Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald

Deer-hunting season has been over for a month or two now, but for many hunters’ families there’s still plenty of deer (not to mention elk, moose, caribou, and antelope) venison in the freezer. And for the rest of us there is now available on the U.S. market a nice selection of both wild and farm-raised venison. The well-stocked Cambridge, MA market Savenor’s was the source of the gorgeous loin of venison we used in our recreation of Markham’s dish. The meat was pricey (about twenty dollars a pound), but far less expensive than a venison dinner for two in a fancy restaurant—and it provided enough meat for six to eight servings. For a special occasion meal, especially when company’s coming, this dish is an absolute knockout. It’s also quite easy to prepare.

Although Markham spit-roasts his meat over an open fire, we baked ours on a rack placed inside a roasting pan in our electric convection oven. If you have a way to spit-roast your meat—and catch the juices beneath—by all means do so. But we can attest that oven-roasted venison, when the meat’s been properly larded, is tender and juicy with just enough drippings to make a dark and luscious gravy. The drippings, along with some red wine (we took a liberty here, as otherwise we’d have had too little gravy), vinegar, and bread crumbs, are boiled and seasoned with sugar, cinnamon, ginger, and salt. We served our venison roast and gravy with homemade cranberry sauce, small baked potato/oatmeal cakes (Scottish “skirlie” potatoes) and braised red cabbage made soft, sweet, and slightly tart with redcurrant jelly, citrus fruit, port wine, and butter. We chose a good California Cabernet sauvignon for our beverage. True, neither this particular grape varietal nor the California region would have been known to Gervase Markham, nor to the early New England settlers who imported and presumably cooked from his book, The English Hus-wife. But we firmly believe that if Markham or his colonial contemporaries had had the ability to time travel, they would have enjoyed the wine just as much as they would have relished our rendition of his “To Roast Venison.”

The Ingredients
Serves six to eight

For the Roast
3 ½ pounds venison loin, neatly tied
½ pound leaf lard, cut in long strips
21 whole cloves

For the Gravy
1-1 ½ tablespoons drippings
½ cup red wine
1 teaspoon bread crumbs
1 ½ teaspoons cider vinegar
¼ teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon brown sugar
¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt


How We Made It
Before roasting, we rinsed the loin under cold, running water, patted it dry and larded it, inserting a larding needle lengthwise into the loin in five places—three insertions were made at one end of the loin and two at the other. Each insertion reached about halfway through the loin. To load the needle, we used thin strips of fresh leaf lard, which comes from around the pig’s kidneys and is generally considered the best fat the pig has to offer.



If you don’t have a larding needle (readily available on Amazon and in kitchen supply stores), make slits in your piece of venison with a skewer or long, narrow knife and insert the lard into the slits. Alternately, you can cover the roast with lard (this method is sometimes called barding). With lean meat such as wild game (farmed game is fattier, to be sure) larding is a step you don’t want to skip. Otherwise, you may find that your expensive roast comes out of the oven dry and tough. After this preparation, we studded the loin with whole cloves,


put it on a rack inside a roasting pan, covered it lightly with waxed paper, and refrigerated it while we preheated the oven and prepared our side dishes of cranberry sauce, skirlie potatoes (mashed potatoes with toasted oatmeal, onions, and a bit more lard), and braised cabbage.

Now to baking the meat. When our electric convection oven reached 400°F, we were ready to pop in the roast and, on a rack below, the baking sheet of potato cakes, which got nicely browned in about fifteen minutes.


We roasted the meat for ten minutes at this temperature, then reduced the temperature to 325°F and continued roasting for about thirty minutes. To avoid overcooking the meat, we checked it periodically with a meat thermometer. When the loin’s internal temperature reached 145°F, we removed it from the oven and allowed it to rest for ten minutes before carving it. Our meat was a perfect medium rare.


While the meat was resting, we carefully scraped into a heavy saucepan the small bits of meat and juice that had coagulated in the roasting pan. To this nectar we added the red wine, bread crumbs, cider vinegar, ground ginger, brown sugar, and sea salt.


We brought this mixture to a simmer and stirred vigorously until we had an aromatic, smooth, deeply brown gravy. Venison doesn’t make much gravy, so we were careful to simmer it only long enough to blend the ingredients but not so long as to cook away any of this precious stuff.

With our table set, our cranberry sauce made, our skirlies baked, our cabbage fragrant and warm, and our venison looking utterly regal, we were ready to dine in high seventeenth-century fashion.


Eating a well-roasted piece of venison that is napped with a rich gravy and served by candlelight of a winter’s night makes one feel a bit like Lord Grantham. But as we know, the Crawleys of Downton Abbey didn’t invent high English style; they merely perpetuated it. Since Markham’s day and before, the English have been known for their skill in roasting meat and for their passion, among the nobility, at least, for wild game. Following Markham’s recipe, you can entertain your family and friends with this sumptuous English roast game dish that both Plymouth Pilgrims—at first through the generosity of Indian hunters—and twentieth-century Anglican earls would have enjoyed.


Gervase Markham's original recipe, with commentary, can be found in Northern Hospitality, pp. 208-209.

Let Them Eat Creamy Boston Cakes
Nowadays Americans think the only word that can possibly complete the phrase "Boston Cream" is "Pie." But in fact the BostonCream Pie—a notoriously misnamed yellow sponge cake with cream filling and chocolate icing—did not appear in print until the 1870s, long after Catharine Beecher’s 1846 cookbook made Boston Cream Cakes popular with those of a mind to imitate the dining fashions of New England’s metropolis. To confuse matters further, Beechers’s recipe wasn’t the only one circulating at the time under the stylish name of Boston Cream Cakes. But in our opinion those other recipes, relying on heavier, scone-like dough, aren’t nearly as good as Beecher’s éclair-like concoctions. Her recipe produces a light, flaky pastry, which she suggests filling with cream (meaning pastry cream) or custard. It seems highly likely that she got the idea—and most of the details—for these elegant little cakes from the famous French chef Antonin Carême, who in his Royal Parisian Pastrycook and Confectioner (1834) gives extensive instruction on making choux pastry of this type. Beecher's recipe is to all intents and purposes Carême's recipe, so she might just as well have called hers "Boston Carême Puffs.” (Pardon our punning but we just couldn’t resist that one!)

Beecher doesn’t specify the filling, so we used her own lovely, rosewater-scented pastry cream, which she calls "Mock Cream."

The Pastry Shells

Ingredients

9 cups all-purpose flour
4 sticks butter
4 cups water
12 eggs

How We Made The Pastry Shells
First we preheated the oven to 450° F. Using a stand mixer and paddle attachment, we mixed the butter, cut into about ½-tablespoon size pieces, into 8 cups of the flour.


Then we removed the bowl from the mixer and rubbed the butter into the flour by hand until the mixture resembled coarse meal.


We brought the water to a boil, removed it from the heat, and, working quickly before the water cooled, stirred in the butter/flour mixture.


We allowed the mixture to cool for about 10 minutes before beating in the eggs, one at a time, and adding the remaining cup of flour.


Now the glossy choux pastry dough was ready for baking.


We dropped 12 "teacup-size" scoops of dough onto a lightly greased half baking sheet (aka cookie sheet).


We baked the cakes for 10 minutes, reduced the oven temperature to 400° F., and baked them for an additional 20 minutes or so, until they were slightly puffed up and golden brown.


We resisted the temptation to sit down to the freshly baked cakes (okay, we admit we “tested” one or two hot from the oven) and proceeded to bake the remaining pastry dough, deploying an additional cookie sheet to be able to bake two batches at a time. Beecher’s recipe makes a ton of cream cakes! After a while, our house was filled with the fragrant smell of fresh-baked pastry and we had 5 dozen pastry shells cooling on racks everywhere. In short order they were ready to fill or freeze.

The Cream Filling

Ingredients

3 eggs, beaten well
3 heaping teaspoons all-purpose flour, sifted
3 cups whole milk, scalded
¼ teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon rosewater

These quantities of ingredients made about 3½ cups of pastry cream. Using about a tablespoon per shell, we were able to fill 50-55 of the shells.


How We Made The Filling

Using our stand mixer, we combined the beaten eggs and the sifted flour just until there were no lumps and the mixture was the consistency of a smooth batter.


To prevent the eggs from curdling, we stirred the hot milk constantly as we added the egg/flour batter,


and the salt and sugar.


Over low heat, we whisked the mixture vigorously for two to three minutes until thickened, being sure to whisk to the very bottom of the pot to prevent scorching.


We removed the pastry cream from the stove and allowed it to cool for a minute or so before adding the rosewater. Then we cooled the pastry cream to room temperature. Both the shells and the filling were all set to be turned into luscious cream cakes. We split the shells, filled them with the cream,




and, or et (as the great Carême doubtless many times announced) voilà!


Catharine Beecher’s two original recipes for “Boston Cream Cakes” and “Mock Cream,” with commentaries, can be found in Northern Hospitality, pp. 386 and 323.

A Bit of Thanksgiving Corrective
Before the standard roast turkey, stuffing, and gravy overtook Thanksgiving dinner like some monocultural virus decimating all other species and preparations, New Englanders enjoyed a healthy diversity of meat, game, and poultry on their annual festive board. Describing a typical New England Thanksgiving of the time, the December 23, 1801 issue of the Hampshire Gazette enthusiastically details steaming joints of roast beef, platters of mutton, tender chicken pies, and succulent geese alongside the reasonably-sized and well-dressed turkey to be found on the typical regional table. Alas, the modern turkey is not only an invasive weed of a bird driving out the many pretty Thanksiving offerings of the past, it is also untidy and overgrown, usually a titan of 18 to 22 pounds that takes visceral strength and uncanny arm movements to wrestle into the oven. Ah, for the eight or nine or even ten pound dainty fowl of yore. And in case we haven’t made our anti-turkey case sufficiently strong, be it remembered that the big bird is, after all, yet more poultry in a contemporary culinary world more awash in the stuff than the Jersey shore currently is in storm detritus.

So if you, like us, find in these few weeks after Thanksgiving that you’d like a break from the early 21st century’s relentless feathered regimen, now might be just the time to stew up some beef cheeks. Yup, beef cheeks. Don’t let the name of the cut put you off—we’re talking cheeks, yes, but not of the posterior kind. And if eating head parts isn’t something you’ve done before, this is a perfect way to start—the cut is small and the preparation uncomplicated. Trimmed and cooked long and slowly in Guinness stout and a couple of glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon until the meat falls apart under a fork’s gentle prodding, beef cheeks have a deep, rich savor all their own. Serve them over toasted French bread, ladle on a bit of their own spiced gravy, light the candles, and be prepared to be blissfully transported.

It’s no surprise given their exquisite taste that braised beef cheeks have become trendy in snobbish food circles. But that doesn’t stop them from being a perfect late autumn dish for those of us who mostly learn of metropolitan fads only decades after the fact. The recipe for them given by Hannah Woolley in The Queen-like Closet is also a perfect example of how inspired a simple seventeenth-century dish can be.

The Ingredients
Serves 6

4 pounds beef cheeks, about 3 pounds after fat and silverskin are trimmed
1 bunch parsley
4 sage leaves
2 sprigs rosemary
1 small handful thyme, about 5-6 stalks
12 ounces Guinness stout
2 cups Cabernet Sauvignon
Thick slices of good-quality bread, preferably French bread, 2 per person

“some whole Spice”

1 stick cinnamon
10 whole cloves
10 allspice berries
1 teaspoon sea salt
3-inch square of cheesecloth
Kitchen twine
Toothpicks


Our Version of Hannah Woolley’s “To Bake a Bulloks Cheek to Be Eaten Hot”

First we preheated oven to 325° F.

Here are our meat, spices, salt, wine, stout, and herbs. We also got out cheesecloth, twine, and toothpicks.


Next we trimmed the beef cheeks. This took some time as they were covered with a thick layer of gnarly fat that snuck into crevices of the meat and was difficult to extract, as well with as a good bit of filmy membrane, aka silverskin.


Take your time with this step, don’t get discouraged at all the trimmings, and you’ll get a nice looking piece of meat at the end; hurry, become overzealous, or just plain sloppy and you’ll get cheek mincemeat!


When we were done, we weighed the cleaned meat and the trimmings and discovered that we’d lost about a pound (maybe a bit more even) in all. This of course makes the cut more expensive than the price we paid per pound, but it’s what the cheeks needed and we ended up with some right good meat.



We removed the leaves from the thyme sprigs and the needles from the rosemary stalks by holding a single herb stalk in one hand and running two pinched fingers of the other hand down the length of the stalk in the opposite direction from the way the leaves grow. The thyme is a small leaf and needs no further chopping. We bundled the rosemary needles together and chopped them small. Then we made a mound of the parsley, sage leaves, rosemary, and thyme, mixed them together and chopped roughly. This would become our stuffing of parsley and sweet herbs, as Hannah Woolley instructs.


There is a natural flap of meat at one end of each beef cheek that makes a nice cavity in which to insert the herbs. We did this, then rolled the meat and secured each piece with two toothpicks.


We placed our stuffed cheeks in the enameled dutch oven. The quantity we had just covered the bottom of the pot in one layer.


We then made up our sachet of spices, putting 1 stick cinammon, 10 whole cloves, and 10 allspice berries into a square of cheesecloth and tying it up with cotton twine.


We added the teaspoon of sea salt to the pot. We like to undersalt our food (just a taste preference). You could add another teaspoon or two of salt, depending on taste.

In went the two cups of Cabernet, 12 ounces of Guinness stout (another rich stout would do just as well), and the spice sachet.


To retain moisture while the dish cooked slowly in the oven, we placed a piece of waxed paper over the mixture,


and then added the dutch oven cover.

Now it was ready for oven braising.

We left it alone for three hours, until curiosity got the better of us. When we tested the beef, it was still tough and we were worried. But we popped it back into the oven and in another hour, all was very well indeed. Our braised beef was tender, our gravy rich and deep and fragrant with spices. We removed and discarded the sachet.


As the beef was cooling, we lightly toasted the French bread rounds.

It was time to serve. Atop each piece of French bread, we placed one beef cheek and then spooned on enough gravy just to soak the bread. We served two cheeks per person. We had made brussels sprouts and mashed sweet potatoes for accompaniment.

With a glass of Cabernet and a bit of good company, this came pretty close to a perfect, and perfectly simple, meal.


Hannah Woolley's original recipe, with commentary, can be found in Northern Hospitality, p. 232.

Now that we're smack dab in the middle of the fall, New England's best time of year (as we noted in one of our summer posts), it's time to talk about one of the seasonal pies for which New England is best known—pumpkin pie. But the pumpkin pie we have in mind isn't your mother's pumpkin pie. Far from it. That pie—a pumpkin custard, gently spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg, and a bit of ginger and allspice, and baked in a crust—didn’t come into existence until the late eighteenth century. A century and a half before that, the early settlers of New England weren't all that keen on pumpkins, or the pies that could be made from them. According to the region's first historian, writing in the 1650s, people ate "Pumpkin Pies" only because they had to, because pumpkins (like corn, another unfamiliar food) grew like weeds in the strange new world in which they found themselves. They came up with ways to cook pumpkins (and corn) so that they could survive, not so that they could enjoy what they were eating.

But their compatriots in England didn't feel the same way. To them, sitting pretty and comfortable back home, pumpkins were intriguing in their novelty, not displeasing. By the middle of the seventeenth century, pumpkins were fashionable enough that instructions on how “To Make a Pumpion Pye” were featured in a cookbook attributed to Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of the deposed and beheaded former King of England, Charles I:


In this queenly pie, the pumpkin is sliced, fried with beaten eggs, sugar, spices, and herbs,


and placed inside a pie crust with alternating layers of apples and currants.


And it was this pie


that New Englanders, as they became more secure and comfortable, adopted as their own for the next hundred years—until that plucky and ever-creative culinary heroine of the new nation, Amelia Simmons, gave us the pumpkin pie that we all know and love today.

We made Queen Henrietta Maria's "Pumpion Pye," along with Amelia's custard-y pumpkin pie, for our family Thanksgiving dinner last year. Everyone around the table pronounced "Pumpion Pye" well worth reviving. So if you'd like to learn more about how we made "Pumpion Pye," click on over to our most recent column on All Things New England.

The original recipe, with commentary, can be found in Northern Hospitality, p. 301.

Bring Back Lard!
Here as promised is the crust we made to go with the peach-cum-pits pie we told you about in our last post. When we first made this shortcrust pastry, which was when we made it for the peach pie, we felt some trepidation about the addition of lard to the dough. We were novices at cooking with lard, and hadn't yet baked anything that included this—to us—new ingredient. Would the baked crust taste, um, piggy? On the other hand, we knew from our historical research that New Englanders had for a long time deployed lard in pie crusts to superb effect. The winning recipe in a 1939 New England apple pie contest called for a crust made with lard as the only type of fat. (Whereas Mrs. Webster’s Short Paste uses equal amounts of lard and butter.)

We made our version of Webster’s Short Paste with leaf lard, from the layer of fat around the kidneys of a hog. Leaf lard is considered the best type for cooking, especially baking. But you can make a perfectly fine pie crust with the hydrogenated lard that is often packaged in 1-pound boxes like butter and is sold in many supermarkets.

At any rate, our first bite of this crust made us into instant converts. Our notes on making it say it all: "This is the most delicious plain crust ever!" It is tender, yet substantial enough to hold up to the juiciness of fruit pies. So, as claimed by Mrs. Webster, it is excellent for fruit pies. It's also excellent for custards, vegetable pies, and meat pies. We just plain love it. Substitute ¼ teaspoon salt for the sugar in the following ingredients list when you are using it with a savory filling.

Ingredients
Makes 2 9-inch pie crusts

1 pound (4 cups) sifted all-purpose flour, plus 3-4 teaspoons, as needed
1 tablespoon sugar
6 ounces (¾ cup) lard
¼ cup cold milk
6 ounces (1½ sticks) chilled butter, cut into 1-inch pieces

How We Made It
We stirred the sugar into the flour and rubbed the lard in by hand until the mixture resembled breadcrumbs or coarse meal. Then we added the cold milk, about a tablespoon at a time, mixing it in with a wooden spoon, until the dough formed a loose ball.

Hands coated with flour, we gathered up the dough and placed it on a lightly-floured pastry cloth on a cutting board.


We rolled it out


and began adding the butter. We dotted the top of the dough with about a quarter of the butter, lightly floured the dough and our rolling pin, and rolled it out until this much butter was incorporated. We continued dotting the dough with butter, sprinkling on flour, and rolling quickly until all the butter was used up. At one point, the dough got a bit warm and the butter a bit soft, so we refrigerated both for about 10 minutes before continuing. Since for most fruit pies the crust should be fairly substantial, so that the fruit syrup doesn't bleed through the bottom as it bakes, we left the crust quite thick in the final rolling out, about half an inch.


We chilled our short paste for 30 minutes in the refrigerator, then filled it with our peaches and pits and baked away, with the results described in our previous post.

Webster’s original recipe, with commentary, can be found in Northern Hospitality, p. 251.

It’s the Pits
Peaches in any form are one of summer’s greatest delights. That goes double for peaches in a pie, and doubled again for the peaches in this particular pie, for which we’re indebted to Mrs. A. L. Webster of Hartford, Connecticut. Webster’s The Improved Housewife first appeared in the 1840s, just as the American publishing industry was getting itself modernized and consolidated and was starting to issue cookbooks at a much faster and more furious rate. Webster’s book was extremely popular and was frequently revised and reissued.


What’s unique, or at least distinctive, about Webster’s recipe is that she says to use whole ripe peaches. In other words, the pie filling includes the peach pits. You can search high and low, but we bet you won’t find nowadays a pie plate deep enough for a bottom crust, whole peaches, and a top crust. We found one that was about a half an inch deeper than the pie plates that are most readily available. In this we could fit two layers of halved peaches-cum-pits.

But why go to such lengths to bake the pits along with the peaches? “The prussic acid of the stone imparts a most agreeable flavor to the pie,” Webster explains. But take care. This “agreeable flavor” is actually imparted by . . . cyanide! Yes, you heard us right—cyanide. One medical authority of Webster’s day informs us that the use “in cookery” of ingredients containing cyanide was becoming “a favorite instrument of suicide.”

No real need to worry though. The agreeable essence from a few measly peach pits isn’t going to kill you. We ourselves dispatched many pieces of peach-and-pit pie with great gusto, although the pits themselves we of course forebore to ingest, pushing them aside as we proceeded. We’re still here to tell the tale, and so are the friends and family members to whom we fed this splendid creation.

Ingredients
Makes 1 9-inch deep(er)-dish pie

2 9-inch pie crusts
7 peaches, washed, halved, and the pits retained
Sugar, enough to strew thickly over two layers of peach halves
2-3 tablespoons water
Flour, enough to sprinkle over two layers of peach halves

How We Made It
We preheated the oven to 450°, then lined our pie plate with one of the crusts.


We put 7 of the 14 peach halves, including the pits, pit side down, all around the bottom crust,


and covered them with a generous amount of sugar and a small amount of water and flour.


Then we put the remaining 7 peach halves, pit cavity side down, on top of the first 7 and covered them as well with a generous amount of sugar and a small amount of water and flour.


We covered our peach halves and pits with the top crust and pinched the bottom and top crusts together with a fork.


No doubt you can see why we sometimes call this our “Tennis Ball Pie.” It was now ready for the oven. We baked it at 450° for 15 minutes, reduced the temperature to 375° and baked it for another 45 minutes, and finally, in order to turn the top crust nice and golden, increased the temperature to 400° and baked it for another 5 minutes.


We cooled the pie for 30 minutes on a wire rack, overcame our fear of cyanide poisoning and helped ourselves to a piece of pie that was a piece of pie to die for.


We urge you to watch for our next post, in which we’ll tell you about the crust we actually made as part of this culinary masterpiece. It’s also from Mrs. Webster’s Improved Housewife.

Webster’s original recipe, with commentary, can be found in Northern Hospitality, p. 317.

Good Every Way
Along the New England coast, it’s the peak time of year for catching striped bass. Or if like us you’re not that much into fishing, it’s the season when you can be sure to find this delicious species at your local market. Back at the very beginnings of the English settlement of New England, in 1634, William Wood, in his book New Englands Prospect, wrote that “though men are soon wearied with other fish, yet they are never with Basse.” Over two hundred years later, our good friend Catharine Beecher heartily agreed. “Bass are good every way,” she said. Nowadays, one of the ways of cooking bass that people particularly like is grilling it on a cedar plank, as is also popular with salmon, and as we did, using a recipe from Mrs. Bliss, with haddock (see our blog post, “Scrod or Young Cod, Roasted”).

Amelia Simmons offers another superb option for bass—filling it with a lovely bread stuffing and baking it. Unfortunately, last summer we didn’t decide to give Amelia’s recipe a go until a bit late in the season, when bass aren’t as plentiful. Our fish market could only provide us with one small fillet—not enough for four servings. But not to worry. Amelia explains at the end of her recipe that “the same method may be observed with fresh Shad, Codfish, Blackfish and Salmon.” Our market always has lots of codfish, so we brought a couple of cod fillets home along with our bass fillet.

The Ingredients
Serves 4

2 slices salt pork
½ teaspoon savory
½ teaspoon marjoram
1½ teaspoons dry, or 1 tablespoon fresh, parsley
¼ teaspoon salt
10 twists of a pepper mill
¼ teaspoon cayenne
2 slices white whole grain bread
1 egg
1 gill (½ cup) white wine
3 bass or cod fillets (about 1 lb.)
1 stick (8 tablespoons) butter, melted

How We Made It
We preheated the oven to 375°F. We took one of the slices of salt pork and chopped it into small pieces.


The other slice of salt pork we cut into strips, and we cubed the bread.


By the way, we used white whole grain bread because, of the breads readily available in today’s supermarkets, this type most closely approximates the basic wheat bread of Simmons’s time. We mixed together the first (chopped) slice of salt pork, the bread, the egg, the gill of white wine,

,
and the seasoning. The stuffing for our bass and cod fillets was ready.


We rolled our bass fillet around the stuffing,


whereas with our two cod fillets, we spread stuffing the length of one of them and placed the second on top, mimicking to some extent a whole stuffed fish.




It looks like the preheated oven would be the next destination.


But not so fast. You may be wondering about that second slice of salt pork, cut in strips. Simmons says to lay the salt pork strips on the fish “as it goes into the oven.”


This helps to keep it from getting too dry during baking.

We baked our bass and cod for an hour at 375°F, discarded the salt pork strips, and poured the melted butter over all.


Simmons says to serve your bass or cod with stewed oysters, boiled onions or potatoes, and cranberries. We made all but the boiled onions, using for the oysters an eighteenth-century recipe by Elizabeth Raffald that’s included in Northern Hospitality, p. 155.


The bass lived up to its reputation. And Simmons is correct--the “method” worked equally well with the cod.


It all made for a memorable New England baked fish feed!

Amelia Simmons’s original recipe, with commentary, can be found in Northern Hospitality, p. 149.

New England is best known for pumpkin and apple pies, which makes sense since the season of pumpkins and apples, the fall, is considered New England’s best time of year. But the region’s historic cookbooks also offer lots of great recipes for summer fruit pies as well, and we’ll be telling you about some of them in this and upcoming posts.

We’ll start with a simple yet elegant recipe for cherry pie from the second cookbook ever written by a New Englander, The American Frugal Housewife (1829)


by Lydia Maria Child.


Child (no relation to Julia, as far as we know) was one of the most prominent American women of the nineteenth century. She was renowned as an abolitionist and as the author of novels, biographies, essays, histories, and stories and poems for children. Today, she’s remembered primarily as the author of the poem, "The New-England Boy's Song about Thanksgiving Day," which has become our national Thanksgiving song, “Over the River and Through the Woods.” The American Frugal Housewife, written when Child was a young woman, is the only cookbook among her vast output.

If you’d like to learn more about both Child and her cookbook, and also how we made the crust


and the filling


for her cherry pie, click on over to one of our columns on All Things New England.

The original recipe, with commentary, can be found in Northern Hospitality, pp. 314-15.

Gingerbread: The History
Simmons’s recipe is closely based on one in an English cookbook, Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (see our blog post on her chowder recipe). Indeed gingerbread had a long history in England before it crossed the Atlantic. The earliest gingerbreads were made with grated crumbs from the finest type of wheat bread, the manchet (see our blog post thereon), were sweetened with honey rather than sugar or molasses, and were often dyed red, violet, or yellow. In the course of the seventeenth century, flour began to replace the manchet crumbs and sugar or treacle (molasses to us Yanks) the honey, while the garish coloring gradually faded away.

Gingerbread was enjoyed on all levels of society. King Charles II was said to particularly favor treacle gingerbread. Here in New England, Samuel Sewall, one of the judges in the Salem Witch Trials (he later publicly repented of his participation in the guilty verdicts), and a man who moved throughout his life on the highest levels of Boston society, was served “Ginger-Bread” by the governor of Massachusetts one day in 1720. Just as people frequently do nowadays when they have dinner in a restaurant, Sewall took some of the governor’s gingerbread home with him. The next day he bestowed it as a token of his esteem, “wrapped in a clean sheet of Paper,” upon a widow woman he was courting. A highly prized piece of gingerbread indeed!

Farther down the social scale, gingerbread was popular among militia soldiers (and children) on colonial muster days. On his famous youthful walk from Boston to Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin nibbled on gingerbread.

Like many other foods, gingerbread didn’t take the form in which we’re familiar with it—a soft cake sweetened always with molasses—until the time of the colonial revival, in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. A hundred years before that, Simmons offers five recipes for gingerbread. Four are relatively soft, though not as cakey as modern gingerbread; the one made with molasses is dense, almost hard. The one we’re telling you about in this post is a cookie-like “little cake” made with sugar. By the way, it was Simmons who first used the Dutch word “cookey” as the American name for English little cakes. But for some reason she didn’t apply the term to these small, circular gingerbreads, which in our eyes are clearly cookies.

If you’d like to know more about the culinary and cultural history of gingerbread in New England, you'll find several pages devoted to the subject in our earlier book, America’s Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking.

The Ingredients
We cut Simmons's recipe in half and converted her weight measurements to volume. Makes about 4 dozen small-to-medium cookies.

6 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon grated nutmeg
3 tablespoons ground ginger
1 cup sugar
2 sticks butter
2 large eggs
1½ teaspoons baking powder dissolved in
¼ cup heavy cream

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How We Made It
We preheated the oven to 350º. We mixed together the flour, nutmeg, and ginger (we like to use a strong variety such as Frontier), and set aside.


Then we creamed the butter and sugar and mixed in the eggs.


In a measuring cup, we dissolved the baking powder in the cream.


We added the flour mixture to the creamed butter and sugar, then added in the cream/ baking powder and ran the standing mixer just until the dough came together.


You can also mix the dough by hand; do not overmix.


Using a small scoop, we formed the dough into little round cakes (i.e., cookies) and placed them about 2 inches apart on greased or Silpat-lined baking sheets. Then we popped them into the preheated oven


for fifteen minutes.


After fifteen minutes, when the cakes were slightly browned on the edges, we removed them from the oven and allowed them to cool for about 10 minutes. Then we served our rich, spicy gingerbread cakes together with one of the other little cakes that Simmons neglects to call “cookeys,” her caraway-flavored “Tumbles.” (We'll be blogging Tumbles soon.)


Ours wasn’t a high tea, certainly, but it certainly was high time for tea and “cookeys” at our house!

Amelia Simmons’s original recipe, with commentary, can be found in Northern Hospitality, p. 369.

Spring is when we think of having lamb for dinner, probably because historically spring was the time of year when lambs were slaughtered—that is, those that weren’t being kept for wool production. Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s big sister,


whose recipes for beef stewed with apples and puff paste we’ve featured in this blog, has a great recipe for shoulder of lamb. Shoulder of lamb isn’t as popular today as leg of lamb, but when properly cooked, it’s just as tender and tasty—and less expensive. If you’d like to know more about Catharine Beecher and her famous sisters and brothers, and also how we made her lamb shoulder,


click on over to our latest column on All Things New England.

The original recipe, with commentary, can be found in Northern Hospitality, p. 216.