Welcome to How To Cook That, I'm Ann Reardon and today we're making a feast from 200 years ago!
In this very old cookbook there are some pages that show you what to serve for what it calls
'grand and splendid entertainment in two courses'. Each of these courses has a great many dishes
the recipes for which are included in the cookbook. Let me make them all and see what
unusual things they served and how long it takes one person to prepare just the second
course of this feast. Let's start with what it calls 'floating island' take a quart of the
thickest cream you can get and make it pretty sweet with fine sugar. Pour in a gill of sac
grate the yellow rind of a lemon and mill the cream till it's of a thick froth then carefully
pour in the thin from the froth into a dish. Now mine is all just thick i've just whipped
the cream so i'm just going to spread a thin layer on the bottom. Then it says cut a french roll or
as many as you want as thin as you can and put a layer of it as light as possible on the cream,
then add a layer of currant jelly and then a very thin layer of roll and then heart's horn jelly.
Now according to the book the current jelly was indeed a current jam but hearts on jelly was
made using deer antlers now i don't have access to that so i'm just going to use a few different jams
here. Over that whip your froth which you saved off your cream well milled up and lay it on top
as high as you can heap it. That's floating island done let's see what everybody thinks of it ... I
liked the floating island and it it seems like a dessert that you could serve today and nobody
would recognize that it was from 200 years ago. Next is blamonge this recipe used eisenglass to
make it set which if you remember from a previous episode is made from boiling the air bladders of
bony fish! To save time i'm going to use gelatin instead because we have a lot of dishes to make
today. For flavour it uses four ounces of almonds and a spoonful of French brandy then it says to
set it over a stove fire and let it remain until it's almost ready to boil then add the
juice of some spinach to make it green. At this point we're supposed to strain out the almonds
my concern is it doesn't look white like blemonge so I'm wondering if they left out a step to grind
up the almonds I'm going to give it a quick blend and that definitely will make it look whiter then
it says to strain it through a gauze sieve and when it grows thick put it into a mold let it lie
until the next day and then turn it out. Blemonge!
It's just water flavored jelly. I don't like it.
Next is the dish of snow this recipe starts by boiling 12 large apples removing the skins and
pushing the pulp through a sieve so we basically have pureed apple and then it says to beat the
whites of 12 eggs to a very strong froth beat and sift half a pound of double refined sugar
and strew it into the eggs work up the pulp of your apples to a strong
froth. Now i'm not sure if the apples were supposed to be cold or hot for this step
i'm going with really hot so that we can cook the egg whites then it says to beat them together
until they're like a stiff snow and lay it upon a china dish and heap it up as high as you can.
now this doesn't look stiff to me i'd love to speak to the original cookbook author and ask
is this right it definitely couldn't make a snowball if you wanted to i'm guessing that
perhaps our apples are much bigger now so i should have used less apples or much smaller apples. It's
like frothy apple puree it's just apple puree and egg white. It was really weird. Moving on
to almond cakes, take two ounces of bitter and one pound of sweet almonds blanched and beat
half a pound of sifted loaf sugar eight yolks and four whites of eggs the juice of half a lemon
and the rind grated and a little rose and orange flower water. Mix the whole well together
either bake it in one large pan or several smaller ones if this tastes nice then we've got a nice
gluten free cake recipe here ... i guess you could take out the rose in orange flower water and add
different flavoring of your choice. Quite a modern taste i think i'm surprised it's an old recipe.
It was nice but it tastes of hotel air freshener. Nice flavour not too sweet. On the other side
of the table we have raspberry puffs there is actually no recipe in the book for raspberry puffs
but there is one for lemon puffs so i'm going to follow the directions for that one but swap out
the lemons for raspberries because they're both quite acidic. It says to beat this for half an
hour boy am i grateful to have electricity and an electric mixer it turns out like this thick
but still a little runny. Next it says to put to it three eggs and mix it well up. I think adding
the whole eggs to this is going to make it really runny but i am curious to see how they bake. Then
it says throw sugar on your papers drop the puffs in small drops and bake them in a slack oven which
we would call a slow oven or a low temperature oven. They do puff up in the oven but when it said
small drops i think they meant really small there was so much of this mixture that i made a tray of
tiny ones as well and when they're done the bigger ones look like this slightly browned and they
have lost that strong raspberry flavour but the smaller ones look like this the nice bright pink
crispy little drops. These make me smile. They're like crunchy raspberries and i really liked them.
Little meringueeee ... very raspberry. Over here we have custards there are
lots of recipes for custards in this book including beast custard that says set a pint
of beast over the fire. beast is the colostrum or first milk of a cow after it's given birth
i think that we'll leave that for the cute little calves and make the baked custard recipe instead.
It says boil a pint of cream with some cinnamon and mace, now mace you may remember is the
covering that's around the outside of the nutmeg seeds it tastes like nutmeg but it doesn't have
that bitterness that nutmeg has. Put those in the cream heat it and then leave it to cool so those
flavors can infuse it also says to add sugar to your palette so i'm going to stir that in now
while it's hot. When it's cold take a little sac and orange flour water ... oops that was a bit
much orange flour water is a bit strong ... and four yolks and two whites of eggs and mix them
well together and add nutmeg and bake it in cups. It's very velvety quite a nice flavor not super
sweet yeah pretty good. Now for tartlets this was an unusual recipe it involves rubbing the oranges
with salt on the outside and then soaking them in that salty water overnight then swapping it
out for fresh water every day for two weeks! Then it said to boil them whole this made the flesh of
the orange really bitter combine that with the rind and it was inedible, so i ended up peeling
them and just chopping up the flesh because i didn't want it all to go in the bin. This was
then combined with some stewed apples sugar and orange juice and then spooned into pastry cases
then it says before you put your tarts in the oven take a feather and rub them over with melted
butter and sift some double refined sugar over them. Obviously my feather is not stiff enough for
this job apparently this will form a pretty icing and make them have a pleasing effect on the eye. I
really like the tartlets they weren't too sweet so it felt like you could probably eat a lot of them.
Oh, that's very strong it'd like a little bit of pastry with a massive scoop of marmalade on top.
Now for pears comport ... let what quantity of pears you wish to be nicely scolded till soft
then take them out pair them and throw them into cold water to harden. Take some cloves cinnamon
sugar and red wine and put your pears into it let them gently boil until syrupy. This dish has
definitely survived 200 years because i've seen this on restaurant menus nowadays. It just tastes
like a pear just a little bit sweeter. Actually it's pretty good i don't mind it. The next plate
is moonshine which no it is not high proof alcohol but rather quite a creative dish ... it's made by
making a sweet clear jelly they used calves feet to make their gelatin i'm using modern
gelatin because to our palette calves feet jelly taste like having beef stock in your dessert!
Now you put some of the clear jelly to one side and with the rest of it you add in some chocolate
some blanched almonds and some cream. They pounded in a mortar and pestle but i can use a blender for
that because i've got the modern kitchen and then we need to strain it. Then it says lay
tin in the shape of a half moon in the middle and stars around it, lay little weights on
the tins to keep them in place where you put them. Then pour the moonshine into the dish
if you need to know how to make your own shapes your own little cookie cutters
i explained that in the Twitter Dessert video that was from quite some time ago
and when it's quite cold take out the tins then fill up your vacancies with the clear
calves foot jelly and garnish with sweet meats. According to the book sweet meats were candied
lemon peel and this dessert looks a lot more creative than i was expecting for 200 years ago.
It's a strong chocolate mousse i like it. It was really nice. There was little sweets on top that
were meant to be stars but they tasted horrible 😂. Next we have fruit in jelly it says to take some
clear calves feet jelly i'm of course using normal gelatin but there's no sweetener or flavor in
the recipe at all so to give it a chance of being eaten, i'm going to add some sugar and then let's
put in the juice of a lemon and an orange. It's not much so it certainly won't be a strong flavor.
It says to put in half a pint of jelly and when it's set and stiff lay three fine peaches
and a bunch of grapes with the stalk upwards, put over them a few vine leaves and then fill up your
bowl with jelly let it stand until the next day turn your jelly carefully out and serve it to the
table. It just has grapes, a whole thing of grapes in there 🍇 The fruit is nice but the jelly seems
superfluous. When i read apple pie i thought great a normal apple pie recipe i know how to do
that but of course it was not. So we started out how you'd expect peel and quarter and core some
apples and put them into pastry and then they've put a little bit of sugar and some lemon juice and
some cloves over it but then it says to boil the pairings of the apples and the cores in some water
with a blade of mace till the flavor is extracted. Strain it put to it a little sugar and boil it
until it's reduced to a small quantity then pour it into your pie, put your crust on and
send it to the oven and if you're thinking that's not that unusual the recipe continues
when the pie comes from the oven beat up the yolks of two eggs with half a pint of cream
and a little nutmeg and sugar put it over a slow fire and keep stirring it till it's nearly boiling
then take off the lid of the pie and pour it in. Cut the crust into small pieces with three corners
and stick them about the pie. Personally i prefer the look of an apple pie with a lid on and the
custard in a jug to the side but each to their own. I love apple pie normally but this one not
so much i was a bit stodgy i thought. But not as good as one that mum would make nowadays. The next
dish is marmalade i'll put all the details of all these recipes on the how to cook that website for
you in case you actually want to try them or make your own 200 year old feast. This one turned out
just like you'd expect marmalade should so if you're throwing a 200 year old dinner party i'd
suggest just buy the orange marmalade instead of making it. Paddington bear and i love marmalade...
I wasn't sure what to put the marmalade with ... strangely they served sweet and savory
dishes together in the same course so now we're making potted lobster which is basically boiled
lobster mashed with mace nutmeg pepper salt and a little butter that's then pushed down into a jar
and topped with clarified butter think of this butter layer as like putting plastic wrap
over the contents to help it last longer. Remember there was no plastic and no fridges back then. The
potted lobster was a bit weird on its own but i feel like it'd be really yum on crackers or like a
little roll. The next dish is potted cha which is preserved in the same way they sprinkle the fish
with salt then pepper and some ground mace they used mace a lot in these recipes. Then once it
had been baked it says to lay it in pots and cover in clarified butter. This would have been prepared
the day before it was needed and stored in the larder. The potted salmon kind of just tasted like
a normal salmon just mashed into a pot. Moving on to the other common method for storing cooked meat
at the time which was covering it in jelly some of the recipes prepare a savory flavored jelly
and others use a lot of vinegar to acidify it. Think of pouring jelly over the meat as
the equivalent to vacuum sealing it today you're aiming to eliminate all the air which as we now
know inhibits the growth of any bacteria that needs oxygen to spread so the food would last
longer. This storage method is rarely used now since the invention of plastic and refrigeration
but for this banquet they put snipes in savory jelly, i used quail because i couldn't get snipes,
and crawfish or crayfish in savory jelly the quail and jelly was really good the acidity of the jelly
actually went really well with the quail. There was lots of bones which is really weird in jelly.
Crawfish tasted like a big prawn with like some of that tree bark bitterness. Next on the menu
is marbled veal for which they take a cow tongue oh this is not something that i have ever cooked
before and probably won't ever cook again it says to boil it for three hours then skin it and chop
it very fine with a pound of butter until it's like a paste. Have ready some veal stewed and
beat in the same manner then put some veal in potting pots thin some tongue in lumps over the
veal do not lay your tongue in any form but let it be in lumps and it will then cut like marble.
Fill your pot close up with feel and press it very hard down when you send it to the table cut it
into thin slices. I thought it was like chocolate mousse so i had a massive bite and it tasted like
i imagined molly's dog food would 🐶 The marbled veal was gross it was just bad maybe spreading
it on toast would make it better but i wouldn't risk it. All of those dishes needed to be prepared
ahead because on the day of the party you still need to boil pork with vinegar herbs and spices,
they stored it in this cooking liquid after they'd sliced some for use again the vinegar and the
acidity of that is going to help and having it in the liquid is going to help get rid of some of the
oxygen. Then you also need to truss two chickens douse them in flour baste them with butter and
roast them by the fire, do the same thing with two ducks and also you need to roast a rib of lamb
and then put all of that on the table and you have your second course ready! Even using a
modern kitchen that took me three days to make all these dishes and that doesn't include the time it
took to collate the shopping list and source all the ingredients 🤯 You'll need a lot of servants
if you want to eat like this regularly and you'd want to make sure none of your guests were vegan.
The whole thing looked fancy but it was kind of odd how they have the desserts and the meats
and it all right there instead of spreading them out. If we were having 24 people over
for dinner we'd probably feed them ... 24 pizzas 🍕 ... crumbed fish and chips of course ... even
if it was Christmas we wouldn't have that many types of meat, we'd probably had just
like maybe some pork and some turkey and then lots of salads. With thanks to my amazing patrons for
your support that allows me to make these sorts of videos, you can click on the link and see
the different rewards for patrons there make it a great week and i'll see you on Friday 💕