Open German Tart

 I was fiddling around with a cooking challenge and was skimming through an issue of Godey's Lady's book, 1863 and I found this recipe for a very simple pie.   If you've never made a pie before, this would be easy enough from scratch and could look amazing.   Of course you don't have to make it all pretty, but it was easy to do.

I didn't convert to volume from weights because I rather like baking with the accuracy of weights.   Anyway, the pie crust is more of a cookie dough and came together really easily.   I sliced up some apples and laid them on top, and popped it in the oven until the scent of cooking apples was noticeable.   I checked it, left it another 10 minutes and it was done.    I set the tart in at 400F for about 15 minutes and then lowered the temperature to 350F until it was done.

I had used a baking sheet to do this and the edges on the pan meant I had to let it cool before it was strong enough to lift over the pan edges.  Next time I'd turn the pan upside down and bake it on the underside so that I could just slide it off onto the cooling rack.   The crispness of the crust was great the first day, but the next day was just a tad soft, and I think this might be why.  I'd make it again though as it was really fast to throw together.  The taste was not of an apple pie, since there are no spices and no liquid to keep the apples soft.  However the crust is like a shortbread or sugar cookie, with the apples on top and was really nice.   It would be really nice with some ice cream or maybe a drizzle of caramel sauce, for a more modern dessert.

I sliced up 4 medium apples and it was probably too much.  It allowed me to get fancy with the layering of the fruit though and make it look a bit like a flower.  You don't have to be fancy about it though.   The downside is the pie is a little lacking in colour.  I was wondering if maybe running a bit of egg wash over the edges would help.   Whatever it was lacking in colour though, the delicate taste made up for it.   

Open German Tart

3 or 4 apples, peeled, cored and sliced

1/2 lb flour

1/4 lb butter, softened

1/4 lb sugar

 1 egg

 

I just dumped all the ingredients in a bowl and mixed it together to make a dough.  I greased a pan and rolled out the dough into a circle and transferred it to the greased pan.  I trimmed the edges a bit and fixed couple of tears in the dough .  This was easy as the dough was a bit soft and easily manipulated.   I then rolled up the edges to make the rim.   I placed the apples in a circle and when I realised I had too many of them, I went back and reset them, over lapping a bit more like petals.    Once all the apples, well all but 3 slices were in place, I popped the tray into a pre-heated oven.    Really super easy, fairly fast and impressively pretty without a lot of effort.

Godey's Lady's Book - Jan-April, 1863, pg 302

It's two volumes in one book, so this volume is the second one, starting at page 586 or so and is available on the Internet Archive.

End of Summer Activities

 It's getting dark so early now.  The chooks are headed back to the coop by 6:45pm and it's getting dark so quickly afterwards that I rarely have time to get a bit of walking in.  During the summer I tend to walk in the evenings, as it's still plenty light out and the temperatures are starting to cool down.  Now though, it's too dark about 10 or 15 minutes after I lock up the girls.  I've gotten into the habit of downloading a trashy audio book from the library and listening to it while I walk.  I've discovered that most modern regency romances are really silly and worth a few chuckles while I'm out walking.

Other than that, I demonstrated Dorset buttons and spinning for 2 days at the local fair.   The buttons on the Saturday and spinning on the Sunday with a couple of weavers.   The weather was perfect and didn't start to turn until after the fair had closed on Sunday.   I got to eat my lunch, sitting on a straw bale, listening to 2 different bands.  One was quite good, who played modern country music.  The steel guitar player was good and the music was nicely amped so you could actually hear it.   I fell in love with the steel guitar  at that moment.  I messaged hubby that maybe one should be added to our instrument collection, but apparently it's priced in line with the Hurdy Gurdy I'd like to have as well. That means it's well out of our price range.   

The other musician was a John Denver impersonator.   He does a great job and this year he costumed up before he hit the stage, which made it perfect.  Last year he was on stage without his wig, and without a full costume, so the look didn't match the music.   If you closed your eyes though, it was almost right...  I got to eat my lunch, listening to good music, with a really nice antique tractor on display.  What's not to like about that?

The Dorset Button display went really well and lots of people stopped by to ask about them.  Last year not a single person talked to be about spinning as they were all interested in the weavers.  This year it was the opposite.  You just can tell what people will be interested any particular year.

A friend asked me for some heritage recipe help for a friend of hers, who needed a Quince jam recipe from an earlier time period.   I spent about half an hour or so digging up some recipes and sending them on.   Then I found another recipe, slightly different which I passed on too, with all the citations of course.    I got a lovely invitation to come and pick quinces from her quince grove.  That was fun.  These fruits smell amazing.  I walk into the kitchen and there is a sweet, spicy almost cinnamon scent.  They are also huge.  I've only seen one quince before and it was quite small.  These things are as large or larger than my hand!  I'm letting them ripen up a bit while I decide what to make with them.   I'll make a period 1860's quince marmalade for sure, and maybe some quince paste, which seems to be a fruit leather type of recipe. I'm looking forward to trying these and will post the results of my attempts.

End of August update

The river on a late summer hike

 This morning had a bit of unexpected excitement.  When I put my glasses on when I woke up, I realised that they were broken!  They were fine when I took them off at bedtime.   Of course without my glasses I couldn't see what was wrong with them, although I did find the missing lens and knew that the frame was unattached at the earpiece thing.   Luckily hubby figured out that a tiny screw had fallen out and by disassembling an old pair of glasses, he was able to fix mine with the scavenged screw.  I was so happy to be able to see clearly again without old glasses or sneaking hubby's glasses, which worked okay in a pinch, although not perfect.

Yesterday I harvested some garden tomatoes.    They are finally starting to ripen.  I've eaten a cucumber and cherry tomatoes for lunch for half the summer, which was lovely.   I've gotten 1.25kg of blackberries in the freezer.   I could easily get another 1 or 2 pickings in,  but I'm not sure it's worth it.   This time of year the seedy berries sometimes get even seedier and they are smaller pickings, for the same amount of work.   I have more than enough for a good batch of jam.

Last time I made blackberry jam, I pressed all the berries though a sieve with a wooden spoon. I've been looking for a Foley's food mill to make that job easier but they don't seem to be available any longer.  These are the metal cone mortar and pestle shaped ones.   The last time I saw one in a store a couple of years ago, I was very tempted to buy it as I've wanted one for years, but the price was really crazy high.   Amazon has one but it's fairly small  and almost $100.   I'm not sure I want to spend that much for a tool I'll only use a few times a year.

 Second choice is a grinder type food mill.   They are more reasonably priced.   When the kids were young, a friend and I would get together a couple of nights in the fall to freeze corn and make apple sauce.  It meant that we each had a freezer full with only a couple of hours of work and fun.    She had a food mill, which was old but really sturdy.  It ground up the apples in no time.   I'm hoping to find one as well built as that.  

I'm ticked at myself for not buying Plums when they were in the store.   Prune plums make spectacular jam.  If you chop them fine enough, you don't even have to peel them, as the peels will dissolve while cooking.   Maybe there will be some left at the market.

On a grey, damp day we went for a walk through the antique mall.   One booth had a few copper moulds in it.  One was $25 and another shopper and I commiserated over that being a ridiculous price for a jelly mould.   She would only pay $5 for one, and because I will pay a couple of dollars more if it's one I really like and don't have, I found these 3.  The strawberry one had some gunk on it, which the $25 one, the same strawberry mould didn't have.   I paid $8 for these and the gunk washed right off the mould with no scratching, discolouration or residue.  I was happy.   

canning and garden update

I wanted to make a batch of bread and butter pickles and some relish, but didn't have enough small cucumbers from my garden.    We went to the local "farm market", which is a shop which brings in local produce, rather than a farmers market because it's only open on Saturday morning, and the timing was wrong.   It was $8 for a small basket of pickling cucumbers and I'd need 4 baskets for the 2 recipes.  There was a half bushel for $30, which was less than the 4 baskets so of course being frugal, I got the half bushel.   

I made dill pickles.

I made cucumber relish

I made a second batch of dill pickles, these ones sliced into rounds instead of spears.

I made bread and butter pickles, my favourite!

I gave 3 lbs of cucumbers to my daughter so she could make pickles.

I still have enough pickles in the fridge to make another batch!

We have more pickles in the pantry than we can eat in a year!  I even started canning some in small jars as give aways!

Last week the blackberries started ripening. They don't all ripen at once, so it's not an onerous task.   If you leave 3 days between picking, or sometimes 4, then it's worth the effort.   This is including the fact that I neglected to weed out the nettles earlier in the season, and keep forgetting to wear long pants and sleeves, resulting in tingling legs and arms.   Anyway, I've got just over 1 kg of blackberries frozen, for use later in the season, when the weather cools down a bit for more comfortable processing.  There are still quite a lot of berries left on the brambles though, so I'm guessing several more pickings before I give up and leave the rest to go to seed.

I also pruned the tomatoes back to get rid of a lot of excess leaves and hopefully aid the fruit in ripening.   I'm not sure I cut away enough of the excess leaves though.  They are still pretty full. The plants have quite a lot of fruit on them, but it's all still very green, due to another summer of less than adequate sunshine.    I may have to buy some tomatoes just to make sure there are some canned in the pantry for the winter.   I use all of the 1/2 bushel that I put up when I have to buy them, but could easily use more.

I have herbs to dry, mainly oregano, basil and parsley this year, and potatoes to harvest.  The tomatoes are wait and see.   The cucumbers are still producing and I'm getting one or two pickling cucumbers a day, which I generally eat for lunch, along with whatever cherry tomatoes are ripe.  The zucchini is still producing, but they are just starting to get a bit of mildew on them, so they'll be done soon.   Peppers, hot Hungarian banana peppers are growing fast and furiously this year.   I will need to harvest soon and I'll likely have to pickle them for winter use too.   They are pretty delicious.  

Quick Trip to PEI

 

View from take off 

It was a quick holiday, with a few travel glitches but full of family and fun.  First there was a power failure, so no elevators which left all of us scrambling to find a place for us to sleep the night before we left.  Since it was an early flight, it made more sense to be safely ensconced close to the airport, rather than several hours away.   The power came back on and all was good.   The plane we were supposed to take was delayed on their departure, so we had a leisurely morning rather than a rushed one.    We didn't have to worry about missing our connecting flight as it was on the same plane we flew in on.   Regardless of a bit more airport time than one would like, for things outside of anyone's control, the service from Porter Airlines was excellent, friendly and professional.  

We landed at the Charlottetown airport in drizzle.   It drizzled all afternoon and evening.   We tried to find a restaurant for supper but there was nothing available.  It was high tourist season after all.  Finally we found a totally empty restaurant, with tons of seating and people coming in and out for take out.   It was a Chinese food restaurant and after talking with the owner, we found out that after a 4 week closure for renovations, this was their first night open.   The food ranged from good to excellent.  Their schezwan noodles were really, really good!   When the guys asked if they were licensed, they were, had no beer, but the owner said just a minute, and rushed to the liquor/beer store half a block away and brought back a shopping cart full of different beers to stock his cooler.  All because two guys wanted a beer with supper, on their opening night.  Partway through dinner the sun broke out, and it was like every glitch suddenly disappeared.

Red boat in harbour was unloading gravel

Charlottetown is a lovely little city.  With a large area set up for tourism, there are lots of restaurants and little shops.  The waterfront is lovely with a great board walk and lots of things to see.   We had rooms in a boutique hotel very close to downtown, so we could walk down regularly.   

We had rented a car so we got to see much of the island.   We did a day of museums, the L.M. Montgomery birthplace, the Green Gables museum, the Potato museum, which had the Agriculture museum attached.   The L.M. Montgomery museum came highly recommended and it was interesting and full of the authors scrap books and some other documents.   The Green Gables museum though was full of "scope for the imagination".   It was a home that was owned by Montgomery's aunt and in it were various items that she'd incorporated into her books, like the blue chest, the china cabinet from Emily of New Moon?, and the view from the window to the lake of shining waters!   It enjoyed it very much.

We had a late lunch at the potato museum, which mainly served potatoes.   The servings were massive and one of the meals was a stuffed baked potato with a side of potatoes!   I bucked the trend and had a bowl of chilli.   None of us were ready for supper yet, so we took a sunset boat tour of the harbour.  It advertised seeing seals and lobsters.   We'd looked for whale watching but hadn't found an available tour, so this one was instead of that.   The evening tour didn't go to the seals, but we were treated to love music, a lot of island information and a very educational program on lobsters.  This included being able to pet a lobster, fresh from the trap.  I will admit that I didn't pet the lobster as it was passed around from passenger to passenger before it was put back into the sea.  The captain had a special permit allowing him to have one trap for educational purposes.   

We went swimming the next day at a provincial park and got to play in the water and a unique white sand beach, on an island with mostly red sand and clay.   We left once it got busy and realised as we drove back to the hotel that we'd seen most of the island.   DH really enjoyed the rental car which was a sub compact SUV.   Even after another delay on the way home due for reasons that apparently included a broken loo door, we got home.   I will say that the landing on a short runway surrounded by water showed me how very much I'm not good with plane landings.   The only downside of the trip was the ride home on the GO train, packed beyond capacity with people from the Jays game and the Toronto Indy races.  

All in all it was a fabulous trip.   We had a blast.   The cats were happy to see us when we got home and the chooks were happy to be let out to free range, as we'd told our son to keep them in, so he had less work.  The only thing I didn't do was find a special skein of sock yarn to have as a souvenir.   Otherwise the trip was perfect and the first time we'd been away for anything at all in over 4 years!

Strawberry Jam Fairy

starting point

 Today I was told that I was the Strawberry Jam fairy by a guest at Westfield, as I was delivering some samples of jam that we'd made at Westfield, to some nearby busy staff members.   

I was working with Ryan today, who is great fun to be with.  He doesn't mind helping out with things, including talking with people, any cleaning chores etc.   Today, he helped with the strawberry jam, which I'd planned to make on the Happy Thoughts Wood cook stove.  

Most jam recipes in historical cookery books call for a 1:1 ratio in weight of

Almost done

fruit to sugar.   The Wife's Own Book of Cookery, 1856, has recipes which call for 1 to .75 ratio of fruit to sugar.  This makes an amazingly flavourful jam.   Today I used 1 kg of strawberries to 750g of sugar.   It was cooked on a wood stove, using a cast iron pot.   I used frozen berries for convenience.  They were still frozen when the jam was started, so they we took turns manually chopping them with a wooden spatula we had to stir with.   It worked well.   The spatula was about 4 inches wide and had small holes in it, which worked a treat at keeping the jam from sticking to the bottom of the pot.

Jam and tea

We cooked it until it started to thicken up and the bubbles blooped appropriately.   When the jam is starting to thicken, the boiling changes and you can tell when it is done.  We were given little paper cups for handing out samples.  We had about 1/4 of the cast iron pot of jam when done, and used most of it up for samples.    It took about an hour to make the jam and for most of that hour, the house smelled awesomely of strawberries.  We also took turns stirring as the jam needed to be constantly stirred for the whole hour.

You don't need to add any water to the fruit in the beginning.  The sugar quickly draws out the moisture from the fruit creating all the liquid that is needed to make the jam.   Early recipes don't add lemon like modern recipes.  This drops the ph to help keep the bacteria away.   Since there was no intention to keep this jam for months, because we were eating it fresh, it wasn't needed anyway.   If I were to make this jam to eat over the winter, I might add a tbsp of lemon juice.  I'd also pre-heat the jars to add the hot jam once it was made, and water bath can the filled jam jars for 10 minutes.  This length of time changes with different altitudes.    

Also, the tea is gingerale.   It looks quite proper in the cups and hides the modern drink well.  I didn't bring enough water with me for both clean up and tea, so this made an acceptable drink with our taste test of the jam.

1839 chocolate ice cream

I made a chocolate ice cream recipe from The Kentucky Housewife cookbook, published in 1839.  I did a bit of research on 18th and 19th century ice creams before I settled on this particular recipe.  It's not completely authentic though I followed the receipt, but chocolate as we know it, be it bar chocolate or even processed cocoa is not the same product as it was in earlier times.   Also, not having a sorbetiere, or even a manual ice cream maker, I ended up using my electric ice cream maker, which I will admit is very enjoyable to use.

Several cookery books have very specific instructions on how to make ice cream, but no, or few actual recipes.   However the 1830 The Cooks Dictionary tells us not only how to make ice cream, but how to adjust recipes for "creams" to make ice cream, as well as having a number of different ice cream recipes.   Most of the cookbooks have recipes for creams, which are custardy, mousse, pudding-like desserts.  Apparently you just make the cream recipe a little less thick and then use it to make ice cream.  

Because I didn't have enough cocoa on hand, and wasn't going to town for a few days, I used baker's chocolate.  I know a number of the recipes call for mixing the chocolate with water, which would be a cocoa product, not bar chocolate as it would seize.   I grated it and it made this lovely pile of soft, tiny chocolate flakes which melted easily into the milk mixture.    Because the chocolate was semi-sweet, I cut the amount of sugar in the ice cream as well.   I used a 10% cream mixture because we only had 1% milk and even our whole milk doesn't have enough fat content to qualify for "rich, sweet milk".   Also because a litre of that mixture was cheaper than purchasing a litre of whole milk and a container of double or whipping cream.   I also only used 4 eggs because my chooks are laying very large eggs, with large yolks.    I followed the directions, melting the chocolate in the milk mixture and then letting it cool a bit.  Then I added the yolks and the sugar  and brought the mixture up to just a boil.   This is pretty important as it cooks the eggs.   I stirred it constantly.   When the custard had boiled just a tad, I removed it from the heat.   I let it cool a bit, then transferred it to a bowl, covered it with plastic wrap and put it into the fridge overnight.  While this step is obviously modern, it is one of the procedures that is suggested in the instructions of the modern ice cream maker.

The next morning, I put the now fairly thick and cold custard into the ice cream maker and in about 15 minutes the ice cream was quite thick.   The instructions say to freeze twice.   In reality this means to pack the ice cream into a mould and re-freeze by setting it in the ice and salt mixture.   I didn't have a suitable mould, so instead I packed it into a lined loaf pan and set it into the freezer.   This second freezing allows the semi-soft frozen ice cream to harden up nicely.  

The ice cream scooped up nicely.  It was so creamy and rich.   It had a great mouth feel and felt very decadent.   I would use less chocolate next time, and try it with a mixture of cocoa and chocolate, which might replicate the actual period chocolate available.   

Would I make this again?   Indeed.  It was well worth the effort.   There is a recipe for peach ice cream in this book and there are tinned peaches left in my cupboard.   That will be the next recipe to try.