Posted on 12/15/2017 4:39:44 PM PST by Jamestown1630
While enduring a ‘bug’ this week that left me unable to do much but sleep or sit in front of the TV, I happened upon Clarissa Dickson Wright’s series, ‘Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner’, which you can find on YouTube, and which is a really interesting history of how our 'three squares', and the ways we partake of them, have evolved over time.
In the Lunch episode, she featured a pasty (yes, no 'r') crust design, executed by food scholar Ivan Day. This was so beautiful, I had to find the design, and know more about it.
On the way, I found some interesting stuff – including Day's great website on historic food:
http://www.historicfood.com/portal.htm
The pasty design seems to have been derived from Edward Kidder’s ancient ‘Receipts of pastry and cookery, for the use of his scholars’, published in 1720 (you can still buy a copy on Amazon ;-):
http://www.historicfood.com/Edward%20Kidders%20Lamb%20Pasty.htm
I’m not personally a fan of British pasties; but it seems to me that we could decorate our sweet or savory pies just as beautifully – it just takes practice, and starting small! And you don’t need cutters to do this; just find a design, make a cardboard cutout of it, and find a sharp knife to cut the pastry to each of the shapes; then do some detail on the pieces.
Food52 has a lot of starter ideas for ‘fancying up’ your pie:
https://food52.com/blog/8744-9-ways-to-fancy-up-your-pies
-JT
Merry Christmas to you too. May you be healthy enough by then to enjoy a nice walk in the snowy wonderland.
Snow here too! Defrosting my shortbread dough for morning cookies!
Love Clarissa Wright Dickson. I have several of her books but her autobiography “Spilling the Beans” is hilarious. What a woman!
I also have Jennifer Paterson’s book of ‘receipts” which follow her favorite saint days. She was a staunch Catholic and before she teamed up with CWD, she cooked for The Spectator Magazine offices. She was fired when, high on cooking sherry she dumped the lunch and all of its pots on the street below, striking several pedestrians.
If you have Britbox (or You Tube), you can watch the Hairy Bikers - two fat fellows on motorcycles who cook too. The male version of the Two Fat Ladies. They’re good too.
The Great British Baking Show is excellent if formulaic. The bakers are brilliant - all amateurs.
can make pastry dough out of bean flour, quinoa flour, coconut flour all sorts of flours that may be on your low carb list?
Just have to play around with flours to find ones you like the dough consistency. Some can be too dense.
I don’t have a recipe to share but I usually end deciding it’s worth eating whatever it turns out to be, because it has better ingredients and I know all the ingredients of things I cook (rather than mystery additives etc), even if density or appearance or such is not top notch
Hi J! May I please put out a request to some of your cooking Freepers (it sort of fits into historic cooking a bit). My youngest loves jerky. She loves it to the point that if you offered her a candy bar OR jerky... she’d take the jerky each and every time. I recently purchased a dehydrator from Amazon (a decent one) but need some jerky tips/recipes. My concern is this: how do you know jerky is done because my concern is bacteria. Any advice/recipe/how to tips are greatly appreciated. (BTW... I don’t have access to anything exotic (I’m defining that as anything you can’t buy in the store like elk, deer, etc). Thank you, thank you, thank you. :)
Greeneyes... I just did a new recipe with leftover ham made into a wonderful soup/chowder.. yesterday. If you would like the recipe... I am happy to post or pm it to you. The family ADORED it! To be fair now... it isn’t a soup/chowder for dieters. However, it is filling and really good tasting. Hugs, Mom
If you can do chocolate you can do this :)
The Hairy bikers are a hoot!
We have a combat Vets biker group at our VFW and those SOBS love to cook LOL
I made this for my husband’s birthday as he loves all things chocolate. It was wonderful with a glass of port.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/recipes/jennas-devils-food-chocolate-oasis-pie/15788/
Back in November, FReeper ‘Lurker’ gave me a jerky recipe .... here’s the post:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/3603821/posts?page=18#18
This recipe was for venison & he said 6 hours @ 160. I would imagine the ingredients would work on beef, too. Maybe he could help you out with some of your questions (?)
Also, I did a quick “Bing” search for beef jerky recipes & here’s a link to one, using a dehydrator, that looks like it has good directions (dehydrator & oven) .... in the comments, it also appears to be ‘delicious’! Good luck!!
The BEST Beef Jerky
https://www.gimmesomeoven.com/beef-jerky/
Woo Hoo! I finally bit the bullet and dumped our podunk grocery store after Thanksgiving when the meat dept. wouldn’t tell me the price of a turkey. Adios, sayonara, kiss my grits, they lost a customer. Sadly, it’s a 40 mile trip to the store now but I came home the other day with all but one item marked off the grocery list - cardamom. That’s a huge change from decades of dealing with 30 items not marked off.
Yeah, plain yogurt has been one of those next to impossible to find items so I learned to make yogurt and yogurt drinks using an inverted crockpot over a heating pad from the Tightwad Gazette 20 years ago. So simple. Way better than that grocery store stuff. It’s fun switching up the types of milk from 1% to cream and there’s a world of flavors to experiment with. Or straining it for cheesecake.
It is cold today and is supposed to rain. Just got a couple of containers of turkey and stock out of the freezer from a cooked down carcass. Yum, a nice warm soup for tonight.
I won’t have anything but electric. Too many burned off eyebrows and arm hairs and stinky smells from gas stoves.
I love butternut squash. This is one of my favorite ways to eat it.I add lots of garlic and sprinkle red pepper flakes over. I drizzle a bit of honey over it when I take it out of the oven. This recipe is quite versatile-see comments for additional ways to make this.
https://food52.com/recipes/7329-butternut-squash-and-roasted-garlic-galette
It will work quite well on beef.
I got the recipe and several other good ones here:
L
“how do you know jerky is done because my concern is bacteria.”
Good question. When it’s done it should feel like leather. It’ll bend almost 90 degrees before it starts to break. To control bacteria I use 1/4 teaspoon of Prague Powder per each pound of meat.
It’s also called Prague #2 or Pink Salt, not Himalayan.
Available on the web.
Which dehydrator did you get? We use the Excalibur 5 tray model and love it. It’ll handle 4-5 pounds of meat, depending. Excellent quality.
L
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