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.)
One more try at the Welsh rabbit. Photo by Wendi.Months ago, one of the first recipes we tried for this blog was Welsh rabbit (or rarebit), an old-fashioned dish I’d always been curious about but never tried. It did not turn out well. But it seemed clear (to me, at least) that it was a comedy of errors on our part (including the death of our oven in mid-cook, and our failure to deal with it correctly) that probably led to the recipe’s failure, and I vowed to try it again. Now I have a working stove and oven, so the time seemed to be right.
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.
My homemade cultured butter.So, I still can’t cook anything in our kitchen. But there are a few things I can do. One of them is to make a batch of cultured butter. I have a bowl of cream culturing right now.
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.
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:
1 quart of heavy cream (not ultra-pasteurized, no extra ingredients)
My milkman only delivers cream in pints, so I just get two pints at a time.
1/3 cup of buttermilk with live cultures
You can freeze extra buttermilk in ice cube trays so you don’t have to buy a new carton every few weeks just to make a little butter. Three cubes are about 1/3 cup. I haven’t tried the frozen buttermilk trick yet, though — I’m freezing some now for next time.
1 spotlessly clean glass or metal bowl with a cover
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.
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.
Cream cheese covered with sesame seeds... and soy sauceRecently Elizabeth emailed me a vintage recipe, saying: “Here is one of my mom’s favorite cocktail party recipes from the 1960s. People scoff at it, but when I put it out at a party it gets eaten fast!”
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!
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.
The finished product; not very pretty, but it tasted good -- to some of us(This is part 2 of the Welsh Rabbit story. See Part 1 for the background.)
Kristen and I gathered at the house tonight to make our Welsh Rabbit. Kristen brought Caesar salad to eat along with the “rabbit.” Jason was there to help eat the food.
The recipe we decided to use, as I mentioned earlier, was from the Good Housekeeping Woman’s Home Cook Book, exactly 100 years ago in 1909. They claim that all the recipes in that book are triple-tested, so we are hoping that this well-tested recipe works for us. Here it is:
A Really Digestible Welsh Rarebit
Melt one tablespoon of butter, add one-fourth of a teaspoon of salt and paprika, half a teaspoon of dry mustard and one-third of a cup of ale or beer. Stir constantly, and when hot, put in half a pound of cheese cut into small pieces. As it gradually melts it may thicken, for no cheese is exactly alike in the amount of liquid it requires. If it seems too thick, add more beer. If the rarebit is preferred creamy instead of stringy, add one beaten egg just before serving. The paprika in this recipe makes the cheese mixture perfectly digestible. If the regulation toast is not at hand for serving rarebit, pour it over saltines.–I. G. C.
This is not too difficult a group of ingredients to assemble. For the cheese, we picked up some Coastal Rugged Mature English Cheddar Cheese at Costco, and it’s really tasty stuff. Yum. For the ale, we got Newcastle Brown Ale. For the toast, we had some rolls from the local bakery — probably not exactly what was intended, but they were fresh and seemed as if they’d make fine toast. I got all the ingredients together, sliced the rolls and put them on a baking sheet, turned on the oven to toast the rolls, and was ready to start cooking.
Some ingredients waiting to be made into tasty sauce
I melted the butter, and then added the spices and beer. So far, so good. I wanted to get the rolls toasting so they would be perfectly toasted right about the time the sauce was done. But first, I put the cheese in the pan. This was probably a miscalculation. As I stirred the cheese, Kristen opened the oven to put the rolls under the broiler, and… the oven was cold.
Broken, that is. The knob had been turned on correctly, but nothing happened. I continued stirring the cheese, and the sauce looked about perfect… but we had nothing yet to pour it on. Jason came in and twiddled with the oven and got it to come on. Then it turned itself off. Then Jason got it to go back on again. The rolls were finally toasting… and right before our eyes, the cheese sauce started to separate. We cooked it too long, I think.
We added the beaten egg as the recipe optionally calls for, but we still had an ugly-looking stringy mess. Smelled good, though.
Shortly after we poured it on the toasted rolls, sort of. The thickest parts sort of glopped on. Kristen said it was “unappetizing.” We dished up our salads and settled down to eat.
The verdict:
Wendi: Thought it was ugly, and obviously not what it was supposed to look like, but it actually tasted pretty good anyway. Kind of salty, though. Would be willing to try it again.
Kristen: Hated it. Would not try it again. Thought it was too salty.
Jason: Liked it and would definitely eat it again. Enjoyed the leftover brown ale with it, too.
If I try this again, and I probably will, I will probably just toast the bread in a toaster, and heat the sauce under much lower heat, so it would not cook as quickly. Since it was a chafing-dish meal in the first place, I really should have done that all along. (What was I thinking? This was pure cook’s error. I would have gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids if I’d taken the sauce off the burner as soon as it looked right, though.) Also, I would probably not add all the salt in the beginning, and would salt to taste a bit later, which might help with the saltiness Kristen and I noticed. The aged cheddar seemed particularly salty in flavor to start with. This may be something that varies with different cheeses, I think. Other recipes I’ve seen include a little flour; I wonder if that would make the sauce a bit more manageable.
Having anchovies in the Caesar salad with it did not help as far as saltiness is concerned! Something to balance out the salt would be nicer as a side dish. Maybe a sweeter salad dressing?
I think one of the reasons that this dish has fallen by the wayside in recent years is the fussiness of making the cheese sauce. The average American household, sadly, is probably more likely to open a can, or just have a toasted cheese sandwich when it comes down to it.
"Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend," a classic comic by Winsor McKay
Welsh Rabbit, or Rarebit, isn’t quite as obsolete as some of the recipes we’re interested in trying. After all, you can still buy it from Stouffer’s. Alton Brown made it on Good Eats. And, while researching this post, I found that a recipe for it was printed on the New York Times website just a couple of weeks ago. It’s supposedly common British pub food. But here, in America’s Pacific Northwest, it’s rarely seen. I’ve certainly never seen it on a menu, whether in a restaurant or a pub. All I really knew about it was that it involved cheese somehow, and had a reputation for causing baddreams after eating it.
In the vintage cookbooks we’ve been exploring lately, Welsh Rabbit is ubiquitous (though usually called Rarebit), and several variations of the dish may be found. My grandma’s Kitchen Guide cookbook from the early 30s (maybe earlier — the book has no copyright date) has Welsh Rarebit, Spaghetti and Olive Rarebit, Mexican Rarebit, English Monkey (for the name alone, we are totally going to try this one), and Tomato Rarebit. Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cook-Book from 1896 adds Oyster Rarebit to the list. Mrs. Seely’s Cook Book from 1914 adds other recipes in the same genre: Golden Buck, Gherkin Buck, and Swiss Rarebit. These recipes, usually prepared in a chafing-dish, were commonly part of the “Sunday night” family meal, and were particularly valued during World War II, when meat was scarce. Though rarebit has not entirely disappeared from modern cookbooks, it is certainly less commonly eaten in the US than it once was.
This is a shame, since anything that basically consists of cheese and beer and toast is pretty much going to be a hit with a fairly large segment of the US population. What’s not to like, right?
We could go way, way back in history for this one, if we wanted to. Here’s an 1824 recipe from A New System of Domestic Cookery Formed Upon Principles of Economy and Adapted to the Use of Private Families, by Maria Eliza Ketelby Rundell:
Welsh Rabbit
Toast a slice of bread on both sides, and butter it; toast a slice of Gloucester cheese on one side, and lay that next the bread, and toast the other with a salamander; rub mustard over, and serve very hot, and covered.
But, instead, we’re going back exactly 100 years, to resurrect a 1909 version of this recipe, from the Good Housekeeping Woman’s Home Cook Book. (Thanks to Karen for sending me a PDF copy of this cookbook!) We’ll try it this evening, so stay tuned for a follow-up post with the results.
