The 1950s are not particularly known for their quality cuisine: TV dinners, meat in jello,
and casseroles galore like this fish pudding from 1954. So thank you to Bespoke Post for
sponsoring this video as we make fish pudding and talk about the history of the kitchen
stove this time on Tasting History. Welcome to the new home of Tasting History. I am still
unpacking and trying to figure out lighting, and camera angles and sound so if things change over
the next few episodes
I ask for your patience as I try to figure things out, though
seeing as I was in the last place for two years and never really figured out my lighting
maybe don't hold your breath on that one.
Now while this is a new space for the show the home itself was actually built in 1952
and that is why I decided to do a recipe from the 1950s to christen the kitchen,
and being from the 1950s it is by far and away the most recent recipe that I've actually
done here on the channel,
but I thought that it was appropriate because not only is the house from the 1950s but
so is the stove that came with it. Actually I posted it on Instagram and somebody thought
that he narrowed it down to being made in 1949 but I figure that is close enough and
we will revisit the stove later on in the episode.
But for now let's make a dish that would have been made just after this house and
this stove were made.
It's from 'The ABC of Casseroles' from 1954,
and the book is cleverly set up with different recipes for each letter of the alphabet.
A is for American chop suey,
J gets you Jiffy macaroni [and tuna],
and T offers up tamale pie,
but when they got to the letter X it seems that it stumped the author and so they just
gave up
and made XYZ fish pudding.
"Boil fish in salted water about 45 minutes or until tender. Drain, skin carefully, pick
out bones and flake finely. Cook rice with water, 2 cups milk and salt for 20 minutes.
Put a layer of drained rice in 3 quart casserole. Add a layer of fish. Season with butter, pepper, salt,
and continue with alternate layers until casserole is two-thirds full.
To well-beaten eggs add 5 cups milk. Pour over rice and fish and bake uncovered for
one hour in a 350 degree oven. Serves 12."
I love that they consider butter a seasoning, a recipe after my own butter clogged heart.
So for this recipe what you'll need is: five pounds or two and a quarter kilograms of haddock,
or if you can't find haddock like me any other flaky fish will work just fine.
Three-fourths of a cup or 160 grams of rice, 2 cups or 475 milliliters of water, 2 cups
or 475 milliliters of milk, 1 teaspoon of salt, 4 eggs well beaten, another 5 cups or
1.2 liters of milk, and butter, salt and pepper.
So I have to be up front with you and tell you that I really was not ready for this
episode,
and I don't just mean like who was ever ready for fish pudding. I mean I was not really
ready to film an episode, but I really wanted to stay on my schedule so I am filming this
episode,
but I am not even close to being unpacked in the kitchen or elsewhere in the house,
and frankly for the last week
I have been living out of a suitcase though actually it's not a suitcase but a beautiful
weekend bag that I got in the Weekender box from today's sponsor Bespoke Post.
Bespoke Post sends you monthly themed boxes with really cool stuff
from under the radar companies most of them made here in the good old US of A.
All you do is take a quiz to let Bespoke Post know what you're into: clothes, outdoor
gear, bar wear, and then they send you a box with awesome stuff like this box called
Brew.
It's a complete brew kit to make your own beer,
so you can bet that I'm going to be doing a beer episode pretty soon.
And since I'm into kitchen goods they also sent me this box called Chop.
It's two blades from marceline kitchen alchemy including this Alaskan ulu knife.
These are great for cutting anything inside or outside of the kitchen.
I've actually been using it to break down moving boxes.
So every month you are assigned a box and you get to review the box before it ships,
and then you can decide if you want to keep it, swap it for a different box,
or just skip that month at no extra charge. You only ever pay for what you get and you
can cancel at any time.
So to get 20% off of your box click the link in the description and enter tastinghistory20
at checkout or go to bespokepost.com/ tastinghistory20. Now let's make our fish pudding.
By the way every time I say fish pudding all I can think of is that Robot Chicken episode.
"Fish pudding".
So first fill a large pot with water and salt it very well. About one and a half tablespoons
for each quart.
You basically want it to be as salty as seawater.
Then bring it to a simmer and add the fish. Then cover the pot and let it simmer for
about 45 minutes,
and you want to keep an eye on it because yes you want it nice and tender, but you don't
want to cook it so long that it falls apart in the pot like mine did.
Learn from my mistakes, they are plentiful
but even if it does fall apart that's actually okay because it's going to be the finished
product anyway
because you're going to remove the skin and the bones and then flake the meat nice and
fine. Also while the bulk of the meat is on the filet don't neglect the other parts of
the fish. In fact the fish cheek meat is the best meat on the fish.
I guess fish lips make for tender cheeks. *Muah
Once it's all flaked and the bones have been discarded set the fish aside and rinse your
rice. Now when I first started this recipe I thought that there had to be a mistake
because it calls for three-fourths of a cup of rice to be cooked in two cups of water
and two cups of milk, and that is a lot more liquid than you would
typically use to cook rice. Uncle Roger would be aghast but as it turns out it kind of works,
so add the rice with the water and the milk along with a teaspoon of salt to a saucepan,
and then simmer it for 20 minutes with the lid off.
And with the lid off you're going to get a fair amount of evaporation
and so you end up with something kind of like a rice pudding.
Now how that's going to actually work in the dish is anyone's guess
but what you do with it is cover the bottom of a large casserole dish with the rice pudding,
and then add a layer of the flaked fish over it, and then a few scrapes of butter,
and then sprinkle it with salt and plenty of pepper.
Then add another layer of rice, more fish, and more seasoning.
Then mix the five cups of milk into your four beaten eggs, and pour that over the
filling.
Then pop it in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit or 175 Celsius for one hour.
Now you'll notice that this oven is rather impractical for modern bakers. Frankly you
could bake about six cookies at a time in it.
Rather different from your typical modern oven, but what it does have that a modern
oven also has is a thermostat to tell you that the oven is at 350 degrees,
but that was not always the case. In fact that's rather recent in the evolution of the
oven,
so while our fish pudding bakes and you go ahead and hit the Like button
let's take a look at how this staple of the modern kitchen came to be.
Now I'm not going to give an entire history of ovens or stoves because frankly that could
fill an entire book,
but I will give a little background of how we got to the stove that is in pretty much everyone's
kitchen today.
Also the term stove or sometimes called a range can vary from place to place,
and from time period to time period, so for our purposes I mean an oven that is paired
with a stove top
because for much of history those two things didn't always go together.
The stove top was usually actually the hearth or the floor of the fireplace, or next to
a fire pit. You would build a wood fire and could have pots hanging over the flame or
cook foods and pans near the flame. The oven was generally separate and started out just
as a hole in the ground that would be filled with hot coals
and then you would put the food over that and then you would heap dirt over that, and
they still do that in some places especially at a luau in Hawaii where they make the pig that way.
Then around 25,000 years ago pottery ovens that didn't require dirt to be thrown on top of
the food
were developed in the Indus Valley in modern day India and Pakistan. Mud brick ovens were
developed an ancient Sumer and around 2,500 years ago they made one that had a flat top
that you could put a pan or a pot on essentially making the first kitchen stove.
But the combination didn't really seem to take off as evidenced in the beehive ovens
that were common in Northern Europe, East Asia and the Americas,
or the large bread ovens of ancient Rome which tended to be built into a masonry wall.
Though those Roman ovens like the one at Modestus bakery in Pompeii used to bake panis
quadratus
would basically set the standard at least in Europe for about the next thousand years
because these masonry ovens became the staple of Medieval Europe where most towns had a
communal oven large enough to bake the bread for an entire village.
And in many places you had to use that oven as it was part of a feudal lord's rights.
Everyone had to bake the bread in his oven and he got to tax every loaf. Pretty sweet deal
as long as you're the lord.
Now at home most people were stuck with their hearth to cook most of their food
and the major issue with that was that the chimney had yet to really take off.
The very first ones appeared around the 12th century but very few homes had them until
the 17th or even 18th century,
and without a chimney with just a hole in the roof your house tended to be a very smoky place,
so much so that you could smoke sausages in the same room where you slept.
Convenient but not ideal, but the smoke issue led to some wonderful developments in the
stove.
See the first home stoves weren't just a way to heat up food but also to heat up the
actual home itself,
and if you could retain the heat but get rid of most of the smoke at the same time
all the better.
In Central Europe this led to clay ovens being built indoors often with ceramic pots
embedded into the clay which helped to radiate the heat outwards. They were still very smoky
but a lot less so than just an open fire in the center of the room,
and they often had a flat top so you could warm a pot while you warm yourself.
That was a far cry from central heating but they could often heat the entire room which
was called a stuba in Middle German
or a stofa in Old English, and that's where we get the word stove.
Isn't etymology fun.
This also makes the philosopher René Descartes 1619 claim that "I remained all day locked
up alone in a stove, where I had every leisure to entertain my thoughts."
A little less alarming.
Now by the 18th century most homes had true fireplaces with chimneys,
and the stove market was just primed for innovation and expansion.
There were the Jamb stoves or five plate stoves which were essentially a cast iron
box that was placed at the back of a kitchen fireplace heating the room on the other side
of the wall. In France there was the Castrol stove or stew stove and in America Benjamin
Franklin developed the Franklin stove or Pennsylvania fireplace which was meant to completely replace
the home's hearth. The stove fit right into the fireplace and was designed to siphon
a greater deal of smoke up the existing chimney,
though they could also be placed in the center of the room and have a chimney of their own.
The concept was improved with the Rumford stove invented by Benjamin Thompson who earned
the title Count Rumford.
He also developed a fireplace called the Rumford fireplace which many people in the
fireplace industry think is actually better than modern fireplaces, and for some reason
at the end of the 19th century they just stopped making them.
Regardless his stove was a huge step in reducing the smokiness of the food being cooked which
was always an issue when you were using wood to heat your food, and that was the primary
fuel used up until the 19th century.
And while that may sound charming it does leave a smokiness, pleasant or unpleasant, to
the food.
And it was the same issue with a new heat source: coal. Mott's oven, pot belly stoves, Stewart's
Oberlin iron stove
they all used coal or wood to heat the inside of a box just as it had been done for thousands
of years,
and the only big issue with that is it's really hard to gauge the temperature
I recently went to the Renaissance festival near me and Garet Gardina was kind enough
to walk me through the process of heating an oven this way.
Essentially you have to build a fire just like in a fireplace,
then let it heat the bricks or whatever material the oven is made out of which can take hours.
Then you would remove all the fuel and put in the food
and the food would bake using the residual heat
and this meant that you really had to time how you were going to do your cooking.
First you would start with those things that really needed a high heat upwards of 800
degrees Fahrenheit,
and often old recipes would call that a very hot or a quick oven, and then you would move
on to things like cakes and tarts that require a little bit less heat, often called a moderate
oven, and then some recipes would call for a slow oven or a slack oven and that is basically
a cooling oven and those foods need very little heat or they don't need a long time
in the oven.
Now of course there were ovens that let you add fuel while you were baking to keep the
heat going
but for most smaller ovens you had to take it all out and just rely on what was there.
The other big issue baking this way is to actually know what the temperature is.
One way to gauge it was to take raw flour and throw it into the oven and see how long
it took to brown. Another way the way that Garrett Gardena and her team did was to stick
your arm in the oven
and see how long you could hold it there, but the quest for relatively consistent heat
and precise-ish temperatures
would finally be achieved at the end of the 19th century with the advent of gas and electric
stoves, and the thermostat.
The electric stove was invented in 1882 and an electric oven was exhibited at the Chicago
World's fair in 1893.
The gas stove was actually invented a long time before in 1826 by James Sharp but as
almost nobody had gas in their house, it took a while to really take off.
And then an oven thermostat was invented in 1899 by Frederick Robertshaw
and for the longest time I thought that that was Robert Shaw the famous choral conductor
but it's not, it's Frederick Robertshaw.
And by the 1920s it could not only tell the temperature inside of the oven
but it would release more gas to keep it around that same temperature
and it's a Robertshaw thermostat that I have on my O'Keefe and Merritt oven.
So let's take a look at this bad boy and see how it's similar and different than a
stove that you might get today.
First of all personally I think that it's just prettier than most modern day stoves
partly because of the white enamel which makes it a lot easier to clean.
Up here we have a clock that still hasn't switched over to daylight saving time, and
it even comes with a timer that I can't figure out how to use. Plus there is a salt and pepper
shaker attached to the sides, though the P on the pepper has worn off.
Then there is this oven cover which can come up to be out of the way or it even has arms
to become a shelf.
Then in addition to four of the best, most sensitive burners I've ever had,
there is a griddle which is always kind of warm because of the pilot light, not hot but
always warm and if you had a modern stove that would be alarming.
Also helpful because I'm always dropping things inside of the burners these trays
come out and can easily be cleaned.
At the very bottom we have some storage and above that is my favorite part of the stove,
even though I doubt I'll ever use it The Grillevator.
Essentially it's a broiler with a grill that will elevate up and down like an elevator to
get it closer or further from the flame and of course the oven and you'll notice there
is nothing inside because it turns out it's not working properly so we had to move over
to the modern oven which is bigger, and it seems actually works here in the kitchen but
I did find somebody who actually works on these old stoves to come by and and work on
it so fingers crossed but for now modern oven.
And here we are fish pudding from the 1950s.
I'm not gonna lie, it doesn't look too appetizing. It kind of reminds me a quiche.
I don't think quiche looks appetizing but I do like quiche, but this just looks... less
appetizing...
but we're gonna try it. Here we go.
[Chomp]
[Chews]
[Chews less enthusiastically]
[Pained swallow]
I don't like that at all. Oh that does not spark joy.
Okay- all right let's break this down. We got two flavors here.
Both flavors are very nice. The fish well seasoned, good fish.
Rice pudding, tasty. They do not compliment each other at all, and even worse is the texture.
It's like mushy fish,
and that's not good. So yeah I can see why you don't see a lot of fish pudding in modern
day cookbooks. It's definitely something that I feel that we've moved past and-
and that's a good thing.
Anyway thank you for joining me in my new kitchen, and make sure to follow me on Instagram
@tastinghistorywithmaxmiller
and I will see you next time on Tasting History.
At least its consistency isn't like chocolate pudding, that could be worse.
X_x