Category: food history

Workhouse Soup and Cottage Loaves

victorian workhouse inmates

The workhouses of Edwardian England served a most excellent split pea soup. Or so claims the 1906 Report of the Department Committee on Vagrancy. Under the Order of 1882 vagrants who intend to be short-term workhouse guests can dine on a spare dinner of bread and cheese, but to those planning to spend more than a day in the workhouse a dinner of bread and soup is offered — in rather exact and somewhat less than lavish portions. Six ounces of bread and a pint of soup go to warm the soul of the beggar, a person otherwise considered to be “a nuisance [who] infests the roads and threatens women and insists on having food when their husbands are absent, and all that sort of thing.” Such minutely observed economy must not divide the beggar from some basic sustenance, as meager as this might be.

And what goes into this bone-warming bit of comestible charity? According to the “Dietary Order” the “ingredients for pea soup in the workhouse are to each pint, three ounces of raw beef free from bone, two ounces of bones, two ounces of split peas, half an ounce of oatmeal, one ounce of vegetables, salt, pepper, and herbs to taste.”

As the Report indicates, workhouse soup goes well with bread. Try serving it with a cottage loaf, like this one from the 1905 Still Room Cookery: Recipes Old and New.

Cottage Loaf

Cottage loaves are formed from two balls of dough, a smaller and a larger, placed one on the top of the other. A hole is made through the top to connect the two, and 4 slits cut in the sides. The oven shelves must have been scrubbed previously and floured and the dough set down on them.

The loaves should stand in a warm place for 1/2 an hour and are then baked in a good oven, for the first 1/4 of an hour on the top shelf, and then moved to the centre shelf to bake another 1 1/4 hours. The loaves must stand on their sides to cool.

This recipe has been used for many years without a failure.

Household Bread (No. 2).

Another recipe made with Barm [the foam on top of beer and other fermented alcoholic beverages].

4 Ib. flour
1/2 pint warm water
1 pint of barm.

Put the flour into a basin, mix in a pinch of salt, make a hole in the centre and pour in the warm water, stir the barm in with it, shake a little flour over the top. Cover the basin with a cloth and let it stand in a warm place all night. At about 9 o’clock in the morning mix it with enough warm water to make a nice dough, and knead it well. Cover again with a cloth and let it stand for 2 hours. Make into loaves and bake.

 

 
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Simnel Cakes

simnel cakes

“It is an old custom in Shropshire and Herefordshire, and especially at Shrewsbury, to make during Lent and Easter, and also at Christmas, a sort of rich and expensive cakes, which are called Simnel Cakes,” writes Robert Chambers. These cakes were hefty things filled with candied fruit. “They are raised cakes,” Chambers continues, “the crust of which is made of fine flour and water, with sufficient saffron to give it a deep yellow colour, and the interior is filled with the materials of a very-rich plum cake, with plenty of candied lemon peel, and other good things.” The preparation of a Simnel cake was a complicated affair. Chambers goes on to describe how the cakes were tied up in a cloth and boiled for several hours, after which they were brushed with egg and baked.

The end result of this arduous process was a round heavy cake “as hard as if made of wood.” Recipients unfamiliar with the Simnel cake sometimes took it for a foot stool, or tossed it in a pot of boiling water in hope of softening it into something more amenable to being eaten.

Despite the labor involved in making them, Simnel cakes were frequently given as gifts on holidays and appeared as a mainstay at feasts. In the seventeenth century youngsters presented Simnel cakes to their mothers on Midlent Sunday (also known as Mothering Sunday), and during the Middle Ages, the cakes were marked with the figure of Christ or the Virgin Mary and enjoyed at feasts.

Though the cakes were enjoyed far and wide, there is much speculation as to the origin of their name. Some claim it derives from the father of Lambert Simnel, a pretender to the throne during the reign of Henry VII. Lambert’s father was a baker and purportedly the first maker of Simnel cakes, whose name survived in the annals of history because of his son’s infamous aspirations.

 

Others assert that the recipe came about as a result of an argument between a couple named Simon and Nelly, who wished to bake the remains of a Lenten cake, which they mixed with leftover plum pudding. But when it came time to bake the cake, the couple fell to blows over whether it should be boiled instead. They compromised by boiling the cake first and then placing it in the oven for a few hours. Once it was baked through, they glossed the outside with a few eggs that had been broken in the scuffle and christened the finished product “Simon and Nelly cake,” which later became the portmanteau, Sim-Nel.

You need not get in a scuffle should you want to bake a Simnel cake. The 1929 Modernistic Recipe-Menu Book of the DeBoth Homemaker’s Cooking School offers a more contemporary, and peaceful, recipe for this traditional holiday delight.

Simnel Cake

2 cups margarine
2 1/4 cups brown sugar
6 eggs
3 tablespoons milk
1/2 teaspoon each of cinnamon, mace and ginger
5 1/2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 lb. chopped raisins
1/2 lb. currants
1/8 lb. sliced citron
1/2 lb. almond paste (do not add to batter)

Combine the batter as for any fruit cake.

Now, this is where this cake is different from other fruit cakes. After the cake batter is mixed together, beat it hard for 10 minutes. Then spread half of it in a greased and floured cake pan, cover with a layer of the almond paste rolled thin and cut large enough to come almost to the edges of the cake. Then spread the rest of the cake batter over the paste.

Bake the cake in slow oven (300°) for about 3 hours; or it may be steamed for 2 1/2 hours. Ice it with water and sugar icing, but not until after the third day after the cake is baked. Store in crock or tin box.

 
Why Fast and Fermented Foods by Christine Baumgarthuber

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Philadelphia Corned Beef Hash

illustration from Roast Beef, Medium by Edna Ferber

In his 1920 travel memoir Travels in Philadelphia, Christopher Morley sings the praises of the stalwart waitresses who provide service in city of brotherly love’s many late-night lunch rooms. “We had been motoring in the suburbs, a crisp and bravely tinted October afternoon,” Morley writes,

and getting back to town after 8 o’clock as hungry as bolshevik commissars, we entered into the joy of the flesh in a Ninth street hash cathedral. Here and now let me pay tribute to those blissful lunch rooms that stay open late at night to sustain and replenish the toiler whose business it is to pass along the lonely pavements of midnight. Waiters and waitresses of the all-night shift, we who are about to eat salute you! Let it be a double portion of corned-beef hash and “coffee with plenty.

Perhaps Morley enjoyed a Philadelphia corned-beef hash much like this one from the 1914 home economics manual, Mrs. Rorer’s Philadelphia Cook Book.

Corned Beef Hash

1 pint of cooked corned beef, chopped fine
1 tablespoonful of butter
1 teaspoonful of onion juice
1 pint of cold boiled potatoes, chopped fine
1 cup of stock or water
3 dashes of pepper

Mix the meat and potatoes together, put them in a frying pan, add the stock, butter, onion juice, and pepper; stir constantly until it boils. Serve on buttered toast.

 
Why Fast and Fermented Foods by Christine Baumgarthuber

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