A few days ago I ordered something from Etsy (I’ll be posting about that something later) and the seller sent along a free gift:
…a very cool 1949 cookbook for new owners of Hotpoint ranges. It has some recipes and a few very cool vintage pictures of that mid-century type with colors that don’t really seem real.
Back in January, when our old craptastic 1970s stove broke, I threatened to get a vintage stove. At the time, we had no idea what we were going to do to the kitchen other than to get another stove, and I wanted to get a new floor because the tiles were horrendous and never looked (or got) clean.
My house was built in 1911, and the kitchen had only been partially remodeled in all the years since — the original built-in “kitchen dresser” still exists on one wall. My dream was always to make it look like something in Bungalow Kitchens. But kitchen remodels — even period-style — are expensive, and I never thought we would be able to do one.
And then we saw this, and had to buy it:
Once you have a stove like this, it demands that the rest of the kitchen go with it. And so began the transformation of the kitchen into a modern version of a 1920s kitchen. (We didn’t quite go all the way back to 1911 style. 1920s kitchens have more storage.) It’s not finished yet. Normal people do this sort of thing in a more linear way, I suspect. But it is about 75% finished, and the kitchen is now usable. New Marmoleum floor, new cabinets, new (old) fridge, new big kitchen table to use as prep space and eating space — it is a dream kitchen, if you are a history geek like me.
The lesson, though, is be careful when you are planning to “just replace an appliance and maybe the floor tiles.” It doesn’t always work that way.
(About the stove — it’s not a true vintage stove. It’s a 1970s Country Charm reproduction, supposedly made from late 1800s molds, but with electric burners, a clock and timer, etc. It’s old enough to be vintage in its own way, but not a true antique. It works beautifully, though the oven is a bit small, and I like it. Eventually I might have to replace it with a gas stove, but currently we don’t have gas running to our kitchen.)
In the comments for the last Welsh rabbit post, reader Lynn wrote:
Do try the rarebit again…it is delicious. I serve it over a bowl of nice bread, cut as for fondue, with steamed broccoli and some nice red bell pepper strips. Quick, pretty inexpensive and really good on a winter night.
Here are my notes: Use a double boiler and cook out the roux first, beat the egg into the beer and thin the roux with this, then melt in the cheese. Foolproof.
We took her advice, using our recipe but her directions. The ingredients were the same, except that we used Buzzsaw Brown Ale instead of Newcastle. We used a metal bowl as a double boiler, and this time the rabbit sauce was dead easy to make and no trouble whatsoever. Lynn was right!
Although we now have a working oven again, I was taking no chances — I just toasted the bread in the toaster this time, playing it safe.
For a side dish, I served a salad with a sweeter balsamic vinaigrette dressing to balance out the salty savoriness of the Welsh rabbit. It worked perfectly.
Kristen wasn’t here that night, and is skeptical that the Welsh rabbit can be good after all, so I’ll be making this again for her to try. The men in the house loved it, though.
The lighting wasn’t great by this time of night (do all the other food bloggers do their cooking in the daytime or something?), but I did get a picture of the finished product:
Compare this with the picture here, and it’s obvious this was a much more successful experiment. Thanks, Lynn!
We are bad, bad bloggers. No posts in ages. Well, I didn’t have a working kitchen for ages. But now I do, and I actually have a backlog of things to post.
I’ll start with a quick one. While browsing around today, I stumbled on a Scribd document that contains links to a bunch of historic cookbooks that can be found online. Some of the links in it are broken, but others work fine, and there’s a lot of fun browsing you can do from these links. Enjoy.
Butter isn’t exactly one of “the recipes that are no longer in vogue, but were familiar to our grandparents, or even our great-great-grandparents and beyond.” We’ve never really stopped eating butter, though people have cut back over the years for health reasons. Butter itself, though, is still found in every grocery store.
The thing that has been nearly forgotten, though, is how to make it. This was a skill that nearly every housewife once had, and now we let dairies do it for us. It’s more convenient that way, but some would say that we’ve lost quite a bit of flavor that way as well. Some of us had the experience of shaking a jar of heavy cream to make butter in school or at Girl Scouts, and others have accidentally made butter when trying to whip cream, but most Americans today have probably never seen butter made.
The butter we buy in the grocery store is also different from traditional farm butter. It’s “sweet cream” butter, made from fresh, sweet cream. Sounds good, right? Well, it’s pretty good, but it turns out that traditional butter is not made from sweet cream at all. It’s made from sour cream. And it tastes much better and more “buttery” than sweet cream butter.
Twenty-Fifth Annual Report of the Michigan Dairymen’s Association, 1909.
Notice the terminology Dr. Rahn uses in the image above: “ripening the cream.” To our modern mind, letting cream go sour is a bad thing. But done right, it’s “ripening” the cream, making it “fit for churning,” as an old cookbook I read puts it. Notice also the perspective on sweet cream butter: “the unusual flat taste and its bad keeping qualities.” My, how tastes have changed.
Traditionally, cream for butter was skimmed from the milk, and then kept for a while until it had soured and become fit for churning. Natural bacteria in the cream and the environment would cause the cream to clabber, to become nicely soured. Modern milk is pasteurized and homogenized, so it doesn’t separate into cream and milk, and it doesn’t contain the “good bacteria” needed to clabber. Left alone, it will just sour in a bad way instead.
The separation problem isn’t too bad. We can buy heavy cream in cartons, separately. (Try to find cream that isn’t ultra-pasteurized, and contains only milk and cream in the ingredients list. No carrageenan, etc.) The bacteria problem is also solvable. We need to put the good bacteria back into the cream, and we do this by either buying a commercial starter culture, or just some buttermilk that contains live cultures. The buttermilk is probably at your grocery store.
So here’s what you need:
And here’s what you do:
Pour the cream and buttermilk together in the bowl and stir gently to mix. Cover the bowl and put in a warm place overnight. (My last batch needed to ripen for 18 hours.) By warm, I mean 70-80F. As the time approaches, it should smell good — not like rotting milk, but like delicious crème fraîche. Which is what you are making at this point. When it’s ready, it will thicken to something like sour cream thickness (of course!). It will smell like heaven and taste just as good. Now bring the cream to a temperature of around 60F.
At this point, you could churn it. But since you probably don’t have a churn, a stand mixer will do. I have a KitchenAid, like the one Kristen posted about recently. (Mine is a green Epicurean model.) I put the cream into the bowl, and stir at medium low speed with the paddle attachment. Do not use high speed, because if you do, when the cream turns to butter, you will have a mess all over your walls. The slow stirring will do the trick. Watch it. If you have 60F cream, and it’s ripened nicely, it may become butter quickly. (5 minutes for my last batch.) But it could take quite a bit longer, too. Watch and you will see it become creamier, creamier, a bit grainy… sploosh! Butter grains floating in buttermilk.
When the grains are about rice-sized, drain the buttermilk (you can cook with it, or use it as starter for another batch), and rinse the butter under cold running water, working the butter by kneading it, squeezing and pressing and folding, and rinsing until the water runs clear. If you don’t do this, your butter will go rancid quickly.
Then keep working the butter to get as much water out of it as you can. This is when you can add salt, which helps it to keep longer.
You should have about a pound of butter after you are done working it. I divide it into fourths and freeze all but one, which is the one we will use right away. I put that one in a cloche de beurre, which is a little crock that keeps the butter cool but spreadable.
The cultured butter will have a stronger butter flavor than you are used to, and you will want to spread it on everything. Be warned.
Well, I can tell you where I’ve been. You know our broken stove? Yeah, replacing it turned into replacing the kitchen. Sort of. In other words, I still have nowhere to cook. No stove or oven. Lots of things I want to do, but… the kitchen isn’t very functional at the moment.
Kristen still has a stove, so maybe we can talk her into starting something. I have a few ideas up my sleeve too, so stay tuned!
As it turns out, we are not only without a stove for a while at my house, but we are also out of a kitchen floor. So I will be unable to cook anything for a while, which is annoying.
It is probably a good thing, though, that I am not able to cook the Dickensian gruel that was served to adventurous eaters in London last week. Even the French chef who prepared it couldn’t do much to make “the barely-palatable meal composed of water, oats and milk, plus an onion” tasty, apparently.
The Royal Society of Chemistry didn’t publish the recipe they used, but there are gruel recipes here. Truthfully, it sounds a lot like the oatmeal porridge I’ve made for Jason in a slow-cooker. With the right added ingredients it could probably be good. But plain Oliver Twist workhouse-style gruel was probably never all that appetizing, though those in workhouses were hungry enough to eat it anyway.
Oh boy oh boy oh boy! I have wanted one of these for sooooo long!
I didn’t get to go home for Christmas this year. Weather was a big deterrent to most of us Beaconians (residents of Beacon Hill, Seattle) over the holidays. This last Friday, I had dinner with my parents before they headed to Belize with my brother and sister-in-law, and they brought along my Christmas presents. Woo hooo! I love prezzies… among them was *drum roll* the PINK KITCHEN AID STAND-UP MIXER!! I thought the package seemed a bit heavy for what I thought was going to be some pieces for my Pfaltzgraf Grapevine Dinnerware… boy, they sure fooled me! I don’t know when I ever actually mentioned this to my mom, but it must have been some random email ages ago. I can’t wait to mix something fabulous… a smooth butter-cream frosting… oh my! Thank you Mom & Dad!
~Kristen~
Since we currently don’t have a working kitchen stove, and last night I had to go to an event where bringing food was encouraged, it seemed like a great time to try this one out. Here’s the recipe:
- Remove a block of cream cheese from the fridge and let it get a little soft, but not goopy.
- Fill a dish with a good sized lip on it with lots of sesame seeds.
- Press each side of the cream cheese into the seeds so that they really stick into the cheese.
- Set the cream cheese on top of the remaining sesame seeds.
- Pour liberal amounts of soy sauce on top of the cheese. you want enough sauce to accumulate in the dish to touch the bottom of the cheese, but not so much that the seeds float off the sides.
- Place the dish in the fridge and turn the cheese a couple times.
- When ready to serve, transfer to a clean dish and, if necessary,
sprinkle more sesame seeds on top.- Serve with Wheat Thins.
We served it last night and it was entirely consumed. People liked it a lot, though some people were unsure at first what the heck it really was. (And we didn’t know what to call it.) The recipe has a vintage vibe, but it’s pretty darn tasty to the modern palate, as well as being simple and not requiring any actual, you know, cooking. Thanks for the recipe, Elizabeth!
Here are a couple of variants to this recipe I found online: Cream Cheese Pickled in Soy Sauce, and Toasted Sesame Cheese Spread.
With luck I’ll have a stove again soon and I can get to work on the Malted Milk Cake.
Remember in the Welsh Rabbit experiment the other day, how we had some trouble getting our oven to work?
Jason opened up the oven tonight to try to fix it. As it turned out, there is a part in the stove that was fried pretty well. Fried enough that I am grateful that we did not have an electrical fire, because it seems possible that we could have. It might be possible to find a replacement part, but they are not all that cheap, and the stove is really pretty icky anyway. So we could maybe get a new one.
A new, shiny, 21st century sparkly modern stove, perhaps? Well, we could. But this weekend, instead, we may be going to look at one of these. Seriously. I have this idea to eventually restore the kitchen to its full 1911 splendor, and that would do the trick.
At any rate, I can’t bake anything until we have a working oven again.
