Not many people make their own pie crusts these days. With refrigerated and frozen pie crusts available in grocery stores, it’s easier to buy a pie crust and add your own filling. Premade pie crusts became available in the U.S. in the mid-1950s. Quote from an 1800s cookbook: “Few people know what really good pastry is. Fewer still can make it. It has no inevitable resemblance either to putty or leather. It is light, crisp, flaky, goodly to behold—goodlier to the…
Popcorn is a special type of corn; not all varieties of corn will “pop.” In the 1800s, some families raised their own popcorn. After cutting the corn from the stalks, they dried it, then shelled it by hand. They put the dried popcorn in “poppers” which were shaped like long, thin boxes made from tightly woven wire, attached to a long handle. Then the corn could be popped over an open flame without having to get too close to the…
Quinces resemble a pear, and are yellow when ripe, but the exterior is bumpy. They have a sour, astringent taste unless completely ripened, so they’re usually cooked. This fruit bruises quickly and very rapidly turns to a dark brown. The quince tree was brought to the American colonies by English settlers. During the 18th century, there was usually a quince at the lower corner of the vegetable garden [reference]. Today, there aren’t many commercial quince tree orchards in the U.S….
When I was in grade school in the 1960s, we visited our grandparents every summer and they grew gooseberries. We picked and ate green gooseberries right off the bushes. They were certainly sour, but that was the attraction. We had contests to see how many we could eat before having to spit them out. We never did get to see them as red berries. They must have ripened in late summer or early fall after we went back home. I…
There are basically two types of fondant that are used for making bonbons. The first is poured fondant, a creamy mixture used as a filling, and the other is rolled fondant or fondant icing, which is of a thicker texture and used for coating candy or icing cakes. INFORMATION BELOW FROM 1800s COOKBOOKS CANDY MAKING AT HOME The proverbial “sweet-tooth” is a characteristic of the American people. Hundreds of tons of candy are annually consumed, and fortunes have been made in…
FROM AN 1800s COOKBOOK: “The unpopularity of prunes is unfortunate. This may be because prunes were formerly one of the cheapest fruits or because they are cooked and served in the same way too often.
Desirable results can often be secured by combining prunes and other dried fruits with tart fruits such as apricots, apples, and rhubarb.”
There were no packaged pudding mixes in the 1800s. Homemade puddings were made from scratch and were either baked, boiled, or steamed. Puddings were made from a variety of foods, served hot or cold, and was a time-consuming process. “My*T*Fine” was the first packaged pudding introduced to the United States in 1918. Source – FoodTimeline.org . INFORMATION BELOW FROM 1800s COOKBOOKS ABOUT PUDDINGS The eggs for all sorts of puddings in which they are used should be well beaten and then…
Baking a cake wasn’t easy for housewives in the 1800s. Boxed cake mixes weren’t available until the early 1930s, so all cakes had to be made from scratch; mixing flour, butter, eggs, sugar, baking powder, and other ingredients by hand. Most ovens were fueled by wood. Oven thermometers weren’t invented yet, so they had to learn to determine how hot to heat their oven and how long to bake a cake. INFORMATION BELOW FROM 1800s COOKBOOKS Before commencing to make…