Welcome to How To Cook That, I'm Ann Reardon and today we're making a 200 year-old apple tart and
strawberry ice cream that uses a really unusual ingredient ... dried bugs! Let's start with the
ice cream recipe ... this book was published 200 years ago so there was no electricity,
no freezers and definitely no ice cream machines back then. It says 'to a pound of preserved fruit
which may be of what kind you choose add a quart of good cream'. Now I wanted to use preserved
fruit that was made in the same way that they would have done it. Canning was only just being
invented at the time of this book being written so you couldn't just go to the shops and buy a
tin of fruit. Further on in the book there's a whole chapter on preserving all different
kinds of fruits and I followed the directions for strawberries, which was basically done by
gently heating them with double their weight in sugar and sealing it up. This method of preserving
fruit in jars was only invented a few years before this book was published and it worked but they
didn't yet know why it worked. It wasn't until 50 years later when Louis Pasteur explained that it
killed the microorganisms that caused it to go off and sealing it stopped more from getting in. The
large amount of sugar would also of course help stop microbial activity but they didn't know that.
'Add to that a quart of good cream and the juice of two lemons squeezed into it. Add some sugar
to your palette it doesn't really need a whole lot more sugar there was so much in with the
strawberries and then let the hole be rubbed through a fine hair sieve'. Now they obviously
didn't have a metal sieve like I do ... a hair sieve was made out of wood around the outside and
woven horse hair in the middle. I guess we'll just squash the strawberries through the metal sieve
because I don't have one of those. They bottled their strawberries with the stems on but we don't
want stems in the ice cream of course so I'm going to chop all those off and take them off and after
20 minutes of trying I just can't get this last bit to go through so we'll just go with that.
Stir the strawberries into the cream and then what's next: 'let the hole be rubbed through the
fine hair see if we've done that and if raspberry strawberry or any red fruit you must add a little
cochineal to heighten the color'. Now cochineal are sap-sucking scale insects that live on cacti,
if you move their waxy white cotton wool-like covering off you can see the little red insect
bodies. These are then collected and dried out and that's what I have here in this bowl. If we
take a closer look this is what they look like when they're dried, they look a bit like little
rocks really not so much like bugs but let's crush them using my trusty mortar and pestle.
Look at that ruby red color wow that's awesome ... don't you wonder who discovered this and tried
it first? Like who ate one of these bugs to check it wasn't poisonous and that it didn't taste bad?
Boggles my mind. Cochineal is actually still used in some foods and lipsticks today for this red
color. If you just look for the words carmine cochineal cochineal extract crimson lake carmine
lake natural red4 75470 or e120 on the ingredients you've got bugs in it. It is actually being phased
out because it's expensive to harvest the insects and people don't like the idea of eating bugs
in their food but people also like the idea of things being natural and bugs are natural ... who
would be a food manufacturer it's really hard to please everyone! Have your freezing pot nice and
clean and put your cream into it. Now from what I could see online a freezing pot looked something
like this ... a tall metal container with a lid. Then it says to cover it, so we'll put the lid on
and 'put it into your tub with ice beat small and some salt'. Okay so let's add some ice all over it
and a generous amount of salt. Salt lowers the freezing point of water so it helps make the ice
melt into a liquid that is below freezing level but it's not solid and then when that comes in
contact with the metal tub it'll help freeze our ice cream. People still do this today so i find it
fascinating that they already had this figured out 200 years ago. Then it says turn the freezing pot
quick and as the cream sticks to the sides scrape it down with your ice spoon and so on until it is
froze. The more the cream is worked into the side with the spoon the smoother and better the flavor
will be. Now i'm not quite sure how i'm supposed to turn it quick ... i can spin it i guess
and then scrape down the frozen ice cream from the sides. Hand cranked ice cream machines were
not invented for another 40 years so i guess i'll just keep spinning and scraping and 20 minutes
later it's thick and frozen, that's looking good. Time to move on to making the unusual
apple dessert. I'm in the fruit pies section of this book and i want to try the apple tart.
'Scald eight to ten large codlins' ... now codlins are an old breed of green apples that i can't get
here so i'm using Granny Smith apples and putting them into boiling water. After a few minutes they
look like this and it says to let them stand until they are cold. Further on in this recipe it says
we need butter and I found this old butter churn on eBay. Isn't it awesome! It said it was working
but by that i think they meant that the handle turned which it does but it had a massive crack
in the bottom so if you poured cream into it it just would have run straight out. So what i did
was to get a little bit of beeswax and melt it and pour it into the crack and while it was still
soft to take the excess off. I really didn't want to use glue because this is an antique.
I've given it a good wash so now it's time to add the cream and unfortunately it is still leaking
but it's not coming from the crack it's coming from a different spot on the side so i'm gonna
have to tip out the cream and add some more wax on the edges and try again. Clearly when they
said it was working they didn't imagine anyone would actually want to use it to make butter.
Yay it's not leaking this time! The practice of churning cream to make butter has been around
for a very very long time. It's even mentioned in the Bible! Proverbs says: "for as the churning of
cream produces butter and as the twisting of the nose produces blood so stirring up anger
produces strife". But the way in which butter was churned has definitely changed over the years.
They used to use a tripod and fill a goat-skin with cream and air and then rock it back and
forward to make butter. Then there was an up and down churn where you pulled a plunger up and
down up and down fairly self-explanatory there and then a barrel churn where the whole barrel spun
and then that was refined to be like the one that I'm using which is a bit like a barrel but the
paddle on the inside turns. This particular one is by E Cherry in Melbourne it's about 150 years old.
After about 10 minutes of churning the fat in the cream is clumped together and separated from the
liquid so now we have butter and buttermilk. The book says to 'spread the butter thin in a bowl and
work it well together with such a quantity of salt as you think fit'. Back to our apples it says let
them stand until they are cold then take off the skins and beat the pulp as fine as possible with
a spoon. Well the skins come off fairly easily, I'm assuming we don't want the core part of the
apple so I'm just going to cut the chunks of apple off around the edges then it said to beat it to a
pulp using a spoon. There's no way I can beat this to a pulp with a spoon because it's just too firm
still and i wondered how they managed to do it did i need to boil it for longer but then i found the
answer thanks to Malcolm from Plantsman's Corner "keswick codlin, one of the most lovely apples
really old one but it's a it's a strange apple it cooks to a froth it takes about 10, 20 seconds in
boiling to just reduce to a froth the puree is absolutely beautiful". So that's my problem codlin
apples turn to a very soft pulp very quickly. I'm just gonna have to chop mine up with a knife
to try and make them a little bit smaller chunks they'll cook a bit more in the oven.
Then the weird thing is they say to add the yolks of six eggs and the whites of four which in other
words is four whole eggs with an extra two yolks but i've never mixed eggs in with apple like
this before it looks like scrambled eggs. Anyway we'll see what it tastes like when it's cooked.
'Beat it all together very fine and put in some grated nutmeg and sweetened to your taste.' Next
it says to make a puff paste now if we turn to earlier in the book it has a puff pastry recipe
here it says: 'puff paste must be made thus take a quarter of a peck of flour and rub into it a pound
of butter very fine make it up to a light paste with cold water just stiff enough to work it up
then roll it out about as thick as a crown piece put a layer of butter all over and then sprinkle
on a little flower. Double it up and roll it out again, double and roll it with layers of butter
three times and it will be properly fit for use.' This has made way more pastry than I need for one
apple tart i'll have to use the rest for something else. 'Pour the ingredients in but do not cover it
with paste. When you have baked it a quarter of an hour strewn over it some sugar finely beaten and
sifted'. Time to see what this 200-year-old apple tart and strawberry ice cream with bugs in it
tastes like ... hmm I like it, I think it's really good. I have to give it to
Dave though he's our true taste tester. Okay we have here a 200 year old apple tart recipe
and strawberry ice cream. Fantastic 200 years! I love apple pie. Hoping you like this...
I do ... it's good it's thumbs up ... it's it's fresh it's delicious it's good. Can you guess
the other ingredient that they? Um 200 years ago? Is it whale? Baby seal? I don't know.
Okay a mystery ingredient in the ice cream ... strawberry ice cream and then let me know if
you can taste anything else. It's quite nice it's uh very fresh it's not nearly as sweet
as what we would associate as strawberry ice cream now. But would you eat the whole plate
of dessert? Yeah absolutely yeah that's good I like it. The mystery ingredient in the pie
is eggs with the apple which was really unusual okay and the mystery ingredient in the ice cream
is bugs! I knew you would get me, what sort of bugs ... is it lice cream? It's cochineal bugs,
they make it a little bit red in color but they have no taste. Okay are you gonna eat the ice
cream? No I'll probably eat the pie though. They still use it nowadays yeah really okay
it's actually really good I like it. Now something they didn't have 200 years ago was merch or they
may have like hessian sacks and stuff like that but what we have now is we got a whole uh bunch
of fresh merch just came out. See this is what we call the how to cook that science lab logo so that
just came out because obviously Ann is a food scientist we have a whole bunch of things like
uh debunking cups and other stuff. Just check them out there you can click down the bottom the other
one that i really love is our aprons and if you can just see that it's got an embroidered logo
h2ct. Really good quality I reckon you'll love it and I'm gonna go eat some more pie. You can see
more 200 year old recipes here and lots of other sweet stuff on my channel here with thanks to all
of my wonderful patrons for your ongoing support make it a great week and i'll see you on Friday.