Grog to Grits

I wrote about popcorn previously, but I was looking through some old issues of Good Housekeeping magazine and saw a few popcorn recipes that I thought I’d pass on.

The recipes are from 1913, and from reading the introduction to the recipes it’s apparent that new ideas about nutrition are becoming popular.  This is just before they discover vitamins but after they’ve realized food can be divided into proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.

As the article says, “We have lately begun to recognize important food values in things which used to be regarded strictly as knickknacks.  Witness the recipes which require dates, figs, bananas, nuts, etc., as a foundation.”  The author goes on to say that “Perhaps the newest recruit to the ranks is pop-corn.”

And there are lots of popcorn (or pop-corn, as they apparently used to write back then) recipes.  It starts with popcorn cereal for breakfast, which could be served “with cream and sugar, fruit juices or plain fruit.”

A “Dressing for Fowl” required the cook to soak equal parts stale bread and popped corn in water, then squeeze the resulting mass dry and add eggs, salt, pepper, onions and celery.  All of that was cooked in a frying pan (“stirring and turning often”) over low heat for 20 minutes, and then stuffed into a bird.  I can’t imagine what that stuffing must have been like.

There are two recipes in particular that are odd, and while I assume they are variations on existing recipes, I’ve never seen modern recipes like these.

The first is for “Corn-nut Loaf,” which, instead of being a bread recipe, is closer to being a variation on a meatloaf recipe.  It started by having the cook mix together one cup each of ground popcorn, soft stale bread crumbs, and broken nut meats, then adding “salt and pepper to taste and a teaspoonful of sage.  Bind together with two beaten eggs and enough cold water to hold the mixture together.”  Make that into a loaf and bake 45 minutes in a greased pan, “in a hot oven…Serve with a brown or tomato sauce.”  Sadly, I’m allergic to flour and eggs, or else I’d try to make it.

And the other strange recipe is for popcorn soup.  The complete instructions are:

Scald one quart of milk in a double boiler with one can of corn [no, it doesn’t say what size corn, and I assume it’s sweet corn].  Press through a sieve and add salt, pepper and a tablespoonful of butter.  Thicken with cracker crumbs and a handful of pop-corn.  When serving put one tablespoonful of whipped cream on each plate of soup with a few kernels of the pop-corn.

If anyone is brave enough to try these recipes, let me know.

All of the quotes above come from “Meals from the Corn-Popper,” by May Belle Brooks, page 119 in the January, 1913, edition of Good Housekeeping.

I’m feeling under the weather, so the topic today is medicine and the kinds of recipes people used to make for medicinal purposes.

Back in the 1800s, most cookbooks had a section on sickbed recipes.  There were lots of different kinds of recipes: some for plasters which were smeared on the person’s body, some for foods for sick people (which were usually things like gelatin or Cream of Wheat), and some for actual medicines that were consumed in some way.

The medicines, by today’s standards, were pretty weak in terms of actually curing the patient, but they certainly tried.  An example of medicine from the period is this recipe, from 1869’s Domestic Cookery, by Elizabeth Lea:

Warner’s Cordial for Gout in the Stomach

Take one ounce of rhubarb, two drachms of senna, two of fennel seed, two of coriander seed, one of saffron, and one of liquorice; stone and cut half a pound of good raisins, and put all in a quart of good spirits; let it stand in a warm place for ten days, shaking it every day; then strain it off and add a pint more spirits to the same ingredients; when all the strength is extracted, strain it and mix the first and last together. Take from two to four spoonsful of this cordial in as much boiling water as will make it as hot as you can take it; if the pain is not removed in half an hour, repeat the dose, and if your stomach will not retain it, add 10 drops of laudanum. (page 248)

Really, it’s a number of spices infused in liquor for a week and a half, then strained.  While it wouldn’t cure gout, it probably would make the sufferer feel better (especially after adding the laudanum, which was from the same poppy plants that heroin comes from).

While I wouldn’t try Warner’s Cordial for gout, I certainly have tried a modern day variant of the recipe, and it’s quite good.  It does seem to help a sore throat, and since it’s mostly liquor, it does make you feel good.

Ginger Honey Cordial

Makes 6 cups – takes 1 month to make

1/2 oz fresh ginger root, peeled and sliced into rounds, about 1 tablespoon
2 cardamom pods (discard papery membrane) (I’ve never actually found
cardamom pods at the store, I always use about 1/2 teaspoon of ground
cardamom)
2 whole cloves
1/4 teaspoon coarsely ground pepper
1 tablespoon raisins
1 quart brandy
1 1/2 cups honey

Put ginger root, cardamom, cloves, pepper and raisins into a clean,
dry bottle with a tight-fitting cap.  Add the brandy, cap the bottle
and shake well.  Let steep for one week, shaking every few days.

After the week, filter the cordial into a clean bottle using a funnel
lined with a coffee filter.  Add honey and shake well.  Let cordial
mature 2-3 weeks, then filter again.  This doesn’t need to be
refrigerated and will keep for well over a year.

In general, the foods we eat aren’t like the foods from a hundred years ago.  Foods are processed today in all sorts of different ways, and fads and trends affect what we choose to eat.  Simply put, Americans’ food preferences have shifted over time.

That’s why it’s so amusing to me to come across an account of a meal from about 150 years ago that’s quite similar to a meal today.  The description comes from a Scot named Patrick Shirreff, who visited America in the 1830s and wrote a book about it later.

He took what was then a fairly typical tour of the states: landing on the east coast, traveling east across New York state, Ohio, and Indiana, and then going south via stagecoach and boat through the south.

As he approaches Chicago in a stagecoach the party stops at a house for breakfast, and he describes the scene:

A kettle and two frying-pans were put on the fire, and two others over some ashes, removed from the general mass by means of a shovel, and placed on the hearth. Into one of these pans some small loaves were placed, which had been prepared beforehand, and covered with a lid, on which hot ashes were placed; and in the other, batter-cakes, called flap-cakes, were prepared. In one of the frying-pans on the fire bacon was dressed, and in the other potatoes; so, in less than half-an-hour, a breakfast of the best the house could afford was prepared.

So this is what they ate for breakfast: fresh bread (prepared in what was essentially a Dutch oven), pancakes (or flap-jacks), bacon, and fried potatoes.  This isn’t much different from what you can get at IHOP, just without all the sugary stuff they add to it.

There are some things we eat for breakfast that Americans in general didn’t eat back then, such as yogurt or cold cereal, but quite a bit of breakfast, especially the hot foods, were fairly common.  The only reason I can think of for why breakfast hasn’t changed much is that it tends to be a very profitable meal for restaurants, given that the ingredients (eggs, bread, potatoes) are very inexpensive.  While you might not have pancakes every morning your local diner will have them available, along with eggs, fried potatoes, oatmeal, and all the other traditional breakfast foods.  This may be one instance where capitalism is keeping a tradition alive instead of changing or getting rid of it.

The above quote was taken from A Tour Through North America…, by Patrick Shirreff (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, et.al., 1835), page 221.  You can download the book for free from Google Books.

Over Christmas my wife and I went to Costa Rica for a vacation. While we were there we toured an organic farm which raised over 100 varieties of fruits and vegetables. One thing they raised was chocolate.

During the tour we got to taste the various products they have, including sugar cane and sugar cane juice. We also got to taste chocolate straight from the tree.

The fruit of a chocolate tree is shaped vaguely like a football and is about four inches long. The seeds inside the fruit are what chocolate comes from, but the seeds have to be processed before they look anything like the chocolate we know (and the processing is quite something, since the seeds have to be both fermented and roasted).

Unprocessed seeds are white, flat, about an inch round, and vaguely resemble a piece of liver in terms of consistency.  The actual seed is inside the fleshy outer coating, and is hard. Our host handed seeds around for us to taste, warning us that we should not bite the seed because the core was bitter. Sucking on the seed and gently biting it released a kind of citrus flavor that wasn’t unpleasant, but it was nothing like chocolate flavor. Again, chocolate seeds are heavily processed before they become what we know as chocolate.

And all of this reminds me of a bit of chocolate history, from Tim Richardson’s Sweets: A History of Candy.

Many years ago, when the Spanish ruled Mexico and when chocolate was extremely popular among the upper class, a bishop in southern Mexico was having a problem with chocolate. The issue was that rich church women had their maids bring them chocolate during the Mass, and this was understandably irritating the bishop. He ordered his priests to confiscate the chocolate the next time it happened, but when they did it turned into a standoff in the church with swords being drawn. The bishop died shortly afterwards, convinced that he had been poisoned by the pro-chocolate group. Was he actually poisoned? It’s impossible to know, but the story is a good indication of how passionate some people are about foods, particularly about chocolate.

Hamburgers make up a big part of the fast food industry, and so they make up a big part of American dining in general, but it wasn’t always so. If you go back to the early twentieth century Americans had very different attitudes toward the simple burger.

Simply put, they didn’t trust it. Hamburger is made from ground up beef and back then was something of a byproduct of the butcher trade. It was where the butcher put all the remaining scraps after cutting up a beef carcass, along with the tougher cuts of meat. Almost anything could be included in a pound of ground-up hamburger.

This meant that hamburger was cheap, which in turn meant that it was used in food operations where price was preferential to quality.  Hamburgers were popular at county fairs, and they and their brethren-in-food—the hot dog—were sold by street vendors in cities across the country.  The fact that these low-class and fly-by-night joints sold hamburgers further reduced the burger’s esteem in many peoples’ eyes.

Because of this, the meat industry and restauranteurs started working to change the hamburger’s bad reputation. For its part, the meat industry helped pass a law that legally defined hamburger as being 100 percent beef (and this law is still in effect—anything labelled “hamburger” has to be 100% beef). No longer could hamburger be made from beef, pork, and whatever other animal scraps might be left behind at the packing plant. While this law might have been intended to increase the public’s trust of hamburger, the law certainly did not say what parts of the cow–innards, tongue, or even hooves–could legally be included in hamburger.

The fact that hamburger was cheap led to some restaurants focusing on producing hamburgers for the public. White Castle was America’s first hamburger chain, and it, too, had to fight the perception that hamburger was a low class, dirty food. The name was carefully chosen to evoke ideas of cleanliness and the upper class. The grill was placed in full view of customers so they could see what was being cooked, and the meat was supposedly delivered fresh twice a day.

The company even went so far to prove that hamburgers were harmless that they sponsored an experiment at the University of Minnesota where, for 13 weeks, a medical student lived on nothing but White Castle hamburgers and water. He was as healthy at the end of the experiment as he was at the beginning, and White Castle used that to show customers they had nothing to fear from eating their burgers.

Hamburgers are far more popular today than they were back then, and White Castle’s popularity was long ago eclipsed by the likes of McDonald’s and Burger King.  Still, the nagging questions about health remain—even if the hamburgers today are made from high-grade meat, are they healthy?  You might be able to survive eating nothing but White Castle’s sliders, but it sure wouldn’t be a good existence.