baked in an oven - in other words: a pie. Funnily enough, the word pie is now used in the Swedish language (but spelled paj) and refers to both sweet and savoury pie dishes.

The reason for choosing a pastej/pie was that I was going on a historically themed picnic on June 6th and I wanted to try a recipe suitable for picnic food: not messy, easy to transport and edible without too many utensils. Small, Pirozhki-like pies seemed suitable.

And I did find a recipe that looked tasty and not too hard for an unskilled and sloppy cook:

Pastej af stek, or (approximately), little meat pies. 

This is a recipe from a Swedish 1821 edition of an cookbook originally published in 1804 by Carolina Weltzin (who by the way had several literary connections; she translated novels and plays, wrote travel literature besides several works on cooking and housekeeping. And not least, Carl Michael Bellman dedicated one of his most beloved songs to her).

The recipe called for any sort of left-over meat: beef, veal, lamb or hen.

A rough translation of the recipe:

When you have cold leftovers of meat, whether it is beef, veal, lamb, or hen, chop it fine, melt butter over the fire and add some flour, finely chopped onion, lemon peel and parsley, stir it together over the fire, and add the chopped meat, some wine, gravy, if you have, or stock, a couple of egg yolks, mace, salt and grated bread, and stir well over the fire, and let it cool. Then you take puff pastry, do not make it too thin, and put it into small mould; put some of the filling therein, and cover with a lid of puff pastry or strips of puff pastry laid out in a grid pattern and bake in the oven. You may also bake them without moulds if you take squares of pastry, put some of the filling thereupon and fold the rest of the pastry over and seal with some egg; thereafter they are baked in the oven.

Day 1. 

I didn't actually have any leftovers on hand, but I did have a small hen in the freezer so I decided to cook it and pretend I had. I wanted to prepare the hen in a somewhat period manner and looked in an older cookbook (Cajsa Warg; see sources below) and found a recipe for hen fricassee. I followed the directions for the first half of that recipe, which was to let the hen boil/simmer in water with crushed ginger, butter, lemon peel, a whole onion and parsley.

Not too complicated, and tasty!

I let the hen boil/simmer for nearly three hours - I had planned on ~2 but forgot about it! At least the meat wasn't chewy... I picked all the meat from the bones and put it in the fridge over night.

Day 2.

Most of the ingredients for the pie fillings can be seen below. I used some home-made chicken stock I had stashed away in the freezer instead of 'gravy' (because I had no idea what kind the recipe referred to) and white wine. I used store-bought bread crumbs as well, since bread rarely have the chance to go stale and dry in this household.

The cooking process was uninteresting and resulted in a not too good-looking mince-like filling:

But it was very tasty! A flavour of lemon was quite distinct and made it taste fresh and a bit tangy (I think the wine helped as well). I was very pleased so far. 

While the filling cooled off I made the dough and here I strayed away from the recipe. It did call for puff pastry, and the cookbook had a recipe for that, but I haven't made a proper puff pastry from a modern recipe ever, and I wasn't sure if I was going to be successful with a historical one (that also was quite different from modern recipes). I know that making a good puff pastry is labour intensive and takes many hours. I didn't have the time, the skills or the inclination, to be frank.

So I went to another early Swedish cookbook from 1802 (by Anna Maria Rückersköld; see sources below) and found a recipe for a dough that was recommended for pies. It looked a lot less complicated than a puff pastry, and the author added that it was a lot easier to digest than the former! So, yeah, that was totally the reason for using this recipe instead!

Approximate translation:

Take 1 mark (212,5 gram) flour and ½ mark unsalted butter and when it is well worked together make a hole therein and add three eggs and work them into the dough and splatter cold water thereupon, a little at a time, until the dough is rather hard, then it is worked until it is tough.

That didn't sound too bad, but I'm not sure how successful I was. Maybe the eggs were too large, but the dough was far too sticky as long as I followed the recipe. I had to add quite a bit of flour to make it resemble a functional pie dough, and I'm still not sure that I would call it tough but it seemed to work.

I let it rest in the fridge for appr. 30 minutes before I made the pies. I used the method mentioned that didn't call for moulds and took ca. 12X12 cm squares of rolled out dough, filled them up, folded over with some egg between the edges and sealed them up by pressing down with a fork. I forgot to take any pictures of this, but they pretty much looked the same before and after their time in the oven (I baked them for 10-15 minutes, I think).

I know that poor craftsmen blame their tools, but my oven is terrible at it's job. I love my gas-top stove but I hate the gas oven that's part of the deal. All heat comes from below which in reality means that everything baked in the oven will look unbaked on top, and slightly to very baked on the bottom-side.

So this is what I ended up with. No they don't look very appetizing. Unfortunately, I'm very used to that.

BUT - they tasted very good, much thanks to the filling (the dough was alright but nothing to write home about, a bit dry and bread-y). I ended up with 13 little pies that I brought to the picnic and treated friends and strangers to and they were well received in spite of their unfortunate appearance.

The Recipe: Pastej af stek/Meat pie from a 1821 edition of Carolina Weltzin's 1804 cookbook with the LONG title of: Ny kokbok. Eller Anwisning till en myckenhet nu brukliga mat-rätters tillredande; jemte ett bihang innehållande kunskaper om hwarjehanda hushålls-rön. Available in pdf version here.

The recipe for the dough is from an 1801 edition of Anna Maria Rückerschöld's Den nya och fullständiga kok-boken[...] available as pdf here.

I also took a peek in Cajsa Warg's 1755 cookbook that unfortunately isn't available online.

The Date/Year and Region: Sweden, early 1800s.

How Did You Make It: I made a pie dough of butter, flour and eggs and filled them with a mince of cold hen's meat, onion, parsley, eggs, wine, chicken stock and spices. They were made into small envelope-like pies and baked in the oven.

Time to Complete: If you count cooking the hen, five hours? otherwise, perhaps two hours.

Total Cost: I had most of the ingredients on hand, so not much; I consider this a rather cheap dish.

How Successful Was It?: They tasted so much better than they looked! I was very happy with them, and my husband who is a very picky eater also liked them, which I take as a very good review.

How Accurate Is It?: Not too bad, I think. I used store bought bread crumbs, but otherwise I think I used as good ingredients as I could considering this day and age. My gas oven isn't very period though. And it's a bad, bad oven.

At last, some bonus pictures from the picnic! It was a huge multi-era historical picnic held on the national day in Sweden.

Me. I chose clothes to match the food. Of course.

Guests with food.

Most of the guests posing for a group photo.

Minus the blue plastic bowl, this is a very pretty 'picnic-set'!

This as well.

Sources:

• Rückerschöld, Anna Maria (1801). Den nya och fullständiga kok-boken, innehållande beskrifning, at med mindre kostnad tilreda hwarjehanda smakliga rätter äfwen af potates, samt wälmenta råd och påminnelser, som jämwäl för bättre hushåll kunna wara tjenande, jemte bihang af et litet hushålls-allahanda [Elektronisk resurs]. 2. upl. Stockholm: Available online as pdf.

• Warg, Cajsa (1755). Hjelpreda i hushållningen för unga fruentimber./(C.W.) Stockholm, tryckt hos Lor. Ludv. Grefing, på desz egen bekostnad 1755.. Stockholm: page 189.
• 
  
• Weltzin, Carolin (1821). Ny kokbok. Eller Anwisning till en myckenhet nu brukliga mat-rätters tillredande; jemte ett bihang innehållande kunskaper om hwarjehanda hushålls-rön. Af C. Weltzin. Fjerde upplagan. Stockholm, 1821. Tryckt hos direct. Henrik A. Nordström, [Elektronisk resurs] : på eget förlag.. Stockholm: Available online as pdf.

A selection of Paul Britten Austins's English translations of Carl Michael Bellman's poems and songs can be read online here.