Tag: 1928

Categories
1900-1949 Food & Drink

Vintage Recipe – Samuel Johnson’s Puffs of Affection, 1928

Dundee Courier, 14th February 1928
Dundee Courier, 14th February 1928

For something a little different this Valentine’s Day, why not make a little “Puff of Affection”, as apparently loved by the eminent eighteenth-century dictionary-compiler, Samuel Johnson. Or Robbie Coltrane, as he is forever in my mind’s eye.

I’d give one to Hugh Laurie, especially in the Prince Regent get-up. A puff of affection, that is.

As Johnson has it – it’s a little cake (“A kind of delicate bread”) for a Valentine (“a sweetheart, chosen on Valentine’s day”) to have for pudding (“1. a kind of food very variously compounded, but generally made of meal, milk, and eggs. 2. The gut of an animal. 3. A bowel stuffed with certain mixtures of meal and other ingredients.”)

“Puffs of Affection”

It is recorded that Samuel Johnson was very fond of these puffs. He refers to them as having been first made in honour of St Valentine, but that in his calendar the saint’s day came often.
Make a batter with 1 tablespoon flour and 1/2 pint milk, then add a beaten egg, 1 teaspoon sugar, the same of grated lemon rind, and a tiny pinch of salt. Butter some small moulds, pour a little of the mixture into each, just half filling them, and bake in a slow oven for 30 minutes. Turn out, sprinkle liberally with sugar, and serve hot.
Similar puffs are often served with syrup, and make quite a good stand-by pudding.

There’s a couple of odd things about the recipe. Firstly – flour, milk and eggs, flavoured with lemon, sugar and syrup. It’s pretty much a low-flour pancake, which seems a bit strange to have as a tradition merely a week after Shrove Tuesday. Secondly – one tablespoon of flour? I was interested to see how this would hold together with so little flour, and…well, it didn’t.

Not so much a Puff of Affection as a floppy slop. And no-one wants that on Valentine’s Day.

A Flop of Affection
A Flop of Affection

I tried again, upping the flour to that of my normal pancake recipe, 125g of flour with all the other ingredients kept the same.

Sugared and syruped Puffs of Affection
Sugared and syruped Puffs of Affection

These were much better in that they at least kept their shape, and they tasted, unsurprisingly, of fat pancake. But one of the charms of a pancake is its delicate thinness, and the fresh memory of a stack of them a week ago means this pales a bit in comparison. To be honest, I’d recommend a Valentine’s breakfast of a savoury bacon and cheese pancake instead.

Categories
1900-1949 Food & Drink

After-Christmas Recipe – Wholemeal Biscuits, 1928

Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 29th December 1928

So it’s back to work for me today. Can’t complain really – it’s in distinct contrast to the days when I was a shop-girl and had to work the busiest day of the year on Christmas Eve, with it all happening again on Boxing Day.

This year it’s been wall-to-wall truckles of brie, salted caramel cream liqueur, marshmallow snowmen and bubble and squeak, and so perhaps it’s time for a more austere diet to kick in. As the recipe below says (before giving the instructions in one, long sentence) “After the surfeit of the festival season it is often a relief to see something that is not garnished with clotted cream or chocolate icing. Wholemeal biscuits seem an eminently suitable change…”

It’s a kind of digestive biscuit which was, as evident in its name, was considered an aid to the digestive system due to the presence of bicarbonate of soda. Notwithstanding the fact that most of it decomposes into sodium carbonate during the cooking process and so having little actual effect, this particular recipe only calls for a pinch of the stuff anyway.

Nb. This is the first time I have come across the concept of a “saltspoon” as a means of measurement. Apparently 1 saltspoon equals 1/4 of a teaspoon so this would mean 1/8 teaspoon of salt in the recipe below.

 

Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 29th December 1928
Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 29th December 1928

After-Christmas Recipe

 

Wholemeal Biscuits

After the surfeit of the festival season it is often a relief to see something that is not garnished with clotted cream or chocolate icing. Wholemeal biscuits seem an eminently suitable change. Here  is a good recipe for them:-

Ingredients:

1/2lb wholemeal flour

1/4 pint milk (about)

1oz caster sugar

1oz butter

1/2 saltspoonsful salt (1/8 tsp)

A pinch of carbonate of soda

Dissolve the butter and soda in the milk by warming, mix the flour, sugar and salt together, add the milk, mix the whole into a stiff paste, roll out thinly, cut in rounds, pierce all over with a fork, place on a greased tin and bake 25 minutes.

Categories
1900-1949 Food & Drink

Vintage Recipe – Bircher Muesli, 1928

Bircher muesli – an old recipe that has been recently revived, trendified and is probably now available in a independent coffee shop near you. However, it has been modernised a little. The original cream and sugar have largely given way to yogurt and more fruit, but there are a huge amount of different recipes out there now.

It’s one of those nineteenth-century health recipes, served in sanitoriums and spas – like those invented by Dr Kellogg, and Hydropathic Pudding. It was invented by Dr Maximilian Bircher-Benner who considered it to be mainly of use in order to get patients to eat raw apples, believing that raw food contained a high level of energy from solar light. He invented muesli in general, not just adapting it to produce this version – muesli meaning “little mush”, which is a very apt name for this recipe.

It was presented in this 1928 newspaper as “a new breakfast dish” – although Dr Bircher-Benner apparently invented it at the end of the nineteenth century, it was only in the 1920s that it became popularised. This recipe is the authentic version, consisting of oats soaked in water overnight, grated apple, lemon zest and juice, brown sugar, cream or condensed milk, and chopped nuts.

Grantham Journal, 20th October 1928

I made the recipe exactly as specified. There is the option to use cream or condensed milk and I went with the condensed milk version as:

1) that was what Dr Bircher originally used,

2) the recipes on my blog are all about the retro, and this definitely adds that element to it,

and 3) frankly any excuse to eat that divine nectar.

It calls for grated nuts to be sprinkled over as a finishing touch, and I toasted some almond flakes for this purpose.

Autumn breakfast in a pumpkin bowl

My verdict – “little mush” is very apt for the look of it, brightened only by the grated red skin of the Pink Lady apple I used. Not particularly inspiring appearance-wise. But the taste! Oh, easily the most delicious breakfast I have had in a long time. The fresh juiciness of the grated apple with the soothing oats, the crunch of the toasted almonds, and the sharp lemon and sweet condensed milk deliciously combining to make the overall taste almost like pudding. I had previously only tried Bircher muesli in those pre-made pots you get with a Boots Meal Deal, which are a not unpleasant but blandly sweet slop. This was….well, not like that.

For more information on the infinite variety of Bircher’s muesli, have a look at Felicity Cloake’s recipe from her fascinating “How to cook the perfect…” series, to which I am a devotee. She tries a range of different recipes, old and new, in order to come up with her own, “perfect”, version. Her verdict on using condensed milk is that it makes the dish “jarringly sweet”, which I didn’t find to be the case, although in my recipe there is only one dessert-spoon of the stuff between four portions, a little less than a teaspoon each, which I think was an amount which worked well. She ditches the brown sugar for the same reason, and I’m sure it could happily be jettisoned, especially if you soaked the oats in apple juice rather than water. My main disagreement with Felicity is that she considers the lemon to be unnecessary if you’re not using the condensed milk – the sharpness not needed if the sweetness is not there. While I’m sure her recipe is perfectly lovely itself, it was the lemon zesty-ness that elevated this dish into the realm of the delicious for me, and stayed with me long after the bowl had been scraped clean.

Bircher Muesli, 1928-style

For four people

Three-quarter teacup of rolled oats, soaked overnight, the cup being filled up with water.

Four medium-sized apples.

Grated rind of one lemon and half the juice.

One dessert spoon brown sugar

One dessert spoon thick cream (or condensed milk)

Grated nuts

Grate the whole of the apples, leaving out only the stalk and the pips. Add the lemon juice and grated rind. Pour off any superfluous water, and add the soaked rolled oats. Lastly, add the sugar and cream, and mix all well together. Grated nuts may be sprinkled over it if wanted – or taken with it at table. This may be made with bananas or other fruit in place of the apples.