Welcome to How To Cook That I'm Ann Reardon and today we're looking at
baking hacks from 100 years ago! I was looking through this really old cookbook
that belonged to my great-grandmother and I asked my mum if I could borrow it.
Let's start by looking at some of the kitchen maxim's as they call it ... some of these
are just common sense like clear as you go muddle makes more muddle! Good advice
not one I always stick to. Others are well how would you put it a bit strange!
wash a saucepan but clean a frypan with a piece of bread. Really? Let's have a
look when did paper towels become common? 1930s so close we've got to wait another
eight years to get paper towel in their grocery store. When the washing up is
over wash the tea cloth as it saves the cloths and cleanses the hands. This book
actually has a whole page about laundry work which is really interesting
Check out a hand-cranked washing machine and if you were rich enough at this
stage you might have had an early-model electric washing machine. We are so
blessed now we just chuck everything in the washing machine no need to wash the
teatowel after you've done the dishes. Let's move from the laundry to cakes.
The first tip here says the cake should be placed in the oven as soon as
possible after the eggs and milk have been added ... if allowed to remain too long
the cake will become heavy. To test this advice we're going to make the plain
cake from this book which has ingredients such as flour and baking
powder and good beef dripping! There is a recipe in this book for how to make beef
dripping so we're going to have to make that first. Go to your butcher and ask
for the beef fat from around the kidneys and chop that finely. Nothing was wasted
back in this time, you have to remember this is not long after World War one
when food was very short. Butter was still rationed right up until 1920.
Because we do now have an abundance of electrical appliances I'm going to
actually use the mincer attachment on my mixer to chop this really finely for me.
The more finely you chop it the quicker it's going to break down when
you do the next step. Add to the fat two times the amount of water by weight and
heat that up over a low heat until all the fat has melted which as I said won't
take long if you've used the mincer and made it really fine.
Then strain that through a sieve into a bowl and leave it to cool and the fat
will come up to the top and set. You just get rid of the water that's in the bowl
but take the fat off the top and it says you want to reheat that to evaporate any
water that might be still in that fat and that takes about 15 minutes just
letting it bubble slowly and then you can let that set again. If you put that
beef dripping into the fridge it sets up really quite hard so I'm gonna have to
let that soften a little bit now up to room temperature so that I can use it.
put the flour and the baking powder together in a basin and stir these
together and I'll put all these recipe quantities on the howtocookthat.net
website for you in case you want to make some of these hundred-year-old cakes as
well and there's a link to that below. Then rub in the dripping it's gonna take
me a while because it's still quite hard but I'll get there eventually.
there we go that's all rubbed in, then it says add the sugar caraway seeds and
peel (it's not a very "plain cake") and the milk and beat that all together very
thoroughly until the ingredients are all well mixed. Grease a tin and put the cake
mixture in. This is a really really thick cake mixture so I don't know if we're
gonna be able to see if it's going heavy by leaving it out but we'll try anyway
it says to bake from one-and-a-half to two hours. I'm putting just the one of
them in the oven straightaway and the other one I'm going to leave on the
bench for thirty minutes to see if waiting makes it heavy. This is the one
that went straight into the oven and this is the one that I left on the bench.
there may be a slight difference but really not a lot and that could be
because it started as such a heavy cake in the first place or it could be because
we have double acting baking powder now ... it starts bubbling while it's sitting on
the bench and then bubbles even more when it's in the heat of the oven. The
flavor doesn't really taste it beef but it definitely has a slightly savory
flavor to it you can tell there's something different - if you had butter
or margarine in it. The beef dripping could actually be quite nice in savory
pastries but given the choice I wouldn't use it in cakes again. Next if you have
unused crusts place them on a baking tray in the oven and then grate them to
make bread crumbs. Next we have two cake hacks to stop a cake from browning. It
says when the oven is very hot and the tops of the cake are taking on too much
color cover them with a sheet of kitchen paper and to prevent the bottom of a
cake subjected to long cooking from burning the tin should be stood on a
baking sheet covered with a layer of sand! Interesting 🧐Okay for the Victoria
cake it says we need to stir the sugar and the yolks of eggs together until
thick and creamy, then add the melted butter. Pass the flour baking powder and
a good pinch of salt through a sieve. Stir lightly into the rest of the
ingredients and add milk by degrees until the mixture drops readily from the
spoon. It actually doesn't give a quantity for the milk so I'm just adding
it and mixing it in and I think that drops readily from the spoon do you
think that looks right? Now it says to whisk the whites of eggs stiffly this is
going to take a while let me just put this in fast-forward...
There we go gee that's hard work hand whisking. Stir them in as lightly as
possible and pour the preparation into a well greased tin. Now we don't have any
sand at our house so I'm just going to have to use soil and this soil is a
little damp for the purpose of experimenting but just so you know what
I had to start with. That looks just wrong we're having soil around the cake
but I guess it's not actually touching so we're all good for food safety there.
and then we're gonna put a sheet of baking paper on top and pop that in the
oven for 20 minutes. This is the one that I baked without the baking paper on top
and this is the one that had baking paper on top so the hack actually worked
for stopping the top of the cake from browning. Then if we flip it over this
one was the one that was baked normally and this one had the tray of dirt ta-da!
Look at that a genius 100 year old hack that I've never heard of before! That's
actually awesome for layered cakes because you don't have a browned base or
a browned top when you're layering them up. I like it and give me that one thumbs
up 👍🏻 The next hack says always close the oven door gently and open it as little
as possible... I remember my mum used to tell me this too but I've never actually
tested it before. So we're going to make the sponge cake it says separate the
yolks from the whites put the former into a saucepan with the sugar and beat
them and let them remain over the fire until warm ... keeping them well stirred.
then it says whisk the whites of the eggs into a very stiff froth. Now I know
a hundred years ago they didn't have electric mixers yet but I've already
hand whisked one lot of egg whites today and that's gonna do 💪 Then it says stir
them into the other ingredients and beat well for about half of an hour! I am not
joking that's what it says beep well for half of an hour I'm so glad I've got my
electric mixer because I reckon it will be done in about 5 minutes. Then take out
the whisk sieve in the flour and mix it lightly together.
put it into a greased mold dusted out with a little finely sifted sugar and
flour and bake the cake in a quick oven. It's been in there for about five
minutes now and I'm gonna open the oven and slam it shut a few times and just
one more and we'll see what happens. It looks like it didn't really drop at all
it seems to be rising fine. I imagine the modern-day ovens are a lot
better at recovering the oven temperature than it would have been if
you had one of the older ovens. This next one made me laugh when you were done
peeling onions wash the knife at once and put it away to be cleaned. Do not use
it for anything else unless it has been cleaned.
Nothing is nastier or more indicative of a slovenly and untidy cook than to use
an oniony knife in the preparation of any dishware the flavor of an onion is a
disagreeable surprise. Thrusting the knife once or twice into the earth will
take away the smell. I'm worried the rocks in the earth are going to
blunt my knife and now it smells of soil! If a loaf is rather stale it can be
freshened by being enclosed in a large biscuit tin and warmed through in a
gentle oven. That seemed to work I like warm bread I'd like to warm up any bread
it makes it a bit more yummy. Next it says a spoonful of vinegar will set a
poached egg. Let's test plain boiling water first
give that a stir to make a whirlpool then add the egg into the center and you
can see the white is getting quite feathery and thin and there are little
bits of white floating around in the water if I pop that on some toast you
can see it hasn't really encased the yolk. Now let's get some fresh water
bring that to the boil and add some vinegar in give that a quick swirl and
then add in the egg and look at that it's setting up really fast. The acid in
the vinegar actually helps the egg white to coagulate quickly so it
not as feathery. It's surrounding the yoke it looks beautiful
that hack works a treat and I know chefs today still use that one 🥚
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