welcome friends welcome back to the
kitchen welcome back to sunday morning
and the old cookbook show so today
i need some i need some molasses
so
we'll get that dripping out first today
we're going to do a cookbook
that is fairly significant in the
history of canadian
cookbooks
this is just called the home cookbook
first published in 1877
here in toronto
it um
my copy is the 70th edition
which puts it much later than 1877
although the only date in the book is
1877.
uh
this is
the culinary landmarks book um by
elizabeth driver it's a bibliography of
canadian cookbooks
it is
sort of the go-to knowledge about all of
these books she did extensive research
and this little cookbook
takes up four or five pages
of this larger book
as she talks about it and so
right off the bat elizabeth says one of
the most significant events in the
history of english language canadian
cookbooks was the publication in toronto
in 1877 of the home cookbook
this was or is or represents the first
community cookbook for fundraising in
canada
for the hospital for sick children here
in toronto
and
it has an interesting history
because there was a bit of a kerfuffle
in 1879
i guess the ladies that compiled this
book
modeled it on a book called the home
cookbook of chicago published in chicago
in 1874. they got a cease and desist
letter about this book
accusing them of piracy
and to be sure
a lot of the recipes in this book are
lifted directly from the chicago
cookbook and if the name hadn't been
exactly the same the people in chicago
wouldn't have had a leg to stand on
and as it was
these ladies fired off a strongly worded
letter and the whole thing went away but
the hospital for sick children asked
them from subsequent versions to remove
their name from the book so there's no
mention about this being a fundraiser
for the hospital for sick children in
the front of this book which i think is
kind of interesting so
lots of copies of this floating around
out there
and so today we're going to do a recipe
called rye cakes for tea
submitted by harriet n jenks
i don't know the jenks family but a lot
of the family names that you see in this
book
are linked to the most prominent toronto
families of the 1870s and 1890s so it
starts out with rye flour
this is rye flour
i really like rye i've never baked with
rye
never baked with rye but i really like
beers and distilled spirits made with
rye there's something about a really
spicy flavor that i like
next in just regular old white
all-purpose flour and some salt
and i'll give that just a little bit of
a stir
now the recipe is listed in teacups
and i know from the comment section that
people have very
strong feelings about what a teacup
represents
uh julia and i have a teacup collection
that numbers in the hundreds more
teacups than you know two private
citizens should probably own
and one time i brought them all out
set them all out and measured them all
and
the teacups ranged between 6
fluid ounces imperial
to 10 fluid ounces imperial
there was no consistency in the tea cups
so when i see a recipe that uses teacups
i
just look at it as a ratio and so in
this instance i just used a regular
canadian measuring cup as the as the
amount and in the 1870s everybody would
have had their favorite uh teacup that
they would have grabbed to do their
measuring with
and that's fine it just says to me that
as much as everyone tells you that
baking is a science
it's really not that much of a science
it's as much an art as a science now it
doesn't look like i'm going to get
enough molasses so let's open this up
and see if we can get just a little bit
more out of the box
i think
i've got enough
half a cup okay so got enough of the
molasses
just barely got lucky on that one now i
need
one teacup full of sour milk
you may notice that i've got a
carton of buttermilk
what is sold in canadian grocery stores
and american grocery stores for that
matter today as buttermilk is one
percent skimmed milk that has been
soured it is essentially what they're
asking for here as sour milk if this
had asked for buttermilk
then indeed i would have needed to find
the leftover liquid from churning butter
as it is i i don't have to look for it
this is this is not when you when you
buy buttermilk in the grocery store in
north america today it is just cultured
milk
it's not what's left over from the
buttermaking process now the next step
is a little bit interesting in that i'm
supposed to put the soda
into the sour milk
and wait for it to froth up a little bit
and
this is down to um
you're making sure that your soda is
good you're making sure that your soda
is going to activate
in the acid
from the sour milk making sure that your
milk is sour enough
and also making sure that your baking
soda is uh
still viable
something that we don't really have to
worry about too much today
the manufacturing process has improved
since 1877
and
for the most part if your baking soda
hasn't been hanging out in your cupboard
for the last
four or five years unused
you should be okay
so the the directions are just to um mix
all of this together so in goes the
molasses as well
there's no fat
there's no eggs
i really don't know what to expect
okay
so we'll just stir this all together
now the directions for stirring just say
to make it stiff
um
i think that's pretty stiff
so no eggs no butter i already said that
no salt
no other flavorings um
for for all intents and purposes
as someone who has lived in toronto
pretty much my entire life who was born
in toronto who was raised in toronto
this to me is the typical
toronto type recipe from this time
period
flavorless now i need
i need a glass of hot water and a spoon
i'm supposed to dip the spoon in hot
water and then use the back of it to
spread this around
i don't know what to expect i really
don't know what to expect i'm
i'm thinking this might be very
interesting and then i'm thinking it
could be dry and flavorless
i don't know
and there are no real baking
instructions other than bake it for one
half hour
and i have to assume that
we're looking at 350 degrees fahrenheit
or thereabouts is probably
the temperature we're going for
so
into the oven for one half hour
hey glenn hey hey friends
cake
rye cakes for tea
okay
we sent it in the tea but i'm sure we
can have some later
so
so it's root
it's definitely rye cake
it's definitely a rye flavor it's very
savory
it's uh it's got that kind of chewy cake
that that
no
like a brownie chewy cake does that make
sense well i was kind of thinking like a
a
like a bran muffin type thing too
well ryan does have that kind of brown
muffin yeah
i mean okay so it'll be really good with
some honey it's not it's not a soft cake
it is a it is a dense cake
um
needs raisins
or dates
needs dates
but you know you put some jammer honey
on it yes it is more savory it is not a
sweet cake you could take it the other
way right you can go completely savory
right and put like caraway seeds in it
yeah or cardamom or yeah
those those two
cardamom and caraway seeds be really
okay so it's
it doesn't meet the 2022 definition of
cake but in 1877
i can see this is being i mean there's
nothing in it there's no salt
mine's gone though so
apparently julie likes it so i mean it
is it is it is a good starting point for
a lot of other things and i i do like
what the rye brings i do
like what the rocket brings too it's
true yeah so this is um
this is a pretty good cake i would say
this is a pretty good cake and now
because we talked about canadian
cookbooks early canadian cookbooks and
about this being the first of a certain
style of cookbook i know that someone's
going to say down in the comments
section
did you know that the cook not mad
of which i have an original copy of the
cook not mad was the first canadian
cookbook
it's not
it is not the first canadian cookbook um
that is a
an untruth
an untruth as glenn goes searching
through his books at the front um
in 1972
a publisher
did a reprint
of this book
because it's so long out of copyright
they could just reprint it and they
blazed on the on the front cover
canada's first cookbook um and they sold
millions of copies across canada at
every uh
at every gift shop of every museum but
it is not canada's first cookbook
it's not even a canadian cookbook so
there you go
we're going to come back to this
cookbook again and again because i think
it's very interesting is it older than
this one uh this is 1877.
okay it's not as old as this one but
this is actually created here this is
the first wealth sort of this is the
first canadian cookbook
um that is a community cookbook that was
a fundraiser for six sick kids hospital
here in toronto okay
um but there's a little lawsuit from a
chicago publishing company
who sued them for piracy
but it's a community cookbook didn't you
didn't all the people submit their
wrestling well it had the same name
and some of the recipes are the same
because people make the same things all
over the world like my chocolate chip
cookie recipe does not vary very much no
it doesn't it doesn't but then
some of the recipes are word for word
exactly the same but they've put
someone's name on it from toronto
i don't know maybe
that person got it
i know and that's the crazy thing about
recipes you can't
copying recipes is what recipes are all
about if we didn't copy and share
recipes
we'd starve
and we'd always be reinventing uh yeah
all the time
so um we're gonna come back to this one
again and again
um because there are some crazy crazy
recipes i'm excited about breakfast cake
well yes do we get breakfast ice cream
with the breakfast cake
just ask him well
remember that maple breakfast cake that
we had a week or so ago i mean it's a
it's not a strange concept okay
uh
rye cakes for tea pretty good thanks for
stopping by see you again soon
you