According to the following recipe, if you wanted biscuits in colonial times, this is how you would get them.
COLONIAL BISCUITS
2 cups flour
4 tsp. baking powder
Dash of salt, to taste
1/2 cup butter milk
Sift flour, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Add butter (still cold) cut into 4 or 5 pieces, work into flour mixture with pastry blender. Add cold milk, a little at a time, blending with a fork (use only enough milk to hold dough together). Roll dough about 1/2" thick onto a lightly floured board, cut with a small biscuit cutter. Place on an ungreased baking sheet.
Bake in a preheated 450°F oven for 10 to 12 minutes or until biscuits are lightly brown.
Makes 20.
Sifting could look like sifting by hand or using a mesh screen. Your butter would probably come from a mold and maybe from a spring house where you have keep it in crockery. The milk … well, you or one of your siblings probably hunched over on a wooden stool and got fairly intimate with a warm, breathing, tail-swishing cow early this morning to collect that. Despite the lack of conveniences in colonial kitchens, that recipe worked 200 years ago and it still works today.
What if you wanted something sweeter? What if you wanted apple pie?
COLONIAL APPLE PIE
Pastry for double crust 9 inch pie
5-6 pared sliced apples
2 tbsp. all-purpose flour
1 c. sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. ground cinnamon
2 tbsp. butter
Arrange apples in unbaked pie shell. Combine flour, sugar, salt and cinnamon; sprinkle over apples. Dot with butter. Cover with slashed pastry and bake at 375 degrees for 1 hour or until crust is brown and apples are tender.
Note here that they aren’t telling us how to make pastry. It’s a given. Anybody knows how to make pastry. After all, it’s not like you can just go to the store and pick up something like pastry, is it?
Again, this recipe that worked so many years ago works well today, too. Just as the cook who recorded it intended.
Yesterday’s cooks might marvel at the appliances we use today. They might scoff. Who knows? But the staples that make delicious happen are unchanged. Flour, sugar, spices, fruit. They existed then, they’re here today, and they still work.
There’s another recipe from the time between colonial days and today. The “cook,” if you will, was descended from Sephardic Jews who immigrated to the United States from Portugal around the time of the American Revolution. She was born in New York City on July 22, 1849. Born some seventy years after that revolution, Emma Lazarus was American.
Lazarus was educated at home, acquiring a knowledge of Greek and Latin classics, as well as the modern literature of Germany, Italy, and France. Lazarus developed an affinity for verse at an early age. As a teenager, she began translating the poems of Victor Hugo, Heinrich Heine, Alexandre Dumas, and Friedrich Schiller.
In 1881, she witnessed firsthand the tumultuous arrival of exiled refugees into the United States. After returning from Europe, Lazarus was asked for an original poem to be auctioned off as a fundraiser for the building of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Though she initially declined, Lazarus later used the opportunity to express the plight of refugee immigrants, who she cared greatly about.
Her resulting sonnet, "The New Colossus", includes the iconic lines that are inscribed on a plaque on the pedestal of the monument.
“… Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Her recipe may have appealed more in the late 1800s because she saw the arrival of people in exile. It was immediate to her. Maybe we need that same immediacy.
Why not try the biscuit recipe? The ingredients are pretty simple. Mix them and put your hands in. Feel the ingredients change as you help them blend. I love biscuits.
If not the biscuits, then try the apple pie. Put it together and savor the buttery cinnamon smell that fills your kitchen when you bake it. All the things that go into it somehow blend to make a whole new thing. That’s 200 years of history just waiting for your fork. And maybe a scoop of ice cream.
Food is simple but fascinating. History is fascinating, but not always simple. I like these recipes because they give us precedents. They say, “this has worked before.” It may not have been pretty while it was happening. I know my kitchen is a mess almost every time I cook. But in the end it works. My family is better for it. And who can say that something we’re putting together today won’t be seen as remarkable in 200 years.
I think that goes for Ms. Lazarus’ recipe, too.
