cacakerbamakhlukpolitik

Hi all! It is with great regret that I announce that this is my last regular Hoydens post. I've just been overwhelmed with commitments lately. I've had a wonderful time talking to all of you for the past two years and I've learned so much--thanks for everything! I'll miss you. In other news, I recently bought a Cuisinart ice cream maker and I LOVE it. I have been making ice cream non-stop. I've never made custard before and it's definitely taking me a while to get the hang of it, but I haven't produced anything actually BAD yet, so. I thought in honor of the season I'd post some period ice cream recipes from Hannah Glasse's The Complete Confectioner. The book was first published 1760, but I'm using the version edited and expanded by Maria Wilson in 1800, similar to how Joy of Cooking has gone through many editions. Hannah Glasse's name became so synonymous with cookbooks that this 1845 joke political letter to the Times used her name (trigge...

The book I'm working on, Crimson Joy, is set in a small West Sussex market town during Advent and Christmas. So I've been reading about Regency Christmas customs. They're really really cool . My favorite is the Christmas pudding. Christmas pudding is a boiled bread pudding full of dried fruit and apples, spices, and brandy. As anyone who's read Lauren's The Mischief of the Mistletoe knows, the mixture was then made into small round balls and wrapped in muslin. In the Victorian era, the custom shifted to putting the pudding in a bowl, covering it and steaming it, then inverting it onto a plate and flambéing it. But in the Regency they were still in the tying-muslin-wrapped-balls-onto-a-broom-handle-and-boiling-them-in-the-washtub phase. (And actually, I took a British Christmas cooking class at my local co-op, and the instructor said her mother used to make them that way in Australia in the 60s. She also said, "I know they're shelf-stable because once they w...

Last month I took the Regency Culinary World class offered by the fabulous Delilah Marvelle through the Beau Monde Academe program. If you are interested in food and ever have the chance to take this class, do it! I learned so much and Delilah was incredibly helpful about answering questions. Our big assignment for the class was to recreate a Regency dish. I like cooking, so I decided to do a full dinner. My menu: pease porridge, fried sausages and apples, onion pie, and potato cakes for dessert. Me in my Agnes and the Hitman  apron. I took the recipes from Hannah Glasse's The art of cookery, made plain and easy (1774).  It's actually a pretty straightforward cookbook compared to some others I've seen from the same era; her confectionery book, which I read for Sweet Disorder , is great too.  And read her Wikipedia page , it's fascinating! (Sample: "In 1760 Ann Cook published Professed Cookery , which contained a 68-page attack on Hannah Glasse and her wo...