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Hot Chocolate from the Eighteenth Century
Here are the two hot chocolate recipes that I use…
Eighteenth Century Vanilla Hot Chocolate Recipe
1 pint 600 ml full fat milk
4 oz 100g Dark Chocolate (I use 50% cocoa)
2 tsp/ 10 ml vanilla extract
2 tsp/10 ml ground cinnamon or nutmeg, or a mixture of these
Put the milk into a pan
Break the chocolate into it
Add the vanilla and spice
Heat gently until the chocolate has melted and the drink is just below boiling point.
Stir briskly or whisk, serve and enjoy…
And the decadent one…
Eighteenth Century Hot Chocolate Recipe, with Claret
I bottle (75cl) Claret or similar red wine
I pt 600ml Double Cream
300 gms Very dark chocolate (85% Cocoa beans)
Yolks of four eggs
Four heaped tablespoons of light soft brown sugar
Put the wine in a large saucepan and add the broken up chocolate and sugar. Heat gently until the chocolate melts. Take off the heat and add half the cream. Mix the egg yolks with the other half of the cream and stir that in. Put back on the heat and heat very gently until it just starts to simmer, it will thicken as you do so. Do not allow to boil at all. Check the sweetness is to your taste and enjoy!
This makes quite a lot, so you may wish to halve the quantities.
To make Parsnip Cakes: a 17thC accompaniment for today’s turkey
If you would like to try something different with parsnips this year, why not try this 17th century recipe from In Grandmother Gell’s Kitchen.
They make an excellent accompaniment to a roast dinner, and would work very well with Christmas dinner, being a little different to roast parsnips, but are neither too rich nor tricky to make. The recipe is below both in its original, and interpreted for today. I haven’t tried serving them with the sugar sauce though!
To make Parsnip Cakes
Take yor parsnips wn they are boyled break y– as small as you can gett y– & beat 6 eggs & but abt 2 or 3 of ye whites & a little Tyme & beat y– all together, & heat ye frying-pan very hot put y– in little cakes into yor pan when they are fryed beat some butter & a little suger for ye sawce. You must put a little sugar into yor cakes too.
2 medium sized parsnips
1 egg
Fresh thyme or rosemary
Boil the parsnips until tender and mash them with a potato masher, add the chopped herbs and beaten egg. Shape into small cakes and roll in flour. These can then either be fried in butter, until each side is golden, or cooked in the oven. I found making them into small cakes and putting them in with roast potatoes for twenty minutes worked very well.
A Discourse on Minc’d Pyes
Mince pies originally contained meat of some sort and were already established as part of Christmas fare during the Tudor period. As they were usually referred to in the singular it seems likely that they were larger pies rather than the individual ones that are usual today. In fact the pie crust is often referred to as a ‘coffin’, giving a clear picture of what we would perhaps prefer to think of as a loaf shape. The mixture of sweet and savoury flavours together was common throughout this period. We do still, of course, do the same, when we serve apple sauce with roast pork for example.
Contrary to what has been written in some places the suet that is used in mince pies didn’t replace the meat but was always there along side it. How these pies have evolved is interesting.
Gervase Markham, writing in 1615, is using mutton as the meat, and adding currants, raisins, prunes, dates and orange peel, along with spices. There is a sad lack of alcohol in this recipe though.
Robert May, writing in 1660 has different recipes for mince pies of veal, mutton or beef. The recipe for the beef ones is catering on a grand scale (he did think that England needed to go back to the ‘good old days’ of before what we now call the English civil war). He takes eight pounds of beef, eight pounds of suet and four pounds each of both currants and raisins, along with nutmeg, clove and mace but no sugar.
One thing that characterises all these earlier recipes is far less sugar than we would use today, and certainly the over sweetened packaged ones that are available today would have been unrecognizable to Mr Markham or Mr May. The post popular versions during the eighteenth century feature tongue as the meat, and the version from Thomas Gell’s recipe collection is here.
To make minc’d pyes
Take 2 Tongues the same weight in Beef Suit 4 pound of Currans and 2 of Raisins, half an Ounce of Nutmeggs, a quarter of an Ounce of Mace, half a quarter of an ounce of Cloves and Cinnamen and Do of Lemon Peel, Wine, Brandy and Sugar to your taste. The bigness of the Tongues must be considered when you put in the above nam’d Spices &c.
Thomas Gell records three festive meals in 1728, 1752 and 1754 and all have ‘minced pye’s as part of one of the courses.
Mrs Beeton, 1861, seems to bring in the idea of making the mincemeat earlier and storing it in jars to mature, and like Mrs Raffald, (1794) has a recipe with and without meat in, although Mrs Raffald favours neat’s tongue while Mrs B. prefers beef. Both use brandy, but Mrs Raffald doesn’t sweeten her pies. The recipe Mrs Beeton gives makes 12lbs of mincemeat which she costs at 8d. ‘A plain cookery book for the working classes’ (1852) uses tripe in its mince pies, which may be economical but perhaps not so appealing.
In a handwritten collection of recipes I have that include dated ones for 1897 and 1902 there is a recipe for mincemeat that includes minced beef. The beauty of manuscript recipes is that unlike those in cookery books, which you don’t know for certain are being used unless annotated or covered in food stains, written out recipes have definitely been used and discovered good enough to keep. This is one I shall be trying this weekend.
By 1914 when Elizabeth Criag was writing, the meat has disappeared from the minced meat pies, and the mince pie, much as we know it, has emerged.