I guess all of that “mutton suet fat” on top doesn’t make these peas a vegetarian dish exactly, but the next one surely is, borrowing from salt fish preservation techniques: This pea-preservation is akin to making potted meats (as the English say), or rillettes, rillons, and pâtés, which were invented to preserve meat without refrigeration, and all relied on a thick layer of goose (or other animal) fat to keep it well. Take fine young peas, shell them, throw them into a cullender to drain, then lay a cloth four or five times double on a table, and spread them on dry them very well, and have your bottles ready, fill them and cover them with mutton suet fat when it is a little cool, fill the necks almost to the top, cork them, tie a bladder and a lath over them, and set them in a cool dry place. Here are a few “receipts” for you vegetarians and vegans that suggest the lengths to which eighteenth century women went to preserve fresh vegetables: These marvelous technologies are largely responsible for the fact that we no longer have to rely on salts, pickles, and prodigious amounts of sugar and fat to preserve fresh foods. I bring this to you not in mockery or with an attitude of mock-sophistication encouraging laughter at colonial palates, but rather in the sperrit of thanksgiving for modern kitchens with electricity-powered refrigerators and freezers, and petroleum-fueled trucks to bring us fresh fruits and vegetables from California and Florida all winter long. Yea, verily: we are a slothful and prodigiously wasteful generation! Keep this one in mind while you’re field-dressing your buck this year, boys and girls! ( This one’s for you, Erica: I double-dog dare you to make this pie!) Won’t that make for an unforgettable dish this year at the Thanksgiving table? I admire the determination not to let a sacred scrap of protein go to waste. Take the humbles of a buck, and boil them, and chop them as small as meat for minced pies, and put to them as much beef suet, eight apples, half a pound of sugar, a pound and a half of currants, a little salt, some mace, cloves, nutmeg, and a little pepper : then mix them together, and put it into a paste add half a pint of sack, the juice of one lemon and orange, close the pie, and when it is baked serve it up. An Umble Pie, as found in Susannah Carter’s The Frugal Housewife, or Complete Woman Cook (1772), 111-112:
0 kommentar(er)
