I love gingerbread in pretty much any form, and I am beginning to develop a love of steamed puddings – so naturally I had to try this 1875 recipe for a steamed gingerbread pudding.
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Category: 19th Century
Pear Butter
Historic cookbooks usually include many recipes for preserving fruits and other seasonal produce. This recipe, with pears, apple cider, and spices, is perfect for Fall.
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Buttermilk Biscuits
Buttermilk and baking soda biscuits are a classic, and with good reason. The acid in buttermilk reacts with baking soda, producing carbon dioxide gas and giving the biscuits their characteristic puffiness.
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Batter Pudding with Cherries
This recipe comes from Sarah Tyson Rorer’s first cookbook, the Philadelphia Cook Book, published a few years after she opened the Philadelphia Cooking School in 1883.
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Peach Pie
This recipe, which can be used for either peach or apple pies, comes from Lettice Bryan’s The Kentucky Housewife, published in 1839. Along with Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife (1824) and Sarah Rutledge’s The Carolina Housewife (1847), The Kentucky Housewife is known as one of the three “southern housewife” cookbooks. These three books are often considered the earliest American regional cookbooks; although they include a variety of recipes, there is a strong focus on “classical” southern cooking.
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Coffee Cakes
This recipe comes from The Woman Suffrage Cook Book, a fundraising cookbook first sold at the 1886 Woman Suffrage Festival and Bazaar in Boston to raise money for the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association.
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Strawberry Vinegar and Effervescing Fruit Drinks
Fruit vinegars, also known as shrubs, were a popular way to conserve fruit in the 19th century. This version comes from Catharine Beecher, an educator, writer, and social activist, and older sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
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Victoria Buns
For Queen Victoria’s birthday, I decided to try out one of many, many recipes named for her. This recipe for Victoria Buns comes from Isabella Beeton – the same author who published the first known recipe for Victoria sandwiches, a much more famous dish also named after Queen Victoria.
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Sponge-Cake Pudding
Victorian cooks hated to waste food, and had all sorts of creative ways to use up leftovers. This super simple one-sentence recipe is an excellent way to use up leftover sponge cake (or, in my case, to use up a failed pound cake that didn’t rise properly. It’s not a failure if you can turn it into something else!). It works on the same principle as a custard-based bread pudding, just using cake instead of bread.
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Victoria Sandwiches
Victoria sandwich, also known as Victoria sponge, was named after Queen Victoria (naturally) and is still a popular British cake to this day. This is the earliest known recipe for Victoria sandwiches, from Isabella Beeton’s 1861 cookbook The Book of Household Management.
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