welcome friends welcome back to the
kitchen welcome back to sunday morning
and the old cookbook show today we're
going to do a recipe out of this
cookbook in front of me
it is called the toronto queen city of
canada cookbook it was published in
1915 by a woman named mrs e j powell
e.j powell ej is her husband's initials
publishing in this time period was
always done under your husband's name
her name was delia was georgia delia
powell
and this was published as
a fundraiser
beginning of world war one
the idea was that they would publish 25
000 copies of this cookbook
and the proceeds after the publishing
costs and distribution costs would be
used
for charity to help those people who
needed a little bit of help uh in this
time period but apparently it wasn't
very successful
and they didn't sell as many as they
thought and a lot of them were sold
after
the war had finished and there was no
need for the charity or the charity had
run its course
and so this book in particular is one
that i know
was sold
after
the war had ended
because there's a section
that is pages two three and four that is
removed from the front of this book
which i find very interesting that
it just didn't make it as a charity item
i don't know if that was because
no one was interested in the cookbook or
maybe a dollar was too much in 1915 for
a cookbook
maybe mrs powell overreached i mean this
is a fairly
thick cookbook to be sold in this time
period
and
i'm looking out there at the cousins who
i know some of my cousins watch this
show
are we related i i can't find any
connection to mrs e j powell um but you
know a powell in toronto in this time
period
could be related so we're going to make
something called squash muffins now
mrs powell was the compiler this is at
its core a church-based community
cookbook so she went out to her
community her church-based community
and
found recipes and put them in this book
and the one we're going to do today is
called squash muffins
and she attributes it to herself this is
her personal recipe in this cookbook
so that's one of the reasons i wanted to
do it
one of the other reasons i wanted to do
it
is that muffins in this time oh do i
have enough milk
not enough milk
so muffins in this time period aren't
sweet and this recipe really holds true
to that concept um
there's no sugar component at all the
only sweetness that i can think of that
comes in this recipe is from the squash
itself
and that squash could be any kind of
squash it could be pumpkin it could be
butternut it could be acorn it could be
whatever squash you have available to
you
from your garden
this in a lot of ways seems like a
recipe to me that um
it's kind of like zucchini bread you
know
you
you've got a lot of squash and you need
to use it up
so you're putting it in everything
and also the squash will bring a little
bit of an earthy flavor to the whole to
the whole recipe
i think it will also bring some
moistness to the whole recipe definitely
add some moisture
now
because it's not sweet
it's not even probably even savory but
because it's not sweet
there's no spicing either
now the first
mention of
sort of i got in there i've got eggs
squash which today i'm using butternut
and milk
this is flour and
it doesn't specifically say this it just
says dump everything in but i'm going to
add the salt
and baking powder to the flour and just
kind of give that a little bit of a stir
first
pumpkin pie spice pumpkin pie spice
not called pumpkin pie spice in the time
but it starts to appear in pumpkin pies
or that combination that we think of as
pumpkin pie spice
starts to appear in the 1790s
and the first commercially available
go to the grocery store and buy a jar of
pumpkin pie spice doesn't happen until
the 1930s so a good uh 15 to 20 years
after this recipe is is printed
but the reality is by this point in 1915
the spices that we think of as pumpkin
pie spice were already embedded in a lot
of recipes and elsewhere in this book
there are pumpkin recipes that use that
spicing combination but
squash
or pumpkin didn't automatically mean
that you were going to add those spices
so i'm just going to mix the flour in
here
a little bit at a time don't go too
quickly
so i guess where i'm going with all of
that is this is a recipe that if um
you happen to have a cup of sugar and an
open bottle of pumpkin pie spice on your
countertop and say two teaspoons of
pumpkin pie spice accidentally fell in
along with that cup of sugar uh you
would probably have
a pumpkin pie spice muffin um
that would be really tasty by today's
standards
and that's not to say that this one
isn't going to be tasty because i don't
know what it's going to taste like yet
so i've got that all mixed together it
says the last thing to put in is
melted butter and it's not much melted
butter it's
just a tablespoon so i'm going to put
that in
and give it a mix
now doesn't say how many muffin tins
this will fill so i'm going to start out
with this many and see what happens it
tells me to bake this
to put it into a hot oven so i've
preheated the oven to 425
and then it says to turn it down to is
it moderate and then cook it for a half
an hour so i'm going to fill these up
get it in the oven and see what happens
and we'll turn this down to a slow oven
hey glenn hey jules hey friends i'll get
some uh spoons for the soup no no no no
just chicken and wild rice soup that's
the next video we're having we're having
squash muffins okay we're having squash
okay i'll put that soup down squash
muffins okay does it have the flour in
it like the flour of the no squash no so
it's okay it's it's
you could use canned pumpkin oh you're
just using any squash any squash okay
got it cooked squash so it's from the
1915 toronto queen city of canada
cookbook written by mrs powell the queen
city of canada he decided that title i
wonder
yeah that's what i i don't often hear of
toronto called the queen city anymore no
no
hog town more often than not
but um so written in 1915 by mrs powell
oh my mrs powell yes i'm hoping one of
the cousins
lets me know are we related which mrs
powell could it possibly be which mrs
powell is it
um
interesting book what kind of squash did
you use so i used orange i used pumpkin
okay that would explode
butternut butternut butter pumpkin would
say why it's so very orange
um
so
soft it's it's got lots of bubbles in it
yeah
it's not super sweet
i put it up there with a
somewhere i would have a cornbread yes i
might have this it needs a little butter
on it the way cornbread often does if
it's not the super
sugary kind
okay so there's absolutely no sugar in
this no there's not much flavor to it at
all there's no there's no there's no
spicing
it's just
flour butter egg milk and squash but in
that way i think you could cornbread it
up like you could put some jalapenos and
cheese in it or you could put
you know some savory spices that you
happen to like that complement what
you're eating so for people that don't
like cornbread because sometimes it can
be dry
oh this is not dry this is not dry this
is really good
um so you could take this so as julie
says i can only eat a little bit because
i can i can't open my jaw but it is a
pretty flavorless like it's got a good
texture it's got a good
savory kind of
blank slightness to it yes does that
make sense that's where i was trying to
get to so you could you could take this
and bring it totally into savory like
julie said by putting in some
jalapeno and and dressing it up that way
or you had 10 pounds of butter you could
add more butter on top or you could you
could add some sugar like a tablespoon
of sugar easily take this into sweeter
territory
by adding some sugar and some oh could
you add dates
well you couldn't but yes you could add
dried fruits pumpkin pie spice yeah put
that in oh
not the yes
october pumpkin pie spice
so it's a good base and it is very it is
very in keeping with what a muffin was
in 1915.
even muffins in the 70s weren't that
small weren't that sweet like they
weren't the sugar bombs that they are
today today there's a fine line between
muffin and cupcake yeah
i can't tell the difference okay so um a
great base to work from a great
sugar-free muffin for people that want a
sugar-free muffin for breakfast i'm
gonna go with gravy yeah it would go
with gravy
put that on the thanksgiving table
or
make them try them out and make your
turkey stuffing with them
okay so thanks for stopping by
see you again soon
you