Oct 18, 2009
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.
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.