Monthly Archive for January, 2010

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Braised Leg of Mutton (ie lamb since it is difficult to source Mutton)

Published by kerewin on January 14, 2010 in Cookery and Consumables and Cooking with Mrs. Beeton.
braised-leg-of-mutton-ie-lamb-since-it-is-difficult-to-source-mutton

Instructions for Braised Leg of Mut..err…Lamb, are very easy. One of the reasons I chose this lovely recipe, the other is my deep fondness for lamb. Of all varieties.

Mrs. Beeton says:

Ingredients.–1 small leg of mutton, 4 carrots, 3 onions, 1 faggot of savoury herbs, a bunch of parsley, seasonings to taste of pepper and salt, a few slices of bacon, a few veal trimmings, 1/2 pint of gravy or water.
Mode.–Line the bottom of the braising pan with a few slices of bacon, put in the carrots, onions, herbs, parsley, and seasoning, and over these place the mutton. Cover the whole with a few more slices of bacon and veal trimmings, pour in the gravy or water, and stew gently for 4 hours. Strain the gravy, reduce it to a glaze over a sharp fire, glaze the mutton with it, and send it to the table, places on a dish of white haricort beans boiled tender, or garnished with glazed onions.

I did this in my usual unplanned way and ran into a a couple small roadblocks. I decided on Sunday morning to make this dish for Sunday dinner and then went out in search of the appropriate ingredients. So that left real mutton a non-choice. According to the internets, you can special order real mutton from some farm in Ellensburg. I made my trek to A&J Meats on Queen Anne and let them help me. Veal trimmings? Nope, but they had a pound of frozen, ground veal that they thought would add good flavor to the broth and was supposed to melt right into the liquid. Leg of lamb? Sure! Which side did I want, shank or leg? Looking at the whole leg (which I really wanted) I chose the shank side. I still regret not getting the whole leg, but it wouldn’t have fit into any pot I own.

I admit now to being at a real disadvantage to not reading more of BOHM before starting this recipe. Gravy in a braised dish? Faggot of herb? Only 1/2 cup of liquid for 4 pounds of meat? Huh?

So I kinda punted a little on this dish. Faggot of herb I assumed was some sort of bouquet garni so I went with my standard empty tea bag and herbs that go with red meat (thyme, rosemary, marjoram). I get those empty tea bags from Uwajimaya and they are great for loose leaf teas AND stocks and soups – amazing for infusing flavor with no flecks of herbs in soup.

As for the gravy, I used a reduced, un-thickened stock from a different beef braise. Still 1/2 a pint is only 1 cup, or if you use the British pint it is still only 10 ounces. Most braises have the meat immersed in liquid. So, I also added a cup of red wine and a cup of beef stock (still not very much liquid for that much food).

Another thing I have never done, line the pan with bacon. Crazy! So I did all that, covered the lamb with bacon and ground veal (which did NOT melt into the sauce as the man at A&J Meats said it would) and added vegetables, liquids, herbs, parsley and covered.


That is one seriously ugly dish

Alright, cook gently for 4 hours? I don’t cook next to a fire, so I used my usual braising temperature of 325 degrees. (Perfect temperature)


Still not very pretty.

After cooking, I took the lamb out, strained the sauce, de-greased, and reduced by more than half. Meanwhile I did a quick roast of the meat to get a nice carmelization and served with broccoli tossed in butter and leeks (not white haricot unfortunately, but butter and leeks cover a lot of mistakes).


Much prettier.

The meat was very tender, close to fork tender and the sauce was divine. It was a perfect Sunday evening meal. We both had seconds. I used the sauce and leftover meat the next day to make a quick soup (hi, lamb soup is so much more flavorful than beef soup). The fat didn’t render on either the lamb or the bacon so the sauce didn’t have that much grease to skim off. I think that kept the meat nice and tender throughout the cooking process. Although, I like when all the fat renders, biting into soft, fatty pieces isn’t that much fun. Perhaps a nice browning of the meat beforehand?

Covering the meat with bacon kept everything moist so perhaps I didn’t need to add the extra broth – I didn’t have the courage to follow the recipe to the letter in case it turned into dust. We really enjoyed it and it was a good early foray. I am considering making stock this next weekend but it depends on my ability to source beef shin and veal knuckle.

–kerewin

I have a penchant for starting tasks at the last minute. I also made this cake on Sunday, with just about as much forethought.

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The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton – The First Domestic Goddess by Kathryn Hughes A Review in Pieces and Parts – Part One

Published by Amelia on January 14, 2010 in Uncategorized.
the-short-life-and-long-times-of-mrs-beeton-the-first-domestic-goddess-by-kathryn-hughes-a-review-in-pieces-and-parts-part-one

Having watched “The Secret Life of Mrs. Beeton”, a 2006 BBC production that I procured from the library, and still feeling a need for more detail and less theatrical conjecture on Isabella Mary Mayson Beeton’s enigmatic and short existence, I thought I’d read the above-referenced biography by Kathryn Hughes and get right down to the nitty-gritty.

Hughes is also the author of The Victorian Governess and George Eliot: The Last Victorian, and has a Ph.D. in Victorian Studies from Oxford. In short, her Victoriana credentials are thick, plus she had full and unhindered access to the entire Mayson/Beeton family archive. Access that no other Beeton biographer had been granted to date due to her descendant’s fear of not only airing some eccentric and scandalous editorial choices Mrs. Beeton’s husband made after her death involving tight-lacing and whipping, but also the speculative specter of assumed venereal disease that hung heavily over both Isabella and Samuel Beeton’s deaths and now hangs over this biography.

I will try to avoid the whole re-telling of Isabella’s life, but I do want to share some of the history and I think Hughes has ably drawn this portrait of Mrs. Beeton as a product of and an influence on the very long Victorian Age. So, in an effort to save this post from tl;dr, I’m going to break it up into installments.

Let’s start with Isabella’s ancestry, as it shows some general class transitions occurring just prior to the Victorian Age and the movement of masses of rural people to the City of London. I’ll try to keep this simple, as I get muddled with all the paternal/maternal tralala.

Isabella’s father was Benjamin Mayson born in 1801 to Reverend John Mayson, a vicar at St. Andrew’s, Thursby and Isabella Trimble, a maltster’s (or brewer’s) daughter. Records from Benjamin’s youth are gone, but he shows up at 30 as a “Manchester Warehouseman”, or linen wholesaler in London helped by his mother’s connections to cotton and flax mill families in Thursby’s neighboring village of Dalston.

Isabella’s mother, Elizabeth Jerrom was born in 1815 in the Marylebone district of London to Isaac Jerrom and Mary Standage. Both parents were domestic servants at the time of her birth, but would leave service by 1820 with her father becoming a livery stable owner and her mother running a lodging house. Mary Standage’s father, William had been “headhunted by the horse-mad Duke of Richmond to work as a groom at Goodwood “, his estate and racetrack in West Sussex and the author notes that Mary and her sisters all married men who worked with horses since “You can only marry someone you’ve already met, and a groom’s daughter in the early nineteenth century met an awful lot of grooms.”

Benjamin Mayson kept his residence in the Marylebone district and was friends with a Henry Dorling, who lodged with the Jerroms. After Benjamin’s death, Elizabeth would marry the widower Henry Dorling, so keep that kernel of trivia handy. Benjamin Mayson and Elizabeth Jerrom married on May 2, 1835 and Isabella Mary Mayson, our Mrs. Beeton, was born March 14, 1836 in Marylebone. The author is kind enough to point out that “She was fifteen months too early to be a Victorian.” Since she lived and died within the Victorian Age, I found this reasoning rather fastidious.

Benjamin then moved his wife and daughter into central London to live above his business and soon buys a house on Milk Street where Isabella’s siblings, Elizabeth Anne, John and Esther, were born. Benjamin Mayson died in 1840 of “apoplexy”, which could mean anything from epilepsy to heart attack, when Elizabeth was a few months pregnant with Esther. Hughes explains that “Death may have been everywhere in early Victorian England, but to find yourself pregnant with your fourth child and suddenly responsible for a highly capitalized business was unlucky by any standard.”

Elizabeth Mayson totally rallied as a 25-year-old widowed mother of four and ran the business in her name for three years. She shipped Isabella and Elizabeth Anne off to relatives, her widowed mother, Mary Jerrom , moved in to care for the two babies, she hired a maid and manservant and is listed in the trade directories as a “warehouseman”. The author clarifies that “it was not unusual for widows to take over this way, and the directories show many heading up pubs, livery stables, and every kind of shop from baker to jeweller.”

In the next installment, Elizabeth Mayson hooks up with Henry Dorling, a widower with his own 4 children (cue Brady Bunch music) and everyone up and moves to Epsom, of Downs and Salts fame.

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1 Beefuary: Too Nauseated to Have Dessert

Published by SJ on January 12, 2010 in Cooking with Mrs. Beeton.
1-beefuary-too-nauseated-to-have-dessert

I have decided to make January a celebration of COW and have redubbed it “Beefuary.” You can have a look ahead and see that I have planned three weekends of Cow Party at my house. The last weekend of the month I am going out of town and would not DREAM of nineteenth-centurying it up at the house I am visiting.

Beefuary started with a bang, which surprised me, because I figured stewed oxtails [640] would be fairly innocuous. I bought them at the HT Market up at Oaktree, which I figured would have them fresh. The labeling said that they were fresh, but then I saw some other cut of meat that was labeled “fresh” when it was clearly half-frozen. I was also sad that I got one of my very favorite things, mochi with adzuki filling, and the adzuki paste was so dried out it was inedible. I would say this has gone from one to my favorite markets to being pretty hit and miss, and mostly reliable for dried goods. The oxtails looked okay, and they smelled good on opening.

Beeton’s called for simmering the oxtails for two-and-a-half hours with herbs and a sliced onion, which, curiously, was required to be cut into rings. In this regard it was an easy meal. I threw in what I had on hand, which was fresh sage, bay, oregano, and thyme and dried cloves. I decided to really make the oxtails the focus of the meal and only serve one side dish–Spinach Dressed with Cream, a la Francaise [1156].

Mostly this meal involved me sitting around, which was okay with me. I had a couple of bunches of dodgy spinach in the fridge, which seemed appropriate somehow. I imagined the scullery maid in dim lighting sorting through sad spinach pre-the invention of the refrigerator as we know it now. I still ended up with a substantial pile.

Near the end of the oxtail stewing, I cooked the spinach. Ten minutes in boiling water, followed by a thorough chopping, with more cooking in the cream with a Victorian staple included–nutmeg. I think it actually called for mace blades, but in many stores it is hard to find ground mace, so I have broken down and ordered blades online this week.

Sad chopped spinach

The next part of the instructions told me to remove the oxtails, which had become sort of congealed browny blobs, and strain the seasonings out of the broth. Then I was instructed to create a “thickening” of butter and flour, which I assumed meant cooking up a small roux.  I whisked this into the broth, which didn’t really thicken up, but only got a little cloudy. I served the oxtails in a bowl swimming in the broth, with the creamed spinach, which was horrendously oversalted per the recipe.

In one way, the oxtails were amazing and delicious. Since oxtails are slippery and mostly fat, I soon abandoned any pretense of mannerly eating with a knife and fork and picked each one up and munched it like ribs. The meat itself was amazing, completely imbued with beefiness and the flavor of the herbs they were stewed with, and falling off the bone. I had pulled puff pastry out of the freezer, rolled it, snipped it with kitchen scissors, and twisted them and brushed them with beaten egg before baking them. These were amazing dipped in the broth. The spinach, of course, was hideous, due to being overcooked and salted.

Urgh

At the end I was stuffed. I put the children to bed and that was it. The pineapple fritter recipe became apple fritters [1472] since my pineapple did not come in my grocery order. I had absolutely no motivation to press onwards to dessert. The fritter batter stayed in the fridge overnight and congealed horribly, and the apples continued macerating in lemon juice and rum. I passed out, and woke up at two a.m. with a vicious stomachache and felt like I was about to blow my groceries.

The next morning my maid of all work reported the kitchen was a disaster, and commenced to mopping it immediately. We were not right for the next couple of days. I am hoping for better results this weekend when I make beef marrowbones, which I have done before and am looking very forward to.

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Knitting From History, Part One.

Published by Faythe on January 10, 2010 in Arts and Crafts.
knitting-from-history-part-one

When I first agreed to write something for TQS, I wasn’t sure what angle I was going to approach the Victorian theme from. I knew it would probably have something to do with knitting, but that was about it. I briefly thought about copying knit items I’d seen in TV shows and movies about the era (like Mary Poppin’s scarf), but decided that wasn’t good enough. If I was going to do this, I should be completely true to the era.

And so it was that I found myself searching for authentic knitting patterns from the 1800s.  I soon realized that it was going to be harder to follow through on than I thought.  I tend to knit things like sweaters, gloves, socks and hats–which aside from the gloves–are NOT things that Victorians knit at all!  Victorians didn’t really knit clothing, they knit very delicate lacy things, things like doilies and stockings and edgings for their dresses. Things that require needles so small that if I failed at knitting with them I could always try my hand at acupuncture instead! Needles so small that I didn’t think anyone even made needles that small anymore. Actually, I was relieved to find out that there are companies that still make tiny needles, and I plan on purchasing the last 5 sizes I need for future projects, the smallest one being 0000-0000 (.5mm).

Even after finding this out, like a fool I still thought it’d be a good challenge. I found a pattern that looked relatively easy–patterns from the Victorian era assumed that you weren’t an idiot and knew what you were doing. They didn’t bother explaining every last little detail like patterns do nowadays. Nope, they figured that if you were going to knit something you were already an expert. Which, to be fair is rather refreshing but at the same time a little frustrating, especially when they didn’t use the same terms that we do now. It took me 20 minutes to figure out that when it says “throw thread over” in my pattern, that they actually meant I was supposed to do what we call now a “yarn over”.

Anyway, so my first project is a pattern called  Lady’s Fancy Mittens (http://www.victorian-embroidery-and-crafts.com/fancy_mittens.html). It was published in Art Needlework in 1895 by Brainerd & Armstrong.  There were several modifications I had to make, the first being that I did not own the tiny size 0000 needles required for the pattern. The smallest size needles I had were the next size up, size 000 needles. Thankfully I had some lace weight yarn already, but it wasn’t knitting silk like the pattern called for. Frankly, I don’t know if “knitting silk” is really made out of just silk or not and that’s something I plan to look into because I am skeptical. I could also be wrong, but I’m used to that.  I also had to size down the pattern because my first attempts came out a little too large—although I should have known since I was using needles .25mm larger and I tend to knit rather loosely in the first place.

I’m slowly making progress on these mittens. I’m not used to knitting with such small needles, and it’s taking forever. The stitches are so tiny that it makes me want to scream and I can’t even imagine having to knit something like this by lamplight.  I have a feeling that once I finish the first mitten there won’t even be a second one. I was planning on giving them to my mom when I was done with the pair since she’s also really into the Victorian stuff (she’s so serious about it that she even has two Victorian outfits), but I might wind up having to befriend a one handed woman instead!

Stay tuned for Part Two, when I finally finish at least one mitten.

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Scotch Woodcock

Published by LaurieB on January 10, 2010 in Cookery and Consumables and Cooking with Mrs. Beeton.
scotch-woodcock

I’ve mentioned this new blog to a few people and they almost invariably ask, “Why?”  It looks to me like the reasons people are writing here are as varied at they themselves are, but for me it’s part of a trend of doing for myself.  It’s very simply that the idea of going back to some of the old ways of doing things around the house to find out what’s been forgotten appeals to me.

So what has been forgotten?  Something inherently missing in today’s world?  Absolutely not.  I am infuriated by “the good old days” syndrome in which the past is fine and wonderful and today is somehow weaker and wrong.  And believe me when I say that Mrs. Beeton and I have some fundamental differences of opinion.  For example, she says of the tomato plant that it “has a most disagreeable odor” whereas I’ve been known to stick my face in one and swoon.  And I won’t be taking up her suggestion of beef tea when I’m ill (the whole “Invalid Cookery” section really kills).  But there are things we have forgotten how to do that are described here; ways of preserving food and ways of working with vegetables we don’t find in the grocery store or at the nearest chain restaurant are two that interest me most.  That’s primarily what I’ll be talking about in my posts, in addition to exploring whatever random Victorian-era comfort food tickles my fancy.  And gravy, good lord, Mrs. Beeton’s world is all about gravy, and I am right behind her on that.

The first thing I was planning to do here was chronicle my attempts to keep eggs without refrigeration.  Mrs. Beeton offers several suggestions, and I’d figured that by now I’d have been able to get my hands on a big box of saw dust and some extremely fresh local eggs.  It is, however, harder to find saw dust than you might think.  Still, the call has gone out and by this time next week I should have something to show you.  In the meantime, let me introduce you to my friend, Scotch Woodcock.  This falls under the “random comfort food” category.  I was thinking about doing Welsh Rare-bit but was, honestly, seduced by the name “Scotch Woodcock.”  The recipe is quick, so I include a slightly abbreviated version below.

Scotch Woodcock

1653. Ingredients – A few slices of hot buttered toast; allow 1 anchovy to each slice.  For the sauce – ¼ pint of cream, the yolks of 3 eggs.

Mode. – Separate the yolks from the whites of the eggs; beat the former, stir to them the cream, and bring the sauce to the boiling point, but do not allow it to boil, or it will curdle.  Have ready some hot buttered toast, spread with anchovies pounded to a paste; pour a little of the hot sauce on the top, and server it very hot and very quickly.

Ok, so, I first went out to get some good bread with a little heft.  This is the only part of the recipe that worked for me.

Damn fine bread.

The recipe appears super simple, but it’s that “to the boiling point, but do not allow it to boil” part that killed me.  I curdled the damn sauce every time.  This is partly due to my being a generally impatient person, and partly due to the difficulty of not boiling such a small amount of cream mixed with egg yolks.  Eventually I put some sauce on the bread, even though it was essentially like really runny scrambled eggs.  It tasted fine, but looked frightening.  Feel free to turn away.

Scotch Woodcock FAIL.

Would I make it again?  Possibly, but I would skip the anchovies and tart the whole thing up with some fresh dill or maybe even curry powder.  Other ideas?  I’d love to hear them.

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New Year’s Eve: White and Jiggly Food

Published by SJ on January 7, 2010 in Cooking with Mrs. Beeton.
new-years-eve-white-and-jiggly-food

How was your New Year’s Eve? Mine was rained out, sadly. I did not make it to my roof to watch fireworks. However, that did not stop me from cooking like it was 1869!!

For Christmas I did courses and made things a little more formal and fancy, especially since we were having company. I always feel a little run down by NYE, so I decided to go with a family style dinner that could be served all at once.

I crave seafood around the holidays, so I decided to go nuts. We started with a small handful of oysters–a few kusshi and a few kumamoto. As far as I can tell, Beeton’s only provides comments about cooked oyster recipes, and how to keep oysters fresh for a few days by cycling them in and out of salty water.

Sweet and salty deliciousness.

Raw oysters have a long history in England, and the Victorians gobbled them up. I would love to get my hands on an oyster plate because of how lovely they are, but we usually just shuck as we go and eat them out of hand. Cracking them this way, squeezing on a little lemon juice, and slurping them down is such an awesome sensual experience that I can hardly bring myself to order them in restaurants anymore, where they arrive preshucked, limp, and way too expensive.

For the meal itself, I settled on an entrée interestingly named Cod a L’italienne [241]. I think that this dish is quite suitable for the modern palette, as it is cod in a ham-flavored sauce! Hello, bacon fiends. I love things that are distilled with the essence of something, but do not actually contain it. There is something appallingly wasteful and whimsical about it all at once. I’m certain that the Victorians would have done something with the leftover ham. I gave mine to my chickens, who deigned to pick at about half of it.

Sad ham leftovers

The method is to combine chopped shallots and a slice of ham “minced very fine” in a broth and boil the hell out of it for about fifteen minutes. At the same time, you boil your innocent fillet of cod that would probably be much happier drizzled in olive oil and broiled or pan seared. JUST SAYING. You remove your cod from the water, and of course mine broke. Drain the sauce, and add some cream “if the color should not be good” (it was NOT). So you pour this plain-looking white sauce over this white fish and you get…hrm.

I think this is what they mean by classic English cooking.

However! The flavor was deelishus! If I was going to modernize this somehow, I would indeed gently broil the cod and add something to make the sauce look less dire. Even dressing it up with a ton of snipped chives and a drizzle of chili sauce would be better, visually. Ah, well.

For a side dish, I made everyone a Lobster Patty [277], except, surprise, crab filling instead. The crab was tossed with a little béchamel (hooray, an excuse to make the awesome béchamel again), anchovy sauce (I used a little fish sauce for the power of umami), lemon juice, and a little cayenne.

With bread placeholder

For this dish you create little cooked shells out of puff pastry in a patty-pan dish. I could not figure out what that was, or what it looks like, though I do have an association with patty-pans and Beatrix Potter somehow. If someone could tell me what one is, that would be fabulous.

Instead I improvised little forms out of foil and filled the center with bread as advised to make sure the shells were hollow. After they come out, you pop out the now-soggy bread and add the crab filling and you’re done. I thought it was very funny to fill it after they were done cooking. Every other dumplingy thing I know of involves cooking everything all at once. They were pretty tasty, though, with the crunch of the puff pastry and the creamy filling.

To round out the meal, I cooked some raw shrimp and chilled them for quick munching and as contrast to the hot seafood. I also made a modern potato roast that turned out very well and pretty, which was really the point. Any opportunity to take my fail excuse for a mandoline (grocery store; ten dollars; plastic; HORRORS) out for a spin.

Normally I would do a meal like this with a salad, but when in sooty-ass Victorian England in late December…potatoes it is.

The Spread

Now onto what was the absolute HIT of the meal: Moulded Pears [1471]. This dish is basically pears poached in wine, which is then turned into gelatin. AWESOMES. I thought this was going to be a sad fridge albatross, but we ate every bite, and this is after our full meal. I think this would be seriously easy and cool to do with a winter meal, and then you can smugly announce that it is a Victorian dessert, eh?

Moulded Pears, with my notes

4 large pears or 6 small ones [4 Comice, I know, I know, these are not baking pears]
8 cloves
a small piece of cinnamon
Sugar to taste [I think I used about a 1/3 cup of powdered sugar]
¼ pint of raisin wine [I used a petit syrah, fuck it]
A strip of lemon peel
the juice of half a lemon
½ oz of gelatin

Peel and cut the pears into quarters; put them into a jar with ¾ pint of water, cloves, sugar, and cinnamon [I put the lot in my dutch oven and was not paying the best attention...I also added the wine at this point]; cover down the top of the jar, and bake the pears in a gentle oven until perfectly tender [Thanks for nothing. Lady. I did 350F for 45 minutes and that was perf.], but do not allow them to break.

When done, lay the pears in a plain mould [glass bowl], which should be well wetted, and boil ½ pint of the liquor the pears were baked in with the wine, lemon juice, peel, and gelatin [I added more wine at this point for color. Yes, that’s it.]. Let these ingredients boil quickly for five minutes, then strain the liquid warm over the pears [I needed all the original poaching liquid to cover them]; put the mould in a cool place, and when the jelly is firm, turn it out on a glass dish.

Mine broke a bit on removal, but oh well. Sliced, it was very cool looking anyway.

Also, I have to correct myself from my previous post where I said that pineapples were only a luxury for the rich with greenhouses, etc. Near my Moulded Pears there was a recipe for Pineapple Fritters [1472] with a note within the recipe: “We receive them [pineapples] now in such large quantities from the West Indies, that at times they may be purchased at an exceedingly low rate…” Well, I stand corrected.

I have EVEN MORE poorly-shot food in my NYE flickr set.

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A Very Good Place To Start

Published by kerewin on January 3, 2010 in Cooking with Mrs. Beeton.
a-very-good-place-to-start

Where to start? I suppose the English would start with a good cup of tea. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management is very clear.

There is very little art in making good tea; if the water is boiling, and there is no sparing of the fragrant leaf, the beverage will almost invariably be good. The old-fashioned plan of allowing a teaspoonful to each person and one over, is still practised. Warm the teapot with boiling water; let it remain for two or three minutes for the vessel to become thoroughly hot, then pour it away. Put in the tea, pour in from 1/2 to 3/4 pint of boiling water, close the lid, and let it stand for the tea to draw from 5 to 10 minutes; then fill up the pot with water.

My favorite part of this “recipe” is the next line:

The tea will be quite spoiled unless made with water that is actually boiling, as the leaves will not open, and the flavour not be extracted from them; the beverage will consequently be colourless and tasteless, –in fact, nothing but tepid water.

I just started reading The English American by Alison Larkin in which the protagonist is an English girl who discovers her birth parents are from America. There is a part where she explains how to make proper tea.

First, you warm a teapot. Then you put in tea leaves – Earl Grey, Lapsang, or Darjeeling, ideally. One teaspoon for each person, and one for the pot. Then you pour in water that has been boiled.

The same directions from a book that was published in parts between 1859 and 1861 and a book published in 2008. I guess when you find perfection, you don’t mess with it.

So, I made my tea with a British brand of breakfast tea, warmed my pot, used one teaspoon per person plus one for the pot, used boiling water, and let it steep for 5 minutes. I was also very careful to add the milk and sugar to the (pre-heated) tea cups before pouring in the tea.

One for me with coconut milk and one for my husband with the real stuff. It was dark and delicious. Had a slight bitter edge that the sugar evened out. I could drink this everyday. Note: I don’t usually use china for sipping on tea, this just seemed to be a very auspicious occasion, plus I figured the Victorian era didn’t use cups the size of giant fists like we do now.

While making the tea, I chanced to look at the side of the Fortnum & Mason tea box. Directions: Warm the teapot before adding one teaspoonful for each person and “one for the pot”. Bring fresh water to the boil and pour in immediately. Allow the tea to brew for 5 minutes, then stir and serve.

My god, those Brits have repetition DOWN.

-kerewin

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A Buttonhole for the New Year

Published by Undergardener on January 3, 2010 in Gardening and the Out-of-Doors.
a-buttonhole-for-the-new-year

One of the tasks of the Victorian Head Gardener was to grow all the flowers ‘the big house’ would need throughout the year.  One of the reasons why I think these Gardeners were awesomely talented, given the Victorian love of all that is floral, is that this was a mammoth task.  Head Gardeners had to master the fairly tricky production of flowers, fruit and vegetables on a commercial scale and they had to provide staff to arrange all the flowers for the house on a daily basis or do it themselves.  To add an extra degree of difficulty to their work schedule they also provided the Master with daily floral buttonholes for his lapel and the Mistress with garlands for her dress and floral head-dresses as required.  Victorian Head Gardeners invented the art and profession of Floristry.

I’ve never really grown flowers for decoration, so this is a whole new area for me to explore and an appropriate task for an Under Gardener to be studying.  To celebrate the New Year I decided to start with something small. I had thought about decorating a table in Victorian fashion but I feel that that is something to work towards for the next Australian spring.  I plan to pace myself with the floristry.

For inspiration and instruction I watched the wonderful Harry Dodson of the BBC’s ‘The Victorian Flower Garden’.  Harry and Peter Thoday are going to be my principle guides through the year ahead as I try to master some of the more technical aspects of Victorian gardening.  If you watch the clip you will see that Harry explains how to make buttonholes in the last few minutes.

Here are my efforts:

Buttonholes ready to present to the Butler and Lady's Maid.

On the left, the buttonhole for him, is a Lemon Geranium Leaf, Sage Leaves, Lavender and Nasturtium flower.

On the right, for her, a Pineapple Sage leaf, Thai Basil flower spikes and a Native Hibiscus flower.  I think the cotton I used was too big, I tried sewing cotton but that was too fine to get a hold of, so for future projects I need to find the ‘Bass’ that Harry refers to or maybe ‘Rafia’ if is was around in the Victorian era.

My sister-in-law obviously has psychic abilities as she bought me a fabulous book, ‘The Head Gardeners – Forgotten Heroes of Horticulture’ by Toby Musgrave, for Christmas.  Musgrave explains that the Head Gardener and the Butler along with the Cook were on an equal footing in the pecking order of a household.  This could lead to difficulties over buttonholes as in some households the Butler would collect the flowers and make the arrangement and in others it was solely the Head Gardener’s responsibility.   Depending on personalities this could be fraught territory.

I’m not sure what the Victorians would make of these combinations.  It seems that any Head Gardener worth his salt would know his Masters preferences and would need to juggle preference with availability in the garden probably planning ahead for special occasions. Both of my buttonholes were very aromatic which I know the Victorian’s would have approved of.  The Victorians invented a ‘Language of Flowers‘ in which any arrangement of flowers would have a particular coded meaning.  Red roses for ‘love’ and rosemary for ‘remembrance’ are probably the only modern survivors of that custom.  I remember reading a beautiful Kate Greenaway book on the subject as a child.  I think working out what the arrangement needed to ‘say’ would have been outside the scope of the Head Gardener’s role – I imagine that if particular flowers were called for this would have been the realm of the Butler or Lady’s Maid to arrange and communicate.

Anyway we enjoyed wearing them for dinner and my husband thought he could get the hang of having one for special occasions.  I don’t think I or my garden could manage daily buttonholes but I like the idea of making them throughout the year.  I may even progress to making a full arrangement for a lady’s dress. Yikes!


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