Hi I'm Jon Townsend,
today I've got with me Michael Dragoo,
and we're doing an experiment today!
We're just going to pull a rabbit out of the hat -
okay, a recipe out of the book that we've never tried before.
This one's called "pindents".
Thanks for joining us today on 18th Century Cooking.
[cheerful traditional music]
So, today's recipe is from William Rabisha's "The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected"
Let me read this one for you, this recipe book is from 1682
It says "How to make small Pindents to fry for the first course"
[reading the recipe text on screen]
"... beat it to a thick batter with cream, rosewater, sack
"season it with beaten cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and mace"
"put to it a handful of par-boiled currants"
"and a handful of minced marrow if not beef suet"
"add salt, then let your pan be hot with clarified butter or sweet suet"
"let it drop in by spoonfuls"
"when they are fried on both sides, dish them up on the table or plate"
"and scrape on sugar. You may add a handful of sugar to the batter."
It's an interesting recipe.
(Dragoo) It's what we encounter all the time.
(Townsend) Yeah, you get recipes like this
that're just, they're very vauge
and you wonder just what this relates to in a current recipe.
A "pindent"? We looked up pindent, I couldn't find anything. (Dragoo) Couldn't find it, nope.
There was no word, it could be a misspelling of "pendant"
(Dragoo) It's slang for something.
I've read all of the different descriptions for pendant and nothing involved cooking.
(Townsend) Right, so, we don't know what that - we're going to not worry about the name then
Um, this seems like, um, maybe a sort of a fritter maybe?
In that it's kind of deep fat fried, kind of?
(Dragoo) When you sent it to me and I was reading through it, it was a cookie until -
- they wouldn't have called it that then but - (Townsend) Right.
up until we're boiling in oil, pretty much.
(Townsend) Right. So this is an odd one.
So we're just going to try this guy out and do our very best
and see what it turns out like.
I've got our ingredients here - almost everything.
It says it starts out with one pint of flour
and we're just going to use all-purpose flour.
And we're going to halve this recipe
So everything you hear there, we're gonna cut it in half
Or else we'll have five hundred pindents.
"As much grated bread"
so we've got breadcrumbs here
again, basically, one cup.
Now it says "eight eggs, cast away the whites"
Beat em up and pour those in
What we're trying to do achieve here is a thick batter
so the rest of the liquid ingredients we're going to try to guess as we go
There's no exact measurements.
We need cream next
This is a gil-cup of cream
Hopefully it's about right.
If we need more, we'll add more.
Aaaand
Rosewater - I don't have rosewater with me, I do have orangeflower water
There you go.
That's just a little bit. I don't think we need a lot.
That just gives it a fragrance.
We need some sack. Or we just have regular white wine.
Two or three tablespoons, we're going to try that much.
So it still looks pretty thick here,
We're only just - yeah it's way too thick
let's keep adding more cream to this.
This is really an experiment. We have no idea where this is going to go.
So, I don't know, where are we at with cream?
We've got about a pint in here?
(Dragoo, laughing) We've got about a gallon and a half of heavy whipping cream.
My arteries are going to stop, just clog right up.
(Townsend) So now it's seems more like a thick batter
It took a lot of cream to get there
(Dragoo) Took about twenty minutes worth of cream.
Sneaking up on us.
(Townsend) Let's add the next ingredients
we want cinnamon - we're just gonna kinda guess it here
that's a teaspoon and a half, maybe?
Ginger? About the same amount.
This is just regular powdered ginger.
Nutmeg and mace.
You've got some mace over there.
Some already ground up in there. (Dragoo) Perfect.
Every recipe's got to have nutmeg. Why even bother to cook it if you don't have nutmeg.
(Dragoo) This is like snickerdoodle recipe I did a couple of years ago.
(Townsend) Uh oh. (Dragoo) Same ingredients.
(Townsend) I don't want to hear about that. Deep-fried snickerdoodles.
This is going to be great. (Dragoo) I haven't tried that. I like deep fried anything.
(Townsend) "A handful of par-boiled currants."
And what we've got here are zante currants
and I went ahead and kinda simmered these ahead of time
go ahead and take a handful of those
and add a handful of minced marrow, which is not easy to get ahold of these days necessarily
or suet, or beef suet, that's chopped up. Two or three tablespoons of suet.
Again, it doesn't call for a measurement, so this is gonna be kinda totally crazy.
And a little bit of salt.
At the very end it says "you may add a handful of sugar to the batter"
Um, it also says to put sugar on top when you're done
So I think we're gonna wait for the sugar at the end, we'll not put any in the batter.
(Dragoo) I would do both.
(Townsend) You would do - (Dragoo) Well, they're going to burn a little more easily if we put the sugar in the batter.
(Townsend) So let's not do that. (Dragoo) Yeah.
So this is going to take a bit of interpretation here.
After we have our batter mixed up it says "then let your pan be hot with clarified butter"
"or sweet suet". (Dragoo) Okay. What's "sweet suet"?
(Townsend) What she probably means is there is fresh rendered suet. (Dragoo) Fresh, okay.
So we're going to take suet and get our pan filled up.
It's hard to tell whether she means to deep - or he, I'm sorry -
Whether he means to deep fat fry these? I think it's just sort of half way.
We're just going to get a nice thick layer of suet going in the pan.
So our pan is good and hot, let's bring the pieces in here
and go ahead and plop in a spoonful.
Hopefully it's not too hot.
(Dragoo) I'm not sure how much to put in.
(Townsend) Well, it says "spoonful" so
(Dragoo) There we go.
(Townsend) Yeah, the question is: are these pancakes? Or are they fritters?
(Dragoo) Yes. (Townsend) I don't know.
(Townsend) And they are kind of a little bit like halfway between, as far as I can tell.
Let's go ahead and I'm going to take some of these out.
(Townsend) They look like they're done. (Dragoo) Just let them drain.
(Townsend) We'll let them drain on the cloth here.
Well, here's our experiment they look very interesting. A little different.
Let's give them a try.
(Dragoo) You first.
(Townsend) I like it.
I haven't decided yet whether it's a pancake or it's a fritter.
(Dragoo) It's not as heavy as I thought it would be. (Townsend) No, nope.
(Townsend) No, it's a little lighter. (Dragoo) I like the currants a lot.
(Dragoo) I don't taste the wine at all. (Townsend) No, no, it's not wine-y.
And you could've used grape juice instead of the wine, it doesn't really matter.
(Dragoo) That's just one of those recipes that you just don't know how it's going to turn out.
(Dragoo) It's so odd. (Townsend) Very interesting. Very interesting.
Well, you can see what it's like.
We dip into a cookbook, and you never know quite what you're gonna find.
(Townsend) Very very interesting. Seventeenth century "pindents".
(Dragoo) "Pindents". (Townsend) I don't even know what that is.
But now we do!
Thank you so much for coming along with us
as we savor the flavors and the aromas of the eighteenth century.
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[cheerful traditional music]