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The Past is One Tough Cookie

The history Intertubes are breaking out in baked goods, this week, and it's a wonderful window onto the past.

At Past is Present, the new staff blog at the American Antiquarian Society, librarians and fellows have a bake-off, testing a twentieth-century poundcake recipe against a poundcake recipe from a nineteenth-century cookbook.

But there's a practical challenge: the ingredients themselves have changed. Grainy white twentieth-century sugar is nothing like the damp chunks of loaf sugar that bakers used in the early United States. Click on the bake-off link in the paragraph above to learn about the unpleasant way that earlier bakers overcame the roughness of their ingredients -- and to see the results of the taste test.

Meanwhile, at Hurst Street, a historian reports that a student brought her class a batch of cookies from dad. But dad is the pastry chef at Colonial Williamsburg -- which strikes me as the greatest job in the history of the world -- and these ginger cookies were made from a colonial-era recipe.

Read both posts for some great, quick insight into the history of daily life. And both offer lessons you can eat.