Roast Goose
Bread & Butter Pudding
Ingredients:
8 slices of bread
½ cup raisins or currants
3 ounces butter
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
½ teaspoon salt
1-2 Tablespoons sugar
4 eggs, beaten
2 cups milk
Directions:
1. Remove crusts from bread.
2. Butter the bread and layer in a greased 1 ½ quart casserole. Sprinkle raisins or currants between each layer.
3. Beat the eggs, then add the milk, salt, sugar and nutmeg. Pour milk/egg mixture over the layers of bread.
4. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes, or until the top is browned, the pudding is set, and a toothpick comes out clean.
Yield: 1 quart of pudding, or 6-8 servings.
Taken from Colonial Burlington Cookery; A Book of Receipts April 1770, Polly Burling, by Sue Huesken & Mercy Ingraham,
Gingerbread Nuts
Ingredients for ½ the recipe:
1 lb (4 cups) flour
¼ lb (1 stick) melted butter
¼ lb (1/2 cup) sugar
1 Tablespoon ground ginger
1 Tablespoon crushed caraway seeds
1 Tablespoon dried, minced orange or lemon peel
1 ½ cup molasses
Directions
1. Mix the flour, sugar and spices thoroughly
2. Combine the molasses and the melted butter.
3. Add flour gradually to molasses/butter mixture. The texture should be clay-like. You may need to add more or less flour to get the right consistency.
4. Knead the dough on a lightly floured board for several minutes.
5. To make “nuts”, roll balls of dough about 1 inch in diameter.
6. To make flat cakes (cookies), roll out dough to ½ inch thickness. Cut cakes with a cookie cutter or glass tumbler in approximately 2 inch rounds.
7. Place nuts or flat cakes on greased baking pan and bake in a slack oven (300 degrees) for 20 to 25 minutes.
8. The only way to accurately determine if the nuts/cakes are done is to taste them. The color and size do not change appreciably. Begin tasting when you begin to smell them baking. They are easily overdone, so err on the side of being underdone. They keep very well.
Recipe above makes approximately 96 nuts or 42 flat cakes/cookies.
Whipt Syllabubs
Take a quart of cream, not too thick, a pint of sack, and the juice of two lemons; sweeten it to your palate, put it into a broad earthen pan, and with a whisk whip it; as the froth rises, take if off with a spoon, and lay it in your syllabub-glasses; but first you must sweeten some claret, sack, or white wine, and strain it, and put seven or eight spoonfuls of the wine into your glasses, and then gently lay in your froth. Set them by. Do not make them long before you use them.
From The Compleat Housewife by Eliza Smith, pg. 190.
Roasting a Goose.
Take Sage, wash it, pick it clean, chop it small, with Pepper and Salt; roll them in butter and put them into the Belly; never put Onion into any thing unless you are sure every body loves it; take Care that your Goose be clean pick’d and wash’d; I think the best way is to scald a Goose, and then you are sure it is clean, and not so strong: Let your Water be scalding hot, and dip in your Goose for a Minute, then all the Feathers will come off clean; when it is quite clean wash it with cold Water, and dry it with a Cloth; roast it and baste it with Butter, and when it is half done throw some Flour over it, that it may have a fine Brown; three Quarters of an Hour will do it at a quick Fire, if it is not too large, otherwise it will require an Hour; always have good Gravy in a Bason, and Apple-Sauce in another.
From The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse, 1747. (The spellings, punctuation and capitalizations are hers, and typical of the era. Needless to say, the copyright has expired and you can print it as I have quoted it.)
A few words of explanation: When you think of cooking an 11 pound goose for three quarters of an hour, it makes you wonder. Unless you understand that the coals of the fire exceed 1000 degrees, you would think they ate their food raw in the 18th century. They did not. I baked our goose for 3 hours at 325 degrees in my conventional 21st century oven for our photo shoot. I have done a goose over the fire many times, but generally cook it low and slow. Whenever I cook something I have not done in a while, I refer to The Joy of Cooking, 75th anniversary edition. Interestingly enough the directions are identical, except for the time the goose roasts. They also want you to submerge the goose in boiling water for a minute to crisp the skin.
Mercy Ingraham
An Open Hearth Cook
Yam or Pottatoe Pudding
Ingredients:
4 yams (1 pound) or 2 cups mashed yams 6 ounces soft butter
scant cup sugar (or less, according to taste)
2 eggs
¾ cup currants
1 Tablespoon rosewater
½ to 1 teaspoon ground mace
½ to 1 teaspoon cinnamon
peel of ½ lemon, finely minced
crust for 9 “ pie plate
Directions:
1. Bake the yams until they are softened. Peel and mash them.
2. Beat 6 ounces of soft butter into the warm yams.
3. Beat eggs, then add sugar and beat together until light and frothy. Add to the yam/butter mixture.
4. Beat in spices and rosewater.
5. Stir in currants and lemon peels.
6. Line a 9 inch pie plate with a pastry crust, and pour in the yam mixture. (An alternative would be to grease a casserole, and bake the yam mixture without the crust.)
7. Bake in a 350 degree oven for approximately 1 hour, or until a knife inserted in the middle of the pudding comes out clean. May be served either hot or cold. Yield: one pudding, serves 10 to 12.
From Colonial Burlington Cookery by Sue Huesken and Mercy Ingraham
Copyright 2008 by Sue Huesken and Mercy Ingraham