How to keep your own hearth fires burning

Even though I've thoroughly distanced colonial cooking from its original hearth application, I thought it would be useful to look at some of the tools used in hearth cooking. You know, in case you had a hankering to put your fireplace to good use.

1. Of course, you couldn't get anywhere without your fireplace. Technically, this is the "hearth" of "hearth cooking," the heart and soul of any good gentlewoman's house. However, today we tend to refer to just that brick-lined area in front of the fireplace as the hearth.

(Plus a lovely costumed interpreter back in her college years.)

2. Then you need something to get those hearth fires going: firewood. Make sure it's dry and that you build the fire the right way (i.e. don't smoke out the inhabitants of the house).

3. You'll also need an iron swinging crane with hooks to hold your kettles over the fire. The swinging part is key, so you can pull the whole system out instead of constantly reaching into the fireplace.









4. Just in case you're not an expert fire-starter, it's helpful to have a bellows. This allows you to pump air into the fire to encourage the flames.









5. Now for the tools that we still use today: a peel, for shoveling hot coals onto the hearth (more on that in a bit); a broom, for sweeping cold ashes from the hearth; and a poker.







Of course, you'll start your fire very early in the morning, so you'll be sure to have hot water and enough coals for cooking breakfast. Fires sadly take much longer to create heat than electric or gas ovens and stoves.

6. Okay. Now that your fire is good and hot, it's time for the fun part: cooking!

You'll heat up water in one of your kettles. This is helpful for washing the dishes or really anytime you need hot water. (But remember to set the water over the fire early in the morning, so you're not caught with a kettle of cold water.)

The skillet is pretty self-explanatory: a good tool for frying and sauteeing. You'll rest your hot pans on one of the trivets. The toasting fork is for, well, toasting stuff.

When you want to bake something small like a pie, or you're working on a slow-cooking stew, your Dutch oven comes in handy. This is the original Dutch oven (with legs!). After you've spread hot coals on the hearth (with your handy peel), you set the Dutch oven on top, place your food inside, and cover. Then you arrange more hot coals on top--the rim keeps them from falling off. Make sure to recover with hot coals every so often so the temperature stays even.

7. For keeping skillets directly over heat for a long period of time, something like a gridiron (also called a spider) is particularly nice to have.

8. If you want to roast a chicken, you'll need andirons (which we still generally see in fireplaces today) to support a spit.

9. Or you could use a tin kitchen. The tin kitchen sits on the hearth with the open side facing the fire, so the heat is reflected from the closed side of the kitchen. The meat turns on a spit within.







10. Finally, if you're ready to do your weekly bread baking, you'll want to fire up (heh) your bread oven, which is most likely a beehive-like hollow next to the fireplace. Make sure to build a big fire inside the oven so the logs have time to burn down to ashes. The inner bricks will heat up enough to bake bread.

And those are just the basics. We haven't even begun to discuss how to do the washing up.

It's posts like these that fill me with conflicting feelings. For one, I have a hard time believing that one summer I could use all these tools like I was in my own kitchen. Never a second thought about spreading hot coals over the hearth. For another, it makes me incredibly thankful for my gas oven and stove.

I know I occasionally conclude my posts with an appreciative statement like that, but really, this time I mean it. To have to wait only 20 minutes for my oven to preheat, instead of the several hours it might take for the logs to burn down into hot coals? It gives me a whole new appreciation for those colonial cooks.




Dutch oven. Brass kettles. Skillet. Trivet. Toasting fork. Crane, gridiron, andirons, fireplace tools. Tin kitchen. Bread oven. Bellows.

To butter shrimps

Last weekend it felt like summer. 80 degrees, not too humid (so, more of an ideal summer than a real one), sunny. I spent Saturday afternoon setting up my tomato and pea plants outside, in a sheltered spot with plenty of sun. Josh and I took our time at the farmers' market, grilled some corn quesadillas, had a long, lazy lunch at our favorite bakery on Sunday. I almost believed that school was actually over, that we had nothing more pressing than figuring out what to eat for dinner.

Of course, then reality set in. Those last few weeks of school are always so agonizing, don't you think? Summer's just within reach--except it's a little too far away.

So maybe it was masochistic of me to cook shrimp for Sunday dinner. Shrimp always reminds me of summer--really, any seafood does--and while I was making it, I definitely forgot that the next day would bring teaching, not sleeping in. The kitchen was a little too hot from the stove, so I wore a tank top and jeans, sipping ice water as I worked. Physically it felt like summer...dinner tasted like summer....so why is it still only May?

These are the questions Josh and I ask each other, at least three times a day now.

In the meantime, I torture myself exquisitely with shrimp.

There's actually very little butter in this recipe, despite what the name suggests. The sunny hue comes from beaten egg yolks, which set in thin swirls to make a sort of egg-drop soup studded with shrimp. Thanks to the vagueness of colonial recipes, I'm not sure if that's what the soup should have looked like, or if it should have taken on a thicker consistency like avgolemono. Either way, it's rich and delicious and ridiculously easy to make.

I was surprised that the colonial Virginians ate shrimp, but after doing a bit of research it made sense. John Smith, recorder of the earliest European explorations in Virginia, wrote a lot about how the rivers and waters teemed with fish,

"lying so thicke with their heads above the water, as for the want of nets we attempted to catch them with our frying pans.”

The frying pan bit is, well, ridiculous, but it says a lot about the availability of fish that they even tried to catch them that way. It's no wonder that colonists touted Virginia as a veritable Eden of abundance. And in his list of fish the colonists recognized, Smith lists "shrimps" along with sturgeon and oysters. So the colonists were eating shrimp right from the beginning.

Now, of course, shrimp are much more dear--I shudder to recall how much these cost. It's sobering to think about how much fishing has changed since the 17th century. But these were worth it. For just a few hours, it really felt like summer.

Buttered Shrimp

(adapted from The Williamsburg Cookbook)

1 1/3 - 1 1/2 lbs shrimp, deveined
1 1/3 cup white wine, divided
1 tbsp butter
1 tsp nutmeg
4 egg yolks
lemon slices for garnish

Rinse the shrimp and place in a large pot, along with 1 cup white wine, the butter, and nutmeg. Cook over medium-high heat until liquid boils and the shrimp is starting to turn pink (the butter should be melted--this is the colonial way to tell if the timing's right). Now beat the egg yolks together with the last 1/3 cup white wine, and pour into the pot. Give the liquid a good stir and cook for a few minutes longer, until the shrimp is pink and the liquid has thickened slightly. Ladle the soup and shrimp into bowls, and garnish with slices of lemon.

Smith source.

Mount Vernon

About a month ago, I chaperoned my tenth-grade class to Washington, D.C. on their annual five-day field trip. Not only did I lead the trip, but I also had spent the entire year planning and preparing for this adventure. Therefore, the trip entailed:

• 33 teenage girls
• 4 chaperones (including me)
• 1 long-suffering bus driver
• 1 viewing of National Treasure and Tangled
• endless fast food
• 3 1/2 days of walking, walking, walking. And then more walking!
• 12 monuments (the FDR Memorial was my favorite)
• 8 museums and visitor centers (including the National Archives, the Capitol, and the Holocaust Museum)
• more reminders about not slamming hotel doors at 6:30 in the morning than I care to recount

Overall, it was a fun (but absolutely exhausting) trip. I have never slept so well as the night we returned home. And while there are loads of stories I could tell, I'd really like to tell you about the morning we visited Mount Vernon.

Mount Vernon is George Washington's gorgeous estate, which is in northern Virginia overlooking the Potomac River. When you stand on the front porch of his mansion, you can look out over the sloping hill to the river beyond, and you completely forget where you are.

While the mansion was beautiful, we were herded through it like cattle to accommodate the huge numbers of tourists. Apparently we'd decided to visit D.C. during prime school visit season, so we had to contend with a group from nearly every other school in the nation. So I appreciated seeing rooms like Washington's bedroom (although I didn't understand the fascination of seeing the bed where he died), but where I really enjoyed myself was in wandering the grounds of the estate.

I found a group of my students watching the sheep. They squealed over the cluster of lambs lounging in the sun, and debated among themselves what to name each one. Luckily they refrained from bleating at the sheep, which is what some other teenagers were doing. You always see a group of kids doing that at farms or living history museums--it's funny, but it's also a commentary on how distanced most kids are from farm animals.

Then I wandered down to the Pioneer Farm, which represents George Washington's innovations in farming techniques. Apparently he grew frustrated with the farming methods used by early Virginian tobacco farmers (this was colonial Virginia, remember), and so he turned to new kinds of plowing, fertilizers, and crop rotation to get the most out of his crops. You don't usually think of Washington as a farmer--he's got that refined, first-leader-of-our-country air about him in all his portraits--but apparently he considered himself a farmer before a commander. When he was away from home, he'd long to get back to Mount Vernon to try out new landscape designs. Landscape design!

It was a gorgeous spring morning, just warm and sunny enough to remind us that summer really is on the way. Walking around the raised beds made me excited to get back to my own garden. And it nurtured that far-away dream I have of an outdoor space that's just for gardening: raised beds, or maybe a plot with neat rows, for tomatoes and spinach and kale and potatoes. All my favorite vegetables. Who knew I'd turn into such a gardening freak?!

And it was fascinating to look around at a recreated 18th-century Virginian farm, complete with old plows (tugged by horses), woven wooden supports for climbing plants, and examples of fencing (yes, he really did experiment with different types of fencing). It's so different from farming today, so much closer to nature, in a way. But I suppose you'd sacrifice efficiency and output for old-fashioned methods.

Perhaps I just got starry-eyed at Mount Vernon, the way I often do with history. It's a struggle for me not to consistently see old methods and techniques as better. But it certainly got me thinking about the overlap between the 18th century and today, and how I can apply some of those more natural methods to my own garden. And that's got to be worth something.

Supposedly delicious

Every now and then I flip through the Williamsburg cookbook, looking for my next culinary adventure, and one of those recipes jumps out at me. You know, the ones that are a little, well, too adventurous.

After the steak and kidney pie disaster, I've become much more hesitant about leaping into the unknown. I'll consider a recipe for a while before taking out my cutting board. But some of the recipes so beloved to colonial Virginians are just too bizarre (or hazardous) for me to even think about making. Take a look and see if you agree.

• Calf's Head Soup. Yes, it calls for "one Calf's Head." I'd like to avoid courting mad cow disease.

• Snail Broth. The ingredients sound like your stereotypical witch's brew: twenty garden snails pounded together with the hind legs of thirty frogs, mixed with sliced turnips and leeks. Apparently it cures consumption. Oh, the olden days...

• Barbecued Squirrel. Unless I want to go all Hunger Games on the squirrels in my backyard, I'll have a tough time procuring the meat.

• Turtle Soup. Again, I don't know where you'd get a turtle meant for consumption. But the instructions are pretty fun: "Kill the Turtle at Daylight in Summer, the Night before in Winter, and hang it up to bleed." I guess turtles' blood runs differently in winter--which makes sense--but it still sounds like instructions for the aforementioned witch's brew.

• Bitters (very fine). Yes, it's tempting to try to make my own bitters. But the recipe calls for cochineal, which is an insect that's been pounded to powder. It was used to dye wool red back in the day.

So, would you be brave enough to try one of these recipes? Or do you know where I could procure a turtle (besides the pet store)?

Cheese biscuits

Yesterday Josh and I had a simple night in. Cooking dinner, watching the latest New Girl episode, talking about our days. As part of our goal to become more mindful, healthful eaters, Josh made a delicious vegetarian chili, chock-full of sauteed veggies, onions, and spicy peppers, ladled over brown rice.

Before he started cooking, I thought about what else we could add to the meal to round it out (my brain is full of terms like this ever since I started obsessively reading Bon Appetit and Cooking Light). I'd been eyeing a cheese biscuit recipe in the Williamsburg cookbook, and that seemed like the perfect accompaniment.

Hah.

All went well as I mixed the dough. It's a simple recipe, flour and salt and butter and cheese. I love cheese, friends. It makes everything better. Someday I'll have to give you my rapturous ode to cheese (when I'm feeling more positive about it). But then it came time to cut the biscuits for baking.

Why yes, that is one half of a tea ball infuser sitting right next to the cut biscuits. What's that, you say? They're the same size? I must have cut the biscuits with a tea infuser?

Sigh. It's true.

See, back in ye olde colonial Williamsburg, "biscuits" meant "crackers." Or "biscuits," too; it was one of those catch-all terms. This lovely recipe, which put me in mind of fluffy, substantial cheese biscuits in the style of Joy the Baker, actually tells you to make them cracker-sized. So I did. With my tea infuser.

These "biscuits" cook up nice and crispy, with a subtle cheesy bite. But they're just the same size as quarters or buttons, and when you prick them with a fork before baking, they kind of start to resemble banana chips. Or buttons.

(I called them "cheese buttons" in the privacy of my kitchen.)

So, Josh and I turned to another recipe I messed up in the past: vegan quinoa cornbread. Last time we tried it we were also making soup with barley, and I may or may not have mistaken the barley for quinoa. And made barley cornbread. This time I was determined to get it right! If we couldn't have fluffy cheese biscuits (though they did make a wonderful pre-dinner snack), we would have fluffy vegan cornbread.

And let me tell you, friends, we did.


Cheese Buttons
(adapted from The Williamsburg Art of Cookery)

1 cup flour
1/3 cup butter, cubed
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup grated cheese (I used cheddar and leftover asiago)
1-2 tbsp cold water, as needed

Preheat the oven to 350 F.

Whisk the flour and salt together until combined. With your fingers, rub the cubed butter into the flour mixture until it resembles cornmeal. Add the cheese, and mix it into a stiff dough. If needed, add one tbsp of water at a time until the dough comes together.

On a flat, floured surface, roll out the dough to a 1/2-inch thickness, and cut with very small pastry/cookie cutter (your tea infuser, if you have one, makes a very nice-sized cracker). Arrange the crackers on an ungreased cookie sheet and prick with the end of a fork. If you like, prick crosswise so the crackers resemble buttons. Bake for 12-15 minutes, or until the bottoms of the crackers are just beginning to turn golden brown.

History 101: Colonial Virginia

This little blog has always been something of an experiment; heck, it's even in the name! And like the way my students pepper me with questions when I haven't taught a lesson clearly enough, for some time now this space has been nagging me (in my own mind) for more clarity. I jump from cookbook to cookbook depending on my mood, with no logical connection between either (Little House to colonial Williamsburg...), and with very little sense of how the cookbook reflects the history of the time. So to set things straight in my mind, I'm going to lay out a brief history of the time periods I've looked at so far. Hopefully this will lend the blog a little more organization. And I do hope you'll enjoy it as well, dear readers.

First up: colonial Virginia.

Time Period

the cookbook in question

The Williamsburg Art of Cookery takes its recipes from cookbooks published/written between 1732 and 1922. These later books were compilations themselves, meant to represent "Housekeeping in old Virginia." That makes our job--figuring out when most of these recipes were created--a little tougher.

Since the book we're using was created by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, I think we can safely assume that most of its recipes date from between 1699 and 1780, the years when Williamsburg served as the capital of colonial Virginia. These are also the years (roughly) represented by the current Colonial Williamsburg living history site.

So, to be clear, we're talking about pre-independence America here. Virginians are still supposed to be loyal to the British king, and while the Revolutionary War might have begun (1775) and the Declaration of Independence issued (in 1776), America won't officially become its own country until 1783.

Colonial Virginia

engraving by Theodor de Bry, 1590, of Virginia Indian chief

Virginia was the first North American colony founded by Europeans, in 1607. Its early history is one of failures and, in my opinion, utter ridiculousness. Most of the first settlers in Virginia were gentlemen expecting to mine for gold.  They nearly starved their first few winters in the New World, since few of them knew how to farm, and it was only the kindness of the Native Americans (including Pocahontas' tribe, the Powhatans) that carried them through. After a while John Rolfe (yes, the one who married Pocahontas) introduced tobacco, and that cash crop turned Virginia into a thriving colony.

For a while most Virginians were young bachelors hoping to make a buck or two on the tobacco trade. Then women started to arrive in 1619, along with indentured servants and African slaves to work the tobacco fields. The colony began to expand, especially after it was made a royal colony in 1624 (governed by the king of England). Finally, African slavery became entrenched in Virginia and the other southern colonies around 1700.

How It All Relates to Cooking

By the mid-18th century, Virginian society was pretty hierarchical, because of its status as a royal colony and its reliance on a cash crop. Here's how it broke down:

• Royal Governor (the big kahuna)
• Wealthy Planters (who were also political)
• Small Farmers (rather poor)
• Landless Whites (very poor)
• Indentured Servants (who worked out apprenticeships)
• Slaves (owned by the wealthy or small farmers)

"The Good House-wife" of the 18th century

The Williamsburg Art of Cookery is billed as the "Accomplished Gentlewoman's Companion." The author goes on to describe the wonders of old Virginian hospitality, even to utter strangers. Apparently this book is full of recipes that an "accomplished gentlewoman" would have served to visiting dignitaries, family members, etc.

In other words: this is not a cookbook for the small farmers, the landless whites, the indentured servants, or the slaves. It represents what the governor or wealthy planters would have eaten--only they would have wives known as "gentlewomen."

My uncle recently visited Colonial Williamsburg, and he told us about his visit to a small 18th-century farm where people ate an extremely limited diet, often 1-2 types of food per day. So as I'm cooking all these recipes, it's helpful to keep in mind who exactly would have been eating this food, because this cookbook certainly doesn't represent all of colonial Virginia.


I hope this was helpful for you, friends! Do you have other questions about old Virginia? Or cooking in general? Or what on earth an indentured servant was?


Works Consulted: The American Pageant, 13th edition. Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Photos: 1. Author. 2. History of Virginia. 3. "Women and Education in Eighteenth-Century Virginia."

Kitchen garden (I)

I've thought about starting my own little garden for a while now. My front windows are filled with plants, sure, but of the amaryllis and African violet variety rather than the edible kind.

When I graduated from college and first started living on my own, my parents gave me a set of lucky bamboo as a housewarming gift. Somehow I managed not to kill the bamboo, and now, four years later, they're growing strong in my kitchen. In the morning the leaves catch the sunlight, and they make the whole room feel cheerful.

However, I've had mixed results with other plants. Flowers? I've been growing iris bulbs in pots for two years and they have yet to flower. The African violet is quite happy, though. Trees? This winter's Christmas tree--a miniature pine in a pot--is now browning quickly and might keel over come summer. Too bad we named him. (Lord Conington: Josh's invention, of course.)

decorating, back when the tree was lush

I've had the most success with herbs so far: basil, chives, rosemary. Having just the tiniest flavor of food that I grew myself makes cooking so much more exciting, and now I want to branch out to other foods. Besides, having my own little garden could give me one more insight into the past, back when people relied more on what they could grow themselves.

Since I'm a complete novice at gardening, though, I didn't want to make the first try too hard on myself. This is strictly container gardening for now, anyway, so I decided to start off with easy plants and a couple handy guides to urban gardening. (The City Homesteader by Scott Meyer and Apartment Gardening by Amy Pennington: both inspiring, neither intimidating.) In an epic trip to the home improvement store, I bought all the seed-starting, planting materials I'd need, plus a few varieties of lettuce, peas, and herbs to try. (Who knew that wandering the gardening aisles of Home Depot could be so exciting?!) Finally, my parents brought an extra grow lamp when they visited this past weekend, and we set it up and tended to Lord Conington (my dad was full of ideas to save the poor tree). Once I return from chaperoning a five-day field trip this week, I'll be all ready to start those seeds.

And in one of those serendipitous coincidences, a friend gave me nine little tomato plants to inaugurate my kitchen garden. They're not historic in the least--Americans were suspicious of tomatoes until the 1900s, and therefore didn't grow very many of them--but they're familiar as childhood, and just the right thing to start my garden.

So this summer, I'll hopefully be posting updates on gardening as well as cooking. I'm excited to use my own food for cooking--it feels more authentic, somehow, more rooted in nature and the past than in going to the grocery store. Are any of you gardeners? What are you planting this spring?