welcome friends welcome back to the
kitchen welcome back to sunday morning
in the old cookbook show today we're
going to do a recipe out of this
cookbook this particular book was
printed in 1855 and it is
miss bliss practical cookbook and then
the title
goes on from there in great detail about
what the book covers
in a bunch of crazy different fonts it
is a the title page is a bit of a
nightmare i would say
from a design standpoint and so the
recipe we're going to do today
is called curd pudding um i've never had
a curd pudding before i've never
made a curd pudding before not like this
anyway
and it strikes me as sort of the
intersection between
a baked custard
and a cheesecake so we're going to start
out with
some milk in this pot and we're going to
bring it to a boil
and i'm using 3.25 milk fat milk
the recipe doesn't say what kind of milk
to use
and in 1855 i mean you could have been
just going
out to the barn and milking the cow and
bringing it in and using
fresh warm milk you could have been
using milk that perhaps
had been separated and the cream had
been skimmed off the top
so it would have had a lower milk fat i
don't really know and i don't know that
it's really going to matter all that
much
so we're going to bring this up to a
boil and while it's coming up to a boil
we'll deal with the wine next now i'm
i've cut this recipe in half i didn't
think julie and i needed
that much pudding so it just says wine
it doesn't say what kind of wine
whether it's red wine white wine could
be
any kind of wine especially in 1855
in in philadelphia where this was
printed it could have been almost
anything
julie and i had the discussion would we
prefer a white wine
or a red wine and end up with possibly a
horrible color in the end
so we decided on a white wine we're just
using something local
okay the milk is boiling and you want to
make sure you're stirring it
so that it doesn't boil over which it's
very close to doing now
and also so it doesn't scorch to the
bottom of the pot which is no good
either so i'm going to turn the heat off
and stir in the wine
now i'm just going to leave this here
so that the curd will set while the curd
is coming together i will get the eggs
ready so i've got
three eggs and i'm supposed to beat them
lightly so i'm just going to do that in
this bowl
let's give them a bit of a light whisk
and next i'm going to move on to this
bowl where i'm supposed to mix together
butter and
sugar so in goes the sugar first
and the recipe specifically calls for
fine
sugar and sugar is one of those things
that
people get really weirded out about and
i go through the comments and i'm amazed
everyone has this idea that sugar
prior to you know world war ii
was always brown always like that sugar
in the raw
really rough that's not the case
not the case at all white refined sugar
first appears in india 2 500 years ago
the process was discovered and they
started refining sugar that way
that process ends up in europe sometime
in the 12th to 13th century
and white refined sugar became from cane
uh the thing that was what people used
and
sure it used to come in a cone or in a
block
and you would chip away some and then
grind it out to make it fine
but white refined cane sugar just like i
used here has been around
forever for a very long time
so i'm going to beat this together until
it's nice and light
nice and light looks great so i'm going
to switch to a whisk
and i'll just scrape off all the sugar
and butter
and now i'll whisk the eggs in
next in is the flavoring which is nutmeg
this cookbook 1855
still too early really for a lot of
vanilla to be used vanilla would have
been
available but it would have been rare
and expensive
we were just as humans starting to
figure out how to grow vanilla and i've
said that before in other episodes
it's one of those things that happened
really late and then when it did happen
it became ubiquitous and a lot of these
other flavorings that you see
from an earlier time period sort of fall
by the wayside so where nutmeg was easy
to get
even rose water or orange blossom water
was used a lot as the flavoring
all of those things were supplanted so i
think supplanted by vanilla so i think
this would work with vanilla as well if
you're someone who doesn't like nutmeg
just put some vanilla in it would be
fine
now we need to turn our attention back
to the curds and whey
so the curd has set up nicely and the
recipe book just says
to turn off the whey so i think i'm
going to use
this super fine mesh strainer
and just scoop out as much as i can let
the whey
drain off it won't take long
and then plop it in for mixing and just
come back in
might take me two or three scoops to get
it all out
so the last little bit now probably be
far more efficient
if i had you know put a piece of
cheesecloth in a big fine mesh strainer
and poured it through and captured it
all
i've got like 99 percent of it this way
and i'm going to use this way
probably to make ricotta um i'll recook
that in a little while and see if i can
get any ricotta out of it
now mix this together
says to beat it well
now it says to bake in small patty pants
no other instructions about time
temperature etc and
no real information about what
size or shape of patty pan it wants me
to use
paddy pants came in a whole range of
shapes some really fancy shapes a whole
range of sizes some were
big and shallow and somewhere like this
sort of fluted they came in heart shapes
they came in a whole range of different
shapes
so i think you could do it in this you
could do it in a muffin tin
i think that's probably what most people
would have in their kitchen today
that would work so i'm going to portion
this out
i've got the oven preheated to 350 and
we'll see how that works out
and i'll keep my eyes on them to see how
well they bake
i think i'm looking for a cheesecake
type consistency
i'm also worried about overfilling them
because i don't know how much they're
going to puff up
and i feel like i've got more filling
than pans yeah more filling than pants
but
not too much
now the recipe says to serve with a wine
sauce so i looked in the book
and towards the back there were two
recipes for wine sauces
so i'm going to make this one it's
called a cold wine sauce
and this second recipe shows how
cookbooks in this time period 1850s
probably the
1890s and earlier
were completely scattered this second
recipe for the cold wine sauce
uses teacups and glasses
the earlier recipe used quartz pints
pounds
ounces that sort of thing the second one
is teacups and i know that everyone or
a certain number of people are going to
write down in the comments
that a teacup is a standard measurement
not too long ago i went down into our
equipment room
and measured a wide range of teacups
that we have
and none of them absolutely none of them
were any sort of standard measure the
sizes were all over the map
there was absolutely no consistency not
even consistency between the same
manufacturer and the teacups that they
made at the same plant
so teacups were definitely not a
standardized measure you had a teacup in
your house and you always used it and
the recipes worked out because it was a
ratio
of your exact teacup but from house to
house you would get a different size
recipe
and then it changed a little bit when
you added in a different type of
measurement like a glass
how big is a glass there's no measure
i'm going to say that's beat to a cream
and since i don't really know what a
glass of wine
is i'm just going to dribble some in
so i'm just going to mix this in and
keep dribbling in a little bit more wine
until i reach a consistency that i think
the sauce should be and i know that
there's going to be people who let me
know down in the comments the size of a
glass
and they're going to try and take 20 21
thinking and put it against
18 50 17 50 16 50 thinking
believe me it just doesn't work when i
look through all of these
old cookbooks and i have you know
thousands of old cookbooks
there's no consistency in the
measurements from this time period and
even in the books where they try to let
you know at the beginning
sort of the sizes of different things
from book to book to book
there is no consistency in the wording
the naming or the sizing of a lot of
these these things
that standardization didn't happen until
after the 1890s
and it really was the boston cooking
school book that such started to
solidify that
hey what hey girls friends
what is the chunky mixture yeah no
amount of beating whisking
or whipping with a hand mixer has
brought this sauce together at all oh
it's supposed to be a sauce there's no
way it's
going to come together there's no way
that the wine is going to mix with
the butter or the wine sauce yes so
of the two sauces in this cookbook that
are wine sauces yeah like that's like
not even like that's completely
yeah separated yeah it's never going to
come together there's a hot wine sauce
that i could have made that might have
been better
but this one will never work never
wow that uh so it's got an interesting
flavor though so i look forward to it
when you perfect it but it's going with
this this so this is a curd pudding okay
and i don't know that it'll come out
of the petition oh that's even like a
yeah no stick
yeah it's not gonna come out of the
pettipeen i've got
some expectations for this let's see
what the texture is like with a little
gentle nudging it
comes out crumbly
it looks actually the texture looks a
lot like like that like that
yes um
it tastes very similar too yeah no it's
completely the same flavor
as as as that and that's the wine that's
pulling that together
that's the one fairly it's wine flavored
okay um
so that the texture is grainy yeah
really grainy so the curd
texture carried through like i thought
the curd might melt
and become smooth like a cheesecake but
it didn't it stayed very grainy
the flavor's nice i like the flavor i
actually think it would be
very good in um if you put down like a
crumb tart
a crumb crust and put this on top with
some fresh fruit
yeah you know like fresh strawberries or
anything that goes like i'm assuming it
was a white wine since from its color
and its flavor
anything that kind of goes with white
wine that light summery fruit i think
would go really well you could probably
even get away with
something savory as well if you wanted
to definitely something savory yeah the
other thing the other thing with this is
um the curdling the
curd creation the curdling of the milk
relies on the acid
in the wine and if the your wine is low
acid like so many wines today are
because people have moved away from high
acid low sugar they're now
high sugar low acid there may not be
enough acid in the wine to curdle the
milk
so you might have to add if you decide
to make this you might have to add a
little bit of
either lemon juice which would add a
great flavor
or some vinegar in order to get it to
curdle
yeah it's a it's an interesting recipe i
i think it needs a little
something to make it a really fabulous
fabulous usable recipe
yeah but you know yeah gotta start
somewhere
the texture's off i'd give it a try
though
i would give it a try you know a crumb a
bigger pie
um and a nice sauce it would go together
really well
oh some fresh fruit with a caramel sauce
you could really take this so
like anything right it's it's an idea
and at this point it's a really
little idea it needs a lot to make it
useful so um
if you make a curd pie
if you live somewhere where curd pie is
still made let us know
yeah and let us know what your recipe is
because maybe this
is not the greatest recipe i mean some
of the other recipes in this book aren't
great either thanks for stopping by
see you again soon
you