Monthly Archive for January, 2010

Time Travel to Marvelous Melbourne – Como House

Published by Undergardener on January 31, 2010 in Gardening and the Out-of-Doors and History.
time-travel-to-marvelous-melbourne-como-house

Last week I was overcome with excitement when my copy of Mrs Beeton’s Guide to Garden Management – the art of gardening arrived in the post – finally! The tricky thing is that this Wordsworth Reference Series book doesn’t let you know when it was first published or reprinted.  It does own up to being newly type-set in 2008. So should I assume that it is abridged?

I’ve never heard Mrs Beeton’s name associated with a gardening book. I have seen reference to a Mr Beeton’s gardening guide. Doing some googling I found that Mr S.O. Beeton published this book in 1861. So now I’m not sure which book I actually have?

On the plus side this book does have one very long article on the usefulness of the Dutch Hoe. Be advised do not operate heavy machinery while reading this coma-inducing quote.

The Dutch Hoe, or Scuffle, as it is sometimes called, is shown at A. It consists of a sharp and comparatively narrow blade, attached to the socket by two arms, which spring from the lower end of the latter, and are fastened at their extremities to the blade, one on one side and one on the other. The blade of the hoe being thus attached forms an angle with the handle, and by means is almost parallel to the surface of the soil when in use. The edge is thrust into the earth with a pushing motion and cuts up the weeds, which, with the surface soil, pass through the aperture between the arms.  By this arrangement the tool meets with far less resistance, and the labour is rendered far lighter than it would be if the opening was closed, or even if the socket for the handle proceeded immediately from the centre of the blade.

The mysterious and legendary Dutch Hoe

As we know the Beetons were editing or compiling these books from many other uncredited sources rather than writing them. This gardening book like BOHM is a grab bag of articles from horticultural magazines, journals and pamphlets. This led me to wonder about the reliability of this book as a text for explaining how the Victorians gardened. Was this the kind of book that you owned rather than used? Certainly it is likely to be a reference book that came out to the colonies but does it capture gardening in Australia in the Victorian era? Australia has such a radically different climate to the Mother Country.  In other words have I been barking up the wrong tree?

Como House - Living in very grand style in colonial Melbourne

While I try to find some Australian gardening reference books I decide to visit Como House in inner-city Melbourne. This amazing house was built in 1847 and is still furnished with its original period furniture and boasts a vegetable garden – hazar!

Apart from being stonking enormous it really has a very plain exterior or I guess elegant depending on your point of view. It actually looks more like an English Regency house than a English Victorian country mansion. The family that built this house were extremely rich owning some 1 million acres of sheep farms across Victoria – baa! It seems unlikely that lack of money was the barrier to a  full flowering of fanciness in architecture.

I wasn’t allowed to take photos inside due to the low lighting that they use to conserve all the soft furnishings. Have a look at their gallery if you are interested.  I was however allowed to take as many photo’s as I wanted in the laundry – very happy!

The laundry outhouse at Como

So by way of an update to my earlier post exploring Victorian laundries here is the real thing.

The devices on the window sill are for ironing crimps into fabric and lace.

In the back left hand corner is a wood fired copper in the corner. Just to the right of the copper is a black iron stove for heating Flat Irons.

Stove for heating irons.

This laundry would have been a hot and steamy spot. It does at least have high ceilings and lots of doors and big opening windows. So not as bad as it could be – still I bags working out in the garden rather than in the laundry as a Washer Woman. I do love the old shabbiness of this room!

A green winding mangle just like Grandma used to use.

That’s probably enough laundry porn.

The kitchen was really unbelievably basic which is surprising as it was the kitchen they used right through until the 1960′s when they sold the house to the National Trust.

The benches in the kitchen were all low; about mid thigh in height.  I’m 165 cm (5ft 6 in) and I would have had to stoop down uncomfortably to use them. The tour guide said this was evidence of how short people were during this era – I don’t know – this would make them very very small indeed.

The scullery seemed cramped for catering to such a large household so maybe they used more of the outdoor space around kitchen than just the indoors? This would be a good solution apart from the flies.

Scullery - not the Queen's

Unfortunately the 5 acres of garden remaining around the house are a legacy of the the 1920′s. The vegetable garden is a recreation of a garden planted by the Mistress of the house in 1925 and uses varieties that were available in Melbourne between the wars.

The 1925 Vegetable Garden with chicken coop but no Art Deco stylings

A little disappointing for me as I was hoping to see how Victorian-Melburnians grew their vegetables. While my time traveling experiment wasn’t entirely successful I have since found one fabulous book and a lead on another.

Remembered Gardens – Eight women & their visions of an Australian landscape by Holly Kerr Forsyth is a wonderful read. Forsyth states that

“Gardens created in the colonies during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837 – 1901) displayed all the plants popular in Britain.  In towns and cities, front gardens of the less wealthy continued to feature circular and oval beds surrounded by upturned rock or glazed tiles…Gardens of the wealthier settlers now featured edging of Box, introduced to the colony in about 1828, and even carriage circles. A typical front garden for a large Victorian terrace house might have a parterre of box hedges encasing standard roses.”

So nothing yet specifically about the vegetable gardens but it is likely that Melburnians were using the same vegetable seeds as the English.  To confirm this I need to track down an 1858 publication called Brunning’s Australian Gardener. More time travel maybe required!

Artichoke flowers at Como
3 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Doing Bad Things to Innocent Cucumbers

Published by SJ on January 28, 2010 in Cooking with Mrs. Beeton.
doing-bad-things-to-innocent-cucumbers

What did the Victorians have against vegetables, exactly? Beeton’s provides a fraction of the recipes for vegetables compared to meat. Vegetables are fried, boiled senseless, mashed, pummeled, and drowned in creamy sauces that glisten with butter or animal fat. One way I cannot force myself to be authentic is to boil carrots for 45 minutes. It’s like you can hear the vitamins screaming as they perish.

Meat usually fares better. And yes, you can hear the scare quotes around the “usually.” Part of my goal for this year is to try things I have never had before, which in most cases means new flavor combinations or cooking techniques. This meal was a prime example of that.

For the closing meal of Beefuary, I decided to cook kidney and beef pudding. Thus far I had only ventured into the world of sweet puddings, which made sense and seemed like very moist cake, or like modern recipes I had cooked that were meant to ape old-fashioned puddings. There were a couple of hitches with the pudding. It called for nice suet crust [1215] with milk added. One funny thing, which is a pretty typical editorial error, I suspect in part due to Mrs. Beeton’s great haste in compiling her book, and in part because it was released in serial form, was that I could not find a suet recipe containing milk. I decided to follow the recipe as printed, which called for water.

I am a little adrift when it comes to baking anything that is like a biscuit or crust, especially if it involves yeast. I think it’s important to get food into your mouth as quickly as possible, really, so I would always choose a quick bread over one that called for rising first. People who know me well know that I love to spend hours in the kitchen touching things–chopping vegetables, poking my fingers into raw meat, cracking a dozen eggs for a chiffon cake–but I usually hate the way dough feels. I had cleverly pawned off the making of the arrowroot biscuits [1738] on my maid-of-all-work, but I wanted to experience cutting the suet into the flour.

I sprinkled the suet, which as I have mentioned comes shredded, into the flour and let it thaw a bit from frozen. When the time was right, I dug my hands in with great gusto, bracing myself for a similar experience as when you hand-cut butter into flour.

Boy howdy did I guess wrong. The suet was gluey and sticky and did not want to incorporate, and at this rate it would never become a crust with the addition of liquid. I thought maybe I could do it similarly to a pâte brisée and cut the fat in with my food processor, so I got that out quickly and began pulsing furiously. In the end, I was left with a mixture that was still a little too lumpy for my liking, but I reasoned it would have to do. I poured the water in slowly through the top of the food processor as I gave it a few more pulses.

What I was left with was the most disgusting dough I have ever seen, which is surprising considering it only contained three ingredients. Apparently the amount of water was too much, and the dough turned out quite sticky, much like drop biscuit dough. I mixed in some more flour, gave it a few kneads, and let it rest, hoping for the best.

Beeton’s beef-steak and kidney pudding [605] (or Kate and Sydney) must be a massive thing, calling for two beef kidneys and two pounds of rump steak. I did not see kidneys in the store I was in, so I grabbed liver. Are organs interchangeable? We shall find out. Mrs. B. notes that the pudding may be “very much enriched by adding a few oysters or mushrooms.” I happened to have some criminis, so I added about a quarter of a pound.

Liver *shudder*

Full disclosure: I have never bought beef liver, nor have I knowingly eaten it. I have a long-running joke with my girls that I completely gaffled from Gary Larson about the liver and onions truck, so liver is known as a Pretty Bad Yet Mysterious Thing at my house. I slid it out of its package and it slorped onto my cutting board, where I was meant to cube it for pie. The smell hit me–it was like beef times ten. Hmm. Urgh. I cubed up the steak to go with it, and sliced the mushrooms.

Of course I still don’t have anything remotely approaching an appropriate pudding vessel, so I used a ceramic bowl. I rolled out the dough, which was sticky, tore easily, and acted generally wretched, so I installed it in the bowl as best I could and piled the filling in. The recipe called for water almost up to the brim to make a gravy, so I filled it with water, slapped the top on, tied it down, and set it to steam for four hours.

Pudding filling mix

I confess hadn’t looked at the arrowroot biscuit recipe closely, so I didn’t realize I was doing the brunt of the dough work, as it is a drop biscuit recipe. To me, the main appeal of the biscuits was that they used a significant amount of arrowroot (6 ounces) and I was curious about that ingredient. I got a great deal on a whomping big bag because I knew I would be using it a fair amount this year. The interesting thing about arrowroot, unlike cornstarch, is that it thickens while leaving sauces very clear.

“There is a lot of sugar in this biscuit recipe,” remarked my maid-of-all-work.

“Hmm,” I said. “Perhaps they will be good with jam.”

“There is no leavening, either!”

“Just make the biscuits,” I said, pausing at the end without adding, “or I will send you back to the workhouse with no employer reference.”

Then it was time to do terrible, appalling, shameful things to cucumbers. Out of some sense of masochism, I chose cucumbers a la poulette [1112]. Well, not complete masochism. I attended a book club dinner party thrown by my friend Ruby last spring that featured dishes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking while we discussed Julie & Julia. One of the biggest surprises from that dinner, other than how many people genuinely enjoyed Julie Powell’s bleating, was the baked cucumbers.

I did not know you could cook cucumbers and have them turn out at all edible. Cucumbers a la poulette seemed to be some prehistoric version of the Julia Child recipe, so I thought I would take a crack at it. The first move is to quick-pickle the cucumber. This is when we depart from reality and good sense, and make a u-turn into “WTF Victorians?”

Not even the good kind of fried pickles.

Next we fry the pickled cucumbers in butter, sprinkle flour over them, and make an unholy GRAVY with chicken broth. At the last, I stirred in two egg yolks and sprinkled chopped parsley on top. This resulted in a yellowish, mucilaginous goo for the pickles to swim in. Perhaps, I said optimistically, this combination will magically fuse to produce something wondrous and new.

The finished cucumbers

I laid the table, scooping clumps of ugh out of my makeshift pudding bowl, and serving cucumbers, which glistened at me sinisterly. The arrowroot biscuits were flat but the bottoms were nicely browned, and they resembled chocolate chip cookies sans chips.

Arrowroot Biscuits

I took a bite of the steak and liver pudding. UGH UGH UGH. The texture of the pudding was Not Okay, and the taste…not good. I tried to pick around it and eat the steak and the mushrooms, but everything was infused with the taste of the liver. The crust wasn’t too objectionable–it resembled dumplings, like in chicken and dumplings. The biscuits were sweet, and decent with butter, but not good with dinner. This is a typical problem I have with Beeton’s–I see a recipe for a sauce or some kind of side dish and I cannot always imagine when it would be suitable to serve it and what with.

There is no Dana, there is only Zuul. I mean, pudding.

My younger daughter, who is four and was not informed about what she was eating, remarked, “I’m impressed of this meat,” and continued shoveling it in.

In a way, the cucumbers a la poulette was the hit of the meal, in that it was the most edible. It didn’t really concatenate into anything new though–it was pickles in a creamy, heavy sauce to the end, a kind of primordial hollandaise.

This is what they serve on Tuesdays in Hell.

For dessert, I was going to serve something called apple snow [1401], but I received a coconut in the mail last weekend and decided to make what I think of as modern macaroons, which are called coco-nut biscuits or cakes [1740] and included instructions to shape the sweetened, egg-moistened coconut into pyramids before baking. Shaping the coconut was not even remotely possible, and the eggs migrated out of the coconut haystacks to form custardy pools around the macaroons’s ankles, which turned crispy in the oven. When they came out, they tasted delicious, but fell apart the minute I tried to move them off their tray. The funny thing was that the recipe did not differ greatly from modern coconut macaroon recipes–I’m not sure what went wrong, exactly. Shelling and preparing fresh coconut was a fun experience, and it was noticeably different from preshredded coconut from the store.

Macaroons

Do I recommend anything from this meal? Sadly, I do not. For gawping purposes, I will leave you with Cucumbers a la Poulette. As always, my modifications are included.

2-3 cucumbers [one large English]
Salt
Vinegar [unspecified, so I used plain white. In hindsight, apple cider probably would have been more accurate]
½ pint of broth [chicken]
1 tsp. minced parsley
A lump of sugar
Yolks of two eggs
Salt and pepper to taste

Mode: Pare and cut the cucumbers into slices of equal thickness, and let them remain in a pickle of salt and vinegar for a half hour; then drain them in a cloth, and put them into a stewpan with the butter. Fry them over a brisk fire, but do not brown them, and then dredge over them a little flour [2 tbsp.]; add the broth, skim off all the fat, which will rise to the surface [unless you are using modern broth in a carton, of course], and boil gently until the gravy is somewhat reduced; but the cucumber should not be broken [ten minutes]. Stir in the yolks of the eggs, add the parsley [I sprinkled it on the top at the end], sugar, pepper and salt; bring the whole to the point of boiling [emphasis hers], and serve.

12 Comments Tags: , , , .

Deciding to Go Hardcore

Published by Faythe on January 26, 2010 in Arts and Crafts.
deciding-to-go-hardcore

I was hoping to show a lot more progress on the fancy lady’s mittens by now, but the problem is that a) I try to have a life (and other hobbies) outside of knitting and b) I’m still trying to finish up projects I started last year.  It’s not like I haven’t made progress, as you can see by my pictures below. I mean, I’m past the thumb gusset and finally at the point where it’s easy knitting the rest of the way until I start doing decreases to close off the mitten and finishing up the thumb.   Now that I’m past the gusset, I’ve got the pattern memorized and I’m not afraid of losing my concentration anymore.

Top of Glove

Palm Side of Glove

However, I have also been doing more research on knitting in the Victorian era, and what I have discovered scares me.  Earlier I found out that women tended to knit stuff like lace, doilies,  stockings or gloves–things that require tiny needles and thin yarn. I didn’t realize how thin and tiny until I decided to look into the whole “knitting silk” issue.  Turns out they weren’t kidding about knitting all that stuff with yarn made from 100% silk! I don’t know if any of you have ever knit with silk before, but depending on how it’s processed it can be super slippery.  Now imagine trying to knit slippery yarn using metal needles! The needles they used were so small they couldn’t make them out of wood, so metal is the only option available.  Then I found out how a lot of women found it fashionable to knit little beaded evening purses with yarn so thin it was the size of sewing thread! I just about fell off my chair, and if I were the type to wear pearls I would have clutched them!

At this point, it has become obvious that I have to make a decision. Do I really want to knit such complicated things? If so, that means I’d have to buy the right yarn and needles and devote a lot of time to finding projects that won’t take forever to make and that also won’t be so hard to understand that they’d make me want to kill someone. I don’t usually plan out what I want to knit in advance, but since I enjoy a knitting challenge I thought it’d be in the best interests of this blog to step up and make an effort. And so, I have decided to go all in.  That’s right, 2010 is going to be the year of Victorian knitting!  For my grand finale I think I will even attempt to try my hand at making one of those insanely complicated beaded evening purses, although I’m not going to go completely crazy and make one with a mosaic design that has 400 beads knitted into a square inch. No thanks, I’d like to keep what remains of my already thin grasp on my sanity! As a comparison note, if I were to add beads to the mittens I’m making now, they’d only have 100 beads per square inch.  However, the upside of committing to this whole adventure is that my mother will probably be very happy because she’ll be the recipient of everything I make, and it’ll make any knitting I do after 2010 seem like a total breeze!

4 Comments Tags: .

Tonight we Celebrate like it’s 1888!

Published by Undergardener on January 26, 2010 in Cookery and Consumables, Gardening and the Out-of-Doors and History.
tonight-we-celebrate-like-its-1888


January is Stone Fruit season in Southern Australia. First the cherries are ready for Christmas then plums ripen, then peaches and finally apricots and nectarines. At this time of the year the Head Gardener would be busy ensuring that fruit was sent up to the kitchen for turning into jam and preserves just before ripening. This highlights that good communication between the kitchen and garden was important to ensure that the cook got a heads-up from the Head Gardener as fruit began to ripen.  It would certainly make the Cooks life easier to get on well with the Head Gardener.

As choice as the peaches but delivered in a fair quantity were dark red Morello cherries.  Harry had picked these from two fan-trained trees spread against the north wall of the garden. Old recipes spoke of having the stalk half cut, but Harry followed his training, delivering them to the kitchen minus any stalk at all.  It was a gentlemanly gesture that gardeners of the past always made to housekeepers who preserved Morellos, for leaving the ‘strings’ on the tree and removing just the cherries saved the housekeeper’s fingers from being soiled.

The Victorian Kitchen 1989

Keeping the garden watered daily would be the other major task as rainfall begins to decline and temperatures rise as we head into February.

Picking delicate fruit like peaches would have been an important task for the Head Gardener.  They are really difficult to pick without bruising once they are ripe.

Peaches and nectarines, once they gave off that certain ‘translucence’ Harry associated with ripeness, were cupped in the hand and given a slight twist.  Coming away from the stalk easily they were turned over and placed on padded trays.

The Victorian Kitchen Garden 1987

Peaches ripening in the sun.

I tried to remember this advice as I picked peaches for tonight’s dessert.  If you use your finger tips like I tend to do you end up with big bruises on your peaches; you really do need to cup them carefully.

As today the 26th of January is Australia Day we are have a fancy dinner to celebrate our day off work.  My contribution to the spread is dessert.  I’m going to make a Victorian peach dessert that is a big favourite in my family – Peach Melba.

Peach Melba

Peach Melba was invented in 1892 by the french chef Escoffier in celebration of the Australian Soprano Dame Nellie Melba’s performance of Lohengrin at Covent Garden in London.  Melba was born in Melbourne Australia and is probably our only international Victorian era celebrity (here is a link to Melba singing Sempre Libera which I recommend you listen too while simmering peaches – she sounds a little like she is being boiled herself!).

Escoffier’s original receipe for Peach Melba is really easy to make. Peach halves are boiled in water for about 2 minutes, one peach per person.

Simmering peaches

Once the peaches are removed from the water it is easy to slip off their skins and remove the stone.  They are then drained, sprinkled with caster sugar and left to cool.

Make raspberry sauce by pushing a cup full of raspberries through a fine sieve to remove their seeds. Add caster sugar to sweeten the raspberry puree to taste.

Scrunch berries through sieve.

To serve place scoops of vanilla ice cream in a dish, add two peach halves and then pour over raspberry puree.

Yummy!

In order to make this an authentic Escoffier dish you need to serve this in individually carved ice swans but this has never happened in my household. Escoffier recommends serving in a silver dish if your swan carver is on holiday.

There are heaps of versions of this recipe on the internet and most of them boil the peaches in sugar syrup.  This is OK if you like sweet peaches.  I prefer Escoffier’s original recipe because I like the tart peaches with the sweet ice cream and tart-ish raspberry.

It must be possible to make this dessert look really elegant but I find mine always looks like a train smash!  This is not up to Victorian standard but still tastes extremely yummy.

A Buttonhole for Australia Day

On the 26th of January 1888 all the colonies of Australia celebrated ‘Anniversary Day’ for the very first time. This date marked the 100th anniversary of the First Fleet arriving at Sydney Cove and the beginning of colonial Australia. In 1888 the colony of Victoria (the State where I live) was only 50 years old.  The separate colonies of Australia did not come together as a federation until 1 January 1901 only 21 days before the end of Victoria’s reign.

In modern Australia we celebrate (possibly too strong a word) Australia Day with a national public holiday, a day off work and a barbeque. It is a Nationalists festival that we have become somewhat embarrassed about as our indigenous country men and women refer to the day as ‘Invasion Day’. Back in 1888 colonialism was still cool, Victoria was on her throne and all was right with the World.

I decided this morning that in order to capture some of that 1888 gusto we would have buttonholes to wear at dinner tonight and that the appropriate buttonholes for today would be made of only Australian native plants.

Australia Day Buttonhole

Slim pickings in the garden so we have two identical buttonholes for the Master and Mistress. They are made from Pittosporum and Plectranthus leaves which both last very well out of water.  The small white flowers are Lemon- scented Teatree which smells delicious.  The purple berries are the fruits from the Flax Lilly which I think would look really nice as a hair decoration; these berries are edible and a great favourite of our chickens.

The final word goes to Melba our diva long before Kylie singing an appropriately smultzy and patriotic “No place like home“.  Happy Anniversary Day folks!

5 Comments Tags: , , , , .

The Citrus Saga Continues

Published by LaurieB on January 24, 2010 in Cookery and Consumables, Cooking with Mrs. Beeton and Uncategorized.
the-citrus-saga-continues

This past week was spent babysitting lemons as a part of my lemon pickling experiment.  I periodically turned over a salted lemon without a peel and regularly stirred two brining lemons with peels, looking for signs of some magic alchemy taking place.  Sadly, none was immediately evident, which was not surprising but was disappointing, nonetheless.  Still, I put my faith in Beeton and dutifully tended my citrus for six days.

As soon as I had free time this weekend I sprang the lemons from their respective brines.  There was little obvious change, but I did notice that the lemons with the peels on were slightly heavier than they had been before brining, and their peels were slightly smoother.  The one without the peel on had shrunk a bit, as if it knew what awaited it.  And (spoiler alert!) what awaited it was not good.  I tackled this one first, following Mrs. Beeton’s instructions to heat the lemon to dry the salt.  Not having a fire in the same way I imagine she’s describing, I put the lemon in a heavy lidded pot over a very low flame on my gas stove.  Since the idea is, as I mentioned, to dry the salt – for what reason I’m not exactly sure, as the next step has you pouring boiling vinegar over it all – I think it would have been wiser to do this in a low oven.  But I’m apparently more of a trial and error cook and in this case that was pretty much exactly as it turned out – I tried it and it was an error.  Insert rim shot here.   The problem was that, even on a super low flame the salt on the outside burned before the rest of the salt was even remotely dry.  Eventually, the entire business got brown and stuck to the pan, and when I tried to get it up the lemon pulled apart and it all went to hell.

poor, sad lemon

I didn’t bother continuing with the process, because there was so little left to keep and it really needed to be put out of its misery.  RIP, pickled lemon without the peel.

On the plus side, the lemons with the peel on fared much better.  I boiled them, as instructed, and can recommend this as an air freshener, too.  The lovely, lemony smell almost covered the boiling vinegar smell that preceded it.  After boiling, the lemons were even heavier and smoother than before.  Who knew how much liquid a lemon could absorb?  Once they were cool I popped them in sterilized jars (Mrs. B doesn’t specify that you must sterilize the jars but the USDA canning site has scared me so deeply that I fear I will soon be sterilizing our silverware and plates and anything, basically, that comes into contact with our mouths) and watched the cloves and other spices swirl around.  It was kind of dazzling, to be honest, even if it’s not the most amazing culinary feat ever attempted.  I have just been kind of skittish about canning in any way (picking, fermenting, whatever) because of the aforementioned site o’ horrors.  It’s a great site, really, a deeply informative site, but the underlying message I pick up is that if I don’t do everything just right I will die.  The minute the jar is opened, instant death.  So you can see how spending a week with a couple of lemons and finally wrangling them into what I assume is a fairly disease-free environment for what I hope is about a year or so might bring a measure of satisfaction.

Lemons pickled (or, pickling), I decided to end the Beeton-related activities for the weekend.  I’ve got my eye on some more comfort food recipes for this week, though (bread and butter fritters, for example?), and the sawdust quest from my first post continues.   And – prepare for another rim shot – the picture I grabbed of my pickled lemon includes, I kid you not, my favorite uninvited guest…  Eggs, anyone?

Hello, my little friend in the background.

4 Comments Tags: , , .

Lavender and Great-Grandma’s Laundry

Published by Undergardener on January 20, 2010 in Arts and Crafts, Gardening and the Out-of-Doors and The Queen.
lavender-and-great-grandmas-laundry

It’s a hot hot summer’s day here in Melbourne, Australia, and in a fashion entirely inappropriate to the position of Under Gardener, I’m in my back yard drinking Pimm’s and Lemonade while harvesting Lavender.

Lavender is widely quoted as one of Queen Victoria’s and hence the Victorian era’s favorite scents.

“It is generally known that the Queen is a great believer in Lavender as a disinfectant, and that she is not at all singular in her faith in this plant… The royal residences are strongly impregnated with the refreshing odour of this old-fashioned flower, and there is no perfume that the Queen likes better than Lavender-water, which, together with the oil for disinfecting purposes, Her Majesty has direct from a lady who distills it herself.” Fragrant Flowers, 1895.

I love growing lavender.  It thrives in our Mediterranean climate and does very well in the free-draining sandy soil in my backyard.  To keep it flowering well I make sure it doesn’t get too dry on hot sunny days. I give each bush a light pruning after I have removed the flower spikes for drying. The pruning helps to keep the bush from getting leggy and in some years encourages a second flush of flowers. Bonus!

Lavender ready for harvest

Victorian Head Gardeners were responsible for harvesting the lavender spikes and tying them into paper cones for drying.  The drying, processing or distillation of the lavender then fell into the domain of the Housekeeper who managed the Still Room with her maids.

I dry my lavender in the same way by hanging the paper cones of flowers in a dry dark spot in my laundry.  It only takes a week to dry in warm weather.  Hanging the flower spikes upside-down also helps to keep the spikes straight which is useful if you are going to use them in dried flower arrangements.

The Victorian House Keeper would place bags of dried lavender flowers amongst stores of linen to perfume the cloth and help prevent attack by Clothes Moths.  My Mum’s Mum, my Nanna, told me that her mother Susan (a Victorian Country Woman ) keep a lavender bush by her clothes line on which she draped her favorite pocket handkerchiefs to dry and pick up the scent of lavender.

Dried lavender, Lavender Bag and Reckitts Blue Bag

I’ve often wondered how women in my family, during the Victorian Period, managed life in the newly settled State of Victoria in Australia.  It’s very easy to find information about the daily life of the ‘big English Victorian house’ but very difficult to find out about the lives of people such as my Great-Grandmother living in rural Australia.  What I know about her is from snatches of stories passed down from Nanna to me. The same is true for my father’s family who, by contrast, lived in an inner Melbourne working class suburb from the mid-Victorian era to the 1980′s.  Stories I do have about my Great-Grandmothers relate mostly to domestic chores and, surprisingly, to how they did their laundry!

The house built by my paternal Great-Grandfather still had its original corrugated-iron lean-to laundry when I was a small girl.  I remember my Grandma boiling sheets in a copper cauldron and then helping her to wring them out through an old winding mangle.  It seems amazing to me now, as I stuff another load of clothes into the front loader, that basically Victorian laundry techniques were still in place in Melbourne in the early 1970′s!

Grandma standing by laundry in mid 1960's

Mrs Beeton outlines the duties for a Laundry-Maid in paragraph 2372 of BOHM. There is another great description of Victorian laundry practice in the novel Lark Rise to Candleford written by Flora Thompson describing her life in late 19th century Oxfordshire.  She explains how the clothes were laundered every two weeks by a visiting Laundry Woman.  Flora explains that washing the clothes this infrequently showed that a family had enough money to afford enough clothes to wait that long between washes (when I don’t get to the laundry this week – this is how I plan to sell it).  Neither of my Great-Grandmas were affluent enough to send laundry out or hire help in.  I can’t imagine what a thankless task it was to boil clothes clean in a hot Melbourne summer – blah!

I am really interested in the idea of ‘blueing’ that both Beeton and Thompson described.  This is the practice of putting a light temporary blue dye in the rinse water for white linen to make it appear whiter. Today washing powder contains sophisticated optical whitening chemicals so the use of blue or Fig blue as Beeton calls it is rare.  So does it work?

When discussing this with my Mum she found that she still had some of Nanna’s Reckitt’s Blue bags in the laundry and was happy to give me a couple to experiment with.  Here are the results.

Using a Washboard to clean hankies - very tedious!

Dunking the 'Blue' tea-bag fashion in the rinse water.

Rinsed one in clean water and one in the blue rinse.

Hmmm - the one on the right was blued. Is it whiter?

I discovered that using a washboard is extremely tiresome. Washing an entire household’s laundry this way would give you the shoulders of an olympic swimmer. It did eventually get the dirt out.  I used an Australian washing detergent from the Victorian era that my Great-Grandmothers would have made from scratch using this recipe.  It is free of whitening agents and available ready made in Australia today.  I remember grating soap on a cheese grater for my Grandma when she was making a batch – it still smells like my childhood to me.

Then I dunked the bag of Blue into the rinse water until the water was a pale blue in colour.

It is difficult to see in the photos that I’ve taken but the Hanky dunked in the blue rinse looked blue at first rather than white.

Opinions in this household vary but I really couldn’t see a difference between the blued hanky and the other one.  It could be that the bluing works more effectively on older linen that tends to yellow as it ages.  I might try again if I find a piece of old fabric.

I guess this has strayed a long way out of the territory of the Under Gardener.

So bringing this discussion back to the garden.  My Grandmothers, as their Mothers did, loved the scent of lavender and kept bags of dried lavender with their hankerchiefs.  Grandma used lavender water to spray linen while ironing to help remove wrinkles and scent her sheets (ironing sheets seems unnecessary but I think this was one of her little luxuries). I like growing lavender as it is a plant that connects me to the women in my family and back to my Great-Grandma’s laundry rituals.

If you feel inspired to try Lavender Water here is a modern version of the Victorian Recipe for Lavender Water that I use at home.

Lavender Water

100ml (4 fl oz) Vodka

10 drops Lavender Oil

500ml (17 fl oz) Water

Add all ingredients to a Pint Spray Bottle and shake to mix.  It will keep indefinitely.  Spray it around the house to kill odours, on ironing for smoothing or keep some in the fridge to spray on you on hot days. It is also fairly good at killing the ‘wet dog smell’ on woollens that have got damp in winter.

Just be-careful not to use it as a cocktail mixer by mistake!

2 Comments Tags: , .

Making Stock The Beeton Way

Published by kerewin on January 19, 2010 in Cookery and Consumables and Cooking with Mrs. Beeton.
making-stock-the-beeton-way

Good stock is the basis for great meals, or so I have heard. I think I make pretty good chicken stock (thank you Zuni Café). Usually I make a double batch and make a demi out of half of it, which I freeze into ice cubes.

My original intention was to make the Beeton Strong Rich Stock and Zuni’s Beef Stock as a comparison. The downside to that is that in order to make the Zuni beef stock you first have to make chicken stock and I just couldn’t see making three stocks on a Saturday. So I stuck to just Beeton.

Now, interestingly, Beeton only has different kinds of meat stock – no chicken, veg or fish stock: Rich Strong Stock, Medium Stock, and Economical Stock. Economical comes closest to chicken stock in that she doesn’t specify a beef joint (although, I would say it is implied). Otherwise the other stocks definitely call for beef. In fact, the Rich Stock calls for beef, veal, ham, and poultry trimmings. A multi-animal broth, if you will.

Ingredients–4 lbs of shin of beef (every butcher I talked to said this was likely beef shank, which looks remarkably like lamb shank but smaller), 4 lbs of knuckle of veal (question by butcher, “Which knuckle? We just have veal bones, will that do?”), 3/4 lb of good lean ham; any poultry trimmings (the Zuni chicken stock uses extra wings for their glycerin content, therefore I looked for wings. My local store was out of chicken wings but had a honkin’ turkey wing, so I used that.); 3 small onions, 3 small carrots, 3 turnips, 1 head of celery (I just realized at this moment that I completely forgot this item – oops), a few chopped mushrooms, 1 tomato (during the winter I chose to use a tomato from some home canned tomatoes), a bunch of savoury herbs, not forgetting parsley; 1 1/2 oz of salt, 12 white peppercorns (I hate white peppercorns and used black), 6 cloves, 3 small blades of mace (everything I could find was ground and so I omitted this item), 4 quarts of water.

Mode–Line a delicately clean stewpan with the ham cut in thin, broad slices, carefully trimming off all its rusty fat; cut up the beef and veal in pieces about 3 inches square (my veal bones had no meat, so I only cut up the beef shank meat), and lay them on the ham, set it on the stove, and draw it down and stir frequently. When the meat is equally browned, put in the beef and veal bones, the poultry trimmings, and pour in the cold water. Skim well, and occasionally add a little cold water, to stop its boiling, until it becomes quite clear.

I am not a good skimmer. I hate it, which is why I tend to like the Zuni stocks because they are anti-skim. So, skimming until the broth is clear pretty much means skimming off the cooked blood until the liquid is golden and not red. A good tip, while the bones and such cook, right before skimming give a good hearty stir to the bones to get any impurities up to the top of the water. Skimming adds an extra 20 or 30 minutes to the recipe but perhaps I am just a crappy skimmer.

Then put in all the other ingredients and simmer very slowly for 5 hours. Do not let it come to a brisk boil, that the stock be not wasted, and that its colour may be preserved.

Strain through a very fine sieve, or tammy (or a regular strainer and cheesecloth), and it will be fit to use.

This is the first beef stock and one of few stocks of any variety that doesn’t call for the browning of the bones before the cooking. That was the hardest thing to resist changing. I had to buck up and really follow the recipe and have faith that all would come out fine. Then the addition of cloves (and mace – next time I will wait to get the un-ground article, it was very clear that it was blades and the ground stuff seemed like it would make too much of a profile so I avoided it) that gave me real room for pause, especially as it was cooking and I could smell the cloves. Plus, turnips? Weird. Now I wish I had double checked on the cabbage. Oh well, still not a perfect Victorian recipe.

Wings of any variety add so much glycerin I was very happy to add turkey wing to the recipe. The more glycerin, the more weight and silk your stock has, therefore the better it is.

As I first cooked it, the stock smelled so strongly of ham, I kept thinking what a mistake it was to have it. As the hours went by the more it smelled of pure beef. I wonder if the ham served as the replacement for vegetable oil, as I used none. Also, that whole non-browning of the bones! Another thing to resist, we are told over and over to brown our bones before making stock. I tasted the stock every hour, or so and at first it was so pale and weak. I was sure I messed it up by not adding that important caramelization (is that a word?). By the end it had that nice black tea color.

After straining, I split it evenly into containers for the fridge. It still came out to 4 quarts – so the 5 hours of slow simmer paid off, all I boiled out was the liquid from the meat, herbs, and veg. One trick I stole from Zuni Café was to swirl a little cold water in the empty pot at the end and then pour over the strained bones to get any last glycerin or good stock.

At the end of the evening, I tasted the stock. It left my mouth feeling coated with silk and there was a definite beefiness to it. In fact, the clove added a subtle, elegant EXTRA to it. I know that I have to add clove to my stock from now on. It doesn’t take over, it adds that undefinable quality. The best thing? The next morning in the fridge, the stock when jiggled acted like jello. A very firm set. I am super excited about what to make with this luxury item. Any ideas?

5 Comments

Kidnapping chickens and pickling lemons

Published by LaurieB on January 17, 2010 in Cookery and Consumables and Cooking with Mrs. Beeton.
kidnapping-chickens-and-pickling-lemons

Week two, for me, of all things Beeton and the going is best described as… slow.  Both in terms of what I wanted to have done by now and in terms of what I’m actually tackling this time around.

First off, the egg experiment promised in my last post has come to a stand still.  The first problem is that it requires really fresh eggs, and every time I acquire really fresh eggs I eat most of them immediately.  It’s like eating a different food altogether when you compare them to grocery store eggs.  People rave about the incredible yolks of fresh eggs and I get it, but for me the biggest difference is in the whites.  They set up better, they taste better, they look better… The whole thing is just a big improvement on mass marketed eggs.  My neighbor keeps chickens but uses all the eggs for his family (or perhaps they have them packed away in sawdust).  I have been showing some restraint and getting them from a lovely woman at work instead of sneaking over and raiding the neighbor’s coop.  Their chickens, however, keep getting into my yard.  I may start holding them ransom, and offer them back in exchange for a dozen eggs per bird.  Or maybe two dozen… We’ll see.

Returned without a ransom note. This time.

That’s not really the biggest issue, though; I’ve been known to not eat delicious things I shouldn’t eat.  No, the biggest problem is the sawdust.  I live in a fairly urban area, admittedly, but I’m surrounded by vast stretches of deeply rural land.  Like, unincorporated,  no local government, rural-type country.  And yet sawdust seems to be a rare commodity.  I enlisted a little help from someone who is married to a carpenter for heaven’s sake, and the best he could do for me was wood chips.  Wood chips?  Not the best thing, I imagine, in which to preserve an egg.  So I’m going to go begging at a lumber yard, I think.  Or I might just do a little scavenging behind a big box hardware store.  We’ll see.  I’ve found that a lot of people are interested in how this thing is going to work – and so am I – so I’ll find a way to put this together soon.

In the meantime, I’m tackling a much slower project – pickling lemons.  Mrs. Beeton offers two recipes (numbers 455 and 456); one with the peel on and one without.  I’m trying both.  The one with the peel on takes about a year or “rather sooner” (what a tease); the one without the peel takes about nine months.  I know, there are many recipes out there, in books and online, that are much quicker (including this one for an Indian pickled lemon I might also try – it only takes two months and looks really flavorful), but I am throwing in my lot with this Victorian-inspired ultra-slow food madness.  And I’m looking forward to it, honestly.  I like the idea of some lemons pickling over here, eggs in saw dust over there, and so on.  Sure, my kitchen is best described as microscopic, but it will be nice to have some long-term food-related projects going, especially during these months when the garden is on hold.

The first steps for both are fairly simple.  The lemons with the peel just have to be brined for about a week; the lemons without the peel have to be packed in salt for about the same length of time.

The peeled lemon in salt.

After that (and you’ll get pictures of this next week), it’s the pretty standard process of packing them in a jar and adding vinegar and assorted spices.  Then the waiting… If it works and I can resist I’ll crack open the peeled lemons in the fall, and the unpeeled ones around Christmas.  In the meantime, I’ll keep you updated periodically and will pick a slightly less long term project for next week.

3 Comments Tags: , , .

Beef Marrow is the Jam of Cows

Published by SJ on January 17, 2010 in Cooking with Mrs. Beeton.
beef-marrow-is-the-jam-of-cows

For dinner last night, I decided to go a little more low-key even than last week’s stewed oxtails. The BOHM lists several “plain family dinners” that are not the extensive time-sucking multi-course feasts for 8-20 persons Beeton also plans for. Don’t get me wrong, I love multi-course time sucks. I just can’t see myself producing that much food on a weekly basis for my small family. So for normal meals, I have been taking my inspiration from these menus-soup, a meat course, some veggies, and dessert, not much different than what we might have now, really.

I have had a busy busy weekend, so I was glad to have a dessert that could be cobbled together and then ignored for hours. I chose Aunt Nelly’s pudding [1224], which was flavored with citrus in a few forms. Meyer lemons are awesome right now, so I thought I would use them. Once I made limoncello with Meyer lemons, and I found the soft peels difficult to work with, so while I was eager to taste the result, I was dreading the preparation slightly.

The recipe calls for candied peel as well as fresh, and the juice of one lemon. Since candying peel is quick and easy, I decided to make some while I was making waffles yesterday morning. I peeled the skin off two lemons since they are wee. I have the kind of “ergonomic” y-shaped peeler that is also very good for peeling citrus, except for Meyer lemons. Yesterday I learned that if I dig into the peel slightly I can get a strip off with ease if I move the peeler in a slight wiggling motion as I go.

Candied Meyer Lemon Peel

When it was time to assemble the ingredients, I also chopped some fresh peel, which I added to the batter as well. The sweetening agent is treacle, which if you are modern American type like me is something you hear about in old children’s stories. I asked The Governess what she thought I could substitute for treacle, and she opined that golden syrup, which is what I found at the hoity toity store, could substitute with some molasses mixed in.

Mixing the syrup in was another story. The base of the pudding was flour, which differed from the Christmas pudding I made, which started with already-cooked bread crumbs. To this I added suet and the syrup. Have you ever tried to mix syrup into flour? My gosh. Beeton’s is not super clear about how to go about mixing everything together. I knew from experience that lemon juice could cause an egg/dairy blend to curdle, so I decided to add that last.

After pouring the syrup in (and adding a couple of tablespoons of molasses), I tried to stir it, and the syrup bunged up on the spoon. I treated it like a pie crust after this, moving the flour around and working the syrup into the flour with my fingers until it was all pretty even. Unlike butter, I was pulling the syrup in strings and mixing the flour in. Then I stirred in an egg/cream mixture, and the lemon juice last. This produced a creamy, albeit lumpy batter that I turned into my buttered rice cooker basin, which I figured was oven proof.

Pudding Batter

I “tied it down with a cloth,” which from what I have heard is to make it less soggy while it steams. After I made my first pudding, I was advised to layer some flour into the cloth as well. I decided to dampen my cloth slightly so it would hold the flour better.

Floury Cheesecloth

It’s funny to me that it is a simple thing to knock together a pudding now that I have the ingredients and turn it out. I don’t think I prefer them to leavened cakes, but they can be delicious. Aunt Nelly’s pudding turned out not overly-sweet, and with a strong taste of lemon. I think the extra step of candying the peel was a complete waste of time, since it was unnoticeable.  For my next trick, I will try a Sussex pond pudding, which looks like it may have appeared on the scene after BOHM.

After the pudding came out of the oven, my camera battery conked out. Whoops. I made boiled marrowbones [635], which I have previously roasted to serve with dinner in the past.

$9.88 cents worth of marrowbones.

Mushing on the "common crust" that plugs the end of the bones.

Beef marrow is like this amazing cross between steak flavor and butter, and is excellent scooped out of the bones and spread on toast, and then sprinkled with salt and pepper. I toasted some nice bread in the oven, and served it with Carrots in the German Way [1101], which involves, surprise! butter and nutmeg. These people could not let a day go by without tasting nutmeg. The carrots turned out crispier than they were supposed to, because I did not cook them for the whole recommended 45 minutes! The carrots were also cooked with parsley and a “dessertspoon” amount of minced onion.

Overall, I enjoyed dinner, because most of the time was waiting while the food cooked, as opposed to a ton of prep. Cheers!

3 Comments Tags: , , .

Victorian Boat Drinks

Published by John Smythe on January 16, 2010 in Cookery and Consumables and History.
victorian-boat-drinks

Ah yachting in the Caribbean.  Blue sky, sun-drenched ocean, warm breeze through the sails, and something lovely in a coconut with an umbrella.  This is the life…or it will be this decade next century.  For now we’re in the British Navy of Queen Victoria (god bless her) sailing in a tall ship and our boat drinks are a bit more utilitarian.  Now get up those rat lines and reef the top gallants; there’s a blow coming.  Or you now, something like that.  Moving on.

Navy sailors generally had enough to eat and drink and it wasn’t all ship’s biscuits and salt pork, either.  Most ships spent from a third to a half of their time close enough to land to get fresh food and drink.  Everything from loading to maintenance to docking was done by hand and took a good deal longer than today’s landing of a container ship with the aid of a couple of diesel tugs, emptying out the holds with giant cranes, and warehousing the containers by computer management.  During the times they were close to shore, they made every effort to get fresh food, even carrying live cattle for eating en route to avoid dipping into preserved food a bit longer.

But when ships did put to sea, they could be out of touch with shore supplies for quite awhile.  By the Victorian era, marine chronometers were routine equipment aboard Royal Navy ships.  This meant navigation improved to the point that getting lost was unlikely.  Even so, 2 months sailing to cross the Atlantic wasn’t out of the ordinary.  In addition to sailing time, we’re talking about warships, which means when they get to their destination, there still may not be fresh food.  If they’re going to blockade a port or if the captain gets into a diplomatic tiff with the locals, re-supply from shore may be cut off, and they might still be eating salt pork.

While at sea, food could be stored without too much trouble.  Here’s a list of supplies Loaded onto the frigate Doris in the early 1800s:  “…the Doris was loaded with beef, pork, bread, flour, tobacco, butter, raisins, sugar, cocoa, peas, oatmeal, lime juice, lemon juice, red wine, brandy, and rum.” But water was a different matter.  After two months in a barrel, algae and slime will grow.  Might as well drink out of the fetid pond.  But mix in rum and lime juice and you’ll hardly notice the horror you’re consuming.  At least that’s the theory.

Grog was a combination of lemon or lime juice, water, rum, and cinammon.  It was served at noon every day as a 1/2 pint of rum mixed with a quart of water, for a 1:4 ratio.  Lauchlin Rose (of Rose’s mixers) had patented preserving citrus juice in 1867, and the vitamin C in the juice was added to the grog to prevent scurvy.  I imagine it helped with the whole tastes-like-drinking-out-of-the-pond-problem, as well.

grog

19th Century Gator Aid

Grog was for ordinary sailors and ratings, though if I was an officer, I imagine I’d have had some.  But the midshipman and officers had at least one drink peculiar to themselves.  Pink gin was a mixture of Angostura bitters and gin.  The bitters was a cure for seasickness.  However the taste was, well, bitter.  Mixing with gin makes an interesting pinky-orange drink with the bitter taste mostly submerged underneath the feeling that you just bit a Christmas tree which is what drinking gin always reminds me of.

pink gin

Close-up of Pink Gin

After trying the pink gin and the grog, I definitely prefer the grog.  The gin was like a bitter martini, but the grog was a lightly alchoholic, mildly spicy thirst quencher.  Sort of a gator aid for 19th century.  Of course, I didn’t make it with pond water.

3 Comments Tags: , , , , .