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Reading list, I have a question: does ~3,000 words of Methos and Joe Dawson talking about the Lone Power, Ahriman, Immortality, and the Song of the Twelve count as "a Highlander/Young Wizards crossover fic" or "boring self-indulgence"?
Because that seems to be appearing on my desktop, and I'm not sure which one to file it under.
So yesterday was the church picnic. And Saturday I went to the Books for International Goodwill book sale in Annapolis, and pulled A Calendar of Dinners with 615 Recipes (printed 1923, last revised 1913) off the free-cookbooks shelves.
I was thumbing through it and found a recipe for The Wholesome Parkin, which turns out to be a traditional molasses-oatmeal-ginger bread from Northern England, famous for only getting better as it gets staler ('excellent when a week old'). And partly because I have a thing (inculcated by LotR at a young age) for durable breads, and partly because I realized that it only uses ingredients that I have in my basic camping kitchen, I decided I needed to make it for the church picnic.
I think if I made it again, I would cook it slightly less time, and maybe in a slightly cooler oven (the cookbook assumes you're using a woodstove, obviously, so it doesn't give exact temperatures). And I would probably grind the rolled oats a little bit smaller in a food processor, to see if it ends up more cake-y that way. And age it longer.
It came out very dark (tasting as well as looking, with the molasses dominant) and very dense and chewy (it went 'clunk' when I emptied out from the tin), and slightly dry (the dryness is improving over time.) The consensus was that, as a dessert confection, it isn't great, but as survival rations, it's delicious. After I ate one slice for breakfast with a glass of milk at ~7:30 AM and then realized that, come 1 PM and the picnic, I still wasn't hungry, I sat down and worked out rough nutrition numbers from the recipe:
One 3/4"x1.5"x3" slice of this (as seen in photo) has more calories, fat, total carbohydrates, and fiber than a McDonald's hamburger (and less sugar!), and half the iron and calcium; 3 g protein; and a whole laundry list of significant amounts of vitamins and trace nutrients. One slice per meal hits the USDA recommended daily allowance for most of the macronutrients and gets you a good start on the rest. We'll have to see if it really does get better as it ages; if so, I may have another thing to go on the list of from-scratch backpacking foods. :D
Here's the recipe right out of 1913:
1 cupful flour
½ cupful melted Crisco
2 cupfuls fine oatmeal
¾ cupful molasses
3 tablespoonfuls sugar
¼ teaspoonful salt
1 egg
1 teaspoonful powdered ginger
¼ teaspoonful powdered allspice
½ teaspoonful powdered cinnamon
½ teaspoonful baking soda
Melt Crisco and mix with molasses, then add sugar, egg well beaten, salt, soda, spices, flour, and oatmeal. Mix and pour into small square Criscoed tin and bake in a moderate oven thirty-five minutes. This little cake is excellent when a week old. Sufficient for one small cake.
You may note that this recipe includes Crisco, which seems odd for a hundred-year-old traditional recipe. That is because this cookbook is a stealth Crisco promotion, which was put on the market in 1911. Every recipe in the entire book includes at least several tablespoons of Crisco, and it has a whole section in the front about how important it is for the diet, digestion, and overall vigor to eat healthy fats with every meal (especially young girls, it says, who sometimes show an unwarranted dislike of fats.) And since I am of the opinion that any recipe which starts with butter, shortening, or lard is a good recipe, I approve of this.
Other baking recipes I already want to try from this book:
Chocolate Wafers (to see if they'll work in my Oreos recipe - I was reading our local SCA group's mailing list, and they posted about bringing food to an event, but they wanted it to be at least vaguely period, "which means no Cheez-its or Oreos", and I was like, "But I have a 17th century Cheezits recipe!" And now I want to try to push my Oreos recipe as far back into history as I can taking chocolate into account, just so I can bring home-baked Cheezits and Oreos to an event and claim it's period.)
Crisco Brownies (which in fact contain no chocolate - they seem to get their brown from molasses, like the Parkin. Which is making me think about historical molasses Oreos, to get around the chocolate problem.)
Fried Cornmeal Nut Cakes (made in the Crisco tin! Which I can't do because Crisco tins are cardboard now, but I think I'll manage somehow.)
Maryland Beaten Biscuits (another historical trail ration that stays good as it goes stale, although these are much more about the 'just add lots of carbs'. I've made the Wye Island version of these before - they are excellent for letting out aggression, the "beaten" part is literal - and I might try this recipe next time just to see, even if I'm of the spheres rather than discs party.)
Southern Spoon Bread (because SPOON BREAD. ... I should come up with a spoon bread recipe I can post on![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
cookability.)
Butterless-Milkless-Eggless Cake (Most of these recipes are blamed on wartime rationing, or on the Depression, but 1913 predates both of those)
Lunch Cakes (these appear to be cupcakes from before cupcakes were a thing.)
Other books from the B.I.G. sale:
(I didn't have a lot of time, so I only looked at a few of the sections - they have an entire warehouse full):
@free:
a 1911 cookbook with the cover missing (this one has a lot of home remedies and recipes for convalescents and invalids;)
A Guide to the Architecture of Washington DC;
Spring in Washington (an urban nature book written in WWII DC)
@25¢:
Golden Guide to Non-Flowering Plants (a book so old that it thinks fungi and bacteria are plants! Oh bless) and Golden Guide to Butterflies and Moths;
Crab-Gra-La (A self-published novella about talking crabs (etc.) in the Chesapeake Bay; my dad bought the first three in the series off the author at a yard sale in ~1991, so I was intrigued to get this one too;)
Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (a tiny accordion-fold concept book which tells the story of Little Red Riding Hood in wordless lithoprints with nothing but colored dots;)
The City of Ladies by Christine de Pisan (amused that I have finally acquired both this and The Female Man in the space of a month - yay feminist utopias);
Oh ye jigs and juleps! by Virginia Hudson, age 10
@50¢:
Black and Red notebook (so I have a black and red notebook that is at least forty years old, and I picked this up because it looked the same as the old one, without knowing that Black and Red was a brand name, and now I am desperately curious as to the history and whether my old one (which has no identifying text in it at all) is related.)
PS: I am testing the new AO3 update in IE6. Always offer to test in IE6: it is so much fun, there are so many things that don't work.
Because that seems to be appearing on my desktop, and I'm not sure which one to file it under.
So yesterday was the church picnic. And Saturday I went to the Books for International Goodwill book sale in Annapolis, and pulled A Calendar of Dinners with 615 Recipes (printed 1923, last revised 1913) off the free-cookbooks shelves.
I was thumbing through it and found a recipe for The Wholesome Parkin, which turns out to be a traditional molasses-oatmeal-ginger bread from Northern England, famous for only getting better as it gets staler ('excellent when a week old'). And partly because I have a thing (inculcated by LotR at a young age) for durable breads, and partly because I realized that it only uses ingredients that I have in my basic camping kitchen, I decided I needed to make it for the church picnic.
I think if I made it again, I would cook it slightly less time, and maybe in a slightly cooler oven (the cookbook assumes you're using a woodstove, obviously, so it doesn't give exact temperatures). And I would probably grind the rolled oats a little bit smaller in a food processor, to see if it ends up more cake-y that way. And age it longer.
It came out very dark (tasting as well as looking, with the molasses dominant) and very dense and chewy (it went 'clunk' when I emptied out from the tin), and slightly dry (the dryness is improving over time.) The consensus was that, as a dessert confection, it isn't great, but as survival rations, it's delicious. After I ate one slice for breakfast with a glass of milk at ~7:30 AM and then realized that, come 1 PM and the picnic, I still wasn't hungry, I sat down and worked out rough nutrition numbers from the recipe:
One 3/4"x1.5"x3" slice of this (as seen in photo) has more calories, fat, total carbohydrates, and fiber than a McDonald's hamburger (and less sugar!), and half the iron and calcium; 3 g protein; and a whole laundry list of significant amounts of vitamins and trace nutrients. One slice per meal hits the USDA recommended daily allowance for most of the macronutrients and gets you a good start on the rest. We'll have to see if it really does get better as it ages; if so, I may have another thing to go on the list of from-scratch backpacking foods. :D
Here's the recipe right out of 1913:
1 cupful flour
½ cupful melted Crisco
2 cupfuls fine oatmeal
¾ cupful molasses
3 tablespoonfuls sugar
¼ teaspoonful salt
1 egg
1 teaspoonful powdered ginger
¼ teaspoonful powdered allspice
½ teaspoonful powdered cinnamon
½ teaspoonful baking soda
Melt Crisco and mix with molasses, then add sugar, egg well beaten, salt, soda, spices, flour, and oatmeal. Mix and pour into small square Criscoed tin and bake in a moderate oven thirty-five minutes. This little cake is excellent when a week old. Sufficient for one small cake.
You may note that this recipe includes Crisco, which seems odd for a hundred-year-old traditional recipe. That is because this cookbook is a stealth Crisco promotion, which was put on the market in 1911. Every recipe in the entire book includes at least several tablespoons of Crisco, and it has a whole section in the front about how important it is for the diet, digestion, and overall vigor to eat healthy fats with every meal (especially young girls, it says, who sometimes show an unwarranted dislike of fats.) And since I am of the opinion that any recipe which starts with butter, shortening, or lard is a good recipe, I approve of this.
Other baking recipes I already want to try from this book:
Chocolate Wafers (to see if they'll work in my Oreos recipe - I was reading our local SCA group's mailing list, and they posted about bringing food to an event, but they wanted it to be at least vaguely period, "which means no Cheez-its or Oreos", and I was like, "But I have a 17th century Cheezits recipe!" And now I want to try to push my Oreos recipe as far back into history as I can taking chocolate into account, just so I can bring home-baked Cheezits and Oreos to an event and claim it's period.)
Crisco Brownies (which in fact contain no chocolate - they seem to get their brown from molasses, like the Parkin. Which is making me think about historical molasses Oreos, to get around the chocolate problem.)
Fried Cornmeal Nut Cakes (made in the Crisco tin! Which I can't do because Crisco tins are cardboard now, but I think I'll manage somehow.)
Maryland Beaten Biscuits (another historical trail ration that stays good as it goes stale, although these are much more about the 'just add lots of carbs'. I've made the Wye Island version of these before - they are excellent for letting out aggression, the "beaten" part is literal - and I might try this recipe next time just to see, even if I'm of the spheres rather than discs party.)
Southern Spoon Bread (because SPOON BREAD. ... I should come up with a spoon bread recipe I can post on
cookability.)Butterless-Milkless-Eggless Cake (Most of these recipes are blamed on wartime rationing, or on the Depression, but 1913 predates both of those)
Lunch Cakes (these appear to be cupcakes from before cupcakes were a thing.)
Other books from the B.I.G. sale:
(I didn't have a lot of time, so I only looked at a few of the sections - they have an entire warehouse full):
@free:
a 1911 cookbook with the cover missing (this one has a lot of home remedies and recipes for convalescents and invalids;)
A Guide to the Architecture of Washington DC;
Spring in Washington (an urban nature book written in WWII DC)
@25¢:
Golden Guide to Non-Flowering Plants (a book so old that it thinks fungi and bacteria are plants! Oh bless) and Golden Guide to Butterflies and Moths;
Crab-Gra-La (A self-published novella about talking crabs (etc.) in the Chesapeake Bay; my dad bought the first three in the series off the author at a yard sale in ~1991, so I was intrigued to get this one too;)
Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (a tiny accordion-fold concept book which tells the story of Little Red Riding Hood in wordless lithoprints with nothing but colored dots;)
The City of Ladies by Christine de Pisan (amused that I have finally acquired both this and The Female Man in the space of a month - yay feminist utopias);
Oh ye jigs and juleps! by Virginia Hudson, age 10
@50¢:
Black and Red notebook (so I have a black and red notebook that is at least forty years old, and I picked this up because it looked the same as the old one, without knowing that Black and Red was a brand name, and now I am desperately curious as to the history and whether my old one (which has no identifying text in it at all) is related.)
PS: I am testing the new AO3 update in IE6. Always offer to test in IE6: it is so much fun, there are so many things that don't work.
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The parkin sounds really good. That's packing some serious food-value, there!
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Parkin was supposedly invented by poor working-class people to carry in pack lunches during the Industrial Revolution. I would believe it! It is definitely a high-value-for-money-and-effort food.
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I forgot to say: 3000 words of Methos and Joe sounds like something I would read, for sure.
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That bread sounds AMAZING and I need to try it...
*complete fangasm* YOU SCORED ALL YE JIGS AND JULEPS! That is a WONDERFUL little essay book, completely charming, and really just adorable. Especially if you got the one with all the illustrations. You will love this book, I promise you.
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Jigs and Juleps is fun, I read the first three essays on the way home. I love the little-girl voice! Though I have a vague memory at some point of reading about a controversy about whether it was actually written by a ten-year-old, or whether it was "heavily edited", but I can't find anything about it now, so maybe I imagined that.
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But given that someone has been heavily promoting the new
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(also, hey, I know very little about Young Wizards but I have a good track record of enjoying things you write even when I don't know a fandom, so my vote would also be for sharing it with the world!)
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