FOOD. 18th century recipes.

For Your Medical Kit. A Natural Antibiotic & More.

www.myspicer.com/history-turmeric/

Hannah Glasse’s 1747 cookbook, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. 

http://www.pbs.org/food/the-history-kitchen/turmeric-history/

Customised Brass Trade Kettle.

I finally got round to cutting my Track Of The Wolf brass trade kettle down to a correct documented size! I also made & fitted the correct type of bail lugs for this type of kettle. It is much lighter now, & of course it will take up less room in my knapsack.

I am pleased with the way it turned out, but I know I could have done a better job if I had the right tools for the job.

Inland Icelanders Burned Whale Bones for Warmth

https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/inland-icelanders-burned-whale-bones-for-warmth/

By K.N.Smith.

An archaeological find shows that whale bones were sometimes imported inland to use as fuel.

https://minds.wisconsin.edu/bitstream/handle/1793/6671/Experiments%20in%20Bone%20Burning.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Getting Rid Of That Gamy Taste.

Soak the meat overnight in salt water/brine or vinegar. Wash the meat before cooking.

Period Cook Book Links.

https://sites.google.com/site/archoevidence/home/historic-cook-books

What self-help looked like in the 17th century! ‘Gentlewoman’s companion’ from 1673 offered women advice on handling everything from ‘lewd’ men to ‘windiness’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-5808027/Self-help-book-17th-Century-sells-1-700-auction.html

Doc Paul's Salt Horn.

One of the best replica salt horns I have seen, lovely work. Not too flashy, but tasteful.

Photo & horn by Paul J Schonbrun.

Preserving Eggs.

Wilderness Camping & Safety. FIRE.

 Any fire small or large, day or night has the potential to attract unwanted guests, so an all night fire is going to at least double that risk. Raiders are opportunists & a fire glowing in the night or the smell of smoke will draw them like ants to honey. Because I am a living historian, my historical treks have to be as authentic as possible. Now even today there are risks in camping out, but back in the 18th century those risks were far greater, so I set myself scenarios. Some nights I have camped with no fire, this requires knowledge of how to stay alive in winter with little bedding, because bedding is bulky & adds weight to your pack. It also requires knowledge regarding what foods to carry, because with no fire, you can not cook food, so you need to carry some food that can be eaten without having to cook it.

Other nights I do light a small fire in a fire hole. This is a scrape in the ground to contain the fire surrounded by rocks back & sides. The heat reflects off the rocks back into my shelter, & they help hide the fire from prying eyes. But a small fire does not last long once I have fallen asleep, & at some time in the night the cold will wake me & I will stoke the fire from my supplies under cover behind my bed & from a supply of wood at the end of my shelter. Despite the fact that I am always mindful & therefore alert to sounds in the forest, this waking up from the cold is for me a security measure. It is an opportunity to look & listen to the sounds around me before I make up my mind as to whether or not I should re light or stoke the fire.

If I had placed a large log on the fire to keep it going all night I would probably sleep soundly, certainly I would not be waking frequently because of the chill seeping through my bedding. This would create a security risk, one because as I have already said, the fire would be noticeably visible from a distance at night, & secondly because I would not be so alert. Just something for you to think about next time you are camping out & practicing your skills.

Keith.

17th Century Recipe Found. German Gingerbread.

Take 20 litres of honey and boil it together with 2 litres of water. Add in cinnamon and nutmeg, a healthy amount of ginger and pepper, plus some aniseed and coriander. Mix it all together with rye flour and water.

http://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn/medieval-manuscripts-and-xmas-recipes-abbey-library-a-trove

Native Americans and the use of Brass Kettles©

https://thehistoricfoodie.wordpress.com/2012/01/11/native-americans-and-the-use-of-brass-kettles/

Pots, Kettles & Dutch Ovens. A Link.

https://www.scribd.com/document/205854633/Food-Food-Preparation-Pots-Kettles-Dutch-Ovens#

18th century Double ended Marrow Scoop.

https://www.barnebys.com/auctions/lot/441869474/an-18th-century-double-ended-marrow-scoop-marks-rubbed/

Archaeology. Tin Cups & A Wire Bail.

Some time ago I wrote an article about some tin cup fragments that had been found without handles, and that also a wire bail was found with these same fragments (http://woodsrunnersdiary.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/early-to-mid-18th-century-tin-cups.html). Based on this information I made myself a tin cup with a wire handle, but I was never sure whether the wire bail was like a bail on a kettle, or whether it meant a wire handle. Anyway I have since then used my cup in the field, and as I was trying to lighten my pack, I decided to try and use the tin cup with the leather wrapped wire handle for cooking as well as drinking. This did not work. Firstly it was difficult to heat water in the cup without burning the leather on the handle, secondly I found it inconvenient to only have the one vessel. I could not drink and eat at the same time.

Having given this problem further thought I decided to make a second cup with a wire bail, but this time I would make a wire bail such as found on kettles, so I could hang my tin cup over the fire. Given the primary evidence of the two cups found and the presence of the wire bail, this seems to me to be a reasonable thing to do. I used an old spare ball mould as a pair of pliers and constructed the bail without punching holes in the tin.

Original tin cups shown as found. Taken from the PDF.

1 ¼ pounds of iron and brass wire, both thick and thin.
Ft Pontchartrain 1747.
http://www.timothyjkent.com/pontchartrainexcerpts.htm

http://collections.mnhs.org/cms/display.php?keywords=fur+trade&startat=61&irn=10295819

Examples of gold and silver jewellery dating back to early Egyptian times exist which incorporated hand woven wire meshes, but the earliest evidence of the development of wire weaving on looms for industrial purposes appears to be in the early part of the 18th Century. Wire drawing had existed prior to this for many hundreds of years on a simple scale. Iron ingots were beaten to a flat sheet which was then cut into strips, hammered round, and pulled through a stone die and many products were made from hand wrought wire.

http://www.lockergroup.com/history-of-wire-weaving.asp

Twisted wire forks have been unearthed at several 18th-century military camp sites.1 These may have been available through the army sutlers, but more than likely were fashioned out of scraps of wire by the soldiers themselves. 

http://www.nwta.com/courier/11-96/forks.html

The east well at Bloomsbury yielded two moderately well preserved tin cups and some flattened tin. A wire bail handle (Figure 94, page 239) appeared to belong with the tinware. As the pieces of tin were sorted, it became apparent that the flattened tin included a damaged bottom and part of a side of a tapered vessel. The cups and fragments were taken to Richard Haddick, a historical tinsmith in Wyoming, Delaware, for interpretation and replication. Haddick concluded that there were three fully reproduceable vessels: two cups and a basin. As nearly as possible, the construction methods of the eighteenth-century originals were duplicated, using hot-dipped tinplate of the type that was available to the original maker.

http://nativeamericansofdelawarestate.com/Bloomsbury/19__0013.pdf

The cooks and confectioners dictionary; or, The accomplish'd housewifes companion.

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=P38EAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA63&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

"Peas Pudding" - A Recipe From 1750

SALT PORK, SHIP’S BISCUIT, AND BURGOO: SEA PROVISIONS FOR COMMON SAILORS AND PIRATES, PART 1.

Sailors or Pirates loading provisions onto boat for transport to a ship. From an illustration of Blackbeard in Charles Johnson’s, “A General History of the Lives and Adventures of the Most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street-Robbers, &c.,” illustrated by Joseph Nichols, 1736.

https://csphistorical.com/2016/01/24/salt-pork-ships-biscuit-and-burgoo-sea-provisions-for-common-sailors-and-pirates-part-1/

SALT PORK, SHIP’S BISCUIT, AND BURGOO: SEA PROVISIONS FOR COMMON SAILORS AND PIRATES, PART 1.

Sailors or Pirates loading provisions onto boat for transport to a ship. From an illustration of Blackbeard in Charles Johnson’s, “A General History of the Lives and Adventures of the Most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street-Robbers, &c.,” illustrated by Joseph Nichols, 1736.

https://csphistorical.com/2016/01/24/salt-pork-ships-biscuit-and-burgoo-sea-provisions-for-common-sailors-and-pirates-part-1/

PDF. Reproducing The 18th Century English Biscuit.

http://colonialbaker.net/Reproduction%20Biscuit%20article%20JOTEA%202011.pdf