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Thursday, June 2, 2016

Historical Food Fortnightly 2016, Challenge No. 9: Mock Foods

The Challenge:
9. Mock Foods (April 22 - May 5) Historic cookbooks are full of recipes meant to imitate rare, expensive or impractical ingredients. It’s your turn to help your food pretend it’s something that it isn’t!

Intro
If the fellow foodies will remember, I've set an additional challenge to interpret dishes that are listed as served at the 80th Anniversary Dinner of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick. For this challenge, I will focus on an ingredient that will be needed for another challenge soon, cream for the Strawberries and Cream.


The Recipe:
From: Miss Beecher's Domestic Receipt Book by Catharine Esther Beecher, 1846 (1850 edition)

Mock Cream.
Beat three eggs well, and add three heaping teaspoonfuls of sifted flour. Stir it into a pint and a half of boiling milk, add a salt spoon of salt, and sugar to your taste. Flavor with rose water, or essence of lemon.
This can be used for cream cakes, or pastry.

The Date/Year and Region: 
Early to Mid 19th century United States

How Did You Make It:
Bring to a boil one and a half pints milk.


Meanwhile, Beat three eggs.













Add 3 teaspoonfuls flour. (I used the trusty Bob's Red Mill 1-to-1 Gluten Free Baking Flour)
Add egg mix to milk.
Add salt-spoonful of salt.
Add 1/3 cup sugar.
Add dash of lemon essence.












Time to Complete: 
About 10 minutes

Total Cost: 
I had most ingredients to hand, so for me, nothing.

How Successful Was It: 
It was not quite what I expected. It was very much a liquid, with clumps, which was disappointing. The taste was lovely, though. Perhaps mixed into another recipe would be better, thus their recommendation that it is good for pastry or cream cakes.

How Accurate Was It: 
Certainly true to the recipe as presented, so I'd consider it high in accuracy.

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