History - Day One

Today was pioneer food day and it took a whole lot of work I can tell you, tomorrow will be a day of convenience I think.  I did a bit of research over the last few days and came up with quite a few recipes from the 19th century that I shall link through to in case you have any pressing desire to try them.  Here's how it went.

For breakfast we had bacon and Johnnycake.  Johnnycake is like a sweet cornbread, predictably it was too much for Jacobs rather restricted palette (so he had a bacon butty) but Rose enjoyed it.  I'm not sure if there is a little too much milk in this recipe and if I do it again I might reduce it.  Tom did not partake and went for his usual Quakers instant gruel which is sort of authentic so I let him off.

After breakfast the kids churned some butter for me, the recipe for this came from the Johnnycake site.  I wasn't holding out much hope as I have vivid recollections from my childhood of shaking top of the milk about in old jam jars for days and ending up with about 3 grains of butter.  This recipe works really well and only took about 10 minutes.  Here it is with my Galt potato bread.

For lunch we had bread and cheese, we were supposed to have apples with it but I forgot to buy some yesterday so Rose had grapes.  I made the bread to a recipe from The New Galt Cookbook, written in 1898, the recipe was only half complete so I had to do quite a bit of improvising but in the end it was very good, you'd never know it has potatoes in it!  Galt is where some of Tom's family are from so that was a nice touch.

Dinner was Chuck wagon beans, scalloped potatoes (from the Galt book), sausages and carrots followed by brownies from Mrs Small's Kitchen and Conkey's Tavern at the American Museum outside Bath in the UK c.1990 (recipe supplied on request).  Actually, I just looked up the museum website and it looks like they have gone upmarket, there seems to be a waitress service restaurant in the orangery so I suspect Mrs Small and Conkey have been given the old heave ho.

Anyway, I quite liked the beans but the kids were not impressed.

The potatoes were very good and the brownie had a universal thumbs up which is good as the recipe made vast amounts.  Here is Jacob eating some, he doesn't look particularly pleased, I think he is just experiencing extreme relief that there was something to eat that was not new or at all challenging.